In previous posts, I told you about the early days of my corporation, Empty You [EMTU], as we embarked on a mission to remove as many POSes from highsec as possible, alongside our usual MTU removal service. In this post, I would like to summarise the growth of my corp thereafter, leading towards the eventual end of our POS-related activities.
Shortly after the events of the last post, we popped one more POS, and then that was it, we had well and truly burned ourselves out. We had started bashing POSes in mid-May 2017, and concluded operations mid-June of the same year. Less than a month after we had begun this activity, it was now time for a break. We had popped a respectable 28 Control Towers, and 127 starbase structures in total, not counting the vast amounts of unanchored POS modules we’d scooped and stashed in stations. Highsec was a little cleaner, but I now understand that there is a fine-line between providing content, and not burning-out.
It wouldn’t be until March 2018 when corp activites would finally begin ramping-up once again, and the POS-popping would resume. We began slowly, taking our time to ensure we wouldn’t burn-out again. With most POSes in highsec completely stripped of loot-bearing arrays at this time, we shifted our focus somewhat, opting to take down Control Towers we had never killed before, in a sort-of “pop one of every type of tower” minigame, rather than focusing solely on arrays and loot. This worked for us, and we would find other minigames to enhance our gameplay in other areas too. There is still an ongoing competition within the corp to pop MTUs using as many different types of ship as possible. I believe Oyl is currently far in the lead on that one!
Pix Severus, Carnivorous Swarm, Oylpann Kumamato, and Niyalyn.
At this point the corp still consisted of just myself, Niyalyn, and Oylpann Kumamato, but soon we would find ourselves inundated with fresh applications to the corp. The people applying would usually be friends of ours who we chatted with regularly in the MTU Hunting chat channel.
The first person to join us was Kogen in late 2017, he was a man who had taken to the MTU hunting profession quite well. Unfortunately he joined us during a period of downtime, and the corp wasn’t active and/or stimulating enough to keep him around. I wish he’d joined us later, or had stuck around for just a little bit longer, when things started to pick up.
The first person to join us after POS-related activities had resumed was Alexis Thunderkunt, also known as “The Drone Whisperer” due to his penchant for finding ridiculous quantities of expensive drones laying abandoned throughout highsec. You might remember Alexis from the blog posts Finders Keepers, and Empty You Empties 1000 MTUs. Just a few days later we were joined by a long-time friend of the corp, Rosov Aulmais. The first I had heard of Rosov was through a friend, he told me that there was this guy going around killing MTUs in an ECM-fit Scorpion, at that point I knew that this man meant business. You should recognise Rosov from the post The Holy Grail? Again? if you’ve been a recent reader.
Alexis Thunderkunt, Rosov Aulmais, PI Tool1, and Mr Chili Palmer.
The next person to join us was PI Tool1. If you’re a long-term reader of this blog, then that name will probably look familiar to you as he features in an old post named Vocal Local 2. I had met PI during my early days of MTU hunting, but it was years later that PI found my blog, and decided to join the corp. Shortly after PI joined us, we were joined by another long-time friend, Mr Chili Palmer. Chili was a man who had dabbled with MTU hunting in the past, and also did a lot of wormhole PvP. If you recognise his name, you might remember him from Return of an MTU Hunter and MTU Mailbag 4.
Some of the latter additions to our corp were Solacia Solette, a dedicated MTU hunter and drone collector, who was also the brainchild behind the corp’s slogan “You drop ’em, we pop ’em.” Mikey G Udan, another dedicated hunter, who preferred using a Tengu for his hunts, and Deep Choad, a PvPer who wanted to try something a little different for a while. All three of these fine fellows are featured in the post Back For More, which is about one of the few corp competitions we ran around this time. The last person to join us during this period was Emrald Rayne, an MTU hunter and PvPer who did highsec, and MTU hunters everywhere a great service, by removing vast quantities of Mobile Depots from space.
Solacia Solette, Mikey G Udan, Deep Choad, and Emrald Rayne.
If I wanted to, I could write an entire blog post about each member, but a general overview will suffice for now. Some of them have also moved-on from the corp, but thankfully most of those who have left still remain a part of our little community through the MTU Hunting chat channel.
There are a few memorable POS-bashes we had together during this era, mostly because something new, or weird, had happened. I’d like to cover those events now.
The Disappearing Act
One notable event was what we sometimes refer to as “The Bash that Never Happened”. We had wardecced EVE BUSINESS CAREER GUIDE CORP [EBCGC] belonging to a pilot named Roge Alt One, because they owned a tower with a few desirable arrays. When researching this corp, I followed the link in the corp’s description, which was supposed to be some guide on how make ISK in EVE, but instead I found a very poorly written website that was filled with nonsensical cult-like ramblings. If you have ever read something written by a schizophrenic, then you’ll know just how incomprehensible this site was. The site is no longer up, and unfortunately I couldn’t find anything using the Wayback Machine to show you what I mean, but it was clear that English wasn’t his first language at least. After that, I looked up Roge’s alt/main Roseta mallard, and found that he’d had some trouble with CODE. in the past. Expecting something fun, or at least a little bit weird, I was excited to declare war on this.. entity.
Well, something a little weird did indeed happen, but it didn’t exactly provide us with any fun. Just before the war went live, Niya sent a scout into the system as usual, to check for war targets, or to see if the POS had been fuelled, only to find nothing. Yes, absolutely nothing. They had packed-up their POS completely and had shipped it off god knows where. This was the first time we’d ever seen someone do this, and hadn’t even considered it as a possibility to be quite honest. Our primary purpose with these POS bashes was to clean-up highsec from the large amount of signatures that POSes put-out though, so our purpose had been fulfilled, albeit in a way we weren’t expecting. Well played, Roge/Roseta!
The Legacy of DiaRosCris
While hunting for MTUs in the system of Eiluvodi one evening, I spotted a POS on scan that had a couple of arrays, so I decided to add it to our list of potential targets as usual. When I add a target to the list, I note down the name of the corp that owns the POS so I can easily wardec them when it’s time, I also look up the corp’s members and killboard for anything interesting. The corp that owned this POS was called Agram Interstellar [AGRAM] an inactive 1-man corp owned by DiaRosCris. I recognised the CEO’s name instantly because it is rather unique, and that person had been featured on an old Minerbumping post I’d read years ago.
We’d had a few drinks that night, and corp chat was indeed rather silly at times. Old stories of battle, and Alexis’ home-brewed banana wine were the topics of choice that night, along with my usual flavour of bad jokes. The POS bash went by uneventfully, but I always remember it because we were the final cleanup crew that removed the last remnants of DiaRosCris from New Eden. It was also Alexis’ first POS bash with the corp, a time to remember indeed.
The Dark Path
I remember this next one because we didn’t encounter online targets all that often. One night, after making our way to the Kador region, we were setting-up to hit multiple POSes when I noticed 4 war targets docked-up in Khafis. These guys belonged to DarkPath [DKPTH] and owned one of the POSes we were due to hit that night. While waiting for the rest of our corp to get online, we started bashing our first target in the system of Gonan, right next-door to Khafis. As soon as our first POS target went down, and with more of our corp members now online, we headed-out to Khafis and the surrounding systems to see what was going on with these war targets.
With Oyl in a cloaky ship, he popped-into Khafis first to take a look at what they were doing. They had all formed-up behind the bubble of their now-fuelled POS, which already had plenty of guns around it, that were now online. They had also completed their setup with a slew of ECM modules and shield hardeners that they had added in the meantime. They’d got us, we simply didn’t have the ships needed to take on a POS this well defended, and following Rosov’s advice, we just moved-on to continue bashing our next target. Well played DarkPath.
We did have the last laugh though, as a few days later, when Rosov was roaming through the area, he managed to catch one of them on a gate flying a PVE-fit cruiser.
Kill: Deltagram (Caracal)
Eventually, our bashing days came to an end, in much the same manner that most things do in EVE (at least for me). A few corp members take a break, a couple leave the corp for better things, and before long you find yourself taking a break too, leaving things to fizzle-out. To every member of Empty You, past and present, it was fun destroying Starbases with you. We did some solid work together, removing 50 Control Towers from highsec, and totalling 201 Starbase Structures destroyed. Job well done.
This may not be the end of our shenanigans with POSes, as I am exploring options in regards to continuing this activity in the future, now that I’m back in New Eden. With POSes supposedly being removed from EVE soon (I hear CCP are having some trouble in that regard) if you’ve ever wanted to try out POS bashing yourself, take my advice and do it now before it’s too late.
There were more events surrounding our POS bashes that I haven’t covered in this post, but I’ll save those for another time. The next post in this series will be the finale, and will cover our corp’s culture.
To be continued.
MTU Hunter 