56 Weeks of World War Bee

While we spent much of the week waiting for PAPI to prepare for the coming onslaught on the Imperium capitol, a true hero of the PAPI coalition emerged in the form of one Syrio Ikunen of TEST who managed to launch an electron bomb from their Purifier that caught a John Hartley Kestrel fleet dead on, destroying 119 Kestrels and two support ships in one go.

They were not the only attacker on the battle report, but their bomb was the most spot on and a majority of the Kestrels blown up were marked as solo kills attributed to them.  That Purifier has a lot of kill marks on it now.

Who got all the kills?

XtraSquishy captured a bit of the bomb run on video.

I am actually kind of bummed I missed that because I had one of those Kestrels sitting in my hangar waiting to get used. (I have now named it “Syrio Ikunen Target.”)  They’re zippy fun to fly around, but clearly they are a bit thin on the tank end of things.

One Year Ago

CCP did some updates to command ships, though I couldn’t tell you if that changed anything.

In the war I was out on a fleet in Paragon Soul with Dabigredboat chasing TEST dreadnoughts.

And in my summary of week four of the war it looked like 10 trillion in ISK had been destroyed so far, split fairly evenly between the sides.  Fraternity and PanFam had broken into Fountain and we were falling back.  Legacy was deep into Querious.

Delve Front

Since this was just move op and re-subscribe week for PAPI, the strategic situation in Delve did not change, so I can once again re-roll the same image of the front lines.

O-EIMK Constellation – Aug 01, 2021

The expectation, given the PAPI announcement last week, was that, come the weekend, things would heat up, that the actual assault on 1DQ1-A would begin.  And it seemed for the briefest of moments that this was going to come to pass.

As I got up and got online Friday morning I opened up Jabber and there were pings about hostiles in 1DQ.  I logged in, but all the fleets were full, so I undocked in a Kestrel to see if I could get a shot in on something.  I managed to get missiles away on one target before it blew up… my one kill mail in 1DQ for the week… before the whole thing was over.

But it wasn’t even a real attack on us.  Some Imperium pilot in a Nyx warped into a bubble and PAPI tried to take advantage, as we would in a similar situation.  It was just another minor skirmish in a week that was mostly minor skirmishes.  The weekend saw no assault, and every time PAPI pinged for a fleet we stood to with a counter and they declined to come to us.

There have been rumors of move ops heading away from Delve, rumors of structures being unanchored, and somebody noted that there were a number of titans for sale in the T5ZI Keepstar, the Tower of Legends as it has been named, just across the way from the Forge of Heroes Sotiyo, but there has been no official announcement that PAPI has called off the assault on 1DQ yet.  Even some PAPI members are getting tired of their inability to commit.

Meanwhile, the NPC Delve interdiction campaign, aimed at cutting off 1DQ from the rest of New Eden petered out when Imperium pilots shot up the first few bubbles deployed to the NPC station undocks.  Nobody seemed interested in maintaining the watch on 11 different camps.

As for the weekly Delve campaign report, numbers were up again as the Imperium prodded PAPI and shot structures and generally tried to be a pain.

Delve Campaign – Week 56

So there were a half a trillion in ISK in destruction, and that doesn’t even count all the clashes in E-VKJV, because that system is in Querious.

Other Theaters

Do we care at this point?  Something might be happening in Feythabolis, but no ihubs have changed hands.  Likewise, whatever was going on in Catch appears to have tapered off.  All eyes were supposed to be on Delve.

Really, the only interesting bit was Snuffed Out baiting Fraternity into another fight in the northeast.

My Participation

After hitting the 5K kill mail mark last week I was able to go back to flying logi… and promptly lost a Scalpel in a skirmish in E-VKJV between an Imperium Harpy fleet and PAPI Retributions.

Scalpel still alive

I also lost an Eagle late on Friday night when we went into E-VKJV to reinforce the Ansiblex jump gate there to make any attempt to go around the back on Saturday, when we expected that the assault might begin, a little more awkward.

Tidi makes for nice explosion shots

Given the lateness of the hour, I was surprised how on the ball the reimbursement team was.  I got my payout in under a minute.

Eagle loss paid out 47 seconds after being submitted

I am pretty sure this is becoming a point of pride for the Imperium after we keep hearing that some PAPI line members wait for weeks to get something.

I was actually fairly active as we went to visit PAPI in their space multiple times.  I was there in a Scalpel, an Eagle, a Ferox, a Kestrel (long after the fleet mentioned at the top of the post), and at one point we took a wormhole out to Insmother to try and nab a capital, but were too late so we caught a Thera connection back to Fountain and gated through T5ZI without incident.

Kestrels escaping from T5ZI

As a measure of the tide of the war, I was on 98 kill mails in week 56 and only one of them was in the pocked of space the Imperium still holds.  We spent a lot of time poking PAPI.

Anyway, the two losses above bring my total loss count for the war to:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Cormorant destroyer – 5
• Purifier stealth bomber – 5
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 3
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Eagle heavy assault cruiser – 1
• Scythe T1 logi – 1
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

CCP dropped the expected Grand Heist patch on Tuesday, releasing the reserve bank keys into New Eden.  I hope we get some report later on about how much of that ISK gets harvested by the groups that own the systems they are in.

The Grand yet Slow Heist

The whole thing got off on a bit of an awkward foot as the low sec sites with the keys were broken when the update hit and it took CCP the rest of the week to get things corrected.  I think things are good now.

CCP also started straight up giving us ISK in a login campaign.  I’ll take 235 million ISK thank you.

Collected them all

I wonder how this will influence the July MER?

They also reduced sales tax and broker’s fees in NPC structures by 50% for the next three months.  Again, I don’t think anybody is going to complain about making more money on market transactions, but I do wonder what the goal here is.  Are they trying to stimulate the economy, jump start production, or undercut the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter?

The latter would be amusing for the Imperium.  Even if it wasn’t the intended effect, CCP made NPC stations cheaper to sell from if you have all the right skills, so a lot of trade moved from Perimeter to Jita.  While we get a 20% cut of the TTT, Pandemic Horde and TEST are much more dependent on it for income.

When it comes to the peak concurrent user number for the week, New Eden was up again.  No doubt the promise of a huge battle got people to peek in.  We’ll see how the failure of that to materialize affects numbers next week, but we saw the numbers pass 27K for the first time since week 49.

• Day 1 – 38,838
• Week 1 – 37,034
• Week 2 – 34,799
• Week 3 – 34,692
• Week 4 – 35,583
• Week 5 – 35,479
• Week 6 – 34,974
• Week 7 – 38,299
• Week 8 – 35,650
• Week 9 – 35,075
• Week 10 – 35,812
• Week 11 – 35,165
• Week 12 – 36,671
• Week 13 – 35,618
• Week 14 – 39,681
• Week 15 – 40,359
• Week 16 – 36,642
• Week 17 – 37,695
• Week 18 – 36,632
• Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)
• Week 20 – 37,628 (Saturday)
• Week 21 – 34,888
• Week 22 – 33,264
• Week 23 – 33,149
• Week 24 – 32,807 (Saturday)
• Week 25 – 31,611
• Week 26 – 39,667 (Saturday)
• Week 27 – 34,989 (Saturday)
• Week 28 – 34,713
• Week 29 – 35,996
• Week 30 – 38,323
• Week 31 – 38,167
• Week 32 – 37,259
• Week 33 – 35,886 (Saturday)
• Week 34 – 35,626
• Week 35 – 35,379
• Week 36 – 35,085
• Week 37 – 34,394
• Week 38 – 36,319
• Week 39 – 35,597 (Saturday)
• Week 40 – 35,384 (Saturday)
• Week 41 – 33,708
• Week 42 – 33,521
• Week 43 – 33,731
• Week 44 – 33,742 (Saturday)
• Week 45 – 33,758
• Week 46 – 31,768
• Week 47 – 29,898
• Week 48 – 31,462 (Monday)
• Week 49 – 27,914
• Week 50 – 26,045
• Week 51 – 25,661
• Week 52 – 24,262
• Week 53 – 24,290
• Week 54 – 24,922
• Week 55 – 26,259 (Saturday)
• Week 56 – 27,176

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 56
• INN – PAPI’s Perfunctory Plan
• INN – WinterCo Town Hall
• INN – The Assault Begins (but not really)
• INN – A “Humanitarian” Effort in T5ZI-S

Pandemic Binge Watching Part One

The Covid-19 pandemic has kept many of us at home for more than four months now.  All that staying home has led to a demand for entertainment.

Oddly, video games haven’t proven quite the outlet for me that you might imagine.  The problem is that I have also been working from home for more than four months, so I spend 8-10 hours a day sitting at my desk in front of a computer.  When work is over, I often feel strongly that I need to get up and go somewhere else in the house rather than switching over to play a game at that very same desk.

So, for my wife and I, with no movies, no going out to dinner, and not even any sports, the television series has become the entertainment outlet for us.  We are subscribed to a few streaming services which offer us up full seasons of shows, and so we have spent time binging on those.  I’m often tempted to write something up about each as we finish them, but that means going back to my desk again, so I have been slacking on that.

Now, however, I am going to sum up some of what we watched both as a public service as well as a reminder to myself as to what we have watched.  This is in some sort of order close to chronologically related to when we watched them, but there was some overlap.  The bullet points are the title and the service on which they are currently available.

• The White Queen – BBC series available on Starz
• The White Princess – Starz series
• The Spanish Princess – Starz series

That is a three-fer right there.  Based on the books by Philippa Gregory, they cover the War of the Roses and its aftermath, spanning a time frame that covers a few of Shakespeare plays.  They represent and ongoing story, though each series was filmed independently and is a complete story on its own.

A good set of tales, if not fully historical at times, they point out the key problem of the War of the Roses, which was too damn many people named Henry, Edward, Elizabeth, and Margaret.  Seriously, at one point I think there were four Henrys, three Edwards, two Elizabeths, and two Margarets in play, and more came and went.  We had to pause to establish which Henry or whoever was being referenced at times.

Also, a completely new set of actors takes over for each series, which can be a bit of a test when the same characters can span series.  Still, some good fun, if you like that era.  I enjoyed watching the 1995 film version of Richard III after this to see how many of the same people were treated by the two perspectives. (Also, that movie is a must for the casting alone.)

Starz had a $25 for six months deal on their streaming service, and these three made that worth the money.

Good for: Tolerant history buffs, people named Henry, and people keen for drinking games related to spotting actors from other shows.

• The Great – Hulu original seriess

More historical tales, this one is a comedic look at Catherine the Great and her early time in the court of the Czar.  I had to double check that this was a US produced series, as we’re not usually that big on European history that doesn’t involve us directly.  Very funny at times, often crude, and feeling no need to adhere to any particular historical accuracy, it can be quite a ride.  The main problem was it felt like about 8 episodes worth of content in a 10 episode series, so it flags a bit towards the end.  Still, I was good with it.  Huzzah!

Good for: Really tolerant history buffs and people who kind of miss Blackadder.

• Brockmire – IFC series available on Hulu

I don’t think I have laughed out loud as much in a long time as I did during the first two seasons of this series.  Hank Azaria’s character is relentless.  This humor is often crude and rarely strays from sex, drugs, alcohol, and his character flaws.  Very much not for children.  Gets serious at the end of season two and into season three, then completely flies off into a bizarro future history in season four, but is still pretty damn funny.

Good for: Hank Azaria fans, baseball fans, and anybody who might like a Filipino knock-off of Hart to Hart.

• High Fidelity – Hulu original series

A solid interpretation of the novel by Nick Hornby, transplanted to New York City in the current era, so mix tapes are out and play lists are in.  Vinyl though, that is eternal.

The cast is very good and the story flows well enough.  My main problem is that this series exists in the same universe as the 2000 film version of the novel which is a favorite of mine.  The series seems tame and a bit flat compared to the manic energy and comedic rhythm of Jack Black and John Cusack in the film.  Also, the characters in the TV series are not even half as obsessed about music as the film cast is, and that obsession really drives the characters at times.

Basically it is the same issued I had with the Catch-22 series; if I already like the existing film version a series really has to work to get away from that comparison.

Good for:  People who haven’t seen the movie… or read the book probably.

• 12 Monkeys – Syfy series available on Hulu

I think Hulu is our best value for streaming services at this point.  Also, another series that is based on the same work as an already existing film that I like.  A Terry Gilliam film no less, so you know I have it on DVD on the shelf already.  Oh, and the series is literally based on the film so, while I don’t know how that works legally, it certainly qualifies as a great big “Danger Will Robinson.” (Which reminds me, I need to put Lost in Space on the list for next time.)

That said, the series didn’t just copy the movie.  I suspect the lack of a popular novel as the original source material meant that they didn’t have to go scene for scene to meet expectations and could run with their own plan.  And that plan seemed to be to illustrate that no simple plan ever ends as expected.

The first season is a non-stop roller coaster of “if we just jump somebody back in time to save a person, kill a person, or stop an event, then our problems will be solved.”  That never happens.  I mean, of course it doesn’t or it would be a very short series.  But you do end up with a lot of plans and time spent figuring out what they missed and the jump back in time to fix that only to find there is some other complication.

Season two is a little less jumpy on the timeline, but still full of paradoxes and unanticipated results.  We haven’t started on season three yet.  We’re still a little dizzy and needed a break to watch something else.  The acting is good and I like most of the cast.  It will hold your attention.  Just don’t expect resolution, or even answers half the time.

Good for: People who like their time travel shows to be complicated.

Next time: Maybe something not on Hulu.

Opposite Day for the Local Channel

We have been living under the blackout in null sec for a while now.  Back in mid-July it was put in place and its duration has been said to be indefinite. (Which means of an unknown duration and not “forever” as some have interpreted the word.)

You say that CCP, but is it?

Well, we got a surprise today on the “indefinite” front.  This morning CCP ended up having problems with their chat systems… or maybe the Secure Commerce Commission got their hands on some bad Quantum-Entangled 4-Helium, I don’t know… which had com channels down all over New Eden.  And while the chat systems has been restarted and normal service restored, one side effect was the return of immediate local to null sec.

Local, now filled with trash again

According to Reddit, wormhole space was visited by this change to local as well.  I’m sure that made everybody happy.

That people still appear in local after the chat system restart seems to be because they have not logged out.  Maybe.  Logging in after the restart, my character did not show up in local.  I am sure nobody will abuse that particular aspect of this strange event.  Presumably everything will be back to normal after downtime.

Welcome to the Chaos Era!

Other coverage:

• Official Forum Thread
• Imperium News
• A Missioneer in EVE

WoW Classic is just about Three Weeks Away

The great big test of nostalgia in Azeroth kicks off in just 25 days.

Classic is as Classic does

At my end, there has been some interest from the old instance group.  A few email messages have gone around, people have re-subscribed to World of Warcraft, and it looks like we will be giving it a go.

One of the problems starting off is that many of the communication channels we have used in the past have disappeared (Raptr) or become unusable (Skype, Yahoo IM).  Re-establishing a coms baseline is under way.  I think Discord might be our solution since it is pretty easy to setup, has voice support, and mobile clients.  While my default Discord behavior is to join popular Discord servers only to leave in annoyance when the discussion ends up being lowest common denominator stuff (though that might also be related to the nature of EVE Online Discord channels), I have found success there as well.  I didn’t have to rejoin the Blaugust Discord this year because I never left.  So Potshot and I are tinkering with that.  With a small group it ought to be manageable.

As for WoW Classic itself, my baseline goal is just to run Deadmines as a group once again, with anything after that being gravy.  Others are more ambitious, but there will be plenty of comedy along the way I am sure.

We shall see.

Among the changes we face, we will be about 13 years older than we were the last time we set off on this same venture. (I posted about the humble beginnings of the instance group as it happened.)  A lot of things can change in that time span.  Jobs, kids, health, geographic location, and the simple ability to stay up late all come into play.  In 2006 it was a chore for me to get up before 8am.  Now I can barely sleep past 6am.  Earl, who used to stay up into the wee hours of the morning on the east coast in order to play with us likewise reports that age has made an earlier bed time much more of a thing.  Also, he might be in Japan.

Anyway, I have that to look forward to, which is good, because I have otherwise pretty much fallen off the Azeroth wagon.

I was ready, really ready, for the 8.2 update.  The Rise of Azshara was going to bring some new content as well as the ability to unlock flying in the Battle for Azeroth expansion.  I had my main all set to go.

Then I didn’t log in the day the update dropped.

Things were busy in EVE Online for a start.  I put off getting dug into the expansion for over a week, until the first weekend in July.  At that point I got the quests, went through the new zone intro, then was distracted by Darkmoon Faire for a bit.  And then I stopped logging in at all.

Rather than being well on my way to unlocking flying in Battle for Azeroth, I pretty much just have a camel that can walk on water at this point.

Ship of the desert… and now the water

And that was thanks to the fact that, having done the work to earn the Azure Water Strider mount back during Mists of Pandaria (best mount reward ever from the most underrated of expansions), I was given the mount gear for water walking with the8.2 update, an item which applies to all my mounts.  It isn’t just camels walking on water.

Otherwise, I have been pretty much neglecting WoW.

I wouldn’t necessarily blame my current Azeroth malaise on Battle for Azeroth.  As expansions go it is mid-pack.  There is a lot there to love, but also a lot that really isn’t all that exciting.  It has many of the usual problems of expansions.  Blizz changed enough things to annoy a segment of their core fan base, but not enough things for the game to feel fresh, new, of different.  So some of the core is (loudly) annoyed by BFA but there isn’t anything that would bring back a lapsed player.  And so it goes.  As I noted back in February, expansions mean change and there is a balancing act as to how much or how little change will lead to success, and the margins within which a company can find success seem to narrow with each successive expansion.

I don’t think the expansion is necessarily my problem.  Time has shown that I just tend to be cyclical with my WoW passion.  I play for stretches, then fade for a while, only to find renewed interest when I return again later.

I will probably be back to BFA later.  I have not forsaken the flying unlock yet, having managed it in every expansion so far.  But that will probably be at a later date.  I suspect that my next login will probably be for WoW Classic.  I hope to be refreshed and ready for that in under a month.

But if I want a sampler there is always that last stress test event coming up next week, open to everybody with a live account.  Also, name reservation day is on the 13th I understand it.  And I still need to consider which class to roll up for the big day.  Maybe it is good that it is still about three weeks away.

Clash of Titans in X47L-Q

The event started warming up at about 17:00 UTC, which was 10am local time for me, so I was at work.  But I could watch coms on my phone and follow the progress as events unfolded.

The source of the conflict was a Keepstar timer, so the trend of the war continues.  NCDot dropped a Keepstar in Pure Blind in X47L-Q to support its allies facing the Imperium.  That system put it in range to support the Circle of Two Keepstar in DW-2TI in Fade.  That also put the CO2 Keepstar between it and the Imperium staging in Cloud Ring.

It was, however, quite close to NPC null sec in Pure Blind, where Imperium SIGs and squads have been active since November of last year, and its position also put it astride the route to Tribute, NCDot’s home.

The fight itself was over the armor timer for the Keepstart which, depending on who is speaking, either doesn’t really matter or is the most important timer.

As I have noted before, to kill an Upwell structure like a Keepstar there are three fights that need to happen.  The shield attack, the armor timer, and the structure timer.  Successfully breaking through the citadel’s shields starts things off and can be done at any time.  The following two fights come at specific times.

The argument against the importance of the armor timer rests on the obvious; the Keepstar doesn’t die if the defender loses.  Very simple.

The argument for the importance rests on the idea that if the defender loses the final timer, they are stuck on grid, unable to tether or dock, thus left to the dubious mercy of the victorious foe.  You can lose the armor timer and still find safety.  Losing the final timer means a need to find an exit.

Either way, it wasn’t clear that the fight was going to happen.  Both sides were ramping up for it, however there was a DDoS attack on the game yesterday morning that was causing people to get dropped and leaving them unable to log on.  This rather ironically occurred about when CCP posted a Dev Blog about issues with the game earlier this year.

However, the CCP team was able to get that in hand before the timer hit and I saw the pings go out for fleets.  Ships were forming up and the battle was on.  Cynos went up and ships were bridged in, the system having been captured by NCDot too recently for them to be able to put up a cyno jammer.

A couple of people started live blogging things.  NER had a thread up on Reddit, while INN put one up on their site.  From those I was able to watch things unfold from work.  It looked like both sides were willing to drop titans on the field and battle soon became a measure of who was killing the most of the big ships.

Things seemed to be going in favor of the defenders on the titan count.  While the attackers managed to kill a Vanquisher, a very expensive faction titan, overall the count was going against the Imperium by almost 2 to 1.

Some of the Imperium leadership was on record before the battle saying that we would trade two of our titans for an enemy titan and feel we’d come out on top due to the economic power of Delve.

Of course, it is one thing to say that and another to see it actually happening, especially when our own faction titan landed on the chopping block.  The first Molok to die in the game went down during the fight.

As I finished up with work I went to try and slip into the system to see what was going on.  By then the live blogs were starting to taper off as those who needed to get up in the morning wandered off.

I managed to get into X47L-Q in a Purifier stealth bomber, joining nearly 4,000 other capsuleers as I crossed slowly into the system.

I am in the system, almost…

I was even able to get on grid with the Keepstar but I hadn’t reduced the video settings to put myself in “potato mode” and the client objected to this strenuously, closing down repeatedly until I gave up and went to have dinner.  At some point my ship was in system long enough to get blown up, so op success I guess.  But it seemed like I might just be reading about this battle on Reddit.

Later in the evening though, when the timer had been won by the Imperium, thus setting up a return match, and the EUTZ players were starting to fade, the call went out for USTZ capital pilots to get online an in various fleets to drop on targets of opportunity.

This looked like my chance.

I won a Naglfar as a prize for the Reavers race we had way back in December and it has been sitting in a station waiting for an opportunity like this ever since.

Nag in the hangar… and of course I bought a SKIN for it!

I got in fleet and made sure I was ready to go.  My hope was to be able to drop on a titan.  And a titan came up as the first target, but I did not “x up” in time to be called for that drop.  But another target was said to be coming up shortly, so I undocked so as to be ready to go.

On the undock about to get bumped

I did remember to set my graphics to “potato mode.”   I never do that, and I tend to pay for it in big fights, but I like to see pretty pictures dammit.  You must suffer for beauty!  This time though I wanted to get in and stay in if I had the chance.  So I dialed everything down.  Gone were the shiny, high res textures, but we were called and told a cyno would be up for us in a moment, so I was ready to go.

Then it was up and we jumped, the tunnel speeding along until we started to hit the X47L-Q server, at which point the animation, like everything else, slowed down to 10% speed.  That took a while, but people eventually started to land.  Our target was a Nyx that had disconnected and had been caught coming back into the game.

Then I had to do all the things, get myself in siege mode, target the Nyx, put my heavy warp disruptor on the target because I was close enough and wanted to help hold him in place, and none of the buttons were responding, which is often the norm in these fights.  Eventually siege went greed, and the warp disruptor went live, but I managed to toggle my guns on then back off, so I was set to unleash just one volley.  But that was the minimum I needed to at least get in the fight.

Potato mode Naglfar firing at last!

I had to tinker with things.  I had started the guns up again when I noticed that I had loaded long range ammo.  That made sense because you never know where you’ll drop, but I was close enough to want to swap to shorter range, higher damage ammo.  That meant cycling the guns off again, going through the reload cycle at 10% tidi, then getting the guns going again.  I made it happen, but all that fooling around probably explains my low position on the damage list for the kill mail.

The wreck of the Nyx

Things were going well enough that I started bumping up my graphic settings a bit, so that wreck is not full potato mode.  Tidi even jumped up to 14% at one point, before heading back down to 10%, indicating that the server wasn’t as swamped as it was earlier in the day.  But there were only about 2,600 people in system and the defenders were attempting to de-aggress and dock up or jump out.

Then we had to wait for the siege modules to cycle down.  A dreadnought in siege does a lot more damage, but cannot move or jump out, so you’re stuck there until it is done.  I had three minutes left on my timer, which meant 30 minutes real time until I could do something.  But coms were enough to keep me entertained.

Leadership was quite excited.

As I mentioned, in the first half of the fight the Imperium was losing two titans for every one we blew up.  But as the fight went on we kept piling in more pilots at every opportunity while the defenders began to try to escape once the fate of the Keepstar timer was set.  The aggressiveness of the Imperium set the titan kill totals back towards an even balance, with the end result being something around 29 titans lost on each side, which is the second largest loss of titans in a single battle, behind only B-R5RB.  (Infographic about that battle here.) I haven’t seen a final count, and zKillboard is still a bit wonky this morning, but to win the objective and trade titans one for one is a big op success for us.

The final titan kill for the Imperium was one that got bumped off of tether by Jay Amazingness then quickly killed by mass doomsday fire.

After that it was clean up.  There were a few more smaller targets of opportunity, but it was mostly about getting people out of the system.  Our group got out of siege and jumped to the extraction cyno lit for us.  There were efforts to communicate with people who seemed to have gone AFK on grid with the Keepstar, including trying to find people who might know them personally to call them and get them to jump out.  Most ships seemed to find their way home, but there were still plenty of people who got dropped and called it a night.  The defenders set up a bubble camp to catch people logging in this morning.

Bubble camp in X47

As with the bubble camp at UALX-3, there are lots of ships and fighters waiting in that bubble.

This is waiting for you

As I said, final numbers are not up yet.  I have heard a few estimates, but nothing concrete yet.  There is a nice graph estimating the ISK war up on Reddit.  And DOTLAN confirms that a lot of stuff died in the system yesterday and early today.

Pure Blind saw a lot of action

I’ll link any final result posts at the bottom when they show up.

And, of course, this was only the armor timer.  The final fight has yet to come.

Timer is counting down

So at about the same time next Wednesday everybody can long in and do it all again, this time for keeps.

Since I missed out on the main fight, I at least have some links to Imgur galleries of other people’s screen shots, if you are interested.

• Gallery 1
• Gallery 2
• Dead Apostles Picture

 

Quote of the Day – Activities in Mordor!

This new end-game system allows players to pledge their allegiance to one faction at a time. Pledge yourself to the Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits, or Men, and unlock rewards through activities in Mordor, including a unique story arc! Players will accrue Allegiance Points which advance your character along a given Allegiance. These points can be earned through acquiring items found in Mordor, completing repeatable quests, and more.

-Allegiance Mechanic, Mordor Release Notes

Here we sit, waiting for the Mordor expansion to go live.

Keep an eye open for Mordor!

The launch was planned for Monday, but was postponed until today.  Now we have entered the period of downtime, after which the expansion should be available.

Nothing left to do but wait and wonder and look at the patch notes for Update 21, which covers the expansion.

Of course, that leads me back to what we’re going to be doing in Mordor, how we’ll be interacting with the main story, and just how far we might be asked to stretch canon.

Mucking about with the core of the stories has been, as has been brought up elsewhere, has been a concern of mine since Lord of the Rings Online was announced.  Almost eleven years back, about ten posts into this blog, I was already writing about those concerns.  How was Turbine going to handle building an MMORPG with thousands of people wandering around while keeping the linear framework that is the story itself?

The team has done a pretty good job so far.  The player sees the story advance.  You get to interact with some of the key actors in the story, but they aren’t strewn about the landscape to bump into over and over again… except in Rivendell… no matter how far you progress you can still go back to Rivendell and find everybody still hanging about.

Most of the time as a player you are occupied with subordinate tasks, things that move the story along behind the scenes, but which wouldn’t get you a mention in the book.  And so it is that you spend a lot of time helping the quartermaster corps of the local Dunedain contingent by slaying bears, boars, wolves, and the occasional servant of Sauron.

So while there was no chapter about the brave battle against the tomb robbers of Esteldin, if there had been my character would have figured prominently.

Once in a while you get to be an uncredited extra in a key scene in the story.

Of course, the flaws of the MMORPG genre are manifest in the game.  The servants of Sauron pop up again as soon as you wander off… as does the mass of wildlife you spent all that time slaughtering to help provision the various outposts of the free peoples.

And their outposts are many.  It was a bit much in the early part of the game.  I don’t recall Eriador being that densely populated.  And the game moved along, the population density became more out of character.

While Moria was a delight to explore, the dwarves did seem to be devoting a lot of time and resources to fixing up their old home when there was a war raging.  But at least they had a reason to be there.  I’m not sure why Mirkwood has so many people wandering about.  If any place was more barren of life… save the odd dark squirrel… and spiders and elves at the far end… it was Mirkwood.  But you cannot run an MMORPG zone without a half dozen quest hubs.

So I do wonder what we will encounter in Mordor, and when in the timeline of things we shall be doing that.  There is, after all, no time between the battle at the Black Gate and the destruction of the one ring (spoiler), the former only ending with the latter.  The up front promise of the release notes…

Witness the fate of the One Ring and Sauron! The Epic quest line reaches a major milestone, and remains free to all players.

…is pretty much the end of the tale save for the cleaning up afterwards.  We can’t even go find Frodo and Sam, really, as the eagles arrive and whisk them off to rejoin the remains of the fellowship.

Still, I am keen to see Mordor, even if the tale there is going to be another series of supply runs for the free peoples and some sort of post-war favor buying system.  Tourist of Middle-earth, that’s me.

I still have yet to decide which character is going to get that level boost into the expansion.  I had best decide soon.

A Fortizar Goes Online in 1-SMEB

TODAY 23:00 MAX NUMBERS DIVORCE YOUR CHILDREN, SACRIFICE YOUR WIFE AT THE ALTAR STRAT OP, SUBS, CAPS, SUPERS, TITANS, RORQUALS. BE THERE.

~~~ This was a broadcast from asher_elias to all at 2016-08-01 18:29:53.901185 EVE ~~~

Somebody was trying to impress upon us the importance of the 23:00 op.

As it happens, 23:00 is about the earliest time on a weekday when I can possibly make a fleet op, and I was home in time, online, and ready to pile into Asher’s fleet once the official ping went out and the fleet went up.  This was officially a Proteus fleet and I got into my Oneiros again.

The fleet filled up quickly enough and a second fleet went up on Apple Pear, one of our EU TZ FCs who was up late.  His fleet seemed to be… less discriminating.  There was a call to get people in fleet, alts included, in whatever ship was to hand.  So I logged on my combat alt, put him in a Crucifier, and had him join Apple Pear’s fleet.

Meanwhile, there was a capital fleet forming up… and all of us were using the same coms channel.  While confusing at times, this is generally a sign that we are doing some sort of coordinated op.

With one fleet full, another filling up, and the caps doing whatever it is they do as they assemble, we began to undock, with Asher’s fleet going first.

Once more out of the Genolution Biotech Production station

We undocked, headed to the 1-SMEB gate and jumped through.  The Apple Pear’s fleet undocked, warped to the gate, and then stood to there as the capitals began to hit the gate.  The landed there in two streams, one from the station and one from the safe POS, and jumped through.

Caps landing on the 1-SMEB gate in Sakht

On the 1-SMEB side, once most of the caps were through, Asher warped us to a spot on grid.  Had I been more aware of my surroundings, I would have seen it on the overview.  But, as I have grown used to citadels showing up there, another one didn’t strike me as something worth noting.  But as when we landed on it, I saw what was going on.

Fortizar going online

Yeah, I know, big deal, right?  There are lots of Frotizar’s in New Eden now.  We lived under the unblinking gaze of three of them in the Quafe Factory Warehouse back in Saranen.

You could see three Fortizars on one grid in Saranen

But this was ours.

The Imperium has put down dozens of Astrahus medium citadels.  They were in Saranen, all over Venal, in Pure Blind, and dotted the route south to Delve.  But for us to actually bother putting down a Fortizar, as common as they may be, is something of a statement I suppose.

And we were all there to make sure it went online without a hitch.  So all three fleets spread out around it and watched it count down through its final period of vulnerability, after which it could be gunned and would require the whole timer routine to kill.

Supers in a semi-circle around the Fortizar

One hostile landed on grid with us during the process, but warped off quickly.  Otherwise nobody showed up to try and keep our new citadel from going online.

When the counter finished and it was live, there was some cheering.  Asher and another titan pilot shot off their lance doomsday weapons.  And Jay Amazingness let us shoot his Chimera, a sacrifice to the welp gods in Delve no doubt.  We were also encouraged to troll Reddit by putting up pictures with 1-SMEB replaced with 93PI-4.  Somebody did one that looked pretty good.  My own attempt was a bit more… raw… in the grand MS Paint tradition.

And that was that.  We had a large citadel in Delve.  It isn’t a Keepstar, but we’ll get there I bet.

Then it was time to run the whole thing in reverse, with subcap fleets covering each side of the gate as the capitals went back home.  A participation link was generated, my first one for August, and I got to click on it with both my main and my alt. (Though, since they are both linked to my forum account, I am not sure if that really means anything.  But I did it anyway.  Never not click on pap links.)

Not a terribly exciting event, but one that was good for the team.  Once we were done shepherding the capitals back, the op was done.  We were encouraged to go mine and rat in 1-SMEB to build up the ADM.  I got out my Procurer to help out, but as it turns out 1-SMEB only had two asteroid belts (one of which was already mined out, and the other was almost gone) and wasn’t spawning any mining anoms, which put a damper on that plan.

So I decided to use the time to jump clone back to Jita to list all the items I shipped there from Saranen.  More assets converted to ISK.  I also stopped to look at the TNT Delve 2016 video.  See, we’re still a thing, we have a video!

The array of ships around the Fortizar as we babysat it was pretty neat, and a number of people put up good screen shots:

• Fortizar fires as it goes online
• Capitals arrayed around the citadel
• A large format picture with the local nebulae
• Fortizar looking shiny and steel
• Asher shooting his doomsday

And I have my own screen shots from the Fortizar op: