Enaluri Offensive (Node) Crashes to a Halt

Enaluri is a normally Caldari held system sandwiched between two Gallente Capital systems, Hallanen and Nennamaila. It's a fairly important system for them because it has not one, but two State Protectorate stations in it providing double missions for Caldari FW mission runners.

As one can imagine, every time we've taken the system, it's usually been taken back. It's a little out of the way for us to use as a staging system, and while it is in jump range of the entire warzone which would be a boon to our capital pilots, so is Nennamaila and Hallanen.

Beginning a couple weeks ago, a few Caldari groups began building up arms in the system. We watched, we waited. Last weekend we got the word from an intercepted eve-mail to Russian Caldari Alliance, Old Man Gang, they were making a push for the weaker of our capital systems, Hallanen, on Monday (yesterday).

We've fought these guys before, and they're pretty good. They don't have overwhelming numbers, but they make up for it with great piloting and heavy use of off grid boosters. We have 2 counters for this, "Soviet Offense" using hoards of small, cheap, and fast ships to overwhelm them, or bring boosts of our own. During our counter offensive against Enaluri that started yesterday, we brought both.

The day was exciting. Since I'm on vacation this week, I was able to fly with the fleet for most of the day. We lost a lot of ships, we killed a bunch as well. Slow times were filled with jokes and stories over comms, and punctuated with several short fierce fights.

After a lot of hard work, and several shifts, the system was pushed up just past 23% contested. Then at 01:26 GMT the node went down, our entire fleet was unceremoniously kicked from Eve, and when we were able to get back in Enaluri's contested % was reset back to 0.

Queue rage on comms.

After a petition attempt, it appears that fixing this contested counter is beyond the abilities of the GMs, and an appeal was made on Twitter. Erlendur has tagged CCP Veritas, so we'll see if there's anything that CCP can do.

In the mean time, this event seems to have steeled the resolve of the Gallente offensive. AUTZ is typically our weakest time, but after hearing about what happened, pilots began appearing out of nowhere, pulling late nights, early mornings, and getting in fleet when they might otherwise be off roaming or soloing. The result was that they managed to push the system back to 19% by the time the EU folks started logging in, when we fully expected the Caldari to be able to push the system back down to stable. As of 1500 the system is almost back to where it was before the node crash and still climbing.

I think this calls for some propaganda.