Spy Party!

It was a few days before the weekend and Huola was unusually quiet. A passerby from Otelen may have never noticed that they had slipped from highsec into a warzone, as the only movement was the slow shuffle of space janitors, quietly cleaning up Fweddit graffiti from days passed.

Was it a sign of things to come? --The quiet before the storm of the coming weekend where Nulli Secunda would be pushing Tier four and the majority of the warzone would be flipped out of the hands of the Minmatar?

Or, was something strange at work, causing Late Night, and many others’ home base to resemble a ghost town?



Not long after Nulli came to town, the Minmatar became aware of an unusual ‘mechanic’ that involved ‘buffering’ vulnerable systems. Since the Minmatar had previously never held onto systems but had flipped them almost immediately upon becoming vulnerable, this situation had never been made widely known to us until then.

The buffer was such, that there was nothing within ‘normal’ game-play parameters that the Minmatar could reasonably do to counter it. Many systems were so heavily farmed by the Amarr, that some Minmatar estimated it would take days of solid, non-stop defensive plexing to bring the system out of vulnerability. (And then the usual time to plex down the contestation level.)

We were left with three options:

1. We could sit on our thumbs, and wait for Null Secunda to flip the warzone.

2. We could cry, and then sit on our thumbs in a puddle of tears—begging CCP to fix it so that we could have a fighting chance (as well as rage on the forums and in our blogs about how the game mechanics were against us) or,

3. We could look for something productive to do to deal with it, and have a bit of fun in the process.

Most of us chose option #3.

Therefore, while Huola slept for an evening, a party was going on a mere two jumps away in the vulnerable system of Labapi. Dozens of ‘Amarrians’ filled the system, chit chatting in local, laughing on coms, and slowly chipping away at the I-HUB. It was, at times, a bit rowdy –and hilarious when we were occasionally ‘reported’ …to ourselves(lol)

The plan was to flip our own systems ourselves, and then flip them back again forcing the Amarr to start from zero in many systems, and possibly delaying their ability to reach higher Warzone Control Tiers. Call it forced metagaming, if you will. Needless to say, who knows what would have happened if Nulli had delayed another week.

I tell you this, because it’s the first time I’ve heard in my five years of playing EVE of a group infiltrating their enemy for the purpose of taking space from themselves.

Needless to say, while the ‘experiment’ was successful, we’re not too keen on shooting our own I-HUBs. (Shooting the Amarr’s is work enough.) So, it is not surprising that a small cheer went up as Nulli started flipping systems Saturday morning.

At least we wouldn’t have to do it ourselves.