User:Amoni Panala/WIP/3

An Account of the Eviction of Innuendo

This is one account of the eviction of Innuendo "Innu" (J211936 ), a vanilla C2 3/H wormhole system, the then-current home the Wormhole Community. The purpose of this is mainly educational and historical. It is not meant to be definitive nor entirely objective. That said, I will do my best to clearly state when I am speculating or offering an opinion that cannot be supported by the facts.

Prior to the Eviction

In 2023, I (Amoni Panala) was in No Vacancies. I had my alt, Kamille Panala, living in Nullsec Community. Kamille served as my teaching, mentorship, and newbie FC character in EVE University. We were in the middle of the campaign to defend the PC9 pocket, but the fighting had lulled as we heard rumors that a couple in Cynosaural Field Theory had recently had a child and therefore real life was preventing them from engaging properly. I had chosen to live in nullsec because I knew very little about it and while my first love has and will likely always be wormhole space, I already had C5 space to play in. I had also noticed that WHC had become disproportionately represented by people who were more interested in PVE activities than PVP. I heard from people who were in WHC at that time that day after day there were fights to be had but they couldn't get enough people to undock to actually fight.

I wrote a scathing post on the now-defunct EVE University forums essentially saying that if people don't undock for PVP, they will leave themselves open to eviction. This was based on a vague and inconsistent notion that to krab in wormhole space is to take from it and to engage in PVP is to give back. If all one ever does is take, it is not only a drain on the entire wormhole ecosystem but also a sign of weakness. The idea behind calling it a sign of weakness is that if people are unwilling to undock in low stakes PVP fights, they won't be willing or able to put up much resistance when the stakes are as high as losing their home system. Most of the people who were already convinced that PVP was essential component of WHC appreciated the post. I had hoped that it would shake up what I perceived to be stagnation in WHC where too many krabs had come to believe they were safe and that they were not contributing enough to WHC unless and until they began participating in PVP.

It is my opinion that PVP and krabbing both necessary in wormhole space and one without the other creates an imbalance. At the time, I was jaded against krabs because of my own personal distaste for krabbing and also experiencing some burnout with working with new players who require patience and a gentle guiding hand.

Ominous Foreshadowing

When I still lived in Wormhole Community as either Amoni, Zipporah, or Kamille (I cannot recall which); we were returning home from a little skirmish. I spotted an Orca jumping into Innu from the hisec static. We were excited thinking this would be juicy killmail for us, but then I hear Boran Lordsworth audibly gasp over comms and he tells us that one of our structures (I believe it was the either the fort or one of the industrial structures) had unexpectedly unanchored. This structure had been unanchoring for weeks. The unanchoring process took so long specifically because the goal was reset the timer repeatedly and make it nearly impossible for random groups to know when the structure would actually unanchor. This was part of a process known as "flipping" in which a structure is unanchored and new structure with the same configuration is anchored. The idea is that by doing this, any unnecessary or abandoned assets are removed to kspace and the overall value of the structure is brought down thereby making it a less appealing target for someone to bash.

Instead of a controlled unanchoring, we were now scrambling like kitchen workers trying to scatter rats that had found their way into the kitchen as 30+ hangar containers littered the area around where the structure had been. WHC called upon the Hauling Department as well as our friends from Nullsec Community (who were then just part of Main Community) to help us with the logistics of gathering up and moving all these stray assets into hisec. It was a lengthy process and it is not clear to me what if anything the Orca pilot was able to scoop before we scared it off. I do remember, as the person who first spotted the Orca pilot, that it was a Lazerhawks pilot.

For reasons that will become clear later, I am of the opinion that this accidental unanchoring was not an accident, but an intentional act of sabotage for reasons that I can only speculate were meant to "teach WHC a lesson." The official story from leadership, up to and including the then-CEO, is that the unachoring fiasco was caused by a miscommunication and bad timing with the winter holidays fast approaching. At the time I was discouraged from conspiratorial thinking as it was deemed neither productive nor based in fact. This is understandable given how little we knew at the time.

The Eviction

Initial Incursion

In early December of 2023, I received a DM over Discord telling me that my prediction came true and that a large fleet of Legions had stormed Innuendo and were reffing structures. The first 24 hours were absolute chaos as many in leadership were unavailable due to real life. Some WHC folks were podded out of Innu either due to unfortunate circumstances or not being fully cognizant of the fact that with this opposition force ("opfor") maintaining strict hole control, they would not be able to return. I was eager to help WHC but the folks who were there were busy trying to figure out what they were doing and how to respond.

Thera

Once enough of leadership became aware of the situation and willing pilots were assembled, there was an attempt to infiltrate Innu by way of closest connection from Thera. Groups of people formed up into squads, given an exit from Thera, and told to burn as fast as possible to the hisec entrance. This was only mildly successful as the opfor were diligent in their hole control. Hole control is a tactical maneuver where all wandering wormholes are rolled off (i.e. closed) and the static connections are kept at critical (10% or below their allowed mass before collapsing) with a rolling ship on the outside to close the hole in the event that anyone they don't want coming in should appear.

WHC folks tried to organize skirmishes to antagonize, exhaust, and distract opfor from their hole control efforts. Unfortunately, this would occasionally result in someone who was already in Innu getting podded out. It was for this reason combined with the low efficacy of the infiltration squads from Thera that this strategy was abandoned. Folks were told to sit tight and wait for further instructions.

POS Staging

One member of WHC who had been podded out pitched leadership on the idea of trying to roll a static C2 connection as a means of getting into Innu. A POS was anchored and I led the initial wave of Unistas from all areas of New Eden to our infiltration staging. People took turns rolling the C2 static for hours on end across timezones. Unfortunately, there are 537 C2s and therefore the chances of this method succeeding were miniscule. I was there and on comms when the discussion and decision was made to stop rolling for Innu. The main concern, as I recall, was that we were risking burning out both the most enthusiastic and the most casual participants. The most enthusiastic were putting incredible amounts of effort and hope into their attempts to roll into Innu. The most casual participants were essentially sitting in space waiting for the moment someone wait, "warp to me and splash the wormhole" for hours on end. Either way, it wasn't very fun for anyone and there's only so much a person can take before they want to do something, anything else.

Opfor

Before I can continue with the rest of the story, I need to talk a bit about the opfor. Opfor was not one corp or alliance, but rather a loosely affiliated group of pilots who do evictions for fun and profit. One notable alt corp was Corporation 98646435 which at the time had a name that was so obscenely racist and culturally insensitive that CCP eventually stepped in and changed it the way they will with pilot names. As I said, this was an alt corp that included an alt of CSM's own Mick Fightmaster (this I only learned later from Mick himself when he casually bragged about being part of the eviction in NoVac's comms). I don't believe anyone used these alts to hide their identity as much as they enjoyed the edgelord nature of their corp and character names. There is also the simple fact that having alts who can do evictions while your main stays wherever it is normally staged is extremely convenient. In my opinion, it speaks poorly of the CSM that someone who enjoys that is a member, but I'm sure that is not a fact that Mick chooses to share outside of people he believes won't say anything about it.

The majority of the group were wormholers: Lazerhawks, Hard Knocks (who at the time were considered dead), as well as a variety of smaller names and characters in NPC corps. It is important that I name Lazerhawks and that I now explain that EVE University's FC Team boss (manager or director, I cannot recall), Sparklez Ripper had her main in Lazerhawks while one alt was serving as leadership and a central part of WHC's strategic management team. When Sparklez stepped down from her leadership position it was only weeks before the eviction kicked off.

Thera 2: The Uni Strikes Back

As the bulk of Uni's leadership was brought up to speed on the situation, a new plan was formulated involving hiring Wingspan for their locator services. I was the FC leading the infiltration group on that final push to get into Innu. Wingspan is renown throughout New Eden for their wormhole locator services and they are highly efficient at finding wormholes. They were able to find us a connection to Innu via the C3 static. We had to burn several jumps through lowsec and nullsec; getting smartbombed to fuck once and having to burn back again. After bouncing from stargate to ping to stargate for several systems, the one system I decided to warp the entire fleet direct to the gate was the one where we got smartbombed by some random Machariels. Despite this frustrating delay, the locator services strategy proved to be the most effective as we successfully infilled approximately 20+ pilots.

11th Hour Betrayal

At some point during our efforts to infil as many pilots into Innu as possible, likely around the time the second Thera infil operation began, we became aware that our strategic reserve of doctrine ships intended specifically for this type of situation were gone. There are no logs that record who takes and places assets in the cans and hangars used to store all those doctrine ships. I will return to that later. As the FC trying to rally people to Thera, I did my best not to share this detail as it was not going to do anything except discourage pilots from joining the infil fleet. Our hope was that despite this major setback that we would have enough ships from WHC folks that we would be able to have something for everyone to fly.

The Final Fight for the Fortizar

By the time the infiltration fleet had arrived in Innu, the only remaining structure was a fortizar named The Rock, the main docking structure for WHC. The structure was in hull and therefore there was no reason to hold back. Although those of us who had been a part of clean up operation from the unscheduled unanchoring had seen a few capital ships in Innu after years of speculation that there were caps in some director-level hangar, this was the first time that we had seen all the capitals undocked (other than the few that were blown up or trashed to deny opfor the killmail). Unfortunately, the capital fits had not been updated in some time and were not optimized for the engagement we were facing.

That left the subcap fleet, FC'd by Archimede, to try to push off opfor long enough for the structure to repair. While initial shipping up was roughly something of a doctrine, the ships were ill-equipped and died quickly. After initial shipping up, reships were a hodgepodge of random ships that had been turned over by WHC members to be distributed as needed.