A Pixel Nomad

Filed by Gallente Citizen 4586793463

Captain Gobbins announced he was stepping down.

Not gone, exactly — just stepping down, in the same way a capsuleer says they’re taking a break from EVE and then logs in six hours later to check the market.

The announcement dropped into the alliance broadcast system mid-cycle, sandwiched between a doctrine reminder and a mining tax clarification:

[Alliance Broadcast]:
“I’ll be stepping back from leadership for now. Continue business as usual. Train Maelstroms. o7”

And that was it. No fanfare. No farewell fleet. Just an oddly understated endnote from the man who’d led one of New Eden’s biggest coalitions for years.

Within minutes, the ping was buried beneath hundreds of messages arguing about whether the new staging system in R-AG should have a Keepstar emoji in the MOTD.

Business, as ever, continued.

Meanwhile, in the same constellation, something strange was happening.

Captain Broseidon — multiboxing mining specialist, self-proclaimed industrial visionary, and chronic overachiever — had been busy. He claimed to be “strengthening the region’s infrastructure.” What he didn’t mention was that his idea of infrastructure involved anchoring an entirely new Keepstar right beside Horde’s existing one in R-AG.

When questioned, he reportedly told someone in fleet chat:

“Don’t worry, it’s strategic redundancy.”

By the time anyone noticed, the structure was already anchoring — a massive, gleaming citadel parked less than a grid away from Horde’s own Keepstar, the space equivalent of building a rival’s palace directly across the street and spray-painting your name on the front.

A director pinged the leadership channel:

[Director’s Channel]:
“Anyone else seeing this anchoring timer in R-AG?”

[Another]:
“Yeah, it’s… ours?”

[First Director]:
“Not exactly. It’s Broseidon’s.”

The silence that followed could have frozen a sun.

[Director]:
“You’re kidding.”

[Reply]:
“Nope. And rumor says he’s talking to Goons.”

Three minutes remained on the anchoring timer.

Three minutes between “strange personal project” and “diplomatic catastrophe.”

The directors moved fast. Broseidon was expelled from the alliance before the timer hit zero, and the structure’s fate was sealed — it would now take six days to finish anchoring, and Broseidon was now a man without a home, staring at his half-finished citadel from the outside.

But if the story ended there, it wouldn’t be EVE.

Because Goons came.

They didn’t just come — they hell camped R-AG. Carriers, dictors, titans, bubbles stretching across every gate. Horde pilots logged in to find local spiking like a fever, and pings flying faster than cynos.

[Alliance Broadcast]:
“Do not undock capitals in R-AG. Repeat, DO NOT. Broseidon has made… choices.”

As the siege dragged on, someone updated the MOTD:

“Welcome to R-AG: now featuring two Keepstars, one alliance crisis, and an existential question about leadership succession.”

Some whispered that Gobbins’ decision to step back had somehow sparked the chaos. Others said it was just Horde being Horde — that entropy was the natural state of things, and leadership changes were merely punctuation marks in an ongoing farce.

Gallente Citizen 4586793463, sipping their lukewarm coffee from a borrowed station office, summarized the situation succinctly:

“Captain Gobbins is stepping down, but no one’s sure what that means.

Captain Broseidon defected to Goons and built a Keepstar beside ours.

The Goons hell camped the system in solidarity.

Horde is fine. Everything is fine. Nothing is on fire except R-AG, and that’s probably normal.”

They paused, saving the report to their datapad before adding one last note:

“New title suggestion for the alliance newsfeed:
‘The Broseidon Gambit — or How to Lose a Keepstar in Three Minutes.’”

This isn’t a story about covert ops ships, which I adore, but instead it’s about Pandemic Horde and their handling (or lack of) un-anchoring forts and their heavy desire for secrecy to their own members (yeah yeah, spai, I get it). I understand that things need to be kept quiet so that we don’t entice Goons or other NullSec blocks to come after structures that may be un-anchoring, but there were barely any messages sent out that not only was MJ un-anchoring (this has finally completed and MJ BEANSTAR is no more), but that many other forts scattered through PH territory were also un-anchoring. Places where folks do industry, mining, and ratting. On a whim I happened to check the system I spend most of my time in – and yes, the fort there was un-anchoring, too. There was a tiny little brief discord message buried with a single line that we were somehow supposed to infer as to the scale of these changes, and that was it.

Thankfully I got all of my ships out of my ratting / mining systems and hauled them to other structures along with the new home of R-AG. I feel bad for the swaths of people who were unable to get their stuff out in time, who were away, who were wining at EVE, or whatever other situation happened to occur. I feel like there wasn’t a clear -> ‘here’s what’s happening’ message, instead it was “we don’t trust you, we don’t trust anyone in this discord, therefor here is a cryptic message about what’s going on but really no message about what is going on”. Instead of being all secretive we could have flaunted the un-anchoring, and arranged for our people out in force to protect it. Put up some sort of fight instead of what PH has been doing, which feels a lot like rolling over. Yeah, I’m frustrated with the state of Pandemic Horde lately. Looking at the amount of older members who are jumping ship to INIT and other blocks, it doesn’t feel like I’m alone in that thought. Ah well.

Fly your way o7