Pellaeon DuGalle
Caldari
Deep Black Industries
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Posted - 2006.11.19 09:54:00 -
[2]
Edited by: Pellaeon DuGalle on 19/11/2006 10:01:27
The first night of their seige went badly, with only two starbase towers damaged and none destroyed, and their overnight lockdown of the only stargate into the system swiftly dismantled as european-time forces came back online in the morning. It looked unlikely that they were going to succeed in their goal even then, but then a further blow came: due to a controversial forum signature (involving a dead player and SomethingAwful "humour") Band of Brothers, widely regarded as the strongest alliance in the cluster, declared a holy war on the Goons and vowed to destroy them utterly. Their expected strike against the Goon assets in Cloud Ring never came, but neither did the Goons' allies, many citing recent events as the reason for changing their mind. Unprecedented (and thus far unexplained) levels of system lag made the fighting on friday night near-impossible, but the Goons were faced with a herculean task anyway, one which they clearly didn't have the infrastructure to complete. Instead, they pulled their remaining assets out using jump-capable carriers and retreated to defend their homelands and wage war on their enemies in Empire space.
While we were busy in CR, the forces of the Tau Ceti Federation, a French-speaking alliance based in the no-man's-land of Venal, seized the opportunity to attack RAWR in Tribute. Unfortunately for them, the western front collapsed far more quickly than they'd predicted and allied forces piled back east to remove this latest threat. While smaller than the Goons, TCF are far more experienced fighters and the war thus far has been hard and bloody, with one engagement seeing both sides lose seven dreadnaught-class starbase-busters apiece. The first of the two contested systems has now returned to friendly hands but D7 still remains a contested system, sitting astride a vital travel corridor and thus being a key system to control. We're confident that we will eventually evict the squatters - their botched diplomacy means a settlement is unlikely at this stage - but we're expecting the war to go on for a while yet.
The map currently looks like this: http://dl1.eve-files.com/media/corp/crii/10.08.108.jpg
Cloud Ring is now in the hands of RISE, who took ownership from D2 once the Goons were cleared out. Dek is now split between D2, FLA and IRON. And, although it's not shown (the map is produced by Joshua Foiritain, who's just another player and thus not always 100% accurate), Tribute is still disputed.
That is why a lot of us play Eve. Not because of the graphics or the mechanics or how many points it gets in a poxy review. If you want to go on bashing NPCs in WoW, be my guest. We're busy fighting a full-scale galactic war, with multiple fronts, a huge logistics chain, politics, drama, territory changing hands, and people losing days or weeks of work in a single ill-judged engagement against superior forces. I can go out there in my little frigate that I could fly when I was three weeks old and play an important role (yes, really) in a key battle which helps decide the fate of a thousand stars and ten thousand space pilots. At the end of the war, one side will win and the other side will lose in a real and tangible way, and as a result all this stuff matters. There aren't that many games out there that can make the same claim.
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"There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible." |