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    Home Unlabelled Eve Online Operation Enho: the Valhalla Ride - YZ9 AAR

    Eve Online Operation Enho: the Valhalla Ride - YZ9 AAR

    October 15, 2020

    Eve Online Operation Enho: the Valhalla Ride - YZ9 AAR

    Operation Enho: the Valhalla Ride - YZ9 AAR

    Posted: 15 Oct 2020 12:00 AM PDT

    Quick note: I wrote this out immediately after a long fight and tried to get it out as quickly as possible, hopefully you enjoy it but I'm certain there are some mistakes, apologies in advance.

    This fight was a month's long plan come to fruition. Many many hours of preparation and practice. You probably already know how it ended, but I'll tell you how it started.

    We'd seen the way the PAPI coalition cynos in and we thought it was really unusual, they seemed to cyno all right on top of each other, our cynos are more spread out to avoid AOE titan DD. We started seriously looking at the idea of how they bring them in but we wanted to see if they would do that in a combat situation. So we decided to fight over 49-u fort as a test run. We would observe how they cyno'd and if they bubbled their fleet. To our utter delight at 49-u they used a small group of cynos and brought all their supers into a tight ball. We lost a lot of supers because of the PDS not working but we considered it a price we were happy to pay for the information and we continued to plan.

    We did test runs with BFGs at ranges starting at 10km off the cyno and going out to 50km to find the perfect range and we worked on different ways to get the titans warped to the perfect range. Once we settled on the method of delivering the titans we started testing how many you needed to wipe a super fleet. We found that 10 titans could get some supers that load but don't get hardeners on or get neuted out. 15 get most all nyxes/hel. 20 catch almost all aeons. 25 kill everything but heated phenom'd aeons.

    In the end we did about 50 different test runs with various ranges and configs and we had it down to a science. As we zeroed in on the ideal way to deliver titans to their exact spot (even if they hictor or dictor bubbled) there was a sense of giddyness. "If this works it will be the biggest thing to ever happen in Eve" people said. "If this works it will be AMAZING". "If this works we can clean up everything with a dread bomb." If this works. We all had it in the back of our mind. On the test server it worked. On TQ it worked. But would it work in deep tidi? No one knew, it had never been attempted before.

    We started using the code-name Enho, named after our favorite sumo wrestler, a very small guy who routinely beats much larger opponents. It seemed appropriate. The actual warping in of the titans we started calling the Valhalla Ride. We knew if it worked or if it didn't the titans were heading to the same destination.

    There was a lot more planning that went into it but I'll spare you all the gory details, but there were many hundreds of man hours that were put into this and I want to thank everyone who put their time and effort into this. We then had to start looking for the right time to put our planning into action. The keepstar drop fights looked attractive but we didn't know what system they would be in so it was hard to pre-seed titans. The anchor timers wouldn't work because of tether. So we waited for PAPI to go on the offensive again. When they started reffing out forts we knew we had a good chance so we choose YZ9 because it seemed like they thought we'd focus more on FWST.

    Over the 24 hours before the timer we we tried to get as many titans secreted into YZ9 as possible. Whenever the system would empty out we would jump one titan in and warp him to his pre-assigned spot then safe log him. A couple times one titan was spotted but I wasn't too worried, titans move around all the time. We wanted 25 but a few just had no time where they could come in because YZ9 is a pipe system. I wasn't worried though, 20 was plenty.

    The night before we had most of our titans assigned and the perches were burnt for our interceptors, I checked the spreadsheet and went to sleep. Not very nervous, we had prepared as best we could. We were ready. At this point everything was just would the stars align and would the server work.

    The day of came and the prep work continued. Much discussion was had about their escalation theory and what we would need to do to get the PAPI supers dropped. I was hoping to do so without aggro'ing our supers but I was willing to do so if needed. The question were: would they drop the same way again. Would they aggressively bubble themselves? Would they use the same small cyno grouping or spread out more? Would they change strategies entirely and use their supers a different way?

    The battle started and they had, as expected, larger numbers than us. But you are playing with house money at this point, like 49-u the only thing that mattered was walking them up the escalation chain. This time they used B-52 Phoenixes and long range BS to assault the fort, a different strategy, and I was gravely worried they would light the super cyno inside a bubble wall they erected around the rokhs. I had Laz use our supertrains and primary all the hictors to try and lower the amount of bubbles that would potentially pull our titans. The battle evolved slowly and we played it patiently, we were on the losing end but it was all part of the wager we had to pay to push our chips in.

    We kept running them up the escalation chain to see what it would take to bring their supers in, as I mentioned before we wanted to see if we could get them to jump in without aggro'ing our supers, but we weren't able to do so. They had a carrier blob that had a bubble that just clipped one of our titan warp ins and would possibly catch 5 or so. We were very worried that they'd bring the supers in next to those carriers and our plan would be shot and we'd have spent a lot of money for nothing. On top of that you don't want to look like a moron to your line members but you can't say "Don't worry guys this is part of a big plan", we couldn't after 49-U and if we had whiffed here we wouldn't be able to do so.

    Luckily I think our guys have a ton of confidence in us, so we made the call to have the supers aggro. I said something nerdy like "the die is cast". We watch the Test cyno warp far away from our area of concern to a naked area of space, then all the other cynos go in the same place. INTENSE RELIEF. This is it, they are doing it in a tight grouping with no protective bubbles. Most people in command comms were not clued into the plan so we were tip-toeing around it but they were starting to pick up on it at that point. Something was up. We get on global, myself, Elo, Laz, and a few others debating on if the placement is good and if they are actually jumping to those cynos.

    The wait was excruciating. We wanted to see the jump out animation of the PAPI supers in 8QT but it took so long. Our titans were uncloaked and aligned, ready to warp, but also quite obvious. Eventually we saw the first of the jump animations in 8QT, enough to assure us this wasn't a fake. Then I called "ENHO, ENHO, ENHO" over global comms and the plan was set in motion. Our interceptors warped in. Our titans waited and then warped to their assigned interceptor. Right after we called for that PAPI got one sabre bubble up but from our testing I was certain that even if it was up before the warp it would have no negative effect.

    Then we waited, again. The load-in for their supers took forever. Our titans were creeping closer, in warp. Eventually they started hitting grid and no supers had loaded, but the warp ins were perfect. I thought again "if it works". We had executed the warp in perfectly, a beautiful spread, a fleet killer. I keyed up to all my fleet members and said "If you believe in a deity we could use a few prayers now". We waited a long time for supers to load, we knew they'd hold invuln after they come in.

    Now it was just waiting and hoping "if it works". Our warp in was exactly how we practiced and perfected it. We had to wait an obscene amount of real time. I don't know how long it was, it felt like 15 minutes, it was probably 5.

    After the majority of their supers had jumped in and lost invuln we called for BFG. Seeing those spool up was incredible, watching the massive amount of work that we put into it come to fruition. Finally after what seemed like forever I'm trying to be quiet and just wait, but I was dying to know if damage would apply. Eventually we got a report of good hits on many targets. I started daring to believe it would work.

    And then, the damage stopped. A review of our logs later would show that most of the titans only got 1 to 3 damage cycles on the boson, not the 20 that you normally get. We watched nyxes lose shield and then drop one or two percent of armour. But we didn't know at the time that the server hadn't worked. We thought maybe it would catch up. Sadly it never happened. For thirty minutes or so I hoped the server would rubberband and catch up but eventually I lost hope that it would catch up.

    So "if it works" turned out to be "it didn't work". We only did 5-10% of the damage we expected. We held out hope for a while that the server would catch up and that was the problem but it never did. We kept the fight up killing dreads with our supers while they focused on our now trapped titans and sent them on their Valhalla Ride then we called it a night and dropped aggro and re-tethered.

    I want to say thanks to every single one of my guys who put a titan in for the ride to Valhalla. Thanks to everyone in Enho Squad who spent so much time planning it and helping test it. I love you guys more than you know and I appreciate your confidence in me more than you suspect. In the end in this type of war we have to think outside the box and come up with unusual strategies. Sitting in front of each other and trading vollies will never work for us. The amount of people who have personally reached out to me with kind messages saying they support me and they are happy to fly with me is incredibly touching. We tried something the server had never seen before and it didn't cooperate with us. There's very little you can be upset about when you have a plan and you execute it to perfection.

    Along with the thank you to everyone who helped with this I want to say thank you to our enemies in PAPI. There are a few personalities I dislike (particularly the FC who keeps DMing me with borderline rape-y language) but overall you guys are alright and we wouldn't have the opportunity to come up with these kind of schemes without you. Necessity is the mother of invention and you have forced us to invent quite a bit. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but without an opponent like this we wouldn't have had a chance to try.

    • Some quick notes: The supercarrier size change was terrifying. When the Aeon size was changed to make it much larger it would have made the supers bump so much more and ruined this plan. We were all extremely nervous this would end our plan before we even had chance to try it.

    • When the titans decel'd my discord just EXPLODED with DMs. So many FCs from every alliance and other people sent me a message saying something along the line of "HOLY SHIT". Lots of people grasped what was going on almost immediately. Even a bunch of PAPI FCs messaged me.

    • Cryo Huren made this amazing piece of art

    EDIT: For the people saying "Shouldn't you have known it wouldn't work cause of x-47?" - Bosons worked in x-47, Jay did about 5 that worked and the titans that warped onto the Imperium worked one just missed totally and the other applied regular damage as far as we saw.

    submitted by /u/Eve_Asher
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    Beautiful pic from the battle in YZ9-F6

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 05:46 PM PDT

    YZ9-F6 SuperCap Fight Screenshots

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 09:00 PM PDT

    YZ9-F6

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 09:43 PM PDT

    What fear of death have we who know there is immortality in our great and noble deeds?

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 10:15 PM PDT

    TITAN ESCALATION IN YZ9-F6

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 07:49 PM PDT

    3 parties killing each other: Imperium, PAPI and the server.

    Edit: Initial objective was fortizar,

    PAPI vs IMPERIUM started the fight in subacap

    PAPI droped some dreads on Imperium fleet

    Goon dropped dreads on PAPI dreads,but PAPI counter-drop with more dreads, so Goons and init droped more dreads, but Papi counter counter-droped with more dreads etc..

    Goon droped supercariers, PAPI counter-drop with dreads

    Panfam droped supercariers, Goons counter-drop with a few titans

    Panfam droped more supercarrier on these titans

    Now it's escalating... we'll see

    Edit: https://adashboard.info/intel/dscan/view/w8yKaVRB dscan

    1 erebus dead https://zkillboard.com/kill/87875031/

    TEST droped their titans, I don't think Imperium will save the titans on grid.

    Panfam drop titans also, Goons titans are dying

    https://br.evetools.org/br/5f87d0fb55bb56001bc05158

    Fight is over.

    Gf and thanks for this fight, I was hoping more but it was fun !

    submitted by /u/Acia_Saraki
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    BREAKING: Goonswarm titan bot mistakes PAPI super blob for rock haven

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 11:46 PM PDT

    YZ9-F6 (Delve) -- A top secret self-replicating boson titan RMT bot apparently went rogue Thursday afternoon as it mistook an attacking PAPI super fleet for a Blood Raider rock haven anomaly. The titans warped to what it believed to be an easy source of isk and attempted to boson the blob of supercapitals and force auxiliary ships, resulting in the tragic loss with all hands of all but a handful of the titans.

    GARPA AI development specialists were at a loss to explain the unusual departure from the intended behavior. One such specialist offered commentary on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal: "I haven't seen any of our RMT bots do anything more unproductive than what we've just witnessed here today. We've lost over twelve ticks in bounty prizes alone." The delve minute, an economic point of pride for the Goons and their renters, must be maintained in order to survive the ongoing war, for home mortgage and kool-aid powder expenses to enable the cult of personality which has kept the martini regime in power for so many years.

    The specialist added, "What we found most interesting was the amount of titans which spawned in the next wave after we destroyed the trigger, which we believe was the ares piloted by a RAZOR member". At the time of shitposting, GARPA had not yet decided whether to file an official support ticket with CCP about the issue with titan spawns.

    submitted by /u/delve_is_for_wusti
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    ccp_exploits.jpeg

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 09:14 AM PDT

    The new tally.

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 11:05 PM PDT

    YZ9-F6 - Major battle going on in Delve

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 07:03 PM PDT

    EDIT: every time I put in the effort to do one of these things there are still downvotes. Not sure why. As Treebeard said: "I am on no one's side because no one is on my side."

    I will update if I can.

    Fortizar armor timer.

    02:02 - Some caps on grid. Some supers cynoing in. about 300B destroyed so far. 2500 in local.

    BR report so far

    02:07 - 244B losses Goon losses vs 105B PAPI losses

    02:23 - Carriers and supers are involved. Local is up to 2700. 283B to 118B

    One of those fights that grows organically? Armor timer on a fort, not exactly a major strategic event.

    02:35 - 2900 in local, fighters out I think, and on an unreinforced node. So far claims are it is holding. 305B to 150B

    02:49 - losses going up quickly and evening(?) some. Supers are starting to die as well. 423B to 243B

    02:56 - 3300 in local. Goon Titans cynoing in. 431B to 280B

    Numbers are more even in this fight, about 1 to 1.5, where in the past they were 1 to 3.

    03:10 - Goon Titans bosoning fleet of supers.

    Brisc about TiDi: "this is what we live for, this is why we play." tons of KMs on zkill from other regions all over Eve say differently. You have to love this sandbox.

    03:23 - Imperium has confirmed they have lost a titan. Still 3300 in local. Lots supposedly in mid jump into this thing including PAPI titans. (this includes Brave titans. I still feel kind of wrong saying those two words together. 7o to you guys!)

    03:31 - big ball of PAPI titans jumped in. A bunch of them bounced hard off of each other. We have crossed the 1 Trillion isk in losses.

    03:38 - according to Brisc over 100 PAPI titans dropped on field. Goons have about 15. According to TIS 2nd Goon Erebus is down.

    Dscan

    03:41 - losses are 806B to 422B

    Sorry kids, I have to haul my old ass to bed.

    Twitch links:

    TalkingInStations for a more PAPI sided view

    ImperiumNews for the Bee side of things.

    submitted by /u/HaliJones
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    After seeing this, my erection is gonna last more than four hours

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 08:05 PM PDT

    To the best change of the patch!

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 09:25 AM PDT

    In the sky this morning

    Posted: 15 Oct 2020 12:32 AM PDT

    First Titan death in Delve for this war

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 08:25 PM PDT

    Callout : Elise Randolph

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 11:21 PM PDT

    This is a callout of /u/eliserandolph for conduct unbefitting of a CSM member, a community leader, 3 time Alliance tournament runner up/quarterfinalist, and CEO of honourable PvP corporation Habitual Euthanasia.

    Point 1 - Rather than using an honourable battleship, Elise Randolph used a a cowardly Kitsune ECM frigate.

    Source - my lossmail

    Point 2 - The jammer used was a magnetometric jammer, which is of the wrong type if one wishes to jam a Caldari Rokh.

    Note that there are plenty of hostile Gallente Megathrons on field. As to why the jammer was not used on a proper target, that brings us to point 3.

    Point 3 - Rather than effectively supporting the fleet, Elise Randolph jammed the primary to whore on killmails.

    As all Ewar pilots should know, you don't ewar the primary, since if the primary dies (which I did) you waste a cycle. Whoring on mails is best done with whore guns while jammers go on proper targets.

    As such I demand absolutely nothing be done because <3 elise.

    submitted by /u/angry-mustache
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    Caldari Supremacy

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 09:58 PM PDT

    PSA: Not a single levi died in yz9 blood bath today. All other titans are clearly inferior.

    Caldari Master Race.

    submitted by /u/H0n0ur
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    Eve Font Sizes: a deep and intellectual study

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 02:15 PM PDT

    Another casualty of war. 12 bil gooooone

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 11:19 PM PDT

    Shooting Drones to get standings be like.

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 07:00 PM PDT

    supercaps_irl

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 09:52 PM PDT

    VERSION 18.10.jpg

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 09:42 AM PDT

    CCP lied. We got fucked.

    Posted: 15 Oct 2020 01:29 AM PDT

    [This is a hisec crying post. If you are a nullsec player, you can probably skip this one, but I probably feel the same nerdrage now that you felt during blackout so I can feel your pain to some extent there]

    "At the core of EVE Online is a universe where actions have consequences, and this year the consequences of the Invasion storyline will have deep and lasting effects on players. Players will have to make their choice carefully – will they side with the new invaders, or will they resist?" said Bergur Finnbogason, EVE Online's Creative Director. "Chapter 3 delivers a universe-changing event with a series of activities and player-driven decisions that will span the summer and change the landscape of EVE forever!"

    1. Having now seen the conclusion of the invasion content, we can see that the first part of this is false. There was no way to influence the outcome of the invasion. The Triglavians were always going to get 27 systems. This can be seen from the fact that we saw as many as 5 Liminality candidates pop at once. 5 liminality candidates coming under attack at one time is basically guaranteed to result in one, if not more losses. If EDI showed up to babysit the Caldari(an all hands on deck event considering the Caldari rat problems), Kybers could split up and push Gallente/Amarr systems uncontested. If we showed up to help the Gallente, they could just contest us in full numbers and allow the Caldari system to be autopushed, while they sent a small force to handle the Amarr and delay. The only thing we all spent hundreds of hours doing was prolonging the inevitable, at the cost of tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions worth of isk. On the final day, when it looked like we might have held off the 27, we had 3 active liminal candidates up, which effectively made things impossible. With almost every player between EDENCOM and the Triglavians active, it seems that EDENCOM was never supposed to have a chance to hold off the invasion.

    In hindsight, if we had known this going in, we could have literally ceded every invasion system, been done with this shit in a month, and potentially still have access to Niarja if the magic 27 had been hit before it became active. The amount of burnout this content has caused has been astounding, and to find out that all of that was for nothing fucking sucks.

    1. The Pick-A-Side Dichotomy was a fucking lie. Nobody in EDI wants an exclusive region, nobody in EDI wants gates locked off. What we did want to see was literally anything. It's become sort of a meme at this point that "We fought for months to protect the galaxy, and all we got were these lousy t-shirts". We got mails from new players, from roleplay communities, industry corps and FW groups asking us to come in and save their systems. CCP, in their wisdom, even put up systems that were required to complete Tutorials and Epic Arcs for invasions, and some of them were lost, and new players literally got sent into systems with Triglavian gatecamps while they tried to complete their tutorials. We showed up, we worked just as hard as the Trig-aligned players, and in return got less than nothing. Not only do we not have access to shiny new systems and null rewards(none of which we have asked for nor want), but we don't even have the ability to run any Triglavian content anymore. There is no longer a way to earn DED LP for our LP store. There's no longer a way to make money fighting Triglavians, however meagre it may have been. There's not even a good way to get into T-space and take the fight to them in any meaningful way, seeing anyone who see's a combat fleet on D-scan can just jump gate and leave us behind. Even if we did catch something, it's worth noting, Triglavian rats would defend them, and it would be very, very difficult to secure any of the loot we picked up.

    2. The current handling of the invasion is terrible for new players. Laying aside the aforementioned gaffs with newbros being yeeted into gate camps as part of their tutorial, the invasions were really good for getting new players engaged with the game. The fact that a new player could see that a system was being invaded, ask in local what the fuck was going on, and then be given a cruiser from any of the races, and immediately get to join a fleet was INCREDIBLY valuable and good for the overall health of the game. I cannot speak for the Kybernaut fleets, as I was not in them, but at least in EDI we had players from Faction warfare to mission running to lowsec and nullsec PvP, to Indusry/Miners to wormholers, and the EDI fleets served as a way for them to make connections with vets and access playstyles that would have taken a great deal of time for them to access previously. I know ten or so newbies that started running wormholes consistently because of someone they met in EDI. I know several more who've started to dig their teeth into faction warfare after going on their first frigate roams into lowsec. All of them now know what it means when they hear "align to the broadcast", "anchor on X" "broadcast for reps" and "primary is X", as well as understanding how fleet communications generally work.

    I've met a lot of new players who were either just starting out, or coming back after being bored by the game, and I've been told a handful of times about how this content was the first that they'd found really engaging and fun in Eve online. I know all the vets, myself included, were pretty worn out by the content by the end of it, but to a new player, hearing that the navy is engaged with invading forces, and then warping into a big fleet fight is really really cool. Finding a new player, and then taking them to see Field Bases with all the EDENCOM rats was fun. Telling people that we'd personally fought hard for these star systems, and that people fighting for the other side couldn't come in(there are some caveats) was fun, and it showed them that even in Hisec there is such a thing as player agency and impact on the map.

    We had such a high number of new players, and such a solid retention rate that I decided I wanted to run weekly fleets specifically to keep together this community that has been built up around EDENCOM through EDI. We were to run a Flashpoint fleet once a week, every week, and the beauty in that is that I could(and did) send many new players fittings that they could fly within a week. Starting from day one, in a week you could fight a Dreadnought, make pretty good isk, and get connected with players from a wide range of backgrounds and skill levels. We ran it once, the newbros had a good time, and now that content is effectively removed from the game entirely. SOL, sorry new players.

    If anyone has ideas for what else I can do with them in Hisec on a scheduled basis, let me know, but I'm drawing a blank.

    1. "Well, what the fuck do you actually want then?"

    Ideally we'd get a new station(an existing model would be great, no need for something custom and shiny) in the Fortress systems with DED LP stores. We'd get some form of combat site to let us kill Triglavians and earn LP. It would even make sense if we had a Titan bridge(purely rp here) set up that sent fleets into some sort of deadspace pocket so we could fight them there. After all, EDENCOM controls more than double the systems that the Triglavians do, it makes zero sense that they would stop fighting now. Bonus points if Flashpoints become available again, but that one is purely self serving so that I can let more newbros fight the Zirnitra. Finally, coming up with a lore justification(advanced scouts, hacked triglavian gates, etc) would go a long way in the meantime, with the end result being that EDENCOM players would have a meaningful way to continue to engage with the content by being able to transit gates in system. As it stands, a neutral player has an easier time shooting triglavians than anyone who sided with EDENCOM, and that seems rediculous.

    ​

    TL:DR: Imagine telling players to chose a side, and then completely fucking one side over when the event is finished.

    ​

    P.S. My heart goes out to all the Kybernauts whose cosmetic items, which took between 120-150 hours to grind out, are now available to buy on the LP store and are essentially worthless now. That is fucked too.

    P.P.S Good luck getting anyone to show up to defend against whatever the next invasion is. All the shinies go to the invaders regardless and the outcome will be whatever CCP pre-determines, so there's really no point losing sleep to defend a hisec system when you know the only thing you'll get is spit in your eyes as a reward.

    submitted by /u/Legolas170
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    After i lost my job as a janitor in Lantorn, i have a new job in YZ9-F6 - The fuck they doing over there.

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 10:48 PM PDT

    YZ9 Screenshots (full album in comments)

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 11:14 PM PDT

    Final Update (reupload)

    Posted: 14 Oct 2020 01:07 PM PDT
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