The Fall of Visteen

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.

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And so it begins

My remaining two readers may recall that I fly with Anomalous Existence (N0MEX), a storied WH corporation with home in a C2/HS/C4.  I joined N0MEX because they focus on small gang PvP, acknowledge that real life is more important than PvP and – yes – because the corp has core ethics that appeal to me.  No shittalk, no screwing anyone over, honor your word, come to the defense of others etc etc. Yeah, my kind of people, no regrets at all.  Solid dudes, all of them.

Yeah, I’m thinking I’m back!

As my last remaining reader(s?) may recall, I recently took a break from EVE and played No Man’s Sky exclusively.  There was really no drama involved, “my” EVE (=low class Wormholes)  have not experienced any changes in years and the “blackout” or PvE content has not had any impact on my play style at all.  And the NOMEX team I fly with is awesome, nothing wrong there either.  I just felt like exploring something brand new, learn new skills, really discover something that I had never seen before and No Man’s Sky delivered every time I logged in.  New planets, new alien worlds, new stuff to see after every warp – its an incredible game when played solo and – so I heard – with others.  Last week, a massive update dropped, full with base-building, quality of life and multiplayer features that sounded incredible (one can tame and ride the weirdest critters now – and yes – milk them).  But for some reason, the same update patch turned my interest off entirely.  Its sort of like WoW for me in 2009 (or any game other than EVE since…), once I “get” it, I lose interest.  NMS has phenomenal breadth but very little depth, i.e. I can warp to a huge variety of planets but once landed, do pretty much the same thing.  Most players seem to go down the base-building path and painstakingly assemble gigantic, floating castles or go the team route which – thankfully in NMS – is quite controlled and allows small groups of RL friends to do quests together, sort of what Elderscrolls Online should have been instead of a WoW clone 10 years too late.  I am not into multiplayer (outside EVE) and never really got the “building” bug – not in EVE or Space Engineer (never tried Minecraft).  So, I logged into NMS the other day and realized that I’d really like to play EVE for a bit.

Mindful Visteen – Chapter 1

EVE Online is the last remaining computer game where the interaction between players actually matters.  Within EVE, the smaller and the more ambitious a group is, the more the actions of one man or woman impacts the success of the whole team.  Wormholes with their resource and mass limits attract smaller groups who relish the complexity of transient routes, danger running even the most mundane activities and the uncertainties that this lifestyle brings.  Wormholers are tight group, even by EVE standards for those reasons and many of us can not imagine anymore flying in the anonymity of a large k-space alliance.  And when corpmates become friends, the transition from “game” to “Real Life” is complete.

On December 30th 2018, our corpmate Mindful Visteen died while logged into EVE.  He was scanning an unknown signature when he suddenly disconnected and dropped off voice comms.  Nobody knew what happened, people attributed his sudden disappearance to a computer or network crash and only later we found out from a friend what happened.  It hit us like a sledgehammer.  Some of the information can be found here, some other details stay with us.

I shot the Myrm, but I did not kill the Dominix

As my last remaining reader may recall, I live in WH space, staging with NOMEX out of a C2.  And while fleet fights are awesome fun with our solid FCs, occasionally I get “wanderlust”, drift away with my two characters and deliberately go down chains with EOL holes.  When the last known connection expired, when the bookmarks become stale and old, I really get the old feeling of being totally isolated and alone.  Whether I engage hostiles or not, whether I live or die, win or lose is now all up to me, no excuses, no regrets.

And so I drifted from Wormhole to Wormhole over the weekend with my Legion and my Stratios, sniffing around dozens of holes, checking out citadels for activity, keeping a mental log of how many anomalies or gas sites should be there but are not (indicating recent PVE), checking if the POCOs are allied with the citadel owners, checking the citadel owner’s killboard and so on.  Much has changed (for the worse) in WH intel since POSes are gone but I just try to get a feel for each hole I travel to and get a mental image of the people who live there.

I bumble into a C1 with a static Low Sec connection.  Its a very large system (which is good, so I can make excellent safe spots to log off in) and I tend to like C1s.  In general, they are inhabited by PvE guys who seek riches from PI, hacking, mining (the anomalies are nearly worthless) and of course as manufacturing base.  I look around and see an Astrahus and 2 (!) Athanors pulling in rocks.  All owned by a 7 man corp (i.e. 1 guy with 3 accounts and 2 Jita trade toons).  A single POCO is being reinforced, comes out in 24 hours or so.  I shall sleep here tonight.

A Series of Fortunate Events

As my remaining two readers know, I spend my EVE life in Wormhole space, flying with Anomalous Existence (NOMEX) based out of a C2 hole.  However fun this is, between real life job(s), family and other stuff I barely can make 2 hour / week piloting work and consequently lost much of the “edge” that I used to have may have had .  Basically, I screw up a lot these days and while this is humorous occasionally and solo, in fleet operations it can put the whole fleet at risk.  And here follows the tale of the screw-ups that nearly ended badly:

Big picture. NOMEX lives in a C2 but had reasons to make an Astrahus in a C5 go away.  I have no idea why, don’t ask, don’t want to know but I like explosions, so of course I volunteer. As usual, the fleet combo is something like DPS+Scout+Logi and my always preferred roles for “Scout” were already taken.  The DPS fleet ships into “Leshaks”, these newfangled ships for which I have so far been too arrogant to train for and that leaves me with flying Logistics.  Actually, that works, I am reasonably confident that I know what I am doing and I certainly could use the practice.  But wait!  Why use a standard corp-approved Guardian if I could make things far more complicated and fly a T3 Cruiser?  Logi-Proteus is a “thing” these days, I already have a hull. Its expensive, risky and unnecessary, just what my corp didn’t ask for but the FC grudgingly approves. Someone smarter than me gives me a fit and I head to Jita with a song on my lips.  This is what I buy:

Endgame?

For most of us old EVE players, the metaverse of the game is as important as the game itself.  EVE would be nothing without the player-generated stories of evictions, slander, theft and good deeds, we have become a famed community not despite EVE itself is such a buggy work in progress but because of it.  And while blogs and news aggregators used to be our watering holes (EVE Forums have always been limited to new players who just didn’t know any better), the shift to r/eve is nearly complete.

Goodbye 2018

In December, it is customary among bloggers to recap the year and I nearly didn’t make it which is in itself indicative of my state of mind.  EVE and blogging are simply not as much in my thoughts as it used to be. There are a few obvious reasons that have (almost) nothing to do with the game itself and I’ll get into it.

The Eviction of Hard Knocks and why it could be good for Wormhole space

As my last remaining loyal reader (hi Mum!) may recall, I bounced around in EVE but always come back to Wormhole Space (aka Anoikis). To me, the uncertainty of connections, resources and enemies, the excitement of working in small, highly skilled teams and the slow, cat-like scouting sessions are the most thrilling aspects of the game.  Wormholers in EVE are a little bit “different”, we used to have a fearsome but also slightly weird reputation.  I mean, who is nuts enough to stalk an enemy for weeks in order to get a single drop on a site running fleet?  We do.  Oh yes, we do.

Space Bushido. Its why I log in

EVE Online used to have two distinct reputations: a) its a spreadsheet game played by the hyper nerdy, basically those who are so socially inept that their D&D group threw them out and b) total and complete immoral bastards who plan for years how to stab their best friend in the back.  Like all stereotypes, these are vastly exaggerated but have a kernel of truth: EVE is complicated and driven by numbers and mechanic lets you be a total asshat as long as you can deal with the in-game consequences.  The same mechanic that lets you be a dick also lets you (and the group you fly in) actively reject being dicks.  There are pragmatic reasons behind not being a dick, especially in smaller wormhole outfits.  By nature of the wormhole mechanic, we run into each other all the time and getting a bad reputation is a recipe for an eviction.  On the other hand, being true to one’s word allows rapid, temporary coalitions to form to help in a defense situation or when fun demands it.

The video that my corp-mate Seraphessael recently posted shows off the bizarre nerdiness that EVE is and the honor code that our small world lives by. See, in the video,  Seraphessael chose to show the entire engagement, not just the juicy combat parts. That’s a little unusual but I personally love it, it really shows so much more how a team functions than just the choice parts where missiles are in the air (well, vacuum, whatever).

So, first, full disclosure.  I came into this really late, I had had the audacity to eat dinner while the corporation had been “rolling for content”  and I only logged in when the ping went out.

In wormhole space, you push enough heavy ships through a wormhole, it eventually dies and a new one spawns soon after.  The mass-calculation, the fleet coordination, the fits of the various “rollers” are finely tuned and a good corporation can crush a hole within a few minutes, scan down the new one and have scouts in there to search for targets.  Its entirely routine and in Seraphessael’s video, the first 2:14 minutes show the team in rolling action, coms are relaxed and people goof around.  However, when the scout finds a mining fleet with their pants down, the tone and content changes dramatically.  I love this inflection point because in good corporations, within seconds a PvP fleet forms, pings are sent and everyone gets down to business. Unlike Nullsec, its not always organized, there are no real FC’s but the roles are flexible.  Much, much hangs on the scout – whoever it is at this time.  A second experienced person quarterbacks the fight relying on the word of his scout and the competency of his team to execute.  In the video, shooting starts at 4:48, basically 2:30 minutes after the target was first seen.

The fight itself was short and brutal, it could have ended either way since nobody (not our target, not us) had any idea what they were really up against.  We won – this time – but next time we may be the victim.  In this light, notice the call not to loot the field, keep the very expensive mining drones on-field and basically not be dicks.  We had what we wanted (kills), now was the time to display our honor code.

Of course, we could have spammed /local with taunts.  Instead we typed “gf” and nothing else.  We could have looted everything denying our target valuable assets.  Instead we chose to leave the field unlooted.  We could have podded everyone, laughed about them on /r/eve, sent meme-gifs and basically be dicks.  Instead, we chose not to any of these things because it goes against our “bushido” and dishonor would have been worse than defeat.

And here the video: