A new contender has arrived.
As all of Eve is well aware, CCP have been attempting to up their game with regard to PvE within Eve Online. Initially, it took some time for the location to even be revealed as much of the focus of The Imperium’s efforts were based in Delve and Querious. The Blood Raider Sotiyo is a tricky beast to locate and considerable cunning and guile is required to hunt it down. The Blood Raider industrial ships act as the trail of bread crumbs with the final hurdle being the need to combat scan the Blood Raider minions to their base of operations.
Amusingly the new Blood Raider event with the much hyped new NPC “AI” feature was finally located in Period Basis within the system E-DOF2. The humour of this is that it is not The Imperium’s space and being the honourable chaps that we are we were not going to run it. So this left this event in the hands of our neighbours and friends. Even with valiant efforts and great cunning they had little luck in this endeavour. After a few days, they reached out to The Imperium for assistance.
Previous attempts have been plagued by unusual module behaviour, or to be precise, no behaviour at all. Add to this considerable TiDi in conjunction with lag and general glitching. Despite considerable testing on SiSi, there was never any conclusive proof of a system that would work. It was made public on more than one occasion that tweaks were being made on a seemingly daily basis.
Despite claims of a “brain drain” being levelled at The Imperium by those hostile to us, our best and brightest were hard at work theory crafting solutions to this knotty problem. The threat of hostiles coming to interfere with our efforts was a concern that also had to be considered. Quite simply the response of the Blood Raiders to any “serious” fleet was overwhelming. Hundreds of Blood Radiers were spawned to deal with the immediate threat to their base. And deal with the threat they most certainly did.
But not all was lost. The Imperium will rarely offer a single solution to a problem and the efforts of SynthiaGreey were about to have their chance at glory.
The flight of the Punishers
So at around 19:30 a relatively small punisher fleet of just over 100 pilots was formed to perform an experiment on the Blood Raider Sotiyo. The fearless guinea pigs headed over to the target system of E-DOF2, the home of this new Blood Raider incursion. “Punishing CCP” was the fleet name with Jay Amazingness as the FC and many of the punishers were named “♦ Blood Punisher”. Chatter on the way over was light hearted as no matter the outcome this would be amusing to all but the most bitter of vets.
Now you may ask yourself given our prestigious history, why were rifters not used? The answer is a simple one in the main. By using the punisher we would have infinite ammo and only have to press F1 once. This was a most welcome relief to an F1 Monkey such as myself.
Five actions were required to enact this plan, and precise instructions were given so that these could be carried out. A further 4 were offered should a pilot be unfortunate to lose their incredibly expensive Punisher to get them back into the fray.
Initially, the Blood Raider fleet present was small in nature and light in hull type. Cruisers formed the bulk of their fleet. The heroes of The Imperium dutifully followed their orders and a moment of suspense arrived. It soon became apparent that we were taking no damage of any signifigance or for the most part at all.
With the damage applied to the Sotiyo and the repair timer paused the shield indicator was chipped away. The Blood Raiders would spawn new ships as required and had seemingly little trouble in an inexhaustible supply of fitted, and probably insured, NPC hulls.
As time passed the shields were reduced with continuing surprise and excitement from the assembled fleet members. 95% remaining, then 90%, then 80%, then 50%. The writing was clearly on the wall now as the Blood Raider defenders desperately increase the number of ship they fielded. It had now gone from but a dozen or two on the initial spawn to around 600 Blood Raider pilots as the shields reached 0%. Blood Raider ships were in a frenzy of warping in a seemingly futile attempt to fend off the attackers.
Wrapping up
Ultimately a total of 5 punishers were lost to the defending Blood Raider forces. This surely had to be the final insult to the Blood Raiders, it would be an embarrassment to any player run organisation.
Jay described the whole event as a “spiritual journey”, and in this he may well be right. We have defeated other supposed insurmountable foes in the past with the use of rifters. For this enemy it was Punishers.
With the Blood Raider Sotiyo now reinforced we will soon move onto the next phase.
With news quickly spreading of The Imperiums success posts and streams were created to spread the word further. Many of which were keen to reap the cheap karma that was on offer. Even CCP Fozzie was seen to tweet about it. With the news being so public it will be interesting to see who will come to the next phase of this event. More importantly it will be interesting to see what the hostiles bring, what tactics will be deployed to defeat the Sotiyo and many other questions.
