Interesting article Finn. Especially the part where he keeps getting emails from people that think his account was hacked.
What happened to the war reports by Zarch AlDain you were running? Those were fun to read for a carebear that never leaves Empire space.
I can’t post everything but here’s a short run down on the Delve invasion so far:
History:
To understand Delve II you have to know about Delve I. In late 2007 BoB had been pushed back from the south into just Delve itself by a large super-alliance of enemies they had made through their own arrogance. Every ally of major consequence of theirs had been either eliminated or alienated.
The goons and allies managed through good fortune mostly to gain a foothold in Delve by capturing the qy6- system. Further progress into delve was blocked by Bob’s ‘Fortress delve’ tactic. This tactic involved camping any system that could be attacked with a full cap fleet under cover of a cyno jammer (preventing enemy capitals from entering the system) supported by multiple titans to doomsday any sub capital fleet that entered the system. Such a setup basically renders the system unattackable for as long as you can maintain presence. Similar setups were probably used defensively by the northern coalition during Max. In addition to the problems for the attackers Delve is a small region and BoB has a lot of Jump bridge infrastructure that makes it easy for them to get around in. Both cyno Jammers and jump bridges require Sov level 3 to function.
In face of this tactic The super coalition experienced a gradual bleed off of numbers, leading to a successful BoB counterattack on qy6- and an end to that round of hosilities as both sides realised they would have difficulty progressing further. From this point BoB launched Max and goons went to ride bikes.
Delve II: Elect… (nah I can’t do it)
The defection of haargoth set up a situation where the goons and their allies who were facing participation difficulties in a long drawn out war with some splinter factions of red alliance and all of AAA were gifted a chance to do something… spectacular.
Four regions of space were abandoned, every ally was called in, every bargaining chip cashed and all bags were packed. Delve was our home now, and we would fight for it. BoB had no Sov 3 (although they have towers claiming sov so they would eventually get it back) so they had none of the boring grind out mechanisms available to them this time around.
At first there were some epic battles, with multiple capital ship losses on each side and even the death (for the fourth time) of Shrike’s Avatar class Titan.
Then BoB made two horrible mistakes.
Firstly they moved all their capital assets to one system (pr- ). Once the coalition heard of this there has never been fewer than 200 people in system making sure those assets stay there. The station gates and former bob pos locations are all bubbled and manned 23/7. Without their capital ships BoB have been unable to contest the combined allied cap fleet which has killed an estimated 1.2 Trillion isk worth of POS, mods and baby titans (most of BoBs POS are faction). This ‘hellpurging’ is quite unprecedented in EvE and makes for some good reading
http://killboard.goonfleet.com/ will have some of the towers, Razor, morsus mihi, pandemic legion and TCF boards will have most of the rest. On average we kill 35-50 faction towers per day.
The second BoB mistake is to think that the goons will get bored and go home. The problem is that Delve is our home, and we’re not going away. It won’t be safe until BoB has no sov anywhere and we have sov3 (for our own fortress delve) but we know what has to be done, and it will be done. Meanwhile BoB participation is dropping because they can’t really do anything to us and sitting in pr- spinning your ship just isn’t that fun.
Finally on a lighter note there were reports yesterday of BoB pos gunners shooting their own pos mods so we couldn’t steal them. Much was made of this in pr- local.
Yeah, they were awesome. Zarch still works for the Tribune (he was recently promoted to be my Managing Editor) but he’s had real-life concerns over the last few months which have kept him from compiling the Nullsec War Zones pieces. And, to be honest, as I’ve already got a hobby that turned into a job (being the Editor in Chief), I’m really not up for doing NSWZ’s myself each week.
We’re trying to get another staffer to pick up the slack, but so far, no luck.
On a similar note, the Tribune is still hiring writers. 
Oh, and:
Actually, they definitely were and they proved to us Northern NAP Monkeys that it was eminently beatable if you didn’t have morale, numbers, coverage, and most importantly cap ship pilot skills. I can’t count the number of times our own titans DD’d our own fleets. Or how sick we got of trying to defend our turf while IRON forces hid behind bubled gates in VFK and only moved to switch sniper spots.
When the invasion of VFK came, morale and participation were so low that we were pretty much steamrolled and lost at least one titan IIRC.
Say what you want about Kenny, but their ability to keep NOL defended through the entire invasion of Delve speaks to an almost monomaniacal degree of drive and obsession. Whether or not it’s a good thing is certainly up for debate, but I can tell you, as a pilot who X’d up for ops time and again only to find myself sitting at a sniper spot on a gate for three or four hours with no contact… it’s waiting that’s the killer and being able to keep X’ing up under similar conditions is a sign of amazing tenacity.
I’ve been spending 3-4 hours a day in pr- for quite a while now.
Goon TS gets… odd during these times. The erotic slash fiction reading contest really was something to hear. I think most of our allies have taken to leaving TS.
Finn, I thought it would be something like that. I hope his home life gets straightened out soon. And that you have some luck with finding writers. 
Yeah, I’m close to posting an ad for new writers on Scrapheap.
I guess I feel I haven’t gotten trolled enough recently, or something.
Scrapheap? :shudder: I can’t offer any substantive help, but for what it’s worth that was a good interview and I hope you’re able to carry on the work. Want me to post on GF.com about looking for a reporter?
Yeah… we’ll probably carry on one way or another, even if it’s with a reduced article load. We won’ shut down and we still have a few writers who submit stuff fairly regularly.
And yeah, scrapheap is both what’s best and worst about EVE.
And heck yeah, if you’d like to post on GF advertising for folks to join the Tribune, that’d be much appreciated. We pay 20 mil per page of text with a salary cap of 100 mil per article (which can be waived at my discretion), and we do allow people to submit more than one article per issue.
We’re specifically looking for folks who can report on the war in Delve, and even do some forum whoring. Mr. M (the Tribune’s owner) has talked about wanting someone to report on the goings on at CAOD for example an, of course, NSWZ is based on the battle reports in the General Battle Bullshit forum of scrapheap. In addition, we’re always open to publishing interviews, commentary, guides, rants, and so on.
P.S. Thanks again for the offer.
I do not understand why their fleet is pinned. Can’t they just cyno out of there? Do you have two massive cap fleets in the same system just staring at each other?
Just confused…
As a general comment I really hope the mechanics of 0.0 Sov get changed. The whole POS spam thing and unassailable systems thing seems bogus to me (and I have no care for who is doing it…just stinks in general).
Not if they’re bubbled.
Shouldn’t they be shooting each other then?
Well, sure, Kenny could do a mass undock and try to break the camp. Problem is, they’re probably outnumbered, they have all the tactical disadvantages (bubbled, enemies have grid loaded, at their optimal range, etc). And there are active capital fleets that can be cynoed in at a moments notice…including titans, which could bridge in additional sub-cap reinforcements. So it’s understandable that they haven’t undocked. But they could all clonejump out and pick up battleships etc in empire, and I really couldn’t say why they haven’t done that. Some likely have.
On the contrary, Engineering is one of the most essential skills for ship fitting. Eng 5 gets you 25% more powergrid, which means you can fit more and better mods on all your ships. The other two essential fittings skills are Electronics for CPU output, and Mechanic for hull hitpoints. There are a bunch of other fitting skills that let you use various mods, reduce their fitting requirements, or improve their performance, but all of them take one of these basic three skills as a prerequisite.
Has anybody seen the new info on Apocrypha? No ambulation in this one but T3 and wormholes are finally in.
I’m wondering if removing schools and careers means everyone will get a respec. I hope so, at least a chance to get rid of my useless charisma points.
IIRC, new characters can change their skills twice in the first six months. Established characters can do so once per year only. And again, IIRC, characters can only change their initial attribute points, not those gained from Learning skills.
Still, I hope that our ‘once a year’ starts when apocrypha launches. When I made my main I wasn’t sure what the attributes did - they had very roleplayish descriptions - so I made sure to spread out the points evenly, one per attribute. If I made a char today I would focus entirely on 2 of the four ‘good’ ones.
Yes, it probably works along the same lines as the cloneumping cooldown timer. 24 hours starts from when you clonejump, 365 days starts from when you respec.
I might change mine around some. I could use my Memory up a bit. But I will keep mine fairly even across the board. I spend too much time training up in all kinds of areas to short any one attribute.
How do you respec? I want to respec because I got Charisma, but I also wanted to be a CEO type, and I am about to leave my first CEOship, but I still could use some of those Charisma skills. I probably have to wait until 365 days. When that happens though, what can I do?