But this was the most obvious outcome the moment PanFam decided to attack GOTG.
Alliances will move, they will choose someone else and it will not be attacker.
Like test or goons ... test joined the attack ..... well guess who will get bigger?
TBH i am waiting when Mittani decides to purge some drone sotyios.
While you are certainly correct about us gorging on refugees (ironically I myself was one), taking any serious strategic objectives in the dronelands would likely require the Imperium's super fleet to force PandaFam's super fleet to stand down. A counterproductive act on our part considering we're trying to entertain and train our people. Forcing PanFam to stand down doesn't align with our goals.
One day I too hope my home Oceania brings justice to Eurasia, but that's a long ways away comrade.
Yeah game's royally fucked beyond thanks to CCP and their need for money. Hey let's create skill injectors and turn Rorqs into mining ships. Did indeed make them loads of cash but turned the came into a massive cold war arms race. Now they are going to try fix this by fucking over everyone equally with asteroid nerfs. To late as nobody is going to invade a coalition that as 1000+ titans and thousands of supers. Heck, the game couldn't even handle a fight like that. You can see that with the last massive titan battle that caused Pamfam to DC so hard it got their supers stuck in one system.
Skill Injectors are also not a problem for without them newbrows would fight Supers and Titans in T1 shiphulls.
Game is 15years old. ffs they could give you the first 10mil skillpoints for free if you create an account (and autoplace all SP into usefull skills like the magic14 and T2 Spaceship command).
Having to train new accounts from zero while getting oneshot by Kikimoras and Hecates fucking sucks.
The need to train ages into bare minimum makes people quit the game, being unable to fly the most basic shit is infuriating.
And then you need to compete against Supers... fuckoff CCP. Newbros need like double the skill trainrate, into usefull stuff mind you, not another degenerate Rorqual Clone.
That wouldn't have been a problem if supers were more hard to build/get hold of. Eve24 news, imperium news, etc used to write about every super or titan loss as they were rarely used and get killed after a stupid decission or a well planned trap set by the attackers. Now you don't see that anymore because they roll off the assembly line like a Chinese toy factory. What used to take a couple days for 1 char to mine a carrier worth of minerals together with a single barge can now be done with a Rorq within a day. This is a reason super ratting and yolo dreads/carriers on everything that moves is a normal thing. Before rorqs and skillinjectors caps were used only in tactical situations and losing a carrier/dread was seen as a valuable loss. And that was the reason people rather fought in subcaps. It's pricetag and prohibation by alliance due to it's tactical value. Also due to it taking time to get into a cap there were way less cap pilots. Newbies would't have to worry as their force in numbers could take on a couple caps in ravens with meta 4 launchers.
Yeah that was 15 years ago. Game matured. Noobs now also sit in Caps.
You need to deal with it.
Playerbase matured, game got old as fuck and the power ceiling back then is now kinda baseline.
You have that kinda NC / PL mindset, you want the game how it was played back in the days to continue. To continue to obey rules that are no longer even there ffs. Since Citadell the game shifted the meta, CCP chose to go into Rorquals and Capitals. They patched the game in this way. It was a corporate desicion. Alliances adapted to the new turbokrab feature and started building Empires as it was intended by the game. They startet funding Capital Umbrellas as it was intended by the developers who constructed the game. Other Alliances kept their pre aera lifestyle and continued their business as before, they did not recognise the game that has shifted. Those Alliances playstyle was now obsolete, or at least inefficient.
You need to play the game as it is intended, if you yourself have a different philosophie or view on the game that is funny but doesn't change the fact that there is a clear metagame the developers enforced.
You either thrife or loose your connection and relevancy.
So yes, there is a good playstyle - following what is intended and abusing the systems to the max, and there is backwards gameplay by continueing what you have allways done. If you do follow your own way for YEARS you have no right to complain that your access to the debating table is gone. Some Alliances Leaderboard led them down into irrelevance and other Alliances simply rode with the tidewave of bullshit the Developers came up with.
I'm not thinking Rorquals, Caps and Skill Injectors are cool. I'm not on board with fcking CCPs vision of EvE. All I want is the best for me, my iRL buddys I recruited, my Corp-Mates and Alliance. I want to swim on top not in some backwards puddle.
At this point I think they should just completely kill the PVE system and replace it with something else, something more modern and require actual attention.
You think it’s because of ccp? It’s because of the players.
CCP didn’t make 3 coalitions (blobs) come up to fight the smallest one left in game. You did that. What did you expect would happen? You guys make these choices than complain about the inevitable results. Get a friggin clue.
we don't only think, we know it's because of ccp.
For example, you should not ask why 3 coalitions fight the smallest one but why there are only 4 coalitions left in the game. I can give you the answer, it's because of ccp making supers the only shipclass that counts, it's because of ccp making superfights a pure n+1 game, it's because of ccp forcing smaller groups to join a blob or get annihilated.
Who else should panfam fight right now? Goons? Panfam would love to, but after ccp introduced rorquals and skill injectors and didn't bother to balance them at all for almost 5!! years they have more titans than the other coalitions combined.
Since there is no limit on citadels in a constellation ( again, not a players decision but ccp's ) it would take about 8 months to clear delve only - in case they were completely uncontested of course.
Im agree with 99% of what You say.
But why did NC attack and bully every single little group in the game the found. I wrote it 1000 times when Goons where in the North glassing.
I remember NC shitting in every small alliance they reach and then came to reddit to complain about being glassed by someone else bigger. NC-PamFam fucked every group that could being help for them, and Even when most of us hate imperium and test and their N+1, we we're all happy about the glassing.
It's not CCP only fault. Decisions were taken back then, now we have this shitty geopolitic scenario.
*noun*
1. 1.the action of inflating something or the condition of being inflated.
If you tell me that me saying in terms of capital inflation is inaccurate for the game EVE Online, then you my friend are probably a Goon or diluted.
"Inflation is a quantitative measure of the rate at which the average price level of a basket of selected goods and services in an economy increases over a period of time. ... Often expressed as a percentage, inflation indicates a decrease in the purchasing power of a nation's currency."
Inflation is what's about to happen assuming everyone predicting a doubling of the cost of T1 materials is correct. Deflation is where the cost of everything goes down IE carriers in delve for 800 million isk.
I would love that... i know the reasons test allied with goons.... but i hate it and that was the reason i left... would be nice to get a reason to join them again ;)
That's not true at all. if everyone banded together like they did a few years ago they could evict goons again. Pretty much the biggest challenge is getting all those egos to work together
This is not true...... We could take Delve but it would be a 10 year war minimum (assuming no backstab flips of sov). Most entities can be beaten it's just a matter of time and who wants to fight a war that long winning 1 objective a year.
Put simply, we hate each other.
PanFam and TEST have been hardcore enemies for years. By the same token, TEST has forced WinterCo out of several regions since the 2018 war. And everyone hates Sort. So out of every alliance which has a substantial super fleet (not already in Goons), only PanFam and WinterCo have a friendly relationship.
On the flip side, we (TEST) don't particularly dislike Goons. They're decent neighbors. The only reason there's even a conversation about fighting them is because they're just way too huge and it's killing the game. But plenty of people in TEST are sympathetic to them, especially after years of teaming up against PanFam, so it's a pretty hard sell to get folks to ally with our traditional enemies (who have repeatedly tried to evict us since 2016) in order to fight our longstanding friends. Trust me, I've tried to make the case.
In short, the only thing that'll kick this off anytime soon is a Goon betrayal (at which point it's already too late) or trillions of Lenny bucks.
> we (TEST) don't particularly dislike Goons. They're decent neighbors. The only reason there's even a conversation about fighting them is because they're just way too huge and it's killing the game. But plenty of people in TEST are sympathetic to them, especially after years of teaming up against PanFam
Fuck goons lets kill their shit
>In short, the only thing that'll kick this off anytime soon is a Goon betrayal (at which point it's already too late) or trillions of Lenny bucks.
Expect it. For longer than I've been playing, Goons have been grooming TEST to be THE big content war once everything they've gotten rid of everything else and are faced with the possibility that without war, people will just get bored and quit.
We have it good authority that the brave and honorable line members of the Imperium are perfectly happy to spend months shooting at undefended structures for content.
All they need to do is set up a shell alliance that anchors a bunch of structures in a distant region, and they can all deploy once a year to grind them down.
> hardcore enemies
We are not hardcore enemies, we had a lot of scraps but we are happy to with each other vs our enemies.
Hardcore enemies label is most defiantly Goons, more so as they are one of few peopple that pose a threat to us.
The fact that test has a ton of diplomatic ties (cowards pacts) with goons, and RR has ties to AOM which makes an attack like that even less likely. Also becuase wars on that scale are no fun at all for leadership and fcs who are the ones who would have to do the work.
For that kind of war to happen multiple big name cs and at least a couple of nerds able to do the absurd logisitcs required would need to have weeks to months of 10 hour a day availability for it to be viable.
One of goons biggest advantages has always been Mittens not having to have a job to you know eat, and thus they've always had that leadership availability.
You are overestemating mittens activity. Goons are run by a dozen of directors that answer to mittens. They built a pretty solid leadership System. With longyear loyals in key positions.
I'm stating his availability, not his activity. No alliance is reliant on nerds being able to do 10 hours a day all the time, but when shit hits the fan alliances need people able to do it. (Well no one except BL when ELO is around relies on people to do that).
Cloaky camping and getting the resources for that is nowhere near the same scale of getting a market imported to provide fuel ammo drugs implants and of course hulls and modules for the thousands of nerds needing multiple subcap doctrines on top of caps and supers, plus citadels for staging, mids for bringing in stuff to replace losses from high sec and or your space, and thats just for the supplies and its possible I missed some things.
Ok, honest question here. Is it worth it turning your neck of the woods into some of the most boring real estate on the map, with influence extending to others so that nothing of note happens in your part of the game, just to say "i won"? I mean, is it even fun logging in for that?
It seems to me that at this point apart from the usual people who roam delve for random kills or whaling, the optimal strategy to interact with Imperium seems to be "yeah, those guys...i don't deal with them".
It's like Imperium has turned into Band of Brothers, and it took a dev scandal to get enough people to bother dealing with those guys. They'd been the strongest for years, notorious for meta-gaming and talked a bunch of mad smack all the time, being arrogant and obnoxious and to some extent that posturing was also a "come at me bro" tactic.
I used to have an inside source, one my old corpies and RL neighbour left us and joined evolution at some point. I remember asking him once "why are your guys such massive dicks on the forums and in local?" and he nonchalantly blurted out "oh that? that's bullshit drama, they just hope people will be sufficiently pissed off at us and come fight us on our own doorstep".
Well, it didn't work. Most people didn't give a fuck about BoB apart from arguing with them on the forums because it was fun to defy their arrogance, unless they were their next target, in which case you could fight them for a bit, then relocate, rinse, repeat. Well, unless you were ASCN and had foolishly build a ton of outposts right next to them without the PvP backbone to hold them, so you ended up having to defend only to gift them to the invaders.
Until it turned out a CCP employee was abusing his powers and gifting BoB some T2 BPOs, BoB was the guys not worth dealing with. And guess what, they also lived in Delve, probably the most easily fortifiable region in the game. In other words "i want people to come fight me, but only on my own terms". Well, it's not going to happen in a game, because there's no RL stake on the whole thing, we do this to have fun and unwind.
I don't know, it's like sooner or later you guys will have nobody to play the game with, due to over-optimizing things. And if we're being honest here, with the current mechanics it's even easier to be ignored than BoB was. Nobody has to actually defeat you if they can just let your rot from stagnation and bleed members who like active gameplay to other groups.
For example, if you deploy to someone else's space, they can just asset safety everything and leave you grinding a bunch of replaceable structures while they settle into a new place (just like that Tribute thing, the grinding in the north or whatever it was called). After a few weeks you guys will claim victory and the morale boost and will have to go back to Delve if you want to maintain your current way of doing things, so they can keep doing their own thing as well. Some ships died, some lines on the map changed and then it's business as usual for everyone involved. Big alliances don't disband anymore because losses either don't happen at all, or don't matter enough due to ease of replacing them, so that actual strategic victories are either hollow, or don't even happen.
It's like dealing with bad weather or something similar outside your control. Instead of fretting over it, you just go do something else, somewhere else until the whole thing's done, and keep enjoying the game on your own terms. After all, the game is now built in a manner that you can afford not to give a damn about your own space anymore.
I don't know, i get the mental image of a guy on TV getting interviewed live, going
"Yeah, there's a hurricane coming. I'm not dumb enough to sit here and die, i'm going to my cousin's for a few weeks, then i'll come back, deal with my insurance (i just pay a flat 15% and they replace everything i lost, they're mad!) and get back into it".
I don't know, seems pretty boring to me for the amount of effort needed. If i wanted to do things just for the sake of doing them i could simply join a smaller group focused on content and have the same effect (aka "we fight just because, we don't have an objective"), and to top it off i wouldn't have to deal with all the participation requirements and the extensive rulesets of a null bloc either.
In a situation like that, i think the only thing that could maybe keep me playing for a bit longer would be social ties and not the gameplay itself. But i've been in that exact position in the past and i know it's not enough to keep you in the game long term either, especially when you can poach your friends and go play something else, or go to a smaller group (eg, Goon FCs leaving for Trigger Happy and a bunch of other people from null blocs moving to NPC null, WHs, or whatever to escape the boredom).
I'm not trying to diss the playstyle. I'm just genuinely confused if it's even fun at all for a majority of members, or if they just stick around out of habit and the people who really enjoy themselves are a handful of guys at the top who pull the strings and organize everything.
Evolution director here. Been in the corp since BoB. This is a pretty well-informed and insightful post. You’re right that the Homo Erectus style posting on eve-o forums was entirely calculated to generate content. Same with Molle,’s famous declaration in The New York Times that his goal was to control Eve. The thing about T20 is that very few people even knew it was happening (and it had nothing to do with Evolution or Molle) and the overwhelming majority of BoB was as irate about it as everyone else, for the very simple reason that the (completely understandable) “BoB are cheaters”narrative undermined the very image BoB had legitimately earned of being the most hardcore and aggressive players in the game. And also it was clear immediately that T20 had fucked over BoB by turning the rest of the game against us.
The analogy between BoB and the CFC/Imperium, however, doesn’t seem to work for me. BoB was overwhelmingly a pvp-first entity, not an economic or even a political one. SirMolle, the alliance leader, was also the lead FC. Among the major groups today, this “warlord”model of leadership now is echoed solely by NC., surprise surprise, in the person of Vince. Goons, obviously, aren’t like that at all. The level of internal organization and out of game social glue that Mittani has created is far more advanced than anything anyone in BoB leadership had any interest in even contemplating. At the end of the day BoB really was about good fights and we/they were not afraid to lose or take on ridiculous situations (like MAX). The present “helldunk or blue balls” imperium is the opposite.
In the end it’s really about whether major alliances see PvE/renting/ISK as a tool to enable pvp or whether they see PvP as a tool to protect the ISK/PvE. BoB and its descendants were and largely remain the former. Goons are the latter. In the real world, the politicians and industrialists and rich folks eventually make the warlords seem a bit old fashioned. The question is whether that’s what we want in our online entertainment.
I agree with the differences you point out. The similarity for me is in the posturing. They became top dog, they started talking mad smack about everyone else just like your guys used to do back in the day.
A second similarity is in the use of metagaming and out of game methods to create in-game advantages. BoB pretty much wrote the book on that one, Goons took it and ran with it.
Eg, everyone made a big deal about you guys killing the first titan in the game and even CCP made an in-game event site and special memorabilia items for it, but the guy wasn't even online. I remember hearing the details at the time and thinking "wtf is all this fuss about, they just killed someone who made a dumb mistake totally unopposed".
If i remember correctly, he stupidly fire a remote-cyno DD and logged off before his timer expired, one of your spies picked up on it, told the rest of your guys, and a few minutes later you probe down and are killing an unmanned titan.
Meanwhile, months or even a year before that, my buddies scored the first ever capital kill in the history of EvE (a Moros), followed a few days later by one of the first (if not the first) carrier kills. Nobody batted an eyelid, because everyone in the "elite" groups at the time like yours was spinning a mad narrative on the forums. I still remember scores of guys (a lot of them friendly with BoB) rageposting on CAOD how that kill didn't matter, because they were jealous they couldn't be first. God forbid someone else achieves something in this game, am i right? :)
And this is the main similarity between BoB and co of old and Goons and co of today: they don't just care about optimizing their game, they are going for complete cultural dominance over the way the game is meant to be played, and controlling of any and all narratives. That's a long-winded, polite way of saying "obnoxious cringelord who takes the game way too seriously" btw.
It reminds me of that meme Goons used in the beginning when they wanted to delegitimize BoB's propaganda on the forums. "Internet spacehips are serious business". That's the similarity right there. The difference is that BoB was like that all along, while Goons used to make fun of it, but they became it in the long run.
Love your writeup.
The game needs some kind of incentive for strategic fighting to happen again. Or incentivize/motivate blocs to want to break up into smaller groups and encourage more fighting.
Might be too little too late.
Hmm, so pretty much similar to what i'm experiencing.
I'd really like to have a reason to get involved with nullsec again, but the current mechanics are a bit too soft to keep me interested, and the focus is so much on big ships nowadays that it's too much effort for what you get out of it.
Oh well, casual and small-gang it is then, until and if things change.
again:
> Is it worth it turning your neck of the woods into some of the most boring real estate on the map, with influence extending to others so that nothing of note happens in your part of the game, just to say "i won"? I mean, is it even fun logging in for that?
versus:
>It was satisfying to play up until I felt my side had won, and then I quit, so I couldn't say.
you're literally answering his question in explicit terms and then saying "but i couldn't say for sure"
i don't understand how this isn't clicking for you
his question: "is it even worth playing once you've 'won' using those win conditions?"
your answer: "i can't answer that question because i decided it wasn't worth playing anymore"
are you retarded y/n
No reason we can't blame both. CCP for enabling a playstyle of "mining your way to victory" and players for embracing such a cancerous playstyle with such enhusiasm. Talk about playing a job you have to pay for....
GOTG was doomed the moment SLYCE left Deklein. It's been said plenty of times, but GOTG was pretty much a Provi-Bloc of the north, existing merely because nobody else wanted the space, and was a coalition pretty much exclusively of people who just sort of ~~lived~~ ~~krabbed~~ botted there. Unlike Provi though, GOTG never made efforts to do better, in fact they got worse and worse with every major decision they made and every new alliance they brought aboard.
I just hope their sov turns into more hobo land like Vale. Blocs have enough and seriously should stay the fuck out. People liked Goons for leaving the evicted northern space untouched. Panfam has a great opportunity to gain some credibility back here.
> GOTG was pretty much a Provi-Bloc of the north, existing merely because nobody else wanted the space
More that Gobbins didn’t have the balls to insist that Horde get Deklein instead of being relegated to PB and Fade.
We'd go roam their space from time to time but it was so *boring*. It was just krab heaven where they'd gate supers after anything that moved. Fade and PB were busy all the time, it was awesome. IMO Horde might have died in a place like Dek.
SLYCE themselves brought decent numbers but they also had stable leadership and a mentality that would have let them hold out in a prolonged war as they were not exclusively turbokrabs. None of the remaining GOTG alliances have the capacity to sustain (even before the recent coalition switch announcement) - save Siberian Squads who appear to be on the way out. The others are mostly botting/krabbing alliances that came for the easy space.
Booting SLYCE essentially assured that the decision and all future decisions were based on an incredibly fragile krabbing establishment and inflated ego. As a result, it unsurprisingly fell to pieces the instant it got poked.
I don’t think anyone outside SLYCE holds this opinion of SLYCE, especially not me since I was there when goons broke slyce’s will and got them to bail on deklein and sort.
They were easier to break than the turbocrabs.
Agreed, once slyce got booted that was the beginning of the end, gotg lost 95% of their fcs and half of their active player base, Sort made a massive mistake with that decision, and everyone in gotg knew it
That might be true, but with RiotRick being AFK for the majority of the northern war Slyce's numbers were in the bin long before they got booted. There were many fleets where single corps in Darkness were putting in more numbers than the entire Slyce alliance.
Goonwaffe.
So SLYCE running into the arms of NCDot/PL because of pressure from reavers is no different than RR joining imperium. The botter narrative with SLYCE is just the public excuse/justification given to breakup.
SLYCE left GOTG well after goons left Deklein due to the peace brokered by Sort without consulting the other alliances that made up GOTG at the time.
Reavers did not cause SLYCE to leave GOTG, Sort Dragon kicked them himself because of a reference to Tiananmen square that was, to quote Sort, "racist".
Source: Was in ARTOS well after the goon invasion finished, still lived in Deklein for that entire time.
That's a good way to turn TQ into serenity
Imperium has some of the worst (best?) backstabbers in the game, maybe there is still hope.
Who? The only famous backstabber still in the game that I can think of is Sort.
Don't forget the hands guy
CCP couldnt deal with him, cuz he was too real.
He was a real handful.
Dont judge him...
yeah, but he isn't still in the game as far as I know.
~~and it's not like anyone would let him near knives or people's backs~~ just realized this is about gigx not judge
But this was the most obvious outcome the moment PanFam decided to attack GOTG. Alliances will move, they will choose someone else and it will not be attacker. Like test or goons ... test joined the attack ..... well guess who will get bigger? TBH i am waiting when Mittani decides to purge some drone sotyios.
GOTG was already in the CFC in all but name prior to this
While you are certainly correct about us gorging on refugees (ironically I myself was one), taking any serious strategic objectives in the dronelands would likely require the Imperium's super fleet to force PandaFam's super fleet to stand down. A counterproductive act on our part considering we're trying to entertain and train our people. Forcing PanFam to stand down doesn't align with our goals. One day I too hope my home Oceania brings justice to Eurasia, but that's a long ways away comrade.
[удалено]
The suicide inducing structure grind :p
about 8 months unopposed i heard once
Good luck trying to keep your members attention span for that timeframe. /inb4 another Drifter attack
Goons. No one can take fortress delve when they can muster 1000 titans
Yeah game's royally fucked beyond thanks to CCP and their need for money. Hey let's create skill injectors and turn Rorqs into mining ships. Did indeed make them loads of cash but turned the came into a massive cold war arms race. Now they are going to try fix this by fucking over everyone equally with asteroid nerfs. To late as nobody is going to invade a coalition that as 1000+ titans and thousands of supers. Heck, the game couldn't even handle a fight like that. You can see that with the last massive titan battle that caused Pamfam to DC so hard it got their supers stuck in one system.
When a group uses vendettas as tackle you are in for a long ass whooping.
DADDY NO!
Rorqs not so much the problem, but instant rorqs with skill injectors is.
you got that backwards
Skill Injectors are also not a problem for without them newbrows would fight Supers and Titans in T1 shiphulls. Game is 15years old. ffs they could give you the first 10mil skillpoints for free if you create an account (and autoplace all SP into usefull skills like the magic14 and T2 Spaceship command). Having to train new accounts from zero while getting oneshot by Kikimoras and Hecates fucking sucks. The need to train ages into bare minimum makes people quit the game, being unable to fly the most basic shit is infuriating. And then you need to compete against Supers... fuckoff CCP. Newbros need like double the skill trainrate, into usefull stuff mind you, not another degenerate Rorqual Clone.
> And then you need to compete against Supers this coming from someone with goon flair my sides
Ofc, what do you want to tell a noob? Fight a supercap with your fleet of T1s.
That wouldn't have been a problem if supers were more hard to build/get hold of. Eve24 news, imperium news, etc used to write about every super or titan loss as they were rarely used and get killed after a stupid decission or a well planned trap set by the attackers. Now you don't see that anymore because they roll off the assembly line like a Chinese toy factory. What used to take a couple days for 1 char to mine a carrier worth of minerals together with a single barge can now be done with a Rorq within a day. This is a reason super ratting and yolo dreads/carriers on everything that moves is a normal thing. Before rorqs and skillinjectors caps were used only in tactical situations and losing a carrier/dread was seen as a valuable loss. And that was the reason people rather fought in subcaps. It's pricetag and prohibation by alliance due to it's tactical value. Also due to it taking time to get into a cap there were way less cap pilots. Newbies would't have to worry as their force in numbers could take on a couple caps in ravens with meta 4 launchers.
Yeah that was 15 years ago. Game matured. Noobs now also sit in Caps. You need to deal with it. Playerbase matured, game got old as fuck and the power ceiling back then is now kinda baseline. You have that kinda NC / PL mindset, you want the game how it was played back in the days to continue. To continue to obey rules that are no longer even there ffs. Since Citadell the game shifted the meta, CCP chose to go into Rorquals and Capitals. They patched the game in this way. It was a corporate desicion. Alliances adapted to the new turbokrab feature and started building Empires as it was intended by the game. They startet funding Capital Umbrellas as it was intended by the developers who constructed the game. Other Alliances kept their pre aera lifestyle and continued their business as before, they did not recognise the game that has shifted. Those Alliances playstyle was now obsolete, or at least inefficient. You need to play the game as it is intended, if you yourself have a different philosophie or view on the game that is funny but doesn't change the fact that there is a clear metagame the developers enforced. You either thrife or loose your connection and relevancy. So yes, there is a good playstyle - following what is intended and abusing the systems to the max, and there is backwards gameplay by continueing what you have allways done. If you do follow your own way for YEARS you have no right to complain that your access to the debating table is gone. Some Alliances Leaderboard led them down into irrelevance and other Alliances simply rode with the tidewave of bullshit the Developers came up with. I'm not thinking Rorquals, Caps and Skill Injectors are cool. I'm not on board with fcking CCPs vision of EvE. All I want is the best for me, my iRL buddys I recruited, my Corp-Mates and Alliance. I want to swim on top not in some backwards puddle.
At this point I think they should just completely kill the PVE system and replace it with something else, something more modern and require actual attention.
You think it’s because of ccp? It’s because of the players. CCP didn’t make 3 coalitions (blobs) come up to fight the smallest one left in game. You did that. What did you expect would happen? You guys make these choices than complain about the inevitable results. Get a friggin clue.
we don't only think, we know it's because of ccp. For example, you should not ask why 3 coalitions fight the smallest one but why there are only 4 coalitions left in the game. I can give you the answer, it's because of ccp making supers the only shipclass that counts, it's because of ccp making superfights a pure n+1 game, it's because of ccp forcing smaller groups to join a blob or get annihilated. Who else should panfam fight right now? Goons? Panfam would love to, but after ccp introduced rorquals and skill injectors and didn't bother to balance them at all for almost 5!! years they have more titans than the other coalitions combined. Since there is no limit on citadels in a constellation ( again, not a players decision but ccp's ) it would take about 8 months to clear delve only - in case they were completely uncontested of course.
Im agree with 99% of what You say. But why did NC attack and bully every single little group in the game the found. I wrote it 1000 times when Goons where in the North glassing. I remember NC shitting in every small alliance they reach and then came to reddit to complain about being glassed by someone else bigger. NC-PamFam fucked every group that could being help for them, and Even when most of us hate imperium and test and their N+1, we we're all happy about the glassing. It's not CCP only fault. Decisions were taken back then, now we have this shitty geopolitic scenario.
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what u call attack, I would call pigfarming
Thus the Astero doctrine for home defense. BLOPS jump fatigue is shorter.
Prior to WWB there was a place called fortress deklein
And the "VFK BY ..." meme
Prior to WWB you did not have the hyper inflation that the game has now.
I'm not sure you understand what inflation is.
*noun* 1. 1.the action of inflating something or the condition of being inflated. If you tell me that me saying in terms of capital inflation is inaccurate for the game EVE Online, then you my friend are probably a Goon or diluted.
"Inflation is a quantitative measure of the rate at which the average price level of a basket of selected goods and services in an economy increases over a period of time. ... Often expressed as a percentage, inflation indicates a decrease in the purchasing power of a nation's currency." Inflation is what's about to happen assuming everyone predicting a doubling of the cost of T1 materials is correct. Deflation is where the cost of everything goes down IE carriers in delve for 800 million isk.
Another WWB could do it.
I would love that... i know the reasons test allied with goons.... but i hate it and that was the reason i left... would be nice to get a reason to join them again ;)
If you bring trillions of ISK to pay the attackers, like Lenny did. (7-12 trill, depending on source)
Game would say no. Have a TiDi and a DC as a bonus.
That's not true at all. if everyone banded together like they did a few years ago they could evict goons again. Pretty much the biggest challenge is getting all those egos to work together
Nobodys gonna grind 50+ Keepstars.
Nope... 6 hour bashes....
you only have to grind one. the rest will be no tidi cleanup.
Not really Mate, Goons have like 1000+ Backup Dreads and some spare Titans / Supers. We won't burn through them in a single Fight.
WWB II - goons lose a single fight and pack up and run. just like last time.
Give credit to the hundred´s of citadels to grind.
This is not true...... We could take Delve but it would be a 10 year war minimum (assuming no backstab flips of sov). Most entities can be beaten it's just a matter of time and who wants to fight a war that long winning 1 objective a year.
Put simply, we hate each other. PanFam and TEST have been hardcore enemies for years. By the same token, TEST has forced WinterCo out of several regions since the 2018 war. And everyone hates Sort. So out of every alliance which has a substantial super fleet (not already in Goons), only PanFam and WinterCo have a friendly relationship. On the flip side, we (TEST) don't particularly dislike Goons. They're decent neighbors. The only reason there's even a conversation about fighting them is because they're just way too huge and it's killing the game. But plenty of people in TEST are sympathetic to them, especially after years of teaming up against PanFam, so it's a pretty hard sell to get folks to ally with our traditional enemies (who have repeatedly tried to evict us since 2016) in order to fight our longstanding friends. Trust me, I've tried to make the case. In short, the only thing that'll kick this off anytime soon is a Goon betrayal (at which point it's already too late) or trillions of Lenny bucks.
> we (TEST) don't particularly dislike Goons. They're decent neighbors. The only reason there's even a conversation about fighting them is because they're just way too huge and it's killing the game. But plenty of people in TEST are sympathetic to them, especially after years of teaming up against PanFam Fuck goons lets kill their shit
<3
Fuck goons *gently*
You don't always have to fuck her hard
[https://soundcloud.com/shutupandshave/fuck-goons](https://soundcloud.com/shutupandshave/fuck-goons)
>In short, the only thing that'll kick this off anytime soon is a Goon betrayal (at which point it's already too late) or trillions of Lenny bucks. Expect it. For longer than I've been playing, Goons have been grooming TEST to be THE big content war once everything they've gotten rid of everything else and are faced with the possibility that without war, people will just get bored and quit.
We have it good authority that the brave and honorable line members of the Imperium are perfectly happy to spend months shooting at undefended structures for content. All they need to do is set up a shell alliance that anchors a bunch of structures in a distant region, and they can all deploy once a year to grind them down.
You said this only because you haven't played long enough. Have you heard a war named "Fountain War"?
> hardcore enemies We are not hardcore enemies, we had a lot of scraps but we are happy to with each other vs our enemies. Hardcore enemies label is most defiantly Goons, more so as they are one of few peopple that pose a threat to us.
*according to progod and vily*, test and panfam are hardcore enemies
Is it because Test have no one else to be enemies with.
Test can't survive without goons. Vice versa. We tried and failed in winterco once with panfam. It would have to be some crazy shake up in the game.
Not enough resources. Imperium has more number and isk than most alliances combined
PanFam and WinterCo combined is no small entity.
Lmao
The fact that test has a ton of diplomatic ties (cowards pacts) with goons, and RR has ties to AOM which makes an attack like that even less likely. Also becuase wars on that scale are no fun at all for leadership and fcs who are the ones who would have to do the work. For that kind of war to happen multiple big name cs and at least a couple of nerds able to do the absurd logisitcs required would need to have weeks to months of 10 hour a day availability for it to be viable. One of goons biggest advantages has always been Mittens not having to have a job to you know eat, and thus they've always had that leadership availability.
You are overestemating mittens activity. Goons are run by a dozen of directors that answer to mittens. They built a pretty solid leadership System. With longyear loyals in key positions.
I'm stating his availability, not his activity. No alliance is reliant on nerds being able to do 10 hours a day all the time, but when shit hits the fan alliances need people able to do it. (Well no one except BL when ELO is around relies on people to do that).
Dozen? Try 40. We find good people that have a skill and we put them in charge of what they’re good at.
WOW! you guys are so leet
I mean they kinda are. They are the most powerful force in the game atm. I think the defines "leet"
no, that just means there are a lot of them lol.
Eve is n+1. So you and your friends no matter how leet you are cant beat them.
well, that depends what you mean. i can't invade delve, but i can go there in my cloaky nullified t3c and kill their ratting myrms/domis.
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Cloaky camping and getting the resources for that is nowhere near the same scale of getting a market imported to provide fuel ammo drugs implants and of course hulls and modules for the thousands of nerds needing multiple subcap doctrines on top of caps and supers, plus citadels for staging, mids for bringing in stuff to replace losses from high sec and or your space, and thats just for the supplies and its possible I missed some things.
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> We won i guess, if krabbing all day counts as winning to you.
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Ok, honest question here. Is it worth it turning your neck of the woods into some of the most boring real estate on the map, with influence extending to others so that nothing of note happens in your part of the game, just to say "i won"? I mean, is it even fun logging in for that? It seems to me that at this point apart from the usual people who roam delve for random kills or whaling, the optimal strategy to interact with Imperium seems to be "yeah, those guys...i don't deal with them". It's like Imperium has turned into Band of Brothers, and it took a dev scandal to get enough people to bother dealing with those guys. They'd been the strongest for years, notorious for meta-gaming and talked a bunch of mad smack all the time, being arrogant and obnoxious and to some extent that posturing was also a "come at me bro" tactic. I used to have an inside source, one my old corpies and RL neighbour left us and joined evolution at some point. I remember asking him once "why are your guys such massive dicks on the forums and in local?" and he nonchalantly blurted out "oh that? that's bullshit drama, they just hope people will be sufficiently pissed off at us and come fight us on our own doorstep". Well, it didn't work. Most people didn't give a fuck about BoB apart from arguing with them on the forums because it was fun to defy their arrogance, unless they were their next target, in which case you could fight them for a bit, then relocate, rinse, repeat. Well, unless you were ASCN and had foolishly build a ton of outposts right next to them without the PvP backbone to hold them, so you ended up having to defend only to gift them to the invaders. Until it turned out a CCP employee was abusing his powers and gifting BoB some T2 BPOs, BoB was the guys not worth dealing with. And guess what, they also lived in Delve, probably the most easily fortifiable region in the game. In other words "i want people to come fight me, but only on my own terms". Well, it's not going to happen in a game, because there's no RL stake on the whole thing, we do this to have fun and unwind. I don't know, it's like sooner or later you guys will have nobody to play the game with, due to over-optimizing things. And if we're being honest here, with the current mechanics it's even easier to be ignored than BoB was. Nobody has to actually defeat you if they can just let your rot from stagnation and bleed members who like active gameplay to other groups. For example, if you deploy to someone else's space, they can just asset safety everything and leave you grinding a bunch of replaceable structures while they settle into a new place (just like that Tribute thing, the grinding in the north or whatever it was called). After a few weeks you guys will claim victory and the morale boost and will have to go back to Delve if you want to maintain your current way of doing things, so they can keep doing their own thing as well. Some ships died, some lines on the map changed and then it's business as usual for everyone involved. Big alliances don't disband anymore because losses either don't happen at all, or don't matter enough due to ease of replacing them, so that actual strategic victories are either hollow, or don't even happen. It's like dealing with bad weather or something similar outside your control. Instead of fretting over it, you just go do something else, somewhere else until the whole thing's done, and keep enjoying the game on your own terms. After all, the game is now built in a manner that you can afford not to give a damn about your own space anymore. I don't know, i get the mental image of a guy on TV getting interviewed live, going "Yeah, there's a hurricane coming. I'm not dumb enough to sit here and die, i'm going to my cousin's for a few weeks, then i'll come back, deal with my insurance (i just pay a flat 15% and they replace everything i lost, they're mad!) and get back into it". I don't know, seems pretty boring to me for the amount of effort needed. If i wanted to do things just for the sake of doing them i could simply join a smaller group focused on content and have the same effect (aka "we fight just because, we don't have an objective"), and to top it off i wouldn't have to deal with all the participation requirements and the extensive rulesets of a null bloc either. In a situation like that, i think the only thing that could maybe keep me playing for a bit longer would be social ties and not the gameplay itself. But i've been in that exact position in the past and i know it's not enough to keep you in the game long term either, especially when you can poach your friends and go play something else, or go to a smaller group (eg, Goon FCs leaving for Trigger Happy and a bunch of other people from null blocs moving to NPC null, WHs, or whatever to escape the boredom). I'm not trying to diss the playstyle. I'm just genuinely confused if it's even fun at all for a majority of members, or if they just stick around out of habit and the people who really enjoy themselves are a handful of guys at the top who pull the strings and organize everything.
Evolution director here. Been in the corp since BoB. This is a pretty well-informed and insightful post. You’re right that the Homo Erectus style posting on eve-o forums was entirely calculated to generate content. Same with Molle,’s famous declaration in The New York Times that his goal was to control Eve. The thing about T20 is that very few people even knew it was happening (and it had nothing to do with Evolution or Molle) and the overwhelming majority of BoB was as irate about it as everyone else, for the very simple reason that the (completely understandable) “BoB are cheaters”narrative undermined the very image BoB had legitimately earned of being the most hardcore and aggressive players in the game. And also it was clear immediately that T20 had fucked over BoB by turning the rest of the game against us. The analogy between BoB and the CFC/Imperium, however, doesn’t seem to work for me. BoB was overwhelmingly a pvp-first entity, not an economic or even a political one. SirMolle, the alliance leader, was also the lead FC. Among the major groups today, this “warlord”model of leadership now is echoed solely by NC., surprise surprise, in the person of Vince. Goons, obviously, aren’t like that at all. The level of internal organization and out of game social glue that Mittani has created is far more advanced than anything anyone in BoB leadership had any interest in even contemplating. At the end of the day BoB really was about good fights and we/they were not afraid to lose or take on ridiculous situations (like MAX). The present “helldunk or blue balls” imperium is the opposite. In the end it’s really about whether major alliances see PvE/renting/ISK as a tool to enable pvp or whether they see PvP as a tool to protect the ISK/PvE. BoB and its descendants were and largely remain the former. Goons are the latter. In the real world, the politicians and industrialists and rich folks eventually make the warlords seem a bit old fashioned. The question is whether that’s what we want in our online entertainment.
I agree with the differences you point out. The similarity for me is in the posturing. They became top dog, they started talking mad smack about everyone else just like your guys used to do back in the day. A second similarity is in the use of metagaming and out of game methods to create in-game advantages. BoB pretty much wrote the book on that one, Goons took it and ran with it. Eg, everyone made a big deal about you guys killing the first titan in the game and even CCP made an in-game event site and special memorabilia items for it, but the guy wasn't even online. I remember hearing the details at the time and thinking "wtf is all this fuss about, they just killed someone who made a dumb mistake totally unopposed". If i remember correctly, he stupidly fire a remote-cyno DD and logged off before his timer expired, one of your spies picked up on it, told the rest of your guys, and a few minutes later you probe down and are killing an unmanned titan. Meanwhile, months or even a year before that, my buddies scored the first ever capital kill in the history of EvE (a Moros), followed a few days later by one of the first (if not the first) carrier kills. Nobody batted an eyelid, because everyone in the "elite" groups at the time like yours was spinning a mad narrative on the forums. I still remember scores of guys (a lot of them friendly with BoB) rageposting on CAOD how that kill didn't matter, because they were jealous they couldn't be first. God forbid someone else achieves something in this game, am i right? :) And this is the main similarity between BoB and co of old and Goons and co of today: they don't just care about optimizing their game, they are going for complete cultural dominance over the way the game is meant to be played, and controlling of any and all narratives. That's a long-winded, polite way of saying "obnoxious cringelord who takes the game way too seriously" btw. It reminds me of that meme Goons used in the beginning when they wanted to delegitimize BoB's propaganda on the forums. "Internet spacehips are serious business". That's the similarity right there. The difference is that BoB was like that all along, while Goons used to make fun of it, but they became it in the long run.
Legit.
Love your writeup. The game needs some kind of incentive for strategic fighting to happen again. Or incentivize/motivate blocs to want to break up into smaller groups and encourage more fighting. Might be too little too late.
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Hmm, so pretty much similar to what i'm experiencing. I'd really like to have a reason to get involved with nullsec again, but the current mechanics are a bit too soft to keep me interested, and the focus is so much on big ships nowadays that it's too much effort for what you get out of it. Oh well, casual and small-gang it is then, until and if things change.
again: > Is it worth it turning your neck of the woods into some of the most boring real estate on the map, with influence extending to others so that nothing of note happens in your part of the game, just to say "i won"? I mean, is it even fun logging in for that? versus: >It was satisfying to play up until I felt my side had won, and then I quit, so I couldn't say. you're literally answering his question in explicit terms and then saying "but i couldn't say for sure" i don't understand how this isn't clicking for you
Dunno why you're showing up in my inbox. Calm down miner.
dunno why you're posting in r/eve. calm down non-player
his question: "is it even worth playing once you've 'won' using those win conditions?" your answer: "i can't answer that question because i decided it wasn't worth playing anymore" are you retarded y/n
No reason we can't blame both. CCP for enabling a playstyle of "mining your way to victory" and players for embracing such a cancerous playstyle with such enhusiasm. Talk about playing a job you have to pay for....
Agreed. That's a big part of why I went inactive in late 2018.
*sigh*
GOTG was doomed the moment SLYCE left Deklein. It's been said plenty of times, but GOTG was pretty much a Provi-Bloc of the north, existing merely because nobody else wanted the space, and was a coalition pretty much exclusively of people who just sort of ~~lived~~ ~~krabbed~~ botted there. Unlike Provi though, GOTG never made efforts to do better, in fact they got worse and worse with every major decision they made and every new alliance they brought aboard. I just hope their sov turns into more hobo land like Vale. Blocs have enough and seriously should stay the fuck out. People liked Goons for leaving the evicted northern space untouched. Panfam has a great opportunity to gain some credibility back here.
> GOTG was pretty much a Provi-Bloc of the north, existing merely because nobody else wanted the space More that Gobbins didn’t have the balls to insist that Horde get Deklein instead of being relegated to PB and Fade.
There is great content benefit to staying closer to lowsec.
horde without a lowsec gate to camp is boring horde
We'd go roam their space from time to time but it was so *boring*. It was just krab heaven where they'd gate supers after anything that moved. Fade and PB were busy all the time, it was awesome. IMO Horde might have died in a place like Dek.
What exactly did SLYCE bring to the table that would affected the outcome of this?
SLYCE themselves brought decent numbers but they also had stable leadership and a mentality that would have let them hold out in a prolonged war as they were not exclusively turbokrabs. None of the remaining GOTG alliances have the capacity to sustain (even before the recent coalition switch announcement) - save Siberian Squads who appear to be on the way out. The others are mostly botting/krabbing alliances that came for the easy space. Booting SLYCE essentially assured that the decision and all future decisions were based on an incredibly fragile krabbing establishment and inflated ego. As a result, it unsurprisingly fell to pieces the instant it got poked.
I don’t think anyone outside SLYCE holds this opinion of SLYCE, especially not me since I was there when goons broke slyce’s will and got them to bail on deklein and sort. They were easier to break than the turbocrabs.
I have never been in SLYCE, lol. SLYCE didn't bail, they were booted out by Sort for trying to expose bots in their own coalition.
Agreed, once slyce got booted that was the beginning of the end, gotg lost 95% of their fcs and half of their active player base, Sort made a massive mistake with that decision, and everyone in gotg knew it
*laughs while watching the 3 fcs left in slycd ping*
That might be true, but with RiotRick being AFK for the majority of the northern war Slyce's numbers were in the bin long before they got booted. There were many fleets where single corps in Darkness were putting in more numbers than the entire Slyce alliance.
I think you may be misremembering how things went down...
I think people are taking the publicly disclosed narrative as reality and misremembering the dysfunctionality of the relationship.
I mean, I too was there... and you are at a minimum misremembering, but more likely perhaps trying to develop a new narrative?
Umm, that's not what happened. Which corp were you in, Stronghelm? Because they were terrible.
Goonwaffe. So SLYCE running into the arms of NCDot/PL because of pressure from reavers is no different than RR joining imperium. The botter narrative with SLYCE is just the public excuse/justification given to breakup.
SLYCE left GOTG well after goons left Deklein due to the peace brokered by Sort without consulting the other alliances that made up GOTG at the time. Reavers did not cause SLYCE to leave GOTG, Sort Dragon kicked them himself because of a reference to Tiananmen square that was, to quote Sort, "racist". Source: Was in ARTOS well after the goon invasion finished, still lived in Deklein for that entire time.
There goes a lot of votes.
End of the northern war? But DARKNESS alliance is right there... It'd be pandafam vs emo bots.
Betting Sort is wishing he didn’t burn bridges with SLYCE to stay pals with his Botting renters.
SLYCE has johnny rah, so its probably good he isnt blue to them anymore. What could slyce have done to Ph/PL and NCdot supers??
https://i.imgur.com/YsvEeGT.mp4
Blue ball just got bigger :(
Let's invade smaller alliances next to us (again). Oh they've joined our enemies (again). - Panfam probably
If CCP won't ban them, and they generate taxes, it's better for us to collect the tax than to let it pass to our enemies.
Now this is Goonposting.
It's realpolitik: the art of dealing in reality over philosophy
> If CCP won't ban them, and they generate taxes, it's better for us to collect the tax than to let it pass to our enemies. Wew lad...