Eve becoming cool again

[Endie]

I noticed Viper Squad on some of those killmails... is ole Sith Bandon still flying these days? That Romanian fucker could rage, but I've never been led by a better small gang leader than him.

After a little searching, seems he hasn't been on a kill since April 2015. I don't recognize any names from -VSQ-'s TRI days. Ah well!

Always had a lot of respect for PL. Glad you guys landed there. Well done, Endie.

Funnily enough, a member that left us just before we moved to PL (and that we couldn't let back in for now) is in Viper Squad, FCing a good bit, and it was him that worked with us to get the 24 chimera kills when they tackled Gaara.

[Gets]

A wormhole corporation tried to transfer their planetary customs offices to their alt corp, but somehow messed that up and transferred them to us instead. We now have tax collecting customs offices in a wormhole solarsystem we've never even been to 

[Jayce]

So how is life in PL? How is the culture, compared to CFC/Imperium/whatever? Where do you live (region or general area is enough if it's :opsec:)? What are the goals of PL since they don't own space as far as I know (except a little bit of BOT space that inexplicably survives in a post-Phoebe/Aegis era)?

[Phildo]

Someone else can write a lengthier reply, but it's been a blast.  We're living out of NPC nullsec and BAT splitting time between the north and the south right now.  As far as I can tell, PL's only goal is to fight everyone and kill stuff.  The only downside I've encountered so far is that it's easy to burn through isk keeping up with experimental fleet doctrines.

[Endie]

Someone else can write a lengthier reply, but it's been a blast.  We're living out of NPC nullsec and BAT splitting time between the north and the south right now.  As far as I can tell, PL's only goal is to fight everyone and kill stuff.  The only downside I've encountered so far is that it's easy to burn through isk keeping up with experimental fleet doctrines.

Yeah: while I've yet to lose a ship (helped by the lack of internet for the last ten days when i should have been doing the riskier small gang stuff out of Venal), it is easy to throw cash at every new doctrine that comes along, some of which don't get much of an outing.

Even my napoc is just sitting there collecting dust, although I noticed a fleet going out with them a week or two back in US TZ.

I'll also say again that the actual fleet stuff is part of it but the movie nights and Bob Ross watching and stuff like that is great, too.  There are roughly 1/20th of the real people in PL as there are in the emporium, so you can actually get to know the folks in irc or the people who go on your fleets in your tz.

[Slayerik]

I loved living in Venal. My old stomping grounds... ah the memories. I actually even scouted and tackled a few ratters using directional scanner in the North (and I sucked pretty bad with that thing). It would escalate to small gang fights, then alliances chasing us down and getting raped by our HAC squads. Or us getting caught in a trap that we could usually escape due to our love for Vagas. Unless there were rapiers. Or Huginns. Damn those ships. DAMN THEM TO HELL.

[Meester]

From Sisi some citadel and capital items

This one burns out on use.


Rorqual only drones


Support fighters [includes warp disruption]


Carrier skill and module



Some doomday's



Citadel doomsday



Other citadel defence weapon



Cloaked citadel

[ajax34i]

Someone's also linking pictures of capital-sized NPC rats, in-station billboards, and a cloaking citadel.

[Comstar]

War is coming?


Hmm, seems it's already here.

Is the start of the Third Great Eve War? Someone in the action care to comment? Will it end the Imperiam in the ruins of YA0/VFK? I can't imagine the Collation who really needs a snappier title can go all the way to Deklien, but it looks like C02 *just* missed an event on the scale of Istavaan III that could have destroyed the supercap fleet.

[Sir T]

All I know is that Daopa has been streaming Timer fights around M-0 the last few nights so I imagine something major is going on. I have no idea what though.

[Phildo]

Comstar, you think Money Badger Coalition isn't a snappy enough title?

Everything is mostly speculation right now, but Goonswarm and their allies definitely took a major blow yesterday when CO2 defected.  It still seems unlikely that Deklein will fall, but I'd bet it just depends on who whelps their supercap fleet first.

[Meester]

C02 have switched sides, CFC under attack everywhere, cool beans.

[Endie]

War is coming?


Hmm, seems it's already here.

Is the start of the Third Great Eve War? Someone in the action care to comment? Will it end the Imperiam in the ruins of YA0/VFK? I can't imagine the Collation who really needs a snappier title can go all the way to Deklien, but it looks like C02 *just* missed an event on the scale of Istavaan III that could have destroyed the supercap fleet.

I think that this post, originally from reddit, describes it best:

So I've been seeing a bunch of wtf is going on posts from travelers or people not fully aware of the war going on in Eve, and I got a few messages to post my writeup on the reddit rather than as a comment. So, without further ado:
The political structure of Eve before the war was CFC, a super-coalition of 40,000 members+ having total dominance in the north of the map, in an area called null sec (or 0.0 space, it's lawless and can be player owned). The hallmark of CFC is enormous numbers of people in generally cheap doctrines (doctrine being a set of ships and tactics) to outnumber an enemy. They were considered to be totally unassailable, possessing manpower and resources far beyond even the most powerful of entities in Eve.
Low Sec (0.1 - 0.4 space) is another area of space, and has some laws (not many though). The LowSec entities (known collectively as LSV) are constantly fighting over "moons" (a way of passively generating income for a player group), and their hallmark is obscenely expensive and skill intensive doctrines, to make up for comparatively very small numbers of players.
CFC, the big group up north, have been stagnating because no one wants to fight them (they're known for making fights not fun, by intentionally lagging servers, avoiding fights and when they do fight, bringing so many people they can't possibly lose). To counter-act this, they declared war on LSV to take their moons (the passive income thingys) and force them to fight.
This didn't work. Instead of steamrolling the LSV groups with minimal preparation and effort, they got crushed in pretty much every engagement. By this I mean they'd lose full fleets and kill only one or two ships in return. Gradually they got a little better, but they almost never did "well," almost always losing, and continued to be demolished by fleets that at times were a quarter their size or less.
To counter-act this, they prepared better and got more numbers. In response, the LSV entities put aside their constant squabbling and war mongering to band together into what is affectionately known as "Forming Voltron." (thus the name, Low Sec Voltron – LSV). LowSec Alliances might constantly fight and war with their rivals, but they all hate one thing above all others, and that’s outsiders. The same thing happened again, with CFC losing fights, but on a much larger scale with fights involving thousands of pilots.
After not only defending all their own moons, the LowSec entities proceeded to wipe CFC out of LowSec, taking all their valuable moons in the process. While this was happening, one of the larger Alliances in the CFC (who are a coalition of alliances) pissed of a group called I Want Isk (IWI), and enormously rich and powerful gambling organisation. Something about theft and betrayal, but regardless, they decided to pay these low sec groups to get revenge against the CFC for them (and is likely a major catalyst in them forming together so quickly).
Having successfully expelled CFC from Low Sec, LSV looked for future targets, and with likely direction from the IWI (gambler guys) and Tishu's BLOPs (battleships with a very long range jump drive to attack farming ships) campaign in Fade, set their sights on the north. With the assistance of virtually every major entity in Eve, who answered the call to arms from either being paid by IWI or the glory of the next major war, the new Coalition (who have yet to decide on an official name, although Money Badger Coalition (MBC) seems to be a front-runner) have begun an invasion.
Spread across numerous regions and hundreds of systems, MBC have begun to systematically drive out CFC from their homes. Currently most of the alliance sin the CFC are in full retreat, after having lost several regions that were previously thought to be impregnable. As it currently stands, a large portion of the CFC have been ordered to withdraw to the far north, the home of Goonswarm, the leaders and core of the CFC. A recent address by the leader of goonswarm indicates they intend to use the north as a base to harass the allies as they grind the regions in order to control them totally. As the allies begin to grind out the regions which are increasingly being left undefended, the last few pockets of resistance such as the Co2 Alliance are gradually being worn down.
It is assumed that at some point the allies will move further north, once their latest conquests are secure, to take the fight to Goons. If this happens, you can be almost certain that we will see another battle such as that of B-R5RB several years ago (you can look that up), which resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of assets being lost.
In other words, it’s the war of a century in Eve, with pretty much the entirety of the PvP groups in the game all allied against a single super-coalition. Regardless of who wins, it's going to be a really cool time to be in the game.
Update 1:
As of a few hours ago, the allies / money badgers / whatever won a major strategic victory, successfully taking control of Co2's (a member of the cfc) primary staging system. This is significant because it was defended by the full CFC, lacking only their capital fleet due to their suspicions of a trap (which was actually them reading more into Co2 evaccing than anything).
This was the first major test, and the timer was won whilst inflicting enormous losses from the CFC's subcapital forces, with several fleets being wiped out to a man.
Importantly, M-O is traditionally the bottleneck for accessing the space of the Northern Empires of the past, as it allows access for the allies into the northern regions (where the core of CFC live).
Following the victory, Co2 have declared they will no longer support goons, and it is assumed they will now be supporting the Allies in the hopes of having their space returned to them.
Update 2:
So the leader of the CFC, The Mittani, released their version of events from the M-O fight in a soundcloud recording which you can find HERE.
The gist of it is they felt it was at least a partial victory for them, as they were falsely lead to believe that the whole point of the iHub fight was to trap and kill their super capital fleet (neither side fielded their extensive super capital fleets in this conflict). Note the iHub is a structure which grants control of the system (ownership if you will) and allows upgrades of the system, and thus is essential to controlling the system.
Supercap fleets contain the most powerful ships in Eve, Titans and Super Carriers, neither of which can be docked and must generally always be piloted (thus tying up that pilot whilst the individual owns the ship), resulting in added cost on top of their already enormous build costs (for titans, this number is in the thousands of dollars range).
It is worth noting that the iHub timer is considered important because it allows the Allies to control M-O, which is an important stepping stone to the northern regions, where the CFC has retreated to. Whether they remain ignorant of the system's importance, or merely do not consider it to be important is unclear.
Thus you have the two sides of the conflict spinning this massive fight two different ways, with both claiming victory of different objectives.
~TL;DR~
The largest coalition in the game decided to take a poke at the numerically inferior Low Sec alliances. Instead of crumbling as expected to the superpower, they banded together and pushed them back out of their area of space, taking all of the big coalition's income in the area as they did.
Once people saw it was possible to beat this super-coalition, most of the player groups in the game decided to band together, with encouragement from the enormously rich I Want Isk (IWI) gambling organisation who have grievances with the super-coalitions's component alliances.
Today marked a major victory in taking the strategically important staging system of one of the super-coalition's player groups which caused that group to flip sides to the attackers.
~Very TL;DR~
Big War.
Big group attack little group.
Little group win.
Little group attack big group.
Everyone attack big group now.
Big group losing. Badly.
Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/4c5r7q/what_the_hell_is_going_on/d1ff5om
Edit: For clarity, CFC = The Imperium, they rebranded to Imperium to increase cross-platform marketability (so to other games).

[Meester]

I think that this post, originally from reddit, describes it best:

TLDR - Its all Endies fault?

[ajax34i]

Sounds more like the entire high school ganging up on the one bully.

[Endie]

Sounds more like the entire high school ganging up on the one bully.

Not a bad analogy.

[Comstar]

Reminds me of the feeling when BoB was fighting Goons...just before someone switched off the lights in Delve. Both times in fact.

[Meester]

Goons allies are currently taking most of the pressure, surprisingly Fidelas Constans is not as bad as I thought in engaging but they are still getting their shit pushed in.
Some in FCON alliance chat are blaming CCP and are accusing them of paying the Moneybadger Coaltion in order to drive up subscriptions. Lol.

Lots of tears :P

[Slayerik]

So... somebody give me a guy to shoot stuff with... ;)

[ajax34i]

Cash -> many PLEX -> Skill Injectors -> You can create a new character and take it to 100m skillpoints with your choice of ships trained in about an hour, depending on your clicking fu.

[Phildo]

Start a fresh newbie alt and app to Pandemic Horde.  Best time in Eve.

I'll float isk for skill injectors if vets without accounts want to come back.

[Ginaz]

A hilarious side note to all this is that Mitanni guy is apparently pissed that the war is being referred to as World War Bee.  Maybe he's upset that it's not a very marketable name and his opportunities to monetize it aren't as great.

Edit: Aaand I resubbed.   I stuck deep in Goon territory with a lot my stuff locked away from me and ended up getting my Hurricane destroyed about 10 jumps away from safety.  Not unexpected, though.

[Comstar]

Sounds like the war is over. VFK and YA0 have fallen without a fight. Senior Manager Kismateer got booted for making a joke about leaving. Which was apparently just before the Mittani was going to give him a reward...running https://www.reddit.com/r/eveonlinenews - the only news you need to hear about Goonswarm these days.  Goonswarm Federation has more people in it from Karmafleet now than Goonswarm itself. These are the end days for the 3rd Goon Empire.

I don't doubt Goonswarm will be back...but I think The Mittani needs to leave it and let someone else build it up from the ground up, again. It was never Endie who had gone off the deep end, it was someone much higher than that.

[ajax34i]

The leaks on reddit were pretty amazing and very entertaining (they're not done yet, btw).  It's biased, but still, hilarious. 

The amounts of ISK that some entities have accumulated in this game were surprising (and disheartening) for me.

[Sir T]

Oh yeah, definitely. I earned more money with exploration than I ever had when I played Eve before, which is why CCP started nerfing it hard because fuck new accounts earning decent cash to pay for Plex etc. However some fucktard can have a tower injecting 100+ mill/hour up his cock for years and that's cool, yo. In a channel I was in some guy who was playing for years quit the game in disgust because he just found out how much moon goo was making for some of his alliance mates while they sit on their ivory towers while he was busting his ass to make less than a tenth of it.

And I remember looking at towers with about 20 moon goo canisters during Bob War 1 and thinking "ok they must be using some exploit that the Non elite in eve have no idea about" and lo and behold a year later everyone was shocked, shocked to dicover that there was a moon goo duplication bug that everyone in 0.0 was using.

Speaking of which The account I left training skills has pretty much every scanning skill at 5, bar one that its training now.

[Sir T]

If anyone wants to see some red and blue squares drawing lines at one another, Daopa has some videos up on his twitch channel. This one has a lot of big things involved so its a good example of big battles.

https://www.twitch.tv/daopa/v/61077648

[Endie]

Oh yeah, definitely. I earned more money with exploration than I ever had when I played Eve before, which is why CCP started nerfing it hard because fuck new accounts earning decent cash to pay for Plex etc. However some fucktard can have a tower injecting 100+ mill/hour up his cock for years and that's cool, yo. In a channel I was in some guy who was playing for years quit the game in disgust because he just found out how much moon goo was making for some of his alliance mates while they sit on their ivory towers while he was busting his ass to make less than a tenth of it.

And I remember looking at towers with about 20 moon goo canisters during Bob War 1 and thinking "ok they must be using some exploit that the Non elite in eve have no idea about" and lo and behold a year later everyone was shocked, shocked to dicover that there was a moon goo duplication bug that everyone in 0.0 was using.

Speaking of which The account I left training skills has pretty much every scanning skill at 5, bar one that its training now.

When Himo says "everyone in 0.0 was using" the duping bug, he means one small group of Germans at the head of one alliance and that nobody else was found to be doing it.

I would love to bandy that sort of smear nonsense about Bob, but sadly there is no evidence at all of any such widespread nonsense.

[Meester]

Tell me Endie are you as against Daily Opportunities as I am?
I pay NOT to play WOW and I pay to play in a sandbox.

This is what CCP said in their skill injector blog - 'while we make sure there is one single mechanism that brings new skillpoints in to the system – training.'
Now they bringing something probably cooked up by their ex-EA employee CCP Denebola, that directly contradicts that.

Get CCP to see some sense will you? To say I despise this is really an understatement.

[Endie]

Tell me Endie are you as against Daily Opportunities as I am?
I pay NOT to play WOW and I pay to play in a sandbox.

This is what CCP said in their skill injector blog - 'while we make sure there is one single mechanism that brings new skillpoints in to the system – training.'
Now they bringing something probably cooked up by their ex-EA employee CCP Denebola, that directly contradicts that.

Get CCP to see some sense will you? To say I despise this is really an understatement.

Nah, I'm fine with it: not-logging-in is habit-forming.  Keen newbies who want to log in a lot can gain from it while us bittervets who sit in irc and wait for fleet pings every day won't.

Although the flurry of death when our fleet moves through a gate and spots rats on the far side will be awesome.

[Sir T]

When Himo says "everyone in 0.0 was using" the duping bug, he means one small group of Germans at the head of one alliance and that nobody else was found to be doing it.

I would love to bandy that sort of smear nonsense about Bob, but sadly there is no evidence at all of any such widespread nonsense.

That's because the heads of all the alliances had an emergency meeting and agreed to pull all their dupe towers down before CCP officially acted, and CCP smacked a small alliance to show they had done something(tm) and then said everything was hunky dory (and allowed the "banned" players to make new accounts, and I know they did because one of the "banned" Players showed his email with both the banned message and a "welcome to Eve Online" email right after it). And I wasn't saying anything specifically about BOB, its just what I personally saw. Everyone of the big Alliances at the time was at it.

*shrug*

[Meester]

Nah, I'm fine with it: not-logging-in is habit-forming.  Keen newbies who want to log in a lot can gain from it while us bittervets who sit in irc and wait for fleet pings every day won't.

Although the flurry of death when our fleet moves through a gate and spots rats on the far side will be awesome.

I wish I had your optimism on it but it only kills the sandbox for me in a lazy attempt to appeal to the fickle lowest common denominator while scaring off those who want an eve where
they are the ones that make the goals and not CCP's. CCP is supposed to be HTFU but instead they are trying to psychologically influence players with boring pve is which not going to work
while damaging certain sandbox playstyles and making SP trivial. Skill injectors I don't mind as they come from an existing pool but this is just crap.

When they say 'while we make sure there is one single mechanism that brings new skillpoints in to the system – training.' & a couple of months later add this, you know something is rotten in
Iceland. I'll play eve but if they add this its goodnight sweet prince.

[Sir T]

But by gum those mission running bots are gonna be busy! 

[palmer_eldritch]

Molle Mitanni has always been the biggest asshole in Eve and I look forward to BOB CONDI getting what they deserve.

[Endie]

When Himo says "everyone in 0.0 was using" the duping bug, he means one small group of Germans at the head of one alliance and that nobody else was found to be doing it.

I would love to bandy that sort of smear nonsense about Bob, but sadly there is no evidence at all of any such widespread nonsense.

That's because the heads of all the alliances had an emergency meeting and agreed to pull all their dupe towers down before CCP officially acted, and CCP smacked a small alliance to show they had done something(tm) and then said everything was hunky dory (and allowed the "banned" players to make new accounts, and I know they did because one of the "banned" Players showed his email with both the banned message and a "welcome to Eve Online" email right after it). And I wasn't saying anything specifically about BOB, its just what I personally saw. Everyone of the big Alliances at the time was at it.

*shrug*

Lawl you got trolled.

Did you also get shown a letter in which "the heads of all the alliances" plotted 9/11 and exulted at their success in faking a moon-landing?

I was right at the top of the biggest alliance in Eve at that time - not to mention privy to the Bob/Kenzoku/IT inner sanctum forums and I'm telling you that you're only getting more embarrassingly weird on your conspiracy theories as you get older.  If there was any suggestion or hint of that at all then we'd have used that to burn everyone.  Everyone.

Oh wait, no: I'd be in on it too!  How deep does this rabbit-hole go?  If only people would take the red pill they'd see the truth behind the shadowy mesh of lies* that you are uncovering**.


*complete bullshit
**making up in your head to ruin yet another fucking Eve thread with your uncanny reverse Midas touch.

[Sir T]

Grow the fuck up Endie. Seriously.