In wormholes, nothing is safe. When your structure dies, all of your assets drop with it. It’s the purest form of EVE Online!
This June, we evicted J155203 with Singularity Syndicate. This was a Class 1 wormhole with a highsec static connection. The owner was Independent Corps Federation, a large group of corporations (300 characters) mostly of industrial players.
In this article, we’re going to go over why we decided to evict this particular hole, how we did it, and what the results were.
Motivation
We met these guys back in early April from this engagement. Originally, we tackled a mining barge with the Jaguar and held him there for a few minutes to bait them into escalating. They did not disappoint, and our jaw dropped after we saw the initial kills. Just why?
They started talking a lot of trash in local and it was fairly annoying. Fariius decided to move a few seed scanners in their wormhole so that we could watch them over the next few weeks, and maybe scan back in for an Orca kill or two.
A few weeks later, they lost this. We immediately knew they were building capitals in their Fortizar, and this put the final nail in our decision to attempt to evict these guys. We wanted to kill those capitals!
I’d be lying if we said we only did it for the capital kills. There were several additional motives.
- 300 characters, only 5 logging in
- Ship fittings were horrible, mostly bling for no reason
- Lost many high value ships (freighters, battleships, etc)
- Extremely poor attitude after fights
- Monday final timer would make weekend hole control easy
With all of this considered, we decided we would move forward with the operation.
Initial Planning
In May, we posted a large internal forum post with a poll. This eviction was going to take significant work due to the nature of the wormhole (C1>HS with a Wolf Rayet effect), so we needed to figure out when we’d get the most numbers.
We settled on May 31st to June 3rd, and everybody started clearing their calendars. We’re a small corporation, so even with max numbers we’d only peak around 30-40, which isn’t bad for a 60 character (30 actual people) corporation. Due to this, we decided we needed help, and who better than our closest friends at Singularity Syndicate!
This was a very tough one to decide on, mostly because they have a handful of guys that actually undock. J-space honor compelled us to go easy on these guys and leave them alone, but ultimately we decided to proceed and give them two conditions for our exit.
- Ransom of 15B (very reasonable for what they had, 100B+)
- Make an honest attempt at defending your home, we’ll leave
Needless to say, they did neither.
The Plan
Going into this, we had the following laid out.
- 3 day eviction
- Whaling Doctrine. Drekavacs, Guardians, and Zarmazads.
- Hole control with HICs, Yachts, and other camping kitchen sink.
- Anchor a Raitaru Thursday, defend it Friday, logistics all night.
- Reinforce Saturday at 16:00 – 20:00.
- Follow up Sunday at 14:00 – 22:00.
- Kill timers Monday between 20:00 – 00:00.
Things never go according to plan, though!
Day One
Our day started at 00:00 Friday (technically Saturday, but we’re USTZ). The Raitaru was coming out of anchor, and we formed nearly a 30 man fleet of Drekavacs and Guardians.
One enemy (Han Sollow) was in the Fortizar, and they had not yet recognized our Raitaru from the day before. Cyrus and I started discussing about how tight the timers for a 3-day eviction would be, and he talked me into reinforcing immediately.
We started killing the small structures, and ended on the Fortizar. Needless to say, Han Sollow was going to have a very long night. At this time, we start the theme of this eviction. Why?
After reinforcing the timers, we started our 72 hour hole control. We planned to do logistics after the anchor, so we had no rolling ships at the time. We started moving in Yachts, Stratioses, and other ships to get sorted out. Han Sollow started engaging local, and we brought them in voice to try and get them to sing a song. They ended up being very boring to talk to, so we just went silent in local and started the long weekend.
At 05:00, we got a fairly decent fight out of them, which was the first major positive in their favor, considering how we mentioned an honest attempt would get us to leave. Also, why?
Day Two
Hole control was going smooth, we had nearly 10 on throughout the night. I pulled around 3 hours of sleep, and woke up to learn that AU goofed and let them sneak back in after podding them. Grrr.
I also woke up to learn that Han Sollow had nearly killed 10B worth of ships on the undock of the Fortizar, mostly self destructing things or PDSing them. At this moment, we decided to do a full eviction. These guys had given up in literally 12 hours, and turned to killing their own assets.
This day went fairly quiet. We maintained hole control for the full 24 hours, and started setting up bubbles. We killed some things that Han Sollow was trying to hide, but nothing too interesting.
Day Three
Day Three was one of the busiest ones, so we’ll have a few sections.
A test of faith
Bob decided to test our faith on Day 3. A C5>C5 frigate hole opened up in the morning, where our skeleton crew was active. We quickly realized that we didn’t have the ships to roll these, and I didn’t even know how to roll them. Luckily, Cyrus Kurush (SYNDE CEO) knew what to do, and started burning HICs to the wormhole.
I also had a work brunch that I needed to go to, and I was getting ready to leave when our first test of faith began.
BAG8 jumped in with a small Confessor fleet.
I hate you Jeko, you made me cancel my brunch plans.
We started ringing the bells because we only had a few on maintaining hole control, and most of our guys were still snoozing. We managed to get together a large enough fleet to repel them, except they seeded scanners.
Thus began our ragerolling of the highsec static, trying to keep them out. They had a Helios mapping, and he was very tough to decloak due to 5K m/s speed. But on the third highsec, Fariius got him.
We cleaned up, made sure there was nobody left in the wormhole, and ran locators on the BAG8 that we rolled out.
Thanatos on scan
We missed the Thanatos several times trying to get him probed down, but luckily he was giving us all of their corporation safespots. Nicholas Kirk eventually caught him, because he’s a legend, and we continued the theme of our eviction. Why?
Timers
Our Sunday timers were popping out, and we started chewing through them all. We were mostly uncontested, until the Fortizar.
Nobody:
Cyrus Kurush: “Do you know what would really suck? A few nags and a FAX”
Our friends decided to actually undock a few seconds after Cyrus mentioned the above statement, 2 Moros and a Ninazu. This was going to hurt. But why weren’t they engaging?
Capital Punishment
The capitals warped off to a safespot, continuing the theme of our eviction… why? This was probably the biggest mistake they could have made, because Cyrus probed them down and tackled one of their Moros as the other two capitals warped back to the Fortizar. We had them split.
We set up a ton of drag bubbles and started chewing through the capitals, keeping the Fortizar paused with a small fleet of heroes. The capitals melted fairly easily under Drekavacs without the support of their Fortizar, and man were we confused.
What now?
We finished reinforcing the Fortizar, and opened the discussion again about letting these guys go, since the capitals were their attempt at a defense. We held some polls, and had very mixed results. Killing the Fortizar and leaving everything else was the main option, so we opened a conversation with Han Sollow and Harlock Roise (their CEO), to see what they wanted.
We asked if they’d prefer us to kill all of the surrounding structures, or just the Fortizar, and they were fairly jaded. “Burn them all“, they said. They were fairly bummed out since they were only a handful defending, and we told them how they could have defended and mentioned we could mentor them in PvP to help them out a bit.
Our final question was if they’d stay in wormholes if we leave everything, but they just told us to burn everything. So we started Day Four.
Day Four
This was going to be the hardest day, because it was a Monday. Most of our US pilots were at work until 4PM, when the Fortizar came out, and we knew hole control would be very difficult. Chou managed hold it solo, until our second test of faith began.
Really?
As we were working, we got a message that we didn’t want to get. Right after our skeleton crew killed a Rorqual.
HK had a Loki and several Helios in the hole.
Vacation Days
Several core US guys start to leave work as our EU pilots maintained hole control. One hour and we would be home. The Athanor final timer was coming out of reinforcement, adding additional difficulty.
Hole control was our number one priority, for obvious reasons. By the time I was home, Stridsflygpan had the situation under control.
We rolled the Loki out and ran locator agents, and kept the wormhole 3j from Jita with a doorstop. Ballsy, right?
The Siege
I was home now, and we continued the siege. Timers went extremely smoothly, and we started dropping them one by one.
The Fortizar went clean, and pop went the pinata.
The Spoils
After killing all of the structures, there were nearly 300 hangar containers to sift through. It took us 7 hours to clean everything up, and we had to deal with a HK Helios trying to scan the highsec connection.
We killed 800 hangar ships totaling 50 billion ISK. 53 billion ISK worth of loot was extracted, which will be split between Krypted Gaming and Singularity Syndicate.
These guys had capital BPOs, skill extractors, multiple pilot character training licenses, and other stupid stuff. Our journey of why? continued for the entire 7 hours we looted.
Survey
We held a survey after the eviction to gather feedback on what to improve. 28 respondents.
General Feedback
Fun Rating: 4.18 / 5.00
Organization Rating: 4.17 / 5.00
85.7% of attendees would do this again. 92.9% of attendees learned something from this operation.
Fleet Commander Feedback
Primary FC Rating: 4.46 / 5.00
“Comfort with FC” Rating: 4.50 / 5.00
Doctrine Rating: 4.46 / 5.00
Our Guardian fitting was very poor for what we were doing, this was our primary bit of feedback from our logistics pilots. There were also several other bits of strategic feedback that we have taken note of.
Coordination Feedback
Comms Discipline: 3.89 / 5 .00
Hole Control: 4.10 / 5.00
Fleet Coordination: 4.25 / 5.00
Hunters: 4.32 / 5.00
Fairly decent ratings, we definitely have some room to improve on cross-corporation voice discipline and hole control. Most of the feedback here was the difficulty of getting in Discord for Singularity Syndicate players, we hear you.
Special Mentions
There are a handful of people that this eviction would have failed without them.
- Chou Yakumo, for keeping solo hole control and contributing a significant amount to other efforts.
- Walter Kirk, for 4-boxing Guardians, being a 1 man hole control army, and sharing great amounts of C1 knowledge from previous experience.
- Stridsflygplan, without him taking command while US was at work we likely would have been screwed.
- Fariius, for setting up this eviction and putting in a ridiculous amount of legwork.
Honorable mention to Suyan Cao for running everybody off of voice with his singing voice.
If you liked this, check out the article from the defenders perspective.
This is a nice rewiev:)