Everybody knows that in wormholes- nothing, and no-one, is safe. When structures die, they spew out anything you’ve left in the hangars, marking the end of a 72 hour (or more) campaign of white-knuckled game play. It’s the purest form of EVE Online.
On March 22nd at 21:37 we popped the final structure in J120316, ending our exhausting operation on Outfit 418‘s wormhole. It was a 5-day battle of armor brawls, doorstops, ending with a dreaded TiDi fuckfest from a Sunday frigate hole. Man, that final Athanor dropping was a huge weight off our chest!
Over 2600 ships were destroyed, totaling around 220 billion ISK, with fat sack of loot extracted. Countless things were learned and plenty of friends were made. Overall, the fleet was a booming success. That being said, it took a lot of work.
In this after action report, we’re going to go over the initial plan, how the defenders made all the wrong choices, and some of the exhausting mechanics we were thrown. Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
The Plan
Outfit 418 is a primarily EU group, so pretty much every one of their timers was an alarm clock for us. We do nearly every eviction with Singularity Syndicate, and this op was no different. Due to this, we’d have an extremely beefy USTZ fleet and an acceptable EU force.
The problem was AU timezone. As much as we love staying up for 24 hours straight, we weren’t going to keep it up for 5 days straight. Queue War and Wormhole, who are absolute fucking legends. Our times lined up perfectly- we would pass hole control to them at 04:00 and pick it back up at 15:00.
Just like that, we had our crew. We would hit on Wednesday, follow up on Friday, and finish up Sunday. We would cover EU and US hole control from 15:00 to 04:00, and War and Wormhole would cover the rest.
First Contact
Outfit 418 was on edge days before we were going to hit them, making life a lot more difficult. We formed a little early (22:00) on Wednesday and waited for them to start logging off around 00:00, then we made our move.
Getting a hole was pretty rough, but they left their C5 static destabilized (wormhole mass that allows us to still get a fleet through) and we sneaked right in. Whoops! Pretty much immediately they started pinging for a defense, and called Spoopy Newbies from BRAVE to help them. I’m honestly not sure why they didn’t just wait until EUTZ the next day, they would have had a much better chance.
We took hole control (locking down the holes so that they couldn’t get friends in) immediately upon entering, and had a juicy armor brawl with multiple capitals. Unfortunately for them, the new C2 connection had friends nearby doing another eviction, and they came to assist with the Apostle. If Outfit 418 closed the C2 connection upon landing, I definitely could see that armor brawl going on for over an hour.
Armor Timer… why?
There’s not much to say about the armor timer fight, it was the worst possible time for Outfit 418 to undock. All three groups were online because we were preparing to take over hole control from War and Wormhole so that they could go to sleep.
They would have had a much better chance contesting us at their strongest point (EUTZ), because it was our weakest point. Although we were leaving everyone online (50 characters), only around 15 were actually there at a given time.
Pretty much immediately Outfit 418 started self-destructing the rest of their capitals, and tons of doctrine ships. With 2 days left in the eviction, it was extremely early for them to be rolling over. You’ll see why soon.
Frighole Generator
On the weekend is when you always wake up to those pings that you don’t want to see…

A C2 frigate hole spawned, so our life just got twice as hard. Frighole Coalition (TDSIN, MCAV, etc) pretty much started pinging immediately. By the time we woke up (7 AM for us), War and Wormhole managed to burn rolling battleships to the other side of the C2 and start doorstopping it. The situation was stable.
Doorstopping is when you jump ships through a wormhole to roll it, and leave the last ship on the other side. When something lands (or jumps through) from the enemy, you jump the last ship and close the wormhole. We trapped out tons of scanners this way.
And then it happened.

A C4 frigate hole spawned in the C2, and quite honestly we felt like ragequitting at that point. It was a major slap in the face, but we decided to go all in. We were committed to burning Outfit 418 down. A large number of Megathron characters were injected.
We burned 12 Megathrons to the new C4 frigate hole entrance and started doorstopping it. As soon as we stabilized the situation in the C4, MCAV managed to weasel their way into the C2 frigate hole, forcing us to close out many of our rollers. So we burned 8 more to the C2 frigate hole. We weren’t going to give it up to some baddies with an Enyo.
Frigate holes survive for 16 hours. 16 hours of not looking away for a second. 16 hours of managing 20 rolling characters to doorstop 6 static wormholes, rolling away the nullsec static every time they land their frigate fleet from Thera. It was brutal.
As the clock ticked 02:17 I felt the greatest moments of relief I’ve ever felt in this stupid game. The frigate hole collapsed. We immediately passed hole control to War and Wormhole and went to bed pretty fucking exhausted.
Are you kidding me?
We went to sleep with dreams of the amazing armor brawl we’d have when our alarm clock screeched at 7 AM, slugging it out for hours against their 11 Gaurdians and 6 Nestors. Instead, we awoke to a ping from WaW that we didn’t want to see.

This is not fun gameplay, CCP. Needless to say, INIT and a plethora of wormhole bois already had pings out.
TiDi Fest
The last bit is sort of a blur because we didn’t have the energy, time, or morale to deal with a 200 man Kikimora fleet from Initiative (which is what exactly showed up). Luckily, this is why you have friends- preferably ones that are a lot better than you at dealing with situations like this. They handled the nullsec blob situation while we continued the eviction as normal.
The boys came and we had an absurd amount of Loki’s sitting on a wormhole, waiting for INIT to jump.
Well, they did.
Followed by 70 TDSIN interceptors.
.
.
.
And then they died.
It was a pretty hilarious slap, I’m not really sure what those interceptors were there for. They could have easily reshipped into the armor composition Outfit 418 had in their corporation hangar (they had plenty of ships left, more if they didn’t self destruct half of it). HK/HC/LZHK/IH handled the infill like child’s play while we continued the structure siege. We cleaned up the rest of the timers, gathered our loot, and went home.
Closing Notes
The best parts of that eviction were the armor brawls, and I was really looking forward to us slugging it out in EUTZ when we were at our weakest. Sadly, it never happened.
I honestly believe that the overall eviction would have been better for both sides without the frigate hole, Outfit 418 had a great heavy armor composition that would have fared pretty well with the weaker EU numbers from KG/SYNDE. Without INIT forming, there is a 0% chance that we would have called more people in- and we probably wouldn’t have been able to break their ridiculous amount of Nestors and Guardians.
It was a fun experience, but not one I’m looking to repeat any time soon. Evictions outside of your group’s timezone are taxing, and 16 hours of 6 doorstops were probably the most miserable I’ve ever been in this game. I’m going to go back to nanogang for a bit.