Just to keep my last two readers updated, I am collecting screenshots from our fights / eviction and writing my observations in to a blog post, probably tomorrow or Tuesday. In the meantime, I copy/paste Seraph Essael Reddit post and video below just in case Reddit dies. Seraph is one of our main FCs and has really the full “Director’s view” of what happened. I couldn’t write a better AAR, so I shamelessly copy his.
If you want to see the post on Reddit (and read all the comments), go here. All content below comes for Seraph.
So, before this all gets out of hand and people start to speculate how, why and what happened in J150859: The home hole of N0MEX. Codename: ENVY
Back in January 2018 a few of us in N0MEX decided that we wanted to build a Keepstar from scratch and so began our long and arduous task of doing it. There was only about 7 of us that were actually involved in the planning and building of all the bits and bobs. And keeping it quiet from the rest of the people in the corp to avoid a leak was actually done rather well…
Why did we build a Keepstar in a Class two hole with a Hisec and C4 static? Because we could. We’re not about to allow others to dictate how we play our game. It was a gargantuan task and we wanted to see if we could do it. And here’s the thing, we had the balls to do it. So we did.
After the IH Keepstar loss and the eviction of HK and their Keepstars, a lot of groups who may have thought about getting one, decided against it, and other groups decided to take theirs down. The funny thing is, that the three main group that lost their Keepstars, are the three main groups currently evicting us now.
But I digress.
About three quarters of the Keepstar was built by the time Null came for HKs and a few people involved seriously considered not doing this. With the majority vote we decided to go ahead with it. I personally had put in far too much time and ISK into this endeavour and I would be damned if I was going to let someone take away my fun. This though was mirrored by the majority of people involved. Many hours, lots of ISK and so many corp mining ops and buying of salvage off members, all the while whilst trying to maintain a healthy dose of PvP. As I am 100% PvP driven in this game, for me keeping the PvP going was paramount. Same with the others.
Originally called Project Dellingr the name of the Keepstar changed just as we were about ready to go when we tragically lost one of our members on the 30th Dec 2018. Thus the name changed to Visteen in his honour.
And so we locked down the hole. We had previously unanchored The Red Queen, our main Fortizar, to make sure we had a cover for locking the hole back down and having max dudes on to protect it if necessary. Carriers on mega bubbled holes, rollers on standby and an assortment of other goodies to throw at people.
We had waited for this moment. In January 2019 about a month or so after HK had lost theirs and everyone else took theirs down. N0MEX anchored their Keepstar. Not because we wanted to brag about it; there was no reddit posts, there was no praise bob comments etc. but simply, just because we wanted to.
We had been updating our homedef fleet constantly whilst other evictions were happening. We had ships to counter Machs (which was the flavour of the month when we first began to build Visteen and before we started doing this), Counters to boosh Ravens (seeing how effective they were against HK in large numbers). Leshak Counters. And a whole load of shit to hand out. Overall, we just needed the pilots to man them. I won’t go in to detail about our tactics or the reasons for the ships and Keep being fit the way they were but it was all planned well with testing done to ensure it worked. So we will leave everyone wondering on that one.
Of course, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. We had been betting on someone that was not IH to come knocking…
What can I say, Inner Hell are on a whole different level. Their attention to detail is like military precision. Almost surgical. The way they hold hole control the way they have their timers and their fleets set up. Honestly, it’s damned impressive. And something not many other groups in Eve can match, certainly not us.
However, that being said, we still wanted a fight. We wanted the people rolling for us to be able to get an entrance. We wanted to hand out the armada of homedef ships we had built, and we wanted to employ our tactics to see if they worked. Overall what we wanted more than ever, was to be able to go down swinging with our dicks in our hands. If we lost, so be it. If we won, fucking great, so they’d come back the week after, but we knew we’d given a damned good fight.
For all the spin about people doing evictions for the “good fight” and in the “hope the defenders put up a good fight” mentality. That is not the case. And I 100% agree with the fact that: just do an eviction because you can and because something is shiny to kill. Don’t try and spin it so that you spout all the nonsense about a good fight. Because at the end of the day, that’s what we wanted, win or lose, we wanted to give you one hell of a fight that you would never forget.
When 15-20 real people with 30 chars are faced with a fleet of 150+ chars and around 60ish possibly more actual people. There isn’t a lot you can do to get people in. HK, LZHKS and a lot of other people learnt this the hard way when they were outnumbered during the HK invasion. Also, it didn’t help some of our main people were locked out of the hole getting stuff sorted for another story.
But regardless, know this: at the end of the day we’d rather go out with a swing instead of SDing all the crap on the undock. Because let’s face it. Eve is a game and we don’t give two buggers about the killboards.
There is also some confusion about the killing of Jonathan Lennellucs Rattlesnake. The dudes 1 year Anniversary is today and so he wanted to go out of Envy in style. We granted that. So please wish him a happy anniversary. All the best matey.
We also allowed most of our members to speak up if they wanted to give the DD a go, because lets face it. How many people can say they have actively fired the main cannon of the biggest, most baddass structure in Eve during a fight. Not many.
Truth be told. No one in N0MEX is sour over this, the good majority have taken this pretty well. There are a couple who were blamed for it that took it real hard and a couple that have just decided a little break is necessary. But generally spirits are good.
This is not the end for N0MEX, most certainly not for the core group of players who have played the same games with each other for years. The morale is not broken and it won’t be any time soon. We don’t just play Eve. We play a multitude of other games with each other. APEX. PUBG. Sea of Thieves. Forza on Xbox. Long story short. We bullshit on comms about RL issues, politics and our better halves. And we meet up IRL to have food and drink. Even if some of our members go elsewhere after this, they will still be on our comms and having a wild ride.
To everyone that tried to roll for us. To everyone that offered aid. To everyone involved in that. Thank you.
To Inner Hell, fuck dudes the shit that you do is mental. No one was expecting Polarised bombers spread out around the grid. Clever. Your timing is immaculate.
To Lazerhawks and HK, we honestly didn’t expect you guys to join in with IH we thought the days of Quazerknocks was over, but we understand you guys needed to remember what a Keepstar looked like.
For real though, no hard feelings.
Oh…and btw… N0MEX is recruiting.
A journey through the mind 