SuperData Shows PUBG Continuing its Meteoric Rise

SuperData Research is out with their digital market sales numbers a bit late this month.  They have been busy writing editorials about the Star Wars Battlefront II fiasco and what comes next.  But, finally, we have the numbers for October here on the last day of November.

SuperData Research Top 10 – October 2017

On the PC side of things PlayerUnknown’s Battleground continues its ascent.  Last month it was in 4th place, now it has risen to 2nd position, with only League of Legends ahead of it.

Destiny 2, new to the PC chart, hit 4th spot, injecting itself in the midst of the perennial top performers in the Chinese market, Crossfire, Dungeon Fighter Online, and Fantasy Westward Journey Online II.  Middle-Earth: Shadow of War also gained a spot on the list while ROBLOX returned to the top ten as well.

This left World of Warcraft and World of Tanks in 7th and 8th position and knocked DOTA 2 and Overwatch off the list.

On the console side FIFA 18, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, and Destiny 2 grabbed the top three spots.  Last month it was Destiny 2, FIFA 18, and NBA2K18.

And on the mobile side Candy Crush Saga stayed on the list hanging on in 9th position.

Other bullet points from SuperData’s monthly update:

• PLAYERUNKNOWN’s Battlegrounds sells another 5 million units.
• PUBG vs Fortnite. While Fortnite has seen a higher out-of-the-gate active user base thanks to its F2P status, the game’s long-term success vs. its major and earlier-released rival is uncertain.
• PUBG comes to XBox One as an exclusive and leaves Steam Early Access in December.
• Destiny 2 has a solid release on PC. Destiny 2’s much-anticipated Blizzard Battle.net PC launch proves very successful.
• Super Mario Odyssey launches on Switch. Mario sold 191,000 digital units in October, making it the biggest digital launch on Switch to date. However, digital download rates continue to lag compared to those found on the Xbox and PlayStation consoles.
• Single player games still have legs. While multiplayer-centric genres (FPS, MOBA, and Battle Royale) are in the spotlight, there is still room on the stage for single-player focused games. In October, South Park: The Fractured but Whole, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, and Assassin’s Creed: Origins collectively generated over $160M through digital full game sales. However, we don’t expect these games to have as much success in the long run, compared to the multiplayer genres, as it is generally harder to monetize through microtransactions in a single-player focused title.

At the Camp in 68FT-6

Being the space tourist that I am, I had to get out to 68FT-6 to see the pilfered Keepstar, the hell camp, and the various warp disruption bubbles laid about the station.

The bubbles above the Keepstar

Pings were calling for more interdictors and I had a Flycatcher stashed not too far away, so I tried to get out to the scene, but fell victim to a gate camp.  It was a gate camp I should have expected, could have avoided, and likely could have escaped, but I managed to be dumb on all front at that point and got blown up instead.  Typical me.

That put me back in Delve where I grabbed a Sabre I had handy and started the flight out to 68FT-6 all over again.  The route from Delve to Impass was actually pretty safe thanks to the fact that we are temporarily blue with both TEST and Brave Newbies, so in my speedy ship it wasn’t too long before I was arriving at my destination.

First glimpse of the Keepstar name

I docked up, then undocked to join one of the fleets camping the Keepstar, waiting for any daring CO2 pilot to try and get away.

Hanging out in the bubbles near the undock

I hung out in the fleet, listened to coms, and generally only paid half attention at most to what was going on.  There wasn’t much.  Capsules and interceptors that undocked to try and slip out were quickly picked off by sensor boosted insta-lockers in the fleet.  There was little chance to get in on those kills unless you had drones assigned to one of those pilots.

I did luck out and get on one kill when an Apostle undocked to get blown up for insurance.

Apostle getting hit

I almost missed out on that.  I saw the Apostle appear on my overview and it took me a moment to process the fact that somebody had undocked and wasn’t almost instantly dead.  By the time I locked the ship up the damage was well into armor.  But I was close enough to get in a few hits with my tiny whore gun and was included on the kill mail.  Somebody gunning the Keepstar did most of the damage.

After that it was more hanging out and listening to coms.  DBRB showed up for a bit and stirred people up.  After he left some new guy said he had heard about DBRB but now understood why people hated him.  I could only think, “You know nothing Jon Snow!”  That little visit was barely Boat at all.  I am very much on the pro-Boat side of things because nobody throws themselves into this game like he does and he has been leading fleets and getting kills for longer than any active FC I know.  But he is an acquired taste and a little Boat can go a long way.

Sitting around on the Keepstar

We also have the station in the system well covered.

Station bubbles? Check!

Being a tourist attraction, other fleets and individuals would show up from time to time just to look in on the event.  What looked to be a Spectre fleet showed up in Confessors and hung about for a bit, killing somebody being dumb in a Legion before heading off for greener pastures.

Confessors lurking well out of range

Not far off from the Keepstar, on the same grid, Legion of xXDEATHXx was dropping a Raitaru.

Raitaru online in seconds

I am not sure what Legion of xXDEATHXx has planned in the area, but TEST was about guarding the deployment, so they are clearly welcome in the area.

Legion of xXDEATHXx logo on the Raitaru

And then there were the CO2 members hanging out in the Keepstar looking for a way out.

I am not going to go Gevlon and claim there were no victims here, but the people in CO2 do have some options.  There is asset safety with citadels, so after some duration they can pay 15% of the assessed value of their stuff to have it delivered to a station in low sec.  That can add up quickly and  you’re still stuck in low sec and have to move your stuff around, but you can at least get your stuff… unless you have a super capital.  You can only dock a super in a citadel, not an NPC station, so some very expensive ships might be lost.

But even that can be worked around.  A number of alliances are taking in CO2 individuals and corporations.  TEST is very open and even the Imperium has picked up some members from CO2.  Back at the end of the Casino War I saw people leave the Imperium, join Pandemic Horde, rescue their stuff, then come back to the Imperium.  Some times you have to do what you have to do to get your stuff safe.

I wouldn’t want to trade places with them, but all is not lost.

While out on the camp the word came over coms that The Judge had joined Goonswarm.

The Judge

Like Haargoth Agamar before him (the guy who disbanded Band of Brothers) The Judge was take in by Goonswarm, but faces a future of relative obscurity.  As others have noted, and even Haargoth himself said before he pulled the trigger, after you do something like this it isn’t like you’re going to get a lot of positions of responsibility.  You’ve shown your colors and that is that.  He certainly won’t run for the CSM again.  He would be a distraction and would be more likely to get people to vote just to elect somebody else.  Some people have been asking if there is a way to recall him from the current CSM.

And then there is GigX.

He got himself perma banned for continuous, very public, often very specific threats to harm The Judge in real life either at his home or when he shows up in Iceland for the next CSM summit.  That goes well beyond “heat of the moment” to my mind.  He burned himself and good, though he might yet get himself reinstated with an appropriate apology and whatever amends might fit.  We shall see.

I’m somewhat pissed that he felt he had to loudly and publicly threaten The Judge and get himself banned.  It was both dumb and avoidable and it also hurt the game.

First, the end of the story was cut short.  And in null sec stories are what makes the place great.  You can blow people up anywhere, but you can only play space empires in null.  CO2 is done for now by default because GigX is gone.  We won’t know how things might have played out had he stayed in the game or what sort of recovery of might have occurred.  I wouldn’t bet against the determination of GigX, and despite some of the things he has done to his alliance, he has his share of supporters.

Second, and probably more importantly, his behavior changed the narrative in the news.  Rather than this being a story or intrigue and betrayal, it is becoming a tale about how a bad person in a bad game made real life threats and got banned.  Gamers remain horrible people as he managed to shit on all of us.  Thanks.

Welcome to the new cycle.

So I remain out on the camp, collecting participation links… I need some as I haven’t been on a fleet yet this month… and watch a lot of brand new TEST pilots undock and fly away.  I wonder what we’re going to do with the Keepstar once the temp blue situation is over?

Even Fat Bee is in a bubble

There is still work to be done, CO2 space to be carved up and conquered, new homes to be found, and a new balance of power to be sorted out.  But that will come and eventually things will settle down and events of the day will fade into memory just like the mocking bubbles spelling out LOL above the Keepstar.

Bubbles, like events, fade eventually

And yes, somebody made a giant penis out of warp disruption bubbles below the Keepstar.

Make no mistake, it is a dong

I think people… well, men… have been scrawling penises on things throughout history, so why not in this pretend dystopian future?

Coming Soon – Empires of EVE History Lectures

As I mentioned in my look at the audiobook version of Empires of EVE, the author Andrew Groen was looking for a way to continue telling the tales of New Eden.  Yesterday there was an announcement as to how that might go forward as a podcast.

Coming Soon…

The idea is to tell the stories of EVE Online in a more dynamic way.  As I noted about the audiobook of his work, Andrew Groen reading his book is not as engaging as Andrew Groen talking about the game in front of an audience.  The hope, I gather, is to try to capture some of what is special about seeing him speak in a podcast.

The details were shared as an update to the Kickstarter page for the book.

There is already an Empires of EVE area over on SoundCloud, which I have dutifully followed.  I am sure it will be available via other sources as well.

I am really looking forward to seeing how this plays out.  The stories of EVE Online, the player made lore of the game, is one of the most interesting aspects of the game, so I am always keen to see somebody learning it to save and re-tell.

Following the Map Through Queensdale and Kessex Hills

My return to Guild Wars 2 has started off in a somewhat stuttering and haphazard way… which might well describe my wanderings in Runes of Magic last month.  I have not been very invested nor have I sat down and played for long stretches of time.

I’m going to use this logo for every post, you watch

On the flip side of that, GW2 seems pretty well setup to accommodate that lack of commitment and short play sessions.  Basically, the map and completing all of its various points and events not only gives me direction but also ensures I have something to do.  As soon as I log into the game, there is that arrow in the upper right corner pointing me at something.

Hey, go there!

Sometimes the arrow even points me to a scout who fills in areas of the map for me.

Here is a new place to go and something to do

This mechanic lacks the directness of quests, but in a world mostly lacking in what we might consider traditional quests, the map and its events and points of interest fill in the gap, at least for somebody who tends to be as goal oriented as I am.  So at times I just log in and follow that little pointer around the map, doing events and slaying things as I come across them.

Usually it involved centaurs.  Centaurs are into everything out in the human starter zone.

They’re even stealing our booze now!

And then as I wander about the map, going where ever the pointer tells me, I will hit a significant level, in this case 20 and the personal story pops up as a consequence.

Woo hoo, a round number! I get rings… and a story.

Big deal.  People… well, Bhagpuss… have said I can just skip the whole personal story thing.  The problem is that the personal story takes over the pointer of destiny in the upper right hand corner.  The arrow of whim is gone, replaced by a nagging reminder with only one destination.

Yes, yes, I know…

I could just use the map itself to wander around.  The points are marked, and when they are not it is usually because they are in an area of the map I haven’t been through yet… something that is obvious when looking at the map… so just going there will reveal them.  But I wanted my pointer back, so I schlepped around doing the personal story, as I had done after level 10, in order to get that out of the way.

That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a different, and perhaps more traditional, more quest-like set of things to do.  There were some nice prizes at the end, including a mastery point which even the game says I don’t need to worry about until level 80, which is a long way off.

Mastery point now for mastery later

I was happy with that and happier still to be back to my now standard method of operation.  But the personal story had one more trick to play.  Upon leaving the instance it dumped me out in the middle of two events which succeeded in getting me killed almost immediately.

Oh not that spider again…

The Toxic Spider Queen and falling from high places are my two leading causes of death so far in Tyria.  I have generally been pretty successful with the struggle mechanic that lets you come back from mortal injury, but that just doesn’t work when the damn spider is camped right on top of you.

Once I recovered from that I went back about my wanderings, following the pointer this way and that until I found that I had finished things up and now had two complete zones under my belt… for specific definitions of complete I suppose.

Two zones down, many to go

As noted, this works for the task oriented completionist in me.  And the pace of leveling seemed to be just about in tune with this method.  While I tend to look askance at auto-leveling systems, the GW2 version seems to work pretty well at this point.  In my last attempt at the game, I found myself not keeping up with the content so advancing to the next zone meant either being in over my head in the new content or re-doing the old to level up.

This time around I seemed to have been about right where ever I have gone.  Being a level or two up and having the game down-level me is better than being too many levels down to start with.

So two zones down, many more to go.

The uncovered chunk so far

And my friend the pointer was nice enough to direct me to my next destination.

Go here and stuff… also, damn centaurs

Along the way I had a few discoveries of quality of life improvements.  The first was suggested in the comments on last week’s post by Orthom, where he pointed out that I could send crafting materials off to storage from anywhere via an option in my inventory window.

The magic option

I was aware of the crafting storage, but had only deposited stuff there while at a crafting station.  That went a long way towards helping inventory management.

The second was a bit silly.  I spent a bunch of time walking back and forth in the game because I did not know that teleporting between waypoints for a bit of coin was a thing.

I can just go there for some copper?

So that made life a little easier.  I just wish I had discovered that when I was doing the level 10 personal story line, as that involved quite a bit of running back and forth.

And, finally, I discovered dyes in the game, so changed up my cosmetic armor set to be more ranger-ish in color scheme.

Green on green with gold and gray to off-set

And so it goes.  I am off into the third zone and level 30 and the accompanying personal story looms.

Sunday Afternoon Raitaru Shoot

We can’t just rat and mine in Delve all the time, so when a warning ping came up Sunday morning that there would be an op later I got myself over to our staging system and ready to go.

And so did a lot of other people, judging by the response the official op ping got.  There were two fleets called for, one for our Machariel doctrine and one for our Jackdaw doctrine.  I was already online and in a Mach fleet ship, so was able to join that fleet before it filled up.  And it filled up very fast, hitting the 255 ship cap in well under a minute.

I was in an Oneiros primarily because I already had it there and ready to go, but also because logistics is generally a protected class in fleets.  If you’re flying logi you’ll almost never get kicked out of a full fleet to make room for other critical roles such as boosters.

However, the logi turn out seemed to be especially good.  In fact, according to the FC, turnout in general was good with people in ships appropriate to the doctrine.  There had been a call put out to stop bringing random ships to fleets as there had been a growing number of people who would join up in interceptors, crowding out doctrine ships.  For the Machariel doctrine, it needs a certain number of the main line ships in order to be effective, relying as it does on its alpha damage to destroy enemies in a single volley.  Anyway, people seemed to take this to heart and the Mach fleet did not have too many off-brand members.

There was more than enough logistics and when somebody asked if they could switch from logi to a Machariel, this was greeted with some enthusiasm, and even after those people swapped over the FC said that he could stand to lose another half dozen logi if more people wanted to switch over.

So I looked at the contracts listed and, sure enough, there were a few Machariels available.  They carry a 550 million ISK price tag.  That is a lot of ISK for me.  I don’t do much to boost the ratting and mining numbers in Delve.  But it was also a ship I had never flown, so after a bit of thought I decided to splurge and bought one.  I swapped out of my Oneiros and into the Mach and got it fit out as dictated in the fleet MOTD.

Among other things, the doctrine Machariel comes with a load of modules in its cargo bay so they can be refit to meet the needs of the moment.  That is another reason I have tended to avoid the Mach, staying in my logi boat.  While I am used to refits, flying with Asher means having a mobile depot and refits with you all the time, they are a complication that my Oneiros doesn’t face.

I got myself set and undocked to look at my new ship.  Shortly there after we were given a “burn to” destination and off we went.

Machariel on the way

Seeing as I had a shiny new ship, I logged my Jita alt in and check to see if the Guardian’s Gala SKIN for it was available.  It was, so I splurged and bought one even though it was about half the price of the ship itself.  It is only ISK I guess.  Plus that is one of the better looking SKINs in the game, and possibly the only good SKIN for Gallente ships aside from the Quafe SKINs.

We made our way out to a titan, where people who had not read the fleet MOTD were given time to refit their Machs using the fitting service of the super.  Then there was a bridge and soon we were at our destination, the system of Gehi in Amarr low sec space.

Landing at our destination

If I understood correctly, this is also where NCDot has been staging for things like the HED-GP fight the other day.  We were there to blow up a Raitaru engineering complex belonging to one of NCDot and PL’s allies, Darwinism.

Darwinism logo on the engineering complex

Our fleet was there, the Jackdaw fleet was there, and because there were still people who wanted to go out and get a kill mail of some sort, there was a Hurricane fleet that rode out with us as well.  Needless to say, we had damage o’plenty in order to stop the repair timer and start bringing the structure down.

Timer paused, never to resume

The Mach fleet anchored up on the FC then put out drones to attack the Raitaru more as a means to make sure we got on the kill mail than to beat the structure down any faster.  We were already well over the damage cap that the citadel mechanics enforce, so firing our guns would have been a waste of ammunition.

Anchoring up for the shoot

My Warrior II drones were putting up zero damage almost the whole time.  They ended up getting about 1,400 points of damage, which divided over the total structure hit points rounds down to 0%.

Warrior II zooming over the structure

The outcome for the Raitaru was pretty much a foregone conclusion.  There were more than 550 of us on the kill mail for what is essentially the smallest of the Upwell Consortium structures.  A light missile spewing Jackdaw got top damage and the whole thing went boom.

The sky glows orange as the Raitaru explodes

Nobody rose to oppose our assault on the structure, so the most difficult aspect of the whole operation was just getting ourselves home.  Sure, travel is simple, but pushing more than 500 pilots through gates in low sec space causes time dilation to kick in.  So our fleet waited around a bit while the faster fleets got off the same node.

A ball of Machs on a gate waiting for the green light

After a bit of a wait we were given a destination, jumped through, and moved out as a group.

Machs aligning for the next gate

We moved along, still bringing up time dilation and traffic control every time we passed through a gate.  The joy of driving a full fleet through systems that generally do not get a lot of traffic and are provisioned accordingly.  You can see how much we spiked the jumps metric in Gehi that day and can see which systems we took by following the spikes through low sec.

DOTLAN marks out visit to Gehi

I also remained convinced that the traffic control mechanism that throttles the passage of players through a gate to keep the system from getting overloaded is biased against me.  Either that, or it sorts alphabetically and, being a “W” I end up at the end of the queue.  I swear I can be the first on the gate and still be the last one to show up in the next system.

The trip gave me further time to admire my new ship and the SKIN I bought for it.

My Mach aligning out near a planet

About two hours after the first ping went out for the fleet we arrived back home in Delve in 1DQ1-A, where we docked up in the Keepstar and disbanded.

That was about the high point of operations for the day.  Other fleets went out, but not strategic ops.  The coalition was back to ratting and mining and I was off to do other things.

Visiting the Blood Raiders Shipyard

As mentioned in the notes for the YC119.5 update, the Blood Raiders Shipyard is now a thing.  It is a special new PvE event… a null sec raid if you will… that has the possibility of dropping blue print copies of special Blood Raiders capital ships.

The first step in the whole thing is actually finding the shipyard.  There will only ever be one shipyard in space at a time and it will spawn somewhere in Blood Raiders territory, which spans the regions of Delve, Querious, and Period Basis.  In order to locate the shipyard you have to find one of the Blood Raider mining operations and follow ships from there back to the shipyard.

The Imperium incursion SIG went to work finding it after it was supposed to spawn, some time on Thursday, and by Friday the shipyard had been located in the system E-DOF2 in the Period Basis region.  The tale of its discovery is the subject of a post over at INN.

Having found the shipyard, there is the whole “blowing it up” aspect to master now.  As I noted in my post about the YC119.5 update, I am not sure if having the shipyard in our part of space is a blessing or a curse.  From what I heard about the trial runs on the test server, the Blood Raider reaction forces creamed every attacking force by burying it in numbers.  As noted in the story linked above, RED Alliance threw a small Rattlesnake fleet at the shipyard and promptly lost most of it.  INN had follow up posts about further attempts including a force of frigates trying to put the shipyard into reinforcement mode.

The shipyard is a special citadel and only has a single 24 hours reinforcement, which means you only have to go through two rather than three fights to kill it.  But so far nobody has has managed the first fight and it sits there in space unharmed.

Since this was something new in New Eden and not too far from home, I decided to fly down to take a look at the shipyard myself.  That meant setting a course for Period Basis and RED Alliance space.  I got out my alt, put him in his Buzzard (so he could scan down the site), and sent him south.

Headed to Period Basis

We are set blue with RED Alliance, so I didn’t have to worry about the locals shooting me.  However, with any space attraction, I did keep alert for possible gate camps on the way down.  Somebody is always looking to shoot tourists.  There were a couple of camps but, fortunately for me, they were blue.

When I arrived at the system I launched combat probes, cloaked up, and then made myself a safe spot from which to work.  For my first scans of the system I was looking for structures, but didn’t come up with any likely results.  I could have save myself some time if I had read the patch notes where it says;

They Blood Raider Sotyio does not show up on the tactical overlay, nor can it be probed down. The best way to find them is to try following a Blood Raider hauler (Bestower or Impel), coming to pick up minerals from a mining operation. There will always be a mining operation in the system with the Blood Raiders Shipyard.

I changed that to ships and found an extremely dense ball of Amarr ships, including Apocalypse and Bhaalgorn battleships.  I narrowed down my focus on that, getting 100% results pretty quickly, then warped in at 100km so I would stay cloaked.

And I landed right on the shipyard and was immediately uncloaked.

Back to my safe!

I quickly aligned back to my safe spot, bookmarked my position, and then warped back to my safe to cloak up for a return trip.  I warped back at 100km from my bookmark and landed far enough from anything that might decloak me to be safe for the moment.  My overview did not show much going on, just a few people shooting at the structure.

Initial overview…

That might have been some of the Succubus frigate fleet mentioned in the INN post.  What I did not see was any Blood Raiders on my overview.  In fact, I didn’t even see the structure, which reminded me that new things in the game often don’t get added to the overview by default.  I added the structure to my travel overview. (The pic above was after I did that.)  They I started looking around in space to see if I could see any Blood Raiders.  They were definitely out there, I could see lasers chasing the frigates around the vicinity of the shipyard.

The Shipyard with lasers

Those were dreadnoughts, which seemed to be strewn about the undock area of the shipyard.  But I knew there had to be more ships about.  I tried the default “ALL” overview that CCP provides and was pleasantly surprised to find that they had added the new ships to that.  I have, in the past, had to add things to “ALL.”  And with that I was suddenly aware of just how many Blood Raiders ships were lingering in the area.

Lots of Blood Raiders

The overview was full, with pages and pages of Blood Raiders ships.  There were dozens and dozens of ships out there.  I could see fleets of Blood Raiders ships cruising around.

A flight of Augoror cruisers orbiting the shipyard

Not many of the ships on grid seemed interested in the frigates flying about taking potshots.  In fact, so far as I could tell, only the Chemosh dreadnoughts seemed to be firing on them.  There was a gaggle of them on the undock and some more spread out around the shipyard.

Chemosh dreads on the undock

The subcaps seemed mostly interested in warping off to where every they go when they’re done with their task.  I could see the bright streaks of ships warping away every so often.  However, for every ship warping off I say what seemed to be a couple more stuck mid-warp.  There was a large number of ships either bouncing off the back of the structure or actually withing it that were bumping and bouncing and unable to enter warp.

Or such was my assumption.  I was trying to “look” at ships in space and could not do so with many of them, which is generally a sign they are trying to enter warp.  However, they stayed on the overview and I could, by maneuvering the camera around, see ships actually bouncing off the citadel or poking partially out of it.

The shipyard itself seem unperturbed by events.

Shields barely scratched… or not scratched at all really

The shipyard itself seems to be a standard Upwell Consortium Sotyio structure.  It even says so on the side.  Glad to see that Upwell will sell to anybody with ISK I guess.

Look for genuine Upwell marked structures!

The Blood Raiders opted for a spray-on logo though.  That is a special order item not available to mere capsuleers.

Blood Raiders are #01!

They also get the new logo features that came with the YC119.5 update including alliance logo and CEO portrait along with more spray on logos.

CEO Omir Sarikusa sends his regards

I was amused to see that the Blood Raiders shipyard get the same advertising screens around the undock as player deployed structures.

Waiting for “Vote for Xenuria” to go past again…

The Blood Raiders can get a special paint job and their own logos sprayed on the hull, but they cannot opt out of ads!  Anyway, I saw the big new thing in space and beat Mark726 to it no less!  He’s usually the first space tourist on the scene.

The Blood Raiders Shipyard out in Period Basis

Now to see about blowing the damn thing up.

I know some people are angry that CCP decided to try this version of their new NPC response AI in null sec.  And not just in null sec, but in the Goon corner of null sec no less!  “Grr Gons! Hat Gons!” and all that.  Why should they get the new PvE shiny?

The flip side of course is that this new shiny seems intent on destroying as many player ships as possible by dropping overwhelming forces on them.  I am not sure high sec would put up with that.  I am told that many mission runners like the predictability of rewards and that an AI intent on making things difficult might not be appreciated if that is the case.  That is ever the PvE carebear conundrum, a desire for interesting tasks mixed in with an aversion to any loss.

And who could CCP blob more ironically than the Imperium?  Blobbers blobbed  and killed by blobbing NPCs, film at 11.

Of course, that won’t sate anybody feeling left out, but I find it amusing.  And we shall see how long and how many destroyed ships it takes to destroy the first Blood Raiders Shipyard.