10th of March 2022 we made the decision to launch a null sec campaign to advertise null sec space for new players. Six days later we onlined our first TCU and claimed some unused space for our own name in Cloud Ring. You can read the full story of this in here: https://eve-linknet.com/linknet-sovereignty-established-the-call-of-null/
This won’t be permanent so if you want to go throw the sand around in this new sandbox and try your feet in the null waters, now is your time!
LinkNet Sovereignty Established | The Call Of Null
So we managed to setup some basic sov and start to learn the sov mechanisms. We estimated that with the current amount of people interested in this adventure we would manage to hold of the space for a few weeks, maybe a month at most. We grinded an handful of systems for our use and even managed to do some ratting and mining for a very sort period of time: https://eve-linknet.com/day-3-glory-for-the-grind/
A hull timer was created against our staging Astrahus in XT-R36 to go live at 2022-05-03 by Deepwater Hooligans, almost a month since we launched the campaign. We seemed to estimate our survival rate pretty accurately. We called a CTA fleet and raised around 150 pilots to defend the hus. Against the original enemy who reinforced the structure we would had stood a good change but Snuffed Out decided to give the timer a visit as well and we lost our staging station in cloud ring after a very nice fight against shiny ships: https://br.evetools.org/br/62717b533eefc5020b9f24c7
At the same time as the first armor timers against our Cloud Ring station were created we had been offered the chance to move to Feythabolis. While we were preparing our final defence of XT-R36 we had a small taskforce sent out to Fay and reinforce the pocket.
After losing our staging in XT-R36 the decision to move out from Cloud Ring was rather easy. We had seen from our CTA that there is a lot of interest still towards null sec adventures. So we started to move our stuff to Fay and setup sov in there. Yet the original plan was in play and we did not plan to permanently become a null corp (we have partner corporations for that).
So we lived in Fay again for a good month and set up some ratting upgrades and handed out ships for people to rat and mine in. This was all until, well the space got blown up. You can read a pretty accurate description of the fights in here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/vb6rkl/the_biggest_neutral_alliance_32k_members_in_eve/
So after the fight in Fay was lost we gave the evacuation order on the 12th of June 2022 and decided to regroup back to high sec space to raise some funds and let our management and FC team get some slack and go out to enjoy the summer.
This ends the LinkNet sov adventure of 2022.
Final Words
Over all our sov campaign was a success. Our goal was to find empty sov space, plant a flag in that space and live in that space from a few weeks to a month while deciding on what to do next with the space. The usage of the space was decided for us by guns in both cases as we were expecting to.
We wanted to offer new players the experience of gaining null, using sov null mechanisms and eventually losing the space. We completed the full life cycle of this which made us meet our goal 100%. Granted we could had spent a few months more in Fay after finally setting up some ratting upgrades but at least we got to experience it for a month before getting stomped on.
This campaign greatly increased the amount of new player applications to our null sec partner corporations and spiked the interest of null sec for a lot of new players. As we have not seen that running campaigns like this is a good way to advertise different spaces in eve we will definitely be doing this again around the end of this year or the beginning of 2023 depending how things develop from here.
A huge thank to all of the staff, FCs and line members who made this journey possible, see you next time o7
