Naturally, the next question most people ask is ‘why?’ Do all EVE players love spreadsheets that much, or is there something more to it? It certainly seems to be the former at surface level, especially when we see so many corporations utilising real-world project management tools like Trello, setting up virtual business meetings to discuss matters, and recruiting more thoroughly than your average small business these days. Before the advent of Discord, many corps would also leverage the communication platform, Slack, often with their own set of rigid on and offboarding procedures for members.

Going back to the aforementioned recruitment practices, this has also historically been part of the unique allure of EVE Online. Many corporations won’t simply accept any Tom, Dick, or Harry into their ranks, employing sophisticated, player-built solutions like SeAT to investigate the potential recruit’s credentials and employment history. Combined with lengthy interviews and occasional entrance tests it can often seem a bit much. Then again, you wouldn’t want a spy joining, would you?

The Community

It may come as no surprise that one of the biggest reasons people still play EVE is purely for the community. When you spend hours each night with the same people, bonds are obviously going to form. As was mentioned by (I think!) CCP Convict back at EVE London, meetups such as that one slowly turn into some sort of family reunion. At first, you may only know a handful of other players, but by the second, third, and tenth visits to the halls of Harpa or bars of London things start to take on a different atmosphere.

London last weekend was only my second ever EVE meet and I can already place it up there as one of the best events in my past quarter-century on this planet. Together, my small corp managed to bring ten nerds from England, Switzerland, and Isreal together as if they had been lifelong friends. I love these guys and I doubt that I could have met such a group in many other games. This isn’t even counting the dozens more of whom I had a chance to meet again. Including Jin’tann, Jezza, Nihilaus Vause, Joseph Barnacle, Big Hilmar, Little Hilmar (you know who you are), and so many more.

Hell, I even met my fiancé, Teddy Gbyc, through EVE. If something has to be worth the stress of building a corporation, managing virtual finances, and whatever else, then that’s it.

“The Shakes“

Another reason commonly touted for playing EVE at all is because of the stress. There’s this phenomenon that, for years, has been referred to only as “the shakes”. It’s that feeling you get before a fight. The pure adrenaline-fueled anxiety when there’s something at stake, a challenge lies before you, and your hands shake as if you’ve drunk twelve cups of coffee. It’s not unlike the stories you hear told by adrenaline junkies with their life on the line. Everything goes a bit cloudy, you call targets, and escape with your ship burning and what the hell just happened?

It’s times like these that I can place in my top moments of EVE Online. Namely, my tenure captaining an Alliance Tournament team. I remember my very first match with an experimental Machariel Moa setup like it was yesterday. Up until a minute remained it was just like practice, but with more nerve-calming wine. The timer ticked down to 10 seconds and it hit me. My eyes were scanning the screen. Did I make a mistake? I know I’m too close to the Vindis. There’s no way that my ships can beat out that damage. What if I don’t catch their logi? I knew the commentators felt the same way based on their laughing at my fleet composition.

Five, four, three, two, one, GO. And it was real. I gave my standard order “props on, let’s go” “damage on SirRalph and Veil; Machariels keep burning away”. There was a lot on the line and I had this distinct thought in slow motion while burning to catch the first Deacon. This is real, I’m in the Alliance Tournament right now. How did I end up here? 350 seconds later and I was celebrating with my team loudly over Teamspeak, music bot and all.

Having played this game for so long, it’s times like this that become more and more difficult to come by. Experience and knowing that I’m always going to lose in a 5 vs 500 nullsec blob situation mutes the feeling a bit. It’s still a bit like chasing the dragon, though. It’s also part of the reason that I’m glad I had another opportunity to fly alongside my tournament buddy Nihilaus Vause in London.

A Whole Wide World

Or should I say galaxy? Another reason I usually hear mentioned as the key motivation for playing EVE is because of how big it is and how much you can do. EVE Online is a massive place with nearly 8,000 solar systems to visit and explore. These aren’t just filler, either. Being around for over 16 years means that, while I have no way to prove it, every system seems to have some sort of history. You might come across the current staging system of Pandemic Horde, a historic battlefield of years gone by, or maybe just the high-security home system of some small corporation.

Deeper than just physical space, though, you find the people themselves. It’s often said that ‘EVE is more fun to read about than to actually play’ and that seems to always stem from these crazy stories by (almost) crazy people. Taking Steven Messner’s list, for example, we have tales of con artists, a scouting and pilot-rescue service, and legions of players being swayed by one person’s propaganda. Almost any kind of real-world espionage has a duplicate. Google “EVE Online Ponzi Scheme” and you’ll see.

But life in New Eden doesn’t always have to be so grandiose. It’s about the little things, too. Meeting an old friend in one of those ~8,000 systems and having a chat before parting ways; joining forces with an Australian fellow you found for several hours because “why not?” These are some of the things that make it feel like a living, breathing, universe (if it weren’t for the bots, but that’s another conversation). And that feeling only multiplies when you visit these highly trafficked areas to find thousands of other pilots milling about, each with their own livelihood.

If the population of EVE were to disappear tomorrow, leaving the servers online, then there would be no reason to play. These players form the living, beating heart of the galaxy and make it feel real; they make it feel worth something. Not too different from going about your everyday tasks if you ask me. Things would feel a bit off if nobody worked in your local Tesco and the streets were empty.

In the end, it really is an individual thing for why we play this game. From the flowchart above, it’s clear that players have many different objectives, just as the average Joe on the street does. I like to think, though, that everyone has just a little bit of what I’ve mentioned in my main three headers here. The industrialist might not be a fan of PvP, but escaping a gank by the skin of their teeth may be their most thrilling thing that week. The players living in the middle of nowhere may not appreciate scale, but without the existence of others, their little pocket of space wouldn’t exist at all.

And for the people who may not have a community? I pity them. To me, having a solid group is what it’s all about. I’ve ran a rag-tag bunch of players through thick and thin and a hell of a lot of stress. We’ve split and reformed several times over the last few years, causing me no end of admin work with recruitment and day-to-day running. I’ve spent many a night logged in for the sake of making sure others are happy at the expense of my own time. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The post Why Do We Play EVE? appeared first on Talking in Stations.

Now, while I personally felt that the Typhoon was in a fairly nice spot as a cheap battleship, the Rapid Fire patch saw it get even better. CCP have made a nice few changes to several Minmatar ships and that includes an application bonus to everybody’s favourite bucket of rust, the Typhoon. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Minmatar Battleship bonuses (per skill level):

5% bonus to Rapid Heavy Missile, Cruise Missile, and torpedo Launcher rate of fire
7.5% bonus to Cruise Missile and Torpedo explosion velocity (originally 5%)

I’ll preface this article by stating that I don’t view the buff for the Typhoon as particularly meaningful, but a buff is welcome nonetheless. In reality, it results in a tiny (very tiny) application increase to the cruise and torpedo platforms. If only we saw a bonus to explosion radius instead of explosion velocity, but that would be silly and sliiightly OP.

Before I start with the fits I’ve devised for this sexy ship, I want to mention that I have a bias towards faster warp speeds. So most of the fits here will include a Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizer, despite the recent warp changes. If you, however, don’t mind the base warp speed that battleships provide then feel free to change it out for a rig more suitable for.

Long-Range Cruising

Before the buff, I found the cruise missile Typhoon rather lacklustre with regards to application and didn’t particularly see a strong use for cruises over other long-range DPS platforms. Especially outside of large null bloc engagements. And honestly, my opinion really hasn’t changed as the cruise missile platform has shown a minimal increase in application with and without EWAR support.

However, while the patch didn’t do much for cruise missile Typhoons, you could technically fly a cruise fit in a nano gang by foregoing tackle modules. Instead, relying on dedicated on-grid tackle and support to help apply your damage. The only issue with this is the massive delay in applied damage at longer ranges (approximately 14 seconds at 100km on a stationary target, not including the acceleration period) as well as the fact that you would struggle to receive boosts. Whereas an Oracle can apply as much instantaneous damage from over 60km for cheaper and be within range of friendly on-grid boosts.

Still, if you feel the need to launch literal space Tomahawk missiles from roughly 100km away, this fit might be your jam:

Doesn’t look too bad on paper, right? Adequate tank for a nanogang with the immense utility of a Micro Jump Drive which can be used defensively and offensively, 688 cold missile DPS with faction ammo, rising to 994 when your Wardens are out. This jumps up further to 1,171 hot with Fury Cruise Missiles. Compared to other nano DPS focused ships, it can be a little slow with Quafe Zero at 1.47km/s // 2.1km/s. There is also limited room for improvement as you’ll really struggle to be skirmish boosted while at such extreme ranges.

As previously mentioned, your DPS is also delayed a fair amount if you decide to exploit the range cruise missiles provide. Nevertheless, if you bring two or three of these to the field with a larger gang that can screen for tackle, your volleys will be glorious. It’s also quite nice being so far away from the 20 caps that land on your nanogang. Thank Fraternity.

Back to the topic of application, the graphs below express the damage numbers you’d expect out of Precision and Fury missiles alone, including Standard Crash on a range of targets. I’ve also tested a support ship being present to help with application if you have a spare alt/friend to sit in a Hyena.

Again, to stress the importance of application, this fit needs to be paired with some kind of long-range support for webs and paint and a dedicated tackle ship due to the lack of point. If you choose to forego any kind of support then the application will be absolutely abysmal and you will be laughed at.

Torpedo Supremacy

Moving onto something a little more fun and rather more dangerous, the torpedo Typhoon provides the average pilot with EVE’s version of a $20 Amsterdam special. Do you want to sit on someone’s face with your 1600mm rolled tungsten balls out and shove a beautiful amount of DPS down their throat? Yes? Well take a look at this monstrosity:

The heavy armour torpedo Typhoon has pretty decent stats for a brawling battleship, whether you use it for solo roaming or for a kitchen sink gang on a gate. Tank-wise, you can get a comfortable 108k EHP to brick your way through a fair bit of damage. While it’s not as much of a brick as the max bulkhead Megathron or some of the crazier faction battleship fits, that’s still pretty ok.

Additionally, even without the new buff to its explosion velocity, the Typhoon was able to get reliably high DPS on a wide range of targets. Fit with two target paints (No missile guidance computers mind you, to take full effect of its role bonus), you can expect 843 cold DPS with faction, rising to 1,167 hot with Rage torpedoes when you really want to show off. Add 158 DPS from the Hammerheads and you can get a maximum theoretical damage output of 1,325 DPS on top of a utility high for a heavy neut!

To put the Typhoons abilities into perspective, the following graphs show the missile-only DPS using faction and Rage missiles on a range of targets using standard crash.

Tasty amount of damage, right? While some might prefer to active tank their battleships to try to have a longer-lasting presence during a fight, the fitting requirements of the torpedos heavily affect the Typhoon’s ability to active tank at all.

All in all, the buffer torpedo Typhoon can be a brawling beast if you want a cheap, solo roaming battleship that simply throws DPS without worrying about transversal. Talking about splurging DPS, how about those Rapid Heavies huh?

Rapid Repping

The following fit lovingly expresses the art of sitting still, popping some Exile, Hardshell, and going ham on whatever you’ve managed to lock up first. But before I go into the details, have a look at this beauty. 

This fit can output 1,027 DPS hot plus drones, and that will be a near enough constant output between reloads if you repair during your reload cycle! If you have the chance to use Fury missiles with proper application, your paper DPS can rise up to 1,176. And trust me, you’d be surprised at how well heavy missiles can actually apply under a paint and grappler. For reference purposes, it’s also worth knowing that Rage does about 50k work of damage before you hit reload. This isn’t always going to be an issue, but might affect time to kill a tanky/repping target if you need to escape.

Armour wise, this particular Typhoon can reliably tank up to 1,028 omni DPS before running out of paste about 600 afterwards. Buffer EHP plus ancillary rep totals 104.7k EHP, making for an easy comparison to several other battleships. At that point, the Large T2 Rep is only a bonus.

Do note that as I’ve mentioned in the introduction of the article, one of the rig slots does use a hyperspatial. Additional tank rigs are a possibility, but having that extra mobility could make the difference between landing on the gate and hitting a sabre bubble at 20km. Likewise, your friends will appreciate not having to wait around too long for you.

Again, to put the Typhoons abilities into perspective, the following graphs express the typical, missile only damage output on a range of targets with Standard Crash, using faction and Fury missiles.

Talking about heavy missiles, I’ve left my favourite Typhoon fit to last, a beautifully cheap, yet timeless classic.

Party Like It’s 2007

This fit is an absolute baller if you can fly it properly. Drop it into the mainline DPS role of a small gang with skirmish links, some Quafe Zero and, if you’re feeling it, some Snakes and you can go silly quick. With a beautiful defensive web range of 22.1km thanks to Interdiction Manoeuvres, Ramjags just don’t even get close. Honestly, you don’t know how beautiful a battleship going 3.4km/s and shitting nearly a thousand DPS across the field actually is until you actually see it. All for a cheap price of approximately 231 million ISK plus optional implants. Bloody pennies, that is.

I do have to note, however, that this is a fairly operator skill-intensive fit to fly. Without proper situational awareness, knowledge of ship matchups, and when to be aggressive, you yourself can crash and burn just as easily. Only fly this if you are confident in your abilities with kiting and you have proper support from your nanogang. Then again, it is cheap.

Finally, here are the expected missile only damage outputs for a range of targets like before, with faction, Fury, and standard crash.

Closing Thoughts

The Typhoon in my opinion has always been capable of being a strong contender for small gangs and solo PvP. With CCP’s recent patch, it has been aided ever so slightly with an application buff but hasn’t exactly been lifted into a higher bracket in terms of viability. 

There isn’t much else to say about this ship really, other than that the Cruise variant is weaker in a small gang setting than the Rapid Heavy variant albeit with the benefit of continuous over burst DPS. But hey, extreme range needs a trade-off and it’s still possible to make it work with the right ingredients. Some of the most interesting PvP happens with weird fits, and you can always try and pull of an MJD alpha strike by timing your missiles.

The post Fit Kitchen: The Typhoon appeared first on Talking in Stations.

On the “CSM Disillusionment”

It is said to be a common feeling for newly elected CSM members to become a bit disillusioned about EVE’s development. I felt like this a bit after the summit. However, the more I spend time in CSM, the more I actually began to give more credit to CCP. I don’t think CCP have been errorless. I have been highly critical of some of their game design decisions, and many of their financial decisions as well. But because of a very unique situation about CCP that I came to appreciate more, I’m not disillusioned with EVE as a CSM member. Let me explain.

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Think about a game like WoW. Blizzard have their employees immerse themselves fully into the game. These people can participate in raids, arenas, quests, guilds, and anything else a player can do in the game. Then they can decide what the problems are and try to fix them, or try to create a better experience. The development of any AAA video game one can think of probably works in a similar way.

CCP employees cannot immerse themselves in anything impactful in EVE. They cannot be economic masterminds, build empires, FC hundreds of people, or steal trillions’ worth of Excavators. It should be quite clear why. As actions have lasting consequences in the sandbox, the community would go nuts if CCP participated impactfully in the game and this was found out. We had examples of this before.

CCP CAN ONLY HEAR ABOUT THESE PROBLEMS IN A SECOND-HAND MANNER

It is a common criticism that they should play their game more. The problem here is that no matter how much they play in the non-impact zone, the most important aspects of EVE will always be inaccessible to them. They have to rely on second-hand information and testimony to get the feel of the most important problems of EVE. Moreover, due to its sandbox nature, EVE is a game with overlapping, clashing, mutually amplifying, mutually neutralizing problems. Problems inside problems inside problems.

One can construe governing EVE as similar to governing a city. Imagine CCP as the mayor. This mayor is never allowed to visit the city and truly experience its worst problems. Meanwhile, many of the city’s dwellers have their own visions of the perfect city. And they have their own ideas on how to get this city there. The mayor can only listen to the city’s people to make decisions. Obviously it would not be a straightforward task for this mayor to govern the city.

There are two main takeaways here. Firstly, the deepest problems of the EVE “core gameplay” do not resemble well-defined engineering problems or math problems. They resemble nebulous political problems with multiple dimensions. Secondly, CCP can typically only hear about these problems in a second-hand manner, from other people. Surely they can cure and analyze data, but the interpretation of data also gets political. 

CCP is probably the only game company on this planet that faces such a situation. They have an extremely complex ecosystem in their hands, yet with a true inability to access it. Getting to know how EVE’s development works allows one to appreciate this fact much better. This is why, as a CSM member, my respect for CCP has actually grown. I understand that none of this inspires confidence about EVE’s future so far. I just wanted to share this feeling.

On the Usefulness of CSM

The above situation makes CSM a very valuable resource for CCP. Since EVE’s “core gameplay” problems are complicated, inaccessible, and political; it is helpful to have a selection of trusted expert players to lay them out.

The CSM is often criticized as a lobbying platform for nullsec empire builders. This narrative came forward again this year, particularly after the NPC Sotiyo cargo can volume changes. In my experience, it is mostly incorrect. I haven’t witnessed significant and blatant metagaming. I also imagine CCP would see through that in a heartbeat.

Make no mistake. I still fully think that the CSM is “null biased”. I keep nagging my fellow CSMers with this. And I thank them for putting up with me. However, the null bias doesn’t come in the form of metagaming or lobbying. It comes in a more complicated form.

Since most of the game’s problems are complicated and political, people’s opinions about their existence or severity differ. These opinions are typically shaped by the way people play the game. For example, imagine a question such as; “on a scale of 1 to 10, how much of a problem do you think large bomber fleets are?” I am confident that nullsec empire builders would score way higher. 

I DON’T THINK THERE IS A STRAIGHTFORWARD, OBVIOUS ANSWER

Now imagine a thousand similarly complex questions. Are capital ships still one of the most oppressive and problematic aspects of EVE balance? What is the overall value of ganking activities to the game? How strong should heavy bombs be? Do nullsec empires carry EVE’s interesting end-game content mostly by themselves? And so on.

These questions are such that—depending on your background and your primary activities in EVE—your answers to them might begin to fit a stereotype. Don’t get me wrong. Not every empire builder will provide the same answer to every question. There will always be a diversity of opinions. There will be places which an empire builder answers some questions in a way that is not stereotypical. There will be empire builders which fit to the stereotype to a higher or lesser degree. There will even be cases in which empire builders argue against empire building interests. And some will even use these as examples of how there is no null bias in CSM. But among the empire builders, there will also be a heavy overlap. There will be a lot of places in which five out of seven empire builders agree on the stereotypical response, for example. And this phenomenon yields the stereotype.

“Null bias” comes into the picture when that stereotype is overemphasized in the CSM. Given EVE’s player distributions, there should probably three null empire builders in it for a fair representation of the population. Given that we get 7-9 each tenure, that background gets overemphasized. 

Some might say a CSM member can represent all players fairly. That’s not true. People’s opinions do get mainly shaped by their background. And when a disproportionate portion of the CSM’s composition fits into the empire builder stereotype in their responses and feedback to CCP, it is impossible to talk about fair representation. Hence the null bias emerges.

I actually do not think there is a straightforward and obvious answer to the above questions. The answers depend on other meta questions about what kind of game one wants EVE to be. There can be varying valid answers to each question and all we can do is to vocalize our own background, perspective, and approach to the game. We can then hope that CCP makes the best of it. That’s about it.

Thus, in my personal opinion, it’s best when CSM representatives are experts in various in-game activities which yield the deep complexity of this game. The higher the amount activities and backgrounds represented by their experts is, the better it is for CCP. Market PvP, empire management, and FCing large fleets are all core activities to EVE. But so are other less represented activities. We need more solo PvPers, hiseccers, lowseccers, wormholers, whalers, soloers, etc on CSM. And we need them to be EVE experts. Not just socially skilled, loveable people. 

By the way, I believe CCP does have a filter for the null bias described above. In matters of conflict of interest, they do take anyone’s feedback with a grain of salt. I also believe the filter doesn’t always work. And exactly this point is why diversity on CSM matters.

The CSM is bound to be “null biased” as long as the members are chosen via elections. The reason for this is that the null empires have better social structures to push their people to care about voting. Social mobilization and coordination are prerequisites for being a competitive empire, and that will never change. So putting a FW or hisec population in an electoral race with null empires is not dissimilar to a monkey competing with a bear in a tree-climbing race. The null empires, by their very nature, will have an advantage.

That said, given CCPs current capabilities and dev time, elections still look like the best way to choose the CSM. I can imagine alternative systems to choose members, but none of them are cheap for CCP to implement. We all know how scarce dev time is. I also think a “null biased” CSM is better than no CSM for the betterment of EVE

So, null empires will always start the race ahead. Changing the election system is not viable at the moment. Yet the current version of CSM is better than no CSM. What else can be done about null bias? 

BE THE VOICE OF YOUR PERSPECTIVE

If you enjoy niche playstyles like me, there are still a few things you can do. It goes without saying that you should start by voting and making your buddies vote. Secondly, structure your opinions and use your voice. It was incredible for me to witness how many CCPers were actually reading the posts on Reddit that I spent hours writing up. Most of those posts were written before I was on CSM. This means that you don’t have to be on the CSM to be heard. 

In my personal opinion, despite being a very polarizing figure, the very way I was elected with a lot of votes and positivity helpd to shape dev perspective significantly in the past year. But I might not have time to do the same next year. So if you are as disturbed about null bias as me, and care about game balance, be the voice of your perspective. Sit down, articulate it, campaign for it. And even if you don’t get elected, it’s not in vain. That’d be the best way to beat the “null bias”. 

In my experience, people who aren’t nullsec line members or empire builders are less interested in the social side of EVE. They tend to spend less of their EVE time in socializing and talking, and more of it to actually playing the game. Naturally, these people also participate less in balance discussions. Some even give up on the CSM election process and the campaigns, as they think it is a lobbying mechanism or a popularity contest. Unfortunately, that actually results with more “null bias” in the CSM. 

So here is my hope that a greater amount of independent players begin to participate in game balance discussions soon.

On The Necessity For Consensus Among CSM

If I had to choose one notion for what I am a CSM member for, that would be “asymmetric warfare”. My primary motivation in the CSM is to represent everything asymmetric. Be it smaller groups against larger ones, niche playstyles against more common ones, subcaps against caps, solo vs. many, and so on. As I mentioned above, the crowded side has enough CSM representation already, and CCP could use the diversity. 

Before and during the CSM elections this past year, one thing that people kept underlining was how the CSM needed perfect consensus to function optimally. In my opinion, that’s not true. Pushing for consensus is another way to make the entire process is “null biased”. Consensus as a concept helps to force candidates into submitting the majority opinion in the CSM. 

Meanwhile, diversity can be better and more productive. But only when members diverge on opinions (e.g. bombers are currently out of balance), and not facts (e.g. whether there are counters to Stukas on a grid). And only if you can get the divergence of opinions across civilly; without straining personal relationships.

We began the year with myself trying to convince other CSM members, in the hopes of creating consensus and common ground. It turned out that people typically don’t change their opinions via debates over the internet. To this day I disagree on many issues with many CSM members, although there is also significant common ground. Once in the summit, we managed to establish mutual trust. Meeting people face to face helped a lot. In the summit, the divergence turned out to be, in my humble opinion, productive. And I’m trying to hold onto the same spirit. 

On Where The Game Is Going

I agree with many others that there was a lack of big and exciting content among Vegas announcements. Remember, this is the company that introduced entire game areas like FW or wormholes as expansions. So why there isn’t similar content today? There are two underlying reasons for that.

Firstly, CCP doesn’t want to commit to ‘false promises’ anymore. This is actually positive. They could have announced way more content and perhaps not delivered. But this time, as you may have seen on CCP Rise’s presentation, they focused on actually allocated dev time and how it’ll be used. He laid out a few months of upcoming changes and some more potential ones. The potential ones aren’t ‘false promises’ as they will be things which Team Talos does after delivering the first few months. They still might not be brought into the game depending on developmental specifics or prioritization. But contrary to many commentators, I don’t think something like heavy bombs is a ‘false promise’ like shield slaves have been. The main distinction between them is that the dev time required for potential Team Talos changes is already set aside by CCP.

Secondly, CCP has been working on non “core gameplay” issues. Both internal tech updates, and issues such as NPE, took a lot of dev time past year. It’s not like CCP doesn’t understand most of EVE’s “core gameplay” issues. But right now there are even bigger issues. Once these issues are addressed, I believe the game could take a better turn with more dev time focus on “core gameplay”. Naturally, this would require some patience from the veteran player. Currently, there are still enjoyable things in EVE for me. I just hope it’s the same for others. 

THERE ARE STILL PATHWAYS FOR EVE TO RECOVER FROM STAGNATION

I went into this year with a few major problem areas in this game in my mind. Capitals are too oppressive vs subcapitals. Being on the defense is too advantageous compared to being on the offense. Being a blob is too advantageous over being a smaller sized group. And being a bureaucratic static empire is too advantageous compared to being a less organized nomadic group. 

The “smaller sides” in most forms of asymmetric warfare has had huge hits with farms and fields, Rorquals and injectors. Lots of people in that side saw their playstyles invalidated due to complex ecosystemic issues. Many has already left the game. 

I do not see a significant paradigm shift with respect to any of these complex problems above given what was announced in Vegas. There are even further losses for asymmetric warfare; particularly boosher changes. I have to agree that the ability to move fleets infinitely with booshers was unsettling and out of balance. It was also problematic that Stukas shined in both ganking and fleet versus fleet warfare. A balanced fleet composition should probably master only one of these areas.

But out of hundreds of “core gameplay” problems with EVE, I do find it disturbing when CCP chooses the one that would nerf asymmetric warfare against supercap umbrellas even more. My impression is that this is how “null bias” in the feedback they are receiving prevails. Nevertheless, there is a silver lining in that long-range citadel-killing compositions (Ravens et al) were nerfed alongside Stukas. I think these compositions were uncontroversially broken. So while the best doctrine to operate under supercap umbrellas is severely nerfed, the change at least brought down some more problematic uses of booshers as well.

I am proud to say that there are also significant gains for asymmetric warfare. Cyno changes, boson changes, subcap warp speed increases, and so on. I am also particularly excited about heavy bombs. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting this many positive steps in my CSM tenure. Something like the cyno changes was unimaginable in previous years. I must say I find this trajectory a bit underappreciated by people who want to kill ships in nullsec. I can say that CCP is paying more attention to enabling asymmetric warfare than ever. Hopefully, there will be more changes in accordance with the same spirit.

Once more of the dev time comes back to “core gameplay”, there will be more room for CCP to solve problems in a more ‘positive’ manner (by creating new tools and mechanics) than a ‘negative’ manner (by nerfing existing tools and mechanics). Nerfs are often easier to implement. However, nobody likes getting nerfed. For us the enthusiasts of asymmetric warfare, it is politically more plausible to ask for new things rather than asking the opponent to be nerfed. More available dev time will hopefully make such requests more reasonable.

All this is why I’m still “cautiously optimistic” TM. Not because there are super exciting things in the near future. But because there is still hope that the game will start growing again reasonably soon. There are still pathways for the game to recover from the stagnation it’s currently in. It’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be fast. But it’s possible. I will hold onto this possibility for now.

The post Olmeca’s Post-Vegas Update: Why I’m Still Cautiously Optimistic appeared first on Talking in Stations.

Don’t Worry About a Thing

WHEN HAS GAME DESIGN VIA REDDIT EVER BEEN A GOOD IDEA?

Every Little Thing Gonna be All Right!

Fortnightly Updates

One of the most exciting announcements of Friday evening was the introduction of Team Talos and their balance passes every other week. The first of which will be occurring very shortly on the 30th October with a buff to all combat interceptors, hoping to bring back the wolfpacks of yesteryear. This has been a sorely missed feature over the past decade and, if done correctly, it should be pretty effective in creating the shakeup that we always seem to need. The target they need to hit is going to be in making old ships feel new again and I’m confident they can do it.

A brief schedule for the immediate future looks a little like this:
Howling Interceptors – ~25% damage buff + fitting for Raptor, Crow, Crusader, and Taranis. -10% base velocity to all assault frigates.
Beat Around the Boosh – Jump dessies will only be able to carry 25 other ships at once. Signature radius increase to bosons. Dromi web -5% effectiveness. New Upwell flex structure minimum anchor from structures to 500km.
Rapid Fire – Some kind of buffs to autocannons (likely 650mm Artillery, too?) and a likely Muninn nerf

Factional Warfare – Cleaning up the mess

Ships, Modules, and… Weather?

Stop the Bleeding, Fix the Stupid, Assorted New Player Experience

New Triglavian Dreadnought! Sirnitra?

Hull Mutaplasmids! Maybe?

Three Little Birds

The point of all this really is to say that everything will be fine. I’m not without my own criticisms of CCP for their presentation of EVE Vegas. I am quite happy with the changes, but I never expected much in the first place. Providing that they can work together efficiently, we could be seeing some the best changes in years over the next year or so.

EVE isn’t exactly on the life support that many make it out to be, but we can think of the changes that they’re making a bit like that. Player retention, little fixes, balances passes. These are things that have been needed for literally years and they are what absolutely must form the foundation for EVE if it is to be forever. To keep building on legacy code and on bug debt is unsustainable and we already knew that this year would be focused on the aforementioned bug debt and related issues.

CCP’s roadmap of roadmaps that was mentioned during the keynote is proof that something is going to happen and all it needs to work is the proper player interaction and a bit of developer love. If this was a battle royale game then we’d be seeing people jump for joy at the possibility of a new, themed update. We don’t need the constant negativity around almost anything that CCP does for the sake of “it doesn’t make me more ISK.”

Seriously, chill out and let things happen. Enjoy the game in a way that you find fun and if you aren’t enjoying things then offer constructive feedback, vote with your wallet, or find something else to do in EVE. Toxicity brings us all down; we don’t need that in our game.

The post EVE Vegas 2019 – Three Little Birds appeared first on Talking in Stations.

The Maths

Acceleration during long warps

• Every ship covers exactly 1 AU during the acceleration part of a warp.
• Time taken to accelerate simplifies to ln(149597870700)/warpSpeed which is roughly 25.7/warpSpeed
• To bookmark a particular distance in metres, work out time in seconds to wait using the equation time = ln(distance) / warpSpeed

Deceleration

• Instead of using warpSpeed, the calculations call for either ‘warpSpeed/3’ or ‘2’, whichever is smaller. We call this value j
• The above means that deceleration stops getting faster over 6AU/s
• Ships will always drop out of actual warp at either ‘100m/s’ or ‘shipBaseSpeed/2’ . This is known as ‘s’
• The final deceleration time formula is: time = (ln((149597870700 *warpSpeed)/s)/j)

Cruising & Short Warps

• Cruising (mid-warp) is very simple and time spent works out to be (cruiseDistance) / (149597870700 *warpSpeed)
• The cruising distance is simply all of the space not taken up by acceleration and deceleration.
• Most ships will only hit their full cruise speed on warps of 4 AU or greater
• Calculations on short warps require an initial calculation of max velocity: vMaxAU = (distanceAU * warpSpeed * j) / (warpSpeed + j)

So what fits can we make?

The post The Finer Points of Warp Speed appeared first on Talking in Stations.

Release 1.0

EVE Jukebox Project 1.0

Features

• Draggable, fully featured Jukebox styled to look like the 2012 client.
• Most, if not all, of the EVE Music until now. Newer login screens are missing, however.
• Fanfest Orchestral tracks and fan-made New Eden Logs added.
• Background options of still images or looping video captured from walking in stations.
• +10% bonus to nostalgia per level.
• Permaband.

FAQ

Known Bugs

• Caldari and Amarr backgrounds don’t exist yet.
• Background may appear completely black on first load. Use the Opt button to fix.
• Custom scrollbars do not work in non-chromium browsers (nothing I can do, sorry)
• Volume slider looks strange in Firefox
• Video may not loop properly. You can right click to turn this on.
• There isn’t a system name being shown currently
• Player buttons may take a moment to load and cache on first hover.
• Switching playlists will stop the currently playing song

The post The EVE Online Jukebox Project appeared first on Talking in Stations.

One of the most common questions I get in EVE Online has to be “Ashy do you have a fit for x?” Usually the answer is that I do and I can dig it up later on. If I can’t find that specific meme in my list of 2,000+ Pyfa trash, though, I’ll need to make it there and then. What I want to share today in this article is how I personally go about that process. The theory has been covered in depth by EVE Uni, and Jester’s Trek already, so I want to keep this short and sweet with my own personal spin. Think of it as the idiot’s guide to theorycrafting, going over the key areas that you need to know about to get a foothold in this wonderful part of EVE Online.

The Modules

I know I know it’s an obvious one. Of course you need to know what modules do what to actually fit something. But you’d be surprised at how many people I see fitting an Armour Layering Membrane in place of an Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane (EANM). The difference between those two being that one gives a minuscule percentage increase to armour, the other just a uniform set of resists. Another example being the Capacitor Power Relay + Shield Booster combo. A Power Relay is great, it gives you SO much more capacitor… until you actually read it and see that it’s reducing your shield boost amount…

EVE theorycrafting is full of these little nuances that you just kinda have to know. I’d love to create some sort of AI that shows you workable alternatives, but I don’t know how. Instead, I’ve created a few lists below of piloting styles with their key modules and some one-liner style tips that you might not have thought of. If you’re new and unsure about any acronym then google EVE <acronym>, that usually works.

Ancillary Tanks

• XLASB for cruiser and up, LASB only on tight fitting, MASB is for frigates.
• Ancillary Armour Rep + Plate is a thing for max buffer; Plate + T2 Rep is inefficient.
• Almost always maximise rep amount to get the most from your charges. Nano pump > Nanobot Accelerator.
• These can be considered “active buffer”. An XLASB is just a buffer tank that runs out when your charges do.

Speed/General Prop Mod Stuff

• Restrained > Enduring, usually. A restrained MWD gives lower signature and better cap life through reduced cap penalty. Enduring usually isn’t good enough to match this.
• Oversized prop fits have slow aligns. This translates to the time it takes to reach 75% velocity. Consider this your acceleration and your turning speed.
• Align times generally round up. Try and keep your align as close to x.99 as possible to avoid waste

Armour Tanking

• 1600mm plates are preferable on most cruisers and above. Sometimes it might be worth switching to a faction version to get a better align time.
• Energized resists can be replaced by Corpii A-Type resists to save a lot of CPU.
• Combinations of navigation rigs + armour modules or vice-versa have negative penalties for speed and buffer.
• Dropping the Damage Control can be a very good option on many ships.

Shield Tanking

• Passive tanks can often tank a lot of damage providing you have the EHP. If someone breaks past 25% shield, though, you’ll drop fast.
• Caldari extenders help with CPU, Minmatar ones help with PG.
• Make the most of your low slots. Usually this means aiming for high damage.
• Many polarised-weapon ships can effectively use lots of shield extenders, rather than plates.
• T2 Shield Resist Rigs are cheap, T2 Extenders are NOT.

General EWAR

• Racial ECM is usually better than multispectral.
• Sensor damps are often a good choice on unbonused ships, especially in fleets.
• Compact scrams are a quick and easy downgrade, but keep them at T2 if you can for the range boost.
• Sensor Boosters are often a good all-round module to have if mid-slots are spare.

Utility Slots

• An Auto Targeting System I can give you more lockable targets for minimal CPU/PG.
• Nos modules will not work if the target has less actual capacitor than you. This makes large nos usually a poor battleship choice.
• Battlecruisers can often benefit heavily from making room to fit a self-link in a high slot.
• A small neut can sometimes be enough to save the day against tackle.

The Process

I’d like to think that anyone could look at the above list and know exactly what to do. Unfortunately, ISK doesn’t grow on trees and players aren’t born with an inherent knowledge of what goes where. Outside of all of those tips you really have to understand certain basic principles like how a ship can be bonused towards shield/armour/hull. Or on a more basic level, the difference between short and long-range weapons. When making a fit you take this knowledge and sandwich it together in the following formula:

Experimentation([Basic Principles] * [Type of Fit] * [Hull Choice] + [Fitting Method])=[goodFit]

Basic Principles

Ok that’s all a bit silly but we can break this down properly and dive into what each of those key areas are. The first is to really just know some of the more basic elements of the game and how they interact. Here’s an incomplete list of “things everyone knows” in a nice, easy-to-read list.

• Stacking Penalties exist for most modules. Damage controls and Reactive Armour Hardeners are in their own stacking class.
• Hull tanks have the opposite of this. Each bulkhead gives more EHP than the last.
• Gallente ships typically have bonus hull. Always try to fit a Damage Control on them and consider nano’s carefully (they reduce hull).
• Minmatar ships are historically the fastest and fit either shield or armour, usually.
• Amarr ships are slow, heavy armour ships and Caldari ships are slow, heavy shield ships. Simple.
• T2 resists can be “calculated” by looking at the weapon damage which they oppose. Minmatar’s enemy for example is Amarr who use lasers. Therefore T2 Minmatar ships have extra EM/Thermal resists.
• Pirate factions tend to take on characteristics of the two racial ship lines you need to fly them. Read their descriptions.
• Long range guns have poor application (Rails, Arty, Beams, Light/Heavy/Cruise Missiles).
• Don’t mix shield and armour unless you know what you are doing
• Don’t mix tanking styles (Passive/Active/Buffer)
• Always have a plan for how your setup will get into range of and apply to the enemy.
• Don’t just look at cap stability. How much cap resistance do you have and how many Gj positive are you?
• Alpha damage through your reps is a common problem. Tanking 2k DPS is no good if your shields are blown away between every cycle.
• Have a clear goal in mind for what one job the fit will perform. There are rarely exceptions to this and hybrid fits almost always fall down against a proper dedicated fit. (i.e. no exploration + PvP)
• If all else fails, work towards the bonus of your ship and the slot layout. Read it!
• Don’t be afraid to use a ship for something weird and unusual. Just compare the numbers to conventional fits and see if you’ve made something better. Break any of the above rules if you know what you are doing.

Types of Fit

Classifying every single fitting into the game into a concise list is pretty much impossible. Instead, here’s a list of most of the possible ways to fly a ship in EVE Online. You can mix and match with some success depending on environment and in many cases that’s exactly what I would expect. Ancil tank plus a lot of speed, for example, is a very common way of running a kiting ship such as an Orthrus.

Kiting – The conventional way of being an elite solo PvP player. Often found glued to phrases such as I’m feathering my Kestrel so hard right now. This is the act of flying fast and keeping out of range of your opponent while still holding them with a warp disruptor. These kinds of ships usually want to move quickly with high acceleration for changing directions (low align time!) They will sometimes be equipped with defensive scrams, webs, or neuts to prevent faster ships from approaching them easily. A derivative of this is known as scram-kiting and typically involves an afterburner and fighting at the edge of scram range. This helps turn off the opponent’s MWD and might keep you out of range of their weapons.

ALWAYS HAVE A PLAN FOR HOW YOUR SETUP WILL GET INTO RANGE

Brawling – This is what it says on the tin. You get in close and slug it out with a big tank and hefty close range guns or hard neuts. A good example of this is the dual or triple rep Myrmidon. Without much speed or weapon application, it can’t hit targets at long range and will wait for targets of opportunity at close range when it scrams and grapples them. Most brawling ships won’t have the luxury of such a big tank, though, and must always be sure to have a way to close in on the target.

Skirmishing – is a bit of a mix between brawling and kiting. These types of fits are usually very fast with high damage and disengage potential. They find a target, hit hard, then leave or burn away before hard tackle comes to hold them down. My own Drekavac fit is a great example of this. The long range disintegrator ammo is another bonus, giving them the ability to kite to an extent as they burn around. Hecates often work in this way despite technically being brawlers. A fleet of four can drop 3k+ DPS and leave before backup arrives.

Overprop – While this is often seen as a method of skirmishing in order to maintain an ability to disengage, I’d put them in a class all on their own. The concept involves putting a 10mn AB on a frig/dessie, or a 100mn on a cruiser/battlecruiser. This will blow your align time somewhere into next week and make your turning circle that of a freight train. Among fitting issues this makes an overpropped cruiser quite difficult to fly. If you can manage it though, you can attain some serious sig tanking and “fuck-off-ability”. As a rule, aim for about 22s and below for your align with these ships.

Sig Tanking – Speaking of sig tanking…. This is the process of keeping a small signature radius and dodging bullets like Neo. It’s the signature (ha, get it) tool used by Sansha’s Nation ships such as the Succubus. I don’t want to start talking about every type of tank here, but the way a sig tanker is piloted is quite different to many others and demands a specific approach to theorycrafting. Big shields are a nono and sometimes light drones can be your worst enemy.

Support Ships – Often a ship that performs a supporting role is clearly defined as logistics, EWAR, or fleet boosting. The key to theorycrafting these ships is to strictly the follow the rule of doing one job. Think carefully about engagement range and build everything around surviving and continuing to harass safely for as long as possible. This might include small autocannons on a hybrid ship purely for killing drones. HAMs on a Rook might also be a novel idea, but it sure isn’t the most effective way to apply ECM.

Hull Choice

Once you’ve picked just what sort of ship you’re going to fly, you need to picture it in your head and imagine how it’s going to work. This is a necessary step in narrowing down the available options in the first place. Let’s say you’re after a sig tanking frigate. It’s possible to use almost any frigate to perform in the role, but going for AB Punisher won’t be nearly as effective as a Dramiel or Succubus.

Normally what I start doing now it throwing on an equivalent T2 fit to all the ships I want to fly and seeing how they perform against each other in Pyfa. Try similar amounts of nanos, similar range weaponry, and similar tanks to see which starts to edge it’s way ahead. You can then focus on one or the other and refine using the method described in the next section.

Starting from the other side of things is also entirely possible and probably a more common question for younger players in EVE. “How can I fit this ship?” An obvious answer is to read into the ship bonuses and see what CCP is trying to make it do. A rep bonus obviously means you should probably fit a rep, tracking/range bonuses probably means long-range guns are preferable! Outside of that, or if the bonuses aren’t exactly clear, it’s a good idea to just try things out and compare different methods of fitting and see what sticks.

One line of thinking for the Rupture, for example, might be well a shield tank is fast and gets 27k EHP with 558 DPS, but the armour tank gets 40k and 424 DPS with webs too. So you have to weigh up in your head if you’d rather the damage and speed, or the tank and webs. It eventually all comes back to knowing what to expect in your combat environment. Picture in your head just how this ship is going to engage and what potential threats are; it can always be reevaluated after you die. This process is vital and I can stress the importance of general EVE knowledge and learning from your mistakes enough.

The Method

So with everything else covered, the barebones method of fitting itself comes into play. A prerequisite here is to have Pyfa installed. The sheer amount of information on display, storage of fits, and experimentation options make it so much better than Ghost Fitting in-game.

TRY THINGS OUT AND COMPARE DIFFERENT METHODS OF FITTING AND SEE WHAT STICKS

I’d start by suggesting that you fit exactly what you want and check out the PG/CPU. Literally just throw on the guns/tackle/tank/prop(s) and see how well it fits. In many cases it won’t and it will need rejiggling by way of module downgrades or faction-ing. This process, however, needs you to know a hell of a lot of different ways to do the same thing. A common choice could be to drop navigation rigs to fit a nano and use rigs for fitting space.

Once your fledgling fit is in a place where it can actually be built, it’s good to start running through your choices and just trying out the options. You might, for example downgrade two of your gyrostabs and drop the web to enduring just scrape up the CPU for a medium neut rather than a small. You could also swap damage mod > damage rig and use the newfound lowslot to gain more tracking. The nuances that describe changing fits in this way can hardly be explained in a simple article, though. It’s always been a case of tinkering and watching EHP/Speed/Align/Damage/Capacitor/everything move up and down. A good theorycrafter is someone who can effectively manage that and pick the best tool for a specific planned job.

And unfortunately, that’s about all the information I can give without going into specific fits and talking them through. Writing that up in an article is just asking for this to turn into a textbook-based lecture. I’d much rather put together a video talking through some theorycrafting on the fly. That’s something I’ll perhaps do in time, but until then, Lasker has an excellent video on the topic. Enjoy~

The post How 2 Fit appeared first on Talking in Stations.

Notes compiled by TIS Team, Written by January Valentine

Sunday 11-4

Roleplaying Amarr

Amarr extremists from Fweddit self-destruct nine freighters executing over 2 million slaves in Kahah. Statement from The Lord’s Speaker,

Today in the skies of Kahah III, we have conducted the execution of some two million Minmatar slaves, to demonstrate our will and wrath to those who would defy God’s order. The wreckage of each vessel was destroyed. The blood and bone and steel rain down upon Kahah III, and as it falls, so fall the hopes of those rebels who defy God upon that world. We give pious thanks to our sovereign Empress Catiz I, and to our sovereign Lord Almighty, for entrusting us with the sacred task of maintaining His order in this galaxy. All souls shall be Reclaimed, in this world or the next. Amarr Victor.

Battle Report: https://br.inyour.space/?s=3873&b=8332800&e=90&t=qv

Titan’s Ransomed?

At roughly 19:00 Bombers Bar, Pandemic Legion, Black Legion, and Pandemic Horde had tackled five Titans. Dark Shines reports in his AAR that they had been keeping an eye on the Black Legion Muninn fleet when reports came in of the super capitals tackled. They immediately formed a 250 man Stuka (stealth bombers with command destroyers, electronic attack frigates and T2 frigate logi) fleet and raced towards Deklien. One jump to go into N2IS-B when a coin flip decides whether or not to save the trapped Darkness Titans. They land on grid and prepare to engage the BL Muninn fleet when the hostile fleet warps out. Disappointed at the retreat, they bomb off the bubbles trapping the super capitals, and they jump out. Deepfry Erase, the last Titan to jump out was reportedly saying on the reddit thread, “my titan was the last to extract. I’d do an AMA but I have no fucking idea what was going on so no point really.”

In disbelief by Dabigredboat, who had raced to the system in an interceptor fleet, gone through the five stages of grief in about 10 minutes from anger that Initiative had saved the Titans to an accusation that DeadCo (Dead Coalition, formerly GotG) paid Initiative to free the Titans to shock that the kills had been denied to him.

Battle Report: https://br.inyour.space/?s=2945&b=8332980&e=90&t=bLqqwvvvvvvvvuvvvvvvvvvvvuvvvb

TEST Deploys

TiDi is felt in Jita as TEST alliance deploy armor capitals and supercapitals north. Called ‘The Coming of The Tide’ the move fleet was spotted in Derelik and ended in Oijanen – a region of Caldari lowsec right outside the region of Geminate. Snuffed Out catches a straggler – an avatar dies in Tasti.

Gigx voice or not?

GigX – alliance leader of CO2 – reportedly skirting a ban in a clip of CO2 state of the alliance that was re-broadcasted on soundcloud.

Monday 11-5

Slave Revolt

DED Marshall dies to Ushra’Khan in Kahah as it likely connected to the slave revolt and mass murder above Kahah III. It might have been in retribution for a Khanid Kingdom Aeon hotdropping a player freighter from the Minmatar corporation.

Expensive Loss

Dreadpilot Roberts lost a Caedes – an alliance tournament covert ops frigate – in Nennamalia.

Tuesday 11-6

Dev Blog

The development blog for the next iteration of structures to be released in the Nov. 13th ‘Onslaught Expansion’.

Several topics covered in detail are:

• The new Upwell FLEX structure line
• Details on navigation structure deployment, reinforcement, and destruction
• Improvements to the attack flow for all Upwell structures
• The Pharolux Cyno Beacon
• The Tenebrex Cyno Jammer
• The Ansiblex Jump Gate
• Navigation Structure Transition Plan
• Some related miscellaneous changes

Fast Logistical EXpansion [FLEX]  is the brand name of Upwell’s new line of fast-deploying specialized structures with built-in service modules. These new FLEX structures have a lot of unique distinguishing factors separating them from the standard Upwell product lines:

• They deploy extremely quickly, with the first FLEX structures requiring just 3% of the time of previous Upwell products to deploy and activate
• They can be deployed closer to other Upwell structures, with the first batch sporting minimum ranges of 150km and 200km to the nearest standard Upwell structure
• They are much faster to destroy, with a single short reinforcement cycle when in full-power mode and no reinforcement cycle when in low-power mode
• They come with built-in service modules that control their core function, but do not have any other slots for fitting or rigs
• They do not have standard docking facilities, instead being able to be boarded directly from space like a ship so that a pilot can control their service modules
• Any pilot can place fuel into FLEX structures through the Upwell Cargo Deposit system
• The initial group of Upwell FLEX structures do not have any weapons, asset safety, or tethering

The Pharolux Cyno Beacon comes with a built-in Standup Cynosural Generator I service module that activates the jumpable beacon when active. This service module requires the same IHub upgrade that the old starbase Cynosural Generator Array required. This service module cannot be active in a cynojammed system and will turn off if the system becomes cynojammed.

• Maximum of one structure per system
• 45 minute deployment/unanchor time
• Built-in Standup Cynosural Generator I requires the Cynosural Navigation strategic infrastructure hub upgrade to be active in the system
• Service module consumes 15 fuel blocks per hour while active
• May not be deployed within 200km from other Upwell structures
• Slot Layout: 0H, 0M, 0L, 0 Rig, 1 Service
• Volume: 4000m3
• Low Power Mode Hitpoints (shields / armor / hull): 750,000 / 750,000 / 3,000,000
• High Power Mode Hitpoints (shields / armor / hull): 3,000,000 / 3,000,000 / 3,000,000
• Resistances (EM/Therm/Kin/Exp): 20 / 20 / 20 / 20
• Damage Cap: 5000 dps

The Tenebrex Cyno Jammer comes with a built-in Standup Cynosural Jammer I service module that provides the system jamming effect when active. Activating this service module requires the same infrastructure hub strategic upgrade that the old starbase Cynosural System Jammer required.

When the Standup Cynosural Jammer I service module is activated, there is a 5 minute spool up time before the system becomes jammed. This 5 minute timer will be extended by time dilation when applicable. The status of the jamming effect in each star system (either unjammed, jam pending, or jammed) will be clearly visible to all pilots in the system through the sovereignty info panel at the top left of the screen. This status display will also show when a system is jammed due to an active incursion.

• Maximum of three structures per system
• Maximum of one online service module per system
• 45 minute deployment/unanchor time
• Built-in Standup Cynosural Jammer I requires the Cynosural Suppression strategic infrastructure hub upgrade to be active in the system
• Cynosural System Jamming takes effect 5 minutes after service module is activated
• Service module consumes 40 fuel blocks per hour while active
• May not be deployed within 150km from other Upwell structures
• Slot Layout: 0H, 0M, 0L, 0 Rig, 1 Service
• Volume: 5000m3
• Low Power Mode Hitpoints (shields / armor / hull): 1,000,000 / 1,000,000 / 4,000,000
• High Power Mode Hitpoints (shields / armor / hull): 4,000,000 / 4,000,000 / 4,000,000
• Resistances (EM/Therm/Kin/Exp): 20 / 20 / 20 / 20
• Damage Cap: 5000 dps

The Ansiblex Jump Gate is the crowning achievement of Upwell’s initial research into navigation structures. This fast-deploying and powerful transportation structure was made possible thanks to Upwell “borrowing” technology both from underground pirate research labs and from reverse-engineered Triglavian gates salvaged deep within abyssal deadspace. Unlike previous long-distance teleportation technology available to capsuleers, Ansiblex gates enable movement for some capital ships as well as avoiding jump-fatigue for their users.

The Standup Jump Generator I service module consumes fuel blocks at activation and every hour like a normal service module and also consumes Liquid Ozone whenever a ship jumps through the gate. Both types of fuel can be placed into the same unlimited fuel bay within the structure by any pilot outside the structure using the Upwell Cargo Deposit feature. Liquid Ozone consumption per jump depends on the length of the jump connection and the mass of the jumping ship. The currently planned formula for Ozone consumption per jump is:

Ozone Consumed = (Ship Mass in kg) x (Jump Distance in LY) x 0.000003 + 50

Owners of Ansiblex Jump Gates can use Access Control List profiles to control exactly which pilots and organizations are allowed to jump through their gates, as well as controlling tolls. Tolls are set as an isk value per unit of ozone consumed, so larger ships will pay more isk for using toll gate networks and gate operators can charge a predictable profit margin above and beyond whatever they are paying for their ozone. Individual pilots can set a personal threshold below which they will automatically pay for their jumps without prompting, and any value above the threshold will prompt them about whether they wish to pay before executing the jump.

Since pairs of linked Jump Gates do not need to be owned by the same organizations or follow the same ACL profiles, there will also be warning messages for jumping pilots if they might not be able to jump back through the connection or if the isk fees for return trips are significantly higher than the fees for their current jump.

• Maximum of one structure per system
• 45 minute deployment/unanchor time
• Built-in Standup Jump Generator I requires the Advanced Logistics Network strategic infrastructure hub upgrade to be active in the system
• Service module consumes 30 fuel blocks per hour while active
• Jumping ships consume Liquid Ozone based on their mass and the length of the jump connection
• May not be deployed within 200km from other Upwell structures
• Maximum Jump Range: 5 light years
• Ship mass limit: 1,480,000,000kg
• Slot Layout: 0H, 0M, 0L, 0 Rig, 1 Service
• Volume: 6000m3
• Low Power Mode Hitpoints (shields / armor / hull): 750,000 / 750,000 / 3,000,000
• High Power Mode Hitpoints (shields / armor / hull): 3,000,000 / 3,000,000 / 3,000,000
• Resistances (EM/Therm/Kin/Exp): 20 / 20 / 20 / 20
• Damage Cap: 5000 dps

Wednesday 11-7

1000 Drones Stolen

u/Olmeca_Gold celebrates his 1000th excavator steal from Goons with this reddit post on how he’s done it and what’s happened since his first post on the topic.

Thursday 11-8

Dread Bomb Countered

Pandemic Legion, Black Legion and Pandemic Horde escalated Titans onto DeadCo (GotG) who seemed to attempt to counter-escalate a dread bomb. Loses are approximately 325b Pandemic Family to 800b lost by DeadCo.

Battle Report: https://zkillboard.com/related/30004332/201811081000/

Rock Paper Shotgun reviews Project Nova

Init downs Pincone Squads Fort in Syndicate

Pinecone Squad lost a Fortizar in 2X-PQG to a fleet of Jumpy Ravens (ravens with command destroyers) from Initiative, Initiative Associates and Iron Armada. The battle report from u/swaglfar described as formup from United Federation of Conifers as max ravens with triage and dreads on standby. Initiative and Associates came with jumpy ravens and booshed around the fortizar grid, causing them unable to be caught by the defenders for the next 40 minutes.

Battle Report: https://br.inyour.space/?s=3275&b=8337900&e=90&t=aufrrve

Caldari Militia Downed

Last Caldari Militia staging fortizar dies in Asakai.

Friday 11-9

Rorqual Whales harpooned

Initiative loses 10 Rorquals in CHA2-Q to a Black Legion Munnin fleet. A bomber fleet was formed to save them but due to late USTZ, they quickly died to the heavy assault cruisers with no super escalation from Initiative.

Battle Report: https://br.inyour.space/?s=4601&b=8339220&e=90&t=ebb

Youtube Video from Black Legion POV: 

Saturday 11-10

Querious Brawl

Small brawl in Querious between Odin’s Call and Outlaws with Stellae Renascitur. Note the armor heavy assault cruiser class Zealot in the Odin’s Call fleet.

Battle Report: https://br.inyour.space/?s=3968&b=8341620&e=150&t=u

The post TIS Report: November 4-10 appeared first on Talking in Stations.

After a tense two days following the reinforcement of the Aunenen Keepstar, Matterall announced on Tuesday – just hours before the timer would have left the Keepstar vulnerable to a second attack – that a deal had been struck between him, Fafer of Ghost Legion, and the Imperium’s leadership that would save both Keepstars.

The deal, which was confirmed by The Mittani, leader of the Imperium, would see both the Aunenen and Malia Keepstars removed from those systems and moved to new locations which have yet to be determined. The movement of these Keepstars, which will require the destruction of citadel rigs worth billions, was deemed sufficient by the Imperium to save the Keeps, despite their history. The ownership of the Keepstar, in the meantime, was transferred from Ghost Legion to “Talking in Stations Corporation” as Matterall announced early Monday.

“The reality was that the guy that financed his so-called ‘WWB’ also put these down as trade hubs. They were going to die, but we worked out a death-by-name destruction deal that at least saves two keepstars for future City-State locations (with some security assurances). That’s a two Keepstar win, rig loss,” Matterall said. “They get what they came for, we live to anchor another day.”

The Imperium has made clear through all of its media outlets that it will not rest until all those who were a part of the Casino War have been punished. As The Mittani confirmed, “…everything touched by those involved in the Casino War deserves to burn or otherwise be stomped on as publicly as possible.” He went on to say “[w]e intend to destroy every part of the New Eden Trading Company/PL network. If the keeps are moved from that system, they are no longer part of the network.”

While this outcome has satisfied both Matterall and the Imperium leadership, it left a sour taste in the mouth of some others.

Lady Scarlet, of Northern Coalition, was skeptical of the deal. “Let me guess,” she said in a statement on the Talking in Stations Discord, “it’s only safe if you put them where the puppet master tells ya? Have fun replacing the rigs, hopefully Goons pay for them. [I] still think he should self-destruct it and give the middle finger.”

Sort Dragon, Dead Coalition leader, pushed back on this attitude, saying, “I mean that’s only fair. The north wasn’t going to defend it. So to the victor goes the spoils.”

While the deal ensures the Keepstar moves and is no longer in a position to serve as part of PanFam’s infrastructure, no decisions have yet been made on a new home for either structure. Matterall noted that he wanted to move his Keepstar more than five light years from nullsec to prevent potential future attacks. He also confirmed that, once moved, the Aunenen Keepstar will become a true “freeport” and that Goonswarm and Snuffed Out will be allowed to dock and use the facilities.

“[This deal was] really hard to negotiate. I’m impressed,” said Carneros of the Bastion.

The deal comes on the heels of two days worth of furious negotiation between Matterall, Fafer and the Imperium leadership. While originally indicating a willingness to form to defend the Keepstar shortly after it was reinforced late Sunday night, Northern Coalition leadership appeared to reverse itself the next day, with Lady Scarlet saying “…we are going to sit back and watch, then laugh how Goons again prove they shit on [their] own.” Without a major coalition to mount a defense, it was clear that the only solution that would keep the Keepstar from being destroyed would rely on Matterall’s ability to talk.

That ability, obviously, is significant, because the deal was struck and the Keepstar has already begun the unanchoring process.

While the immediate threat has been resolved, the fate of the Aunenen and Malia Keepstars remain hanging in the balance. The unanchoring of a Keepstar, especially ones that have received as much attention as these have, will become prime targets for pirates – once the Keepstar has unanchored, any player with a freighter capable of hauling the 800,000 meters cubed packaged Keepstar will be able to scoop it and run off. While this requires hard work and impeccable timing, it has happened in New Eden on more than one occasion, including a year ago, when Mercenary Coalition’s Syndicate based Keepstar was unanchored by accident (after a half dozen or more ‘faux’ unanchoring attempts) and scooped before eventually being destroyed by the Initiative. Ensuring that the Keepstar remains in the hands of its owners will require considerable effort.

As this story ends not with a bang, but a whimper, it is important to note just how unlikely the result was. Diplomatic solutions are a rarity in New Eden, given humanity’s propensity towards violence, especially when it comes to high-value assets. The fact that Matterall was able to come up with an acceptable solution and convince both Fafer and the Imperium leadership that he was both willing and able to hold up his side of the bargain was not a likely outcome when this crisis first began.

One thing is certain – the dream of freeport Keepstars remains alive … at least for now.

The post High Drama in Low Security – The Denouement appeared first on Talking in Stations.

These innocuous words, words spoken almost daily across New Eden and often in jest, began a night that would end with a low security space Keepstar reinforced, new questions raised about the future viability of non-aligned major assets, and the power of EVE celebrity tested in a way rarely seen in the modern era.

The attack, which occurred late Sunday evening EVE time, primetime in the United States and around 9 PM local time for the station owner was, on the whole, unremarkable.  As has been seen countless times over the last two months in New Eden, a titan and supercarrier group from the Imperium entered the Aunenen system via cynosural beacon and proceeded to turn their massive guns and heavy fighters against one of the largest structures New Eden has ever seen: a Keepstar.  A small subcapital screening force of Lokis attended the capital fleet, while over a dozen onlookers watched the fireworks. Their task completed less than half an hour later and long before a response fleet could be summoned, the titan fleet left as quickly as it came. It left almost no evidence behind that it had ever been there, save the Keepstar being reinforced, and a vulnerability timer that would ensure safety for those who used the massive starbase, at least for one day and fourteen hours.

All of that was, as noted, unremarkable.  It was everything else around the Keepstar – from its ownership, to the attackers, to what the Keepstar represents and the hanging question of whether it will survive – that made this everyday event in EVE both fascinating and unusual.

A Little Background Information

New Eden is a big place, and the ships and players that call it home come in various shapes and sizes.  From the lowly Ibis corvette to the massive Avatar titan – capable of carrying dozens of smaller ships in its maintenance bay – you can find just about every kind of spacecraft imaginable plying the space from Tenal to Feythabolis, from Delve to Drone Lands.  And like any sailing ship on one of Earth’s oceans, those ships need a place to come home to.

Enter the Keepstar, the largest structure – including both player-made and NPC-controlled structures – in New Eden.  Capable of allowing titan and supercapital class ships to dock, Keepstars are almost the exclusive domain of the largest and most powerful alliances and coalitions in EVE.  The Imperium (a collection of alliances including groups like the Goonswarm Federation, The Initiative, Bastion, Tactical Narcotics Team and others) alone boasts 28 of the awesome stations, sprinkled across their holdings in Delve, Querious, Fountain and Cloud Ring.  Other large entities, including Pandemic Legion, Northern Coalition. (the two groups and their allies forming the PanFam coalition), Test Alliance Please Ignore (of the Legacy coalition), and many others across New Eden have also put together the resources to build and maintain Keepstars, primarily in zero security (nullsec) space, but also in low security space and the strange, surreal unknown space that lies behind the many wormholes dotted across the galaxy.

These Keepstars require significant resources – millions of units of minerals, manufactured parts and the like – to build and maintain, and largely are controlled by the strongest alliances and coalitions.  While they are fearsome structures, capable of decimating capital and subcapital fleets when properly armed and well gunned, they are also major targets, and are still considered strategic level assets for the groups that own and maintain them.  Fights around their construction as well as assaults and defenses of them once they have anchored in place have, at least in the last two years, been the primary genesis of the massive fleet engagements that EVE is known for.

Less than a week ago, the destruction of a Keepstar in X47, less than two dozen jumps from Aunenen, saw a massive fleet battle that left more than twenty titans in a cloud of melted slag and bitter tears on the battlefield.  Two weeks before, in the south, another massive fleet fight surrounded the anchoring of a Keepstar in UALX. That fight, while a tactical victory for the forces of PanFam against the Legacy Coalition and their erstwhile allies in the Imperium, turned to bitter ashes in the mouths of PanFam leadership as Legacy immediately dropped a second Keepstar almost on top of the ruins of the old one, and this base anchored successfully without contention.

Yet as is often the case, what was once the result of the herculean work of tens of thousands can quickly become as routine as a trip to the dentist. Where once these structures were limited to key systems and the largest alliances, today they are far more common, just as supercarriers and titans used to be rare and are now ubiquitous in the modern era.

What made the Aunenen Keepstar so different?

Proliferation and Pipe Dreams

Most Keepstars, at least those under the control of a major alliance, are restricted to members of the alliance and their allies.  Imperium Keepstars are open for business, but only for Imperium member alliances and their allies. The same can be said for PanFam, Legacy, and other major Keepstar controlling powers.

But not all of them.  There are a handful, like Aunenen, that were built and have been maintained with the express purpose of being available to everyone regardless of faction – even if that ideal has largely been honored in the breach.  Aunenen remains open to almost every alliance in New Eden, major exceptions being Goonswarm and Snuffed Out.

Prior to the introduction of things like Keepstars and skill injectors, the largest ships in New Eden were far rarer. Titans and supercarriers cannot be docked in NPC controlled stations, or player-built citadels like Fortizars and Astrahauses.  Before Keepstars, player owned starbases (POSes) were used to provide a level of protection for these supercapital sized vessels. Within the protective shields of a POS, supercapitals were safe, but they were still subject to things like bumping, and players often had to either leave the ship in space unmanned or put a “sitter” character in the ship permanently to ensure it could not be snapped up by anybody who happened to have the POS password and noticed it was there.  This made these supercapital ships both expensive and a hassle to maintain. And with the skills needed to train characters to fly these prized ships, most players were locked out of the ability to own and fly a titan or a supercarrier. They remained alliance level assets, protected and nurtured by the groups who possessed the players, skills and resources to build and field them.

All that changed with the introduction of skill injectors and Keepstars, as well as the rise of Rorquals – capital industrial ships capable of stripping asteroid belts in a fraction of the time needed for traditional miners to complete the same task –  and moon mining. What had been an exceedingly costly and time-consuming process, both the construction of these ships as well as the training of characters to fly them, suddenly became compressed. A player with enough in-game or real-world currency could buy a titan skilled character before, but now he could just as easily make one for himself.  What had taken years to train before skill injectors now took mere minutes. Mining the materials necessary to build one of these goliath ships now became something relatively easy to do, and individual players with the resources could build their own, sell and trade them easily without the need for a major nullsec alliance backing the effort.

There was still the problem of where to store these ships and how to trade them. As more and more players wanted these ships and could afford them and fly them, the demand for solutions to this question that plagued New Eden increased dramatically.  The demand for “sanctuary Keepstars” began to percolate up throughout the galaxy.

That’s when a proposed solution was created, and the dream of a massive trade network that would include Keepstars designed to allow players outside of big nullsec blocs to own and store the toys that had been heretofore the sole province of the powerful arose – the New Eden Trade Network.

The Birth of the Aunenen Keepstar

The New Eden Trade Network was announced by a group of EVE tycoons on Reddit on November 21, 2016. The Network was designed as part of a massive trading conglomerate that would, if successful, rival the trade hubs of Jita, Dodixie and Amarr, and shift much New Eden’s trade out of Empire space and into low and nullsec.

With famous names like Seleene of Mercenary Coalition, LennyKravtiz2, EVE-Mogul, Fafer, Chribba, and others behind it, the New Eden Trading Network and later New Eden Trading Company seemed like a sure bet.  Soon players in a variety of groups, including those outside the major power blocs, would have access to citadels across New Eden. The move represented a massive investment of ISK, including over 4 trillion ISK from LennyKravitz2 alone.

And then it all collapsed.

Implicated in the Casino real-money-trading scandal that gave birth to the Casino War and the impacts of which are still being felt today, LennyKravitz2 was permanently banned from EVE Online, and with him the idea of the New Eden Trading Company began a slow death.  While Keepstars had been built in some of the hub systems envisioned by the NETC – like Aunenen, Malia and Basgerin – the rest of the network never truly got off the ground. With the supply of investment capital shut off, NETC fell apart.

But the dream of sanctuary Keepstars open to all (or most) still existed in New Eden.  The Basgerin Keepstar, for instance, was transferred to Max Singularity, EVE’s “Spacepope,” who has run it largely along the ideals of the NETC’s dream of freeports across lowsec and nullsec. Fafer of Ghost Legion, controls the Malia Keepstar.

At the same time, the Aunenen Keepstar, while ostensibly still under the control of Ghost Legion, an alliance built out of former Northern Coalition. members and nominally aligned with PanFam, was transferred to one of EVE’s most known and most prolific Twitch celebrities: Matterall.

Matterall’s Keepstar – the Matterall Broadcasting Network

Most of EVE’s biggest names come from the ranks of major Alliance leaders or Fleet Commanders.  Others are known for politics – members of the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) that represent players to CCP or the diplomats that work the deals between coalitions and alliances that cause or avert wars.  Then there are those who have built their names through their media efforts – podcasts, Youtube videos, Twitch stream shows and fan websites. Of those, no one looms larger in EVE media than Matterall. The outgoing, hard-hitting host of Talking in Stations, the most-watched EVE news based program in New Eden, Matterall has been one of the most popular and respected hosts of any of the various Twitch shows, and Talking in Stations is one of the top programs on the Imperium News Network.  Jokingly referred to as the “multi-dollar media empire,” INN was created and is controlled by The Mittani, leader of Goonswarm Federation and its Imperium Coalition, and one of the undisputed most powerful people in the history of EVE.

Matterall and the Mittani have long had a close, working relationship, built on mutual respect and trust.  Matterall, despite being a member of Northern Coalition., one of the Imperium’s oldest and longest antagonists, has largely been given a free hand to plan and execute his show ideas, has been critical of the Imperium yet still kept on the air, and has never been one to pull punches or otherwise dilute his opinions simply because they clashed with those of the owners of the network his show appears on.  That independence and willingness to be fair has ensured that Talking in Stations has been able to book guests that most other EVE streams and podcasts could only dream of getting, from then EVE Executive Producer CCP Seagull, to leadership from just about every major alliance in the game.

That’s why it was so surprising to many to see the Imperium attacking Matterall’s Keepstar.  While Matterall remains a member of Northern Coalition., he has long been viewed as one of the more neutral of the hosts on INN.  And he’s also been one of the most outspoken, especially on his desire for sanctuary Keepstars in lowsec.

Matterall has long supported the idea of Keepstars available for non-bloc aligned players to use, both as a place to store big ships, as well as a place to contract and sell them without fear of the all-too-common scams that New Eden is notorious for.

“[I]t’s about the players that want to live and exist around a Keepstar without having to choose a side or get involved in null politics,” Matterall noted on Reddit yesterday.

Despite Matterall’s desire for the Keepstar to exist as an island of freedom in the frothing sea of nullsec politics, the Keepstar couldn’t truly be called a “freeport” – a station open to all – because some members of the Imperium, like Goonswarm Federation, were denied access, often for making overt gestures against it.  While the Keepstar has remained under the public ownership of Ghost Legion, although Matterall announced that the Keep was being transferred official to a “Talking in Stations Holding Corporation” so that any question of his ownership of the almost-a-freeport would be resolved.

“It’s not a ‘freeport’,” said Goonswarm Federation fleet commander and past Talking in Stations guest apple pear. “It’s a Keepstar with a guest list.  That’s not a true freeport and people should stop calling it that. They just do [that] to try and be the sad person [whose] Keepstar in lowsec gets shot,” he said.

While Matterall and others have pushed for sanctuary Keepstars, the idea itself remains very controversial.

“I hate the concept of freeport lowsec Keepstars,” said Sort Dragon, the coalition leader for the Dead Coalition (formerly known as the Guardians of the Galaxy), a Northern-based PanFam ally.  “They are everything EVE is not,” he argued.

Corebloodbrothers, a former CSM member and leader of ProviBloc’s Volition Cult alliance, noted “[h]aving lowsec safe zones no one can touch (often accessible from null) would mean null sec got safer with an asset safety of zero cost. Fly what you are willing to risk … los[ing].”

TheJudge, a current CSM member along with Sort Dragon and the author, as well as a former member of the CO2 Alliance, famed for having lost the first armed Keepstar in New Eden, has also argued against these kinds of open-to-most Keepstars. Despite claims that these Keepstars are neutral, he said “[i]t’s simply the landcape of EVE that nobody is 100% impartial and there is always going to be someone wanting to stomp on your sandcastle. I’m surprised this Keepstar has survived this long given how much of a strategic point it is.”

Matterall’s Aunenen Keepstar, while arguably held to the ideal of helping smaller alliances break into nullsec supercapital warfare, does represent a significant strategic asset, as TheJudge argued.  Aunenen’s distance from the primary market hub in Jita – six gate jumps – makes it a key point for moving large amounts of material and equipment to Northern Coalition. and other PanFam controlled areas in the North and West of New Eden.  It also is part of the jump routes through those areas of space that can be utilized by PanFam to move its supercapital fleets in relative safety to forward staging areas closer to places that are currently involved in the on-going war between Imperium and Legacy against PanFam aligned groups in Tenerefis in the South and the Cloud Ring/Fade/Deklein regions in the North.

Matterall acknowledged the concern, saying in a statement to the New Eden Report that the “Imperium sees it as a strategic midpoint, while NC sees it as a low sec station they tolerate on their border. The Sanctuary Keepstar is being used as a pawn between warring parties, but the attack is a hit to the morale of many independent players who want to access the higher gameplay of building, selling, living, without having to choose a side or play politics.”

Despite the strategic location, the fact remains that this is Matterall’s Keepstar, and his relationship with the Mittani and others in the senior leadership of the Imperium, as well as his own PanFam coalition, would seem to insulate him from the usual brutal nullsec politics he largely finds distasteful.

Those relationships, however, weren’t enough to keep the Imperium away from the Keepstar.  Will they be enough to stop further assaults?

What happens next?

As news spread of the Keepstar being attacked, dozens of questions bloomed in the minds of capsuleers across New Eden.

Was this just a joke, or was it serious?  The answer to that question isn’t clear. The Titan fleet that reinforced the Keepstar included a number of senior Imperium leadership including Merkelchen, a current CSM member, and leader of Goonswarm’s largest corporation, Karmafleet. It even included Carneros, a former CCP employee who leads the Imperium aligned Bastion alliance and is one of Matterall’s co-hosts on Talking in Stations, who made clear following the fight he was not aware of the target before arriving in system.  Present as well in system to observe were the author, a current CSM member and avowed “Friend of Matterall,” as well as Dirk MacGirk, another Talking in Stations co-host and host of the Open Comms show on INN. While some treated the reinforcement as a joke, the willingness of the Imperium to dedicate a sizeable force of titans and supercarriers as well as a subcapital screening fleet that numbers more than forty vessels total is more than just what you would see in a fleet designed to troll an old friend.

Will the Imperium return to hit the Keepstar on its second, armor timer, and – more importantly, who, if any, will come to defend it? The answer to those question is equally unclear, although both Lady Scarlet and others within Northern Coalition. seem willing and ready to mount a defense.  NC. forces scrambled to put together a response fleet to the Imperium force that attacked the Keepstar but was unable to move quickly enough to stop the Keepstar from being reinforced or to catch any of the Imperium ships before they returned to their forward staging in Cloud Ring.

Still, more questions are being asked and answers remain few and far between.

What impact will this have on Matterall’s relationship with the Imperium?  Will it impact Talking in Stations? With Matterall having friends in various coalitions across New Eden, could a defense force made up of a variety of groups that are not aligned with each other but loyal to Matterall show up to defend it?  Will the Mittani tell his forces to stand down? What is the future of “freeport” or “sanctuary” citadels in New Eden?

Rest assured, these questions will be answered sometime in the next week.  The Keepstar’s second timer comes out on Tuesday, August 14, and if it is contested, the preparations for the battle will either soon be underway or will already have been completed.  Like the fights in X47 and UALX, if PanFam and Imperium forces choose to make this Keepstar yet another round in their on-going war, the fight over Matterall’s Keepstar could be yet another glorious chapter written in the history of EVE warfare.  Matterall himself has spent much of the day engaged in a furious round of diplomacy, trying to build a defensive team to save the station.

Thanks to the personalities, the history, the dynamics of the real relationships that lay behind EVE Online, what could have been just another day in New Eden and just another common event – a structure bash – takes on the kind of high drama and grit that makes EVE what it is: one of the most fascinating video games ever made.

The post High Drama in Low Security – a Keepstar Story appeared first on Talking in Stations.

Comrades hello. My name is Harvey Skywarker, CEO of Higher Than Everest [P3AK] a corporation within Pandemic Legion. I am best described as ‘about as charismatic as a bowl of Golden Grahams’.

This is my story, from the perspective of a Pandemic Legion pilot, of the Sack of Providence, the eviction of CVA/ProviBloc and the eventual Legacy counter-invasion to steal the spoils of war.

IMMENSEA PLEASED TO BE HERE

My personal story starts in Immensea. I had recently decommissioned my alliance The-Culture, sending corps their separate ways. I had secured a trial period for P3AK within Pandemic Legion [-10], aka PL. At this time PL was staged in Curse on the catch border, with the aim of getting fights from Legacy Coalition and their premier alliance Test Alliance Please Ignore [TEST], aka TAPI. In coordination with PL leadership, we deployed to the Domain/Providence border system of Assah and signed up for ‘The Legion.’

Our new alliance laid out the objectives for the eventual campaign: we would engage and threaten the longtime owners of the region of Providence, CVA, and their coalition of other alliances known as ‘ProviBloc.’ At this time ProviBloc could form large fleets in the hundreds of characters, and also had access to dreadnaughts and carriers in large fights, which they could use to good effect. This was a deviation from ProviBloc’s tradition of banning carrier ratting and not using capitals in PVP fleet warfare. An event that was a precursor to PL’s redeployment was a large engagement in which ProviBloc baited PL’s Dreadnaught fleet into the open arms of TAPI’s fledgling Supercarrier and Titan fleet. We were caught unawares and our ‘dread bomb’ was wiped out to the last doomed siege engine. ProviBloc was thus seen to be strong enough to contest our advance while providing fleets for PL to fight.

It was assumed that Legacy would be invited to come and help ProviBloc repel the invaders, with the promise of more dread bombs for TAPI to use their supercapitals against. From the PL perspective, drawing Legacy out of their direct capital sphere of influence in Catch would mean either FC fatigue from constant forward pre-staging or using sub-capital fleets unsupported by capitals, which would then be vulnerable to our own fleets. Whatever happened, we knew – at least on paper – it would be a challenge. At the time there was still a vague ‘some time in summer’ date for the much-talked-about station/outpost migration patch that happened on June 5th. It was following these carrots the led the PL pack mule trotting into Providence at the beginning of January 2018.

Pandemic Legion’s long-term ally NCdot agreed to help with the campaign, as it was thought ProviBloc’s fleet sizes, coupled with a sub-cap fleet from Legacy, would be too many dudes for PL to take alone. Staging in Misaba, the lowsec entrance system to southern Providence, NCdot formed sister fleets ready to help us in any citadel fight timer that we thought ProviBloc would form big and call allies for.

Our first move was to place many medium-sized citadels into the northern half of providence with NCdot doing the same in the south. With multiple citadels onlining in quick succession, the defenders opted to focus on one citadel and cede the rest to PL. ProviBloc formed a strong fleet and used their carrier fighters at range to destroy the first citadel, but game mechanics are such that citadel spam is very effective, so several other staging Astrahauses and Raitarus were onlined.

It was time to start applying more pressure. I deployed my corporation forward from PL’s alliance staging in Assah into the junction system of 4B-NQN. This system was positioned between ProviBloc’s staging in F-YH5B and the twin constellations near Providence’s high sec entrance (see: Dital). ProviBloc is a coalition of alliances, and each alliance had been allocated a constellation to call home and tasked with its upkeep. Because of the way Aegis-Sov works, coalition partners are unable to assist in entosising to defend friendly space. This left the constituent parts of ProviBloc vulnerable to being cut off and isolated from support.

Our primary strategy was to break off the weaker alliances in ProviBloc and bring their fleet numbers down to something more manageable, as at the outset we couldn’t form big enough to contest them on their own citadel grids with a conventional brawling doctrine. We used Boosh Ravens/Rokhs to take on both Provi and Legacy fleets that were initially called to assist on single point objectives, namely citadel timers.  ProviBloc quickly countered with long-range dreads and carrier born fighters. In the area where we knew Legacy could not assist, we went to work. Setting a goal of creating two good EUTZ I-hub timers per day, then following up to kill at least one of those, my team of entosis and small gang PvPers set about lopping off the weaker parts from CVA’s bulky frame.

Yulai Federation, for example, lived in the P6N8-J constellation. We set about removing their I-hubs, yet in response, ProviBloc failed to muster the full strength that we’d seen them form for timers that were pre-planned in advanced elsewhere. When they formed a Ferox fleet, we would counter form in Assah and drop on them for a fight.  If they tried to use interceptor fleets, we smart-bombed them on occasion and more often used heavy entosis that could tank the ceptors just long enough to cycle down and catch reps from FAXes. In the early stages of these operations, every FAX we dropped was a gauntlet thrown down for CVA to step up and escalate. They did not escalate, however, and I don’t blame them. We were almost always ready to escalate to dreads, and with the numbers they got on day-to-day fleets, they would have stood no chance in my opinion. While on a max-hyped CTA ‘bring a friend to fleet day’ form up, ProviBloc could at the very least match us, on the daily fleets that were required to defend space under entosis attack, their numbers were not high enough to take us on, especially with NCdot waiting on standby for a brawl.

That’s not to say we remained at full strength throughout the campaign. We, too, drew fewer numbers day-to-day as the large fleet battles dwindled and all that remained was small gang warfare, entosis, and the odd flash form to dunk a stray ProviBloc fleet. One such stray fleet tried to go for a roam out into Immensea, for example.  We followed them and eventually caught up, and Mukk used his experimental doctrines to send them back to Provi, GF.

Fundamentally, Provibloc was struggling with the entosis mechanics.  They needed a presence in the space and some old-fashioned PvP-centric dudes who know how to small gang. In small-gang tactics, most were simply out classed, with a notable exception being Deaduck (the ONI pilot that baited Doom’s Rorqual and has since joined Goons ). We rubbed our hands together with glee when in a State-of-the-Alliance speech to ProviBloc, Jin’Taan of CVA, their most successful FC (at the time) essentially said (and I am paraphrasing) “[w]e will focus our defense at our staging citadel timers, which should all be timed for Saturday EU Prime, when Legacy will be able to assist us. We won’t form for every Sov timer that PL are creating.”  This was an underestimate of PL’s willingness to entosis, and ignored the two-fold significance of I-hubs.  There are two clear advantages to killing an I-hub.  First, the strategic index drops to zero, which breaks any jump bridges, cyno jammers and stops supercapital construction. Second and perhaps, more important, it removes the respawning anomalies linked to military upgrades. With no anoms to rat in, keeping the ADM up via ratting becomes much harder. Finally, and, most importantly of all, if you joined a krabbing alliance and can’t krab because there are no anoms, you probably leave or don’t log in. The decision to not put maximum effort into defending I-hubs left the satellite constellations vulnerable, isolated and easy pickings. After all, most null-sec residents live in their havens, not in their citadels.

AN I-HUB A DAY, KEEPS THE ADMS AWAY

We spent the following few months killing I-hubs daily and milking kills. Attempts were made by all the various Provibloc groups to utilize Griffin spam to jam our entosis ships, and Deaduck would bring out his long-range Jackdaws to try and kill our entosis teams. Generally, each ProviBloc alliance attempted to defend their space independently.  This was primarily against P3AK and the few dudes from other PL corps who enjoyed a bit of small gang and who had started to hang out with us. Christened “The Peaky Blinders,” PL’s small gang and entosis enthusiasts from various corps had a field day, hazing Griffins and fearful tiny Ferox fleets alike. We found the bulk of our entosis operations could be taken care of by 5-15 real people, and by keeping it small scale we guaranteed some form of resistance and of course the dank frags that go along with that. Apocalypse Now, one of these somewhat abandoned alliances in ProviBloc, proved to be capable of forming up the strongest single alliance defensive attempts aside from CVA. For their 50 man Ferox fleets, we even had to resort to using ‘The Black Fleet,’ our fleet of ten Navy Apocs with that black skin from an event ages ago.

Soon, the patterns were set. In EUTZ, I-hubs fell and once the ADMs had lowered naturally, the stations were claimed and even eventually TCUs were killed. In USTZ, Rorquals were dropped on anything that moved, I-hubs were still killed but we had less drive to entosis, so a certain amount of pushback when we called for those ops was felt. In Southern Provi, with NCdot staged in neighboring Misaba, the will to entosis was also thin on the ground.  While some I-hubs were killed and maybe even a few stations claimed for NCdot, with lower-tier FC’s being given the menial task of Sov warfare, the ProviBloc defenders were doing well. Notable alliances that resisted well were Care Factor, Coalition Hispania and often CVA, who would leave timers in the north that were being run by PL’s Peaky Blinders in favour of going against NCdot in the southern theatre.

Eventually, NCdot re-deployed elsewhere, and at about that same time we had finished in the north, so we were free to bring our tools to bare. I re-deployed my corp forward to G7AQ-7 with a few honorary Blinders from other PL corps coming along for the frags. From here we finished off the last of the I-hubs which, because Care Factor’s vulnerability window was set to USTZ, required a strong showing from PL’s USTZ. Waiting for ADMs to drop and then coming in for the stations as always, we noted dwindling help from Legacy as PL’s Rokh fleets began clearing citadels from Provi north. With the loss of Jin’Taan from CVA’s ranks, CVA and what remained of her allies could no longer form a fleet large enough to take PL on at any level, and the decision was finally made to headshot the ProviBloc staging Fortizar in F-Y and end the campaign.

WHERE IS TAPI?

With CVA evicted and her coalition cut in half, PL turned once again to ask ”where is TAPI?”  Can Legacy provide us with conflict? At this time, PL’s ‘Operation Market Garden’ was launched and a “Fort Too Far” was anchored. With I-hubs cleared and strat indexes nuked, we were free to anchor citadels wherever we liked in Providence and even along the border zone with Catch, where some Apocalypse Now sov had overlapped. So where was TAPI? The answer to our question was TAPI had been going northeast to assist the DRF against TRI and the Winter Coalition. Each time they traveled for a timer in Immensea or Insmother they would have to take a gate into Curse with their capitals. Learning this, we wanted to get in range of this traveling route, and so a Fortizar was anchored in T-RPFU.  The neighbouring system to T-RPFU was in direct range of TAPI’s staging Keepstar and the vulnerable Catch/Curse 0SHT-A gate.

A FORT TOO FAR

This Fortizar got a strong reaction. It made TAPI very nervous that we had encroached into jump range of Catch. Next door in D-GTMI, PL had been bridging off an Athanor mining an R64 moon. Legacy reinforced it, and the stage was set for a showdown. Although I wasn’t at the fight that ensued, I’ll arrogantly draw my own conclusions. TAPI had their fledgling super and titan fleet at this fight. I call it “fledgling” because they came south the previous year specifically to build it and it had yet to have its logistics backbone truly tested. PL’s broad strategy going into this matchup was to rely on boldness while anticipating TAPI would make mistakes or blink at the last minute and chicken out. TAPI, to their credit, did neither.  A joint PL/NCdot Dread bomb was dropped into the fight with the intention of killing as many supers and titans as possible. In response, TAPI pulled the trigger and went all in.  As a result, only one TAPI titan succumbed to the Dreadnaughts before enough FAXes were fielded to tank the incoming DPS, and they were able to do that long enough time to kill all the PL/NCdot Dreads. TAPI’s supercapital fleet had finally come of age.  In today’s meta, we all know that Dread bombs don’t beat Super/Titan fleets with sizable FAX support. At the same time, we also know you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take (thanks nan).

In the aftermath of this fight, some things changed.  First, TAPI and Legacy finally realized that they could handle PLNC in the south, and they didn’t need to fear a dread bomb as long as they followed their training. This new found confidence gave them the wherewithal to destroy PL’s ‘Fort Too Far’ staging in T-R, which was dispatched without resistance. The final timer for T-R fell on the same weekend as Fanfest in Iceland, where many of PL’s leaders and FCs had gone. Second, it was at this event, that CCP announced that the mythical station/outpost migration to Faction Fortizars finally was going to happen and a date was set: June 5th.

Talk of the next campaign for PL had started as soon as the D-G dust had settled and the power shift occurred. Within FC circles and leadership chats, it was agreed that after Fanfest we would go and do something else, even if that meant CVA rose from the ashes and took back the Sov and stations. We couldn’t contest a single point objective with Legacy now, and we had killed ProviBloc to the point of them being unable or unwilling to provide content for our alliance. The station patch announcement made us rethink that, obviously.  With the patch date revealed to be just over a month away, it was a no-brainer decision to delay any new campaign to stay and try and hold them for a month. I was confident that despite the ADM’s all being 1, we could hold back the erosion of our station claims and finish claiming the last few stations still in Care Factor and Coalition Hispania control before the cutoff.

By the time Legacy announced its deployment to Providence only one single station was not under the PL banner – thanks to RKMACARTHUR and Coalicion Hispania (well done). Alas with the changes to entosis mechanics made around the same time that allowed remote repairs to sub-caps with a link running, capital umbrellas became relevant in Sov warfare once again. And Legacy moved theirs over our heads and made it rain FAXes.

From my perspective, this was going to be tough to resist, but we knew it would mean lots of ships in space, which for a small gang PvPer means many kills. To adjust to the new meta, I had to adapt all our entosis alts and the ships available to them. No longer could we use heavy entosis with FAXes to save them, and no longer could I use FAXes for reps with ‘The Black Fleet’.  We changed to Bifrosts for entosis alts and made a slippery, purpose-built fit. Much like the long-range Rapiers of the previous meta, these could run a node in a hostile area and burn for freedom when Legacy went after them. I knew that the big FC’s of TAPI would not be interested in, nor available to run, the necessary number of fleets every day to first claim, and then hold the 70+ stations that were up for grabs. I figured that as lower tier fleet commanders took up the slack and other Legacy coalition member alliances stepped in to claim stuff, we would get opportunities to steal a timer back or just dunk a small gang. I was proven right at least in one regard, as much delegation was handed down and various Legacy fleets under newer FCs were sent out to claim stations and win timers. The Peaky Blinders went out to meet them. Early PL victories included beating the DV/Tickle AUTZ Ferox and Gila fleets with our own Ferox/BNI fleet, and many exciting chases in which one Legacy alliance or other would come out to play and inevitably run away. At the same time, I was proven wrong that the fatigue effect of ‘endless fleets but no fleet fight’ would wear down Legacy’s resolve to commit to the endless entosis battles.  Unlike a typical fight that has no end in sight, the fixed date of June 5th gave a solid finishing line to any endurance slog and made it easier to bear. The Legacy campaign also proved they had some depth with their FC’s, as even the newer ones still pulled good numbers.

The most relentless TAPI FC had to be Farmstink. On many occasions one or two of us would go out and start to either entosis or chase a Legacy noobie gang around and Farmstink would be the guy to form up a bucket load of ceptors and come sit in local with us, forcing us to dock up, while in some cases the full 1.5 hours of regen passed by.  I have to give him respect for that – I would never put my boys through that, but it got the job. All the while, single point objectives were bringing out massive numbers for Legacy, culminating in the destruction of PL’s 9UY Fortizar and, eventually, our Assah fort. Hedliner, PL’s highest ranking Fleet Commander, pushed back nightly against the overwhelming numbers the Legacy alliances brought to bear. Fozzieclaw fleets took their pints of blood, but with TAPI’s interceptor fleets in theatre, we were unable to complete entosis nodes, which was the focus of the fighting.

With all entosis conflicts, adaptation is the key to victory and as we adapted so did TAPI. Whenever we went after one of the smaller fleets from TAPI’s allies, more fleets were called for. The initial Jackdaw or Ferox gang would ‘get safe’ and await the TAPI X-Wing interceptors and capital support. I don’t blame them honestly – almost every time they ran for safety, it was the right call. At the same time, we got our fair share of ego boosting engagements with lopsided number disparity, so that was great. But numbers matter, and without being able to go head-to-head in brawling doctrines because we remained under Legacy’s super cap umbrella, for alliance-wide fleets we were forced to downscale to Claws, then Jackdaws and ultimately search elsewhere for things to do. As the meta for the latest entosis iteration gets thrashed out in the months to come, I hope we will see the reintroduction of capital escalations into Sov warfare.

Time passed and we lost station after station. By the time we got to patch day. Legacy owned all but one station in Providence, 9UY4-H. This was a significant station, because it was built by Ushra’Khan and was fought over by them and CVA for many years in Eve’s dark history.  Guess who owned it on patch day?  None other than Ushra’Khan, the closest thing to CVA’s all-time arch nemesis.  How fitting. On the Talking in Stations podcast many months ago, PL’s leader, Elise Randolph, mentioned how he would like to gift that 9UY station and with it the everlasting monument to Ushra’Khan, and it seems someone was listening. Thanks to a deal struck between Brave and Ushra’Khan, the station was owned by UK on patch day and the monument has been secured for all time, in Ushra’Khan’s name.

Personally, I hope to see some further conflict in Providence as small low sec groups make plays for a bit of Sov or just to mess with those that want some of the scraps. The state of Providence when all the stations are gone will set a precedent for future campaigns. No longer will you need to actually want to take someone’s Sov to muster up the will for a full-scale invasion. In the years since Aegis-Sov, everyone has had almost all they need in regards to Sov null space. Invading your enemy without intending to take and hold was deemed a wasted endeavour as the defenders could always just wait until you leave and reclaim their space and, more importantly, their stations. That has all changed, and in the future, the need to defend your space against marauders instead of only against settlers will be key.  These changes may finally open up new avenues and create new narratives that see great empires rise and fall as before, but this time with regions full of infrastructure being wiped clean, back to nothing but empty space and SCORCHED EARTH.

Thank you for reading and don’t fly safe out there!

The post The Sack of Providence appeared first on Talking in Stations.

by Sort Dragon, Executor of Darkness Alliance —

With the time slowly winding down to downtime, knowing that tomorrow 0.0 stations will cease to exist. I just want to take a moment to remember both the good and the bad of stations.

A lot of people who have joined the game since the introduction of Citadels have truly no idea how much of an effect stations had on this game. For people like me who have played for what seems an eternity, we can look back at stations and remember both the positives and negatives of them. To CCP they are monoliths of dead, broken code. While at the summit you could tell the excitement to finally be rid of them, but at the same time, you could see there was a certain level of respect for what these stations brought to the game for the last nearly 15 years.

As players, stations were the focal point for many years of an alliance’s hold on a region. We used them to stage out of, we used them to produce nearly everything. Anyone who held a station remembers the pains of how many office slots were available to be used when staging in a station. We also remember the fondness of hell camping hostiles into a station as you took their space around them. Or the bitterness it felt to be the one being hell camped.

Through the years we have all defended and attacked numerous stations through multiple different and strange sov mechanics no matter how painful or how boring they were. It’s important to remember how important and how much of an effect these stations had on the game.

Some of the biggest battles and wars in eve have been fought over stations. B-R started because without the TCU online in the system the station could be flipped to hostile hands just by shooting it. The fight took part on the station because Manny dropped in on us on the station trying to do just that.

Other big systems fought over for the station I have listed below.

• C-J6MT in Insmother. The true home of Red Alliance (I for one find a slight satisfaction in knowing they will go into DT holding the station.)
• NOL-M9 in Delve. The true old home of BOB now held by their oldest enemy.
• VFK-IV In Deklein. The old home of Goonswarm, now held by the descendants of BOB and others.
• H-W9TY and UMI-KK in Tribute. The 2 towers of tribute. Depending on where the war was would depend on where the NC would stage.
• BKG-Q2 in Branch. The old home of Razor and many others.
• LXQ2-T in Etherium Reach. The old Russian entrance to the northern drone regions.
• GE-8JV and HED-GP in Catch. The 2 towers of Catch. For years depending on what time of year would depend on who owned it.
• 9UY4-H in Providence. Ushra Khan and CVA who owned it was down to what color underwear. Not many understood the importance of this station other than the ones involved in it.
• BWF-ZZ in Geminate. The entrance to Geminate. Not one inch! (old joke)

I know I didn’t collect all the stations of significance from the past. If I missed any or if you have any stories about the ones I listed go ahead and tell your story in the comments. A lot of the newbies would surely get a thrill out of hearing some old war stories from the past. To those of you who were around during the age of stations, I tip my hat to you. To those of you who have come along since then, I hope Citadels can create the same crazy stories that stations did for us.

The post Goodbye to Stations appeared first on Talking in Stations.

This conflict is interesting because it draws on current players in the northern campaign, where the Imperium is harassing Darkness and SLYCE, the main alliances in the self-titled Guardians of the Galaxy (GOTG) coalition. Elise tried to get “Dumpster Coalition” to stick when Darkness was starting out, but in the end, GOTG won out. This conflict is shaping into one of the more interesting in New Eden current events.

PL Takes Providence

Like any veteran alliance, PL needs to keep their members busy, or they will log off. Many of their members are experienced players that had already done everything they want to do in EVE, often before they even joined PL. In-between mercenary contracts, PL has attacked places where they could get consistent resistance – Brave in Catch (2015), for example, and most recently Provi Bloc in Providence (2018). In both cases, resistance collapsed and PL “suddenly regioned” i.e. they ended up taking ownership of the region.

“The type of people that look to join Pandemic Legion are the ones who aren’t interested in empire building – they’re simply after PvP.” – Elise Randolph, Pandemic Legion

In the most recent Providence campaign, Northern Coalition (NC.), which has conquered Providence in the past alongside longtime regional menace Honorable Third Party (HTP), helped evict Provi Bloc (a coalition including CVA, Sev3rance, and others). The timing of the invasion coincided with the Faction Fortizar changes appearing on the Test Server (SISI), which has led to speculation that PL knew the timing of the conversion of the Stations to Faction Fortizars in advance. Elise denies this was the case, noting that CCP had already announced the approximate time for the change over would be late spring or early summer and interested parties, including PL, were already moving to prepare for them. CSM members confirm they knew only two days before the official announcement.

Imperium Menaces the North

The Imperium Coalition, led primarily by Goonswarm (Goons), purchased the Fountain region from Harvey Skywarkers “The Culture.” The region has since been turned into rental space managed by Imperium member The Initiative (INIT.). The sale of the region included both sovereignty as well as some significant assets. These assets also included a Keepstar, which Goons put to use as a staging point for incursions into GOTG territory. This sale was a problem for the North, as it gave Goons a quick route from their home systems in Delve to the North and allowed them to build up more infrastructure to allow quicker and safer travel for their various fleets. Thanks to the Fountain purchase, the Goon Supercapital fleet could move from its home in the South to the North in as little as 10 minutes. While it would have to rest before it could strike, that rest time was simply a matter of hours. This fast travel ability lead to the battle of 9-4RP2 in Cloud Ring, the largest single battle in the history of EVE Online to date. The 9-4 battle was so large that it slowed the servers down to a crawl. Over 10,000 pilots were involved, but only 6,142 made it into 9-4. This is a world record in gaming, awarded a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the “most concurrent players simultaneously involved in a single multiplayer PvP video game battle.”

In the pre-fight hype, Progodlegend generated mainstream news headlines by claiming the fight would be a “million dollar” showdown and went on to blast Imperium leader, The Mittani, in his comments, much to The Mittani’s consternation. During the 9-4 fight, TEST did not support the Imperium but instead anchored a Fortizar in a contested area between their coalition and the Imperium. This action put a wedge between TEST and Imperium, who had been growing closer before the fight. While this could have had more significant implications, the rift between the two was resolved soon after.

“The tension resolved itself when TEST proved their commitment to killing PL and NCdot in a few major fights after 9-4, which is the basis of the strategic relationship between TEST and the Imperium. So we essentially just got over the 9-4 thing and got on with our lives.” – The Mittani

Following the battle, which was mostly a draw, the Imperium withdrew the bulk of its forces back to Delve, but allowed Special Interest Groups (SIGs) within the Imperium to sortie into the North. These skirmishes, led by the Black Ops, Reavers and Space Violence SIGs, generated a lot of activity on both sides.

Shortly after 9-4, in early March, Pandemic Horde decided they needed more space and moved from Pure Blind to Geminate, which put them three regions away. Before this move, Horde was the primary buffer between the Imperium and GOTG in the North. This move intensified the role of GOTG’s subcapital fleets in protecting the North, and put NC. into the position of supercapital support GOTG – the role that GOTG provided Horde. Critical jump fatigue changes hit the live servers a few weeks later on March 20th, and just four days after that the Imperium delivered a punishing blow to GOTG – killing 5 Titans – in a trillion ISK battle in ROIR that shook GOTG’s morale and served as a wake-up call to the North.

NC. Leaves Providence Area

Vince Draken ordered NC. to Gehi to stage a counter-attack into Imperium controlled Querious. The move was strategic, meant to force the Imperium to stay home and defend their second-largest income producing region, rather than continue attacks up North. So far the Imperium has not ordered their SIGS back to Delve, they continue to attack Northern regions.

NC. have been dropping supercapitals on Imperium SIGS with their primary fleets in the North. Manfred Sidious of HAVOC Corporation commands NC.���s subcapital fleet in the South, usually as his alt Paik, hitting targets of opportunity in Delve and Querious.

Neither front, so far, has evolved into the huge brawls we’ve seen in the past, and it is unlikely to do so unless one group commits to a single front. As it stands, these conflicts are nothing more than attempts to disrupt sources of alliance income, if they have any strategic meaning at all.

Without NC. support nearby, PL is on its own.

TEST Attacks

Last week, TEST announced their deployment to Providence to challenge PL’s control over the region’s Stations. The region has 79 stations, one in almost every system of the region. These Stations were built up over the years by Provi Bloc, but under the terms of the changes CCP will be implementing, those Stations will belong to whoever conquers them before June 6th. On that day they convert to Faction Fortizars that can be taken down and sold off for an estimated 800 Billion ISK.

“The reason we move around between different areas/objectives is simply because we found that by staying in one place one of two things happens: the locals all die, or they band together and get reinforcements from elsewhere – both of which hamper our ability to PvP” – Elise Randolph, Pandemic Legion

On the TIS program, Progodlegend made it clear TEST’s effort was not a rescue mission for Provi Bloc since they were not bound by standings or coalition ties, leading to the conclusion that TEST was taking advantage of an apparent belief that PL was weak in the region to move in and clear PL out. The rest of the answers are still in flux. By the end of the week, though, TEST capital ships were observed supporting CVA, one of the core alliances in Provi Bloc, in a rapid reconquest of Providence. In the end, NC. did not relocate, and PL appears to be retreating, putting up little more than token resistance to TEST’s Reconquista of the sov, the stations may be another matter. TEST is letting CVA have the sov, the real fight will be over the stations.

What’s Next

While there is no active “great war” on-going in EVE, every day, sizable battles are happening all over the map as multiple forces stretch to fight on various fronts. This week it was TEST’s turn to force its will on the map, with CVA benefiting from the sov take over. TEST appear to have the upper hand, especially in the media war waged through propaganda.

TEST is now camping the system PL staged in, Assah, and fights for the stations have begun. The next few weeks, expect Providence to be the epicenter of activity in the South. Then again, further east there are signs that something bigger may be happening a few regions away. Find out Next time on Talking In Stations.

The post TEST vs. PL in Providence 2018 appeared first on Talking in Stations.