Some capitals were getting up to mischief

Equinox is here – Seize Something

I just know that somebody at CCP is taking the fact that GSF is moving of its own accord across several regions of null as proof that their rejuvenation plan is working.  And, I guess if you can accept the fact that the changes imposed by CCP made us want to spread out and take more space to keep our alliance viable, sure thing.  CCP can claim, “Made you form… and  move!”

But I don’t see the big rental empires in the north and the dronelands sharing much of that rejuvenation spirit.  If you already had a lot of space, and the rental empires have plenty, with some decent true sec, you were probably good.  And once we finish moving… then what?  As I noted a bit back, there are opinions out there about winners and losers with Equinox.

I checked the patch notes this morning to see if CCP had decided to make any last minute adjustments to the Equinox sovereignty scheme, but they could not find anything else they wanted to change.

Patch Notes for 2024-10-29.1

Features & Changes:

Sovereignty:

• All remaining Sovereignty Hubs which were running in Legacy mode have been automatically converted into using the new mode.

• It is no longer possible to remove rigs from structures which were eligible for rig removal.

The rigs change represents a concession CCP eventually made allowing groups to take down structures and recover the rigs rather than destroying them, a pretty clear acknowledgement that null sec alliances were going to face a reduction in what they could deploy and maintain with Equinox.  And yes, there are a few other fixes in the patch notes, but nothing that has an impact on the sov changes.

I guess CCP achieved all their goals and are ready to move on to the next thing.

I still have a lot of questions about WHAT CCP’s goals for Equinox really were, unless “rejuvenation” is a little known synonym for “nerf.”

As an expansion it meant the end of farms and fields, the return to a bunch of null sec systems not being worth the effort to upgrade, a pretty substantial downgrade to the number of combat anomalies, a trivialization of mining anomalies (you can pick what spawns, but you only get a selection of tiny rocks), and a push on any large group to change from a tall to a wide stance on sovereignty… unless they were already wide the way PanFam and Fraternity were.

Due to how the new resources are allocated, there is even a low key nerf to power projection in that there are not likely to be as many Ansiblex jump gates in use.  I mean, Fraternity appears to have made a choice on that front in Geminate and Vale of the Silent… or they forgot… one of the two.  But there are less Ansiblex jump gates online today.  You’d think the “small gang” crowd I mentioned the other day would be happy… but they are never happy if there is somebody out there not forced into their play style.

Oh well.  The motto of EVE Online has always been Harden The Fuck Up I guess.  That is what the song says.

As always, no tears here.  I’m in a group that will adapt to the new meta the same that it always has.  We’ve been doing that for the last three weeks… the last three months really… in such a big way that you’ll be able to see it on the October MER pretty clearly.

The question remains though as to whether or not this is what CCP intended.

At least we got our free 15K skill points again today. (And some free drugs.)  Yay?

From Delve to the east

Sure, Hilmar is out there agitating on X.com for another Guinness World Record based on all the ships and jumps that happened last weekend (I forget where I saw this and I am not linking to X.com any more, so just trust me on this… I mean, it is totally in character for him to ignore EVE in general and null sec in particular until he can claim some upside before going back to his crypto fantasies), but for an alliance that has sat in Delve for most of a decade and that has around 48K characters in it, there is a lot to move.

The top five alliances by members – Oct 25, 2024

So while myself and some others who had crossed the regional gap during that long Saturday event were all eager to get going and get our stuff moving towards, we were kindly asked to put a sock in it and wait while a series of additional move ops were spun up to keep getting people from Delve to 49-U6U, then through the regional gate to 4-07MU.

Somebody asked elsewhere about what this regional gate is and why it is a thing in our move.  Didn’t I just go around it on my own little adventure last week?  So I am going to go down that rabbit hole for a bit… but I have visuals!

History:  Back when EVE Online was first a thing and was fresh and new, there were not long range gates between regions in null sec.  They were viewed as pockets, often with a single point of entry.  This made them easy to defend and there was, as noted, often one way in to a region or group of regions.  CCP realized the error of their ways and later added gates that made long jumps between null sec regions.

In the lore these are “smuggler gates” that were being used by… well, smugglers I guess… that were then discovered by the empire authorities and hooked up to the main network.  This is why they have a different gate model than the the empire gates.

Sitting on a smuggler’s gate… back in 2013

The most direct, fewest gates route from our old home in 1DQ1-A and our new Tenerifis staging point at UALX-3 is through one of these gates; the one linking 49-U6U and 4-07MU.

The link between Querious and Catch

You can see other regional gate connections in that image, but the one highlighted in green is the direct route.

That distance is further than most capitals can jump these days.  (When I bought my Archon back in 2012 it could jump 12ly, then came Phoebe and the jump nerfs now it is 6ly… though it was 5ly for quite a while before CCP relented a little.)

To go around that gate… well, the route my black ops battleship adventure took was this.

Getting from 1DQ to UALX in my Sin

That is 8 jumps, not too far out of the way, somewhat safe… though I did land in Provi twice… because my black ops can jump 8ly.

For my carrier or force auxiliaries, limited to 6ly, that number goes up to 12 jumps.

Taking a capital around the regional gate

That is mostly safe… though two stops still have me hanging out in the middle of systems in Providence as a tempting target for the locals with a cyno that shows up on everybody’s overview (the covert cyno black ops uses does not) inviting investigation and other potential trouble.

And when you get to the now very expensive super carriers and titans, limited to 5ly in range, the path goes to 15 jumps.

The route for supers from 1DQ to UALX

That actually looks a bit safer than the capital route, until you remember that supers cannot dock up in stations.  They need a Keepstar to be safe, otherwise they are in space and vulnerable.  That is bad for what are now very expensive hulls. (Super carriers hulls were 20 billion ISK at the peak of the economic boom, but are more like 50 billion ISK these days.)

The only jump capable ships who can jump the gap for a direct path are jump freighters and Rorquals, which can go 10ly.  So those fleets have been going directly to UALX all this time.

Jump Freighters and Rorquals have options

As such, the plan was to first take the alliance from 1DQ1-A to 49-U6U, an easy two jump trip.

Getting from our old home to the regional gate

Then, when people had piled up and were ready to go, to do a covering operation allowing people to safely take the regional gate into 4-07MU.

From there it was another four jumps to get to our new home in UALX-3.

Past the regional gate to our new home

On both sides of the regional gate the way points are systems with Keepstars, so everybody can dock up and everybody is kept as safe as possible.  For ships not capable of jump drive travel, bridging titans were to be made available.  This let a huge number of normal freighters make the trip in relative safety.

A bevy of Providence freighters waiting for a bridge

And, as it turns out, there was a side bonus to safety, which was less jumps because it turns out that when one of the biggest organizations in New Eden picks up and moves even six jumps over, the fuel needed to power all those jumps is… a lot.   So now there is a jump fuel crisis and shortage as we soak up all the isotopes we can find to keep things moving eastward.

Now is a good time to be an ice miner I bet.

Anyway, that was the general plan and route, and for the first half of last week there was continued focus on getting people from 1DQ to 49-U6U, with occasional cover ops to move groups through to 4-07MU.  There were also occasional pings about people making the regional gate jump on their own and getting blown up.  Hostiles kept camping the regional gate whenever they could because the prizes coming through were worth the effort.

Having moved pretty much everything through the regional gate during the big push the week before, I joined up with a few cover fleets to help out as I waited for the move forward to UALX.

Rokhs of the cover fleet landing on the regional gate

That was easy as most people had their ships on one side of the regional gate or the other, so it was a quick join and then an hour of sitting on the gate while capitals, industrials, and other ships passed through.

Watching the gate as big friends jump through

Then, come Thursday, move ops started going between 4-07MU and UALX.  These were of the “do it yourself” variety where there was a cyno on each of the Keepstars along the route so you could join up, jump, then leave fleet while you waited for your timer to run down.

That was my kind of op.  The first one spun up during EU time but, as I work from home and my home computer is basically a 90 degree turn from my work computer, I was able to join up, make a jump, then leave fleet as my jump timer counted down.

Jump fatigue, also a thing introduced as part of the Phoebe updates linked above, has been toned down in the last decade.  Once you were able to essentially wreck a character with months of blue timer.  Now the red jump timer is capped at ~30 minutes while the blue fatigue timer is capped at 5 hours.  The bigger the blue timer when you jump, the longer the red timer will be after the jump.

That was fine.  I could leave things sit for a long stretch before turning around to join the fleet, undock, and jump again.  I moved my Ninazu, Apostle, and Archon the four jumps to UALX.

Archon arrival in UALX, a new skybox for us

Then I got back in the fleet and ran the Archon back to 4-07MU to pick up more ships as the gates between those two locations were regularly camped, so that it was pretty risky to go on your own.

A bubbled gate, camped with wrecks around it

I also sent some of the ships down the line using the titan bridges provided, though that was a bit more hands on that just jumping your own capital.  You have to pay attention to when the bridge goes up and which direction it is going, as they were bridging people both ways.

Then I sent my other black ops battleship, a Redeemer, down the line of cynos, though messed up because I had an alt in a Purifier to conduit jump, then realized that the Redeemer didn’t have the bridging module fit.  Ooops.  Flustered, I sent my alt gating to catch up, which is where I ended up getting that screen shot above.

By Friday afternoon I had most everything moved to UALX… which was then awkward because cover fleets were still being formed back around the regional gate and getting there to join in was not always viable with the route being camped.

Then came the Saturday fireside.  We were doing one last big cover op from places besides UALX… once we satisfied honor by defending the Sov Hub in 1DQ… and then all ops thenceforth would be from UALX.  It was to be our official home going forward.

Move ops will continue for weeks, if not months.  But they won’t be as common or constant.  This past week was all about move ops.  Now we need to settle into our space and get used to what is going on there.

This week I probably as many capital jumps as I have done on almost all previous move ops since the retreat to Delve back in 2016.

Ninazu making a jump

All my stuff has been moved though… all my stuff from Delve at least.  Looking at my assets list I still have some stuff in Curse left over for long ago deployments, including a Ferox with seven guns fit.  The Ferox hasn’t had seven turret mounts for a while.

But that is just another side adventure for later.  My need to be on move ops has been satisfied.  All my courier contracts have been delivered… including one that had a 14 day timer that didn’t get picked up until it was down to 12 hours left.

We live in Tenerifis now… Tenerifis, Impass, Catch, and Immensea.  Those are places I’ve been, but never a place I’ve called home.  My journey around the clock face of New Eden continues.  Will I eventually live in the Dronelands?

One of the Narcotics franchises, located easy walking distance from The Pit and the same model as Pleasure and Human Containment Facility.

Council of Stellar Management 19

The results had the following ten candidates come out on top, with two additional members being picked from those landed in 11th through 20th place.

The 19th Council of Stellar Management

Here is the list, in order of when the won during the count, plus the two picks, with incumbents marked with an asterisk and returning former CSM members marked with two.

Following the usual voting plan for CSM, the single transferable voting goes through sufficient rounds, eliminating one candidate each round, until the final slate of winners is established.  With each round, the votes on the ballots for the person eliminated are then transferred to the next individual down the list or, if there are no further candidates selected, that ballot is exhausted and removed.

For this election there were 47 people running for ten seats, so there were 37 rounds of elimination to reach that total.  There were 35,701 ballots cast, about 10K fewer than last year, and this is how the initial votes were applied.

The first round voting results

With that three people met quota and were elected, Kazanir, Luke, and Zintage.

Then we went through 32 rounds of elimination before the next two people hit quota and were elected.

Round 33 state of the vote

Round 36 saw two more people hit quota.

The state at round 36

And then with the final round, round 37, the last votes were distributed and the ten winners were declared.

The final round results

CCP then announced their two picks from the 11th through 20th position finishers and that was the election.

For those interested, this is the order of elimination by round.

1 – “AtheistOfFail” with 15.560817 votes
2 – “Redus Taw” with 25.000000 votes
3 – “Aerodinamica Attiva” with 34.000000 votes
4 – “Colby Bosh’tet” with 47.000000 votes
5 – “commander Shepard Brotherhood” with 52.726261 votes
6 – “Styxx” with 53.851566 votes
7 – “Mcopiate” with 63.000000 votes
8 – “Frippyy” with 75.102690 votes
9 – “Grima The Mad” with 92.610748 votes
10 – “Aqustin Agustus” with 99.357072 votes
11 – “NeoShocker” with 106.075882 votes
12 – “MILINT ARC Trooper” with 109.326459 votes
13 – “Hexator Gaming” with 137.568273 votes
14 – “Bexey Songweaver” with 153.253403 votes
15 – “SKALE Organa” with 157.637742 votes
16 – “Prospektor Schipplock” with 175.648109 votes
17 – “Frozen Fallout” with 178.525700 votes
18 – “Viciate” with 186.624351 votes
19 – “Switch 4” with 208.510593 votes
20 – “Aurous Victoirespere” with 209.887881 votes
21 – “Komo Sunder” with 234.153007 votes
22 – “steven mardis” with 249.214794 votes
23 – “SeriesPro” with 257.948458 votes
24 – “Creatnos” with 322.000000 votes
25 – “Gideon Zendikar” with 338.397338 votes
26 – “Ankh Lai” with 361.767627 votes
27 – “DutchGunner” with 415.420345 votes
28 – “Drake Iddon” with 530.187141 votes
29 – “Gustav Mannfred” with 615.549615 votes
30 – Rots Mijnwerker” with 661.233382 votes
31 – “Machagon” with 748.118691 votes
32 – “Kshal Aideron” with 813.402096 votes
33 – “youngpuke2” with 841.769079 votes
34 – “Phantomite” with 951.401862 votes
35 – “Mike Azariah” with 1695.886520 votes
36 – “Dalros” with 1784.397815 votes
37 – “Itaer” with 2285.417164 votes

Somebody put together a Google sheet with all the ballots collated into a readable format and there were over 3,000 ballots submitted with only one candidate who did not make the final 10.  Those ballots were exhausted.  If those people had put anybody else in the 11 through 20 finishers on their ballot as an alternate, we could have had different results.

On the flip side, the Imperium and other null sec groups voted pretty consistently.  6,260 ballots were cast with the GSF suggested ballot, which was as follows:

1. Kazanir
2. Zintage Enaka
3. Dujek Oneye
4. Luke Anninan
5. Seddow
6. youngpuke2
7. Ariel Rin
8. The Oz
9. Ankh Lai
10. Kshal Aideron

Seven of those individuals were elected, and one was CCP’s pick, so we did pretty well.

Likewise, there were 3,805 ballots were submitted with what looks like the PanFam slate.  Given the combined size of PanFam, that seems a bit low.  But they also had a candidate banned from the election which seems to have disrupted things.  The Initiative ballot got 1,383 votes, making it the third most popular slate.

The fourth most common ballot was just Itaer from “bar code” (as we call them, because pronouncing “IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII” isn’t a thing) who got 1,257 votes, and fifth was a ballot with just Dalros from Absolute Will, with 925 votes, neither of whom decided to work with anybody else on a ballot plan.  Them including each other as a second entry would have elected Itaer.

Meanwhile, voting was down compared to last year, but out of recent history elections the turn out was well within the range expected.

• CSM18 – 47,155 total votes
• CSM17 – 30,814 total votes
• CSM16 – 38,086 total votes
• CSM15 – 36,120 total votes
• CSM14 – 32,994 total votes

In many ways, kind of a normal CSM election.

Thoughts on Results

As we say, “Good guys win again!”

Certainly that is the GSF point of view on the results.

But you could clearly see in the ATXX chat some people were angry about the results.  Those ranged from the usual “Goons run CCP” conspiracy theories (which are completely at odds with the view within GSF, where it is an article of faith that if we want CCP to nerf something we merely have to start doing it and it will happen), to people failing to understand how voting and elections work (a big problem here in the US), people thinking that the CSM makes game design decisions or has some magic veto power, and the oh so tiresome wail of people bemoaning the death of the game, the death of small gang, or the general fear of stagnation because null sec isn’t doing anything right now.

Null sec wins most of the seats because null sec is organized.  I would suggest that perhaps the aptly named AtheistOfFail shouldn’t have signed up to run if they could only get 15 freaking votes.  Somebody like that is just noise in the election cycle.  But how do you fairly filter candidates like that without having a pre-election?  So you let them come in and be noise.

Null sec is organized because to play in that sphere of the game you organize and grow or you go home.

And null sec is serious about CSM elections because back in the early self-obsessed, dilettante, clown show era of the CSM, when it was a popularity contest that attracted little attention and fewer voters, a number of winners made it their business to “fix” null sec without having an experience with it.

I recall Tredbor Daehdoow declaring that shooting structures was boring and should be removed from the game.  I suspect he had never shot a structure, didn’t understand conflict drivers, and clearly had given little thought to what mechanism might replace that.  Entosis is what we got.  Entosis, the magic sov wand, is so much worse that simply shooting structures… at least a whole fleet gets to join in when you’re shooting… that it highlights the reason that null sec takes this seriously.

(And yes, I know who he is.  That doesn’t mean he was qualified or correct in making that statement.)

But mostly it was the “small gang” mentality applied to null sec that got null sec invested in the CSM.  We saw that in the CSM19 campaign, as we have seen it in almost every campaign.

The “small gang” mindset is somebody who feels that they, in a fleet of 10-20 people, should be able to go anywhere in null sec and face only even odds fights.  They hate when null sec residents respond in force, when they can’t find a quiet corner to camp and steal ESS bonds or rob Skyhooks on their own schedule and not an arbitrary time window, and basically resent when they can’t do as they please in our space.

So it is always a “nerf null sec” argument because they want all of New Eden to accommodate their specific play style.  When I write about other MMOs I occasionally make mention of the PvP die hards, the very vocal forum warriors who want open world, full loot, no holds barred PvP in every game.

In EVE Online, a PvP game, the small gang mob occupy a similar sort of niche in our ecosystem.  The game would be great if only everybody was forced to play on their terms and CCP is betraying the game and all that is holy if they aren’t catering to their every whim.

But they don’t represent a popular point of view or any region or play style really, besides their own dream/vision, they’re just loud like those PvPers in the PvE game forums… which is why they generally don’t win.

Now that the election is over the “small gang” proponents are stewing again because null sec won, never once considering that their voices ought to be balanced against ours.  The reality is that, while electing representatives is, at best, an imperfect way to create an advisory council, the results do end up reflecting the views of those who voted.  If you didn’t get out the vote… blame null sec?

Finally, winning majorities on the CSM hasn’t save null sec from nerfs in the long term in any case.  CCP will do what it wants and one of the jobs of CSM reps is to complain about how CCP blindsided them with some new change that was never once put before the CSM.  One of the main arguments of small gang, that null sec is stagnant is true largely due to CCP breaking the economy and making everything more expensive.

As I have noted elsewhere, the first rule of New Eden is don’t undock with anything you cannot afford to lose.  When CCP made capitals and supers too expensive to lose, blaming null sec for not undocking in them shows a profound disregard for reality.

I personally would like to get back to wars and big, consequential fights and all the things that get headlines in the gaming press and beyond, things that draw attention to the game, things that make the stories that bring the game alive and get people who’ve never heard about EVE Online to think about checking it out.  (But didn’t we just conquor a few regions and blow up a bunch of structures including two Keepstars? Is it our fault that PanFam and Fraternity opted not to fight?)

Anyway, others have opined on this point more clearly and succinctly than I.  In the end, this is the result a CSM election is always going to generate.  Null sec is going to win 6-8 seats due to size an organization.  I have suggested a couple of things in the past that CCP could do to improve representation… and it even adopted one, expanding the size of the CSM, though not because I brought it up… my words into the void are rarely if ever marked by anybody at CCP… but unless other areas of the game can coalesce behind candidates they are always going to come up short.

So it goes.  Good guys win again.

Related:

• CCP – CSM Election Results Forum Post (with link to the data)
• CCP Twitch – The Announcement Stream VOD
• Reddit – CSM19 Election Results Thread (mostly practical, some salt)
• Google Sheets – Election Results as Ballots
• Reddit – CSM Votes by Year

Today, after a fierce fight on the sovereignty hub grid, where Goonswarm Federation unleashed a last gasp defense consisting of two fleets of unrigged Rifters (rigs?), Brave was able to prevail and take the system.

Rifter going into the RLML Caracal meat grinder

The battle report showed a lopsided win in favor of Brave.  Goons were only able to achieve their secondary objective, blowing up Imadingo Baby, in an attempt to retrieve some honor from the fight.

Battle Report Header

Brave was able to flip the system, achieving the goal set out back in July of 2020 when they and their PAPI compatriots set out to evict the Imperium from its home.

Brave taking the core constellation

Brave’s complicated and convoluted plan apparently involved them losing their sovereignty at least three times over the last four years, defecting from and being attacked by their former PAPI allies, suffering through multiple retreats, then finally joining the Imperium where they were finally put in a position to achieve their long held goal.

The conquest of the rest of Delve continues.

In reality, this is part of the great migration.  With GSF leaving Delve and heading east, somebody needed to fill in the vacuum left in Delve.

From Delve to the east

This is all part of the Imperium realignment caused by the Equinox expansion.  But it is a sign of the strange ways of null sec politics where Brave, who has been both ally and enemy over the years, ended up in possession of our old home.

The view from 1DQ1-A

Times change.

Related:

• Reddit – The Battle of 1DQ1-A
• Reddit – 1DQ taken by very sus toon

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Don’t worry, it was intentional. Torvald Uruz is quitting Eve – this time for really real. At least according to his comments in the Abyssal Lurkers Discord. This time is serious, because well, biomassing your character and leaving all your assets at a point of no return is somewhat final.

But who is Torvald Uruz?

If you haven’t heard of him yet, you’d probably call him a content creator. In the past he made some Youtube and Twitch content. Mostly Abyssal Dungeons and PvP, Especially Abyssal Proving Grounds but also, likely due to lack of the former, some Faction Warfare.
He also started the afore mentioned Abyssal Lurkers Discord server, which currently has over 9.300 members.
As a candidate running for the Counsel of Stellar Management (CSM) 17 in 2022, he got a good load of sympathy points as an overall likeably dude, campaigning for ease of access of the game and overall “just making things fun”.
Which landed him a spot on my CSM 17 ballot too and got on CSM 17. I later had the opportunity to meet him during fanfest 2022 and did not regret my choice afterwards – whatever that may mean.

I’ve played this game for 15 years, and in that time I’ve quit 6-7 times. I’m 30 years old now, and this game and CCO just isn’t it anymore. Old CCP cared and put passion into their work. New CCP chases trends and buzzwords. Being 30 years old, if I’m going to spend any of my precious time gaming, it needs to be fun and enjoyable. This game and CCP more so is absolute fucking dog shit.
Quitting in this manner (destroying all my stuff and bio massing my toons) ensures that if I ever get the itch, I won’t come back because i have nothing to come back to

Torvald Uruz, Abyssal Lurkers Discord

It’s of course sad to see yet another content creater leave. However, it reminds me of a German saying: Reisende soll man nicht aufhalten.
I’d translate the meaning like that: Don’t try to stop someone who made their decision.
Trovald obviously made his. Also people come and go. That’s live. And if you stick around long enough, Torvald becomes one of many that have left, and one of many who came into this community in the first place.

But I want to add some more substance than German Sprichwörters. Check out a response from Razgriz to Torvalds explanation. I think it holds some water.

[…] company culture comes from the top, and they [CCP] have always had a pretty consistent company culture of believing that they know better than the players and the CSM. I’m pretty sure the only reason the CSM hasn’t been axed a long time ago is because of the player backlash it would cause.
The above attitude isn’t uncommon with larger developers, especially for MMOs and other live service games. It’s understandable why it develops, the signal to noise ratio of good suggestions vs utter lunacy from players is often quite poor, but it usually ends up blinding developers to the larger trends of player opinion that do pretty reliably indicate problems.

Razgriz, Abyssal Lurkers Discord

I had typed out another four paragraphs rambling about this… but after review, I think there is not much more to add to Razgriz comment.

Just one thing I’d hold up against CCP these days is lacking communication in certain situations. For example the fact that there was zero official intel about the Abyssal Proving Grounds, or events like the Empire celebration days. If you were in the rigth channels, and had your ears on the ground, you might have cought a rumor at times, nothing more though.

A simple statement like:

we hear you, but currently X is not on the agenda, it’s not forgotten though and might return one day, just don’t hold your breath.

would be enough in my opnion. It would cause some disappointment, sure. But it would also prevent that looming, frustrating debuff of the unkown. But getting approved such a statement is probably easier said than done. Company politics can be a tricky place to navigate.
Communication in general is a fine line to walk when you have such a dedicated fan base as Eve Online has it. As anyone could observe with the more frequent roadmaps CCP published in the past, when CCP Seagull was still stearing the ship.

Back to PLEX

Still, 34.800 PLEX (~200 billion ISK) is a substantial ammount. One could buy and fit a newer AT frigate with that kind of money.
Some would say it would have been the better move to wait for a PLEX for Good campaign and then donate the PLEX to that. In €, these PLEX would have had a value of around 1.200€. Certainly not a shabby sum to come from a single donation.

But with the PLEX being destroyed, you could consider it a little ‘gift’ to CCP. As the services they would have had to provide for that PLEX will never be claimed, and never result in costs for the company. Then again, if you look at the numbers The Noisy Gamer pulls from the quaterly Pearl Abyss earning calls, I doubt anyone would notice.

What is left to say?

Cheerio, Torvald. I hope you find your fun.
o7

• Alliance Tournament XX – Final Matches

Tomorrow kicks off the second weekend a big finale for Alliance Tournament XX.

I’m just rolling this for all further ATXX posts…

Smarter people than I have written up summaries, but I will let you know that last week I bet all my channel points on Goonswarm in the GSF vs. Pandemic Horde grudge match… and figured I had lost them when GSF spent the first few minutes of the match remembering how to kite while losing a key ship.

Then they appeared to rally long enough to make a “69” joke with the score.  I know this was not on purpose, yet it happened.

Never not make memes

They then managed to kill everything save Vily’s Vindicator, which they then evaded as Vily appeared to have burned out his prop mode, leaving him alone and ineffectual as the timer closed out the match.

Vily thwarted again

A metaphor for World War Bee?  Then I stopped betting and Goons lost their next match and were eliminated, but we beat PH and I doubled my channel points and am close to earning another SKIN, and that is what is really important here.

Otherwise, last year’s winner Fraternity hung on and made it past last week, so they still have a chance.  Matches set for tomorrow kicking off at 15:00 UTC on CCP’s Twitch channel.

Coming Up

All matches after that will depend on who wins and will feed into Sunday’s final round which culminates with a best of five battle for the crown.

Brackets and other tournament information can be found on CCP’s site.

(The Community Beat has some recaps of the first weekend as well.)

• Empires of EVE Vol. III Announced

If you pledged to the Empires of EVE Vol. II Kickstarter campaign back in 2018… has it been that long… you may have seen a few updates from Andrew Groen about figuring out whether or not a Vol. III was a good idea or not.  But raw enthusiasm from several people in comments, myself included, seems to have diverted him from good sense and the healthier life he has achieved and convinced him to dive back into the swamp of New Eden politics for a third and final time.

Complete the set!

From his announcement on the campaign page:

This initial phase is going to be the biggest departure from previous Empires of EVE projects. In the past I’ve sought funding for the project before getting very deep into the writing so that I could understand the scope of the project that I had to budget for. However, in order to make this new project work, I’ve decided I need to go into the Kickstarter campaign with a book that is already in an advanced state of completion.

In order to do that, I’m seeking supporters to help me fund the research and writing of this volume separately through a new site at empiresofeve.substack.com.

The goal of this new publication is to be the headquarters for Volume 3 for the next year. I’ll be releasing a steady stream of updates similar to the monthly updates that have been a feature of previous EOE campaigns. What will be new is that I’m enabling a premium subscription tier where those who support the research and writing of the next volume will have access to chapters of the book as they’re being written. Each chapter drop will also include its audiobook version read by me.

The first two chapters are available today. Called A Eulogy for Death Parts 1 & 2, the story is a tribute to one of the greatest EVE players ever, and one of the most important sources who helped make Empires of EVE possible.

This is a departure from how we’ve done things in the past, but I’m confident this is the best strategy moving forward. Creating the book first before funding the printing of the final volume on Kickstarter will allow us to create the most streamlined campaign yet.

I’m deeply excited about this new paradigm because it not only solves some of the difficulties of previous Empires of EVE projects, but it also allows me to bring the community in much closer to the creation of the book.

You can sign up for free or be a financial supporter to help bring this final entry in the series to fruition.  There is even a retrospective video in with the announcement.

I am all in on this.  The first two volumes were excellent, so I hunger for a third.

• More Revenant Stuff

CCP has been out there pitching the upcoming Revenant expansion.  Last time it was the corporation goals update that was the focus, this time around it is about the new mercenary dens.

Trying to summarize, these new dens will attach to Skyhooks, but only above temperate planets, to siphon of resources that can be used for fun new stuff.  At least that is what I think it said.  The cat came in and started pestering me about dinner mid way through so I stopped paying attention.  The Deathless and Zarzakh figure into this.  I’ll wait for the patch notes in November.

• EVE 20th Anniversary Edition PLEX Subsidy Delivered

Somewhere a bit back CCP let me know that the PLEX subsidy they promised to help offset the rather pricey shipping costs for the 20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition had arrived.

A gift I paid for I suppose

That put 1,000 PLEX in my PLEX vault, just in time to cash in on the next tidbit.  You would think that might help drop the price of PLEX, but I guess not enough us bought the package.

• PLEX Prices in Crisis

The price of PLEX has climbed to around 6 million ISK per lately.

PLEX Prices yesterday from my listening post in Uitra

This has led to people becoming very angry on r/eve.

I neither buy nor sell PLEX, being content to just pay my subscription and not feel like I have to have a second job in space to keep my account in Omega status.  But I do enjoy the rants and conspiracy theories and sheer pig ignorance that goes into the threads.  There have long been people claiming that CCP is manipulating the PLEX market.

While CCP has been driving an inflationary economic policy for a while now through incompetence… remember, the mineral price index just hit a new all time high after a number of failed attempts by CCP to fix it… the motives attributed to CCP range into the absurd.

One of my favorites is that CCP wants to stop the freeloaders from paying for their Omega with ISK, something that completely ignores how lucrative PLEX is to CCP and that everybody who uses PLEX to subscribe is effectively earning more money for CCP and not less.

Anyway, I don’t know why PLEX is up so much.  One theory is that the GSF move from Delve to Tenerifis spurred a PLEX purchase binge to subscribe capital alts.  Or maybe we’re all selling our assets and investing in PLEX, a good long term hedge against inflation… both natural and CCP induced.  And PLEX does have a long history of going up.  I remember when this was the price of what is now 500 PLEX.

That works out to about 600K each for current PLEX

Somebody pointed out we’ve been at a 5 million ISK plateau for a while now and we had a PLEX pricing panic just two years back.  As I have said about a number of this this month, the MER should be interesting.

• PLEX Destroyed during a Rage Quit

Long time EVE Online streamer and candidate for the CSM Torvald Uruz… he placed 12th in the CSM18 election so could have been one of the CCP picks if they had been so inclined… has apparently had it with EVE Online.

As part of this he took a Gila with 38,400 PLEX valued at over 200 billion ISK… the kill report pegs it at 194 billion but the current price of 6 million per makes that number closer to 230 billion… along with some other stuff and let it die in an Abyssal pocket where it is gone, never to be recovered.  Obligatory r/eve thread about it.

So, if you were thinking about the age old New Eden question, “Can I have your stuff?” the answer is a pretty hard “No.”  I have no idea what set this off… I mean, I have been critical of CCP for a good five plus years running about their messing up the economy and haven’t hit that point… but there it is.

Taking that much PLEX out of the economy… and, perhaps ironically, letting CCP vest it and claim it as revenue… won’t help bring the price down.  (A better write-up over at The Greybill.)

• EVE Galaxy Conquest
  

Finally, CCP’s next EVE Online spin-off title, the mobile 4x conquest title EVE Galaxy Conquest is set to launch on Tuesday the 29th.

EVE Galaxy Conquest

Will it be any good?  I don’t know.  Last year they said they would look into a PC version of the game.  But that is the sort of promise a company like Blizzard can deliver on with something like Diablo Immortal.  Does CCP have the wherewithal for that sort of thing?  We shall see.

That is about it.  We’re still waiting for the CSM19 election results and CCP has said it is the last call for early bird tickets for FanFest 2025.  More to come.

Just waiting for some hostiles to jump through

Step 1: Recognize Their Ship Type and Role

The first thing you’ll notice in any encounter is your opponent’s ship. This alone reveals a lot about their playstyle. Ships in EVE Online are purpose-built for different roles, from nimble interceptors to brute force battleships. To make a quick evaluation:

• Frigates: Fast and agile, likely trying to disrupt or tackle.
• Destroyers: Anti-frigate, good for quick engagements.
• Cruisers: Versatile, but more sluggish—can be long-range snipers or tanky brawlers.
• Battlecruisers & Battleships: Big, slow, and packing a punch. Expect heavy tanking or firepower.

Pro Tip: Check the ship’s faction—Caldari favor missiles, Amarr love lasers, Gallente use drones and blasters, and Minmatar are masters of speed and versatility.

Step 2: Use Your D-Scan and Intel Tools

Before you engage, gather as much intel as possible using in-game tools.

• Directional Scanner (D-scan): Use this to get a sense of nearby threats. A quick scan can reveal nearby ships before they get the jump on you.
• Local Chat: Always keep an eye on local—if a known pirate or PvP corp shows up, you’ll want to adjust your strategy. Check zKillboard to quickly gauge if a player is a dangerous threat.
• Ship Scanner: If you have time, a ship scan can give you specific details on their fit—whether they’re shield or armor tanked, and what kind of weapons they’re packing.

Knowing what modules they’re using (i.e. scramblers, webifiers, or repairers) helps you plan your approach before shots are fired.

Step 3: Monitor Their Movement and Behavior

Once the engagement begins, the real-time analysis starts. Movement tells you a lot about what kind of fight they’re prepared for.

• Closing the Distance Quickly? Likely a short-range brawler. If you’re flying a long-range ship, you’ll want to kite them and maintain range.
• Keeping Distance? They could be using long-range weapons or trying to avoid scrambles and webs. Speed tanks or snipers often try to dictate the fight from afar.

Be aware of propulsion modules—if they engage an MWD (Micro Warp Drive), try to shut it down with a scrambler, as they will likely have much less speed without it.

Step 4: Assess Tanking and Cap Usage

As the fight unfolds, observe their tank type and whether they’re relying on shields, armor, or passive hull tanking. Energy management plays a massive role in PvP, so recognizing if your opponent is using active tanking (requiring capacitor energy) can lead to key opportunities.

• Shield Tanks recharge quickly but are more vulnerable to EM damage.
• Armor Tanks often have high resistance but can be slow-moving.
• Cap Usage: Energy neutralizers (neuts) can starve them of cap if they’re heavily reliant on active modules (like armor repairers or shield boosters).

If you notice them running out of cap, their tank will crumble, giving you an opening to finish them off.

Step 5: Exploit Their Weaknesses

Once you’ve identified the key elements of your opponent’s setup, focus on exploiting their vulnerabilities.

• Against Drone Boats: Target their drones! Gallente ships, for example, rely heavily on drones for DPS. Eliminating their drones significantly reduces their threat.
• Against Large Ships: If they’re using large weapons, their tracking will be poor against smaller, faster ships. Use your speed to your advantage by orbiting closely to mitigate incoming damage.
• Capacitor Management: Use neuts or nosferatus to sap their energy if you suspect they’re relying on active modules. Without cap, even the most tanked ships will collapse.

Step 6: Post-Engagement: Learn from the Fight

Whether you win or lose, the fight doesn’t end when your enemy explodes or escapes. To really improve in EVE PvP, you must learn from each engagement:

• Review Killmails: Analyze your opponent’s fit to see if your assumptions were correct. What did you miss? What worked?
• Reflect on Your Strategy: Were you caught out of position? Did you mismanage your range or modules? Use every battle as a stepping stone to refine your tactics.

The Mind Game of PvP in EVE Online

PvP in EVE Online is as much about psychological warfare as it is about raw mechanics. Analyzing your opponent effectively will not only give you an edge but also tilt engagements in your favor before a single shot is fired. The best pilots are always thinking several steps ahead, and with practice, you’ll be able to read your enemy’s intentions and outmaneuver them with ease.

Fly smart, and always remember: knowledge is power in New Eden. The more you learn about your enemies, the more you can turn their strengths into weaknesses.

From Delve to the east

But there are also a lot of little stories with this move as everybody has to get their stuff together and not everybody has the time or patience to follow the instructions for safe travel… or maybe didn’t even get those instructions.  With any operation at least 10% don’t get informed and a good percentage get a garbled version of the message.

And every time you undock in EVE Online the potential for adventure is unlocked.  Hell, there is a bug currently that can throw you many AU from your station when you undock.  Instant adventure when you’re in a capital or a laden hauler!  (This is a common enough occurrence that we have a guide to reporting it as a bug.  It has happened to me twice during the move.)

I have done my own share of moving stuff around, and most of it has been uneventful.  I try to keep that sort of thing to off hours on week days.  Solo moves are best done at low ebb.

As I noted previously, one of the happy side effects of World War Bee is that everything I had in Fountain, Querious, or Delve got consolidated back into the 1DQ1-A Keepstar during the great siege of 1DQ.

O-EIMK Constellation during the siege

So aside from a ratting Ishtar off in another constellation and my PI farms, on which I did a last collection run before shutting them all off, there wasn’t much to do in Delve.

I did still have some stuff in Aridia, the remains of me moving a bunch of stuff to NPC stations there with taking a long term break from EVE in mind.  That break never happened because that last Reavers deployment I went on turned into a year long campaign that end in the big faction Fortizar payoff.  That rejuvenated me and I hauled most, but not all, of that stuff back to Delve.

I also found some time to zip over into Curse to pick up some ships I had left there back during World War Bee… and before… as part of Reavers deployments.  I slipped an Ishtar and a Scimitar and a Purifier back to U-QVWD, which is on the route to UALX-3.  I will pick them up on the way when the next round of move ops start.

But one evening in that first week when I was feeling anxious about getting stuff moving, my angst was dialed up a bit when a move op aimed at getting expensive pods safely to UALX-3 changed from being run with black ops ships to using a Rorqual.  That swap happened when I already had my pod seated in a blockade runner… a blockade runner filled with 12 billion ISK of stuff like implants, SKINs, and boosters that I wanted to slip through because it was an FC I absolutely trusted to keep us safe.

When the swap happened it was suggested that blockade runners would still work, so I got out on the Rorqual and watched the bridge go up.

The Rorqual bridge is up

However, as I feared, Rorquals can only bridge mining ships.  I got the message that indicated I would not be going in the blockade runner.

No bridge for you

Now, most people going on that op had just grabbed a Venture, the base mining frigate, to go along for the ride.  And I even had a Prospect, the gas mining version I setup when I thought I might go gas mining, so could have just swapped to that.  But I also had 4 hours of blue timer jump fatigue, and mining ships don’t get the jump fatigue discount that industrials like my blockade runner do.  So I would have had annoyingly long jump timers that would have either slowed everybody down, which I did not want to do, or end up with me being left behind.

So I stood down, left fleet, and brooded a bit on what to do next.

Later that evening, after my blue timer had wound down, I was looking at DOTLAN and the jump planner to try and guess how the proposed black ops version of that move would have gone and, decided that I could manage that on my own.  It was after dinner, after television, and into that gap of time before bed when one should absolutely NOT start on some new project… and also in the time frame when my brain thinks it is the optimum time to do some complex operation of unknown duration like migrating my wife’s computer to Windows 11 or updating the bios on my motherboard.

So I decided I could get my expensive pod and my blockade runner full of expensive stuff to UALX-3 all on my own.  Or at least I could get the operation started.  Even my brain knew that this could take some time, the waking hours were fading, and I had to get up for work in the morning.

It would be easy.

I had two black ops battleships in 1DQ.  One was a Redeemer, which is the current homeland defense doctrine, and one was a Sin, the fat Gallente black ops battleship based on the Dominix.  That was a now out of date doctrine.  But it was a tough ship and could bridge, and more importantly, conduit jump to a covert cyno.

I traded the blockade runner full of booty to my main combat alt, who had all the skills to do either that or the black ops side of things.  That would be the traveling pair.  The Crane, the blockade runner, would just get on the Sin, and the Sin would conduit jump, which would take them both across space together to dock up or safe up before the next jump.

The detail was that I needed somebody to light the covert cyno.  As it turned out, one of my accounts then unsubscribed, has a character who could do that.  So I resubbed that account.  He was in Amarr, so I had him fit out a black ops hunting Buzzard covert ops frigate, which has the benefit of being configured to get through trouble and warp at 16 AU a second.  He bought that then zipped on down to the first location that DOTLAN gave me for the navigation route.

The path to low sec

The first stop was in NPC Delve and my alt was in KarmaFleet (he had been acting as my alpha homeland defense fleet character) so he wasn’t in much danger.  He got on the Fortizar in the system, lit the cyno, and my blops did a conduit jump and we were all there together.  First transport away!

The second stop was in Brave space and, again, there was a citadel to sit on.  I let the jump timer run down then it was off to the second landing.

Efa, the third stop, was easy as well.  A low sec system with no station, the coalition has a Fortizar there as well as it connects Querious to high sec.  It is just a gate from Badivefi, one of the Reaver home stations in the early days.

All three stops had only friends and allies in system.  Piece of cake.

The my alt, Claude Ring, headed around Saminer, which took a bit even with fast warps.  But that was fine.  With three quick jumps I was already up at the 5 hour blue timer which gave me a nearly 30 minute red timer before I could jump again.

Saminer is another low sec system, but it has a station.  I made a safe spot out in the system, put up the cyno, and conduit jumped for the fourth time.  Then the Sin and the Crane docked up and I was considering calling it a night there.  The game log showed the time taken for each jump.

04:53:48 – A Conduit Field activated by Wilhelm Arcturus jumps you to Z3V-1W.
05:00:08 – A Conduit Field activated by Wilhelm Arcturus jumps you to 1M4-FK.
05:12:41 – A Conduit Field activated by Wilhelm Arcturus jumps you to Efa.
05:28:18 – A Conduit Field activated by Wilhelm Arcturus jumps you to Saminer.

That could have been enough for one night.  I could have left the back half of the journey for another time.  But then I looked at the route.

The second half of the route

I mean, it wasn’t too late yet, so I decided to get Claude down to the next way point, all the better to be ready to go when I picked things back up.

That took a bit and sent me into null sec in Providence.  Provi alliances have traditionally had an NRDS policy, which is “not red, don’t shoot” which means they don’t shoot random neutrals in their space.  This is in opposition to the stance of most null sec groups, which is NBSI or “not blue, shoot it” so anybody not part of the group is a target.  We don’t trust neutrals to be neutral. (You can read more about standings here.)

Anyway, DOTLAN sent me down to the off the main route system of 18-GZM, which is held by an alliance called LinkNet, which has over 1,500 members according to the site.  There didn’t seem to be many on, and the system I ended up in was empty.  So I made a safe spot.

Then I figured that the jump timer had probably run down on Wilhelm and I was there already, I should probably just make that next jump.  Why not be one more jump along?  So I logged everybody back in, formed another fleet, put up the cyno again, and jumped them.

05:48:23 – A Conduit Field activated by Wilhelm Arcturus jumps you to 18-GZM.

I moved them off a bit, cloaked them up, then safe logged them both out of the game.  Easy.

Might as well move Claude to the next system, right?

Then my wife asked if I wasn’t coming to bed could I turn the light out on my side of the bed, as she wanted to go to sleep.  I did that, got a glass of water, and a few other things that moved the clock forward, so that when I got back to the game and have moved Claude to the next system, QBL-BV… well, the jump timer was about ready to go, right?  Might as well.

This was another group’s space, Reeloaded, and they had a citadel there and there were a couple of them online… but nobody bothered me. I did the conduit jump.

06:14:15 – A Conduit Field activated by Wilhelm Arcturus jumps you to QBL-BV.

Still, I felt a bit seen so logged the jumping pair out and moved forward to the next stop, which was JWZ2-V in Catch.

That was more than a few gates and through the incursion that had set up shop in Catch and which, at that point, was blocking progress for normal capitals and supers in the move towards UALX-3.  One aspect of an incursion is that it cyno jams the system.  No jumps.  I might be done moving forward for a while.

But then I ended up on the far side of the incursion and there was nobody on and by this point I was feeling like the quietness of the night was an opportunity not to be wasted, so I made it to the way point and docked up in the Fortizar there, which was anchored at the sun.

Placed for optimum solar panel efficiency

Again, this had take a bit, so I logged on the two travelers, got them in fleet again and made the next jump.

06:42:58 – A Conduit Field activated by Wilhelm Arcturus jumps you to Q-S7ZD.

That put me at close to midnight local time with another nearly 30 minute jump timer.  But I was safe in an alliance Fortizar and just one jump away from the destination.  After that jump I logged the two travelers off one last time for the night, drove Claude to UALX-3 to be ready for the next day.

Somewhere along the way on that last leg I went through a system with an orange sun that painted a gas giant against the sky in what I felt was quite the dramatic fashion.

A burnt orange sky and sun and the speck of a jump gate

It might have been the one with the Fortizar, I do not remember.  It was time stamed 10 minutes after the one above… so maybe, if above was my arrival shot.  That was it for the night, everybody was docked up and I finally went to bed, close to two hours later than my usual time.

Proof that I am old and never pay the price for staying up late (because I don’t sleep well in any case so how could I possibly tell), I got up at the usual “before my alarm clock goes off” time and, as I had something for breakfast, logged the whole group back in, and lit the covert cyno again, this time between the uprights of the Keepstar.

The cyno is lit

One last jump and I had arrived.

14:03:51- A Conduit Field activated by Wilhelm Arcturus jumps you to UALX-3.

All of which is kind of a dull story in retrospect.  I didn’t get into any trouble or do anything spectacularly wrong, like jumping to a hostile cyno beacon.  On the other hand, I did undock a lot more than I could afford to replace.

And I know the whole trip made me tense because I took three screen shots along the way, the three I posted above.  I am usually a complete tourist, taking screen shots of the sky, stations, my ships, and what not.  When I don’t do that it is usually because I am focused on the mission at hand.

Anyway, it was probably a wasted effort.  By the time the weekend came around we had the big move through the regional gate and most everything I had ended up in Catch and ready to move safely.  Even the incursion is gone.  But sometimes I seem to need to undock and do something like this.

A Player Owned Customs Office being attacked

Council of Stellar Management 19

If you have an Omega (which is to say, subscribed) account that is older than 60 days you are eligible to vote.

To learn about the CSM, what it does, and how you can vote, the links below are much more useful than, say, going over the r/eve and reading whatever is going on there today.

• CCP – CSM 19 – Cast Your Vote Now!
• CCP – CSM Voting Page
• CCP – CSM19 Dev Blog
• CCP – CSM 19 Candidate Announcements
• CCP – CSM Candidate Campaign Forum
• CCP – The Roles and Duties of a member of the Council of Stellar Management
• EVE Uni – Council of Stellar Management

In addition, I have all 47 candidates listed below with links to their required campaign forum post (except Storm Delay whose post I could not find):

The rest is up to you if you are eligible to vote.

Redeemers find a new victim

From Delve to the east

After the announcement… and complaints and recriminations from a few of our foes… the first week of the move was spent consolidating everything at the Keepstar in 1DQ1-A while I was impatient and in a panic by turns as to how I was going to move everything.  Mostly covered here, though I got up to some side things I’ll try to write about later.  The usual bad idea adventure thing.

The second week after the announcement seemed to be focused on getting everybody from the Keepstart in 1DQ1-A to the Keepstar in 49-U6U, the last stop in Querious before the regional gate into Catch.  The regional gate, the choke point where everything has to gate or go way around, dozens of jumps the other way in order to get past, was declared red because people jumping through on their own were getting popped by opportunistic gate camps.

There were plenty of people still in Delve trying to grab loners and strays, but the gate between 49-U6U in Querious and 4-07MU in Catch was a magnet for hostiles.

So the plan was to get us all ready to go in 49-U6U then bust through together with covering fleets clearing the way.  All week long there were safe cyno fleets and bridging titans available to get ships to 49-.  I got my two remaining Delve capitals, loaded with as many ships as they could carry in their maintenance bays, to the system and then flew individual expensive ships and anything I didn’t want to repackage and send via one of the shipping services.

This exercise of moving things got me to repackage almost everything in the end.  I spent a good 2 billion ISK on rewards for courier contracts to ship things to UALX, Jita, Amarr (which is cheaper and seemed more likely to get done than the Jita contracts, two of which are still waiting) so I wouldn’t have to fly or haul ships myself. (Some Tengu hulls are up for sale in Amarr still.)

Granted, looking at my transactions, I ended up selling more than 3 billion ISK worth of stuff on the market myself or via a market alt, so cash wise I am not hurting.  But I know at the far end, in UALX I will end up buying a lot of expensive rigs and probably more than a few modules that I sent to Jita instead of our new staging.

And then I threw what was left towards 49-U6U, and then got out my alliance alts and got them sorted and moving forward as well.  I have a lot of stuff in motion and I barely represent even the tiniest glimpse of a sliver of what is being moved.  The Monthly Economic Report for October is going to be worth examining because the value of all of that stuff moving out of Delve, for example, will be reflected.

All those move ops over the week culminated yesterday in the big move, the jump between the two systems.  The Saturday 19:00 UTC fireside was a brief update about how we were going to move forward through the region gate, then fleets were posted and everybody who could piled on into the game.

It was pretty busy Saturday in EVE Online, with peak concurrent hitting 36,015 capsuleers in the game, a total we haven’t reached in a while.  Now, I am not saying that was all because of our move op, but when we go into 49-U6U we pushed past the 4K mark.

Filling up the system

The number peaked past the 4,200 mark in the main system, plus an easy 1,200 or more capsuleers in 1DQ1-A, 4-07MU, UALX, and other points along the trail that was planned for the day.  That 36K peak concurrent hit at 19:18 UTC, as we were all piling in after the fireside, which meant about 1 player in 8 in the game was somehow connected to or affected by this operation.

However, there were troubles right away.  As you can see above, time dilation was already pegged to 10% and we weren’t even really in motion yet.  Leadership had asked CCP to map the system nodes to accommodate this move op, but for some reason they put 1DQ1-A and 49-U6U on the same node together, which were the two peak systems as we started.  Angry Mustache posted a meme about this to Reddit with an explainer in the comments.

Later 1DQ was mapped to a different node, but leadership had to get on coms and ask people to log off if they were not in specific groups that were slated to move first.

The groups asked to stay were freighters and Rorquals, who would be the first go take the gate, and covering fleets, which included super carriers on the Keepstar, titans on the gate, as well as a fleet of Rokhs and a fleet of Harpies.  Not being in the former move group, I logged out two of my characters and put the third in a Harpy and joined the covering fleet.  I then undocked and got on the gate to watch the parade begin.

Leadership had a plan to control the chaos.  They put a few heavy interdictor cruisers on the Keepstar with their bubbles up.

The Keepstar with the move about to commence

The bubbles were there to prevent people from warping, to act as a sort of traffic control so they could put the breaks on the move if something happened or slow down the flow if the server started lagging or disconnecting people.  On the main undock in front there were actually left and right bubbles that somebody said would alternate, letting people warp in smaller packs, though looking at the video I don’t think that ever happened.  But they clearly turned traffic on and off at various times.  The bubbles on top were to keep antsy super pilots from going early or from getting warped off if they disconnected.

With all of this in place and the cover fleets watching, the first bubble went down and capitals started warping to the gate.  They let both lower bubbles down so it was a freight train of capitals landing on the regional gate.

Here they come!

Time dilation, which had eased up after more than a thousand people logged off in the system, began to hit hard again as all those ships transitioned to the far side of the connection.

That went on for well over an hour.  I have screen shots with time stamps well past 20:00 UTC with a continuous stream of freighters, Rorquals, and some other capitals that should have held back but people get in a rush or don’t follow the instructions.

More haulers… and others… hitting the gate

Some of them made multiple round trips they had so much to haul, so it was a while before other capitals were allowed to start joining the stream.  And then the stream of ships, which had only slackened a bit, was revved back up again.

The trail of capitals headed to the gate

When the clearance for other capitals was given I logged in my capital alt and sent him through the gate in my old Archon, carrying all I could stuff into it.  He got through the gate and docked up at the Keepstar on the other side.  I had set the 49-U6U Keepstar as his home station, so I could just self-destruct him to send him back for another run.

But before he went again I swapped characters around, put him in a Harpy, logged out the other character… who got on a couple of kill mails, the first in over a year… and got Wilhelm out to push my Ninazu through the gate to the other side.

Then, around 22:00, or nearly three hours into the op, which started at 19:00, the word went out that it was the turn of the supers.  The bubbles went up on the main undock and down on the upper area where supers undock on a Keepstar and off they went.

The caps waiting for the supers to clear the gate

Somebody caught a video of the supers being freed to warp off and posted it to Reddit.

Another player put together a nice, sped up view of the gate in 49-U6U with all the capitals landing and jumping through.

Eventually we hit a point where we were clear to gate subcaps and I docked up and started pushing those through, as I had more to move than my capitals could carry.  That was undock, gate, dock up, leave ship, self destruct, appear back at the start, board the next ship, then undock to do it again.

I didn’t have a lot of subcaps to move, but a few battleships and battlecruisers that wouldn’t all fit into my capitals in a single return trip.  That was done pretty quickly, at which point we were under a thousand capsuleers in either system.  Things wound down as the initial rush of people eager to get themselves across the region gate tapered off.

There were still people moving from 1DQ1-A, so safe cyno and bridging fleets went up to move people forward to 49-U6U.  Wilhelm still had… still has… a few ships to move forward, so I had my main and each alt move one forward then fly it through the regional gate.  What is now left back in 1DQ are things that can safely go on their own.

Meanwhile, while our foes didn’t strongly contest this move op… while active in small groups, they haven’t really done much besides try to pick off stragglers and easy marks… they did send some bombers and interceptors out to once again try to pick off targets of opportunity.

In the cover fleet we were not completely idle and just watching the ships go by.  We chased off some bombers and saved a Rorqual that somehow got caught on another gate in 49-U6U.

Rorqual rescued

Some interceptors were running around and we chased them and managed to catch a few in dictor bubbles before the rest flew off looking for easier targets.

Speaking of interdictors and their bubbles, a wily Sabre pilot managed to put up a bubble behind the Keepstar in 4-07MU close enough in to act as a drag bubble.  There is a whole drag effect of interdictor bubbles that will pull ships that land close enough into them, and this pulled some capitals past the Keepstar and into open space where they were vulnerable.

Capitals left out in the open

The Harpy fleet rolled up and chased off the interdictor and shepherded the caps, but somebody had the idea to put a heavy interdictor on the undock on front of the Keepstar to basically catch all warping ships within range to dock up to prevent this routine

I went over to DOTLAN later in the evening, around 4:00 UTC of the next day, game time, to see what sort of stats the two systems put up for the move op.  There were a lot of jumps into and out of those two systems.

Some stats for the two target systems

More than 40K jumps in a 24 hour period is a lot of jumps.  For comparison Jita, which is easily the busiest system in New Eden and has people coming and going all hours, such that CCP always runs it on its own node, had 58K jumps in the same 24 hours.  Amarr, the second trade hub of New Eden, had about 27K.

And all of that was just yesterday’s fleet ops around the regional gate.  There were moves getting to the point where ships could jump into those systems during the day.  There were more last night in Delve as KarmaFleet assembled all of its goods.   And there will be more today for sure and some more in the coming week.  We’ll be moving people from Delve through that gate for a while.

On the far side of the gate, however, things get a bit easier.  There is not another similar situation that would require people to take a gate.  It will be all capital jumps or bridges to cynos on Keepstars where you can land, dock up, let your timer run down, then undock and move on to the next location.  I’ll be able to run up and back the chain a few extra times and get everything to our new home easily enough.

Granted, I still have shipping contracts waiting to be picked up.  I might have to go back to 1DQ and deal with those again.  And I have a few small ships there that can make their way on their own.  But, for me at least, the big effort, the crossing of the regional gate into Catch, is done for most everything I want to carry forward.

So all of that yesterday was mostly just to get people through one regional gate.

Now to wait for those cyno fleets to start so I can move further east.

• Alliance Tournament XX Starting Tomorrow!

The feeders and other preliminaries are out of the way and all that is left is for the final 32 teams to take to the field and decide who has it all figured out this year.

I’m just rolling this for all further ATXX posts…

CCP has a Google sheet posted with the schedule for this weekend and next.  But the only known matches will be tomorrow, so I’ll post a screen grab of that.

Alliance Tournament XX Day One

The final winner will be decided on the afternoon of the 27th with the best of five match up for the whole enchilada.  Will the defending champions, Fraternity won ATXIX, be able to defend their crown?

Also, I was looking for a text list of all the groups in the tournament and the best I could do was the flagship list.  But that is all of them.

| Team Name                 | Flagship 
|---------------------------|-----------------------
| Arrival.                  | Vargur 
| Brave Collective          | Bhaalgorn 
| Bright Side of Death      | Leshak 
| Deteriorated              | Armageddon Navy Issue 
| Evasive Maneuvering.      | Leshak 
| Exodus.                   | Armageddon Navy Issue 
| Fraternity.               | Armageddon Navy Issue 
| Genshin Impact Alliance   | Armageddon Navy Issue 
| Goonswarm Federation      | Bhaalgorn 
| Hole Control              | Barghest 
| IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII | Bhaalgorn 
| NO NEED LOOSE FACE        | Armageddon Navy Issue 
| Odin's Call               | Armageddon Navy Issue 
| Of Essence                | Armageddon Navy Issue 
| OnlyFleets.               | Barghest 
| Pandemic Horde            | Vindicator 
| Paper Numbers             | Armageddon Navy Issue 
| Platinum Sensitivity.     | Bhaalgorn 
| Plug N Play               | Armageddon Navy Issue 
| Post Pod Clarity          | Armageddon Navy Issue 
| Ragequit Cancel Sub       | Vindicator 
| Ronin Reloaded            | Armageddon Navy Issue 
| Rote Kapelle              | Armageddon Navy Issue 
| SL0W CHILDREN AT PLAY     | Vindicator 
| Snuffed Out               | Bhaalgorn 
| Templis CALSF             | Bhaalgorn 
| The Tuskers Co            | Bhaalgorn 
| Till Doomsday             | Vindicator 
| Truth. Honour. Light.     | Bhaalgorn 
| Unspoken Alliance.        | Bhaalgorn 
| WE FORM V0LTA             | Barghest 
| White Squall.             | Bhaalgorn

For those interested, there are 12 Armageddon Navy Issues, 10 Bhaalgorns, 4 Vindicators, 3 Barghests, 2 Leshaks, and a Vargur on that list… for whatever that is worth.

I am a fairly casual AT fan… if I could even be considered a fan… but I will have CCP’s Twitch channel up as much as possible during the event, if only to earn drops and channel points that can be traded in for SKINs.

Addendum: After I wrote this CCP finally put up a post about ATXX and got their own brackets site up.  So those are now available.

• CSM19 Elections Still Going!

Voting started yesterday and effectively runs, for those of us in the US, until this coming Wednesday.

Council of Stellar Management 19

I know, I did a whole post about this yesterday, but here are all the links again today.

• CCP – CSM 19 – Cast Your Vote Now!
• CCP – CSM Voting Page
• CCP – CSM19 Dev Blog
• CCP – CSM 19 Candidate Announcements
• CCP – CSM Candidate Campaign Forum
• CCP – The Roles and Duties of a member of the Council of Stellar Management

Vote now so you can complain later with full authenticity about how the organization of the null sec blocs dominate while low sec and wormhole candidates suffered through their usual chaos.

• Further Updates on the Revenant Expansion

We heard previously that the Revenant expansion is set to land on November 12th.

The Revenant Expansion is Coming

As part of the run up to that launch CCP has released a bit more information about what they have planned… though not much… but then, there isn’t a lot to the Revenant expansion so far, so there isn’t much to share.

That dev blog has a video that goes through some of the features.

I appreciate the effort, and there are some useful items in there around corporation projects, like being able to make them with multiple goals or being able to limit the maximum participation payout to members, but I do tend to be quite skeptical about its ability to run a Ship Replacement Program (SRP).  I did not see anything there that would match a fit against a template, and most large organization programs require you to fly an exact fit.

I could also imagine some problems/abuse of this with it paying out the current market value of the hull, modules, and cargo.  You need to include cargo for refits and ammo, but what happens if I looted something expensive or just shoved something in there unrelated to the doctrine.  Should I really get recompense for my Fedo or exotic dancers?

Anyway, SRP things are way above my pay grade.  My only experience is being on the supplicant end of such systems, and until it can reject a loss with a caustic comment about the rigs still being in the cargo it isn’t there yet.

• Equinox Totality Day is Coming

Meanwhile, CCP is trying to wrap up the parts of the Equinox expansion they are simply pushing into Revenant, like all the null sec sovereignty changes.  Those will all be mandatory come October 29th.

Equinox – in progress since June 11, 2024

We’ll see about the the rejuvenation aspect as time goes on, but there is a decent thread up on r/eve attempting to call out the winners and losers with this return to a state where a system’s true sec dictates its usefulness and location matters.

• Crimson Harvest Crawls On

I am going to say right now that Crimson Harvest came out of the gate slow, dull, and a bit broken this year.  The only people enthusiastic about it as it launched seemed to be suicide gankers who love the 90% drop rate so much that they doubled their efforts to blap unsuspecting haulers in high sec.  I am going to have to look at Uedama kills in with the next MER.

Crimson Harvest 2024

While I will have a whole post about the event at some point, it did get a little bit better as time went on… mostly because many people saw how slow progress was going to be and gave up.  But that is just more hacking sites for me… when I can find them… and they are the right kind.

Four launchers, four missiles on the way

Council of Stellar Management 19

In the CSM19 schedule of events we are now in the voting period.

• 17 September – 1 October: Candidate Submissions and application processing begins
• 4 October: Candidate Announcement
• 4-14 October: CSM 19 Campaign Period
• 17-24 October: CSM 19 Voting Period

There is no date announced for the results yet, save for a statement that it will come after the voting period ends.

I’m also still unsure what candidates were expected to do on the 15th and 16th… except maybe get banned from the election?  Is there time set aside for that now?

Voting is already active as of this post and runs until 11:00 UTC on Thursday, October 24th.  That is downtime next Thursday, the usual cut-off time for most EVE Online events.

For those of us in the US, that means that we need to get our votes in by Wednesday the 23rd or risk sleeping through the end of the election.

In order to vote you must have an Omega (which is to say, subscribed) account that is older than 60 days.  No poors, no Alphas.

That being said, you don’t need to spend the $20 cash or the 2.5 billion ISK to get 30 days of play time.  CCP offers a special Weekend Fleet Pack that gets you three days of Omega time and 50 PLEX for $3.75, so you have a pretty modestly priced way to be able to pay your way to the ballot box.  Are you that committed to the election?

Then there is the candidate list, below in alphabetical order.

There are 47 candidates on the ballot, down two from the initial announcement.  Alcoholic Satan was removed by CCP as noted previously and Yondu Quill withdrew, which was announced in his campaign forum thread.

The voting page and all the CCP information is linked below.  As I run across ballots for various groups I will put them in the comments just for reference.

Now is the time to vote.  You only get seven days.  Most people get their votes in on the first day or the last day of the election.  Don’t be the person who forgot.

Related:

• CCP – CSM 19 – Cast Your Vote Now!
• CCP – CSM Voting Page
• CCP – CSM19 Dev Blog
• CCP – CSM 19 Candidate Announcements
• CCP – CSM Candidate Campaign Forum
• CCP – The Roles and Duties of a member of the Council of Stellar Management

A Dialogue on Life, Death, and Eternal Service

Me: “I can hardly imagine the intensity of living and fighting on the front lines. How do you cope with the cycle of death and rebirth?”

Friend: “Honestly, after the first ten times, I stopped counting. You just accept it as part of this life. Each rebirth is a chance to fight another day for what we believe in.”

This stark admission brought the brutal realities of factional warfare into sharper relief, illustrating the profound personal costs that come with such a commitment.

Exploring My Role in the Amarr Cause

Our conversation meandered through the tactical and the philosophical, exploring not just the mechanics of warfare but the deeper reasons behind our choices as capsuleers.

Me: “With every rebirth, do you feel more committed to the cause?”

Friend: “Absolutely. Each time is a reminder of our purpose. But remember, not everyone on the front lines is a direct combatant. There are many ways to support the cause that don’t require you to risk everything in battle.”

Her words echoed in my mind as I contemplated how my skills and my ship’s efficient setup could serve the Empire. My Harbinger, optimized for endurance and equipped with energy turrets that use crystals for ammo, seemed ideally suited for extended engagements, whether in direct conflict or supporting roles.

The Role of Support in Warfare

Me: “Could my penchant for efficiency and support be as valuable as fighting?”

Friend: “Definitely. Logistics, repairs, even strategic reconnaissance—every role supports the war effort in its own way. And with your setup, you could maintain operations far from supply lines, a crucial advantage.”

Weighing the Impact of Factional Warfare

Our discussion also touched on the broader implications of these conflicts on the Empire’s standing in New Eden.

Me: “Do these skirmishes really impact the Empire’s strength?”

Friend: “Each victory, each loss, shapes the narrative and the reality of our Empire’s power. Everyone, no matter their role, contributes to that.”

Conclusion: Contemplating the Path of a Peaceful Warrior

Reflecting on our conversation, I remain torn between the serene path of exploration and the urgent, vibrant call of supporting our factional endeavors. While I may not seek the adrenaline of battle, I am increasingly aware that my actions, however small, could uphold the values and security of the Amarr Empire.

As I contemplate my next steps, I realize that engagement doesn’t always require a weapon; sometimes, the greatest weapon at our disposal is our ability to support and sustain those on the front lines. My decision lies not just in choosing between peace and war but in finding a way to contribute that resonates with both my capabilities and my convictions.

A POS bubbles, warp disruption bubbles, and a moon

CSM18 is coming

CCP Arcade posted the following the in the official forums:

It has been a while since we have had a CSM issue like this.  There is often somebody who steps down or gets kicked or, as happened earlier this year, goes to work for CCP.

The tale is that when doing an open house talk with his alliance he shared too much of what he knew about some aspects of the upcoming Revenant expansion, the lines being a bit blurry about what he thought was already public knowledge.  What he shared began to make the rounds and when CCP opened up the investigation he admitted he was the source.  That there had to be an investigation meant CCP needed to act.

He may be able to run again at a future date, but for now his account has been banned for 60 days and he will be removed from the CSM19 ballot when it goes live on Thursday.

Related:

• CCP – Forum Post Announcement
• Reddit – Thread on the announcement

This group was to be called the Reavers.

Reavers forum bee

In my head I seem to recall the name Reavers being a placeholder (and a Firefly reference because we’re all nerds on this bus) and then nothing better came up, so it stuck.  But that was also ten years ago and I struggle to remember what I had for lunch yesterday, so maybe it was the name was set at the time?  Also, I had not heard of Asher up to that point.  But I had been hanging around the Freedom Squad ops as they were trying to drum up more people to participate.

I had to actually borrow much of the above text from past write ups as the memories of the time have faded.  And since I started down that path, I might as well continue.  Better to repeat my thoughts from 2015 where the details were fresh in my head than try to piece together memories now ten years in the past.

In a null sec of far flung rental empires that existed at that time, the Phoebe expansion was set to curtail the ability to bridge, jump, or otherwise move fleets rapidly across many light years. In a war, a group with a large area to defend would have to commit to the front lines of any conflict.

In this situation, Reavers were to go deep into the enemy’s territory, far behind the front lines, and cause havoc by blowing up SBUs, reinforcing towers, siphoning mining operations, setting timers, disabling station services, snapping jump bridge connections, and generally making such a nusance of ourselves. The enemy would thus be forced to decide between fighting on the front lines or putting out fires deep in their rear areas.

The Reavers themselves would arrive via wormholes, carrying all they needed in their Ishtars. They would live in, and log out from, safe spots and refit via mobile depots. (I had to check, but mobile depots arrived in 2013.  They were required for those Asher fits.) They would, scout, hit targets of opportunity, set timers, call in coalition support for particularly juicy targets (like capital ship assembly arrays), but otherwise safe up, cloak up, and log off should the enemy show up in force. Our existence was to be denied, we were never to speak in local, we were to be a rumor and a story to scare renters with when it was dark out.

And such was our modus operandi for a while, so long as the large rental empires remained.  You can read about the state of the then CFC (The Imperium was not declared until April of 2015) and null sec in that State of the Goonion link, which goes to the Internet Archive in the hope that the link won’t decay like the rest of my links when The Mittani dot com turned into Imperium News. (Mentioned in that was the attempt to start a casino of our own. Also, we were trying to have a rental empire for a bit.)

In that brief moment of time when the SIG was being founded enrollment was briefly open to all who applied and I wandered in and signed up, never having joined a SIG or squad in my two years in the CFC.  I was strictly a main fleet F1 monkey up to that point.  Granted, I am not much more than that now, but I know how to use a mobile depot to refit in space and can make bookmarks for safes and a few other space boy scout skills.

That first year of Reavers was very active.  I wrote about our deployments, though I was, as I remain, sensitive about revealing what might be useful intel.  It takes a bit of hubris to believe somebody was reading these reports or that I knew enough to pass along any intel of use, but still I took some care, usually writing about things some time after the fact.

This is what I recorded for that first year.

• Notes from an Undisclosed Location in the Insmother Region – Oct. 23, 2014
• Home from Camping in Insmother – Oct. 27, 2014
• Song of the South – Oct. 31, 2014
• Feythabolis and the Fight at ZS-2LT – Nov. 3, 2014
• Meanwhile, Somewhere in Omist… – Nov. 7, 2014
• Returned from Omist – Nov. 17, 2014
• Picking the Right Fleet – NCDot Supers Down in Querious – Dec. 5, 2014
• Back from Operations in Querious – Dec. 17, 2014
• When You Know You Are Making a Difference (The Willy Nilly email) – Feb. 8, 2015
• The Same Old Rumor of War – Mar. 16, 2015
• Fountain, Wartime Jabber, and Points South – Mar. 23, 2015
• Punitive Expedition to Delve – Mar. 27, 2015
• Tales from the War in Delve and Querious – Apr. 6, 2015
• Reavers Represent (Jacket Pals begin) – Apr. 8, 2015
• Back and Forth Across Fountain and Delve as Dominion Fades – Apr. 13, 2015
• In Your Systems Taking Your Space – Apr. 20, 2015
• Doing the Null Sec Shuffle – May 20, 2015
• A Feast for Ravens – May 27, 2015
• The Revenant Kill in JU-0WQ (Reavers in Ravens) – Jun. 1, 2015
• Entosis Link Modules in Action in Querious – Jun. 3, 2015
• Dominion Sovereignty Quirks and the Bloody Defense of ED-9LT – Jun. 8, 2015
• Departures from Querious for Points North – Jun. 9, 2015
• Learning to do the Fozzie Sov Shuffle – Jul. 17, 2015
• Towers Still Give Kill Mails – Sep. 14, 2015
• The Unusual Scent of Victory in Period Basis – Sep. 18, 2015
• Throwing Claws Around Cloud Ring – Sep. 24, 2015
• While We Were Away – Oct. 28, 2015

That is pretty much peak Reavers.  We were let loose and running around hostile space being a nuisance and blowing stuff up.  Key items of “Reavers lore” like the “willy nilly” email from Lady Scarlet and the defense of the station at ED-9LT took place that year.  It was an age of legends.

That was also the last bit of null sec before Aegis/Fozzie sov was implemented.  It was a strange state.  There was a point when you could shoot station services and disable things like the clone bay.  But entosis modules and Upwell structures were on their way.  And the Casino War.

I still need to write a consolidated post about the Casino War to bring together all I wrote about it during and after.  I need to do that for a few conflicts I suppose.  I can’t leave it at just the Fountain War… Andrew Groen has been talking about writing another Empires of EVE book to round things out as a trilogy and I link to a lot of source material.

That made the second years somewhat quiet, with only these posts:

• Wicked Creek Without a Paddle – November 12, 2015
• Home from Wicked Creek – November 18, 2015
• Typhoons and Jackdaws on a Saturday Afternoon – January 18. 2016
• Reavers Move South Again – January 25, 2016
• Last Flight of the Raven – February 12, 2016
• The Defense of the 60M-TG Station and Our Return to the North – February 14, 2016
• Casino War happens and we end up in Delve
• Delve Conquest Complete – September 14, 2016
• Scenes from an Astrahus Kill in Querious – October 11, 2016
• Barghests Down in Querious Astrahus Fight – October 24, 2016

In year three we were back to our usual business, including the camp of the traitors of Circle of Two in Impass.  We were later told that we had a spy who was going to betray them and we were there to cover operations should they proceed, but that didn’t come to pass until later.  We came home and had to await Judgement Day for CO2.

Year four found us working out of an NPC station in Pure Blind for what would later become a full scale war.  I was actually tired of EVE Online at that time and was considering taking a break.  But then the whole thing developed of the months of the deployment.  We were active as a group for possibly the last time in a full campaign.  And even that was difficult because Asher became the Imperium sky marshal and was directing operations against such targets as a resurgent Circle of Two.  But we helped ignite the fire of war that ended with a payoff in faction Fortizars.

This was also the start of Zungen ops, where we were added to pings to go help the Black Ops squad drop on hostile ratters.  That lasted up until just a couple of months ago when Bee Foreign Legion (BFL) squad was formed… another USTZ group… and became the source for auxiliaries for Black Ops.  (I applied but was kicked when the changed the requirements to include capital operations, which my meager PI financed budget could not sustain.)

Things start to slow down somewhat after year five.  We went on occasional ops, and were a source for special activities when needed, but Asher being heavily involved in main fleet operations kept him busy.  Then came the 59 weeks of World War Bee with Asher again as sky marshal.  Then there was the fall of The Mittani and Asher ascending to the leadership of the Imperium.

Kind of hard to run a small squad on the side when you rule a massive coalition.

Still, Reavers feel like it is one of ours running the show.  More than one of ours, really, as a number of Reavers have ended up in director positions within GSF.

My only post with the Reavers tag since the ninth anniversary involves Zungen ops and ramping up operations in the Dronelands.  I went along with that until I didn’t make the cut for BFL, at which point I was off the ping list.  Some day I’ll move the stuff I have stored there back to Jita to dispose of… but I have other moving priorities right now.

We still have a channel on Mumble and a Discord server and there is still and annual Reavers Secret Santa, which I much prefer to the wide open GSF Secret Santa.  But otherwise things are pretty quiet for Reavers these days.

My past annual posts about the group which summarizes, if not all the activities, at least the ones I was around for.

• A Year of Reavers
• Two Years of Reavers
• Three Years of Reavers
• Four Years of Reavers
• Five Years of Reavers
• Six Years of Reavers
• Seven Years of Reavers
• Eight Years of Reavers
• Nine Years of Reavers

What will the next year bring?  I suspect things will continue to be quiet, that the time for Reavers may have passed for good.  But you never know.

Addendum:

Pinged out coalition wide using all – all rather than “jacketpals” or “praiseboat” or one of the ping targets that have been used over the years for Reavers.  There was much comment in the Elysium channel.

Also, if I have a role in Reavers, it is “anniversary reminder guy.”

EVE Online nerds harder

Here are the usual places to look if you want more details or different coverage of New Eden economic activity for the month.

• CCP – September 2024 Monthly Economic Report
• CCP – September 2024 MER Forum Thread
• Reddit – September 2024 MER Thread
• TNG –  September 2024 Activity In EVE Online
• TNG – A Look At The September 2024 Active ISK Delta
• YouTube – September MER Analysis with CSMs Oz, Luke, and Angry Mustache

Overall Summary

September saw reported 456,571 hulls, structures, and capsules destroyed, down slightly from the 462,589 reported in August.  But September had one less day to go, and give that the daily haul of kills in the low five digit range, that means the daily activity was up a bit.

Specifically, the average destruction per day in September was 15,219, up from the 14,922 per day in August, which represented the lowest value for that metric since October of 2023, before the Havoc expansion set the numbers on fire.  Still, in June that number was still up at 17,534 per day.  Things did slump over the summer, but maybe they recovered a bit in September.

Jester’s average online users chart comparing the last four years still looks a little flat in September.

Sep 2024 – Avg players logged in four year comparison

But that is also a 30 day rolling average, so it always influenced by the previous month, and August was a low point.  My own, less granular average kills per day chart shows a trace of an uptick.

Sep 2024 – Avg destruction per day four year comparison

Then again, August was a low point for 2023 as well.

On the ISK front, September saw the loss of 38.73 trillion ISK, an uptick from the 37.89 trillion ISK lost in August.  So things were up these, though even August was up a bit from July, so more expensive things are being lost…or CCP’s management of the economy is just making things more expensive.

Sep 2024 – Economic Indices

That shows the mineral price index at a new all time high, and all our ships are made with those minerals.

The month itself showed mostly the usual pattern of weekend peaks and mid-week valleys.

Sep 2024 – Daily ISK and Loss Count

Saturday, September 7th seemed to be the pinnacle of destruction for the month, but I don’t know what happened.  I was in Hawaii sitting on a beach or floating in the ocean that day.

Top 20 Most Frequent Losses by Class and Hull

Once again to the chart I both like and dislike.  The raw data is of interest, but its somewhat unchanging nature does make it feel a bit stale at times.  There are always the usual suspects on this chart.

I guess the lesson from capsules making up nearly 25% of the total might give some insight into the likelihood of you being podded when you lose your ship.  You’re still more likely to get away than not, but clearly lots of pods died to bring you this chart.

And shuttles are, overall, in second place.  But you know I’ll get to that, as I inevitably do.

Hulls Lost only Once This Month

The once per month club, excluding POS towers and modules along with fighter squadrons, if fairly short this month.

Probably the biggest deal on that list is the Azariel, the Angel Cartel pirate faction titan introduced with the Havoc expansion, of which there are scant few in New Eden.   As it turns out, Brave lost the first Azariel.  Also, Brave killed the first Azariel.  They built one and blew it up themselves to get the first such kill.  I was going to do a post about it, but somebody else went into much greater depth than I would have, so read all about it here.

The Cybele is an ATXIX ship, of which only three have been blown up to this point.

Another Echelon bit the dust in September as well.  These were given out as part of the Incursion expansion and have a bonus to hacking data sites.  I happened to be in Amarr space where mine is parked, so I stopped in and undocked it for a screen shot.

Taking the Echelon out for a spin

It only has one mid slot for a data analyzer, so I guess you need somebody scanning for you.  Also, it will not make this list for October, because three are dead already this month.  A crimson harvest indeed.

Top 20 Total ISK Lost by Hull Type

Which hulls accounted for the most ISK lost in September.

As always, capsules win through sheer quantity, Vargurs for a combo of quantity and expense, and capitals though just being expensive hulls.

Top 20 Regions by ISK and Hull Losses

Now to where those ships were lost, starting at the regional level.

Say what you will about Pochven being an ISK faucet, a lot of expensive stuff gets blown up there.  Quality and quantity, as it is in second place on the overall hull count, and would be in first place were it not for that ONE system in The Forge you know I am going to mention.

Next month I am going to predict that Delve is going to jump up to at least second place, if not first, bases on all the losses we’re seeing as people try to move their stuff on their own, as I mentioned in my post yesterday.  Titans have been exploding.  Those add up.

Top 20 Systems by ISK and Hull Losses

Then we drill down to the system level destruction.

As always, you can often pick up on the system losses by ISK as they tend to favor hot spots in low and null sec.  For example, K7D-II is on the list… for that Azariel Brave blew up, as mentioned above.

You can also see where in Pochven the action is.

For the count though, once again we see Uitra at the top of the list for count while being in 26,15th place for ISK, ringing up just 2.2 billion ISK in losses.  That is a mere 64K ISK per loss.

The Obligatory Count from Uitra

Once again, let’s see what was blow up in Uitra where 7.58% of all the hulls and capsules blew up in New Eden this past September

All told, that is 20,378 shuttles, or nearly 1 in three of all shuttles blow up in September.  That percentage holds true for corvettes as well, with over 10K Ibis blowing up.

The shuttle tally so far in 2024:

• September – 20,378
• August – 20,298
• July – 35,739
• June – 39,863
• May – 37,008
• April – 27,446
• March – 22,149
• February – 26,778
• January – 20,674

It has been much higher, but I think the shuttle lords have shifted a bit over to rookie ships, which are free, for some aspects of this.  And on it goes… but what is “it” in this context?  That is the question I keep asking.

Last month somebody wondered why I didn’t just go there to see what was going on.  The system is only a few gates from Jita and I have a couple high sec alts in the neighborhood, so I did.

There I ran into the nature of time, space, and New Eden… which is to say, you don’t have to just be in the right system, but in the right spot in the right system at the right moment.  There are 43,200 minutes in the month of September, so something was being popped about every 90 seconds in the system, but some of that was in batches or in parallel, some of it on the undock and some of it at a safe spot somewhere in the system.

So I saw things.  I saw the undock littered with abandoned Ibis and cargo containers from kills.

Somebody needs to clean off the stoop here…

The overview showed a little more detail.

Stuff on the undock

And there were new characters with dubious names, as one might expect.

Been here one day… are you the 18th Tipokon?

I even went there in a Buzzard to see if could use combat probes to catch somebody in the act at a safe, but no such luck.

So there are all sorts of telltales that some group is using Uitra to grind out quick characters.

I never meet easy kill on a gate in null sec… I want to

So I flew my alt back to their home without much in the way of an answer.

I still find the idea of it being for skill farming alts to be unproven, though I am now considering the possibility that it is, in fact, suicide gank alts being ground out for use by Uedama multi-boxers.  Uedama is in 4th place for ISK destroyed on that system chart.

This came to mind when I saw somebody complaining over on r/eve about a stream multi-boxing a couple dozen gank accounts in Uedama.

A suicide gank alt doesn’t need much in the way of skill points, but they do end up being useless after a certain number of such ganks as their security status drops to the point where CONCORD will just find them and blow them up as soon as they undock in high sec.

So that is my current working theory.  Skill farmers could be using the location as well, but as I noted in the past, there is a cap on how many of those New Eden can support.  A skill farming clone never wears out, there is no need to replace them.  But ganking alts, those are like ammo, to be expended and forgotten.  Easier to grind up some new ones that fix their security status.

Bottom 20 Regions by ISK and Hull Losses

Then, as the chart of the month, I thought I would look at which regions have the least amount of losses, both in ISK and count of hulls.

Regions is about as much as you can zero in for something like this, as there are nearly 450 systems that had just one kill in September and probably more still that saw zero, so didn’t make the chart.  But it is hard to image a whole region failing to have a single kill.

At the top of the list is Yasna Zakh, which has one system, Zarzakh, which was under siege for most of the month… so not much happened there I guess.

I am kind of surprised to see Immensea and Impass on the list.  But, then again, Pandemic Horde abandoned its small allies in the area, so they all just evac’d to safer space closer to Gobbins.

There are also a lot of wormhole regions on that list, but I don’t really have a sense as to how many systems there are to those regions and what class of wormhole the represent.

So it goes.  I expect next month I will be focused on how the Goonswarm Federation move from Delve to Tenerifis and other regions east will impact the MER and the destruction.  Will it top the regional chart?  With 1DQ1-A be at the top of the ISK list for systems?

And will Uitra still rule the count?  Indications are that it will.

Just another seedy space bar in New Eden