The very first Insurgency took place in Ouelletta about a year ago, give or take a few months. In fact, Stay Frosty destroyed the very first Forward Operating Base in Eve history. That two week period was an exceptionally fun time for us, so many fights and amazing engagements back then. It felt like a new age had dawned in the history of Low Security space and content would be around every corner going forward.
For the past week we've had the Insurgency back in Ouelletta and the FOB is on scan. And while our system, and those around us, have been busy and chock full of activity - it hasn't been the same. In fact, it has been extremely frustrating and weird. To explain this will take some groundwork on my part, so bear with me.
Let's go back to last weekend about 5hrs before the Insurgency started. We watched as several groups lit cynos in local and proceeded to bring about 17 Rheas into system over and over again. Fair enough, they were stocking up for the big push. Makes sense. And then, in the course of just a few hours, they proceeded to run the system to Stage V in an extremely efficient and mechanical manner that was, quite frankly, impressive to watch. This wasn't the haphazard insanity from a year ago, this was well practiced methodical and daunting. It was also, from our perspective, achieved by a total of maybe three or four people multi-boxing dozens and dozens of ships and characters.
And that has been the story of this past week. The other day I watched as two people flew a fleet of 9 Worms and 9 Vexors together into a nearby system and empty it of content in about ten to fifteen minutes. There are multi-boxer fleets of Arbitrators, Vexors, Caracal Navy Issues, and other ships that fly together, align together, and run away together if contested. You can easily tell the multi-boxers from other fleets, simply by the uniformity and naming conventions. Regular player fleets have composition, variety, roles, and random naming conventions typically. And regular fleets might even try to engage. But not these mulit-boxing fleets - they will literally do anything to avoid an engagement. Anything.
So this Saturday we decided to force them to engage. We started catching them in bubbles. We caught a fleet of Arbitrators with a Bifrost leading them and slaughtered them all without any trouble. But then, later on, we caught 12 Gnosis in a bubble and watched in horror as they simply sat there and died one by one to our fleet - all without much resistance at all. As you can imagine, for us at least, this is not the kind of engagements we enjoy. While it is great to take away an entire fleet of ships, it is rather empty in the end. They were back not ten minutes later with a new fleet of different ships.
As solo and small gang players there isn't much we can do to seriously curb these efforts. We're killing them, chasing them, probing them - all the usual things. But it really doesn't amount to much, not when they can just roll another cycle and make the kind of LP/ISK they are bringing in.
The weird part is High Sec. Several systems near us are also Stage V now, which means your friendly neighborhood pirates can enter without Concord shooting us. Sorta. Kinda. We can't dock anywhere. And apparently sometimes, for no apparent reason, stuff will shoot us randomly. I was flying with a corp mate the other day and we caught and killed a Thrasher Fleet Issue and then my corp mate was killed by Concord. We thought it might be because he shot the pod - but now we've had other reports of people shooting pods and not getting blown up. I lost a Broadsword on the gate inside HS and I have no idea why. The gate guns just decided to shoot me and blow up my ship. I've racked my brain on that one and have no answers. The rules in HS seem broken a bit to be frank.
But, even so, I'm having a lot of fun. I wish the content was something we could engage with more often, but we are adaptable and used to finding solutions to remove people from their ships. So we'll adapt.
As always I worry about the rest of Eve. Is this fun to anyone else?
I've heard a lot of first hand accounts this week about players who tried to join the Deathless forces and who gave up on that because of the multi-boxers running everything. I'm certain this was not how this system was imagined or intended. In fact, I know it wasn't.
So yeah, I worry.
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