A fleet of stealth bombers about to jump through a gate.
We’re at war!
This news story lays it out pretty well. The battles I fought in last week were just the initial skirmishes. We’ve now relocated a huge chunk of our Coalition supplies into ROIR in Pure Blind. There are pretty much constant large Northern Coalition fleets operating in the region now.
Most of last weekend was spent managing relocation logistics. Moving hundreds of ships and associated materiel into the system takes a long time. Every hours or so a convoy would leave from our home area so that no one got ambushed en route to the new staging area. On top of that, we had regular Titan bridges operating that could basically teleport our ships directly into our new home system. Friendly carriers can store our fully-fitted ships in their docking bays and drop them off in ROIR.
None of this is particularly expensive, but it does take quite a bit of time. There are other disadvantages to not being in your home region, either – we don’t know the terrain as well, don’t have easy access to modules and ammo, and it leaves our home region somewhat undefended.
All in all, it’s kind of a dull process, but it’s strangely gratifying to be part of a big operation like this. It’s a new feeling to know that there are probably enemy spies watching our movements and if we start to slip up they could descend on us at any moment.
The irony of all this is I still haven’t had a good fleet fight since that first one. I’ve spent most of my time staring at gates like the one above waiting for a red ship to fly through, or camping red cynos to report on TRI ship movements. It’s not glamorous, but the more elder players insist it’s important.
Most fleets these days are going out to knock over enemy moon mining modules (like the friendly one above), trying to draw out enemy fleets into a more decisive battle. It hasn’t worked that well. We’ve taken out lots of TRI towers, but they don’t reliably take the bait and bring a defense fleet. I’m not sure how critical the money is to them; they seem to care more about winning fights than winning the war. Now that a big chunk of NC is based a few jumps away from their traditional home, it’s much easier for us to gather and sustain large fleets. They could muster similar sized fleets during the P2-TTL battles last week because it was mega super drama, but I haven’t seen much of their EVOKE allies in Pure Blind now that there is constant mid level combat.
I’m getting some interesting footage, though. I should have a video about voice communication and fleet movement this weekend. Maybe one about Stealth Bombing, too, but it would be nice to actually land a bomb on an enemy before claiming I know anything about how that process works.
Comments
4 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.Yeah Bombing wise the NC raids on the Coalition forces(Thats us!) base haven’t been very successful at all. nearly popping a cyno frig or similar.
Hah, you were there for that? I may have been part of one of those failing-to-pop-a-cyno-frig runs. In our defense, bombing a target that’s on a station is really hard. You can’t easily tell where the station edges that will decloak you are, and you end up having to sneak around. Much much easier to bomb cynos in safe spots or people coming through a gate. Besides, it was my second time out in a stealth bomber. :P
I hear there was some epic carrier bombing going on recently, though. We’re not ALL fail bomber pilots like me.
Thanks for taking the time to speak with our class last night. I’ve hear of EVE but never played and your talk was a great introduction. I found the game itself incredibly rich in detail, more like an actual conflict than a simulation. I’m curious, do you know what the retention rate for the game is? It seems as though people would drop off fairly quickly (due to complexity) or be hooked for life.
I’m not sure what the numbers are – my guess is that CCP guards that kind of stuff relatively closely. This article claims that it has “higher than average retention” but that’s really not telling you much. I think your intuition is right, though, that the retention after the 14-day trial is not great, but if you’ve subscribed for 3 months or 6 months you’re probably going to be a long term player.
Recently, CCP has been working a lot on the so-called “New Player Experience”, and it’s apparently much, much better than it used to be. I haven’t done it since late 2005, so I can’t comment on how effective it is, but I hear it’s better at helping new players from getting overwhelmed.
I think the other big predictor for retention is corporation membership. People who have a social structure in the game are both more effective players, and probably happier players too.
(If you’re really curious about numbers, the EVE University leadership could give you a decent proxy. They cater to new players, and corporations know when members unsubscribe, so my guess is that EUNI’s churn rates are at least correlated with EVE as a whole.)
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