Close, but no Cigar

The dust has settled somewhat on what was an eventful weekend in the Amarr/Minmatar warzone. As many people have probably already heard, Nulli Secunda, with a killboard that would make any PVPer cry and only enough systems to reach Tier 4, decided it was time to pack things up and get the hell out of Dodge.

Instead of donning their party hats and breaking out the bubbly, the Amarr spent the cash-out in what can only be labeled as a verbal riot. Amarr militia, and other channels lit up as Amarr threw insults at Nulli for leaving before Tier 5 was achieved.



The flipping started in the morning USTZ, and there wasn’t much the Minmatar could do to prevent Nulli and their capitals from quickly burning through the I-HUBs. After around 14 systems, the process came to a grinding halt. Some say that Nulli went on a tea break for a few hours, and others said that they were under threat of being hot dropped and were waiting for things to quiet down.

Quite late that same night, the rest of the systems fell. It is said that even not sieging on the I-HUBs, they were still able to knock them down in less than a minute each.

Not ones to sit on our thumbs, the Minmatar took the opportunity to go after Kourmonen instead. With the Amarr somewhat distracted, the system was contested upwards of 25-30% with little significant resistance by the Amarr.

The cash-out happened on Sunday, and the Minmatar were ready. Our rather large fleet of combined Late Night, Iron Oxide., and many other Minmatar were given unusual orders that you don’t hear very often –spread out and plex.

With nearly every system being plexed by one or several Minmatar, we were able to slowly grind down the upgrades the Amarr were raising. The first time they hit Warzone Control 4, they held it for around 30 minutes before we grinded it back down to level 3. The Amarr continued to try to push it up again, occasionally reaching it briefly before we plexed it down again.

Apparently, greed is no stranger to the Amarr militia. We noticed that in many systems that were upgraded, the Amarr had dumped as little as possible LP to get the system upgraded to five. This meant that in many cases, we only needed to run a single plex to drop the system an entire upgrade level.

However, plexing the Amarr’s warzone tiers down was not just a defensive strategy of the Minmatar. If cashed out at Tier 5, it is estimated that Sunday’s plexing LP alone will net the Minmatar upwards of 100+ billion ISK. Also, within 24-48 hours of Sunday’s downtime, when all the flipped systems from the previous day officially became the Amarr’s, the Minmatar had already plexed a significant number of the systems into critical contestation levels.

At any rate, though brief, the Amarr’s Tier 4 cash-out was a great victory for them. Many who haven’t been able to cash-out in months were finally able to turn their LP into worthwhile ISK and supplies. Even so, a thinly veiled sense of bitterness seems to hang over the Amarr militia, and only time will tell what the next chapter will hold for this war.