Saturday Night Action in Delve

It has been a while since I have been in a fight in the was that was worth a post, but last night we had quite the time.  It was time to get Munnins out to shoot things.

Muninns out for a shoot

It started with an innocuous ping from Asher calling for a Muninn fleet.  It was only about 10:30pm local time for me, not too late to join in on something on a Saturday night.

Asher calls

There were about 100 people in fleet when I joined, which swelled up past 150 before we undocked.

When we did undock, we warped over to a titan that bridged us into NOL-M9 in Delve, a system with some history, both old and recent.  In fact, it had been the focus of a clash earlier in the day when PAPI forces tried and failed to kill an Imperium Astrahus in the system.  That structure, now safe, was where we landed.  Once assembled, we moved over to a PAPI Fortizar which we started shooting.  The plan was to try and reinforce and to see if we could draw a response.

Asher kept us appraised of PAPI’s ping status, the joke now being that they have to ping multiple times to get enough pilots into a fleet in order to come fight us.  On our side pings went out with links to The Count from Sesame Street to indicate how many pings they needed.

Six! Six fleet pings! Ah ah ah ah!

Eventually that number would far exceed how high The Count usually takes his numbers on the show.

They put a Falcon on the Fortizar, on tether but as far from us as they could, which seemed to indicate that they would be bridging in an opposing fleet soon.  As the likelihood of its arrival grew, Asher had us split out one gun from out stack to keep on the Fortizar while the rest would be for the battle.

A Ferox fleet joined us, along with some bombers, and PAPI eventually dropped Muninns of their own along with carriers and fax support.  It became a fairly even exchange between the Muninn fleets, but we still managed to set the armor timer for the Fortizar.

Muninns and Carriers around the Fort

And then, with the timer set and no need to split guns any further, Asher noticed that one of the faxes was off tether.  So we loaded up short range, high damage ammo and he brought us in very close, inside the PDS range of the structure, where we took a shot and one of the faxes… and managed a kill.

A fax kill

Then we managed to grab another.  Then another.  And finally a fourth.  Four faxes down.

Four Faxes Destroyed

That turned what was already a bit of smug… we managed to ref one of their structures while in combat when they had capitals on the field… into a very smug moment for us.  Asher warped us off the Fortizar and back to our Astrahus, the job done.

The battle report fell in our favor, helped along by those four faxes.  We got the objective and won the ISK war.

Battle Report Header from NOL-M9

Asher pointed us back towards home in 1DQ1-A and the Muninns and Feroxes started gating back.  But before we got too far, Asher asked us to respond in fleet whether we would like to just go home and stand down or if we wanted to try and reinforce another structure on the way.  We voted to reinforce.

Mind1, who was doing the Saturday night show, got in our fleet and joined in the fun, streaming our progress and laying down a motivational beat.  Did you know that the Imperium has its own official DJ?  It is a glorious thing.  You should check out his stream.

So we stopped one system short of home, in T5ZI-S, the home staging system in Delve for the PAPI coalition, the place where all of their members are supposed to be and where all their ships and supplies are stored.  We were going to hang out in the lion’s den and shoot a structure.  We would see how awake the lion really was.

Not very.

After a while shooting the Fortizar without a response, Asher moved the Muninn fleet over to their main Sotiyo engineering complex, pretentiously named “Forge of Heroes,” in order to see if that would provoke PAPI to action.

Shooting the Sotiyo

You can see in that screen shot, below the Sotiyo, their Keepstar in the system.  That is their main base.  We were that close to the heart of enemy and for a long stretch the only opposition we faced was the gunner in the structure shooting bombs at us.

I have trouble visualizing something like this happening one gate over in 1DQ1-A, our home, where the presence of bads tends to draw an eager response from people looking for combat.

The first response from PAPI was to get out carriers and HAW dreads to make sure we didn’t take out any of their cyno jammers.  Fighters were sent to cover those as that is all that stands between them and the looming menace of our titans and supers.  Progodlegend, the leader with Vily or TEST, got out on the Sotiyo to assess the situation, but didn’t do much otherwise.

The Fortizar was reffed by the Feroxes, who then came over to join us on the Sotiyo.  The hostiles eventually joined us as well.  Asher had us strip a single gun out of our stack yet again to keep on the Sotiyo and then we started going after the hostiles.   They brought a Ferox fleet of their own and it was on.

Time dilation hit 10% at points and there were nearly 1,200 people in the system, but the biggest frustration was that my guns would cycle fast enough so I ended up only getting on every second or third kill mail, the hostile Feroxes were blowing up so fast.

We stayed in range of the Sotiyo and kept one gun on it while blapping hostiles as quickly as our guns would cycle.  The Muninns went relatively unscathed as the hostiles were more focused on support ships and the easier to kill Feroxes.

Combat on the Sotiyo

The Sotiyo was reffed, the armor timer set, after which we saw ourselves out, warping to the gate to 1DQ1-A and jumping through.

Through the gate to home in 1DQ

The battle report was more even this time.  In the scale of the war, these losses were pretty minor.

T5ZI-S battle Report Header

Strategically this did not change anything about the war.  It was a Saturday night lark and the enemy is likely to get their act together and form up to defend the armor timers of the structures we reinforced.  There is little danger of any of them being blown up.

When it comes to demonstrating morale and responses however, this was another stark illustration as to how low things seem to have sunk for PAPI.  We did something on a whim in their main staging system that they haven’t been able to manage in our home next door in all the months since they set down that Keepstar in T5ZI back in November.

Even the Reddit thread about the whole thing was mild.

PAPI, as a coalition, theoretically out numbers us by a ratio of three to one.  But even in their home they could barely get together equal numbers after sending out nearly 50 pings to get people into fleets.  (The Imperium ping count for the same time was 23, at least half of which were images of The Count or The Mittani smugging and sending out battle reports.)

I am reminded to the tale of why the cheetah doesn’t catch the gazelle nearly as often as you might suspect.  The cheetah is just running for his lunch, the gazelle is running for its life.

The Imperium remains motivated despite the odds because we’re fighting for our survival.  I am not sure what PAPI is really fighting for at this point, but if it is for their lunch then they don’t seem to be very hungry.

POS Shoots are Still a Thing

It is the middle of 2020.  Upwell Structures took over the last bit of functionality from the venerable POS, the Player Owned Starbase of old, back in November of 2018 with the Onslaught expansion.  There was talk by CCP of finally removing the legendarily complicated, unsustainable spaghetti code from the game and giving it a Viking funeral.

I have been wondering since then if any POS I shoot might be the last I see.

They were once the center of system control in null sec, before Dominion sov came about, the place where you manufactured everything up to titans, something in space you could own, and now…

And now I seem to be out shooting one or two every night.

Setting a reinforcement timer on a TEST POS

We were warned almost a month ago now, back when TEST announced that they would be cancelling the NIP between Legacy Coalition and the Imperium, that we needed to get the ADMs up in critical systems because it was expected that TEST would use the tactic of dropping small Upwell structures, usually the Raitaru, all over areas they planned to attack.  But, if the ADM in a system is over 4.0 (and you don’t own the ihub… again, ihubs are key) then you cannot drop medium structures.

So ADM work became, and remains, a thing, with fleets going out to mine and rat in critical systems on the periphery of our territory.  Word is that, closer to home, Rorquals scooping up mining anomalies have been quite effective at raising ADMs.

Unable to do the Raitaru drop thing in our space, the fall back was apparently the venerable POS.  Those are not as handy as a Raitaru.  There is no tethering, so you can’t just warp a fleet to a POS to be safe, get repairs, and dock up to refit if you need.  There are also POS passwords and access control lists to control who can come it, how to set the reinforcement timer with stront correctly, and the mechanics of what you can do inside, outside, and next to the force field.  Furthermore, unlike Upwell structures, there are limited locations where you can drop a POS.  It has to go on a moon at a specific point and there can only be one there at a time.  There was quite the art to grabbing all the moons in a system before your opponent could in a strategic system ahead of time.  GSOL used to be champions at this.

But the POS is cheap to deploy and doesn’t appear on everybody’s overview the moment your drop one, the way Upwell structures do.  It is easier to be stealthy.  Somebody has to actively check every moon in every system to see what is there.  You also don’t need a freighter to haul them around.  And so TEST has been slipping into our space to drop them.

Shooting a POS, this time it is a kill

In war we use all the tools at our disposal.  So TEST is no doubt building new POS towers somewhere, while I am sure somewhere a group on our side is regularly scanning down systems to check if any have been dropped.

Didn’t get any fuel in this one

If I understand correctly, we’re even back to camping hostiles fleets that are hiding within POS force fields again.

I still wonder which POS shoot will be my last, but it doesn’t seem like that shoot will be any time soon in coming.  Until then, we’re still doing what we were doing back when I came out to null sec in 2011.

Shooting a White Noise POS back in December 2011

So it goes.

Pondering all these Free Skill Points

When in doubt, give skill points out!

-Unofficial CCP Motto

As I noted earlier in the week, CCP is giving us more skill points as part of their summer event.  The first day out of the gate I was able to claim 275,000 skill points.

First day Omega reward

And while the first day was big, there are still more skill points coming over the next six day.

More skill points coming

The question is what should I do with them?

Bitter vet problems and looking a gift horse in the mouth, I know, but here I am.

Traditionally I have hoarded free skill points, let them accumulate on my main and primary alt, as a buffer or back up in case I suddenly needed a skill one day.

Holding on to them

I am not sure why I might need a skill right away… dreams of running across a capital ship where the pilot has ejected come to mind I suppose.

And given that you can buy most skills remotely now, I guess if I ran across a Nyx sitting idle and abandoned, I could buy the Gallente carrier skill remotely (which auto-injects it as well), apply some skill points, and jump on in to make off with my new found prize.  But even with the profusion of super carriers, and idle Nyx or Wyvern is still an unlikely find.

Furthermore, the skill points necessary to hop aboard one of those are pretty trivial compared to the skill points I have socked away.  Gallente Carrier I, the skill I would need to make off with that imaginary Nyx, is about 2 hours of training time with my current attribute configuration.  But I have easily a month worth of skill points to hand.

The problem is that I don’t have any skills that I really NEED otherwise.  My main is past the 200 million skill point mark and, while I returned him to training to catch up with the Triglavian hulls, so he can keep his “fly all the subcaps” badge, he is otherwise mostly just filling in the corners, getting to level V on some skills that might marginally improve his ability should he, for example, suddenly take up flying a black ops battleship.

The only hill left to conquer, when it comes to being able to fly ships, is titans.  And for titans I need Capital Ships V, which would run me more than two months to train.  I could dump all my horded skill points into that and be just 35 days or so away from flying a titan… but what if I run across that theoretical abandoned Nyx?  Won’t I feel silly if I’ve spent all my skill points then?

So I am unlikely to spend those skill points without need, but I also have more than enough to meet any immediate need or abandoned super carrier.  Where should I put them?

I can always put them on one of the two alts I have on the same account as my main.  But I have always had an odd relationship with alts on a single account.

One of those alts is actually somewhat useful when it comes to skills.  After my main hit 200 million skill points I swapped training over to him, so he is around the 30 million skill point mark and can fly frigates and cruisers and at least one of the doctrine battlecruisers at this point.  He is trained up enough that I got him in our corp and put him in the 1DQ1-2 Keepstar with a couple of doctrine ships so he could be available for homeland defense fleets.

The problem is that you can only have one character actively training at a time, and when the choice is between my maintaining the versatility of my main in a world of the ever changing meta that can see flavor of the month doctrines come and go before I can buy the appropriate ship (or, more commonly, just after I buy the appropriate ship), or work on training up an alt who is about 170 million skill points behind… well, most of the time it is easier to just jump clone (or death clone) myself to where a fleet is happening and be done with it.

This is less of a problem on my primary alt account.  There my primary alt clocks in at close to 150 million skill points and can fly most sub-caps, but hasn’t wasted time with areas like boosting or marauders or black ops battleships, areas I pursued with my main and then never used.  I also have a secondary alt there who has about 40 million skill points and who acts as my high sec ferry pilot.

She… my only female character in EVE Online… can fly most of the subcap hulls, but not active a lot of the modules, so buys and fits ships in Jita, then flies them out to an NPC station near wherever we are deployed to contract them to my main or primary alt, who then pick up the ship.

Between the two of them I can find a use for the extra skill points… or I could, if I didn’t feel the need to hoard them obsessively.  This is a personal failing.  I am one of those people who gets a special potion or something in a game and then never uses it because I might REALLY need it at some later date.  My bank in several MMORPGs have such items, kept until I got so far past when they might actually be useful that I just put them away and forgot about them.

So of all of the gifts we’re going to get over the week of free skill points, the ones I will use immediately are the cerebral accelerators.  Those actually speed up your current training queue, and I have long training queues on every character.  And I won’t even have to worry about which character to use them with, since only one character at a time can be training. (Unless you buy the multi-character training thing, which I did not.)

All of which is a lot of tsuris over what is probably a non-issue for most EVE Online players.  But I accidentally let the post I had planned for today go live a day early, so to fill the empty day you get to hear about my skill point angst and how I over think these things.

I am usually much better when CCP gives us SKINs.  But if they just GIVE us SKINs, then we won’t buy SKINs.

So what do you do with your free skill points?  Do you save them like I do?  Spend them on things already in your queue?  Find some special skill you might otherwise ignore on which to lavish some skill point attention?

Battle for Azeroth Patch Day Blues

We are over the line and officially into the days of World of Warcraft 8.0.  The Legion expansion is done and we’re on our way to Battle For Azeroth.  The pre-patch patch notes are there to be studied.

It is on its way…

There is even some new items on the map.

Battle for Azeroth map

Meanwhile the Broken Isles are getting ready to be permanently in the off-season, the mage tower has shut down, your pet tokens are called something else, your artifact weapon isn’t nearly as special, and there is a new login screen.

Another alert as well…

And, of course, all my addons need to be updated and all my talents have been reset on every single character.

I’ll be seeing this one every day for a while

Oh, and all the servers are down again.

Yes, I scrolled through the list to be sure

Welcome to the first day of the rest of your expansion.

It is to be expected.  And at least the servers haven’t been down all evening, and when they’re up the login problems seem to have mostly gone away.

And, in something of a wise move, Blizzard didn’t have a bunch of stuff on tap for us to run off and start doing right away.  The biggest part of the “What’s New” pop up when you log in mentions that maybe you ought to spend some time figuring out your talents.

What’s new? You managed to log in!

So that is three places on the UI nagging me about my spec from the moment I log in, the third being down at the bottom of the screen.

Yes, okay, I get it…

That one is actually the most disturbing… but not for what it says but because of where it is located.  All of that is now all by itself over in the lower right of the screen now.

This is not how I left things…

Objectively, that seems like a reasonable adjustment of the UI, collecting a bunch of non-hot bar items and pulling them away from there into their own little zone.

But the muscle memory is already making this change painful because I keep going to the spots where those items were.  They just aren’t where I expect them.

The changes compared

My daughter seemed the most aggrieved at this change.  The position of those moved items had been pretty much constant for most of her lifetime.  She still clings to the belief that the world around her should change, even though she now has a job, a driver’s license, and a car.

Paladin bar from 2007

Of course, where there is a complaint there is a solution.  I suspect that in the not too distant future that somebody will come up with an addon that will put everything back in the arrangement to which so many of us have grown accustomed.

Ah well.  Still not bad for a first night.  This is why they do it during the week, so they’ll have problems sorted out and stuff will be updated and ready to go come the weekend.

I was able to log in my tailor and craft yet another hexweave bag.  And of all of my dead addons Rematch, the pet battle addon, was update by the time I got home, so I was able to do a little pet battling.  And so far as I can tell, the real pre-expansion events don’t kick off until next Tuesday.  Plenty of time to get things ready.

Blogger Fantasy Movie League – Week Seven

In which I play the same hand for the third week straight.

Going into week seven it looks like it might be time to break with the past.  There were enough newer movies over the last couple weeks to think about a completely fresh line up.  Here was the price list for our pretend theaters:

 Planet of the Apes $705
 Spider-Man         $586
 Despicable Me 3    $201
 The Big Sick       $143
 Baby Driver        $93
 Wish Upon          $92
 Wonder Woman       $68
 Cars 3             $33
 Transformers       $30
 The House          $26
 47 Meters Down     $17
 The Beguiled       $12
 Pirates            $6
 The Mummy          $5
 Best of the Rest   $5

Planet of the Apes and Spider-Man were clearly going to dominate the box office, and were priced as such.  After that though, there was a lot of room to play different combinations.

My process is to make my “gut pick” first and throw out a line up.  I picked apes over spiders and built up what seemed like a sound lineup for a theater.

Then I started looking at reviews and estimates and started tinkering in my spreadsheet to see if I could come up with something better.  As I put numbers in and changed them up, it became clear that Baby Driver was still priced pretty well and had a good chance of being the top price/performance pick.

Of course, that was my logic last week, and it did not serve me well.  And Baby Driver was not going to do well enough for me to go all-in on it again.  I needed a strong anchor for it.  Despicable Me seemed to fit the bill.  I could get a couple of those in and then load up on Baby Driver to fill out the selection.  So, I ended up with two screens of Despicable Me and six screens of Baby Driver.

Still obsessed with Baby Driver

As it turned out I was on the right track, I just had the wrong emphasis.  The optimum line up of the week was four screens of Despicable Me, two screens of Baby Driver, and two screens of Best of the Rest (which ended up being Guardians of the Galaxy), the latter winning the price/performance race with its $2 million per screen bonus.

Week Seven Perfect Pick

Failing to get on the right bus with the 78 other players who managed to get the perfect pick of the week put me $14 million behind their pace.

However, in our little blogger group it was a different story.  Here are the scores for the week:

1. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $90,999,400
2. Ocho’s Octoplex – $85,813,237
3. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $85,515,858
4. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $83,926,268
5. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $82,685,858
6. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $82,034,224
7. Void’s Awesomeplex – $80,550,386
8. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $75,707,395
9. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $64,974,540
10. Bel’s House of Horrors – $22,213,643

While my picks were sub-optimal, they were still good enough to squeak out a win for the week.

Ocho also went with Baby Driver, but his second place slot was secured by dedicating two screens to Best of the Rest and its resulting bonus.  That put Liore in third place by just under $300,000 with what was the most picked lineup of the week, anchored on Spider-Man with six screens of the fading Wonder Woman and one screen of the now salty Pirates of the Caribbean.

At the bottom end of the list, Belghast didn’t pick for the week, so his entries rolled over from last week.  Unfortunately for him, three of his picks from week six were not available for week seven, leaving him with soft picks and three empty screens.  And then there was Murf who was the only other one to pick this week and not anchor on apes or spiders.  Four screens of The Big Sick and four screens of Baby Driver did not serve him well however.

And so, at the end of seven weeks, the overall scores sits thus:

1. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $796,266,453
2. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $757,781,105
3. Ocho’s Octoplex – $705,496,896
4. Void’s Awesomeplex – $675,020,447
5. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $658,856,210
6. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $641,289,677
7. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $622,477,102
8. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $617,375,078
9. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $568,080,456
10. Bel’s House of Horrors – $567,038,864

Liore maintained her lock on first place, while Ocho and I edged ever so slightly closer to her.  At our rate of advancement I think we need a lot more than six weeks to catch her.  Braxwolf made the only move of the week, jumping up a couple of spots based on this week’s performance, overtaking Syl and Murf.

And now we look forward to the week eight options, which are:

 Dunkirk               $667
 Girls Trip            $334
 Planet of the Apes    $299
 Spider-Man            $266
 Valerian              $219
 Despicable Me 3       $148
 Baby Driver           $70
 Wonder Woman          $57
 The Big Sick          $54
 Wish Upon             $33
 Cars 3                $22
 Transformers          $14
 The House             $10
 47 Meters Down        $6
 The Beguiled          $5

Dunkirk has great reviews so far and looks to be the sure fire box office winner for this coming weekend.  However, war movies are not usually date movies… I’ll probably have to go see it myself, as the wife and daughter won’t be interested… so it won’t open like Wonder Woman or Spider-Man, with estimates putting it over $50 million this week.  Girls Trip, also opening this week, seems likely to drain off some of the young adult female demographic. That is still very strong and it is priced accordingly.  Like the British Empire, you can only afford one Dunkirk.

The other big new arrival on the list is Valerian and the City of 1000 Planet.  While it is from acclaimed director Luc Besson and was promoted heavily as part of his Fifth Element 20th anniversary tour earlier this year, first week estimates are still somewhat soft based on middling reviews, putting it behind Girls Trip, which is slated for $20 million. (And it has better reviews as well.  So, despite it being new on the line up, it is down the list in pricing, which might make it a decent gamble if it does better than expected.  I know we are likely going to go see this over the coming weekend, so that is two tickets you can count one.

And then there is Girls Trip which my gut says is prices a little too high on the list, and you can only have two screens of it.  It needs to do $30 million to justify that price, and is only estimated to hit $20 million, so I will be interested to see if this makes it into many picks.

That is where we stand going into week eight.

Last Minute Garrison Gold Grubbing

The WoW 7.0 pre-Legion patch goes live tomorrow.

The WoW 7.0 patch notes have the following two items about your Draenor garrisons:

• Many sources of gold from the Garrison has been reduced or removed.
• Newly obtained salvage from the Salvage Yard no longer contains equippable items. Salvage obtained from before the patch remains unaffected.

Both were expected, but you might not be aware of just how much your gold revenue will be taking a hit.  I knew that follower missions that paid off in gold were done for, but I did not know that follower equipment, which is worth a decent amount of gold today, will be worth just 1 copper after the patch tomorrow.

I’ll be cashing all those in when I get home.

Blizzard Watch has a guide up to help you extract as much last minute gold out of your garrison as possible.  Get it tonight, because tomorrow will be to late.

 

Defeat in the North and New Destinations

The war, for whatever name you chose… Casino War, World War Bee, The War of Sovless Aggression… will effectively be over by the end of the week.

The Mittani announced on the weekly fireside chat yesterday that The Imperium would be packing up and leaving Saranen. (Recording here, since it is already up on Reddit. The meat of the announcements are in the first 10 mins.)

I have previously had people tell me that the war was over already because The Imperium lost all of its sovereignty, or because they personally were done, or, most bizarrely, because Reddit wasn’t talking about it enough, as though Reddit defines reality.  But I have always maintained that wars aren’t over until the losing side admits defeat and goes away.

Well, here is that admission.  We lose.  End of war.  Fabian strategy failed.  The reconquista has been postponed indefinitely.  The MBC/CFC 2.0, rules the north.

So the fight, which has been going on for over six months for some of us, is over.  I know that there are ops going on this week, running into Pure Blind, but my heart isn’t in it now.  Of course, part of that is because we were told to pack all of our stuff and be ready to move this coming weekend.

Good bye to the Quafe Factory Warehouse, Saranen V, moon 9

I was just enough ahead of the curve that I got nearly everything out of Deklein and Tribute before the MBC began to actively contest those regions.  There is still a Harpy in one station, a blockade runner in another packed with a final bit of stuff, and an Oneiros I put up on contract in UMI-KK.  But that is about it.

I sent a lot of it to Jita to be liquidated so as to have ISK for a protracted war, but a good chunk of useful stuff ended up in Saranen.  And my stockpile in Saranen grew as we swapped doctrines and I had to buy new ships time and again.

Now that all has to go… somewhere.

Even before the fireside chat was over I had repackaged a bunch of ships and modules and contracted them to be shipped to Jita.  That was the first pass, the easy picks, the ships no longer in doctrine and related items, 100,000 m3 of stuff.  It has already arrived safely.

But I am still left with a lot of stuff in Saranen, more stuff than I can easily move, including a carrier.  Since I am not part of CapSwarm, I am not sure how I will get that safely to wherever we might be headed.

Of course, that is the big question of the day, where are we headed?

If you look at the current null sec influence map, you will notice that there isn’t a big empty spot in sovereign null sec for us to simply move into.  So we will have to take some space.  But where?

Even leaving aside our old space, space occupied by groups with which we have agreements (various Russians), and space that is just shit (sorry Period Basis), there are a variety of possible destination regions on the map.

Where will The Imperium go?

Delve is the classic Goon location and has NPC null stations to stage out of.  Querious has good access to empire space.  Fountain is old, familiar territory, though a bit close to the MBC.  Etherium Reach keeps some proximity to the big trade hub in Jita.  And the others… well… they are far away from the MBC.  Who is likely to follow us to Omist?

Everybody has a guess as to where we will be going, but the official announcement won’t come until the end of the week.

Wherever we are headed, we have been told we will be there for a long time, a year or more perhaps.  And that brings up the question of how this will change The Imperium.  Some people are tired of the war and want a place to settle into and in which they can rebuild.  Others are invested in Deklein and the north, either identifying with it strongly or having left a lot of their stuff behind.  This long march into exile may winnow down our numbers further.

As we head towards the new normal, whatever that may be, the winding down of the war and the summer downturn in PCU numbers has led to the usual “EVE is dying!” reaction, which is the topic of this month’s blog banter.

I won’t be joining in on that, I have too much to do in game.