Lynkfox's Note:
Originally posted by u/unfit_ibis on reddit in r/Eve on early May 2024 (war was still ongoing) here
Tldr: For the past month there has been a massive war raging in wormhole space involving most major pvp wormhole groups. Over 2T in assets have burned and another 1T looted. It’s complicated.
Wormhole War: History and Prelude
Wormholes Intro:
Wormholes are different. On a purely mechanical level, there is no asset safety, no local, no sov, no stations. You can anchor citadels in most wormholes, but if they get blown up, everything you own gets dropped in cans for others to enjoy. Wormholes all have a “static” wormhole, which connects them to either a type of kspace (high, low or null) or to a class of wormhole (1 through 6). Some wormholes have effects which impact ships within them, effects that get stronger the higher the class of the wormhole. The changing nature of wormhole connections (they last anywhere from 4 to 48 hours) means that the “map” of wormhole space is ever-shifting. Wormhole life is in many ways much more challenging than living in high, low or null sec. And as with IRL, hard lives breeds hard people.
Wormholes also have ratting sites that also scale in difficulty the higher the class of the wormhole – and in reward. The best C1 combat site drops 12M in loot. For a C3, the best site is 53M. The best sites in “high class” space – C5s and C6s – provide 253M and 446M, respectively! Those sites are also lethal, doing in excess of 3k DPS along with tackle, webs and powerful neuts.
Wormhole Culture:
There’s been a lot already written about wormhole bushido, or however you’d like to label it. It is true that there are some general understandings among most wormhole groups. Ethics and behavior are central to that. For many years, I tended to use a “biker gang” analogy. Wormholers live off the grid, may or may not engage in anti-social, criminal behavior – but at some level, there’s an overriding “us against them” view towards the rest of EVE – especially where LS and NS groups are concerned. You’ll wave at other bikers, but also fight one in a bar for wearing the wrong patch or looking at you wrong. So yeah, there are disputes and fights and evictions between wormhole groups, but most wormholers are wormholers first. History is replete with examples of otherwise adversarial wormhole groups coming together against kspace groups interfering in wormhole space. (There are good parallels between this and the way that otherwise adversarial LS groups have periodically come together to oppose null bloc interference in LS space.)
At any rate, wormhole groups generally share certain values. Wormhole honour brawls offer a good insight into them. Think of these as glorified tournament matches. Wormhole honour brawls operate under understood restrictions – two groups agree to a fight, and then will put an amount of ships that can reasonably fit though a capital-sized wormhole into a wormhole, and then brawl it out until one side disengages. These fights, then, generally involve 3-4b in mass of ships. That will often involve a battleship comp with 1-2 capitals, or a battlecruiser comp with 2-3 capitals. Bling ships and pods are fairly common in these honour brawls. The outcomes of these brawls, in theory, should be determined by theorycrafting, FCing, and individual piloting. A group that violates these norms (violating mass limits, batphoning third party assistance, etc.) risks being labelled dishonourable/untrustworthy. More broadly, batphoning Nullsec groups is almost universally frowned upon. This is generally accepted as a valid casus belli for home eviction as it runs directly counter to the wormhole community’s values.
From Hells Angels to Narcos
Over the past couple of years though my analogy of choice has shifted from biker gangs to something more sophisticated. In this new conception, I think of Nullsec blocs as akin to world superpowers, with smaller Nullsec alliances or corps being smaller countries just trying to carve out a role in the global ecosystem and economy. Low seccers seem to roughly split into two groups – you have your pirates, undocking to satisfy urges for pvp and looting the wrecks of those they torment, and your faction warfare groups, engaging in increasingly robust warfare within the game’s revitalized FW system (gj CCP!).
Wormhole groups are the cartels of EVE. They have strong cultural norms that are sometimes foreign to those who live in kspace, and they vacillate between fruitful collaboration, local conflicts, and – very infrequently – all-out war with existential consequences. More on that in a bit. These cartels exercise violent control over high class (C5/C6) farms. While the cartels are very territorial where farms are involved, fighting and negotiating over those valued assets, they tend to be very united in opposing direct Nullsec or Lowsec interference in the wormhole community. (At a practical level, high class farms fund those expensive wormhole brawls – wormhole groups need control of the trade in order to maintain a costly pvp lifestyle.)
There are a relatively small number of significant wormhole corps/alliances – perhaps under 50 wormhole groups with over 100 members. And those numbers are deceiving, as a sizeable portion of wormholers multibox. With the mechanical challenges inherent in wormhole space, you need probers, tackle, combat toons and you often need to be able to provide those for yourself regardless if you’re seeking pvp or pve.
Wormholes: Homes and Farms
Most wormhole groups have a “home” hole with multiple anchored citadels and where they keep the majority of their pvp toons and ships. Each day wormhole pvp groups will scan out their “chain” (the map of what their home hole is connected to) in search of pvp content, pve opportunities, or helpful connections to kspace (for logistics to a trade hub, or for other forms of pvp/pve content). Many wormholers also hold “farms” – a wormhole that they will use for primarily pve purposes – running combat sites, data/relic sites, huffing gas, mining, etc.
Of those 50 corps, there are probably fewer than 20 with the pilots, skill and experience to be significant players in the high class wormhole cartel environment. You see, there are over 2500 total wormholes – and 625 of those are “high class” wormholes suitable for farming (C5 or C6, high class because they offer the strongest effects, the highest risks and the most lucrative pve). In practice then, you have about 20 wormhole corps actively contesting control of many of those 625 high class farms.
Please note that there are a large number of wormhole groups and owners that have next to nothing to do with the above. There are C2 residents who live to roll their Nullsec static for ganking and roaming content, there are wormhole groups who focus on pve in their hole and/or static connections. The rest of this post will focus on the larger pvp groups contesting high class space, as those are the groups that are providing the majority of the wormhole combatants in the current war.
High Class Wormhole Landscape: 2023/24
As with kspace, the history of wormhole space – and high class space in particular – is convoluted and ever-changing. I will focus on the past few years, as they might be the most important to help understand the present raging conflict. On the heels of two evictions led by the Initiative, the top alliance in wormhole space (Hard Knocks) largely won EVE.
Those evictions were a major event in wormhole space, and are worth exploring. This offers a decent summary from the Initiative side: https://www.pcgamer.com/the-impossible-year-long-plan-to-destroy-eve-onlines-deadliest-fortress/
A critical lesson to draw from the Hard Knocks eviction is that even though they were the top dog and disliked by a large number of wormhole groups, when a Nullsec alliance besieged their home, a rather shocking portion of previously adversarial wormhole groups invested incredible amounts of time rage-rolling to support HK in their ultimately unsuccessful home eviction defense.
After their eviction, HK led a large coalition of wormhole groups in a campaign of aggressive retribution, evicting many wormhole groups who had collaborated with the Initiative. After that campaign, though, Hard Knocks slowly declined in numbers and activity. Indeed, this process predated their home eviction, which is likely one of the reasons it was executed in the first place – an increasingly inactive loot pinata is sure to attract eager eyes. This period of HK decline overlapped with a broader decline in high class wormhole pvp. For the past few years, there have been fewer evictions, fewer honor brawls, less activity throughout C5 and C6 space. Until a month ago.
For the past couple of years, the fastest growing wormhole group has been the Singularity Syndicate (SYNDE). They steadily added members and acquired more and more farms in both C5 and C6 space through both conquest and diplomacy. As of a month ago, SYNDE had grown to nearly 2000 members between their main and alt alliances. During that period of growth, they had a close alliance with Lazerhawks (HAWKS) with the two groups dominating C6 space, and holding a strong market share of C5 farms as well. The other major high-class wormhole players (with over 1000 toons each, give or take) are, broadly speaking, Hole Control (HC), Stranger Danger (LUPUS), No Vacancies (NOVAC), and Turbofeed or Glory (TURBO). Collectively those groups held the majority of C5 and C6 farms.
SYNDE’s extended alliance with HAWKS was a fairly standard wormhole alliance – they would not seek to evict each other’s farms. In other words, two of the larger groups had agreed on each other’s cartel territory. Fighting is fine and they fought often throughout wormhole space and in honour brawls, but the spice must flow, leave the farms be.
Betrayal and War: The Gauntlet is Thrown
Based on SYNDE leadership statements, it appears that in early-to-mid 2023, a decision was taken to build a coalition, seed HAWKS home in preparation for eviction and ultimately remove HAWKS as a major player in high class space. The reasoning was simple: SYNDE wanted a larger, richer territory - and HAWKS held the territory they wanted.
In secret, then, SYNDE built a sizeable coalition involving half of the major wormhole pvp groups, and many smaller pvp groups. Unbeknownst to some coalition members, the coalition’s foundation was a close, new alliance that SYNDE formed with the Initiative. Initiative had been renting a number of farms from SYNDE, and was eager to have a larger number of farms under SYNDE's protection. This would have important implications for the course of the Wormhole War.
In late March, SYNDE informed HAWKS that their alliance had ended. Minutes later, a large number of HAWKS farms were besieged by members of SYNDE’s carefully built coalition – SYNDE, HC and TURBO (again, along with a number of smaller wormhole groups and - waiting for the appropriate moment - the Initative). All the evidence suggests that HAWKS were unprepared for the loss of their major and primary wormhole ally. Alone and isolated, they could only watch as their territory was set afire by the expansive SYNDE coalition.
More to follow as we explore the first month of the war in the next post – Wormhole War: War in Heaven.