A /r/eve leak from Cassandra Soprano indicates that Sleeper Social Club is closing their doors and evacuating assets from their wormhole, R3. According to the leaked post, written by Biterno Sintaph, CEO of Future Corps, corporation assets were quietly moved out before the announcement under the guise of a new operation dubbed Operation Milwaukee. At this point, members are moving their assets out with sub-cap pilots treated as second-class citizens and capitals given priority in the evacuation.
The leak appears to have created controversy within the group and EN24 has reached out to both Cassandra and Biterno for additional comments. Logically, knowledge of the leak will likely increase the number of camped wormholes and increase the confusion and chaos that accompanies a wormhole evac. That said, its unknown how far along the evacuation is at this point and how many assets remain in R3.
For those unfamiliar with SSC, it’s worth taking a look at their history. Founded by James Arget, a former EVE University pilot, in YC113, they are a wormhole PvP alliance. From their years living in a C2 (named R1) through to their latest home (a C5/C5 named R3), SSC has become a well known name, a force not to be taken lightly. Having competed in both past alliance tournaments and #EVE_NT Collides, they currently rank within the top 100 alliances on zKillboard (Alltime Rank: 110).
A quick look at dotlan shows interesting activity across the alliance’s primary corporation, Future Corps, over the past 2 years. At the beginning of 2014, the corporation sat just below 300 hundred members, but over the first 6 months of the year, they rapidly climbed to just north of 400 members. In August 2014, a sudden drop in members brought them closer to 300-member mark again. The numbers again began to climb until membership peaked in April 2015, just broaching 400 members. In the 4 months that followed, they fell below 300 members, a number they have roughly maintained until now.
These numbers don’t mean much on their own but when paired with zKillboard statistics, the death of SSC appears to have been well foreshadowed. When SSC lost members in August of 2014, they still managed to top 1000 kills on zKill. This level of PvP was maintained for a year, as SSC rebuilt and returned to that 400-member count. However, in August 2015, as the numbers were once again dropping back down to roughly 300, the number of kills decreased. Since then, SSC has been unable to post the 1000+ monthly kills seen previously. For a PvP group, this sudden decline is a strong indicator of a loss of interest and participation. The January statistics seem to further point in this direction, indicating that SSC, a 320-man alliance, has only 66 active PvPers.
It would appear that the writing has been on the wall for a while and, in many ways, this could be considered a proactive move by leadership, evacuating assets before numbers diminish further. This will hopefully limit losses and ensure members safely return to K-Space.
At the time of writing neither Biterno Sintaph nor Cassandra Soprano had answered EN24’s request for comments. Additionally, we reached out to Aaril, the alliances current top killer, but our mail went unanswered.
