Incursion tears: Epic edition

So anyway. You've probably heard of the incursion interdiction, in which people are forming fleets to kill sansha motherships, forcing incursions to despawn instead of letting the incursion runners farm them for days. This - even before they started killing moms - has produced an endless ocean of tears on the forums, to rival even the ice interdiction. And these are the very best sort of tears, the ones produced by highsec 'elitists' with an entitlement complex. The sheer, sadistic joy of watching them curse the gods and shake their tiny fists in impotent rage is intoxicating.


On saturday the incursion griefers rolled out and shut down all the highsec incursions. Three more popped up overnight, and by euro prime the mom sites were available. The interdictors rolled out again, and this time I joined up in a shitfit tempest.

We formed at 2100, hit the first site, and BTL contested it and tried to suicide gank us with ECM and smartbombs. The fun was doubled!

We lost a guardian to the gank attempt, they lost their ships and somehow managed to pod their own fc. We finished the site, burned to the other two incursion sites and took them out too, cackling madly on comms all the while. It took 1 hour and 50 minutes to end all three of them, completely shutting down highsec incursion running.

May need to open in new tab

Now, serious business. Incursions are good because they get people to people work together. The incursion interdiction is also good because it is emergent, player generated content where people work together, as well as the most fun I've had in eve in years.

If you'd like to join in, here's how you do it:

Join:
Channel: Grief the bears
Teamspeak 3: 178.32.239.141

Fleets seem to roll around 2000

If you just want to harvest tears, watch the 'btl pub' and 'the ditanian fleet' channels, and the forums.

The ice must floe

So goons are ganking bots and people who are mining gallente ice (which produces oxygen isotopes), to fill the game with tears and fuck.

You can read the plan. There's been some discussion as to whether it's for real or not, and I was curious to know what was actually happening. So I checked.

The plan includes a list of target systems. Shortly after hearing about the project I checked a few systems and found no gankers, and about 10-20 miners in each ice belt. 12 hours after that, I went through the list and checked every (non-island) system. This is what I found:

• Ardallabier - 2 miners, down from ~15 earlier. Ganks ongoing.
• Brapelille - 12 miners, ganks ongoing.
• Jaschercis - 5 miners. These ones are trying to be tricky, using ECM drones, RR, and hulks instead of mackinaws. An alpha pest or maybe two smartbombers could kill them, but I hung out for a while and nobody took them out.
• Angymonne - 1 miner.
• Aydoteaux - 5 miners, ganks ongoing.
• Carirgnottin - 6... 5... 4 miners, ganks ongoing.
• Tolle - 1 miner.
• Ignebaener - A single miner, being bumped by a gank brutix while the brutix pilot mourned the lack of remaining targets.

Out of curiosity, I then re-visited the systems in reverse order

• Tolle - No miners.
• Carirgnottin - No miners.
• Aydoteaux - 3 miners, surrounded by exhumer and gank ship wrecks. I suspect they were replacing lost mackinaws from a stock in station. Obviously bots. Ganks ongoing.
• Angymonne - No miners.
• Jaschercis - 2 miners. No visible gank activity.
• Brapelille - 2 miners, ganks ongoing.
• Ardallabier - 1 miner, ganks ongoing.

Here's the goon killboard. The search tool shows 280 exhumer and mining barge kills in the last two days, which appear to have taken place almost exclusively in gallente highsec.

I'm gon' call it, highsec oxygen isotope production has been shut down hard. So what's going on with the market?

Well, as soon as the 'goonswarm shrugged' announcement was made, well before ganks started, speculation drove the price of isotopes up to about 3 times their previous price. At that point people started selling stock for hilarious profits, which caused the price to stabilize and even decrease. Some people who would have otherwise held their stock mistook this for a peak and also put their stock up for sale. Currently oxygen isotopes in jita are 1050 isk per unit, down from a peak of about 1300.

And what happens next? Two possibilities:

1. Goons stop killing miners, prices return to normal.
2. Goons keep ice production shut down, stocks are depleted and the price increases more. Possibly a lot more.

I'm betting on number 2 at the moment. It won't last forever, but things could be really interesting in the meantime.

Lastly, forums. There is a thread, and it is full of sperging goonhate, tears and some of the dumbest shit I've ever read. It's beautiful.

I was there

So CCP is starting a new media site thing and encouraging players to send things in.

Did anybody not immediately think of this?

CSM done good

So, we got everything most people wanted. All wrapped in vague timelines and corporation speak of course, but anybody who didn't expect that probably can't type and breathe at the same time.

Newai. If you're reading this you've already read the official poast and trebor's post, watched the video and read the reactions, so I'm not going to go on at length.

But, you remember back when the blagosphere was sperging with nerd rage about mittens in particular and the new CSM in general? And when I said that the CSM would be good and mittens was a very effective politician? [1] [2]

Yeah, I'm going to take this opportunity to rub it in, and gloat a little. I didn't get where I am without being petty and vindictive.

Rioting

Protests continue into their second day. Numbers dropped below system cap during russian prime, but as I type this jita has been pegged at 1600 for about 6 hours. 800 are reported in amarr, and apparently there's a titan in rens. I don't even know what that's about.

Jita

As the threadnaught approaches 300 pages and OVER 9000 posts with no reply from CCP, forum discipline has eroded and ponies have become rampant.

I've lost 5 newbie ships to smartbomb hits, been podded twice and this is the most fun I've had in eve since H-W. So 'acquire' the song Miami, by Sublime, from a sketchy russian website, put it on repeat and join in the chaos. We'll either fix this shit or burn it down, and either way it's going to be awesome.

Channel 'mass-protest'

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Repost from mass-protest channel.


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CSM 6 results: Suck it, bitches

So the CSM results are out, and they are delicious. This year 0.0 has decided to organize for the purpose of being represented in the CSM, which has caused a diverse selection of nobodies on the forums to cry and whine about the vast nullsec conspiracy to control the CSM.

Well you're goddam right we're going to control the CSM if we feel like it. The ability to organize people is what wins elections, and we're better at it than you.

So suck it.

With the election over and the tears harvested, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

(the results are 7 nullsec players and 2 others, by the way)

All Hail Abathur

Breaking news! Abathur, most beloved of devs, has suddenly resurfaced and brought to us all things which are good.

• Capital missiles fixed - signature radius increase for structures and capital ships
  
• Naglfar fixed - double bonus on projectiles, no missile bonus
  
• Titan damage fixed (but still too low)
• SUPERCARRIERS (no, he didn't fix the name)
• Bumping while in siege fixed
  

All this and much, much more, coming in Dominion 1.1!

Linkage.

This is very good news for me personally. Although I won't be deploying a mothership any time soon, the Naglfar boost means I don't have to train Amarr in order to have a useful dreadnought like I was planning.

I probably still will though, since Amarr carrier best carrier; but now that the minmatar have a dreanaught again it's not crucial that I spec for a third(!) race's capitals asap.