Blizzard Confirms June 1st for Burning Crusade Classic, May 18th for Pre-Expansion Patch

Of course I’m away from home for the first time in months when the news hits.

Blizzard let slip the June first date for Burning Crusade Classic by accident on Tuesday, but covered it back up again rapidly.

But earlier today they finally let the cat out of the bag, officially confirming both the date for the expansion launch and the rumored May 18th date for the pre-expansion patch.

The Announcement at Last

They even provided the now standard global launch time map.

The World Wide Launch Plan

Come the pre-patch on May 18th we will all have a choice to make, whether or not to go forward into the era of the dark portal or to stay behind and continue on in the classic era.

Choose your path forward

Blizzard has a post up about how to make the choice you want… as well as how to have it both ways should you desire and be willing to part with some real world cash… but it boils down to this set of bullets.

• On patch day, you’ll be able to open the Battle.net desktop app and choose which game you want to play—Burning Crusade Classic or WoW Classic.
• Your existing characters will show on both game types under your old realm name/s.
• Once you’ve chosen a game to play, you’ll select a character to play and confirm your choice.
• If you decide you’d like to play your character in both game types, you’ll be able to use an optional paid service to gain access to the cloned character in both game types.
• Then all you need to do is log in as you normally would and play.

So you have until the 18th to consider your path. For me, the dark portal beckons, and Outland will be the next destination.

A Return to Dire Maul East

The instance group returned to WoW Classic this past weekend.  Our last run, when we finally wrapped up Blackrock Depths, was back in February.  We have spent most of our time since then in the Viking afterlife that is Valheim.  But the coming of Burning Crusade Classic… Blizz seems set to drop the pre-expansion patch some time this month… stirred us from our resource collection and biome explorations to return to Azeroth.

All of us together again

We had a few goals for this return run, the first of which was to get back into the swing  of playing WoW.  While getting used to how to move passed pretty quickly, I think everybody was pressing the space bar to try and sprint or the Tab key for inventory more often than they would like to admit.  Fortunately, nobody can see you do that and it doesn’t have any real in-game impact.

We also wanted to get to level 60.  That was a low bar goal, as we were all well on our way towards that after the last run.

And we also wanted some felcloth.  Felcloth drops from satyrs in Felwood and is the primary ingredient to make mooncloth bags, which are the 16 slot bags that tailors can make.  To be in WoW Classic is to be in a time when 16 slot bags were a big deal.  Ula, our group tailor, has us mostly covered with 14 slot runecloth bags, but those extra two slots add up.

The coveted mooncloth bag

We spent some time trying for the mooncloth bag recipe drop at one point and eventually snagged it for an acceptable price at the auction house so Ula could start making them.

But to feed the production we need felcloth, and the one place where it drops besides Felwood is in Dire Maul East.  So that set our destination.  It offered xp, we had done it before so it was a probably a good warm up, and there was felcloth to be had.

We got ourselves online on Sunday afternoon and headed towards Feathermoon in Feralas from where ever we last left our characters.  Viniki was out in Gadgetzan for some reason… thorium recipes I think… so was the closest to our destination.

Flying out over the Mirage Raceway

Our group, in the guild window, was all level 59 and looking to level up.

All close to level cap

We managed to find the right instance on the first try… Dire Maul East is on the east side of the Dire Maul complex as advertised… and got ourselves setup.  This is the instance with Pusillin, the little demon that you have to chase down as he has the key to unlock the other wings of the complex.

What if we already have the key?

We started in on clearing our way through, the familiar rhythm of fights coming back to us after not too many rounds.

Viniki was the first to level up.  I had been out mining ore in high level zones, which means killing mobs now and then, so had crept up pretty close to the level cap already.

Hitting level 60 in the first area

We followed Pusillin, not so much because we needed his key or a drop from him, but because he runs off into an area populated by satyrs, and satyrs mean felcloth.

Attack all satyrs!

This was in contrast to our last visit, where we bypassed a lot of the satyrs.  The layout of the instance is such that you don’t need to grab every group.  But if you want felcloth you grab them all.

We made it to Pusillin and managed to wipe on his fight on the first try, the same as we did the last time we came to visit.

Wiped again

Pusillin summons a group of non-elite helpers who hit hard with fire based attacks, which overwhelmed Skronk’s ability to heal.  I heard him say, “Viniki pot!” even as I was going to hit a health pot, but even in motion already I was too late.

We had to run back, but once we got there, the fight was fairly simple.  If you wipe Pusillin wanders back to the far end of the room, but his summoned demons all crowd in at the near end, so you can fight them separately.

From there it was back up through the halls, sweeping up satyrs that we had missed or which spawned after we passed… which is a thing in DME, because I am pretty sure we didn’t miss that one guy in the narrow hallway on our way in… and off into the side rooms with the other bosses and more satyrs.

Lethtendris down

While gear upgrades seemed unlikely, we somehow still managed to find a couple, along with the Frost Ward V tome for Ula, which dropped just after she hit level 60.  And items that were not upgrades went to Moronae, who had taken up the enchanter profession for us, to be disenchanted for materials.

We pushed on, and managed not to wipe again, though we did have a couple of deaths.  Moronae’s combat ress came in handy when Skronk went down in a fight that got away from us for a bit.

Nobody died on Zevrim’s altar this time

Time, however, started to press.  We had been slow to get started and had stopped to slay all the satyrs for a stretch.  As we got towards the end we needed to speed things up a bit as dinner was about ready at my end.

In the conservatory we skipped as many groups as we dared to clear the way for Ironbark to open the last door for us.

Lets get moving there Ironbark

It was in the conservatory that Skronk hit level 60, the last of us to do so.  We were all at the level cap.

Ready for Outland now

We made it through and got down to the final boss, Azzin the Wildshaper, another fight where we forgot that a bunch minions show up to help the boss mid-fight.  It was a bit touch and go for a while, but I managed to keep them mostly on me.

Sudden mid-fight pile on!

We made it through and defeated Azzin.  We had finished the instance.

Victory over Azzin

We had managed to get up to speed, all hit level 60, and even grabbed a few pieces of felcloth.  I think there were five drops, which doesn’t feel like a lot, though the drops per mobs ratio was much better than trying to farm them in Felwood.  And Ula only needs one piece per bag.  Now she just has to turn them into mooncloth at the local moonwell, something that is on a timer, so it will take a bit to process even five.

There are still some instances left that we have not done in WoW Classic.  But even if we do not get to them all, we are set for Outland.  The gear we have will be replaced by the first round of green quest drops once we get to Hellfire Peninsula.

The Restoration of Blizzard Margins and the Resurgence of WoW

What a difference a year can make.  Back in May 2019 I was writing about the sorry state of margins for the Blizzard portion of the Activision-Blizzard-King combo.

The numbers for Q1 2019 were somewhat grim for Blizzard.  While they brought in $344 million in revenue, the operating income… the profit… was only $55 million, giving them a 16% margin, which is horrible for a software/service company.  They were lagging behind King, which made more money and had a higher margin, and Activision, which made less money but still ended up with a higher operating income and thus a higher margin.

What was going on at Blizzard?  We had the meager offerings of the 2018 BlizzCon still fresh, with Diablo: Immortal being the centerpiece announcement.  StarCraft and Heroes of the Storm were on the outs.  Overwatch was slipping.  And the jewel in the Blizzard crown, World of Warcraft, was having a tough time holding on to people due to the myriad annoyance of the Battle for Azeroth expansion.  It was a bad time for the company.

Things began to turn around for Blizzard when WoW Classic hit late in 2019.  But it took the events of Q1 2020 to really boost Blizzard’s fortunes.

I feel like I should quote an exchange early in the movie Schindler’s List, where he talks about this missing ingredient that had kept him from business success in the past.  For him it was war, for Blizzard it was COVID-19.  Winter was keeping some people at home already, but worries about the virus and stay at home orders in many parts of the world helped fuel Blizzard’s quarter.

It was visible on the WoW servers, where things felt more crowded, and on the WoW Classic servers, where login queues and free server transfers appeared again.  As they laid it out on slide 8 of the presentation:

• After doubling in the second half of 2019, World of Warcraft’s active player community increased further in Q1, as the team continued to deliver more content between expansions than ever before
• Reach and engagement were particularly strong as regions introduced shelter-at-home measures through the quarter, with momentum increasing further in April
• Increased engagement in modern WoW drove accelerating pre-sales for the upcoming Shadowlandsexpansion, slated for the second half of this year

While they had some modest praise for Hearthstone and Overwatch,

• Hearthstone engagement improved sequentially, driven by the new Battlegrounds mode launched in November, and strong execution in live operations
• Overwatch engagement increased meaningfully in March as its latest seasonal event coincided with stay-at-home effects

The words “sequentially” and “meaningfully” are pretty soft.  And then there was a mention of Diablo: Immortal, which may ship some day.

• Diablo Immortal , developed for mobile in partnership with NetEase, remains on track to begin regional testing in the middle of the year

Given that, WoW was clearly the shining star this quarter, which led to the following revenue numbers.

Activision Blizzard Q1 2020 Financial Results Presentation – Slide 10

Blizzard is actually in third place for overall revenue out of the three company units, but that revenue was up by $108 million over last year and the increase was all profit, so that on the actual income line Blizzard was ahead of its two stable mates with a huge jump in operating margin.

Of particular note to me was the measure of Monthly Active Users, MAUs, between Q1 2019 and Q1 2020.  They were both the same, ringing in at 32 million active users.

For me, that seals the deal on my assertion that MAUs are a bullshit metric… or would have sealed the deal if I wasn’t already of that mind.  Any metric that stays flat as when revenue is up nearly 25% and margins have nearly tripled clearly isn’t measuring anything worthwhile in the case of a company like Blizzard.  The company ought to be embarrassed by the need to explain how detached their favored metric is.

And the future seems fairly bright for Blizzard in Q2.  As they noted, momentum was increasing in April, with people still at home and Blizz keeping some incentives, like the 100% xp boots, like to tempt people to work on just one more alt.

And beyond that… well, the Shadowlands expansion is coming, and any WoW expansion delivers a boost to revenue no matter how bad it is viewed after the fact.  They did say on the call that the target for Shadowlands is currently Q4 2020, so no August/September release this time around.  (Quote here) But unless they totally drop the ball with the expansion, Blizz looks like they are pretty well positioned for 2020 and into 2021.

The information, financial reports, presentation, and recording of the investors call can all be found over on the Activision Blizzard investor relations page if you wish to scope it out yourself.

Quote of the Day – Goblin Gets His Due

Gevlon was right

-The Mittani, Imperium Fireside May 4, 2019

I previously mentioned the ongoing conflict in Perimeter over control of trading citadels.  Last year the Imperium and Legacy Coalition began to assail the trading citadels set up by Pandemic Horde.  Those were blown up and replaced by citadels run by TEST alliance, including a Keepstar.

Shop at the sign of the middle management dino

Why Perimeter?  Well, it is one of the eight systems that connect directly to Jita.

Jita and Perimeter

More importantly, it is one of the five neighboring system in The Forge, the same region as Jita, so if you are in Jita and searching for something to buy, goods in Perimeter will show up in your results as well.  As to why Perimeter won out over the other four, my guess is that being on the direct route to Amarr, the second trade hub of New Eden, probably tips the scales.  People try to set up in the other systems, but the listings there are even more meager.

Anyway, since the swap over to Legacy Coalition holding the trade stations in Perimeter a low scale conflict has carried on to try and wrest control away or at least make life annoying.  I had not heard much about that conflict of late.  As it turns out that was likely due to negotiations going on over the whole thing.

At yesterday’s fireside The Mittani announced that a deal had been reached and that going forward the Imperium, Legacy Coalition, and Pandemic Horde would all work together to defend the structures of the Tranquility Trading Corporation, consisting of the Keepstar, two Sotiyos, and one Tatara in Perimeter.

Instead of fighting, each of the three groups will now share in the profits from the trading complex.

This is where Gevlon comes in.  Somebody sent the link to one of Gevlon’s posts where he predicted something like this would come to pass to The Mittani, and Mittens had to admit that Gevlon was right on that particular point.  Some null sec powers did come together to hold a trading citadel together rather than fighting over it.

Of course, Gevlon was wrong on just about everything else in that post.  It is debatable as to whether or not the Imperium, led by Goonswarm Federation, Legacy Coalition, led by TEST, and Pandemic Horde add up to being “everyone significant” when it comes to null sec powers.  It most certainly does not mean peace between the three powers.  Even as I was writing this I got a ping to log in and shoot Pandemic Horde and expect to continue with the campaign against them and NCDot in TKE and The Spire, striking straight at their rental income.  These are not staged “gud fites” but an actual campaign meant to hurt them.

And then there is the effect on Jita.  While some trade is going through Perimeter, it seems to be mostly focused on some high price density items, things like PLEX, skill injectors, and the like.  Trade at the station at Jita 4-4 carries on pretty much as before, three years after the Citadel expansion brought this player run trade center option to the game.

Whether people keep trading in Jita out of habit, ignorance, or mis-trust or player run citadels… some of those trade citadels have been blown up after all… doesn’t matter, people still do most of their buying and selling in Jita.

This means that Gevlon’s assumptions and ISK estimates are all completely bogus.  If his prediction had come to pass we should have seen some sort of drop in the Broker’s Fees collects on the ISK sink side of the chart in the MER.  However, compared to his numbers from the February 2016 MER, the broker’s fees collected were actually up in the March 2019 MER.

As for how much the owners of the trade citadels have to discount their fees in order to attract business… well, he was way off once more.

Fee comparison

In Perimeter they had to cut the broker’s fee to the bone to get the business they have, and that hasn’t moved very much out of the much more expensive Jita.  Even if they got the level of business he predicted, the net profit would be nowhere near his cataclysmic outlook.

And Gevlon said he left EVE Online because of this, because of his grim predictions of what was to come with player run markets in citadels.  I guess he could have stuck around.  The null sec empires are still getting rich, but it doesn’t have much to do with markets in Perimeter.

Fifteen Years of New Eden

EVE Online is fifteen years old today.  It launched on May 6, 2003.

It feels kind of strange, thinking about that.

I thought of myself at the time as having arrived late to the party when I first logged in back in 2006.  MMOs were still kind of new then.  WoW and EQII were coming up on two years old while EverQuest seemed positively ancient at seven years.  I played all three of those early on, the Norrath pair at launch and WoW a few months after, but still during the initial population surge when everybody was still new.

I know from experience that there is clearly a fresh happy fun time when a game is new and everybody is just discovering the world and the social dynamics are still in flux and groups and organizations were still coalescing and, aside from those who were in beta, there wasn’t a generation of old hands to look down on you.  Everybody is equal when they’re all standing out in front of Qeynos or Freeport at level 1.

EVE Online was already three years old when I decided to go take a look.  I think we were pretty sure even back then that after a few years MMOs hit a state of decline.  EverQuest seemed to be some sort of unlikely outsider, having peaked four years in.  And even the hugely popular WoW seemed like it might taper off.  So EVE Online… in that moment I could have easily been convinced I was going in to take a peek before if faded away.

Still, I created my character in August of 2006, not much past the three year anniversary of the launch.  That pre-dates the start of this blog by a couple of weeks, and the blog will be twelve years old come September.  So things turned out, but it wasn’t clear to me that it would go this way.

Arriving in the game I found that starting late came with a big penalty.  Due to the way skill points accrue I would be forever behind anybody who started ahead of me.  Also, advancement via skill points was simply a waiting game.  I had to buy and train skills, some of which took days and weeks to complete, before I could use a given ship or module.

EVE as I found it

And the game itself seemed to want to do me in.  The tutorial was a good example of what happens when somebody who knows how to do everything tries to write a document to teach somebody who knows nothing.  There were a lot of assumptions and unexplained terminology.

And, through the tutorial and sent off to my first agent… located at Jita 4-4, which is where all Caldari pilots were sent after the tutorial, which is my theory as to why Jita 4-4 became the trade hub of New Eden… I was handed the mission Worlds Collide which I attempted to do in my civilian module fit Ibis.

That did not end well.  I logged off after I was obliterated and it was questionable if I would ever log back in at that moment.

But I did.  And I trained up a bit and mined for some ore to make some ISK.  I also tried courier delivery, leading to my first ever null sec loss as I auto-piloted my way into Pure Blind.  That kill mail is lost now, no longer visible as neither zKillboard nor my in-game profile go back that far.  But it was another set back. (Though auto pilot wasn’t so bad back then, since there was no warp to zero yet.)

Still, I found something compelling about the game.  I managed to finish Worlds Collide by doing it in a destroyer.  Missions after that were less difficult.

Out with my Cormorant

I ran Avenge a Fallen Comrade dozens of times.  It seemed to be in heavy rotation.  When missions got tedious I left the game, but came back a few months later.

Shooting the final structure, look at that UI… square targeting markers

I got on track to master mining and rolled up my first alt account within a year of starting the game.  I went from mining in an Osprey to a Hulk.

Space was different back in 2007

I kept running missions as well.  I kept training up.  I did manufacturing.  I did tech II invention.  I gave up on all of that and played the market to make my first billion, and then my second.

All the while the game expanded.  New things were added, old things refined, mistakes were made and left to linger for ages before being corrected.

I came and went, playing for stretches then taking breaks.  I read the news about things going on in other parts of the game.  Null sec was a mystery to me.  And then in late 2011 I finally moved out there and saw a whole different aspect of the game.

And now I sit here and the game is fifteen years old and I am coming up on my twelfth anniversary.  As it turns out MMOs can last a long time.  EverQuest is 19 now at is still set to get another expansion this fall.

A dozen years into EVE Online I still have moments of awe just looking out into space and the scale of things, our tiny ships and stations in a huge universe.

Cormorant Docking – Trails On

CCP has some gifts for players on capsuleer day. Today seemed like the right day for that, but I guess we get to redeem them tomorrow.

Things also seem a bit more subdued when compare to the 10 year party.

Anyway, we shall see how things shape up.  The twenty year mark is now just five years off.  That would be quite a milestone, but a lot of things can happen between now and then.

EVE Online Turns 14

May 6th has rolled around again and our favorite internet spaceship games turns another year older.  It has been 14 years since the game launched back in 2003 and a lot has changed along the way.  The game itself has changed and looks much different today, as old screen shots show. (Image below from this gallery of 2004 screen shots.)

War Drive Active… to the future!

And the world outside of the game has changed dramatically as well.  Back in 2003 EverQuest was the top MMORPG with 550,000 subscribers, while the following things didn’t really exits yet:

• World of Warcraft
• Facebook
• Orkut (Google’s first run at a social media site)
• MySpace (didn’t show up until August 2003)
• Twitter
• Imgur (where those screen shots are hosted)
• Smart phones
• This blog
• Tobold’s blog
• WordPress.com, where this blog is hosted

What was even happening back then?  We were apparently hanging out on Friendster and GeoCities and maybe had heard about LinkedIn, which launched the day before EVE Online.

Also, I had a 2 year old child and was facing the prospect of turning 40 soon.  Now I’m past 50 and the child wants to learn to drive.  Oy!

Anyway, in the grand tradition of the game, CCP has a little something for capsuleers who play the game.  The full details are posted, but this is what you get on each account:

• 1x Capsule YC119 Capsuleer Day SKIN
• 1x Festival Launcher
• 200x Barium Firework
• 200x Copper Firework
• 200x Sodium Firework

I am glad they keep giving us new festival launchers.  Every time we have a fleet doctrine with an empty high slot I slap one on there and inevitably lose the ship and the launcher with it.

The SKIN is nifty.  You don’t see capsules running around in my part of space… not for very long anyway.  But if you are without a ship you can go around with a sharp looking red and white paint scheme.

14th Anniversary capsule SKIN

You have until May 23rd to log in and redeem your gifts.  And even Alpha clone accounts get them.  I checked and redeemed them on my own Alpha account.  Another year down and a decade and a half of the game is just around the corner, a mere 364 days away.

Chasing Asher’s Phantasm

The same thing we do every night, Boat – try to take over Fade!

-Asher Elias, Asher and the Boat

Things happened to fall into place last night in just the right order so that I found myself sitting down at my desk with some free time in the evening just as Asher put up a ping for a Cerberus fleet.  I hate it when I get to my computer and there are pings for fleets, but they are all stale and the fleets have long since undocked.  And, having done the Clownshoe fleet earlier in the week, I was up for a combat fleet looking sail into harm’s way.

I even opted to join in my Cerberus rather than flying logi.  I wanted to shoot something… and I like to get a couple kills on the board every month just to prove to my corp that I am still alive.

We would, of course, be heading to Fade, the focus of the war for the last couple of weeks.  Despite the persistent Reddit propaganda about The Imperium not undocking, not fighting, and not contesting sovereignty, DOTLAN and zKillboard paint a different story.

zKillboard Top Alliances and Corps – May 6, 2016

(How the kills are counted and ranked is explained here.)

I think the biggest surprise there is finding my own alliance, TNT, on the list… that has to be ITAI, to corp CO2 wanted to kick and blacklist, doing some heavy lifting there… though I am bad and almost never fly specifically with my alliance, preferring to just take whatever fleet is leaving out of Saranen when I have the time.  Anyway, back to the fleet.

It had been a while since I had been in an Asher fleet… no Reavers ops of late, just the war… and was surprised when he noted my absence of late. [Insert “Senpai noticed me joke here.] It has actually been difficult to find time for a fleet during the week of late, and next week will continue that trend.

Several fleets were going up, but the Cerberus doctrine probably fits me best as I have almost all the related skills for it trained up to level 5.  Asher himself would be leading us in a new FC ship he was trying out which we were able to see once we got ourselves settled and undocked.

Phantastic Fantasm

That is the Sansha’s Nation Phantasm, a pirate faction ship, wearing the Sansha Victory skin, making it a pretty rare site.  I took an excessive number of screen shots of it while we were lolling around in various places.  It is a pretty, and very pointy, ship.

Undocked, we headed to our ride north, stopping along the way just long enough to pop a MOA Drake that was acting as a bait for a gate camp and clearly wasn’t expecting a 100 ship Cerberus fleet to land on it.  At that point I was “Op success!” because I was on the kill boards for May and could go back to flying logi next time.

We moved to our bridging titan and got ourselves in range before it sent us on our way.

Cerbs waiting for the bridge

Once dropped into the north end of Pure Blind, we headed for the usual location in Fade, the system of O1Y-ED.  Along the way we got some instructions on how the fleet was going to work and what to do during certain circumstances.  Key items on the list were to keep anchored up with your prop mod running and to align immediately to broadcasts when told.

Once at the destination we warped to a point off the station and let the festivities commence.  As usual, numbers were against us, but the doctrine was designed to kite and keep foes at a distance until an opportunity presented itself.  This meant quite a bit of aligning, warping, aligning again, warping again, anchoring up, maybe shooting a target or two, then aligning once more for another warp.

The fleet was an illustration of a number of things Asher has spoken about before, both on coms and on his podcast, about the nature of fleet ops and, especially, having the critical mass of firepower and being able to apply it correctly to a target to break its tank and kill it before it can start receiving enough repair reps to save it.

That last bit was key to our fleet last night, and we didn’t do very well.

In one of the first encounters we got within range of PL’s logi and were given a primary and a secondary to target and shoot.  The idea is that you lock both, shoot the primary until it is dead, then shoot the secondary, which is then the primary.

We locked both up and as the missiles flew… it is always a bit unnerving with missile doctrines as you have to sit and wait until the missiles travel to the target and do their work before you can tell how things are going… it looked like we were going to drop the first logi.  It was down to under a quarter armor… and then reps caught and its armor stabilized and started pushing back up.

We almost had it… and would have had it, except that it was clear that somebody had decided to shoot the secondary.  So our damage, which looked to put kills within the realm of possibility, was split and neither target was destroyed.  There was enough damage on our side… for the moment.

In addition to splitting fire we were, as a fleet, having some problems aligning.

Aligning is easy enough.  It an align point is broadcast, you just right-click on the broadcast in the fleet window and select “Align to…” from the contextual menu.  It the align point is a station or a gate or something else that might be in your overview… I have something of a lazy, probably shows too much standard overview I rely on… you can right click there or, if I remember right, just highlight it on the overview or in space as press the “A” key.

Cerbs aligning for another warp

But, in combat, with lots of things going on, people were not keeping up.  In a situation where you are kiting the enemy, being aligned can be a matter of survival.  If you are aligned when the FC warps the fleet, you are on your way pretty much instantly.  If you aren’t aligned you may find yourself hanging about in the face of a hostile fleet hungry for a kill after the rest of their prey just slipped off.

So it went, we would warp off as hostiles landed only to find that one or two people were not aligned, and the fleet would be a couple ships lighter.  There was some talk of Darwin in action and survival of the fittest on coms, but with less ships, the amount of damage we could put out decreased, making kills harder to get.  And so we kept bouncing around the system, or burning along at speed, kiting the enemy around while looking for an opening.

Running with our bubble coverage

After a a stretch of this where we managed to knock off a couple of hostile Cerberuses that strayed away from their cover… but not enough to match our own losses… Asher took us to a gate and jumped us into K4YZ-Y to look for and advantage.

There we continued kiting, getting a few more kills… my favorite being the PH Noctis looking to scoop up loot… until the enemy managed to pop Asher’s pointy new FC ship.

That actually took me by surprise.  I usually keep a bounty on FCs I fly with regularly so that I immediately get a pop-up notification when they are blown up so I know that things might be going to hell shortly.

Fortunately we had a couple of alternate FCs along for the ride.  Thomas Lear took over and began bouncing us around to shake off the enemy until they got bored and left, though rumor had it that the enemy was convinced that Oxygen was driving the fleet now.

We eventually ended up in a POS in system… somebody said it isn’t really an Asher fleet unless we spend some time hiding in a POS… waiting for things to die down so we could find a way back to Saranen.  By this point, in addition to losing Asher, enough other ships had been peeled off that we lacked any hope of tank breaking critical mass when engaging the enemy fleet roaming the area.  It was time to head home.

There was a bit more waiting, and then some dodging about to get away, but Thomas Lear got us through and to low sec and then back home to Saranen.

Landing back at the Quafe Company Warehouse

Not our most glorious fleet op.  I couldn’t get a decent battle report for what we did, in part because other fleets were operating in the area, including a White Legion Muninn fleet.  But it was another day in the war where we formed up to oppose our enemies and show that we will continue to resist.

One of the more interesting aspects of this op was a look at the kills we got.  Less that two weeks ago, when I was out with Boat on that Cormorant fleet, we were really only seeing Pandemic Horde.  Nobody else was showing up in Fade.  Last night we saw fleets from Pandemic Legion and NCDot as well as a few other members of the Moneybadger Coalition.  Fade is where the fights are happening for now.