War

[tgr]

Probably more against IT than with us, but it also sounded like we wouldn't exactly shy from bluing them up if we were to go into delve etc.

[Gets]

Regarding -A- Mittani emphasises that it's not the same New Teeth, New Life leadership anymore, so no reason to hold a grudge. Older goons still like to point out the knife stuck in their shoulderblades.

[tgr]

Quick summary of the past 2-3 days:

We've dominated 6vdt and still hold the station, we killed the ihub i 7bx-6f. the station is out of armor reinforce monday around DT (1415 eve I think), and 7bx station comes out on tuesday.

It's been calm and quiet for the most part after the initial rush to get to the system. There was one breakout attempt the 27th which didn't go so well, and some warp disruption bubbles were down at downtime (seemingly a bug with warp disruption bubbles intersecting a POS in some fashion), allowing a few trapped clown titans, supercarriers and misc other caps to leave.

The next few days was just tons of POS shooting with an increasing level of stealth bomber drive-bys, culminating in the fight on the 30th. Well, that's not strictly true, there were two fights in there.

One of the fleet was a 60-80 strong fleet of ganknight from scrapheap challenge (with a smattering of PL), and one was sys-k, nulli secunda, it alliance etc etc etc of around the same number. The ganknight fleet was annihilated almost to a man at the gate, whereas what I think was a breakout fleet bounced around in the system for a while until we got off a great bubble and shattered the fleet.

In other news, IT lost their ePeen constructor:
http://evemaps.dotlan.net/corp/ePeen_Construction/alliances

Edit: Some grammar and details I forgot in my hilariously sleep-deprived initial posting.

Edit2: Heard on TS yesterday: "IT bombers finally got competent, they finally managed to kill a covops with bombs." "Was it their own?" "No." *slight pause* "Wait, no. Yes, it was one of their own." http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=8725596  

[Oban]

Edit2: Heard on TS yesterday: "IT bombers finally got competent, they finally managed to kill a covops with bombs." "Was it their own?" "No." *slight pause* "Wait, no. Yes, it was one of their own." http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=8725596  

That is awesome.

[tgr]

Seen on the live view comments section:

2:53 Tsien: this is the best part
2:53 Tsien: we have a spy on their TS and there are only 10 people in the TS channel
2:53 Tsien: they can't figure out who the spy is
3:01 Tsien: they finally found our spy
3:01 Tsien: it was a random guy they dragged on their TS
3:01 Tsien: and they couldn't figure out who the spy was

(I just removed all the lol and fail comments, because fuck that noise)

Also, I was stuck at work (after having spent way too much time in that system camping it and trying to kill bombers with MYYYY MAELSTROM), so having a live view of the station being sieged by avatars sneezing lazorz out its nose helped alleviate the :ohdear: feeling.

http://evemaps.dotlan.net/system/6VDT-H/events

[Endie]

Latest Fountain War Update:

IT Alliance: not waving but drowning

It would be somewhat cheap and tawdry of me to draw parallels between the simultaneous events in Egypt and Fountain, and I hope that many of my readers will expect better of me than to do so, so here goes.  Mainly because it excites and stimulates me to think of your disappointment.  Each features an aging dictator with a loosening grasp on the dissolving surroundings who owes his position to a conflict many years ago that few remember and which ultimately led to a series of defeats (you see, Eve is a lot like the Yom Kippur War...)  Each sees his followers melting away and his military refusing to fight on his behalf, although admittedly for the analogy to hold true the Egyptian army would have had to suffer the humiliation of being camped into their barracks for six days while cheery Israelis draw penises on the pyramids and dismantle Cairo.  Not to forget the occasional Cairo-ese tank commander inexplicably deciding to leave his compound and plunge into the middle of a waiting armoured division.

A lot has happened over the last few days in the world of Eve, and now we get to do the whole lean back thing and feel terribly pleased with ourselves for a few hours.  Of course, credit where credit is due.  I am compelled to admit that we couldn't have done this without SirMolle himself: five foot and eight inches of the worst strategist in Eve history.  Despite losing Delve after being camped into PR- a couple of years ago, and despite being camped into H-W last year, he merrily did the same thing yet again and told everyone in his bloc to base out of a single, easily camped system.

Of course, it took some pretty neat timing to pull off.  Here is a little behind-the-scenes vignette from last week.  Those who turned up for the State of the Goonion may remember a degree of delay - even prevarication - in getting things going.  Much moving between channels; Mittens declaring that he was going to get a drink; lengthy and out-loud marveling at the participant count rising above a thousand, eleven hundred, twelve-hundred... And so on.

The fact is that our scouts were sitting in 9R4 watching the IT fleet - remember when IT had a fleet? - and in 6VDT waiting for them to return.  The point was not just to take 6VDT: we've demonstrated that we could do that virtually at will.  The point was to trap the entire IT Alliance fleet in there, supercapitals and all, and if we had announced the hellcamp a few minutes earlier then many of their pilots would have escaped and jumped elsewhere.

SirMolle helped out in other ways, and I don't just mean by pissing off vast swathes of his alliance.  Just as in Delve I and Delve II, when the going gets tough, Par Mollen's eye for a bargain spots a short-notice holiday booking somewhere terribly rustic with no internet access.  And so it was that, when the scale of the disaster dawned on him, SirMolle put on his Cloak of Invisibility, had a lot of jobs around the house come up or something - anything - rather than log in and face up to his screw-up.  Which was, admittedly, probably far better for IT Alliance than if they had been cajoled into one of his grand schemes.

The outcome of the 6VDT hellcamp have been sweeping and dramatic, so rather than write an immense list I'll try and break it down into the effects on Querious, Fountain and IT Alliance.

Querious


While we have agents and contacts in IT Alliance at basically every level, they have no functioning intelligence network at all.  We knew that they had no idea about what was going on until, just as the SotG began, EveNews24 dropped some fairly major hints.  If only SirMolle hadn't ordered his members last week not to read news from unapproved sources!

This meant that we could tell AAA and their friends in Stain and Coven exactly what was about to happen.  They had intended to launch an attack on Querious around now, but they quickly brought that forward and promptly invaded 49- and elsewhere in Querious.  At the same time, the Romanian Legion invaded Period Basis.  I don't have the Period Basis timers but I can tell you that the following Querious outposts are in their station armour cycle, with the last two coming out on Thursday and all of the rest today: 49-, H74, F-N, A2-, ED- and I1Y-.  You cannot hold Delve with a hostile Querious, and yes that covers both empire exit points from Querious.  As a bonus, the loss of H74 and F-N will also cripple the Period Basis pets' evacuation route.

IT Pets Nulli Secunda were announced by SirMolle to be riding to their rescue.  Let's cut to the scene inside Nulli Secunda for an act in three parts for which we should thank one of Vile Rat's agents:


Fountain

In Fountain, our job has been to keep IT locked up and humiliated in their little gimp box.  However, we have not been satisfied with that.  6VDT itself has fallen and two more station systems can be taken in the next two days: 7BX today and G95 on Thursday.  The occasional IT member protests half-heartedly that they still hold half of Fountain and that a mighty counter-attack is nigh, but you can get an idea of the likelihood of that from the fact that the IT FC Sort Dragon sold off his stash of SBUs to Test at a discount rate yesterday

As I write, IT's D4KU jump bridge route to Aridia is going down.  Every hostile subcap now has to go through Y-2 to evacuate, if you catch my drift.  We control every other exit.  The Fountain residents may well claim that this is still their home, but they must now face the reality that they are trapped here with DurrHurrDurr in local in a sort of hyper-dysfunctional Big Brother reality TV existence with housemates who fire guns into the ceiling during their loud parties and who have a nasty habit of setting light to anything of value that's stationary long enough for them to light a match.

IT Alliance

Nobody left BoB until Haargoth booted them out.  Say what you like about the old guys like db Preacher or DigitalCommunist - and I would suggest the term "barely literate sycophantic dunglickers" would be a fair start - at least BoB's member corporations actually wanted to be in the alliance.  By contrast, the only people who want to be in IT Alliance are those corporations with the justified suspicion that even Space Monkey's Alliance would turn them down.  A few months ago, IT Alliance had 6,400 members.  Since then, Beach Boys, Dark, Finfleet and X13 have left.  Dice are about to leave.  Molle has been basically openly begging pet corporations to join in order to prop up their numbers.  Not all have said yes.  As a result, he will be lucky not to hit four and a half thousand in the next week, and since five hundred of those are in Evolution (little more than a retirement home for the permanently unsubscribed) you have to take even that total with a pinch of salt.

When even Dice decide that they are being made to look bad by associating with you - a corporation characterised by the two hundred and fifty hundred pounds of screeching awfulness labelled "Lady Scarlet" (think Cathy Bates in Misery) who serves as their diplomat of all things - then it is time to take a long, hard look at yourself.

Of course, as one door closes, another one opens, and SirMolle was proud to announce that X13 and Finfleet with their hundred-man supercapital force would be replaced by Best Path, who are apparently some sort of corporation.  They have even been in top-notch alliances like Intrepid Crossing welp no I mean Ethereal Dawn.

Ethereal

Dawn

This seems like an appropriate time to say that I am a Liverpool fan, and that yesterday we sold Fernando Torres, a cultured striker of ability, grace and poise and with an unparalleled scoring record.  On the other hand, we signed as his replacement Andy Carroll, an unintelligent man with a record of petty crime whose probation terms forbid him from living alone as much for his own protection as anything else, and off whom our midfield will at best occasionally manage to bounce the ball into the net.  Do you see what I am saying, here?  I think you do.

What I think I am saying is that if we had, between us, a shred of humanity left then we would feel a little sorry for that old Par Mollen guy, and guilty that his four years of abject and almost uninterrupted losses to us should draw towards its close clinging to the leavings of Intrepid Crossing and hoping that Systematic Chaos can rescue him.

Sadly, I think that the clock is well and truly ticking on poor Par Mollen's Eve career, which means that we have to find another cat's paw through which to bring all of Eve's most natural victims into one, easily shot organisation.  On the upside, AmokDot should probably have a good four or five thousand extra members over the next few weeks.


My Dog

When she was younger:



Edit:  I should have mentioned explicitly that this stuff might not have worked at all if it were not for Boat and his willingness to FC on a pretty-much round-the-clock basis.  He is an inhuman FC machine in these things and if we didn't have him we would have to invent him.  Although we might choose to tinker with one or two of the specifications.

[Slayerik]

Who wants all my NOL assets? First to post wins.

Vaga
Hurricane
Arazu
Megathron

Some Fighters


And sorry bout the Megathron, was my only BS 5 at the time.

[Phildo]

Gimme.

[Slayerik]

Contract up, enjoy!

[Furiously]

I didn't want that vaga anyways.

[Phildo]

Now we just need to reconquer NOL...

[Sir T]

I would not write off Mollie yet btw. One of the striking thing is the way all the CEOs were being very careful to avoid criticizing him. I would not be surprised to have planning them bring in Mollie or Evol (which means Mollie) into their new alliances and try to "Bring back the old spirit of BOB". At which point they would be totally failing again in 6 months and everyone will be blaming everyone bar Mollie again.

[Fordel]

The Re-Invasion of Delve is kinda boring really. It just seems to inevitable, there's like no suspense at all.

[SnakeCharmer]

As a complete outsider that only reads this thread because it's freaking fascinating as hell...Why is everyone so careful around this Mollie fellow?  Out of 300,000 people in this game, what makes this neckbeard so feared/loved/whatever?  I might have missed something in the last 219 pages, and if I did, I'd appreciate someone pointing me to it.

[Phildo]

He was the supreme leader of Band of Brothers, once the most feared and powerful alliance in the game.  Until Finfleet and X13 left, his new alliance was also the largest in the game and capable of fielding the largest single-alliance supercapital fleet when properly motivated.  There's more to it than that, but that's the gist of it.

[tgr]

Just to point out how this hellcamp had no effect on IT's morale in any way, shape or form:

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=8745326

[SnakeCharmer]

He was the supreme leader of Band of Brothers, once the most feared and powerful alliance in the game.  Until Finfleet and X13 left, his new alliance was also the largest in the game and capable of fielding the largest single-alliance supercapital fleet when properly motivated.  There's more to it than that, but that's the gist of it.

Ah, ok.  Thanks.  Band of Brothers was made up of people from SA, wasn't it?

Anyway, so he basically is the proverbial EvE badass because he could potentially field 'the largest single-alliance supercapital fleet' and the general pop is reluctant to call him on it and find out?  Somebody needs to go kick the hornets nest really freaking hard 

[Sir T]

Nope. Goons came from something awful. Mollie was a guy that was really good at Homeworld 2 and rode that rep into Eve for 2 years, till it came out the only reason he was winning is that he was cheating outrageously and had an in with the makers of eve. And he was lying about those victories through his teeth. For instance, He claimed he had multiple titans for months before someone else built the first one.

Its a really long story involving use of every exploit known to man. Oh yeah he holds the personal record for losing Titans, ships which till very recently were practicably invincible.

Today he is kinda like Gargamel from the Smurfs, but even more pathetic.

[Kitsune]

He was in charge of what was once the dominant power of the game.  Up until it was revealed that some of the members of his alliance were CCP staff who were "coincidentally" happening to be winning a statistically improbable number of T2 blueprints, i.e. eternal money generators, giving the group an income stream out of proportion to their numbers.  BoB's power turned out to hinge a lot on insider knowledge and flat-out cheating, and when they got caught red-handed at it the glory days took a prompt dive.  Without the extra help from rogue employees, they were pulled down through raw numbers and determination of the other alliances, most of whom now had good reason to hate them, and they've never truly recovered from it.

Molle's demonstrated incapability to manage his current alliance is fairly solid proof that BoB would never have become as strong as it was without the cheating they were doing.

[Sir T]

IT corps are attempting to sell off sov in Delve and say they have no interest in defending it.

http://www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?8031-We-have-no-interest-in-defending-Delve-IT-CEO-s-attempt-to-sell-sov-and-run

[Fordel]

The reason I say this seems boring, is because it's all already happened once and the first time there was still a question of "can BoB maybe pull something out of their asses and save the day?"


This time, it never seemed to be a matter of IF, simply when.


I await the goons losing all their sovereignty by forgetting to pay their bills again in 6 month times.

[tgr]

Well, there's one important difference this time. This time they're disbanding themselves, instead of being stabberized and thrown out. I think it also means that the foreverwar against Molle (which began when he camped goons in in ... 2006?) is basically over, unless he manages to pull something radical out of his hat.

I doubt he will.

[Comstar]

Edit- Movie of the Deceleration of the Death of the IT Alliance

Victory!!? I must admit, failure cascading before a single battle in Delve is..pathetic.

T alliance will be disband as of 04.00 hours to morrow
From: Maximum Dam'age
Sent: 2011.02.04 19:20
To: IT Alliance.

hello to all members i regret to inform you all that as of 04.00 hours tomorrow IT alliance will be disbanded we have been in this war now for the past few month and we have lost 3 big corp x13 and finfleet and now Black Nova Corp is leaveing us we can not fight this war anymore we have lost this war once and for all i would like to say thanks to the NC for a good fight and we wish you the best in Delve

i wish you all the best

this is for real this is not a joke

Regards

Maximum alliance head
------

That guy, Maximum Dam'age is ceo of Viborg Odyssey which is the 3 man Exec corp for IT.

Sung to the tune of Leonard Cohen Hallelujah Live
 

Devilish Ledoux Icon
    * Group: [GS] Goonfleet
    * Joined: 09-May 09

Now there used to be a special club
That ruled over Delve and killed ASCN
But you don't really care about '06, do you?
It went like this
Nice region
We control your game, there are no Goons
The baffled Molle confused by 'fofofofo'
fofofofo, fofofofo
fofofofo, fofofofo

They were dumb but we needed proof
So Goons wardecced them as a goof
Their fuckups and our follies ran us through them
We wrecked them
In 6VDT
We broke their tank, we made them flee
And from our lips arose a 'fofofofo'
fofofofo, fofofofo
fofofofo, fofofofo

Molle, he's been here before
He's played this game, he knows the score
He's been tied to the tracks with a rapetrain coming
And the rapetrain, it hasn't brakes
And his friends just ain't got what it takes
To survive when they hear our 'fofofofo'
fofofofo, fofofofo
fofofofo, fofofofo

There was a time when karttoon fucked Goons
And IT rolled in and took our shit
But that was a year ago, y'know?
And remember how they gloated then
Well now we're back and they are through
And every breath we draw is 'fofofofo'
fofofofo, fofofofo
fofofofo, fofofofo

Maybe they'll finally uninstall
Or maybe try their luck in those Incursions
Or go to DC Universe and then rule it
It's not a thing we'll care about
As long as they all just :getout:
And the last thing that they hear is 'fofofofo'
fofofofo, fofofofo
fofofofo, fofofofo

[Sparky]

Predicting "You didn't win Delve, we gave it up " posts in 8 months time when Molle convinces a new gaggle of star struck mission runners that the old BoB magic is still there.

[Furiously]

I'm sorry.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8AWFf7EAc4 is a better way to read it to me....

[eldaec]

Seems like the ~elite pvp~ corps are moving to Raidendot, basing themselves in the literal opposite corner of EVE to goons, and planning to become some kind of PL alongside Initiative and White Noise or something.

Presumably the motivation being that anime themed alliance names are a good gimmick.

[tgr]

A bit of a damp squib ending to the forever war, to be honest, but I'll take it.

[Phildo]

alongside Initiative and White Noise or something.

Why would they be allied with both Initiative and White Noise?  WN is the reason Init had to abandon the last of their space.

[Simond]

Seems like the ~elite pvp~ corps are moving to Raidendot, basing themselves in the literal opposite corner of EVE to goons, and planning to become some kind of PL alongside Initiative and White Noise or something.

Presumably the motivation being that anime themed alliance names are a good gimmick.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if at least one of the 'core' ex-BoB/IT corps just skips the inevitable "new alliance that crumbles the first time someone looks at it funny" stage and just joins PL directly.

[Comstar]

I hope so, as it will in turn begin the decay and fall of PL if they let any of the IT guys in.

Looks like the post of the disbanding of IT Alliance was a troll, as it clearly hasn't happened, though DICE left today. HUN Reloaded is now the solo defender of Fountain it seems, and is proving much more of a menace than the remains of IT.

An IT Insider's view of the collapse. Written by a member of The Maverick Navy, it seems to be a good explanation from a mid-level grunts point of view, though I disagree with some of his conclusion's. Clusterfuck FC's were very wary of IT's Supercapital Fleet, and in the initial invasion's was very worried we'd get hotdropped. However, that never happened, despite IT having demonstrated their Titan power in the defence of a CSAA in Delve early on. IT had more supercap's online that the Clusterfuck, but never committed them - presumably because they were worried about a non-existent NC counter-hotdrop.

By the time they did commit them...the NC counter-hot-drop was actually there.


In other news, Istavann of the Guiding Hand Social Club (remember them when they were relevant?) took credit for the fall of IT...because he got IAC to declare war on ISS...3 years ago. Truly, we are all nothing but pawns in his hands.

Personally, I hope James 315 is still around, and laughing louder than anyone.

[Simond]

"Begin the decay"? That already happened - when they started recruiting ex-Tri en masse. 

[MahrinSkel]

He's correct that Prohibition I turned into the flashpoint that set the sides for what became the Great War, and certainly GHSC was in that up to their masked eyeballs (I've already told the story of how Tyraxx manipulated all sides of that mess).  But that was a side effect of the real plan, which never came off (stealing the Goons blind, except Remedial beat them to it).

I'm sure that if the Goons had died, that would have been the plan all along, as well.  Sometimes, you've just got to play Rainmaker.  The Mittani has far eclipsed the GHSC as "wheels within wheels" stunts (the Haargoth Affair would be pretty hard to beat), and that's gotta sting.

--Dave

[tgr]

Stumbled onto this a while ago:

[Llyse]

Personally, I hope James 315 is still around, and laughing louder than anyone.

This a thousand times, he might be an ex-goon/goon sympathiser but those posts really paint the Eve Universe quite well.

[Kageru]

That IT blog hit the true point early on. You need to make your membership feel the game is fun and has a goal to work towards, something Eve the starship game is weak on providing itself. Running ops, posting on the forums and hatred of IT let even new goons feel involved and that showed in fleet numbers and morale. Reinforce this with a couple of good battles and it snowballs quickly, both division internally and the battle results.

It will be interesting to see what a post IT world looks like. They were the sleeping giant but it turns out they were actually comatose. All the super-cap heavy organizations join PL and they reach critical mass (or implode, or there's a supercap nerf) and the south turns into feuding fiefdoms and bot-farmers while the NC gets (more) bored.