Every time I write these Friday posts, they always seem to be a bit awkward to me. Well, the posting is not awkward, I just don’t want to leave the intro to the post something that is bland, the same thing each week. Bland posts every week lead to boredom for the reader and the writer.

So, what’s the stuff from this week?:

• There is a lot of news concerning the fall of the D-GTMI system pretty much all over the place. The EVE Forums, the EVE Blogging Community, Kugutsumen as well as many other places. There are even a few YouTube videos from the battle in D-GTMI. In a nutshell, Paxton Federation held the system for over three years and when it came time to defend it from -A-, they lost the fight. Many reasons were cited from server lag (which was very bad although the node the NOT crash) to poor FC work to inexperienced combatants on the field. As to what the future holds for D-GTMI and PXF, that remains to be seen. It should however, be interesting to watch unfold.
• Against All Authorities offered an olive branch to CVA after CVA’s failure to invade Catch as well as their loss of the D-GTMI system. CVA continued to be the arrogant aggressor and as a result -A- and it’s allies continue their response with an invasion of 9UY4-H. As of the writing of this blog post, 9UY4-H is under siege. There are both EVE forum posts and a few blogs posts on this battle so far and as always, I am more than willing to share what I find, enjoy!
• Nullsec space drama continues to unfold. On Wednesday, Goonswarm disbanded. Many say this was only the natural course as a problem with maintaining isk in the correct divisions of the executer corp’s wallet led to the loss of key systems in Delve. After listening to the recorded meeting that Goonswarm held and their internal declaration that they were moving back to Syndicate, I initially though this was part of their plan. In that meeting, you clearly hear that the main speaker called the current sov mechaincs (in beta). They seemed to make sense that they would pull out of 0.0 altogether, until you read the post from kartton, the alliance director responsible for the sov loss in the first place. His post titled ‘Dear Goonfleet’ pretty much sums up the Goonswarm mindset of “Frak it all” as he simply took what isk was left and ran. In EVE online, you “adapt or die“. Goonswarm had to adapt to the new sov mechanics as well as the changes to the Titan Doomsday weapon from being an area of effect, grid clearing weapon to a single target weapon. They simply could no longer win fights with large fleets holding people on a grid and using a Titan to ‘clear the board’. Adapt or die, they simply could not do this. Their attitude that the’ sov mechanics are in beta’ reflects this inability to change and thus the infighting must have grown within alliance leadership. Cal over at the Wild at Heart blog has a great post on what happened. As more information becomes available, you can catch the updates at yet another of my Google shared items,Goonsfall.
• Casiella over at Ecliptic Rift has started a Tumblr blog. So, being the social creatrue that I am, I caved to peer pressure and created one as well, http://eve-druid.tumblr.com. I plan to use my Tumblr blog in the same fashion as Casiella, to post things that don’t make it into my blog here or things that I can’t easily share with Google Reader.
• Akura kawanaka of Eve Monkey announced that Fan Fiction Blogfest #2 is underway. You can read all the posts in yes, yet another Google shared item (Google should send more advertising dollars my way for all the props they get from me!)
• One of my favorite sites, EVE Travel, moved to a new home this week. Head over to http://evetravel.wordpress.com and see why it’s a great site. Mark726 fly around New Eden and bring you photos of all the landmarks in game. It will take him a while, but it’s worth following the journey. The “Wanderer” in me just keeps bringing me back to the site.
• CCP announced that they have learned a lot from their testing for the lag in fleet battles. Be sure to read the ENTIRE dev blog as there are some very useful tips on how to deal with these lag situations. It’s a good read and should be something you stop right now and do. I especially liked this part of the dev blog in reference to the final battle in D-GTMI: “On Jan 28^th, we had a 1600 person fleet fight on Tranquility which our team monitored closely, keeping the node alive using methods that make our system admins faint. This was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, fleet fight ever in EVE (at least where the node survived the ordeal). This event allowed us to identify what was causing some of these glitches and deploy fixes live.” So, they finally listened to us, went to a system where the fleet fight request system was used for node reinforcement and actually monitored a live fleet fight 0n the production server. LO AND BEHOLD, THEY WERE ABLE TO IDENTIFY SOMETHING TO HELP THEM RESOLVE THIS ISSUE! Ahem…Well, finally they are listening to the stakeholders and we are again able to work together. Better late than never, thank you CCP. I for one am more than willing to continue to help resolve these issues, let’s keep that collaboration going!
• Manasi over at A Mule in EVE wrote a response to the CCP dev blog on lag and very accurately voiced a valid issue about some of the survival tips for fleet lag.  He feels that the concept of clicking a module to activate it once and wait 8 minutes for the time out is unreasonable.  I happen to agree with him.  Read the whole post and participate in the discussion.
• As always, update work for the blogs listed on The EVE Online Portal and the OPML download continues. I am continually amazed at the number of blogs that we have listed.

See you out there mates!

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