Defending Odd Allies in Stain

There was a ping prompting people to be ready on Tuesday night as a battle seemed to be brewing.  For one… as much of the was seems to happen in EUTZ… the time set was in a sweet spot for me, early evening my time, so I was logged in and ready to go when the fleets began forming up.

There were two fleets available immediately, Munnins under Elo Knight and Sacrileges with Asher Elias as the FC.  I always roll with Asher when I can, so I got into my fast clone, into a Guardian, into the fleet, and into the logi channel.

From there we moved out and headed south, using the Ansiblex network.

Sacs at an Ansiblex

When we ended up in XZ-SKZ in Period Basis I thought perhaps Legacy was making another push for the system.  But we did not linger there, turning instead to the CJF-1P gate and the Stain region.

We burned through Stain for a while, reaching a Fortizar with a titan sitting on it.  We did not having docking rights and could not tether, but the Avatar hanging there on tether next to us did not seem to mind our presence.  We were told to get in range.  The logi channel was confused for a moment, because you don’t cap chain on a structure… unless you can’t tether.  So the cap chain went up slowly as people figured out the situation.

We were then asked to temp blue a few groups, who happened to represent some of the Stain locals, like Pen is Out, Good Sax, and Ferrata Victrix, the latter standing out as a name that isn’t trying to be a sexual reference.

I had heard that we had been working with the Stain locals.  They are not our friends, but they really don’t like TEST for whatever reason and TEST has been returning that as they pass through Stain to attack us.  So we have been cooperating with them at times, and tonight we were with them.

The titan joined our fleet and bridged us off to our destination.

I just like to watch fleets bridge

There we landed on another Fortizar, this time in 4GQ-XQ, which did allow us to dock and tether, though people in the logi channel chained up because it was assumed we would not have rights.

The Fort also had a timer counting down.  This was our objective, defending the timer.

Timer counting down

I was kind of amused to see the name Against ALL Authorities.  We were fighting them down in Delve back in 2012.  I wasn’t aware they were still around, though I guess organizations rarely die in New Eden.

We hung around on the Fort for a while as the hostiles started showing up.  Much to our surprise, an Erebus appeared on their structure in system.  There was speculation as to whether they meant to jump or jumped instead of bridging.  But Asher, seeing a possible opportunity, warped us straight to the cyno and bubbles went up to hold the titan in place.

It was not to be.  The hostiles got their act together and started bridging in as we formed up.

Erebus in the mix

That turned into a brawl on their structure and things were pretty busy for a bit for logi as the two side started trading blows.  Things were happening fast yet slow… tidi was in full effect… so I was both in a hurry to lock people up who were broadcasting, yet often had a lot of time to look around while that was happening.

A Sac in the pack starts to explode

I was able to rep a few people, with my big save being Kappa Hutt, one of our boosters, who I caught with reps when he was well into structure.

All reps on Kappa

Things were complicated when we were hit by a cap bomb that drained everybody’s power.  Logi in the cap chain were able to keep going, but we were slowed down in getting out of the bubbles as most of the Sacrileges had their MWDs shut down.

Getting out of the bubbles

That meant apply cap to the Sacs that were falling behind.  There is a plan for that, but it took a while to get cap to them and everybody out of the bubble, at which point we disengaged and warped back to the Fortizar.

Our losses were not all that much, considering how deep we got into things.  We were able to tether up and repair while the Fort itself repaired.

The objective, saving the Fortizar timer, was accomplished.  But there were still almost 1,500 people in the system, and when some capitals dropped on grid with us, we ran out to see if we could grab something.

Caps on grid with us

That did not go our way as reinforcements arrived to support the caps.  Asher had us align out and warped us off, but there were bubbles up and not everybody got out, including both of my cap chain buddies, who were soon in pods.  I did, however, get reps on Kappa Hutt, who continued to attract fire as a booster.

We’re in warp and there is still a beam on him

From there it was back to the Fort.  The hostiles did not seem content to call it a night, so nobody was going home yet.  Tidi was still running high whenever we clashed and, me being me, I was in full graphics mode and was very happy to be running the 64-bit client given my memory usage.

The graph from the control-alt-shift-M readout

A Thanatos carrier landed not too far off the Fortizar.   We moved to meet it and it was quickly tackled and killed.  But a new brawl opened up at that point.  We were anchored up, but things started to go badly in the logi channel as hostiles warped in and started targeting us.  We shed almost all of our logi in fairly short order.  I was left in a capsule, ship destroyed, as the fight carried on.

In a pod as the fleet moves on

I dropped out of the chain channel, announced my demise in the logi channel, and then dropped fleet to keep from holding down warps to capsule speed.

There has been something of a prohibition on killing capsules at times in order to keep people from re-shipping and returning to battle quickly, which is the only reason I can explain the fact that I was left alone.  (We were far enough away that there was no way I was going to re-ship and return.)

With nothing else to do besides watch, I docked up and grabbed an Ibis.  I then undocked and started going after a few of the hostile ships that were close by.

Ibis on a rampage!

I was able to get in a few hits before somebody noticed and blapped me.  However, they once again left my pod alone.  So I motored back towards the Fort while my aggression timer counted down.  I was going to dock back up and do it again.

And then the person gunning the Fortizar turned on the point defense system and nuked my pod.  I suppose I should have tried to get out with my implants, but I was so far from home that it seemed unlikely.  Oh well.

At that point I was back in 1DQ1-A and could only listen on voice comms to what was going on.

The battle report shows we paid a price for winning that timer. (Alternate report if you like that other style.)

Battle Report Header

It wasn’t a complete wipe for us, but we clearly came out on the short side on the ISK war.  But the war goes on.

Addendum:

Some additional pictures from Lazlow Jones.

DC Universe Online comes to the Switch

Alternate headline: Daybreak ports 8 year old game to Nintendo platform

It is always nice to see some proof of life from Daybreak now and then, and here we have something of a big item with the team in San Diego supporting another platform.

And so, today, DC Universe Online is available on the Nintendo Switch.

I even made a special graphic just for this

So why do I care?  My own relationship with the game was brief at best and, as the alternate headline above (which was the first headline I considered), I am not above a bit of cynicism when it comes to Daybreak.

Also, I don’t own a Switch.  That too would seem to limit my interest.

As I said, proof of life and expanding the business seems to be a good sign these days with Daybreak.

To start with, given that Daybreak probably has fewer people on its overall payroll than Blizzard has just working on World of Warcraft, porting a long running MMORPG to a new platform is fairly impressive.

Granted, the game was designed up front with consoles in mind, as the control scheme clearly demonstrates. (A minor factor in my decision to stop playing the game shortly after its launch.)  That means that there was groundwork laid to help support new consoles in a way that some of their older games lack. (No console controller save one with a full keyboard could support EverQuest.)  Still, supporting the game across Windows, PlayStation 4, XBox One, and now the Switch is a decent feat.

It is apparently more than EA can manage for most of its titles..

But further, the move to the Switch also sounds like something of a success story, that Daybreak is doing something right.  You do have to assume that the company isn’t simply throwing good money after bad (see Turbine and Infinite Crisis, also a DC Comics based title), but the fact that DCUO was the top revenue free to play game on the combined PS3/PS4 platforms about five years back gives one hope that the game remains viable.  While I have heard via back channels that DCUO remains profitable, it is nice to see something that looks like a confirmation that it remains a viable product.

Of course, this also helps feed the rumor mill about a possible break up of Daybreak.  When word of this first started to spread, I assumed that DCUO would necessarily be lumped in with the other non-EverQuest games largely due to it being on consoles.  Why would a the Norrath team want that in their house?

But now, with Golden Age Studios also on the list of trademarks and Twitter accounts, as well as DCUO expanding on its own to a new platform, perhaps it will be going its own way, leaving behind both the Norrath and the PlanetSide teams.

Or maybe none of that will come to pass.  We will have to wait and see.

Learning Restraint in Placid

Our Fortizar in Frarie still stands.  Maybe there will be an actual fight over it at some point.

Named “Little House on the Frarie”

Last night wasn’t the night however.  I got home and saw a ping that we would be forming up to defend it.  Snuffed Out had come by and set the armor timer yet again.

Time running down…

As the time ticked down, we formed up in the Fortizar in our Abaddons and Guardians.  A scout in their home system of Rakapas reported that they were logged in and had eyes on their bridging titan.

But they did not come.  The timer ran down and the Fortizar was no longer in danger.

We were formed up and ready to go, and it was clear that Snuff was as well, though their bridging titan logged off.  They were not going to come to us.  They were expecting, not unreasonably after our past performance, us to come shoot one of their structures like we did on Saturday.

However, Cainun decided that we were not going to reward them with a feed for not showing up to the timer.  The Abaddon fleet stood down, we all got our PAP, and that was that.  Another doctrine was called later and Liberty Squad roamed elsewhere.  No fight with Snuff.

Smaller Operations in the North

Between every big battle, like we saw at X47L-Q last week, there are thousands of smaller ops that undock to take care of business and look for fun and targets of opportunity.  Saturday night saw Asher Elias, the sky marshal who has been running huge multi-fleet operations with hundreds of super carriers and titans following his orders, able to return to smaller fleet ops as Reavers formed up Ishtars and undocked.

Once again leaving the station

He has business for us to attend to and we headed to X47L-Q.

There the first thing we did on entering the system was warp to a cyno on the NCDot Keepstar and pop the ship running it.  Sitting exposed right on the hostile structure, we quickly turned about and warped off, then headed back to a point on grid with it again.

On grid with the Keepstar as it counted down

We had a couple of things on our plate.  One was a matter of expedience.  While we were there and able to fly cover, a call went out to cap pilots who might still be stuck logged off on grid after last week’s battle letting them know that they had an opportunity to log in and jump out of system.  A few pilots too advantage of the opportunity.

Keepstar further back

However, our main task was to cover a new structure being dropped in the system.

Fortizar deploying

A Fortizar named Tosche Station was dropped and we were there to watch it for the 15 minute deployment timer, during which it was vulnerable to attack.  This was part of the change to Upwell structures that went in last last year.  They are now vulnerable for 15 minutes when first dropped and then for 15 minutes at the end of their anchoring sequence.  During that time they are both easy to shoot, as they are unfitted and cannot shoot back, and can be destroyed in a single fight.

However, save for a single Pandemic Horde Cormorant, none of the locals sought to interfere with the structure during that vulnerable time.  The structure made it through and began to anchor.  It was good for three days, after which it would be vulnerable again before coming online.

The longer anchoring timer

We shall see if the locals care to form up to keep it from going online to keep us from having a structure on grid with their Keepstar before the final fight for that kicks off.

After that Asher had us head out for another destination in a hurry.  We flew into Tribute, home of NCDot and Pandemic Legion, and through systems I remember both from living there are from the battles in them over the years, to M-OEE8.

There tackle had run ahead and pinned down some targets for us.  Arriving on grid we found two dreadnoughts, a Phoenix and a Revelation, as well as two Rorquals.  We went after the Phoenix first.

Phoenix under attack while a Rorqual sits in its PANIC bubble

Even as we got there one of the Rorquals had already set off its defensive PANIC module, a protective bubble meant to keep the ship alive for a while in order to let help form up and rescue it, before we had had the opportunity to shoot it.

The Phoenix went down, and then the Revelation, before we were able to get started on the more expensive Rorquals.  By that point the PANIC module had run down on the first one while the second one put its up after we poked it a bit.

Foreground Rorqual dying while the other is in PANIC in the background

After that, we raced off to M-OEE8, a system of legend and PL’s capital, complete with Keepstar.

During this some hostile interceptors showed up with a mind to rescue the remaining trapped caps, but they did not fare too well.  On warping in we were able to divert drones to them, killing a few as the others warped off.  After a couple runs at that they kept their distance, waiting for a target of opportunity.

When the first Rorqual was dispatched we motored over to the second and setup around it waiting for its PANIC bubble to fade.  When it went down we started in, but then were told to pull drones.  Jay Amazingness had a Baltec fleet in the area and Asher wanted to let them come over to join in on the kill.

Baltec fleet firing on the Rorqual

That additional firepower made short work of the Rorqual and it exploded in the dramatic fashion to which we have become accustomed.

Rorqual goes boom!

All four of the capitals were in Rate My Ticks (ticker: WERMT), which is Pandemic Legion’s rental alliance.  Both PL and NCDot still generate income by renting space as their other sources of passive income have dried up.

We then cleaned up the deployed warp disruption bubbles that they had laid about to keep people from warping directly to them from the gates and then started to head back towards home, past more structures.

Tribute is full of structures

As we and the Baltec fleet moved back towards Pure Blind we were shadowed by the hostile interceptor fleet, which was waiting for a straggler or somebody who didn’t align so they could pick them off, as well as flashes of time dilation.  Pushing a couple of fleets through an otherwise quiet region is enough to tax a server that otherwise hasn’t been reinforced.

On the way back we stopped again in X47L-Q in order to clear off some drag bubbles from a POS that was setup as a trap.  We were able to clear the bubbles, though the affair kept the logi wing busy as the tower shot at people, constantly switching targets.

Extricating ourselves from the tower was a task in and of itself, as the warp disruption batteries kept hitting people as we aligned to warp out.  Asher asked if anybody was pointed before he warped, the heard an affirmative only after he had warped us, so we turned around and headed back to try and rescue those caught.  We lost an Ishtar that way before we finally got off grid.

We also lost the fleet Impairor.  One person who logged on to go with the fleet didn’t have anything handy besides a rookie corvette, so brought that along for the fleet.  It made it through, getting on all the capital kill mails.  However, it got blown up at the POS tower, though the kill mail shows that the pilot took the effort to fit it up to be useful.  Tackle corvette!

After that we headed back to our staging and stood down.  Not a bad fleet at all.  It is nice to get back into the smaller ops that Reavers do.

Asher said on The Open Comms show last Friday that our whole SIGs and squads campaign in the north owes its origin to Bigbilltheboss who, after the Hakonen deployment didn’t want to bring all his dreadnoughts back home to Delve. (We came back from that about a year ago at this point.) So setup shop to drop on the locals ratting and mining and found the fields to be rich in targets.  Then we, and BlackOps, and TNT, and Space Violence all ended up in the north, where we have been deployed since at least November.  A long and fruitful deployment it has been too, with a lot of small fleet actions.

But more big ops are coming.  We will have the Fortizar to defend on Tuesday and then the final timer for the NCDot Keepstar on Wednesday.  Expect CCP’s servers to be heavily taxed once again as we see if more titans die.

Another Day, Another Sotiyo in Tribute

On the first day of combat operations in the north we hit what was purported to be Vince Draken’s personal Sotiyo in PBD-0G.  I don’t know if that was really his or not, but it belonged to his alliance and we put it into its first reinforcement timer.

The stoically silent Sotiyo

That first timer lasts 24 hours, after which we have to return to shoot the structure again to setup the second time.  You can’t blow these things up until you come back for the third time.

However, the locals were not going to give us another free shot at this Sotiyo.  We had the weekly fireside chat at 19:00, more than two and a half hours before the timer would run down to allow our second shot at the structure and The Mittani told us that Pandemic Legion and NCDot were already forming up a defense.

There was a cyno jammer up to block us from bridging in, the gate was blocked with a copious number of anchorable bubbles to hold any fleet entering the system in place, while super capitals lay in wait to destroy any incursions into the system.  PBD-0G was locked down tight, something verified by a look at the DaOpa Twitch stream.

This is a serious gate camp – screen capture from the stream

We were not going to go there.  So we went and reinforced another Sotiyo belonging to NCDot instead.

The thing is, from Hakonen, we can bridge into a range of systems and, as it turned out, NCDot had another Sotiyo in its vulnerability window in MJI3-8.

Tribute systems in jump range of Hakonen are red boxes

At 20:00 EVE Online time the call went out for fleets again.  I was online and ready as the ping went up and was able to get into the Typhoon fleet before it filled up.  Cainun was out FC.  People love flying battleships so that fleet fills up in under 30 seconds.  Other fleets were up and filled as well.

We got ourselves squared away and undocked, warping off to a titan waiting to send us on our way.  The bridge went up and we jumped in to see another lonely Sotiyo waiting for us.

Landing with the target in sight

We scooted over to get in range of the Sotiyo so we could begin shooting it.  There was a moment of panic as we started taking damage because somebody had set off the smart bomb mounted on their Typhoon.  But after that we anchored up and started shooting.

Our fleet visible under the NCDot logo

We adopted a very tight formation, so our fleet is one big ball with an electric blue aura about it from all of the sensor booster effects running at the same time.

A close up of the glow around out fleet

If you click on the screen shot and look near the left upright, you can see the Jackdaw fleet bridging in to cover us lest the locals decide to defend.

A couple of small ships came out to see what we were up to, but no defense was mounted.  So we flew in our blob, spewing missiles and keeping close to each other.  Somehow a group of the Guardians ended up in a line with one of the Damnation boosting ships, as though the Amarr ships were being pushed out of the sphere of Minmatar battleships.

Amarr ships together in the strange glow and effects

Amarr hulls also seemed to have a pretty high amount of skin usage.  There were very few Guardians in the stock colors.

We put the Satiyo into its first reinforced state and then packed up to head home.  The way out was easy and short, the fleet not going on nearly as long as I thought it might.

All in all a demonstration of the problems of defending multiple systems when your enemy has a range of targets from which to choose.  So it looked like they would have to form up again the next day on the second Sotiyo to stop us from moving it along, at which point we could return to the first and reinforce it unless they split up or formed up enough people to cover both systems.

But then a few hours later Asher pinged this out:

So I was sitting watching the sotiyo that PL/NC sat 5 hours guarding today, while we reffed another one of their sotiyos. I was watching as it came out of reinforced and I noticed they had left system and it was still vulnerable for another hour, I guess they didn’t want to guard it for another hour. So…

The “So…” was followed by a link to this screen shot.

The first Sotiyo…

It looks like we used that unguarded hour to reinforce the Sotiyo in PBD-0G.  So now if they want to keep us from pushing into the next reinforcement cycle they will have to form up, guard one while it repairs, then jump to the second one and guard that while it repairs.  And they might give mind to sticking around until the vulnerability window, as if it is still open we will be back to shoot them again given the opportunity.

And so it goes from Hakonen, where we continue to setup for a long stay.

One of the citadels already deployed

Stormhold Dodges Third Strike, Votes to Unlock Kunark

The results are in! The community has voted and it looks like everyone is ready to assail Chardok and conquer Karnor’s Castle! The Rise of Kunark expansion will launch at noon PT on August 16th.

The final results for those of you interested were 66% of participants voted to unlock the next expansion.

RadarX, EQII Forums

As I noted earlier in the week, the Stormhold time locked expansion server was on the horns of a dilemma, stay put for a long stretch or move ahead to the next expansion.

That is Daybreak’s graphic for their retro server(s)

The vote to unlock the Rise of Kunark expansion was up for the third time.  If it failed to unlock yet again, the votes would be extended out to an every 90 day cycle, an idea that was causing much fuss on the forums.

However, it looks like the “yes” crowd got its act together.  As RadarX, the CCP Falcon of Daybreak, announced, 66% of the votes cast were to unlock, up from 46% last time around.

For me, Rise of Kunark represents the last expansion where I really know anything about the story or content.  It was, as with the Echoes of Faydwer expansion, a nod to the original EverQuest in design/content/lore.

The next expansion up for a vote is The Shadow Odyssey which, like every expansion after that, I couldn’t really tell you squat about.  Even over at Wikipedia expansions after Rise of Kunark get the briefest of summaries on the page listing out EverQuest II expansions.