Winter Break Is Over

With the holiday season coming to a close, many Eve players will soon find themselves with limited time to play as their educational responsibilities and/or jobs increasingly interfere. I will be in that boat myself, starting tomorrow.

The common belief among many in leadership positions within IT Alliance is that the end of Winter break for many students will harm some alliance more than others. Ultimately, I think people are just looking for an easy explanation for why IT alliance participation has been so abysmal lately.

It’s clear that so far the hostiles have yet to meet with a serious setback since they over-reached by attacking C3N. Despite their momentum, our ninja SBU deployments have been at least a moderate nuisance, and we will continue to make holding space in Fountain a chore until we can do something more decisive.

Nearly all sovereignty-related battles in Fountain have been going badly for IT, and things appeared to be much worse this week than they were when PNQY fell. The latest example is the “fight” for 9R4 where we bridged in a 130 man fleet only to flee minutes later, allowing the formerly Talos-owned system to fall into TEST hands.

The current top-level leadership in IT is very, very cautious about the use of capitals. However, with surging hostile participation (often 2x or 3x our numbers of high-alpha battleships and logistics) it is not hard to see why we haven’t been playing the super-cap card very often.

Getting sufficient numbers online has been our biggest issue in this war. Hopefully we will soon close the gap in Maelstrom and Scimitar numbers with our enemies so that our senior alliance FCs will put the big toys on field.

On the bright side, when it comes to non-critical combat operations, things have been far less gloomy. Unlike battles over structures, roams can engage where and whenever they want. It’s also possible to score a “win” against huge odds by simply getting more kills.

The nightly -MVN- roams out of Fountain have been more fun than ever and we have seen a continual rise in participation. Last night in particular was rather exciting because of one special kill:

The fitting on the dead TEST carrier included dead-space and officer mods. Rather expensive for a carrier (although not quite as pimped as a super might be).

Later in the night we bagged a few more kills and spent a long time trying to get a fight by camping various stations to no avail.

After heading back to our staging system, PK and I dropped SBUs once again. Later that night, a seperate fleet titan-bridged on the enemies who came to shoot those SBUs, but most warped off before we could get good bubbles.

I believe the war for Fountain is long from over. Hopefully we will see a new surge in IT fleet participation, particularly from a handful of important Euro-based corps who have been bringing literally 1% of their corp populations to prime-time ops.