This has been a strange week in null sec.

A strange month. A strange year.  A strange whatever.  Null sec drama is its own strange thing.

There is a whole post to be written to try and cover the path to led to where we are right now, but I’ll get to that later… because right now another chapter in null sec history is coming to a close as Pandemic Horde exits its current space in the drone regions for greener pastures… which would also be some place away from Goons I guess.

It is always a bit of a surprise when a hostile group that talks big, dares us to attack, dismisses our efforts, then suddenly collapses just because we took their bait and moved in next door.  One hesitates to get into historical analogies… I mean, remember that time when somebody said war was over in null sec after the battle of B-R5RB, using an inapt analogy about the Pacific War… but there is probably some mileage in comparing this to the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Or maybe the decay of the Austro-Hungary.  Pandemic Horde isn’t disappearing.  Few alliances do.  And they will still have the heft to make deals and survive in null sec.  But they will not be a first rank power anymore.

And so, once it became clear what was going on, the Imperium rushed into their space, often aided by their betrayed allies… I was tethered up on a Solyaris Chtonium Fortizar on a move op to R-AG7W and I understand that they and Northern Coalition have decided to spend some time earning ISK and staying away from whatever is going on in Perrigen Falls right now… and setup shop on the undock of their Keepstar, a move initially resisted then accepted and we have stayed there ever since.

From the outside the whole Pandemic Horde plan was based on daydreaming that everybody would behave in the most optimal way to ensure its success.  The Imperium dropping capitals and supers on their Keepstar was apparently unthinkable.

A mass of Zirns sitting at the Keep

The idea that we would set up a camp and stick with it didn’t seem to enter their plan.  Have they met us?  If there is one thing that Goons excel at, it is a test of wills where blind persistence and the ability to out last an opponent are on the line.  Never go up against Goons when boredom is on the line… or something.

Alongside that was the apparent assumption that their allies… who they had just screwed over and left in the lurch… would come to their aid, and that Fraternity would help them along their way, and that their new allies in The Initiative would be able to rescue them, all of which turned out to be false.  The allies were pissed, Frat didn’t want an alliance allied with their enemy to enter their current war with The Initiative, and INIT wasn’t going to be able to get there.

It was all an immense pipe dream, and the people paying the price are the PH line members… because PH leadership got all their stuff out of the Keepstar before the news broke.

All of which led us to yesterday.  The sovereignty for R-AG7W had been flipped to Goons.

We now own the system

That meant we were able to drop an Astrahus on grid with the Keepstar, so we had a place where caps and supers could tether safely… and those on the camp could dock up… though we were doing pretty well living out of a few POSes.

Old School POS living… also, Caroline’s Star in the background

We also war dec’s PH so we could safely shoot them in high sec if they tried to get out via that path.  That led to some odd updates, like when a PH corp decided to join an Imperium alliance.

We will be at war with ourselves!

That meant that a couple of Imperium alliances were showing up as war targets, so there was some shooting of the wrong people if you didn’t have your overview setup correctly. (I show the alliance ticker in my overview, so it was easy enough to not shoot allies.)

Meanwhile the haphazard bubble and heavy interdictor camp of the first 48 hours settled down into a more formidable barrier as more people showed up to help with the siege.

The Bubble Keep

By Saturday the bubble density was enough that flying along the undock was like flying through a fog.

My Flycatcher in the fog

It has been suggested that PH leadership may have appealed to CCP, complaining that we were somehow violating the TOS by bringing too many interdictors and heavy interdictors to the camp, but I’ll need to see some evidence that they lacked that level of self-awareness.

And, of course, somebody got out there and put some additional touches on the whole thing

Doesn’t have the same feel as with CO2

Memories of the end of CO2 in that, though that was a very different situation.

Then Sunday evening rolled around and we blew up the Keepstar.  Not much else to say about that.  It took nearly four hours in the tidi, and there were as many as 4,000 people in local at one point, with 3,753 getting on the kill mail.

Peak local number

The explosion took its time in coming… the tidi was hitting hardest at that moment, and it had to do all of the asset safety calculations… but it slowly bloomed into a fireball, allowing me to catch it at various stages of eruption.

The Keepstar finally boiling over into a wreck

Then we turned around and finished off a Fortizar that was on grid… and then it was time to pack up.  Cores were scooped, capitals jumped out, mission accomplished.

Certainly billions, if not trillions, of ISK that wasn’t already in the asset safety queue was sent that way, while whatever remaining clones and implants and whatever were immolated in the final fireball.  End of story… or that particular part of the story.

As with real life events, in EVE Online there is often no sharp end.  Events continue to flow on, and there was a question as to what happens next.

The Imperium made a decision that was sent to us and posted on Reddit by Asher Elias:

Here is what is going to happen now with the Dronelands:‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

*Current drone infrastructure will be glassed

*Drones will be opened up for any alliance that believes they can take the space. Renting any space will not be allowed

*We will drop a handful of freeport structures so groups who take space in the dronelands can have independent logistics to their space. These structures will be defended against any attacker

*We won’t let an invasion force set up next door to us while they say “we’re just a little guy”.

*If a group/coalition takes control over most of the dronelands we will consider them “fair game” to fight with seriously and not someone to skirmish with for fun.

*Current residents are welcome to return if they follow the rules

The spirit of the agreement is we want space for other groups in Eve to grow and we want to end renting in Eve Online. We don’t want to deal with rules lawyers or allow people to stage an invasion “for free” without us being able to deal with it proactively.

I suppose there is an initial question as to “What are the Drone Regions?”  Over at DOTLAN you can look at the regions page and that corresponds to the following 8 regions where the main NPC force are drones.  This was the state of ownership on Friday.  It is already changing.

Those 8 regions are clumped together, separated from other sections of sov null by long regional gates, so capitals can’t just jump into that space… or haven’t been able to since the big cap change that reduce jump ranges and introduced jump fatigue… and the ability for caps to take gates.

The Drone Regions

It is not an easy place to get into and it lacks any NPC space, so you cannot setup shop and easily assail ratters and miners.  But the bottlenecks to getting into the space are also bottlenecks to getting out.  PH’s plans to evac fell apart after a half hearted attempt to put down a Keepstar for members to move to which ended in it being blown up.

Now the Imperium has some work to do, glassing these eight regions and setting up the promised freeport Keepstars to allow reliable access to the deeper sections if the space.  This is another iteration of trying to clear some of null sec so that smaller groups can coalesce and grow.  The Imperium tried this with Querious Fight Club and then with the Southeastern Agreement.  Asher says we’ve learned from the mistakes made in the past.  We shall see.

Fraternity, who sits at the other end of the Drone Regions, has signed off on this plan.  They certainly don’t want the Imperium for neighbors and a large buffer region probably looks pretty good while they are fighting with The Initiative (who have also given the plan a thumbs up).  And the rest of PanFam seems to have bought in as well, though the key alliances are headed to join Fraternity and their WinterCo coalition for now.  So the current residents are ready to leave.

As a side effect of this, both Fraternity and the remaining groups in the coalition once known as PanFam have declared that they will end their space rental programs.  Renting in null sec has been around for a long, long time and has been controversial.  It can be spun as a way for small groups to get into null sec, but it is also a form of passive income that encourage groups to hold as much space as possible in order to rent it out.  This has been pretty crazy in the past, and even the Imperium tried to get in on the act for a while.  I was parodying this situation almost a dozen years ago.

Eternal War – 2014 version – Rental Empires Collide

That keeps smaller groups from being able to own space, keeping them beholden to the landlord and whatever they are up to.  The Imperium stopped renting even before the eviction from the north and the move to Delve and has be agitating against the idea on the basis of providing an ecosystem where new alliances can form and grow in null sec.  Hence, another run at that experiment.

There are, of course, skeptics.  “Grr Goons” runs strong in some, so there is a bit of hair on fire “Null sec is dying, Goons have won the game, EVE is dying” sentiment again from people who should know better but who are emotionally invested in the idea that Goons doing anything in New Eden, winning, losing, or just existing, is killing the game.   Clowns going to clown… and cherry pick data and ignore salient facts and pretend that they have been right all along, even after multiple failed historical analogies.

And Pandemic Horde?  They are headed for Cloud Ring region to reform under their new allies in The Initiative. Or, at least those who stay with the alliance are headed there.  DOTLAN shows they are already down more than 10K characters and I am sure the bleed isn’t over yet.

DOTLAN Alliance Movement – Nov 10, 2025

There has been some hand waving by leadership, both new and old, about becoming a smaller, more elite PvP organization.  Cloud Ring is certainly a place for that.  There are a lot of ways to get in and a lot of people passing through.  It is a rough place to try and settle for good, but I suspect we’ll see the PH remnants getting new space depending how the Frat/INIT war goes.

So we’ll see how it plays out.

In the mean time, according to the big sov map, it looks like TEST is moving to Geminate, a change after having stayed literally as far away from the Imperium as possible in null sec since the end of World War Bee and the destruction of the Legacy Coalition.  I wonder what that might portend?  There is always a new story line brewing.

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