49 Weeks of World War Bee

As things remain stagnant on the Delve front even the narrative wars have started to sag, falling back on a few key points.

With the Siege of 1DQ six weeks in, the Imperium narrative has been bolstered by PAPI’s lack of progress against “Fortress Delve,” which turned out to be just the O-EIMK constellation.

Some Cyro Huren propaganda on that topic

PAPI has been pushing a line that the Imperium is “contained” and “no longer a threat” while the Imperium points to kill mails both in and out of Delve as a counter.  But both sides are stuck with the stalemate.  If PAPI breaks up, the Imperium immediately starts attacking in Delve.  But if PAPI stays together, there isn’t a lot of action to keep line members interested.  There is barely even any drama, just each side trying to egg the other on into attacking for the “good of the game.”

Basically, the Imperium has nowhere else to go and PAPI, or Legacy at least, knows there is no negotiated peace to be had that will end the war cleanly.  So the war goes on.

Okay, there was one bit of drama.  The corporation Imperial Federation left TEST to join Goonswarm and the Imperium.  Not the first time a corp or alliance has decided to join the allegedly losing side.  That brought 400 players into the Imperium ranks.  However, the CEO apparently did this without consulting their membership and a majority of those members voted with their feet, returning to other organizations within Legacy coalition.

Imperial Federation and the downward slope

Meanwhile, the rumor is that Vily has been backing off the well publicized “extermination” plan as a war goal, as he has every time PAPI has stumbled.  He even allowed that The Mittani might be tolerated in the game.  But extermination is always back on the table as soon as PAPI makes any progress, so this is just posturing unless he has a concrete proposal.

Delve Front

This map of the front lines in Delve remains as accurate as it was back at the end of Week 43 when I first posted it.

O-EIMK Constellation – June 13, 2021

After dropping and losing 27 Azbels in attempts to gain a foothold in the O-EIMK constellation in several time zones, PAPI has given up on that tactic.  At the June 6th town hall Progodlegend promised the Legacy line members that there was a new strategy coming, but it failed to materialize mid-week as promised.

There was a bit of mid week excitement as the Imperium reinforced a few ihubs in the F-I56R constellation in Delve, but there was no follow up.  The Imperium has done that again since, but they are more of an annoyance to provoke PAPI than any serious attempt to retake systems.

The campaign stats for the region show there was actually a slight uptick in destruction over week 48.

Delve Campaign – Week 49

Other Theaters

In Esoteria The Bastion and its allies held on to their remaining territory.

Esoteria – June 13, 2021

Deeper in the region TEST appears to be handing ihubs over to Evictus (IOU).

In Feythabolis the FI.RE coalition has gotten the upper hand over ICG and has mostly evicted them from the region, while Red Alliance and The Bastion now find their holdings under attack.

Feythabolis – June 13, 2021

Then, off in the dronelands, The Initiative has gone back to harassing PandaFam in Etherium Reach and The Kalevala Expanse, reinforcing ihubs now and again, but otherwise not doing anything that would make me feel like I have to throw another map into this post.

My Participation

I did not go on any operations that resulted in combat.  I did get out my Ninazu and joined a couple of stand-to operations.

Taking my Ninazu through the Ansiblex

That involved carriers putting fighters on the gate in 3-DMQT because the enemy was forming up.  We were ready to welcome them to our space.

Fighters streaming to the gate in UI only view mode

Faxes were just there for support in case a real fight broke out, but that did not seem likely.

As such, my losses for the war remained:

• Ares interceptor – 18
• Malediction interceptor – 7
• Drake battle cruiser – 7
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 6
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Scimitar T2 logi – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 4
• Cormorant destroyer – 4
• Jackdaw destroyer – 4
• Purifier stealth bomber – 3
• Guardian T2 logi – 2
• Scalpel T2 logi frigate – 2
• 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

The CSM16 elections kicked off on Tuesday.  There are still a few hours left to vote as of this post going live if you have not done so already.  Polls close on June 15th at 11:00 UTC.

CCP also pushed out the patch on Tuesday that introduced mobile observatories, the counter to cloaky camping.  The patch also brought four new gates to New Eden, including the long asked for gate from low sec to the Stain region.  And CCP also fixed the annoying message in the middle of your screen when you put your client in UI only mode, making the screen shot above with all the fighter brackets possible.

CCP also pushed some proposed black ops battleship changes to the test server.

In addition, as part of E3, CCP has a spot on the PC Gamer Show segment and was listed as a sponsor along with Pearl Abyss, so I thought there might be some big news coming.  Instead, it was just another promo for EVE Academy, which we had heard about weeks ago.  I get that player retention is still a target for CCP, but going to E3 with the news that they’re still trying to explain their 18 year old MMO to new players perhaps wasn’t headline worthy news.  Seriously, where do you think that news ranks?

Blizzard: Here is the Diablo II Resurrected launch date!

Square Enix: We’re remaking every Final Fantasy ever!

CCP: We’re taking another shot at a tutorial of sorts.

I had to dig around to find that VentureBeat coverage, and I think they only got that because CCP was a sponsor.

Also, I expect CCP will follow their usual process and immediately ignore the whole EVE Academy thing until it becomes outdated, then quietly remove it.  I am a cynic, but only because CCP has made me one.

And, speaking of player retention, the PCU was down again this past week, with the numbers never getting past 28K over the last seven days.  Summer must be here, or the war must be really getting dull.  We’re a long way from the weeks that were pushing 40K regularly.

• 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

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 49
• INN – Goon and Horde: A Conversation about 1DQ
• Reddit – Ongoing activity metrics for WWB #8
• Reddit – Daily Unique Characters – Nothing Surprising

WoW Classic Gets Summer Bowl and Future Hints on the Test Server

Another look at what is up in WoW Classic, with this past week seeing Blizzard bringing something new to the mix in the for of the WoW Classic Summer Bowl.

Sign ups start soon

This is a 10 v 10 Warsong Gulch double elimination tournament that will take place on the WoW Classic live servers using the “war game” feature that was recently added.  There will be North American and European versions of the tournament.

Warsong Gulch is the capture the flag battleground loved and loathed by many, scene of many an epic run or heinous stalemate.

You can sign up your NA team here, or your EU team here.  EU signs ups close on June 18th, while NA sign ups close on June 25th.  In addition, there is a full set of rules for both NA and EU players.

Meanwhile, the Public Test Realm patch notes from last week give us a hint as to what is coming up for WoW Classic.  That includes:

• The 20-player raid zone, Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj, will be available, but the the 40-player raid zone, Temple of Ahn’Qiraj will only be available on live realms when unlocked
• Tier 0.5 dungeon questline, items, and vendor are now available
• WoW patch 1.10 Dungeon loot table adjustments, increasing the drop chance of epic items, and many new caster DPS items
• Alterac Valley fixes
• Authenticator Bag Slots

That last one, with Blizzard giving players four extra slots on their default bag if they have the authenticator hooked up to their account, is clearly something that came in well past classic, having shown up in January of 2018 with the 7.3.5 patch for the Legion expansion.

Four more slots

My guess is that Blizzard is trying to incentivize people who came back for just WoW Classic to secure their accounts.  My hunter won’t complain about getting four more bag slots, that is for sure.

Since these updates are just landing on the WoW Classic PTR, it isn’t clear when they will be coming to the live servers, but I would guess that some time after the Summer Bowl would be likely.

Line Member Blues

When it comes to life in EVE Online I am a tourist.  I have given up most of the ambitions I ever had about being good at anything in game or having some influence or impact.  I just log in to experience ops and see things get blown up and following the ongoing narrative that flows through the game.

There are ops that are exciting, and that goes for winning as well as losing.  A hard fight where you’re side comes off the worse but still inflicted some damage can feel like a victory.  You lost a ship?  So what.  You’ll lose more if you hang around.

There are ops when you get to blow up big stuff and run away before the locals respond.  I can see the allure of whaling and whenever Black Ops calls out for people to join them on a drop I log in if I can.

There are ops that don’t happen.  You log in, get in fleet, hang out for a bit, then get told to stand down.  Whatever was going to happen didn’t happen.  But you get a low effort PAP out of it, so you get something for your time.  It is better if you stand down quickly.  But I’ve sat on a titan or a black ops for an hour or more, tabbed out and doing something else, waiting for the FC to sing out that it was time to go and not felt mis-used when we have stood down without going.  It is the nature of the game.  If you want a guarantee of something to shoot at you can always go play World of Tanks.

And then there are ops that make you miserable.  I went on one of those earlier this week.

With the destruction of the Keepstars on Tuesday morning, most of the ihubs in Tribute being killed, and Dead Coalition having pretty much wiped out Tenal, focus for the Imperium has started to drift over into the Vale of the Silent, another region held by PanFam.

There was a ping for a very important op at 00:30 EVE time and, given that I was home alone, I figured I would go along.  The call was for Eagles, now called Salt Fleet because part of the gimmick to get people into Eagles was the coalition offering up a free Ghostbird SKIN for Eagles and Basilisks, which are both good looking SKINs and which led to the fleet name.   I jumped into game, got in my Eagle, and was ready to go.

However we were short of things.  Some of them were the usual roles, we needed more boosters and more logi and a couple other roles filled.  But there was also a call for people to fly entosis ships.  We got the “we’re not going anywhere until we have enough entosis ships” talk, and when they offered to hand out ships for entosis pilots to use, I figured I would step up.

I even double stepped up.  I logged my alt in and got him into fleet as well, and got two enotsis fit Drakes to fly.  I just had to hand them back at the end of the fleet if they lived.

I hadn’t done entosis in ages, and I couldn’t recall it being very exciting.  But I do try to fill roles that the fleet needs, which is why I fly logi most of the time.  If I help the fleet undock then all of us get to go out for what might be an adventure.

And we soon undocked, got on the titan, and bridged out to M-OEE8.  From there we slipped into low sec, then back into null sec via P3EN-E, which put us into the Vale of the Silent region.  There is also a Keepstar in that system, which is clearly on our list of targets.

In the entosis channel we were getting ourselves sorted.  I opened up the Google doc with the shared spreadsheet for tracking entosis nodes and put my name in the right column. (Legit spreadsheets in space.)  We flew in a few more systems then the FC told the entosis pilots to spread out to the various systems in the constellation.  As we grabbed systems and got setup one of the other pilots was called out and told not to entosis.  He was not in Goonswarm and this was a defending hack, which means that only those in GSF could participate.

Of course, that meant I couldn’t play either.

Denied this level of excitement

Being line members, we are told little to nothing about where we are headed or what the plan is.  There are enough spies around that I can see the sense of that.  However, if you’re setting up an entosis operation and you know that only people from a specific group can participate, it seems like something you should mention, or at least look into.  I mean, I had to trade with the person running the entosis opt.  We were all in a channel together and there were not that many of us.  A double check to make sure the right people are in the right roles doesn’t seem like a stretch.

Anyway, there would be no entosis lasering for me.  I flew both ships to a Fortizar we had dropped in the constellation and tethered up with the other guy to wait for the op to finish.

Things went quickly.  Nobody showed up to contest us, so after relatively few nodes the defenders had won and we were done.

Well, we were done with the entosis bit.  Since the area was quiet our FC took the Eagles around and began reinforcing various cyno jammers, jump gates, and other structures.   Meanwhile, the rest of the entosis ships, a dozen of us all together, tethered up on the Fortizar and sat around waiting.

As I mentioned above, waiting is nothing new.  But this was a particularly frustrating wait.  I had flown out with the fleet, both main and alt, for a role that I was not able to perform.  Once the entosis part of the operation was done our little band was essentially ignored while the rest of the fleet flew around shooting targets and… well… actually doing things.  And the number of things to be done was very open ended, so there was no ETA or such, just having to hear over coms that the were warping to another structure for another 20 minute reinforcement shoot.

And so we sat for over two hours.  If somebody had said, “Be back in two hours” I would have been good.  But no, we had to stay alert and listening to coms to figure out what was going on.  This was not helped at my end by it being the hottest day of the year so far (it hit 107, and was still in the high 90s as the sun set), my office being the hottest corner of the house, or the fact that one of the cats ate something they shouldn’t have and started throwing up all over the house.  Oh, and the paper towel roll in the kitchen had exactly three sheets left on it and it was the last one we had.  Also, nobody else would join up for a Drake conga line while we waited.

Two Drakes do not a conga line make

So I was salty and boiling, and not necessarily metaphorically, and my patience for being ignored and left to wait for an unspecified time frame was very much non-existent.  And I was not necessarily alone in that feeling.  The mood in the entosis channel was grim and a couple of people said that they had learned their lesson about volunteering for that.  Some people couldn’t stick around and just left.

I considered leaving as well.  If the two Drakes had been my ships I might have just blazed a trail for home despite intel reporting a couple of gangs roaming the route back.  Two high EHP entosis Drakes with RLMLs and ECM drones would make for some comedy moments if nothing else.  Plus they each had a cyno fit, so I could have called in a drop.  I knew there was a group on standby just for that.

But these were not my ships.  These ships were on loan.  And while I could afford to reimburse the person handing them out, that wasn’t the point.  On a deployment getting supplied can be a task in and of itself, so handing somebody the ISK doesn’t solve the full replacement problem.  Plus you just don’t go throw away ships people lend you.  I felt like I had to make a good faith attempt to get them home safely.  So I waited, listened to coms, and fumed.

This was the dark time of the op.  I couldn’t really stray far from my computer, I couldn’t watch a movie because there was still talking on coms, and a lot of it was from the command channel so being in the no chatter channel wasn’t helping, I was hot, I was bored, and I just wanted to get this whole thing done.

This is where you start questioning why you went on this op, why you are on this deployment, why you stay in your alliance, why you play this objectively unfun game at all.  I started planning to head back to Delve, haul the remains of my stuff to low sec… a process I started back in late 2017 when I was bored with the game… and just quit.  Fuck this game.

I tabbed out and played some RimWorld while I listened to the ongoing chatter as the rest of thee fleet moved from target to target, reinforcing various NC/PL structures so they couldn’t unanchor them and carry them off.  There were several fleets out doing this, including Zungen’s roaming fleet of Leshak battleships.

Eventually the FC called out that there were only three more targets before the fleet would head home, then two, then one, then, at last, the entosis crew was told to wake up and given a destination at which to meet up with the fleet.

Having something to do made me feel a bit better right away.  I was still surly, but could feel it ebbing away with activity.  We met up with the fleet on a gate and carried on with it.  The FC said we had a ride home waiting for us, that we just had to get through a couple of systems and a titan would be waiting to send us home.

My annoyance was peaked just a bit as we moved towards our ride.  We had to pass through one bubbled gate, and as we landed 80km off the of it the FC chided us to hurry, to turn on prop mods and get to the gate.

A defensively bubbled gate

Of course the entosis Drakes, the slowest ships in the fleet, had no prob mods fit.  We were going to sail leisurely through the bubbles no matter what the FC said, though at least somebody reminded him that we were not lagging behind on purpose.

The titan was in the next system.  We were bridged back onto the Keepstar where we started.  I docked up, contracted both Drakes back to the person who lent them out, and logged off.  Then I went to the store to buy more paper towels.

I was back by the next day though.  There are still more things to blow up in Tribute.

Watching a Raitaru explode the next day

And there are targets in the Vale of the Silent now as well.  That defensive entosis effort was to keep the ihub in P3EN-E in GSF hands.  There is a Keepstar in that system, and without an ihub in their possession the locals cannot put up a cyno jammer to keep our capitals out.  I imagine that we will be blowing that up some day soon.

And so it goes.  I got through my black moment and carried on, still keen enough to see things through another chapter in the ongoing story that is EVE Online.  Even bad moments make for tales once they are in the past.

But I am still going to sit on my hands and remain silent the next time they need volunteers for entosis operations.  Fuck that noise.

Introducing Your CSM13 Representatives

The voting ended on Monday, the ballot boxes were as stuffed as they were going to get, and, with no real venue or event going on to carry the announcement, CCP went to Twitch to broadcast the winners of the election.

Space elections are serious business…

Those on CSM13 fall into two groups.  First there are the incumbents.  Basically, anybody who was on CSM12 and who ran again made the cut.  Seven incumbents ran and they were:

• Aryth – Goonswarm Federation
• Innominate – Goonswarm Federation
• Sort Dragon – Darkness
• Innominate – Goonswarm Federation
• The Judge – Goonswarm Federation
• Jin’taan – Red Noise (formerly of CVA and TEST)
• Suitonia – The Felines of the Egg of the Lisa
• Steve Ronuken – Fuzzwork Enterprises

Aryth, at the top of the Imperium ballot, was the biggest vote getter.  Sort Dragon, who was substituted in when Vince Draken was removed last year, managed to make the cut on his own this time.  Meanwhile, proving that betrayal is no barrier to success, managed to make it back on the council as well.

That leaves the three new people on the CSM, who were:

• Killah Bee – Northern Coalition
• Merkelchen – Goonswarm Federation
• Brisc Rubal – The Initiative

That gives you all ten members of CSM13.

The CSM 13 Winners

As you can see, null sec dominated the vote even more than usual, with only two players outside of 0.0 making the cut.

For those keeping track, 7 out of 10 people on the Imperium ballot (which I posted here with the full candidate list) made it onto the CSM this year, with only Mawderator, Sullen Decimus, and Commander Aze left out.  However, some of the people on the Imperium ballot had or built constituencies outside of the Imperium.  Still, the top four players on the Imperium ballot made it, which was one more than I really thought would. (I do wonder how many people outside of the Imperium voted for The Judge.)

On the stream CCP Guard said that there was a total of 29,417, down a bit from the 31,274 that were cast for CSM12.  He attributed this in part in that no direct mailing went out during the election as none were slated the one week time frame of the election.  You can see where the CSM13 number stacks up historically.

Number of Votes Cast – CSM 1 through CSM 12

CCP Guard said that there will be a full dev blog about the election published, most likely tomorrow, with all of the voting data so you can check for yourself how things played out.  I will add a link to this post when that goes up.

CCP Guard on the stream

CCP Guard did say that Tikktokk Tokkzikk of Pandemic Legion appeared to be in 11th place, so if somebody needs to be replaced during the term, that will likely be who steps in.

In the mean time CCP is still working on getting the server back up.  The game has been down for a while now today.

Return of the Shang Rush

There is a correlation between some of my past jobs and certain video games.  For a long stretch of time there was usually a video game, or a series of video games over time, that whatever team I was on would play at the office after hours.

Games like NetTrek or Marathon or Diablo or Warcraft II or StarCraft took their turns at various companies as the game to play after hours.

That all ended late in the last decade when HR reached a point of ascendancy in Silicon Valley in companies above a certain size and decreed that people enjoying themselves on company property was bad unless they were doing so in company organized and controlled events.

Before that we were able to find support against IT for our after hours fun.  After that IT was cleared to keep our machines free from anything not specifically mandated by them.  And so ended after hours bonding.  Now we just talk about video games that we play ourselves.  Nobody sticks around late to hang out any more, we all just go home.  Life in enterprise software, where everything is super serious.

There is probably a correlation between the wind down of games after hours or work and finding time at home to blog about games.

The funny thing is how certain games were popular at one company but not another.  In 1998 I moved to a new company.  The previous one had been very much Warcraft II and early Total Annihilation.  The new company was just getting into StarCraft.  The timing was just about perfect, as I was in for the early learning curve of StarCraft, which had just been released.

StarCraft supplanted the previous dev team champion, Age of Empires.  There were still some people who played it, but the new game supplanted the old pretty firmly.

(Side note: As somebody who has played the same MMOs for years at a stretch, it now seems odd that such games had such a short shelf life and how keen we could be to move on to new ones.)

Some people on the team missed the game while others found the balance of the game to be off and much preferred the fine edge balance of the StarCraft races.  The Rise of Rome expansion for Age of Empires came along, but it wasn’t enough to get the game back in play.

Then of course Age of Empires II – The Age of Kings came along and eclipsed the game completely with its improved controls and balance of civilizations that gave each one their special niche.  There was no looking back at that point.

Somewhere along the line I grabbed a copy of Age of Empires just to try it out, but it never really stuck with me.  Ensemble Studios even rolled back some of the UI and control changes that came with Age of Kings to try and improve the game, but it remained in the shadow of its successor.  People have kept playing and modding and expanding Age of Kings while Age of Empires has languished.

I’ve been playing Age of Kings off and on ever since it came out.  The game still (mostly) ran through the last decade until it got an HD upgrade/revamp a few years back that brought it into the age of higher resolution monitors.

Soon though, almost 20 years since it launched, we will all have a chance to take another look at Age of Empires.  One of the tidbits to come out of E3 was news of an Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, featuring 4K graphics, remastered sound track, and improved game play.

Age of Empires

Microsoft has spruced up the long neglected Age of Empires site so you can sort of get a handle on what they are doing.  Information is sparse and the site seems pretty slow, but you can see they have something planned.   I don’t know who is actually doing the work.  The site proudly talks about somebody on the “About Us” page, but Ensemble Studios that did the original game has been gone for eight years, while Hidden Path Entertainment did the Age of Kings HD update and they aren’t mentioned anywhere.

Also, I am pretty sure this statement from the “About Us” page is laughably wrong:

Considered by many as the top selling PC game of all time

If you’re one of the alleged “many,” maybe you had better check that chart again.

Anyway, I’ll hold out for more information before I make an actual purchase decision, but I am leaning towards picking this up when it goes live.  We’ll see if the Shang rush is still a thing.

Hurricane Massacre

Expecting another run with Nagas again, I logged into EVE Online early to grab two off of the contracts available in Saranen.  There seemed to be plenty available, so somebody had worked to restock the market over night.  Pick your favorite quote about logistics and war.

But when the ping went out to form up for the 02:00 op, the call was for Hurricanes alone.  No Nagas would undock, so I had to grab a Hurricane off contracts in order to go along.  Plenty of those were available as well. Thomas Lear was the FC and, by way of indicating what we might be up to, the message of the day in the fleet window asked that we bring extra T1 ammo.

We were going to shoot a structure.

Thomas would neither confirm nor deny this allegation, just telling people to bring extra ammo.  I had shipped out plenty of cheap ammo for Hurricanes, so I was covered, but people who went to the market in Saranen were faced with some very expensive choices.  Somebody had bought up the T1 ammo and priced it way above market, making faction ammo cheaper by comparison.  A bit of economic warfare.  So people bought faction ammo instead.  I listed some of my T1 ammo and mentioned it in fleet chat, however nobody seemed to notice and I wasn’t wearing my headset with a mic, so couldn’t shout about it in voice coms.  Ah well, somebody will buy it at some point… it was still listed last I checked.

After boosters were setup the fleet, approximately 100 people, undocked through the cloud of Abaddons sitting on the undock and warped off to a gate.  A couple people got tagged and had to dock back up, but most of us had no problem.

We traveled a few jumps to pick up a titan that bridged us up into Pure Blind where we did indeed setup and start shooting a tower.  It was an NCdot money moon in U-INPD in a MOA owned system.  So we went into orbit of the tower and started shooting it while sending drones after the offensive modules to incapacitate them.

Hurricane fleet blazing away at the stick

We had a couple of hostiles in system scouting us, but things were quiet for a while until a group of hostiles showed up in local.  NCDot had put together a small bomber fleet to disrupt our POS shot, and disrupt us they did.

When the NCDot bomber force uncloaked and launched against us, the call went out to overheat hardeners.  That I did overheat saved my ship, as I was square in the middle of where they had aimed.  I saw my shields stripped away, then my armor burned off, and finally the very structure of my ship began absorbing the incoming explosions.  I thought I was done for, but the damage stopped with 8% of my structure remaining.  A couple of Hurricanes went down in that run, but most survived.  However, like my ship, the survivors were still heavily damaged.

Meanwhile, reinforcements were coming in to help our foes.  NCDot had put out the call to the other members of the We-Are-Not-A-Coalition Coalition and they were showing up in system.  Thomas warped us off, then brought us to a GSF POS in the system.

However, the POS password wasn’t the standard one you can find by googling “Goon POS password” and he did not know what the actual password was.  So anybody who was in GSF, which was most of the fleet, could safely hole up in the POS while those of us in other alliances had to go make safe spots and bounce around.

While Thomas was trying to get somebody from GSOL maintenance out to reset the POS PIN to let us in, a Guardians of the Galaxy T3 fleet showed up at the POS and started shooting our tower.

A blob of T3s outside of our POS

Meanwhile, somebody woke up MOA and told them they had an Imperium POS in one of their systems, so they dragged out a couple of Revelation dreadnoughts to join in the shoot.  Things had turned around and our own tower was the focus.

MOA Revelations exist

Pandemic Horde also filtered into the system with a mixed frigate and interceptor fleet.  All sorts of people were showing up.

I saw Hendrink Collie again

In the mean time, the GSOL service tech had made it out to the POS and had set a temporary password so those of us warping between safe spots could rejoin the fleet.  Soon we were all huddled together, orbiting the stick at 500m, and wondering how long it would take our foes to get bored and go away.

Sitting in the POS

At that point we were out numbered and out gunned, but in addition to that we were all still heavily damaged.  Ships orbiting the POS tower all showed visible armor damage.  We looked like a fleet of the undead shambling about the stick, giant patches of burned armor exposed.

Skins can’t hide the damage

We were a shield tanked fleet, and shields do regenerate.  However, we still often count on armor and hull to act as a buffer while we hope that logi can get to us and start repping our shields.  And, for me, that secondary buffer was mighty thin indeed.

No armor, 8% hull, and heat damage on the hardeners

So we sat in orbit for a while inside the POS shields and waited.

Then Thomas told us all to wake up.  Asher Elias had pinged for a reinforcement fleet and was going to be arriving shortly.  At that point we were going to leave the POS shields and engage the enemy.

We stopped orbiting the stick on our own and anchored up on Thomas.  He made a few turns back and forth as we waited, then headed for the edge of the shields, then end of safety, and started calling targets.

I had managed to lock up and hit a Guardian before it exploded, then moved on to a Devoter where I scored the final blow, giving my Hurricane a temporary kill mark.  Very temporary indeed, as the NCDot bomber fleet had uncloaked already and bombs were on their way.

I overheated my hardeners again, annoyed that my ship hadn’t come with any nanite repair paste and that I hadn’t bothered to check and grab some before we left, and waited for the hammer to fall as I started shooting the next target.  My shields went down by leaps as each bomb hit.  There was a short pause in the pulses of the attack as my shields lingered at the hairy end of being gone.  I thought for a brief second that maybe I might survive a bit longer.  And then another bomb pulsed and the ship disintegrated around me and I was in my pod.

I am sure I was not alone.  Those who did not go with me on that round no doubt went soon thereafter, as the bombs were not done hitting and my pod was destroyed with the next explosion, putting me back in the station in Saranen.

There were calls on coms to reship and be ready to return, but I doubted that we were going to go back.  The bulk of our fleet, damaged earlier by a well aimed bomb run, had been finished off by the same bombers.

The battle report shows that we lost almost all of our ships in the engagement, totaling up to 15.3 billion ISK while only inflicting 4.43 billion ISK in damage on our foe, a ratio of almost 3.5 to 1.

Not a good day for the USTZ 02:00 op.  And the daily Astrahus in Saranen was destroyed as well.

We shall see what tomorrow brings.