The BoM Eviction

Many of you have probably already read all about the Band of Magnus (BoM) eviction that took place last weekend. I'll go ahead and add my 2 cents as a HRDKX line member. You can see our main FC's AAR at reddit and news coverage at EVE News 24 and The Mittani (really great tears in the comments of both articles).

Our bosses had explained why we were evicting BoM, a Slovak and Czech outfit, but I wasn't particularly interested in the whys. I don't usually require justification for shooting shit - this is a shooty spaceship game, after all. My only concern was BoM wouldn't fight for their system and that I was going to seed my main into a WH for the weekend and just F1 structures.


I haven't been in a full-scale eviction before (not as the aggressor at least), but I have done my fair share of structure shooting. It's terrible. I wouldn't say it's as bad as setting up a dickstar POS or mining, but it's one of my least favorite things to do in EVE. Once our pipe into the BoM system was ready, we moved in and started reinforcing their towers, all 10 of them. Thankfully, structure shooting is marginally less lame with lots of dreads.

Once the reinforcement timers started, BoM did little for the next two days except log in and self-destruct ships. They did a lot of that - over 60b worth in hulls alone. One guy spent at least a half-hour blowing up ventures; scorched earth and all that.

On Sunday I had some issues with my internet connection, but I managed to log in just in time. Ixtab and Hole Control had joined BoM after rolling for five hours, and Quantum Explosion had joined our fleet to even the odds. Not wanting to disturb the fleet chatter with my derpiness, I yolowarped out of our tower and into one of the busiest battlefields I have seen in w-space. There were well over 100 pilots on grid, and many caps among them. I had landed around the same time as the enemy triage carriers, who had been split apart from the main force by some clever bubbling. As they tried to get into range to rep their fleetmates, myself and the other neut legions began the tedious process of emptying out their capacitors.

During this time, the rest of the fleet was attending to other matters. Our dreads had begun a knockdown, drag-out brawl with their dreads. BoM had wisely brought no less than six bhaalgorns, which are real bastards. Without them, we probably wouldn't have lost so many dreads. Our subcaps took out a few of their subcaps in the early stages, like this poor Atztech tengu who got primaried before he was even able to whore on anything. Five hours of rolling, you get on grid for one of the best w-fights in recent memory, and then dead straight away. Sucks so bad. That same guy got his pod out, returned in 15 minutes with his less blingy, second-string jamgu, and then lost that and his pod too, still unable to whore on anything. I feel you bro.

After that jamgu was a loki and some guardians, then we started to lay into the caps. We spread neuts around and our dreads focused fire on their dreads. When they started to catch too many reps, and with our dreads dropping, we turned our attention to the carriers. After they went down, including an especially nice nid, their ability to rep was neutralized and that was pretty much the end of it. We spent the next fifteen minutes wiping out tens of billions in t3s and battleships and cleaning up the few remaining dreads. Some of the highlights include this neut legion, a deadspace on-grid booster, and a random domi. If every dead t3 pilot on the field lost a level V subsystem skill, it would equal a total loss of 6,656,000 SPs.

For our own losses, we didn't suffer much besides the baker's dozen of dreads. We lost one dude in a loki, a sabre, and some pods, according to this battle report. All told we lost 77b and they lost 128b, which is worth about $5,100 total in USD if my math is correct (unlikely). This may not seem like much to big null blocs who routinely field hundreds of pilots at a time to defend ihub timers in deep tidi or whatever those guys do, but in w-space it's a pretty big deal. It was certainly the best fight I've had in a WH.

After that battle we began the cleanup. The battlefield was littered with loot-strewn ship corpses, and we had the now-strontless BoM towers to grind through. There was a bit of excitement when it was announced that NOHO had rolled into the system, but we soon massed the hole to stop their fleet from interfering with the eviction. The rest of the evening was quiet except for this BoM stratios who looks to have been quietly collecting the shiny mods from the self-destructed ships. He logged into a POS just after we took it down, and a few QEX guys still happened to be on grid. That loss alone was worth considerably more than the last pinata I found, which was an entire POS.

Big props to BoM for bringing a fight after all, and QEX for helping out some bros. The biggest thanks goes to Ixtab and Hole Control for their marathon hole-rolling and whiteknighting that turned what might have otherwise been a bloodless eviction into a huge slugfest.
 

This lovely video was put together by our own franky saken