A Very Merry Fleet Fight

_At 15.38, on the 9th of December, reports sprung up that a hostile fleet from the long-dormant CCP Alliance had mobilized and were escorting a cargo of loot to their Christmas party.  Capsuleers all across New Eden rushed to their intel channels to learn more.  Questions flooded in: „Where would they appear?  What would they carry?  What would they be flying?  Did they know how to fit yet?“ but answers were few.  As time went on, the populace grew impatient, then angry, proclaiming the reports to be false, recalling the battle of Tama, and issuing wanton, bloodthirsty challenges to C C P. _

Finally, as the clock turned just past 6, the alliance revealed themselves.  Y7-XFD in The Great Wildlands was the destination.  Ships flocked to the fleet of CCP – some proclaiming their allegiance, some defying their presence – all were gunned down as the convoy fought to protect the prizes contained in CCP Zulu‘s Navy Issue Apocalypse.  The battle raged for an hour, with CCP fending off pickup groups and the might of 0.0 alliances alike.  Sustaining few losses, but by no means inflicting the colossal damage they had on the populace of Tama just weeks before.  Then, all at once, the convoy laid down their arms and pushed the self-destruct button on their spacecrafts.  Timers counted down, 3... 2... 1... and the fleet was no more.  Frigates milled between the wrecks, trying to salvage a memento of a titanic battle... or something greater perhaps?

Hello everyone and welcome to my first dev blog.  Today I want to write about the live events we ran over the last 3 days – to thank those who participated, give some insight into what we wanted to achieve, and hopefully dispel a few myths that have popped up surrounding the events. 

When we ran our event in Tama which I‘m sure you all read about in CCP Diagoras‘s blog on the event, it was with these events in mind.  We knew we wanted to have a Christmas-time live event that involved direct contact with our playerbase, and figured what could be a better way to achieve that than by doing what they love the most – fighting in spaceships!  We decided early on that some ground rules needed to be set to avoid any grey areas.  They were roughly as follows:

• No podding of players by CCP employees (though they would be encouraged to pod us and make fortunes selling our corpses)
• No entering Player owned space. 
• No faction fits except for ammo.
• Use Incursed systems to enable only sub-capital ships taking part.
• Spread the events both over the map and over the timezones to be as inclusive as possible.
• Have fun with our players (and not to hold back on the smack talk!)

With the rules in place, we moved onto prizes.  We decided to run with a semi-fixed loot table for each of the three events, although the method of loot delivery changed slightly over each of them.  On the Amarrian themed event on the Friday, CCP Zulu piloted a Navy Issue Apocalypse that contained all of the loot for the event.  This led to slight dismay when his wreck was destroyed by a bombing fleet.  To improve on this, we decided to spread the loot across the field for the Gallentean themed event on Saturday and so distributed it amongst 5 well known developers.  Once again the bombers had their way!  For Caldari Sunday, we went with a 10 developer spread approach, and each dev had much less loot in their holds.  The loot table was roughly as follows:

• Spiced wine
• Exotic dancers
• PLEX  - Max 10
• Monocles/NeX Items – Max 10
• Single run BPC’s of new Battlecruisers
• 10 run BPC’s of new tech II modules
• Possibly some low end faction modules.

We felt this showcased recent additions to the game, as well as throwing in a ‘festive’ theme. Attracting solo treasure hunters to unsafe locations and adding them to the fray could only add to the fun. Please note that no BPOs were given out, despite rumors that this occurred.

Fleet composition took an interesting evolution over the weekend.  On Friday we turned up with a very simple Abbadon, Guardian, Damnation fleet.  We lasted a long time and ended up running out of time to finish the event.  We found ourselves caught in a range war that we could not win without recon.  For Saturday, we supplemented our Navy Megathron, Oneiros, Eos fleet with a few Arazus and a Helios to provide us point and mobility.  It worked well, but the incoming damage was too high for our limited logistics to deal with so we didn’t get to experience as many tactical maneuvers as we would have liked.  The final fleet comprised of Caldari Navy Ravens, Basilisks, Vultures and Onyx.  The Onyx were a powerful addition to the operation – allowing us to catch the bombers that had plagued us, particularly on the Saturday.  It was safe to say though that we learned a lot through the whole weekend and we were pleased with the way we adapted our strategy to circumvent problems that we had ran into in previous battles.

We would like to thank everyone who took the time to jump out and experience these events.  We hope you had as much fun as we did, and that we managed to get some of you to experience sides of the game you normally wouldn’t.  Thanks to the defense fleets that self-organized and helped us out, and to the attackers, without who the event would have been rather dull to say the least!  Thanks especially go to EVE Radio for providing us live coverage of each event – it raised a lot of interest and the streaming quality was excellent!  Finally, overwhelmingly huge thanks to CCP Affinity, CCP Guard, CCP karkur, CCP Legion, CCP Navigator, CCP Nullarbor, CCP Paradox, CCP Punkturis, CCP Sreegs and CCP Tenitigo, without whose dedication this would not have been possible. 

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