Save Jita - A weekend in review

In case you missed my post on EN24, here is the weekend review for Save Jita from the Moar Tears perspective that I wrote.


Introduction

First off, I would like to begin by saying thank you to everyone who came out to help. While Team Save Jita primarily made up of Moar Tears and Noir. pilots didn’t “Save Jita”, we were successful in being part of an important narrative. Save Jita/Burn Jita showed what makes EVE unique from any other MMO and anyone who can look back and say “I was there” making pixels explode should consider whatever they did a success. In particular, Moar Tears’ success was showing that despite having the highest ever efficiency from a major highsec war dec alliance, we’re not afraid to fight targets that can shoot back and are willing to engage despite being largely outnumbered. While most highsec groups are afraid to undock if it means they might lose ships, we took heavy losses and kept fighting anyways. Not a single fuck was given, we just reshipped and kept doing what we do best, making pixels in highsec explode. Meanwhile, Noir. returned to their roots of flying extremely lethal, high-efficiency, hit and run skirmish gangs. They also showed the strength of their Noir. Academy training program, which particularly shined.

Goonswarm and friends, showed how a large group of players can throw an event which rocks the entire universe. On the other hand, Save Jita showed the value in giving small numbers the ability to impact much larger alliances, something the new war dec price changes would take away. While Team Save Jita didn’t stop the CFC by any means, we were successful in keeping Jita from being an AFK turkey shoot for them, scoring over 22b in kills. We made them dock-up and reship into Drakes whenever we could, forced them to fit tanks and range scripts on their suigank Tornados, and punished anyone who wasn’t paying attention.

While Noir. already wrote up excellent battle reports from the Save Jita side for the first two days, here are some Moar tears perspectives from each day.

Day 1

For most of the highsec guys, this was our first experience fighting under heavy time dialation and we grossly underestimated how significantly it shapes a fight. We undocked our Abaddon fleet with the intent to ninja several of their stragglers who were still sitting on the station without logistics. Unfortunately, the maxed out time dialation allowed people remaining on the station to warp off immediately while their main fleet warped back and it was hard to judge deaggro timing with the tidi so we lost a quarter of our 12 man fleet. Derp derp. Still, no complaints from our side as it was an extremely fun, albeit long fight.

Day 2

Server performance was much better. Noir. setup camp on the Jita gate inside Perimeter and killed off anything that was unfortunate to jump through. Meanwhile, Moar Tears FC VIT0 C0RLE0NE chose to operate directly inside of Jita running sniper Tier 3 fleets designed to hit outside of the CFC’s Tornado suigank Tornado’s range. The hit and run tactics worked brilliantly and forced the CFC to modify their Tornado fits in addition to mixing in Naga/Talos anti-sniper support. We pushed our engagement range even further out and kept ganking them taking minor losses to people warping directly to celestials instead of safespots. Finally the CFC changed up their tactics by actively probing out the perches we were using to rally and after a few close calls we decided operating Jita had gotten a little too hot so we took a break and moved to Perimeter where the Noir. guys had setup.

Next, -A- brought in an armor Oracle gang which was mainly supported by Noir. with their ranged Hornet shield gang. Some Moar Tears guys reshipped into Oracles as well, while the rest of the Highsec Coalition forces brought whatever they could that fit the best into the combined fleet doctrines. There are not enough facepalms in the world to effectively express what happened next. Right when we were about to jump into Jita to fuckup Goons, the two AD0PT pilots that were with us engaged a war target Oracle, which belonged to an En Garde pilot. When -A- Oneiroses started repping the Oracle, they reported on joint comms that their war target was getting reps and asked if we could give them any. Fucking terrible and many of us have the feeling this is why -A- was reluctant to coordinate with us for the rest of the event. This pilot should feel bad and I hope he skills his character in-game.

Day 3/Day 4

We continued scoring kills wherever we could and had great success busting up safe spots. Goonswarm numbers overall had tapered off greatly from the first Day. Highsec forces were able to consistently field a 20-30 man fleet, throughout all time zones. As the weekend went on, we found ourselves fustratingly being just under the threshold of having the fleet numbers to break their logi in a stand-up fight, however, our fleets did successfully dock up their Tornados on several occasions and made them ship into Drake fleets. Also, our skirmish tactics resulted in them changing their fits and continually attempting to bait us, which was rewarding to know we were impacting them enough to force their attention.

Double Tap./Godsquad – Double Tap. completely no showed except for a single person on day 1. God Squad, on the other hand at least had one person each day join the joint efforts, although the rest of their alliance decided they wanted to derp around independently by undocking and redocking battleships on the undock. Very disappointing and we could have done some amazing things with the combined 25 man BS gangs with 10-15 logistics ships i’ve seen these guys bring.
Veyr Collective/Ex-Snatch Victory Guys/CWT Mercs/AD0PT – These guys had a good showing throughout the weekend despite having limited numbers. Much thanks to them for coming out and these guys definitely deserve props for showing up. Individual shoutouts: Pitboss, Ts5p, Luke Hartelse, Potamus Jenkins, Latheth, MercenaryBlue.
THORN Alliance – On Sunday something hilarious happened. THORN Syndicate put in a war dec against Goonswarm which got bugged becuase they formed an alliance after putting the war dec in. As a result, the war dec never transferred to the alliance and neither side could shoot each other without Concord intervention. However, one of the Goonswarm Scimitars managed to pick up aggro, and the THORN Alliance guys began harassing it. A Goonswarm fleet led by DBRB thinking they could all legally shoot the rest of the THORN Alliance proceeded to go GCC with several Drakes on a THORN Tornado. lawl.
RvB/The Aurora Shadow – In my opinion, these guys were the biggest losers of the entire event in the fact that they chose to remain neutral. The Jita thunderdome would have been the perfect kind of event for a group like RvB to participate in and was arguably lots of fun for everyone involved. Their choosing to whore onto killmails of people already GCC had no positive impact whatsoever for the groups actually fighting and from what I saw their efforts were half-hearted at best. While, EVE-University wouldn’t have been able to help even if they wanted to due to their status as TEST pets, RvB denied a lot of their members a potentially amazing weekend and would have honestly been a tipping factor if they had chosen to participate.

Closing thoughts

I don’t think anyone on the Save Jita side expected to stop Goons completely. Like in the movie 300, our narrative was showing that regardless of how outnumbered you may be, there is virtue to be had in undocking your ship and for us it meant killing 22b+ for the weekend. Props to Mittani’s propaganda machine for continually underscoring disinformation on how CFC forces would be primarily bringing alts to Jita in the lead-up to the actual event and our how war decs would be useless. While this ended up being far from reality and many of us on the Highsec side saw it for what it was, I think it definitely diffused attention to our efforts enough that many people who were on the fence about helping, decided not to. The forces they brought to Jita were not unbeatable and had all of the highsec groups actually banded together and flown under a unified fleet doctrine, the behemoth of a player event that was Burn Jita could have actually been stopped.

This weekend showed how much fun you can have PVPing without supercapitals and titan bridges everywhere. I genuinely hope with the upcoming war dec changes CCP realizes the value of Highsec being the last place where true small gang, limited party warfare can happen. For consideration, should the 500k per member war dec price changes go through, there literally wouldn’t be anything anyone could do about another Burn Jita, since the war dec against Goonswarm alone would be 4.3b ISK. Ultimately, I hope that this weekend showed CCP that its subscribers value player driven content/conflict and would rather be given tools to fight, than play an EVE where your best option to fight back is not logging in. Final props to everyone who took part in turning Jita into a thunderdome this weekend.

-Pinky Feldman