The Scope report on the attacks interestingly highlights that the targets are supposed to be low-power and vulnerable structures, which suggests a possible game design purpose behind the Drifter invasions. Hundreds of structure battles have been happening all across nullsec and in all timezones for the past several days, with alliances forced to defend their space against a foe that can’t be negotiated with or bribed. If they arrive at an Upwell structure owned by a player alliance, they’ll even attack the structure and knock it into reinforced mode. If the Drifter gangs land at a stargate, they will camp it and attack any player who goes through with overwhelming force. Roaming Drifter gangs of a dozen or more ships will appear in a star system and warp around the system looking for targets, and they can’t be scanned down in the way that Triglavian invasion NPCs can. The Drifter attacks have been the exact opposite, appearing with no warning whatsoever in nullsec and attacking everything in sight. I’ll write more about this new gameplay in an upcoming article diving deep into the Triglavian invasions, but the important thing to note is that these are small, highly telegraphed invasions in high-security space. The expansion’s primary feature is a series of escalating invasions by the mysterious Triglavian Collective into areas of high-security space, transforming these ordinarily safe areas into danger zones full of roaming Triglavian ship gangs and challenging group PvE sites. It may seem obvious in retrospect that there might be a massive invasion of nullsec in an expansion literally named “Invasion” but the truth is that these attacks came out of nowhere. They reside in special Drifter Hive wormhole star systems that are difficult to access, and have access to technology that lets them manipulate space to travel into the Abyss or anywhere in New Eden. They consider themselves to be the rightful inheritors of the extinct Jove empire, and have been battling the Triglavian Collective in Abyssal Deadspace for some time. The drifters are generations ahead of capsuleers in terms of technology, with the roaming Drifter battleships sporting a superweapon that can take out capital ships. There was a bizarre twist to this story a few years ago in which a few players managed to trick the Drifter AI into attacking player-owned structures for them, but this wasn’t a part of their core behaviour. The AI will even chase players across the star system if engaged, but until now has left neutral parties and structures alone. They were left trapped in for millennia in stasis pods inside Sleeper structures in wormhole space, and a few years ago they managed to escape in a pretty grim manner - They remote-controlled sleeper ships to harvest player corpses and used them to rebuild new bodies.įor players, the Drifters are a powerful adversary run by CCP’s new advanced AI that can be found occasionally roaming the game in groups of one or two battleships. I’ve written before about the history of the Drifters in EVE Online, but the short version is that they’re an ancient faction of humans from before the four empires of EVE arose. In this edition of EVE Evolved, I look at the Drifter attacks hitting across New Eden, where they came from, and what the end result of them might be. Half of the EVE Online universe is on fire, and personally I think it’s bloody glorious. Some players have conversely come out in support of the invasions, both for the fact that they shake up the status quo and for forcing alliances to shore up their defences. Current wars are now being interrupted by Drifter attacks, and alliances have had to factor the NPCs into their war plans. Play EVE Online for freeAlliance leaders have been up in arms over being forced to defend their space from waves of NPC invaders and even call back troops from offensive deployments to hold the line.
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