I don't even know where to start. How about this, "Was a blast! First time in eve I have PvPed and to cap it all off my first kill was on a goon!" - @gizzardpuke37 or the hundreds of other exclamations of well-done, great event, so much fun, my first time in low sec, my first time PvPing, the NPE should be this!, CCP should pay ABA to do this all the time, and a dozen or more comments that rained down in local chat yesterday. I could start there.
Or I could mention:
16,634 explosions in Ouelletta yesterday. We managed to hand out over 10,000 ships under tremendous TiDi and lag, which often hovered in the high percentages. For six hours yesterday the local count hovered right below one thousand players in local - for six straight hours! How many pilots showed up in total, I have no idea. But I do know for a fact that we broke last year's record-breaking event numbers rather easily. Beyond that I haven't heard anything official yet. But we'll wait and see. Certainly though, yesterday was the most explosions in a single day EVER in Low Sec. I know because we broke that record last year with 12,000 explosions.
A very, very special shout-out to our players who worked hard under extreme conditions to hand out ships as fast as possible. We have players who handed out nearly a thousand ships on their own! I would dock up between fights and hand out a bunch myself and I can tell you that it is insanity. Trade windows popping up and then not going away, over and over again. I know at one point I had at least 50 trade windows open at once. And I did nothing compared to some. So they deserve all the credit in the world for helping to make the event a success.
As always we had a few negative comments here and there, and those that showed up to exploit the event. That always happens. If you'd like to see the worst offenders you can check out the event killboard and see the top ECM Burst/Smartbomb users for yourself. They are the ones with thousands of kills. The top killers are all cheaters in my opinion, there solely to pad their own killboards at the expense of other (mostly younger) players. But this is Eve and we always expect it. Not my first rodeo.
Otherwise I believe the event went off with out a hitch. I don't believe we can hand-out more ships in six hours, so that leaves us with about 10k ships still in our hangars. So at least now we know what the upper limit is. Unless CCP creates something new that helps us, possible some kind of locked event contract system or something, then we've reached the absolute maximum.
Which just means putting on our creative hats for next year's event.
I'm sure I'll write more about this in the coming days, but for now I'm supposed to be taking the day off from Eve.
Thanks to everyone who donated, pitched in, provided skins, handed out ships, streamed, participated, and otherwise showed up in local and helped make this year's FF4A the best one ever! I sincerely appreciate you all. Sincerely. Thank you.
Oh, and I hit 10,000 total kills during the event yesterday. Without using a single ECM burst or smartbomb to do so. Which helped make the day even that tiny bit better.
YARRR!