32 Weeks of World War Bee

This past week saw drama in Brave Collective, the fifth largest alliance in the game currently and a member of Vily’s Legacy Coalition.  On Wednesday morning US time they had an alliance meeting where it was announced that they would be moving into Querious.  The fact that this was going to be fun was repeated frequently.  Other groups were reported to want to come live nearby and be close to Brave.  They were going to total take out Siberian Squads, who announced last week that, after having left Legacy Coalition, they were joining the Imperium and going to stage in Querious.  And taking and holding Querious was going to be in addition to maintaining their presence in Catch and Immensea, along with whatever commitments they might have to the war in Delve.  Nothing was being abandoned, there was no evacuation planned.

This seemed like a late point to make this sort of commitment.  As late as Week 24 of the war Brave held significant numbers of ihubs in the region.  They have since lost all of those ihubs, but now they were going to move in and start all over.

A while later a leak showed up on Reddit dumping internal leadership discussions about the state of the alliance and the move to Querious that was very much at odds with the happy, upbeat tone of the alliance meeting.  The outlook there was bleak and the ability to hold their old space while moving into Querious seemed unlikely, while the cost of all of this was going to be prohibitive.

This led to another alliance meeting that evening where Dunk Dinkle admitted up front that the leaked discussion was real.  He said it was embarrassing, but then commenced to hedge and try to paint a rosy picture once again.  Everything will be fine.  The M2-XFE hell camp is dragging the Imperium down.  Goons will collapse soon.  Victory is close at hand.

That prompted further leaks which reinforced the idea that Brave’s finances might be at the breaking point, along with some memes.

Meme’d… nice use of @dril for it too

One of the strange bits was the need to pay 12 billion ISK to TEST to be able to receive Imperium ping relays for intel.  But then Vily said on Discord that TEST pays that too and that it is just some guy in TEST that runs the service.

Sure thing

Looking over from the Imperium, that seems like a pretty ad hoc way to run a coalition.  Whatever.

Despite financial problems and too many commitments, Dunk echoed Kerensky in 1917 in saying that he has to keep Brave in the war.  But the fact that somebody in leadership is leaking these discussions indicates that there is discord within the ranks.

And then it sounded like there was discontent over in Federation Uprising, another Legacy Coalition alliance.

Admittedly this war is different than past wars.  Seven months of continuous fighting at this scale is unprecedented in New Eden and the obvious assumption on the PAPI side was that this would be the Casino War all over again with the Imperium falling back to low sec in a few weeks.  But Vily declared repeatedly that this was a war of extermination to drive Goons from the game because they are all bad people, and few things will make Goons dig in and hang on than making things personal.  Welcome to Delve.

Delve Front

PAPI continued to field large fleets and push on Imperium space in Delve, successfully taking ihubs in the SG-CTQ constellation.

Delve – Feb 14, 2021

PAPI also managed to destroy more than 20 large structures like Fortizars, Tataras, and Sotiyos in the region.

The hellcamp in M2-XFE carried on.  No serious efforts were made to try and break out the remaining ~130 titans and myriad smaller capitals trapped in bubbles around the Imperium Keepstar.  There was an uptick in capitals logging and getting destroyed as some players apparently were getting tired of waiting (some have been trapped in there since Dec 31, 2020) for the rescue that does not seem to be coming.  The big break out two weeks back apparently got enough leadership titans out that the rest of the trapped ships do not seem to be a priority.

Then there is the metaliminal storm, which has wandered down and has removed cloaking as an option in the staging systems for both sides in the war.  That is likely going to make things interesting, and all the more so if it keeps on moving down the path to 1DQ.  It does, in some ways, help the defender, as cloaky camping eyes cannot remain hidden.

Other Theaters

In Querious Brave started laying down ihubs as part of their move-in plan.

Querious – Feb 14, 2021

Since there were no ihubs in place, there was no contest over deploying them.  They just had to spend the 500 million ISK per ihub… if the Jita price is any indication… and carry them out there.  That is more ISK they are spending.  And, as you can see, they ended up getting reinforced.

Siberian Squads (SB-SQ), which joined the Imperium last week and which Dunk Dinkle was saying they would simply brush aside, took ihubs from PAPI during the week as well.  Brave did take the GOP-GE ihub, which is an Imperium Keepstar system, but they failed to take the Imperium Staging system in Querious, W6V-VM.  That also has a Keepstar and is where Siberian Squads is now based.

Back in Catch and Immensea The Initiative and their friends continued to make life difficult for Brave, Warped Intentions, and Federation Uprising.

Catch – Feb 14, 2021

Immensea – Feb 14, 2021

Out there structures and ihubs continued to be reinforced regularly and lost fairly frequently.

And then down in Esoteria The Bastion has kept on pushing against TEST, so that this week I not only have to put up a new map, but I have to change over to the whole region rather than just the northwest corner.

Esoteria – Feb 14, 2021

The Imperium continues to try and make Legacy Coalition regret their plan to move into new space in Delve and Querious while holding their old space.  Again, hearing the heart ache this is causing Brave, the second largest member of TEST’s Legacy Coalition, will only make the Imperium increase its efforts to disrupt their backfield.

My Participation

I will admit that I used most of my available game time to play Valheim last week.  That meant EVE Online (and World of Warcraft) didn’t get a lot of attention.  I did go on a couple of fleets and did some time on the M2 Hellcamp… missed a carrier kill when I  was in the bathroom… but wasn’t all that invested.

Well within range of my Rokh

So my losses for the war remain:

• Ares interceptor – 15
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Drake battle cruiser – 4
• Scimitar logi – 3
• Ferox battle cruiser – 3
• Purifier stealth bomber – 3
• Guardian logi – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 2
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
• Bifrost command destroyer – 1
• Cormorant destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

The Mittani announced the Silver Ticket program last week.  The Golden Ticket program was an offer to any alliance with capitals trapped in M2-XFE to negotiate a price for their release.  Only one Golden Ticket was available and TEST was the only alliance barred from the plan.  This seemed largely a troll and nobody has taken up the offer that I have heard about.

The Silver Ticket program is an offer to individuals still trapped in M2-XFE to contact Imperium diplomats in order to sell their trapped capitals to the Imperium at a modest discount so that they could get out of the bubble camp with some ISK in hand.  This offer has netted the Imperium a Leviathan already.  (A ghost titan too, one from the second fight that showed up as an unfitted kill.) The pilot, who had gone over to Brave from GSF to play with a friend was apparently treated badly by Brave due to his corp history, which certainly motivated him to sell.  You can argue that he is the exception due to his background, but that is one more titan in the ranks of the Imperium.  But Brave has been having some troubles keeping up with its “Stay Classy” motto of late.

CCP also announced the Reign Quadrant this past week with the first February update which, as I mentioned, seemed to be dedicated to the Tactical Supremacy alliance, which has been one of the groups attacking Catch.  Another blow to Legacy Coalition there.

Tactical Supremacy is Victory, CCP says so

We also got the annual Guardians Gala event along with a login campaign.  Reports are that the sites pay off fairly well, but that they are more difficult than last year.

The war and the holiday event were not enough to boost the weekly peak user count, though it did not sag by much compared to the previous week and it is still up some from the holiday doldrums:

• 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

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 32
• CCP – Reign – New Quadrant Begins Today
• INN – The Art of Blobbing
• INN – Brave’s Leak: What Does It Mean?
• INN – Two Faces of Brave
• Reddit – Frat vs The Freemen of the North Week 6

No Good Expansions*

*Some expansions excepted

A post somewhat sparked by what Kaylriene wrote, though I have been harboring bits and pieces of this for ages now.  Ready for a Friday ramble?  Here we go.

I suppose that EverQuest needs to take some of the heat on this.  Coming up to its 20th anniversary it already has 25 expansions past the base game that launched back in 1999.  While expansions and updates and sequels and such were clearly a thing long before EverQuest came along, the success of EverQuest in the then burgeoning MMORPG space made it a standard bearer and template for games that came later, including World of Warcraft.

EverQuest went more than a year before launching the first expansion for the game, Ruins of Kunark, which I sometimes refer to as “the only good expansion,” and then embarked on a quest to launch two expansions a year in order to keep the community engaged and happy with new content.

Maybe the only fully good MMO expansion ever

That kept that money machine printing, but brought with it a series of problems like keeping people up to date, rolling past expansions up into consolidated, all-in-one packages like EverQuest Platinum, and what often felt like an exchange of quality in the name of getting another expansion out.  And some expansions barely felt like expansions at all.

SOE eased up on that plan in 2007, opting to dial back to just one expansion a year for both EverQuest and EverQuest II, which also launched with similar expansion plans.

So, if nothing else, EverQuest solidified the norm that expansions are a requirement, something the players expect.  That we complain about Blizzard only being able to crank out a WoW expansion every other year is directly related to the pace set by SOE.  Sort of.

But the one thing we know about expansions, that we complain about yet never think all that deeply about, is how they undue what has come before.

An expansion to a live MMORPG, by its very nature, changes the overall game.  And change always alienates somebody.  As I have often said, every feature, every aspect, no matter how trivial or generally despised, is somebody’s favorite part of that game.

MMORPG players also represent a dichotomy.  If they’ve played through the current content, it is likely because they have enjoyed it as it was laid out.  They’ve reached the end, they’re happy, and they want more of the same.  Mostly.  Some played through and were unhappy about some things, but happy overall.  Ideally an expansion will give players more of what made them happy, plus adjusting the things that made people unhappy.

Adjusting, of course, will make other player unhappy, as you’re pretty much guaranteed to be changing somebody’s favorite thing.  And every expansion brings change to the world, on top of the usual restart of the gear and level grind which, as people often point out, replaces their top end raid gear with better quest drop greens almost immediately.

Just handing out more of the same when it comes to content can feel repetitive and uninspired, but changing things makes people angry, because change makes people angry.  But leaving everything as it is means people finish the content and eventually stop giving you money via their monthly subscription.  The theoretical best path forward is the one that engages the most people while angering the fewest.

I refer to Ruins of Kunark as the one good expansion because it seemed to thread the needle almost exactly right.  I delivered more of what people were into, more content, more levels, more races, more dragons, more gear, all without having a huge impact on the game as it already stood.

Ruins of Kunark isn’t really the “one good expansion,” if only because “good” is very subjective.  And there are other expansions I have enjoyed.  It is more that it represents an expansion that did more to expand the game than annoy the installed base.  But first expansions can be like that.  Or they used to be like that.  Desert of Flames was like that for EverQuest II in many ways, and certainly The Burning Crusade had that first expansion magic for WoW.  I’d even argue that WoW, ever more fortunate than one would expect, got a double dip at that well, as Wrath of the Lich King continued on and did very well without disrupting the apple cart.

Eventually though, expansions begin to work against the game.  There is always a core group that keeps up, both others fall behind.  For EverQuest, the every six month pace meant a lot of people falling behind.  Expansions also put a gap between new players and the bulk of the player base.  That’s not so bad after one expansion, but each new expansion makes it worse.  And then there are the changes that anger the core fan base.

That leads us to Cataclysm.  The team at SOE, in their attempt to crank out new content, often neglected the old.  If I go back to Qeynos today it looks pretty much the same as it did in 1999.  There are a few new items, some new vendors scattered about, and the new mechanics added in to the game over the years.  But I can still stand out in front of the gates and fight beetles, skeletons, kicking snakes, and the occasional Fippy Darkpaw.  Yes, they redid Freeport, much to the chagrin of many, and the Commonlands and the Desert of Ro, but they have mostly left the old world looking like it did back in the day.  Enough has changed over the years that can’t go back and relive the game as it was at launch, which brought out the Project 1999 effort, but at least  I can still go bask in the eerie green glow of the chessboard in Butcherblock if I want.

Cataclysm though… well, it had a number of strikes against it from the get go, not the least of which was following on after two successful and popular expansions, which together played out the Warcraft lore as we knew it.  So Cataclysm had to break new ground on the lore front.

Cataclysm also only offered us five additional levels, a break with the pattern so far.  We also didn’t get a new world or continent, with the five new leveling zones being integrated into the old world.  We also got flying in old Azeroth right away, a feature that can start an argument faster than most.  I suspect flying is something Blizzard regrets in hindsight, but once they gave it to us they had to keep on  finding ways to make us unlock it all over again.

But most of all, Cataclysm redid the old world.  Zones were redone, new quest lines were created, and the 1-60 leveling experience became a completely different beast.

Arguably, it is a better experience.  I have run all of the redone zones.  I have the achievements to prove it. (Another divisive feature.)  And the zones all now have a story through which you can progress rather than the, at times, haphazard quest hubs which had you killing and collecting and killing some more over and over, often without rhyme or reason.

To give J. Allen Brack his due, for a specific set of circumstances, you don’t want the old game.

The rework, which was also necessitated by the need to give us flying throughout Azeroth, save for in the Blood Elf and Draenei starter zones, was spoiled by a couple of things.  First, the level curve had been cut back, so that the pacing of the new zones was off.  You would easily end up with quests so low level that they went gray if you chased down every quest in a zone.  And second, the rework of the 1-60 instances made them all short and easy and the optimum path for leveling using the dungeon finder.  You could run three an hour easy, even queuing as DPS, so you could, and probably did, bypass all that reworked content.

But, bigger than that, at least over the long haul, the removal of the old content led to something we might now call the WoW Classic movement.  There was already a nascent force in action on that, since the first two expansions reworked classes and talents, so you couldn’t really play the old content the way you did in 2005.  Vanilla servers were already a thing.  But they became a much bigger deal when Blizzard changed the old world.

Overall though, Cataclysm wasn’t a bad expansion.  It took me a while to get to that conclusion, because I did not like it at first, to the point of walking away from the game for a year.

The new races were fine.  The 80-85 zones were good.  Val’shir might be the prettiest zone in the game.  It is like playing in the most beautiful aquarium ever.  (A pity about the motion sickness thing.)  I ran and enjoyed all of the instances, with the reworked Zul’Aman and Zul’Gurub raids being particularly good.  Being at level and doing the content was a decent experience.  I still use my camel mount regularly in no-fly areas.  Regardless though, the changes burned.  They were divisive. Blizz pissed off a lot of the core player base, even if the whole thing ended up getting us WoW Classic.

I think, even if Blizz hadn’t done all of those changes… which I guess would have meant calling it something other than Cataclysm… that it would have been a let down of an expansion.  Having to follow on after TBC and WotLK was a big ask.  How do you follow up Ice Crown Citadel?

Mists of Pandaria revived things a bit, though I think that was as much by being a really solid expansion as it was that expectations were low after Cataclysm.  But Warlords of Draenor?  Doomed.  The expectations set by reviving the themes from TBC meant eventual disappointment.  Garrisons were not great.  They were not the housing people wanted.  They took people out of the world, just like Blizz said housing would, without being a place people cared about and could make their own.  But I think the fact that it wasn’t the return of Outland and the excitement of 2007 was what led to the eventual drop in subscriptions.  People realized there was no going back to their memories of the old game.

As every feature is somebody’s favorite feature, the thing that keeps them in the game, every expansion is somebody’s breaking point, the thing that gets them to walk away.  The more expansions that come along, the more people end up dropping out.  Or, if they don’t drop out, they return to play casually, as much out of habit as anything.  The investment in the game isn’t as deep.  You play for a bit, see the sights, do the tourist thing, get the achievements, then unsubscribe until the next expansion.

Eventually there is an equilibrium it seems.  EverQuest and EverQuest II seemed to have found it.  They still do an expansion every year that plays to the installed base, that gives them just enough of what they want… be they invested or tourist… to buy-in and spend some time with the game.

Basically, expansions are change, and change has a habit of breaking the bonds players have with your game.  However, if you sit still and have no expansions then people will leave over time anyway, so you cannot simply avoid expansions and change either.  It is probably better to move forward in the end, make the changes, earn a bit of extra money, and carry on.

Just don’t expect everybody to thank you for it.

One Hundred and Ninety Million Skill Points

That time has rolled around again.  Another meaningless skill point milestone, a new round number, made more meaningless by the advent of skill injectors, but at this point it is a tradition so I might as well carry on.

Past the 190 million mark

The story so far, for those wanting a quick summary of my skill point progression over the last decade or so.

• Start Playing EVE Online – August 2006
• Ten million – November 2007
• Twenty million – June 2008
• Thirty million – January 2009
• Forty million – August 2009
• Fifty million – March 2010
• Sixty million – November 2010
• Seventy million – August 2011
• Eighty million – June 2012
• Ninety million – December 2012
• One Hundred million – rolled right past with the battle cruiser split
• One Hundred and Ten million – September 2013
• One Hundred and Twenty million – April 2014
• One Hundred and Thirty million – October 2014
• One Hundred and Forty million – May 2015
• One Hundred and Fifty million – December 2015
• One Hundred and Sixty million – July 2016
• One Hundred and Seventy million – January 2017
• One Hundred and Eighty million – August 2017

Since the last check-in at 180 million I did an attribute remap to chase down some skills not focused on willpower and perception, which covers a spaceship command and a lot of the weapon skills, changing the emphasis to memory and intelligence.

Thanks to the way CCP thinks, I am committed to that remap for a full year, which puts me out to October.  You would imagine that a remap token would be something worth selling in the New Eden Store, but that hasn’t occurred to CCP quite yet.  They’ll sell skills directly to Alpha clones, but a skill remap would be heresy I guess.  So until then I am somewhat gimped if I suddenly need a new ship type trained up or a weapon skill.

Fortunately I have all the sub-cap skills up to IV and many of them to V, so that isn’t too likely.

Anyway, this change was to allow me to wrap up skills around scanning.  I was feeling the pain of that after using my alt to scan.  He has all the skills up the V and Wilhelm was still languishing with skills at level III of IV.  So that was my initial focus.

However, that wasn’t going to take anything like a year so, at this point, scanning skills are all done, pushed up to level V.  I haven’t had an opportunity to use them yet, but like so many of the skills I have trained over the years, they are there waiting if I should need them.

That done I started going through and tossing skills on that would be optimized by my remap, or at least not drastically hindered by it.

 Spaceship Cmd 61,730,636 (60 of 75)*
 Gunnery 17,197,141 (36 of 46)
 Fleet Support 12,896,000 (14 of 15)
 Drones 12,652,303 (22 of 26)*
 Missiles 11,111,853 (22 of 26)*
 Navigation 9,660,314 (13 of 13)
 Engineering 7,886,130 (15 of 15)*
 Electronic Sys 7,806,958 (14 of 15)*
 Armor 6,131,137 (13 of 13)
 Shields 6,074,039 (12 of 13)*
 Scanning 5,791,765(7 of 7)*
 Science 5,714,282 (21 of 39)*
 Resc Processing 4,756,183 (22 of 28)*
 Subsystems 4,096,000 (16 of 16)*
 Trade 3,399,530 (10 of 14)*
 Targeting 3,207,765 (8 of 8)
 Neural Enhance. 3,202,510 (7 of 8)
 Planet Mgmt 1,612,315 (5 of 5)
 Structure Mgmt 1,446,824 (6 of 6)*
 Rigging 1,312,395 (10 of 10)
 Production 1,157,986 (5 of 12)
 Social 1,130,040 (5 of 9)
 Corp Mgmt 24,000 (2 of 5)

 Total ~190,000,000 (345 of 424)

That is a total of 345 skills by my count, up from 338 last time, so somewhere along the line I picked up 7 more skills.  Those with an asterisk went up since the last check-in.

Of course, Spaceship Command still reigns supreme as the top category after all these years and, despite the attribute remap, it still went up a bit this time around and a new skill was added.  That would be Minmatar Carrier, since the Nidhoggur is the current new hotness in the meta.  I don’t own one, but I could get in one and fly it if I had to.

A Nidhoggur with a Cerb shadow on it

At the top end of the list Gunnery and Fleet Support didn’t get touched, but Drones saw a boost as I started working on the level V versions of fighter skills in order to use tech II fighters with carriers.  This was spurred by my going on a capital training op that actually explained how to use fighters in terms I could understand, so I think I can do that now… though I think I already forgot how to send fighters to specific locations using that two-axis command.  We’ll see.

A few other slots got minor boosts, but Scanning, as one might expect from what I wrote above, saw the biggest boost overall, jumping over 2.7 million skill points since the last check in.  I have all those scanning skills to V now.

All that training upped the count of skills at level V, so my current spread looks like this:

 Level 1 - 1
 Level 2 - 4
 Level 3 - 43
 Level 4 - 91
 Level 5 - 206

That’s what you get at my end of the training cycle, a lot of skills.  As for what to keep training… well… I always have a queue at least two years deep.  I have to finish up those fight skills.  Then there are things like Neurotoxin Control and Neurotoxin Recovery to enhance my in-game drug usage… all Reavers are Quafe addicts… and others that align with my current attribute selection.  There is more than enough there to keep me going through the 200,000,000 mark.

I do wonder how much longer this series of posts will be viable.  In part, I wonder when I’ll just be done an start actually training an alt on my account.  But mostly I wonder about my ability to get at the data for these posts.

I have used EVE Mon for the data over the years.  However, support for it has fallen by the wayside of late and, while it did get an update recently, even if development for it is renewed with some vigor, it still faces the looming cliff of the death of the old API system in the spring.

Come the 8th of May the old API system, along with CREST, will be shut off and only the new-ish ESI API will be left.  I get the reasoning and we’ve certainly been given plenty of warning, but it will still mean the death of a number of third party applications that have popped up over the years as the authors decide if it is worth reworking their integration.

That’s the problem with community projects, which make up the bulk of EVE Online tools, they depend on players remaining invested with the game.  Once they wander off, support for their tool often stops.  I worry that come May 9th we might find something major like DOTLAN EVE Maps has gone missing.

Meanwhile, my experience with the new ESI API system, largely confined to the Neocom II app on my iPad, has been less than stellar.  Either that app is messed up or the new interface does not deliver data in an accurate or timely manner.  As I noted in my look at that app, it shows me two different skill point totals, neither of which are correct.

Of course, I could just log into the game and dig through my character sheet for the data.  However, it doesn’t total up my skills nicely by category the way EVE Mon always has.

My skill counts by category in game

Though EVE Mon is fallible as well.  It still showed the old 5 subsystems per empire skill plan, but that has been trimmed to 4 now, so it should be 16 total skills for the Subsystem category, not 20.  Such is life.

And my alternate choice, EVEBoard, where you can see my character’s skills laid out, also depends on the old API as well, so that won’t help much unless/until they upgrade as well.

So the next milestone is 200,000,000 skill points which, given the usual 7 month cycle, ought to hit at some point in September.  We will see then if

Some Days You Just Sit on the Titan

I haven’t written much about operations in EVE Online of late for a couple of reasons.

First has been because I have been busy with other things.  Life will get in the way.  And, second, there has also been a drawn down in the number of ops I am likely to join.

The so-called Winter War between Stainwagon and the refugees from the north ended up in a Stainwagon collapse, with the defenders now mostly pushed off the sovereignty map as TEST, Circle-of-Two, and the Drone Walkers… soon to be joined by Brave Newbies… moved in. (Images grabbed from the usual source.)

Just six weeks passed…

That has put and end to that for us.

Which isn’t to say there haven’t been ops running.  There is always some op forming up to go do something; roam, homeland defense, poke a bear, or some such.  But I have become a picky bitter vet of sorts.  I want strat ops and concrete objectives or, barring that, an FC I trust.

Last week it was Thomas Lear who took us out in Sleipnirs.  Earlier this week it was Asher, who called us out for one of his plans.  He had some bait planned and moved us out to sit on a titan and wait for the right moment to spring the trap.

We even brought the titan with us

Sometimes that sort of things pays off, sometimes it goes badly awry, and some nights nothing at all happens.  This time around it was the last item.  The bait was out but nobody seemed interested in taking it.  So we sat there at a POS… at least a change from sitting on a citadel, which is the new normal… staring at the titan and wondering if we would go or not.

My Guardian floating there behind the Ragnarok

This is the nature of sandbox PvP.  Sometimes nobody shows up at your party.  We sat there for a while before Asher eventually called it a night and bridges us back home.  At least we took one bridge.

It wasn’t all that bad.  Being on-call let me tab out and work on other things.  I have screen shots lined up for my other blog into next month now.  And with a wireless headset I was able to get up and do things around the house, like put something in the oven for dinner, get a package from UPS off the door step, and use the bathroom.  My thoughts about broadcasting the latter over coms were held back by the fact that my push to talk button is mapped to the keyboard, which was still sitting on my desk.  Probably better for all concerned.

But other than getting what might be my last peak at a moon mining operation before it is changed to drilling rigs in the fall, there wasn’t much going on.

Moon mining modules running

At least it yielded as strategic participation link, a strat PAP, the collection of which is one of the few reasons I think my corp keeps me around.  It certainly isn’t for my deep involvement in alliance activities.

Later I ran a couple of anomalies and actually netted an escalation finally.  It has been months since I got the last one.

It was the Dark Blood Fleet Staging Point escalation, which is a three part project, only our local escalation running service will only do the third part.  That isn’t bad.  The first two parts are doable, it just means I have to pack up the Ishtar and take it on the road.

The first part was in a nice dead-end pocket and I was able to complete it and drop off the resulting loot in a citadel to pick up later.  We have citadels… usually multiple citadels… in every system in Delve at this point.

The second part however was in one of the heavily traveled pipe systems, which meant I spend about two hours running what is maybe a 20 minute encounter.  Every time I would get settled in intel would announce some roaming gang was in an adjacent system and I would get myself lined up.  Then they would jump in the system and I would pull drones and warp off to a citadel, only to have them just pass through.   Then it was back to the start point, motor to the acceleration gate, and back into the encounter only to have intel ringing the bell yet again.

Somebody finally put up a homeland defense fleet to chase off one gang that had been roaming the area for a while and I was able to wrap things up at last.

Then I got the third part alert, which was in a nice quiet system as well, so it looked like I was in luck to get it run for me.  The last two… the only two… escalations I have had in the region both ended up in NPC Delve, and Lucky Runners doesn’t go there.  Too many hostiles buzzing about.

I went to the escalation, bookmarked the beacon, names it correctly, contracted it, and waited for the ISK to show up.  And then, many hours later, I got a note saying the contract had been rejected due to a contract bug.  But there was still about six hours left on the third stage.  You only get 24 hours from when each part appears in which to run it.  So I contracted it again and actually got paid this time.

So that is life in Delve at the moment.  I’ve been able to build up my ISK reserves, but I haven’t gone on many fleets.