Hulkageddon IV

Hulkageddon IV

Hulkageddon IV ran 19-28 February 2011, the fourth iteration of Helicity Boson's highsec mining-gank tournament. Ten days, broadly the same format as Hulkageddon III - a published bounty board, donation-funded prize pool, week-and-a-bit window - but without the "Summer of Gank" branding splash and without the mainstream-press surge.

Final tally: ~864 exhumers and ~676 mining barges destroyed, totalling ~3,500 ships destroyed across the wider miner / industrial / hauler tail (some retrospectives quote 3,840). Numerically the iteration sits a touch below Hulkageddon II / III on direct exhumer kills, but above on total ship count - gankers had broadened the target list to include orcas, retrievers, and high-value haulers that didn't previously register on the scoreboard.

CCP posted an official "Hulkageddon IV Scheduled" announcement on the events portal and a "Hulkageddon IV Concludes" follow-up - the press relationship between Helicity and CCP stayed cordial. Behind the scenes, 2011 was the year tensions inside CCP between the Walking In Stations / Incarna track and the Flying In Space track were boiling over; a few months after Hulkageddon IV, Helicity Boson would hand the EVE community the leaked "Greed is Good" internal memos that detonated the Monocle-gate / Summer 2011 player riots, forcing CCP to abandon the NEX-store push and refocus on FiS. Hulkageddon IV is therefore the last clean Helicity-CCP cooperative iteration before the relationship became complicated.

For returning players: Hulkageddon IV is the consolidation iteration - not the most spectacular numbers, not the most innovative format, but the proof point that Hulkageddon was now an institution with predictable twice-yearly cadence. By the time Hulkageddon V arrived in 2012, the format was so well-understood that Goonswarm could buy in as a sponsor and scale it to a full month.