f13.net

So it looks like eve has the start of a massive war on its hands.  I know I got interested in this game lurking the forums a couple months ago and joined up so I'm curious what you guys thoughts on what appears to be shaping up?

I don't know all the details but I believe BoB is moving in to help LV vs RAGoon and the other alliances attacking Lv and now it appears D2 are going to start making an attack on fountain.   

As far as I'm concerned, it'll be interesting to read about, but I'm not so involved in EVE that I'd care about what the alliances are doing.  My eyes cross when I see (and I don't understand the) acronyms y'all use; the more acronyms the less I understand and/or care.

More importantly for those of us here: How can we profit from this?  8-)

Shrug, this war could be "everyone else" pouncing on BoB now that they don't have any more "developer help", or it could be BoB trying to go out with a bang and a final war (the only way to get rid of the tarnish on their name, which will otherwise be brought up again and again, which CCP wants to avoid), or it could simply be a war just like the others with no relation to the dev stuff.

Profit?  Simple:  resell minerals and war materials.  Put in for Sabre BPO research points with as many agents as you can, heh.

My guess is BoB is moving to help LV just to pre-emp the inevitable RedSwarm/BoB conflict.


They can either fight RedSwarm with LV's help, or let LV die then Fight RedSwarm without it. I'm not sure exactly how or where AAA or D2+Friends fit into this, but I'm guessing whatever they do, it will be hostile towards BoB.

I'm totally out of my depth here with the politics -- but what if BoB was looking to the North, getting read to expand out there -- and RedSwarm starting gearing for war against BoB, figuring to take them while their attention was divided.

BoB gets wind of this, drops the Northern Campaign (unfortunately, the Northern corps aren't dropping it back) and moves to bloody RedSwarm enough to make them backoff.

Forum drama might have RedSwarm thinking BoB only wins because of Dev support (bad assumptiont here), or BoB might be moving on mere rumors because they want to show everyone they're still strong.

Either way, I don't think BoB planned on a RedSwarm campaign when they were making moves towards the North.

Fuck, I have got to get into the PvP game.

I'm thinking BoB never expected RedSwarm to be as effective as it has, or for the LV Coalition (all but dismantled now) to be as ineffective as it has seemingly. Looking at the old archived maps, you see Red space go from huge to nothing, back to huge in a relatively short amount of time.


Maybe BoB has a secret plan, a dozen titans in NOL 23/7? ;) /shrug

From the V-Dead thread : http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=473385 Looks like D2 is indeed going down to BoB space, in a big way.

Ditto.  But my SA account is nowhere near old enough to get me into GS.  I wish that they had some Stalinist punishment-battalion-type-thing where unproven newbies could zerg rush on orders without knowing why.  My 10 million skill points may not be much, but I sure would like to use them for good at least until the sub runs out.

Of coursem f13 could decide to have some fun and join in the dogpile?

Join the privateers!

Think the situation through for a second.

BoB is starting a war with the Russians on the eastern front in the dead of winter.

Did you just invoke Godwin's law?

Odd. F13corp got wardecced today by a 4-member merc corp, and LV just attacked our (0.3) POS.

Server is gonna die hard a lot.

... what?  Did they give a reason?  What's the corp name?

That is weird.

Are we even on for them to shoot us? :P

They can't dread in low sec I thought? Or am I just not remebering the cyno rules correctly again.

We have a .3 POS? We're -- well you, I'm still newb corp and haven't gotten around to applying -- not affiliated with BoB, are we? Fucking politics.

Dreads can indeed go in lowsec. We're not affiliated with any alliance. I received no mail in regards to the wardec.

Corp is Svefn-G-Englar.

Are there formal alliances in EVE, where you can get some sort of cascading wardec like in WWI? Or can only this tiny corp hit F13?

Hmmm, unless this war destroys the alliances on both sides, it could be the most serious threat that EVE has ever faced.  Winning is the death of a PvP game.

BoB has a tough choice. They can stay home and defend the North against D2, and watch as LV gets steamrolled by RedSwarm, or they can help defend the one system that LV cares about. The one with their Capital Yards that are currently producing a Titan. Tonight they chose to sit in a system all night protecting that Titan, while LV's other stations were systematically destroyed 1 by 1 by RedSwarm. LV will lose Soverignty in Insmother, and if BoB isn't careful, they could lose a good bit of Sov themselves to D2. Oh, that Titan is vulnerable for the next 30 days. I think that BoB will not stick around that long to help LV. May you live in interesting times.

And it's true that complete victory ruins a PvP game. Shadowbane taught us that, if nothing else.

Yoru, let me know if that "war" becomes too much of a nuisance, and I'll see about getting some Goons to help out :)

Napoleon tried the same thing before zee germans, you know?  :wink:

Oh, and the construction of LV's titan got aborted as soon as the POS got put into reinforced - the questions now is whether LV/BoB can rescue the 60 billion isk worth of raw materials, and if they can...can they prevent Redswarm from just hitting the array POS again in a fortnight's time?

No, the Titan is still in production. Apparently shutting down when going into reinforced was a bug that was fixed when the Revelations patch hit. An undocumented bug fix that somehow BoB and LV knew about. The Titan is still in production for another 30 days. So unless LV wants to lose that investment, they are tied to that system for a month.

They're a MERC corp. Wacky merc corp at that, they charge per kill. Here's from the ingame info:

lol. And they're four guys. Obviously someone hired them. Or they're looking to make a name for themselves.

I can just hear the inception of such an idea:

"Let us attack a small corp in low sec for no apparent reason.  That will make us stand out from the crowd!"

More likely they are a front for some larger organization that has an arbitrary line, probably 'no POSs' that they won't let other players cross.  I've seen the same thing in other games, where well-established players draw that sort of line, and call it 'fairness', rather than deal with politics that bore them.

Guys, this is Gotterdamering. This war all gods die sort of thing.

If LV's attacked you, time to join the other side. You'll never get an enemy this big to fight against, never one more arrogent, never one more proud.

This is a war to define EvE. Either you're fighting for BoB and the ability to define eve thier way, or not.

Perhaps a little over-dramatic, but I agree with the conclusion.  Why not?

Because having read Joe's article in The Escapist, I think it is unlikely I will continue to give CCP my money.  Which is sad, because Gotterdamring should be a pretty good time in a PvP game.

Eh, Joe's article skims over the whistle-blower actions -- the guy blowing the whistle is seriously far more of an ass (and is "spy network" is generally "hacking other people's forums") than Joe's article indicates. There's a definite slant there that whats-his-face was banned for whistleblowing. Perhaps he was, but in all fairness the guy had about a two-page long list of bannable offenses to his name already.

I still think t20 should be fired, but I still haven't heard a firm answer as to whether he is actually a fireable dev and not part owner.

Oh, I agree: I cancelled my accounts, and the second one runs out next week.  But I'd resub to the end of this war just to help take down the devs' pet corp.

If you're actually interested, you may want to contact TripleDES here on the forums. I believe he is a Goon and might be able to sponsor you in. If not, you might check the Hate channel in game(Corpnews channel from a while back), it's not often got many(or any) people, but the few who came by were mostly Goons. Alternately, and I'm not sure of IAC's involvement, Comstr might be able to smuggle you into IAC for some shooty shooty on the same side of that war.

Any hints on where the best place in empire to sell things that people in the war will buy? I'm relatively good at making money but I'm still very noob at this game and don't know the geography very well.

Check out the 'latest' map in either the official COAD forums or the helpful links sticky here.  It'll show you where the major powers are. 

Right now there's a lot of fighting in LV space, and apparently D2 moved a ton of freighters down to Fountain for an assault on BoB. 

There are formal alliances (called, oddly enough, 'Alliances') that cost lots of money to form and maintain, but also provide things like shared wardecs, etc.

Then there are informal "coalitions" which are alliances of alliances, such as D2/IRON, BoB and its vassals, and Drunkswarm (IAC/Goonfleet/RA/lots of others). These can certainly cascade into a Space War to End All Space Wars. In fact, it's slowly happening now; there's only a few 0.0 factions that remain unaligned (e.g. AAA).


Unlikely to be much of a problem. We're 40 guys to their 4. At worst we'll Swarm them, Goon-style. :P


Yeah, I was a little confused at why someone would pay 100m/week to attack F13. I figure they're just bored mercs looking for some shooty practice on what appears to be a weak noob corp.

Probably a mistake there. If you need another cruiser, let me know. My Vex can irritate them greatly while everyone else kills them.

And everyone just knows that AAA is merely waiting for the opportune moment.  :-D

"the guy blowing the whistle is seriously far more of an ass"

I'm not paying the guy who blew the whistle to run an honest game.  And apparently, I haven't been paying CCP to do that, either.

No -- but if he's going to bring up CCP's banning of the whistle-blower, he should actually discuss CCP's reasons for it -- as it is, he left the implication that whats-his-face was banned for blowing the whistle.

He was banned for being a persistent forum hacker and -- that his forum hacking fun exposed an instance of Dev abuse (and several other instances of Devs merely playing the game) is incidental. Now, one doesn't have to believe CCP's claims here (although from what I can tell from outside sources, this guy really is a dick and he's been banned before and should have been banned for this too) --- but one should at least have brought them up.

He was writing an article, after all.

Still, I'm a bit surprised by the naive attitude here. The Devs play their game. This is a "good thing". Some playing Devs and some GMs will abuse their authority, their tools, and their access. This is a "bad thing". You're not going to have one without the other, no matter how many steps a company takes to do it.

I don't know if I agree with whatever internal steps CCP took towards t20. I don't know what they were. I am surprised he wasn't fired, but as I've said many times -- I've yet to learn whether he could really be fired.

In the end -- it really doesn't fucking matter. BoB got a few BPOs for some period of time, then lost them. Some corps -- including BoB -- may or may not have gotten insider information that aided them at one point or another. That's all bad.

But practically speaking -- it's not the end of the world. CCP will do whatever the hell they think they need to do, and life will go back to normal until the next Dev with less ethics than coding abilities gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, in which case this shit will start all over.

Well, he's been at it for quite some time, so banning him just now would seem to imply just that. Also, all he has done is see information he wasn't supposed to see, so what is there in banning him for CCP, except revenge?

It isn't the cheating.  As you say, gonna happen.

It isn't banning the person who revealed the scam.  Yeah, looks like a louse, and my distrust of him kept me skeptical until a source I have more faith in, Joe and The Escapist, presented the story, thus putting their own names on the line.  While I'm not a fanboi for either, I accept that they have integrity at stake, and that makes them believable, where Joe Hobby Hacker is not.

It isn't failing to fire the offender, although I do think it is the only proper action.  It is their company, they can decide how to run it.

But, as we have seen so often, the coverup is worse than the crime.  That is the offense I am truely outraged about.  That wasn't an accident, or a rouge employee.  That was a choice by a company to deceive its customers.  And that is not acceptable to me.  I don't do business with people who cannot be trusted.

For me, it is the end of EVE's world, and probably the last time I will deal with CCP.

So what remains to be seen is how many people quit and how many stick around because of this war providing entertainment (I don't mean from F13, but the playerbase in general).

For those keeping count, that moment is now.  They've just declared on MC.  Thoughtfully MC had moved all their cap ships to the other side of the galaxy to bail out FATAL (an LV splinter alliance).

It's fucking WWI in EVE right now. I need to scrape together some more war supplies to haul to The Forge. I suspect a lot of disposable gear is going to be purchased.

This war is really going to move the money around -- between war dec costs, ship and module losses -- this is going to be felt.

After a zerg battle, a node crash or three and nigh-infinite lag, LV's Titan-under-construction went bang last night.
Also, BoB is rumoured to be retreating from LV space to defend their own regions.

Got a front row ticket for this battle, we are the one of the alliances sieging FATAL (who have been bailed out by an LV titan once, a large Outbreak T2 BS gang once, and a huge MC cap fleet once). You think there may be some plans for the new regions involving bob/LV and co? ;) They really want FATAL to hold that ground.

That's a lot of ships (http://216.77.188.54/coDataImages/p/Groups/277/277954/folders/243838/2103674300ongate.JPG)

Fixed your link :P

It worked when I previewed it.  :cry:

Word is D2 just lost their Titan.

Yup...and in almost exactly the same way as ASCN lost theirs.
Interesting.

Is that the ONLY way to kill a titan?  I don't have the experience, but it seems that the problem is keeping a titan from jumping away long enough to allow its destruction.  Other than removing its pilot via lag, what other ways are there to do that?  Can an alliance completely hunt out or suppress all the possible cyno alts that the titan pilot has access to?

If it's the only way to destroy one, I'm not surprised that they spent time to devise a strategy and train themselves to implement it effectively, repeatedly.  That it's illegal, that doesn't surprise me either.

D2 was, I believe, using their Titan solo which was stupid as shit. You can lay a trap for it -- lure it in with a blob of suicide ships, let the Titan fire it's Doomsday weapon, then have the rest of the gang (Dreads, EW ships, etc) warp to one of the pods -- drop a bubble and pound it. Be tricky, though. Would only work if the Titan was flying solo.

Right now there seems to be a bug with aggression timers and wrecks -- what seems to be happening is the Titan pilot blows up some ships, warps out, sees the timer countdown finish and logs. However, someone is down there shooting wrecks -- which keeps the Titan scannable. When the guy logs, they scan the Titan, jump to it, and destroy it.

Gee, I wonder how someone would figure out a bug like that.

If you PvP enough, I suspect it's not hard to spot. More than BoB knew about it, that's for sure -- when ACSN lost theirs, it was quickly speculated that the BoB had exploited that particular bug.

Assuming it is a bug (I can't think of a gameplay reason aggression timers would work like that, but I might understand the bug wrong).

Most people that read the forums are aware of the shooting wrecks bug.  No clue if that's what actually happened though.

Titan is indeed down - http://www.killboard.net/details/130721/. In case the killboard is down: IT HAS T2 FITTING!!?!?

I read through the scrapheap-challenge thread, here's a summary:

1) Titan does not have a kill in the last three days. It is most likely not a wreck exploit.
2) If you have an asset forgotten in empire (shuttle, anchored secure can, etc) that would work as the wreck exploit, so that's one way BoB might have done it.
3) Titan has sat in a POS all by himslef for the past couple of hours. That was why he was alone. No idea why he decided to log off.
4) A quote from the thread:

I have immense respect for Farjung. So for now I'm leaning towards the "OMG D2 ARE STUPID BOB HAD A SPY THAT DID SOMETHING TO AGRO THE TITAN!" or something. We'll know soon enough I guess.

ps: if the forum kills my post again I'll need the location of Schild's home.

edit: yeey it went through. Third time was a charm. Ok GalCiv time, I'll let stuff develop and F5 forums later :)

To counter my own comment, I can verify that the aggro timer is not to be trusted.

So EVE expects people with titans to be logged in 24/7.  That's the only way make sure you you aren't raped by that timer.

Titans really are pretty much only for the Hardcore, so...

I expect you could also put it inside a POS bubble, eject and go do something else, but that's just asking for the POS to get sieged.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=477394

It's legit. It was a spy. Ghey, but legit.

Not gay -- that's how the damn game is supposed to be played. I'm not sure I would have considered that system safe to begin with.

I only added the ghey part as a second thought. I'm starting to feel like a BoB fanboi on these forums, being the only guy that defends them... :)

I'll happily defend that. Spying and backstabbing and treachery is why I joined the game. Mostly so I could watch it. :)

Seems like cheap tactics to me.

If they were not online to see the agro message, they should get re-imbursed.

Spies and all that are fine, but these seems about as close as you can get to exploiting in-game vs. out of game mechanics without crossing CCP's line.   :-P 

2007.02.16 17:58:46 Combat Your Micro Graviton Smartbomb I hits WOTANKN [CE]<D2>(Erebus), doing 15.0 damage.

Titan was killed @ Date :     Fri, 16 Feb 2007 18:07:00

=

9 Minutes. Within aggro range.

Anyway, he was online Furiously. If he logged before the bomb hit him, he wouldn't be on aggro timer and disappear in 2 minutes. That's how I know it at least and that's what the scrapheap guys are saying.


edit: Titan was outside the shields - http://shadowforce.wiredhub.net/bob/2007.02.16.17.58.48.jpg

Sorry its lame. It feels too much like the stupidity of Shadowbane and having to guard your city all the time.  And a kill from exploiting a timer, I thought the point of a time stop people from exploiting.

Let people know when it is safe to log out, and let them log out.  It's game not social experiment on how much screw over your players.

That's one of the reasons I love EVE. The people that _KNOW_ how the game works are actually good at it. And can cause damage to the people that don't.

For reference: The micro smartbombs are considered as one of the most useless modules in the game. That one would think outside the box, the way digi did to come up with that plan is nothing short of amazing. I love the guy.

There are at least 5 things that the Erebus pilot could have done to prevent the current events. That I can think of. Noone made him become a Titan pilot. He most likely volunteered for it. Stuff like this comes with the terriotory - you should be on your toes all the time. If you feel that's too much for you - fly a fucking battleship. Or a Dreadnought.

It was NOT exploiting a timer. Get that through your head.

Here's what happens:

1) Erebus pilot says to corp "Gonna log off now" and warps to safe spot.
2) Covert Ops ship follows him.
3) Covert Ops ship targets him with a passive targeter -- they're called passive because the target doesn't get the sound-effects or notitifcation he's been targeted that active targeters do.
4) As he's getting ready to log off, Covert Ops ship drops a smartbomb -- which doesn't even register on the Titan's shields (virtually no damage).
5) Titan pilot does not bother to look to see if he's in combat, or his timer has restarted because no one has actively targeted him and there's no one around.
6) Titan Pilot logs out.
7) BoB warps in, kills Titan.

If the Erebus pilot had logged off with his tank running, he might not have lost his Titan. (His corp noted that his ship was still in space after 60 seconds, and he tried to log back in -- found himself down to structure at that point and dead as all shit. With a tank going, he'd probably ahve still been in armor and might have been able to flee -- or at least hold out until reinforcements arrived). If the Erebus pilot had bothered to look at the aggression timer, he'd have seen it happily ticking. He just assumed he was safe and logged out.

Why did he assume he was safe? He'd spent 3 hours inside a POS shield -- no one was seigeing the place. He only notified his corp he was logging out. He didn't think about spies, he didn't think about passive targeters and micro-damage -- and it cost him a Titan.

Lame. That isn't playing the game; that's meta gaming on par with stealing monopoly money when the other player goes to the bathroom. I'm fine up to the point where they kill the guy after he's already logged off.

Morat, It's even more lame. If I get everything correctly the exact timeline was this:

1) Erebus pilot says to corp "Gonna log off now" and exits POS shields (why? No idea. Pic I posted earlier proves it).
2) Spy in Covert Ops ship decloaks and MWDs right for him at 2k/s. (again judging by the pic I posted. He's with engaged MWD and at full speed)
3) He doesn't even target him - while the Erebus is alligning to warp to safe the spy hits him with a Micro Smartbomb (you _do not need_ to target someone to hit him with a smart bomb. You just have to be in range) -- which doesn't even register on the Titan's shields (virtually no damage).
4) Titan Pilot logs out.
5) BoB warps in, kills Titan.

Everything else you said about running tanks, etc is very much valid.

Note to self:

When flying a $10,000 spaceship, have someone follow me to the safe spot and tell me over teamspeak that I have logged out successfully.

Or have an alt on another account at the safespot so you can check yourself. An alt SPECIFICALLY for verifying logouts. Name him 'lawn jockey' or something clever.

If he logged out inside the POS's shields, he'd have logged back in to find that POS under seige. Which makes it even lamer -- any corp with the scratch to have even a decent capital ship fleet, much less a Titan, knows it's got spies. Which is why he won't log out inside a POS, lest the spy inform his enemies where the Titan is so they can seige the place and blow it up.

So they warp off to the middle of nowhere and log there. But he doesn't assume the corp is inflitrated when he goes to log, so he doesn't even look up in the upper right hand corner for the bright aggression timer clock countdown.

Krakrok: Given the power of Titans, that is one of their drawbacks. They cannot dock for a reason. This was a very clever hit, in EVE terms. There were a lot of things he could have done to prevent this -- including just glancing at his screen. He screwed up, BoB was very clever and killed a Titan -- they had to burn an agent to do it, but they did it.

If he'd even activeated his tank before he logged, he would have been able to get back to the Titan and flee. I can't imagine why he didn't -- it costs nothing in that situation.

Losing a titan has to hurt, but losing a titan like that must really burn.   However you can't help but admire the logic of someone who engineered a scheme like that - it all relies on legitimate game mechanics and co-ordinated tactics so there's no "grey area" involved.

If they'd gone with the "cheap tactic" route of using a wreck to cause the aggression it would have been an exploit and the loss eventually replaced by CCP.    Instead they took the existing tactic of using a covert ops probe ships as they leave the safety of a POS, and came up with something relatively clever.

It's about the only way to kill Titans, really -- what was really stupid was him flying off unescorted like that. The system was full of allies. Solo Titans are vulnerable, especially if they've already fired their big gun.

If you can coax them to shoot, I can think of a few things you can do that might kill them -- assuming you can keep reinforcements away. It looked like the BoB fleet was actually prepared for him to still be there -- or come back quickly. I suspect their plan was simple: Warp in, hit the Titan with every Nos they can slap on, and hope by the time he realizes he's under attack that he won't have enough juice to fire his big gun or run his tank long enough for help to arrive.

Even if he'd realized what was happening and not logged, he might still have died -- depends on how quick they could have slapped on the Nos' and how much cap it took to warp.

Actually the russians almost got Molle's Avatar the other day. They always have 20+ capitals waiting one cyno away from hostilities, they managed to bump him and warp in a lot of dreads and their mom and started hitting him and nosed him enough so he couldn't cyno out. Actually managed to scratch his armor, but BoB sacrifised two carriers that jumped in and Capital Cap Trasnfer Array'ed him to 80% cap and he jumped out.

So it is possible to kill a titan. Really hard though.

Man I'm really whoring this thread. Interesting stuff like this never happens while I'm at work :(

Someone else lost a mothership today -- don't recall who, but the pilot said it was quite the fair kill.

That timer was flakey when they first put it in, often just showing the wrong amount of time left if at all. I wouldn't be surprised if it was still half broken to this day. I'm half certain its even in the EVE knowledgebase, about how the timer can be wrong due to XYZ circumstances etc.

http://www.mercenarycoalition.com/killboard/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=27227

http://img260.imageshack.us/my.php?image=helendownxg4.jpg

I'm guessing that's the one? Crazy killmail  :-D

(Woah, they had 78 Capitals hitting that mom - http://bbs.eve-china.com/attachments/month_0702/78_capitals_wohgZEMW5gFP.jpg). Ok I'm really stopping the whorage now. Off to bed with me, I'll read up tommorow :)

Killing someone who isn't online isn't clever. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

Tagging him as he logs out in order to keep his ship and his character in game is clever. It was a very well executed plan.

While entirely true, it doesn't make it less lame. Then again EVE is full of playing to win at any cost, so meh. That's just how the game rolls. Be it this, or logoffski, or spying and whatever new metagame is being played.


Still would've preferred to see the ship go down guns a blazing or something similar.

It wouldn't have happened; the Titan pilot would have tried to jump out or somehow avoid the fight, rather than make a "guns blazing" last stand as you imagine.

The situation is similar to the whole issue with instajump bookmarks, back before we had warp bubbles and whatnot.  Poor game design results in black-and-white situations, either you have 100% invulnerability and the ability to escape, or you have 0% chance.  Had the Titans been vulnerable to electronic warfare, BoB wouldn't have had to resort to this sort of stuff to kill one.  Of course, BoB's titans would have been equally vulnerable, but that's besides the point.  Probably the end result would have been that no one would have build any Titans, due to them being too big of a loss risk.

Meh.

If a PvP tactic revolves around creating a PvN situation, that tactic indicates your PvP design is broken.  The point, after all, is to fight players, and fighting empty assets is carebear beyond PvE.

PvP tactics versus supercapital ships are to catch them away from their support fleet. It's a flaw in Titan design that requires this sort of attack, although as I said before -- even had he not logged off, there was a fair chance BoB might have taken him down. Would have lost a lot of ships in the process, but they were loaded to drain his cap, keep him in place, and kick his ass.

I suspect they weren't counting on the guy actually being fooled. Hoping, yes. But with the ships they brought, and the loadout they had -- if the guy wasn't fooled, they had a suprisingly good shot at nailing his ass to the floor and killing him before help could arrive. When a Titan pilot goes to log off is pretty much the only time a Titan is generally away from his fleet.

I'm not disagreeing with what you said, I'm saying that design that promotes waiting for someone to log off, or attempt to do so, is bad PvP design.

Sorry, but I still don't see how Logoffski is a valid tactic - it's totally an abuse of the login mechanics.

AFIAK there was no aggression timer to *See*, so unless he noticed a 1 point hit to his 10000 point shield, you'd never know. If he'd pressed escape, he'd never even see that.

Prediction: CCP adds in a  visable aggression timer *AND* a warning if you log out before hand.

The plan was well thought out, well timed and well exacuted. It is a lame plan. Killing enemy Titans when they log off is a lame idea. it works, but is lame.

Prediction: Someone does a DDOS attack to offline a Titan at some point. The plan will be well thought out, well timed and well exacuted. This does not make any better either.

IAC lost a mothership, because a)lag: it was warped and IN a POS on the motherships pilots view, while still getting shot by the LV gang and b)I suspect the unsuported mothership pilot was being an ass and trying to take down a fleet big enough to kill it anyway.


So, if you want to take down enemy super capatil ships in EvE, cause enough lag to allow you to do it, or B) do it when the Titan pilot is already offline. Once again, CCP shows they havn't thought things through to thier logical conclusion.

Evil Thug from Against All Authorities has an Erebus. MC are back home and fighting -A-

You mean like the big red or yellow text in the upper right corner of your screen that says "Aggression Countdown"?

How do you know that was present?  It is quite conceivable that there might be a bug in the warning display under unusual conditions.

Yellow warning is only from npc's and red is only global criminal countdown which shows up only, I think, if you agress somebody in low sec (ie not 0.0) and definitely not if you're the one being agressed anywhere.   Neither of which would be relevant to this guy.

According to the guy who "tagged" the titan, it was done "just in case" -- he didn't actually know for sure the pilot would log off soon after, at that point. Was a presumption he acted upon as the titan just finished bridging D2 capital fleet to their base POS. Which is by the way why it was outside the POS shields.

Had it not loged off, they were quite prepared to try and drop their capital fleet on top of it and try to kill it in front of D2's assorted 20+ dreads and carriers. But it did log off, so it ended the way it did.

Chowdown (LV Titan pilot) needs to aim better.  :-D

For those playing the Home Game, F13 is no longer wardecced. The "mercs" must've gotten bored or something as they didn't pay the war fee.

Victoly!  :-D

It most certainly is, but by CCP's own admissions, they can't detect/enforce it. So it's "legit" if you are playing to win at any cost. Same with what happend to D2's titan. The aggression timer intention was to prevent people from ditching in the middle of combat, so I can't just CTD when I hit structure to save my ship. I can almost guarantee Plinking someone for practically non detectable dmg to keep them in game when they were logging for the day wasn't part of the original design of the aggression timer, but it's another one of those situations where enforcing or selecting what is legit and what isn't is very difficult.


In the end, it is still, extremely lame.

Logoffski is valid in a sense that there is no other alternative.
Face it combat in EVE is crap and is going to be even crappier (read newest blog from that "many people like it, but it's not the way I feel EVE should be" Tuxford retard) binary win-die.
In ol' good times,you at least had the hope, the chance f getting to the gate/warp out before that frigate got to you. Now, it's simple bubble->dead, no_bubble->alive. Same goes with getting webbed for most cases and it is a known fact that 90% fights are won before they even started.
The moment you engage, or get webbed, or land in a bubble, there is nothing you can do. High speed ceptors duels, were only exception, but as
Mr. Tux says "EVE is not about twitch movement".
If CCP removed logoffski (and it could be easily done), gate camps would become unstoppable, high-speed killmail factories.

In this light, D2 titan kill is an excellent game mechanic - since victim had tons of options he could do (from having someone to cover his as, to simply leaving his tank working). Compare with recent LV Titan-in-production loss: Goons delibrately killed the node and instantly filled it with their own ships - LV simply coud not log back and all they could do was looking at login screen while their titan died.

*snort*. That's one view of it. One could also say that LV decided to crash the node by planting a thousand T1 drones there -- in a node they knew was about have a few hundred ships drop into. You can't tell me T1 drones were part of the LV defenses -- not when they were already outnumbered 2 to 1.

Unfortunately for LV, their relog instructions were a bit stupid -- and the Goons got back on first. Of course, the Goons knew it was coming -- they'd send in a way of ships to clear out fighters and noticed what was going on.

Even had CCP had their shit together and had the node on Jita-size hardware before the battle, none of the CCP structure can handle 1200 ships PLUS every drone LV could place there. 1200 ships, maybe.

It doesn't matter anyways -- Goons had overwhelming force in any case. They had twice the numbers, and a hell of a lot more BS's and capital ships. LV didn't have a chance in hell other than to crash the node -- which failed. Goons didn't need to crash it.

The game just can't cope with the scale of combat being tossed around these days.


The Goons node crashing power was them just showing up. Going to fault them for high participation?

LV deploying drones isn't much worse either in that regard. Drones screaming around the battlefield should be a part of fleet combat, can't fault them for wanting to use them.



EVE was designed around fleet battles of 20-30 odd ships, but the norm seems to be 200+ ships these days.

And why is that the norm?  Is it simply the avg. size of the corps, or is it some game mechanic?

Game mechanics nowadays to considerable degree. The territory conquest revolves around sieging and defending player structures which take large number of capital ships to grind through amount of HP they have in reasonable time. 10-20 capital ships mean heavy money investment, so they are protected with support force that can easily reach hundred pilots. In order to stand good chance to engage and defeat such force, the enemy needs to bring similar numbers (and frequently more for the upper hand). At this point number of pilots in system hits 300-400 or more, and it's simply lag vs everyone else.

What a godawful pain to arrange.

Yes, which is why I laughed when people groused about having to deal with 40 people in WoW. 

Correct - the countdown only appears when in empire space and not 0.0

Also the actual timer is more than 15mins, I haven't timed it yet but it's nearer 20/25mins before your ship finally leaves the game (so now I believe Cyvok did wait out the full 15mins and not 13ish mins as BOB claimed)

If you want you can test this by you and a corp mate shoot each other at the same time in empire and one of you log out - the one who stays in bring up the directional scanner and set it to full distance (just fill the box with 9's) and set to 360 degrees. You will see your corp mates ship (ask what his ship is called beforehand!) on the scanner well after the 15min timer ends.

All you'd need then is some probes.....

Some of those ship names are genius.

The Anna Nicole Smith being destroyed was a nice touch....

Believe me, the aggro timer is not to be trusted.  A vet like Cyvok would know that.

My ships mostly have names from David Bowie songs.

LV is going down hard; by the weekend the coalition will have several of their stations, there's serious dissension in the ranks and they've been spotted self-destructing ships for insurance money.  Shouldn't be long before GS/RA/TCF/IAC/Snigg/others are going at the main target and things start to get really interesting.

Apparently, at least one dreadnaught   :-o

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=479610&page=1#27

What's the insurance on a dread like?

Poor bastards. I'd feel sorry for them if...

Wait, no I wouldn't. I took my pirate alt down to their space, solo, in a friggin' Tristan on Sunday and it took an hour of directors in interceptors running away from me before I managed to get podded. By a random dude in a Vexor. Who was mining when I warped in.


Toot toot!  :-)

He lost it because he was retarded not because he wanted insurance.  From what I've heard being in CA the dude had been undocking shooting people then when they started to put a dent in his tank he would just dock up again.  He had been doing this all day supposedly after LV lost the station he tried to do it again realized he was screwed and instead of letting them get the kill mail self destructed. Supposedly there's other LV capitals stuck in the station as well. Amusingly the station is now named I Didn't Want that Dread Anyways in honor of him or at least it was when last I saw it.

As to how well LV is doing it seems to be going very poorly I've been in 20ish roving gangs and they're refusing to undock even with greater numbers in the system and carriers around etc.  The quality of ships we're seeing them fly has deteriorated significantly as well mostly t1 stuff with mediocre named items like malkulth launchers etc. Several contracts up as well in LV stations trying to clear out a bunch of t2 items from what I saw.

I thought self-destructing annulled any insurance?

Anyway, LV are dead men walking (as was bleedin' obvious since the start, their EVE-O board warriors notwithstanding). BoB have no right to be upset that their buffer is evaporating, though - they pretty much abandoned LV to RedSwarm as soon as D2 + the rest of the North made their move.

Speaking of the EVE-O forums, has anyone else noticed that the worse the things are going for BoB, the more forum trolls & gimmick posters appear in CAOD doing their best to get threads locked?

Absolutely retarded, I knew LV were big K:L ratio whores but that takes the biscuit.  I'd have been tanking the best I could and desperately trying to find someone in the alliance to pop a cyno.


Never has AFAIK.  Always got default payouts when I was pod jumping.

Well, I learnt something today. :)

Oh, and LV just lost sovereignty in two of their systems - namely their home system and the one where they used to have their capital shipyards. They're complaining about hax, cheating GMs and node crashes as per usual.

The Dev-Swarm shit is especially funny to me as we seemed to never get a fucking break from CCP.  For example when we barely had any high skillpoint players and our only defence against T2 snipers chipping away fleets was to drop cans on their warp ins, we had a GM (then a senior GM when we escalated it) tell us that wasn't allowed an the maximum we could deploy was like 4.  That was after dropping something like 10-15 cans on an XZH gate, but LV can get away with 23 bubbles, 400 ships and god only knows how many drones. 

Deleted. There's only so many ways to cal people stupid cunts before it just sounds bitter.

Had to repost this for your viewing plesure:


LV leadership reset those POSes on their own because they're stupid then cry all day about goonhaxx news at 10.  Fun that they wanted their stuff magically teleported away rather than the stations back too.  :-)

Ha, awesome.  Fuck LV, they always were way too self righteous.

There' a couple of LV footsoldiers on another messageboard I post to, and they're flaming me for being mean about LV.

"Being mean" roughly translates as calling them out on their 'ZOMG GMs cheat lolz devswarm' line, and pointing out that their directors are lying to them by telling the rank-and-file to hold the line, it's not over yet, we have not yet begun to fight and so on while the directors are busily stuffing the cargo holds of anything that can fly with BPOs etc while dumping anything too bulky to carry onto the market at firesale prices.

It's going to be an awesome dramabomb once the general membership of LV figures out what's really going on.

Edit: Yeah, if anyone's in good stead with Redswarm and has liquid assets, I'd suggest that you go down to (ex-)LV space and start buying.

Someone in GS got a Megathron with T2 fittings for 150 million down there. I wish I was subbed and liquid right now, hehe.

ZOMG FIRESALE, too bad I'm not blue.

Gotta tell Molle, I see an oppurtunity here:D

Here is some news, D2 has a new Titan http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=481107 .  :-D

You know, reading about what it took to take down a Titan -- what's it take to take down another capital ship?

If I had a dread, and was awake and at the keyboard, how much effort is it to take me down?

What about a mothership?

Carrier?

Am I forgetting any? I still fly cruisers for a living (not even T2, curses!) but I'm a bit curious as to what it'd take if I was scooting around in one of the bigger ships to kick my ass.

What happens when someone wants to log off, can you dock those things, or do they wink out of existence, or are they just floating there waiting to be destroyed while you sleep?

They wink out 60 seconds after you log off -- or 60 seconds after your aggression timer ends, whichever happens last.

Aggression timers can be reset by doing damage to them (or them doing damage to someone else) during a timer. However, if you have no timer and are logged off, your aggression timer can't be spotted.

So if you fly a Titan, and you want to log off, you spend 20 minutes or so inside a POS shield to make sure your timers are off, then warp to a safespot and log off.

However, just to be careful you:

1) Start your tank before you log off.
2) Let your corp know to check you on the buddy list to make sure you actually log.
3) Check your damage logs to make sure some spy didn't hit you with a tiny smartbomb as you warped.

Generally, if one if flying a big ship, one should be a bit paranoid and do it all.

Quick question: Can you warp from inside a POS's shields? Because D2's dead Titan was pinged outside the POS shields (you can't get hit inside them).

They wink out of existence when you logoff normally. If your under the aggression timer from combat, you'll still be in space for 15-20 minutes or so after you log. This is how D2's first titan was killed, the pilot went to log for the day and got pegged by a covert ship with an incredibly tiny amount of damage and never noticed the ship or the damage. Log off, ship stays in space, BoB's capital fleet downs the titan.

As to capital difficulty, I don't have any concrete numbers other then you would need many capitals of your own and/or a large BShip/Support fleet. Carriers are probably the easiest to kill, Dreads are more difficult to down in terms of firepower needed to be brought to bear, but if they get caught in siege mode they are pretty much sitting ducks is my understanding.


MotherShips and Titans would be immensely difficult to kill in actual combat. You would need purpose built fleets full of every ship type to bring them down in a straight up fight. Both MotherShips and Titans are EW immune, so the only way to keep them from warping off is bubbles and bumping... and bumping is questionable (Nano dread ftw?). You would also need enough energy vamps/neuts to suck away the ships cap to prevent jumping away and/or tanking.

I think there has only been 1 mothership to actually die in combat to date, and no titans. Other Titan kills were results of aggression timer "exploiting" for lack of a better term.

Here is a mothership going down.  The huge things that appear after the swirling white stuff is a fleet of dreadnoughts being cynoed in.

http://eve-files.com/dl/88720 (http://eve-files.com/dl/88720)

The ship going down was almost certainly due to a bug: the pilot shot down the first inty to go for him, then says he has screenshots showing him as warped to a POS, but somehow still taking damage.  This is, with the current state of the game, very believable.  It would also explain why, after seeing that he was spotted, and taking out the threat, he would apparently sit there and allow himself to be destroyed without replying or manuevring.  Hopefully he'll get the ship back.  Not that LV will care by then, as they'll be bounced back to Empire or BoB space long before that happens.

In more good news for the coalition, D2 have another Titan.  I'm intrigued as to whther this is a fresh build or a reimbursment for the one BoB blew up with the aggression timer sploit.  Discussion is here (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=481106).  To see it doomsdaying, here is ze link (http://asw.rootofevil.org/emily.wmv).  Assuming you have time for a 90+MB wmv, of course.  I rather think that they should be using the titan to shift fleets around and provide mobile cloning support, while keeping it well out of harm's wau, but I suppose they needed to show they are back, since D2 are having the toughest fight holding BoD's attention by playing Russia to BoD's Germany while the rest of the Coalition hammers LV (or "Italy", in this analogy).

Edi: corrected file descriptions

They built it, which isn't really surprising. D2 and friends have nearly as much space as BoB, and their space isn't a warzone, and hasn't been for a long time now. Wouldn't be surprised if they crank Titans out every month or so. Now, do they have people to actually fly them? That I don't know.

Desperation takes hold. (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=481166&page=1)  :roflcopter:

Edit: Further details - Seems like LV were discussing terms of their surrender (http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/viewtopic.php?t=3560&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=90) to the Goons, and this was their final answer.

I couldn't believe the last-throw mentality it represents.  Basicallly, it lists just about everything that they've fucked up in the war so far and blames each and every event on devs.

That said, as someone on the SA The Mittani is a Spanner thread pointed out (the infamous happydayz?), it is a function of how badly CCP handled the BoD scandal that every single gameplay difficulty is, for quite some time, going to result in the losing corp's leaders rallying the troops by claiming the GMs are batting for the other side.

Bizarre, LV folded in like 3 weeks.

Keep the updates coming.

Eve makes the best drama.  I barely know what all the abbreviations mean, but even I love reading this shit.

Well, this just got posted across from the GF forums to the public SA ones, so I suppose it's declassified now :)

The Mittani is head of Goonfleet's intelligence agency.  I think that he's speaking to corp leaders in LV, though not LV leaders themselves (Lallante/Chowdown etc).

-------

[18:46:12] Vile rat > ale this is the mittani
[18:46:18] Mrs Trustworthy > hay mittani >_>
[18:46:18] The Mittani > Greetings. I am the Mittani, and you're the poor guy who has to clean up Chowdown and Lallante's mess, am I correct?
[18:46:20] Vile rat > he can make firm decisions for Gs
[18:46:57] Ale Tricio > greetings
[18:47:05] The Mittani > How may I be of service today?
[18:47:35] Ale Tricio > well lv's pretty much dead atm
[18:47:40] Ale Tricio > chow's away lalante writing exams
[18:47:56] Ale Tricio > so i'm trying to save 80% of my guys leaving the game
[18:48:08] The Mittani > And BoB has extended an offer to LV to regroup in AZN and counterattack at C3
[18:48:16] Ale Tricio > is there any chance of letting our guys retrieve their assets
[18:48:25] Ale Tricio > sure they have
[18:48:27] The Mittani > judging by the corp and alliance mails of yours I've been reading, and the teamspeak meetings
[18:48:59] Ale Tricio > tbh many are not as keen on becoming meat shields
[18:49:20] The Mittani > You see, for us, this isn't personal with LV. Some of our younger guys don't like LV, but the reason I broke the pos nap was because of Chowdown sucking off DBP in that chatlog
[18:49:37] The Mittani > at that moment it became apparent that he was taking LV towards being BOB pets, so we invaded
[18:49:44] The Mittani > So when we discuss getting your assets out
[18:50:10] The Mittani > keep in mind that my only interest in this is making sure what remains of LV stays the fuck out of this war and no longer helps BoB in any way
[18:50:15] The Mittani > Because it is personal with them.
[18:51:40] Ale Tricio > ok though could be difficlut to arrange
[18:51:40] Vile rat > not better.
[18:52:18] Ale Tricio > essentially we have nowhere lef tto live and nobody left willing to fight
[18:52:48] The Mittani > If you guys fuck off to empire, we won't follow you. Or move to the new regions or break up as an alliance, we won't chase you
[18:53:07] The Mittani > but if you become BoB pets we're going to obliterate BoB and then hound everyone who helped them into quitting the game
[18:53:29] The Mittani > Because I'm vindictive as hell and so is Remedial and I have 3000 people who are bloodthirsty and hate all of you.
[18:53:34] The Mittani > SO
[18:53:59] The Mittani > I want this go work out like this: somehow we reach an arrangement where you can demonstrate to me that LV will affirmatively not help out BoB in this war
[18:54:03] The Mittani > that you are OUT of the war
[18:54:04] The Mittani > period
[18:54:06] The Mittani > full stop
[18:54:23] The Mittani > Withdraw what you can to empire, make an announcement on eve-o that you are no longer aiding BoB in any way
[18:54:45] The Mittani > This sound reasonable so far?
[18:55:22] Ale Tricio > well it kind of robs us of a nice clean fight later
[18:55:32] Ale Tricio > but i can put it to the ceo's and see what they offer
[18:55:50] Vile rat > You speak as an LV rep or a m. corp rep
[18:55:52] The Mittani > There is no clean fight happening here. We are out to murder BoB and every one of the cheating scumsuckers on their side
[18:56:01] The Mittani > Purely in game, of course.
[18:56:22] The Mittani > But this is a combined "purge the unclean" effort between us, D2, and the rest of EVE. Being on BoB's side here is NOT where you want to be
[18:56:46] The Mittani > Unless you want me to bring out the whole "Lallante hired a hacker to get at our forums" dirt and really drag LV's remaining reputation through the mud
[18:57:01] The Mittani > Ideally you would want to withdraw with dignity, and not be slaves or vassals.
[18:57:33] The Mittani > Since we're the victors and we write the history, we can really write you into an awful, awful place if this goes poorly for you.
[18:57:33] Ale Tricio > ok well thats all i can offer the ceo's
[18:57:56] The Mittani > Well, here's the sweetener.
[18:57:58] Ale Tricio > it would take a day or get them all sorted atm
[18:58:19] The Mittani > If you DO withdraw from BoB, and announce it... doesn't have to be all of LV, could just be a corp by corp thing
[18:58:35] The Mittani > we can easily arrange for you to recover your assets once your intentions have been proven to be legitimate.
[19:00:05] Ale Tricio > thats going to be a tough decision to convince them of
[19:00:09] Ale Tricio > as with you
[19:00:15] Ale Tricio > there are many bitter people in lv
[19:00:23] Ale Tricio > all i can do is offer it to them atm
[19:00:42] The Mittani > Sure thing. And remember if you want it just for your corp, just leave LV and annoucne your withdrawal and we'll cut a deal
[19:00:59] The Mittani > It'd suck to see LV, a former power bloc, reduced to 'slave' status
[19:01:10] The Mittani > better to just die against RA than live in chains
[19:02:10] Ale Tricio > ok well I'll put the offer on the table
[19:02:20] Ale Tricio > and see what the ceo's have to say

-------

Harsh terms.  Almost, but not quite, unconditional surrender.  There are more chatlogs there that he's posted, where you can see the suave bastard saying "hey, and they expected you to do their dirty work on Valentine;s night then blamed you when it all went wrong" etc...  He's a one man (or is he?) good cop/bad cop act.

Edit: "The Mittani > judging by the corp and alliance mails of yours I've been reading, and the teamspeak meetings"  Way to rub in your total penetration of the enemy's collapsing C3 structure. :)

I assume the POS is intact?

Wait... what? http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=481258

LV suing Goonswarm? This has to be too stupid to be true... right?

If by "intact" you mean "blown to 1000 pieces and LV won't pay us back", then yes. LV is a cleared target for F13, last I checked.

But what do I know, I'm Goonfleet now. :D

F13's POS was asploded by LV for absolutely no reason at all - thus the low opinions of LV that we have here.  I think it was entirely unrelated to the mercenary corp that wardecced them.

And lawsuits for infiltrating a corp/teamspeak?   Are LV's members completely insane?  How can a major power crumble so damn fast and with such whining?

On a semi-related note, I actually respect Bob (gasp) for their near-complete LACK of forum presence during this war.

That's the thing of it, most major alliances just aren't. They think they are, they look like they are, they act like they are, but when push comes to shove, they are pretenders. The only alliances that seem to actually be major powers are BoB, RA and maybe D2,  have to see more from them in actual war now. Most people in 0.0 have their space simply because no one has taken it away from them. Size, reputation and posturing are what most 0.0 entities get by with.

Most are woefully inept and it is made apparent as soon as they come under fire from one of the actual powers in space.


-edit-

As to BoB not forum whoring, my guess is that is a purely strategic move at this point. With all the bad press BoB has gotten recently, combined with the already significant amount of BoB hate from before, there really isn't anything BoB could possibly say that wouldn't just add fuel to the fire at this point.

I demand more Eve drama.  That stuff with that Mittani giving a "lamentations of your women" speech was good shit.

RA got scammed out of a mothership and had a pod with a full set of slave implants destroyed by a SMASH scammer. RA has now attacked SMASH, or up until this point, were allies.

How the fuck do you scam someone out of a mothership?

Maybe SMASH offered to rig it and then killed the guy and stole the ship or he was inside one of their POSes.

---

I like to think I podded the SMASH alliance leader's girlfriend. Right after that he showed up with a blob in local and started talking trash. Probably just a coincidence though.

2007.02.19 04:27

Victim: happygir
Alliance: SMASH Alliance
Corp: Keepers of the Holy Bagel
Destroyed: Capsule
System: Jita
Security: 0.9

Involved parties:

Name: Stone Burner (laid the final blow)
Security: 1.2
Alliance: Privateer Alliance
Corp: Privateers
Ship: Thorax
Weapon: Heavy Neutron Blaster I

Heh.

From what I understand, this is pretty much what happened.

Mind you, the bloke involved (at the SMASH end) is a known scammer who's done this before so it's partially the SMASH directors' fault for inviting him into their alliance anyway. I'd expect a retreat to Empire space and several grovelling apologies by SMASH in the near future.

Edit: LV launched a brief counter-attack and retook one of their stations for a couple of hours - which was just long enough for them to grab everything out of their hangers and quit the system.

Well, a bunch of renters got put into a corp for convenience by LV a while ago (you can manage standings easily, tax them at a different rate etc).  The corp was called Distant Star Alliance.  To continue the barbarian motif, they just found themselves as the Britons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romano-British) to LV's Honorius (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorius_(emperor)), and got told "you're on your own now: make peace with the horde or defend yourselves."  LV handed over the CEO position the day before Goonswarm demanded surrender and scarpered.

DSA posted some defiant stuff on the boards, one of them an in-character, RP thing (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=482128), saying that they would never abandon their ex-patrons, and would fight on.  Reading the post, it seems to have been a close-run thing among members that swung on the size of a 3.6bn ISK indemnity (the rest of the terms were humiliating, but actually better than those LV had previously imposed on them as renters).  I imagine that the figure (the cost of ten POSes?) was not random, and that the Mittani has their corp penetrated deeply enough to know exactly what they can afford.

In the end, it was foolish showboating from a CEO who should have at least left his options open and stalled for a instead of exposing a largely non-PvP corp to attack.  I can only assume that he was made an offer (perhaps with personal sweeteners) by the BoB side.  Understandably, Goonfleet's Vile Rat quickly posted to say that "...our offer is off the table. Pack your crap up and get back to empire."  The rather meek reply from DSA?  "Yeah, that kinda went without saying."

This continues the collapse of LV, who are now just sneak-attacking stations to retreive possessions then scarpering back to Empire.  The result is that Goonfleet are looking at having to integrate new space several times bigger than their original holdings, quickly enough to use it to stage the next attack on BoB.  Since a lot of the directors are Libertarians, their method is summed up by Remedial's post:


I posted this in our private War forum recently, as part of my ongoing campaign to get us in with the Redswarm for pewpew, lawlz and profit  :-D  It seems a smart move to me: offering neutrals the choice between aligning with BoB, whose structure is rigid, elitist and in some parts EULA-breakingly communist (shared accounts) or Redswarm, with the potential chance to have 0.0 space to explore, without even rental.  They are also, I imagine, trying to set up powerful secondary markets in their space.

How long before the "free trade" zone is completly overrun with pirate ganker corps or even large corps looking for a new home?  Heh.  Still, nice idea, but with the way Eve is set up, I just dont think it will really work (cool if they can though).  Will be interesting to see what the political map of the south looks like after this is all said and done.  Hell of alot of territory being thrown into chaos.

And while I love READING about Eve wars/drama, the way that Mattani guy was talking is why I hope BoB ends up beating their asses.  Its a fucking game you egotistical jackasses.  I think if BoB actually wins/survives the "cleansing" that he, and many other people on the forums, would actually kill themselves IRL. 

And that would make me giggle.

The need for corps to be +5 in standing to use the FTZ is protection against exploitation.  There is some discussion on SA as to how effective the traditional Goon blob will be when there is a wider area to cover, but they'll actively welcome conflict.  The problem for the Goons would be if they didn't have an external threat.

And I suspect that you're way off base re the dynamics of a BoB victory.  The Goons In Space have been close to being wiped out, once already (as have their current allies, RA).  That was largely at the encouragement of LV, who decided to try and camp them out of the game.  In the event (unlikely, I think) that the momentum shifted entirely in the other direction, GF would survive, even if a bit smaller.

As to the motivations of the Mittani, do you really think that someone as in your description could rise to power in a Goon operation?  I take it that you read the SA forums?!?  It's BoB, and people like their leader Sir Molle, who take this very, very seriously (read some of his hilariously pompous posts on the Eve-O CAOD board for evidence).  Honestly: read Eve-O and you'll get why BoB have managed to provoke an alliance of quite so much of the game (many of them long-term enemies of each other) against them.  What the Mittani was doing there was just normal, good, hardball negotiation using the other parties' desires and insecurities.

Eh?  I'm wasnt really discussing anything about a BoB victory other than I'd like to see them survive (nothing about the Goons getting taken out) because it would piss off a good hunk of the 0.0 crowd who, as you seem to agree, take the game WAY to seriously.  A BoB loss just pisses off BoB, who are the smaller minority.  I do, unfortunatly, read the Eve-O forums, which is why I want the majority of those players pissed off, since a shit ton of the players in/leading 0.0 corps all talk exactly like Sir Molle.  And yes, I have an SA account and read the forums, which is why I know that there are plenty of wackos in there ;).  But, as I even said before, I like the Goons (and SA overall).

And come on:

I hope he gets kicked in the balls.  Christ.

Anyone who writes:


can't be taking the game very seriously. Come on, he's roleplaying!

How does one get +5 with a player corp?

Quite so.  You can tell he's a lawyer though, IRL, when he remembers to add the disclaimer "Purely in game, of course."  Just in case one of the Goon Legion decides that it is a call to rid him of this turbulent priest.


Well, I've never been a corp director, so the technicalities are beyond me, but it is some magical standings button that they press, to arbitrarily set standings.  It's not like the NPC corps, that way.  No two months grinding delivery missions for level 3 Against All Authorities distribution agents ("Comrade, breeeng me the entrailz of my enemeez...")

Edit:

Uhm, you want the Goons to lose because too many people in 0.0 speak like the leader of their enemies?

The biggest angstfest of pissed-off 0.0ers will be if BoB, MC, LV and Xelas get pounded.  Then, you shall get your wish.  I omit FiX because I suspect they have an exit strategy.

Plus, you know: "There are no Goons. Goodbye".

This is correct. There is a tab that shows up when you get a certain role which has a magic standings button on it. When you press it, you can adjust the other corp's standings from -10 to +10 and attach a reason; the change is effective immediately and is logged for auditing purposes.

This also works with alliances.

Anyway, as for the negotiations, yeah, he's mostly being a hardass to show LV "da bidness". Outside of the public eye he's quite a bit less Serious Business and much more obviously mock-serious.

More news - two (now ex-)LV corps have left that alliance rather than follow BoB's rules (namely the one which states corps must be either a PvP corp or a PvE corp, not both), most of the rest of LV is fleeing to Empire or Stain, and the core PvP people are remembering the Alamo in a system right in the path from Redswarm to BoB-space.

Surprisingly enough, the location for their Glorious Last Stand was suggested to them by...their liason manager from BoB. Although there is something satifying about LV acting as someone else's meatshield for a change - a karmic debt bewing repaid to the rest of the old South, perhaps. ;)

Meaningful PVP, Eve-Style:

Now that must have hurt (http://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/18692).  I can just imagine the pilot screaming at his computer screen when the Goons got enough scrambler points on it (I think Buzzards have 2 or 3 free points of warp core stabilisers, no?).

Explanation: the buzzard is a blockade runner, for moving high value cargo through risky space.  The stuff you see in his cargo hold is generally pretty pricy, especially stuff like the cloaking device.  The real bugger would be if some of those blueprints were originals.  If so, that could shift his loss into the billions+ range.  I wonder what came out of the kill as loot.

They have 2 extra points, and they warp fast and are decently agile. They are actually quite hard to kill, especially in empire where you have to lock them as they jump into a system, and then put three warp points on them before they warp off. Even after this, you'd have to web them or they'd just run back to the gate they came from. On mine, I equip a cloaking device so if I see enemies on the gate once you warp in, I can just stay cloaked. I actually feel very safe (perhaps foolishly so) in T2 indies in empire low-sec.

Of course, this was 0.0, so there was probably a warp bubble involved.

I so want to play EVE.  The adult in me won't allow it.

As a sane person, you'd think so.  "Unlucky pilot," you might think to yourself.

In fact, Zabernist posted a short account, and it seems the LV bloke undocked from a station with Goons outside, then started to move, couldn't redock in time, got scrambled and webbed, and had to sit there while his nice T2 ship with its nice T2 cargo got plinked by a rifter, a caracal and a merlin. Stupid or panicky.

Buzzards are Covert Ops. They can warp while cloaked, which is why this guy was going to run valuables with it, as it is usually unparalleled as such. It doesn't have built in warp strength though, that is on certain Tech 2 haulers (transport Ships). The only thing I could see happening as it was camped by those frigates, he foolishly undocked thinking he could cloak and warp, when he cloaked he got bumped (which causes you to uncloak), then he frantically tried to either dock, or warp out (but he was scrambled and being bumped so he couldnt align). 30 secs or less later he was toasted, due to the redocking timer.

Hey, I'm a noob and shit, but if I was camping a station, I'd park within 2km of the undocking point.  If I was trying to get out of a station, I'd still wait for an opening even if I had a covops, but hey... I'm just paranoid like that.

This is what you get for not having undocking instas.

Lazy noobs.

/ \
 |
 |

Smarter than your average noob. :)

ISS is in full retreat.  :hello_kitty:

Edit: Aaaand MC "declares" for BoB. Shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

Duh, I confused the Buzzard and the Bustard :P. It's a bit more understandable how you could lose a Buzzard than a Bustard to a couple of cruisers. I never use mine for transporting BPs anymore.

WTH is undocking insta?

It's a set of bookmarked co-ordinates inline with the exit vector of the station, often several thousand km distant - letting a ship jump to warp almost instantly upon undocking, partly due to the initial burst of speed when you undock but also due to your ship being in the perfect alignment for warp.

I'd be happy to bet that he did have an undocking insta, but that a couple of hundred feet dead ahead of the tube there were a few strategically-placed cans called "hamshipment [lwtax]".

Shouldn't matter; I know you don't collide with other ships during the invulnerable part of the undocking sequence, and I believe that carries across to containers. If you use an undocking insta, you should go to warp instantly, and while warping you similarly don't collide.

Pretty much the only way to stop is is with interdictors/warp disrupt bubbles.

To take EVE-O posts from Molle & Co on face value is just as naive as taking Mittani's and Remedial's posts on EVE-O and around on the face value. For about the same reasons.

I never paid any attention to EVE until I read up on the dev's cheating with some of them playing the game in most powerful corp.  I think that's pretty fucked up, it's strange that in the end I got sucked into the game politics and I'm now playing it.  I'm a great believer in the playerbase being able to enforce their own rules in a pvp game, it normally doesn't happen but with SA involved and the whole game based on one server, it sure looks like BOB is going to be wiped out.

Yep, but the guy with the killmail said on the forums that he thought the guy had moved immediately after undocking, so that would, if I understand correctly, be him stuffed?

Apologies for the double post, but I thought this might interest a few.  The first round of the Goon Free trade Zone has been announced (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=483930):


FAQ


Btw, some acronyms:
+5 - Setting a standing so that when an alliance member looks at their ship on the overview or in space they are predisposed not to gank them.
NBSI - Not Blue Shoot It, meaning if they're not allied they're targets, as opposed to NRDS, Not Red Don't Shoot, meaning if they aren't enemies, don't kill them.
LV - Lokta Volterra, current victims of the swarm
ISS - Another grouping who tried to run a neutral free trading zone (with an IPO for gullible suckers) but flew too close to the Band of Brothers' sun and just surrendered.
GS - Goonswarm, duh.
TCF - Tau Ceti Federation, Frenchies in space, currently part of the Coalition.
POS - Player Owned Structure - your happy, kilometres long, space house

Edit: added POS

If you want to see painful killmails, look no further.

http://killboard.outbreak-eve.com/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=249696 (http://killboard.outbreak-eve.com/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=249696)

Yes. If you're a fucking retard and doubleclick in space/click approach on something or try to warp to something while in invulnerably undocking, collision gets turned on and you can be locked/shot/yay!

Someone just quit Eve :)

Wow. Toxin are some bad-asses, i gotta give em that.

Oh man - that's a lot of cargo. Wonder what dropped.

Doesn't the cargo get completely destroyed when freighters blow up?

Nope, it's like a pinata.

Freighters don't drop anything.

Is The Scope a part of anything I should know?  And it's weird that outbreak is using 90% domi's. 

Seemed like they swarmed the freighter with drones. It's how I'd do it, but I'm Gallente. We like to fight with disposable ships.

Maybe they're a Gallente corp that really likes drones. I should join.

If i recall correctly it's one of the Gallente NPC corps, so not a bad place to stash your hauler alt.


Hold up ... this kill went down in a 0.6 system (Moniyyuku) and the victim was in an NPC corp so they weren't a direct war target - that just leaves the gang wardec method (unlikely these days), or a suicide run against the freighter & concord.

Looking at the ships outbreak were using and reading some of the comments attached to the killmail page I'm thinking this was a hit on an otherwise untouchable freighter.  Wow.

Are those SHIPS he was carrying? I knew freighters were big, but holy shit!

No - those were EXPEN$IVE $hip$ he was carrying.

Every single thing listed as destroyed was Tech2. Some of it is really fucking expensive.

And yes, freighters have over 1m m3 of cargo space with decent skills. A packaged frig is only like 2500m3. Hence the giant list.

Good god. That is more isk than I will ever see in my entire EVE career, methinks.

Yes, those are ships, and T2 weapons and ammo he was carrying.  Freighter can do 750k m3, which in terms of minerals like Veldspar is 75 million units.  Or to put it another way, one freighter can carry the equivalent of 30+ regular haulers (which is what they'd have to bring in if they wanted to scoop all that stuff up and re-sell it).

It certainly looks like it was a suicide attack.  All those battleships, destroyed in the process (it's illegal to try to avoid being destroyed by Concord police in high sec).  Ship to ship, if the freighter costs 1.5 billion, and you lose 18 battleships at 100 mil each, it's not worth it if the freighter is empty. 

I still think I read somewhere that freighters don't drop anything when killed, but even if it did drop everything listed, they would have had to have 20-30 hauler alts at the scene to scoop the stuff up.

I think I would still be in a corner crying if I lost all that. Repackaged ships lose insurance right?

Yeah, none of the cargo was insured.  He was hauling all that stuff to sell it.

Yea - that would be account cancel time.

What they did was get a bunch of drone ships to hold off the police while they ganked the freighter.

http://www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?t=363


Funny if true.

This is going to be drama-Nagasaki to last month's drama-Hiroshima.

HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE for that freighter kill. I have no specifics.

Apparently a guy in some corp scammed/did something bad to a certain 0utbreak member. That guy kind of sort of stalked him and found an instance where he's moving a ton of his belongings from one place to another, through a NPC corp freighter guy. His guy or hired I don't know.

They used a ton of doms with a ton of drones out to draw Concord fire. Concord has to appear and whack the drones as well, so it gives you more time to get some damage in. 30ish battleships using the max ammount of drones they can is enough to down a freighter in a Concord-protected area, I guess.

And yes, ships and other T2 things that were being carried around. Rough estimates is about 4B isk lost plus the freighter itself. T1 drone fitted battleships, which were used to gank this thing - about 32M each after insurance.

Alliance leader and titan pilot.  I love this.  There they are, screaming about "Devswarm" and yet another CCP employee turns out to be giving them orders.

And yeah, from the look of it he's been bending the rules to help out his corp, too.  Didn't seem to work too well, though, since they're getting ass-whooped, right now.

But CCP need to say that devs can't be cap-fleet commanders in major alliances, nor can they lead alliances themselves.  Useful as they might consider the data to be, it is a huge conflict of interest.

I thought the use of drones was mostly because concord can jam and drones don't need anything besides the initial targeting to function.  I mean all the domi's were fit with cheap plates and extenders, they obviously knew exactly what they were hitting and knew it would be in high sec.  I'm impressed how far they were willing to get revenge.

More amusing, less dramatic thing from that chatlog: LV are retreating to Stain because they think that the complexes there are unclaimed so they can farm them to rebuild.
Minor flaw in the plan: -A- run all the complexes in Stain.  :-D

They should make a movie out of htis: The Perfect Shitstorm

It will be interesting to see the outcome.

The other piece of the war is happening over in Querious.  The northern allies made a serious play for ED- (the FIX outpost system), BoB showed up with a couple of titans and FIX rolled out everything, after a week of heavy fighting the northerners had managed to plant POS at 2 of the 11 moons in that system, plus some staging POS in nearby systems (they'd taken out POS in a couple of other moons, but didn't manage to get their POS up before we replaced them).  They've apparently given up on ED- for now (all the northern POS are gone from everywhere around ED-) and are focusing on 9CG (a BoB station right in the middle of Q), they've managed to get control of it through some POS-spamming (lots of moons in 9CG). 

KIA has been contracted by FIX to interfere with their empire logistics in the Agil area and has racked up a few hundred kills there (there's been many thousands in Q).  It actually might be a bigger fight than the LV/RedSwarm showdown, but since it's not nearly as fluid and one sided it's not getting as much attention.  Priority of BoB seems to be to fight for every inch while bleeding the north as much as possible and hope that LV can hold out long enough, and/or do enough damage to RedSwarm, that this turns into a repeat of TCAG in the ASCN war (ASCN bled themselves white trying unsuccessfully to take a beachhead in Period Basis, and lost the capacity for effective offensive operations as a result).

--Dave

Interesting to hear the perspective of the other side on the other front of the war.  Look forward to maybe seeing you in space Mahrin :evil:

Wish I had more time to be playing and knew more about exactly what's going on with LV front atm but school calls, oh well week and a half and I'll have time again.

Yeah, Munky has been talking about the reasoning behind that shift as it went on.  The version from AAA's side is that they weren't getting [edit: their desired type of] fighting - FIX were sensibly avoiding head-on engagements - so they moved to try and provoke BoB.  Is it possible that there was rather more of an element that it's really not the right point on the BoB front to start exposing, say, AAA's dreads alone in siege mode to organised BoB+slaves counter-attacks?  That would inevitably end up with another 15-dead-dreads moment (surely a real danger to GS on the LV front if they get careless in mopping up there, too).  If you have substantial superiority of numbers on the way on another front, why not play at managing your own attrition for a while?  But hey, I don't really understand PoS warfare any more than 95% of the playerbase.

I love Eve stories.  I'm half tempted to play, buy a little ship, and just putter around newb space shiftlessly, like Han Solo before he met the rebels.

free 14 day trial...

Inaccurate, if anything. The "advice" in question was posted quite a bit before the player was hired as GM, and it's hardly rocket science either -- anyone with brain would (and did) connect the dots and realize that invention system which was said to become alternative to tech.2 BPO ... would affect the price and profitability of these very BPOs.

Unless somebody slip him details, which is an even more plausible theory, given what we know.

Since even with no insider info it's no brainer invention would affect BPO prices and availability of tech.2 gear it's rather moot point. That would be like getting insider tip shares of company X are going to go up when they've been reporting to public record profits for entire year, or something.

edit: For that matter, the details were posted by dev in charge of that mechanics in the public forum during the test phase iirc, so people could actually test if it works on the test server before it hit the TQ. It's still a sticky in Game Development section, dated 2006.11.24

Dont bother if thats all your going to do.  You can get the same effect by taping a picture of outspace over the top half of your screen and reading Barrens Chat on the bottom of the screen.

I just want to fly around in a badass space jalopy listening to Steve Miller and getting baked with Chewie.  Someone make a game like that please.

Fixed that for you (http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=441).

I love the whine from CCP there: "boo hoo, we just want to get on with playing the game in morally insupportably influential positions in BoB and LV, spawning ourselves BPOs and using inside information to sell one blueprint for 78.5 billion ISK* before the market crashes.  Why does this whistleblower keep victimising us for our morally dubious behaviour?!?"  CCP and Kugut deserve each other.

*A huge sum: somewhere north of 9000 dollars at IGE bulk prices.

Um... you realize that all it says there is that Kugu managed to out a GM, but the player in question wasn't involved in any known malfeasance?

Now, the one thing that is a bit sketchy is that he was still on LV teamspeak as of this week...

I dunno... 78.5 billion and advising his corp to sell, sell, sell BPOs is pretty morally dubious to me.  And I really think that, while devs and GMs should play the game, there should be no way they are in strategic positions within their corps or alliances.  Sucks, but human nature has already been demonstrated on several occasions to be too given to indiscretions (BPOs and all-faction-fittted supership, for instances).

It looks like Enslaver was a different GM, but can anyone doubt that GM Sunshine, in particular, has a vested anti-coalition, and particularly anti-Goon interest?

The "Sell, Sell, Sell!" advice isn't particularly scandalous, and didn't require inside info, I was giving similar advice to Dark Shikari around the same time (one of the major plutocrats of Eve, and a member of my corp).  This *has* taken on witch-hunt properties, the "outing" of TheEnslaver served no purpose.  I genuinely believe that if you look deep into the leadership of all the major alliances, you're going to find developers (there are 750 CCP employees, want to bet that none of them are native russian or german speakers?).

That being said, T20 went way beyond the bounds, and it does shake confidence in the entire edifice that he was apparently so senior and effectively impossible to fire.

On the war itself, Sir Molle of BoB gives a good (if slightly slanted) briefing here (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=485327).  The scale of this fight is staggerring, tens of thousands of players, trillions of isk.  The coalition is repeating their tactics against ISS (massive assault on multiple fronts), but against BoB it's not working as well.  And both sides have uncommitted reserves, RedSwarm is currently occupied with LV (although the goons made a showing) while the southern tenants have not been engaged.

In many ways, the coalition picked the wrong place to make their push.  Sure, Querious and Fountain both border on Empire space which makes them more reachable for logistics when you're coming from the north, but they also both border Delve, giving BoB the advantage of interior lines (it takes fewer hops to take capitals or fleets from Fountain to Querious via Delve than through Empire).  And the police alliances of both regions are thoroughly dug in and used to fighting against superior numbers.  Both have enough strength to contest the assaults and turn them into a fight, which leaves BoB able to hop from one to the other for classic defeat in detail.

The question is if the coalition is going to reinforce failure and make a renewed push in the southwest (where things are currently back to the status quo ante), and if RedSwarm is going to *also* travel 30 jumps to support that.  The only member of the coalition currently operating close to home is AAA, and it's costing the coalition dearly.

--Dave

Afraid you didn't. The allegation I was addressing was "GM gives insider info regarding BPO" while the player in question gave the advice in question *before* he was hired (the post was made around December, player was hired in January) In other words it wasn't GM giving insider info but then-player-now-GM talking with other players about game mechanics.

From what I've heard, LV is basically wiped out. Their last stations have their days numbered and are being swarmed. There's also ops against RISE (one of the southern BoB tenants) being run on a daily basis, although I have no idea what their numbers, purpose and efficacy are.

The real fight is going to come to BoB probably in another few weeks. The question is whether D2 can maintain the stalemate of attrition for that long.

Impressive that you know the dates of those posts since I understood that they're from LV forums and I know they're not dated on Kugutsumen's blog.  Are you an LV member (might be worth mentioning that by way of a declaration of interest!  Would tend to skew things (while explaining your consistent posting record)) or is there another source posting this stuff?  That would be interesting, too, if you have a linky?


More balanced view, Mahrin, yep.  In fact, I agree with you that it's insufficient proof of malfeasance by itself.  It smells bad, especially coming on top of the t20 stuff as you rightly say, but I doubt if anyone would seriously expect more than a character rename.


I'll bet that they push somewhere that requires BoB to stretch its resources to defend.  Beyond that, who knows?  The Mittani  :evil:?

AAA is not part of the coalition, by the way.  As I understand it, and as mentioned in both Eve Tribune and one of the official Eve-Online login page posts, they withdrew and are operating in an independent capacity vs Bob & Slaves.

No, I'm not LV member nor I have the access to their forums, but complete version of the post including the date was made public in similar thread that goes on the FoH board  :-)

http://www.fohguild.org/forums/mmorpg-general-discussion/27167-eve-bob-lv-vs-south-east-74.html#post677107

Nice one, ta!

Well, I have one prediction: RISE won't slow down the Goonswarm for long. I can't see BoB being able to help them anymore than they helped LV. RISE will slow down the train, but only in the time taken to move through them, and the logestics of moving the front eastward as it outruns it's supply lines.

So long as D2 and Co can keep BoB busy. Interior lines only works if you're not under attack from multiple fronts quicker than you can move your forces around, and Molle's post flat out states that too.

I also wounder how FIX would be going if there were being attacked by IAC and friends from the East, which right now, we arn't, despite having a station only 4 jumps from Queroius. Though that might be Gunboat Diplomacy near us, not FIX itself.

This is the drawback of the BoB system: Each tenant cares only about their own patch.  You want Feythobolis?  FIX isn't going to care, hell, FoFF probably isn't going to care much and they're in the next region over.  Where an attack on 9CG is a knife to our throat and ED- is aimed at our heart, and we'll pull out all the stops to defend them, attacks on BoB holdings further out are completely BoB's problem as far as we are concerned, worth participating in only to wring concessions from BoB on something else.  This is why I said Q and Fountain weren't the best places to attack, where RISE and FoFF are recently installed and have serious growth issues, FIX and Xelas have been in their patch for a long time (years in FIX's case, it's the oldest surviving alliance).

Treating the BoB police alliances with contempt is a diplomatic mistake.  They're not simply pets, coming and going at BoB's beck and call, and if they thought they had a survivability option separate from BoB that didn't involve turning their coat and attacking BoB, they'd be likely to take it.  In the end, as long as they retain docking rights, it doesn't matter to the residents of BoB space what color it is painted on the Alliance map (and for many of them, the chance to put their own patch on it in the wake of the hostilities would be attractive).

--Dave

I should keep my shut: the day I post this, a BoB/FIX(?) fleet shows up in FAT and puts all POS's into reinforced mode an hour after I log off. The came, the shot, they left(?).

IAC is now the 2nd biggest allience after Goonfleet...But not nearly as powerful econmically or militarllry, it's more a fact of LV/CA/ISS dropping off the top of the table, and some large corps joining recently (BIG being the...err..biggest, and they are quite powerful econmically).

Thank your friends in RAT.  The LS- POS was a no-no.  But although some FIXians may have been present, it was a BoB operation.  Don't rattle sabers in their direction unless you're serious, they're a little jumpy right now.

Frankly, IAC reminds me very much of Huzzah, and if it's not careful it will suffer a similar fate.  That much growth across that much territory that fast is very hard to handle.  And western Catch is a freaking nightmare to try and keep a handle on in general (AAA never did a very good job of that, I used the back road through FAT for most of my transport runs during both Prohibitions, easier than dealing with HED).  AAA has excellent skills at fleet battles, but actually holding down territory bores them to tears, which is probably why they gave it all to you.  Conquering it is fun, using and protecting it, not so much.

Gunboat Diplomacy has an exclusive on the H74 area, if you want to teach them a lesson about what 0.0 territorial ownership means, be my guest.

--Dave

More weekend news: M.Corp has left LV. Aside from the political implications, this also means that any M. Corp POSes are now no longer generationg sovereignty claims for LV.

Well we've nearly finished in FAT. BoB and Co havn't shown up. An Outbreak gang got Titaned by AAA and cleaned up by the IAC fleet on the way from F4 to FAT.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=486825
They didn't want those stations anyway.  :roflcopter:

I have never seen such heavy handed moderation before, by the fourth page at least a third of the posts were molested in some way.

The Official EVE boards have always been retarded about moderation, not even so much the harshness or lack of it, but simply the consistency of what and who gets modded and who doesn't.

You can get one thread with everyone calling each other cock goblins and no one seems to mind, the thread right below it though will be nothing but *snip deleted*.


So where did LV end up going? Stain? Seems like they got most of their assets out.

I'm curious about that myself - Is BoB taking LV in, or are they simply scattered?

There is a rule in CAOD forum section which prohibits from posting people with no visible player corporation/alliance tag in their profile. This was established due to literally years of "noob corp" alt posting, usually to troll and/or flame. So posts from such characters are deleted now no matter the content.

The smaller edits are result of one side of conflict insisting on calling themselves "the rapetrain". Hardly wonder it doesn't fly well with the mods.

Private and public statements late last week indicated a move to Stain. However, lots of corps have left LV, so there's something of a diaspora. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them joined the BoB Protectorates.

But.. Ladies and Geeeentlemeeeen.. it's time for the Main Event! The reigning champeen, BoB (and company), versus the Challenger, a Drunken Swarm of Red Bees. And some dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you.

This is going to be fun. :-D

Yep, it would be kinda odd if that got through the filter.  A lot are also due to the immediate censoring of anything that suggests that BoB might have had the slightest brush with developers.  BoD and Band of Developers is modded, for instance, though some clever obfuscation still gets the needling through, occasionally.

In quite unexpected move, former allies of D2 from north-western part of map declare war on them and the rest of coalition, allying themselves with BoB:

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=487204

In a slightly less unexpected move, D2 offered Youwhat's collective head on a platter to the Goons.
History: the XZH system was the site of the ill-fated Goon incursion last summer, where D2 fought the Goons back while YouWhat hid in stations. :D

If it's the corp I'm thinking of, rumor on FOH is they did that because D2 was promising their territory to the Goons, and they felt that was a Bad Idea. (EVE's forums aren't loading for me at the moment, so I can't check).

That makes no sense. Atm Goons have more space than they know what to do with.

I'd think so too, so if that reason is actually true this is quite a "wtf was D2 thinking" moment  :-o

I might be remembering who D2 promised the space to wrong. I was skimming and am too lazy to go back and look.

It was probably a deal made long before Goons displaced LV and I'm guessing YouWhat just found out about recently. They probably didn't like their space being offered away ;)



I guess the better question about LV isn't where they went, but where did their capital fleet go? It surely wasn't entirely kersploded in the war, and it was(is) fairly large.

What happens if the majority of the LV capital fleet ends up with BoB+MC's? Mother of all cap fleets all contained within a fortress region of delve/period basis (and Querious I suppose?). That would be like 3+ titans, would it not? Plus at least half a dozen motherships and buckets of carriers and dreads.


Does the coalition have anything that could go toe to toe with the BoB+Friends mega fleet?

It's probably moot point because the servers won't be able to cope with engagement at this scale packed onto single node anyway...

Querious is a tough nut, the ED- station is probably one of the most defensible in 0.0 (close to empire for easy emergency logistics, low moon counts for both it and the 3-F system which is the only one you have to transit to reach empire which makes it hard to operate if your numbers aren't totally overwhelming and leaves you vulnerable for drivebys).  And FIX's military doctrine is *designed* for being massively outnumbered, our core leadership was tempered in the CODA war, when we were always outnumbered.  Our capital ship fleet is heavily tilted towards carriers, and we've probably used fighter-bombing tactics more than everyone else in the game combined. The force that couldn't take ED- and 9CG was the same size as the one that did tear apart LV in the same span, although not nearly as coherent.  Add in that ED- is our only station so it's a matter of survival for us to hold it, and you get what happened recently.

The really wierd thing is the way that the northern alliances actually *believe* the anti-BoB propaganda.  Not just the "Band of Developers" stuff, which if true would mean they had not the slightest chance of success, but the "BoB pets are being oppressed and exploited" crap, which if true would have us falling all over ourselves to cut deals.  Of course, if the enemy leaders actually believed it, they wouldn't treat us with such public contempt and force us into ever tighter relationships of mutual survival.  It's pure posturing straight out of the military and political history textbooks, and it's fascinating to watch.

--Dave

The YouWhat alliance leader has always had a hate-on for the goons after we got him a two week ban from the game for abusing the petition system.  We had his dread locked down facing certain doom at a goon POS then he logged and sent a stuck petition to have his ship moved out of the system.  Once we realised what happened it was petitioned, we didn't see him log in for a while then other YouWhat members confirmed he was banned in one of the many eve-o GOONIELAGSPLOITSTBH threads.

I think he was enraged by the D2/Goonswarm alliance of convenience and didn't need much inducement from BoB.  Dumb move though, his alliance will lose all it's space very soon when they could've sat the war out then cosy up to the victor.

Didn't the goons have something around 100+ pilots in YouWhat's space within a few hours of their announcement?

I think most people I've heard have been of the opinion that BoB had significant, although often tacit, developer and GM assistance, but that that is no longer the case to any significant degree (beyond marginal cases like GM Sunshine).  It's a matter of suspecting weakness rather than strength.


I've barely heard that opinion expressed, and I trawl the CAOD boards (and Scrapheap, and SA etc..) boards all the time.  What I have heard, drearily often, is that BoB pets are riddled with Bob alts, are spied on heavily enough by their "masters" to make the chance of them even staying neutral for a sane deal absolutely zero, and have made their choice so must now live with it.

See, this is the problem with propaganda campaigns: Eventually, the people using it start to believe their own propaganda.

To understand BoB, you only have to understand this: Starting more than 2 years ago, BoB set out to make itself an imperial power.  Not just to hold territory, but to remake it's own culture into that of a martial aristocracy.  Regardless of whether they really were the best combatants in Eve when they started, they've made it true by recruiting the best PvP'ers in Eve and agressively refining their tactics.  They didn't just beat ASCN, they beat them like a drum while outnumbered and outspent by more than 3 to 1.

To understand the BoB tenants, you only have to understand one thing: BoB goes to alliances that have little or nothing but desire, and offers them deals that BoB *scrupulously* abides by.  Deals that are much better than those alliances are in a position to demand, good enough then when the alliances are stronger they don't feel constricted or exploited by the arrangement.

FIX was *this* close (imagine holding fingers a hairs breadth apart) to completely dead at the end of CODA.  BoB could have imposed stringent terms, demanded tribute, rubbed our nose in our powerlessness, and if we'd refused they would have had little trouble finding another alliance of equal or greater capability (FIX was down to less than 400 members at that point, had a total capital ship muster of maybe 4 dreadnoughts and no carriers, and was flat broke as both an alliance and individuals) that would have been willing to take the deal.  But they offered us a safe harbour in which to rebuild, under terms that were quite acceptable (no tribute, no rent, no mandatory military commitments beyond keeping raiders out of Querious, something we would need to do anyway).

I don't know the details of the other BoB police alliance's deals, but they are probably similar.  CAOD throws around rhetoric about us paying tribute, not owning stations, and so on, but the fact is that these things are simply not accurate.  There *are* "renter" corps and alliances who pay tribute, have tight restrictions on where they are allowed to mine, rat, and so on, but they are non-militaristic "carebear" outfits.

BoB respects military prowess.  BoB respects bravery, determination, and all the other traditional martial virtues.  Determination and honor is the grounds for their respect for FIX, it's nearly as much a fetish to us as combat skill is to them.

As for spies, BoB may be the only alliance in Eve that doesn't have spies in FIX.  We're the oldest surviving territorial alliance, we've had a very long time to get penetrated by everyone who ever wanted to.  But they don't *need* them, there are more than 200 FIX alumni in BoB, good old-fashioned rumor mill would tell them everything.  In fact, of all the things in the FIX/BoB relationship, our biggest problem is the way they are draining our PvP talent.  That's not any kind of BoB exploitation, that's hardcore PvP'ers wanting to be in an alliance full of like-minded players.  But FIX has always trained up some of the best PvP'ers in Eve, only to lose them for various reasons tied to the tensions between PvP'ers and industrialists.  Outbreak, PURE, and ESA are all the product of FIXian diasporas.

Quite frankly, much of this stuff that is thrown around is so contrary to fact, or so exaggerated, it only makes sense to me as over-compensation for discomfort over the various smaller alliances relationship towards their own major power.  Where FIX, Xelas, etc., all have explicit deals with BoB and high confidence those deals will be honored, everyone else looks to either D2 or RA with a great deal of discomfort.  It's nice to have them as allies when the target is someone else, but when they make demands, you have to give.  And sooner or later, when the board has simplified enough and there is no external enemy to threaten them, they'll demand everything.

Is BoB inherently "better" in a moral sense?  Well, I don't know much about D2, although what I've seen indicates they're nowhere near as reliable in their honesty.  But the RedSwarm success is built on the goonies "I shit on your game" attitude and RA's bottomless wallet from the systematic exploitation of bugged complex spawns over a period of years, so there I would say it's not much of a contest.

--Dave

I dunno, BoBs terms sound pretty bad to me.  You have to split your corps pure carebear or PVP, aren't allowed to place your own buy orders for minerals(so basically you are mining slaves) and pay 300mil a week for the privilege.  However you do get what formally looked like secure space brought to 0.0, which I'm sure was attractive to a lot of people. 


I look at it this way, if BoB soundly wins this war they're never going to lose one.  It's highly unlikely we'll get another anti-BoB "perfect storm" bandwagon of this size.  Now if BoB is a true hegemon then they can go about their plan as state on kugutsumen of taking over most of 0.0 and installing their pets.  Suddenly Eve's political landscape starts to look monochrome.  It would be as bad for the game if Redswarm or D2 was a towering colossus.  Maybe I'm being hysterical, heh.

Erm, you never really quite say what it is you are disagreeing with, just make wild, arm-flinging statements about people "believing their own propaganda" and "throwing stuff around".  Were you disagreeing with me?  What bit?  All I said is that what I kept reading as justification was past dev involvement in a game-rule-breaking way with BoB (absolutely true, and proven as such, although I didn't say I agreed with it in my post) and that Fix, Xelas, MC etc were penetrated by Bob alts and spies (again, I didn't state this as my opinion, but it would be amazing if they were not, given that their enemies certainly are).

You don't need to justify yourself yet again here with the same old "Fix's relationship with BoB is more complex than that!" thing.  Really.  The bit I agree with is that you have, indeed, made your bed now.  Who knows?  maybe you'll win out.  Not where my money is, but always possible if BoB's metagame is better than the Mittani's.

I'd say that the real question is "Are RSF/the Northern Alliance smart enough to do the Sun Tsu thing and strike where the BoB CapBlob isn't?"

I just want to take the time to thank you people. The game itself always gets me bored after a few weeks (no tooth for PvP), but the news of the war are quite exciting to read.

What MahrinSkel says is in especially stark contrast with D2 policies (selling allied owned space - WTF?!)

Also, don't paint this mess as some monumental "war that will end all wars", to justify massive gangbang rush it is.
I'm going to tell you what will happen - eventually BoB wallets will run dry and they'll have to decide whether to downgrade their ships and continue (in such case, we're looking at years of war), or dissolve(more probable tbh) for a while, just to resurface under different alliance banner somewhere else.

Don't expect a decisive victory - people killed here just respawn at the nearest station and most of BoB core have are used to changing corporate banners. You "kill" BoB, it'll resurface just like CA did (I don't mean new CA here).

So apparently YouWhat is done already?

http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/viewtopic.php?p=79773#79773

and

http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/viewtopic.php?p=80089#80089


Oops? hehe.

Chorus of Dawn follows suit with declaring on D2:)

I do agree that unless something dramatic happens and someone figures out a amazing new strategy towards Fleet and POS warfare, that this current war will probably bog down into a total WW1 style stalemate. Containing BoB+Friends inside the Delve/Period/Querious tri-region isn't exactly a strangle hold on them economically. With RSF+Friends and D2+Friends having free reign of 0.0 that isn't the Tri-Region they won't have much difficulty maintaining their industry either.

BoB is stubborn, MC is capable and Fix is notoriously determined. The MegaFleet can move around in that region of space relatively easily and rapidly, but the further they try to push it out, the easier it is for the Coalition to hit the empty undefended space. The recent YouWhat turn is a small indication from the BoB side of the fight to try and gain fighting outside of their own home space. I'm sure BoB+Friends will get more folks to join their side and attack inside the Coalitions territory.

They overlying long term goal is for the action isn't territorial or industrial, just psychological. My guess is BoB is hoping some part of the coalition will get bored with the stalemate, or will get to tangled up with the guerrillas in their own space. Allowing BoB to go back on the offensive. I'm also guessing BoB isn't banking on this either though, and are fully prepared to turn the Tri-Region into fortress space and wait out the war for the long run. Maybe hoping for constellation sovereignty or something from CCP?  :-P hehe

Rapetrain haven't brakes.  :evil:

See, this is my point, the propaganda and projection has caused a total disconnect from reality in the anti-BoB forces.  We're not fighting alongside BoB because we're afraid of what BoB will do to us if we don't.  We're fighting alongside BoB because everybody who hates BoB has declared they want to kill us *first*.  MC really would have taken a a contract against BoB.  FIX really would have stayed home in Querious if nobody had attacked us there (we never did attack ASCN, although we did stage some reprisal raids against POS).  And BoB wouldn't have made any reprisals against us, if they had been forced to admit they needed our help they would have come to us and cut a deal.

You're projecting this culture of fear and submission that just doesn't exist.  You're making decisions based on this fantasy, and those decisions are becoming more and more hysterical (in every sense of the word).

--Dave

Oh for fuck's sake there you go again!  Stop building straw men!  Where did I say anything about believing you did it because of "fear and submission".  You aren't even reading what I wrote.  Not even slightly.  By all means have mad arguments with yourself, frothing wildly about those who dare disagree, but don't drag me into it, make up stuff and pretend I said it.

WTF?  Did you ever find yourself trying to have a conversation, and the person you were talking to said something so totally off the wall that you found yourself wondering if you were even talking the same language?  Yeah, we've got one of *those* moments.

I try to explain what the real relationship between BoB and FIX is, and you tell me it is irrelevant.  I try to explain how what you are saying about FIX not being able to cross BoB because we're filled with BoB alts and spies is completely off the mark, and you start going on about strawmen.  At this point, I can conclude one of two things:

1) You're a flaming loon.

2) You're engaging in the Chewbacca Defense school of tactical forum warrioring.

--Dave

Forum warriors hooooooooooooooooooo!

Edit: got rid of worst trolling.  :nda:

Let me trim down what I said about alts and spies, getting rid of those tricky extra clauses and brackets:


That is reported opinion, not mine.  I've put bits in bold, too, just to help you.  I merely add that I, personally, would be surprised if BoB didn't have spies and alts in Fix, since they have them in everyone else.  Ie in GF, RA, and all the rest of your enemies.  Hardly an unbalanced jab at Fix.  And if you read things more carefully, you'd notice earlier on I said that I thought Fix were the most likely to have an independent exit strategy planned.

I look forward to your response, denying my assertion that Xelas eat babies and Fix are Satanists, or some other non-sequitor.


That's very special.  Funnily enough, until recently you struck me as a really valuable poster, who would be calm and balanced and offer great insights.  These last few posts are like you are sleep deprived or something.

Okay, one more try:

If the anti-BoB forces are making the decision not to diplomatically approach or militarily bypass the BoB police alliances because they believe them to be so filled with alts and spies from BoB as to be incapable of any action short of complete support of BoB, they are making decisions based on a *massive* misunderstanding of the real situation inside of BoB space.  These decisions appear to be based on propaganda they've been repeating to each other so long they have come to have the force of fact.

Seeing this presentation in CAOD and other fora of "facts" that are completely contrary to reality but have become a self-reinforcing substitute for it, as a student of player mass behaviour I cannot help but attempt to theorize about the dynamics involved.  This is me wearing my "Game Designer" hat, the mass behaviour of players is a source of endless fascination to me.

--Dave

I won't get into anything else about BoB and Tenants and whatnot, but:



Is crap. There just isn't any way MC would go against the people housing their prized capyards for their capfleet. Wait, let me alter that. They would go against BoB, if someone could offer them new space with brand new capyards to replace all the old capyards they would inevitably lose against BoB AND if someone could also guarantee protection from BoB retribution after the move to the new space containing the new yards and stations for them.


The first isn't very likely (but possible), the second isn't possible. Not only can no one provide that kind of protection, which alliance is going to house the MC fleet as a 'neutral' entity if it's already "betrayed" its former landlord?

I'm sure MC loves to think itself neutral (or did at least), a pure merc corp and whatnot... but once the capyards went up in BoB space, they tied themselves to BoB. No amount of ISK would let anyone hire them against BoB. The space they hold in BoB land is worth far more to them then any amount of ISK. You can't buy that kind of security and loyalty that BoB has provided to MC.


With that said, I wouldn't do anything different if I was in charge of MC either. It was clear that in order to be effective mercs on a alliance level, you needed to get in on the capital game. It was also clear the capital game had a new set of rules regarding territory and resource requirements. MC made a good deal, shit a great deal with BoB. Still doesn't mean they would be impartial in terms of contracts though. Going against BoB would mean going back to pre-capital empire war merc'ing, since no one would trust them to house them in their own space and their own capital fleet would eventually be depleted. The only other recourse would be to become a 0.0 power themselves, but then, they wouldn't be mercs anymore.

And again we have a failure to understand the essential nature of BoB and their relationships to the police alliances (although to be fair, the MC relationship is particularly unique).  Part of the MC/BoB deal since the beginning has been the prospoect that someday MC would take a contract against BoB.  There are all kinds of provisions for that event, how MC would not use their leasehold in Period Basis as a military or economic base for attacks on BoB, how BoB would not engage in attacks on that constellation, how neither would take any action with or against any capital ships being built there for the duration of the contract.  Even clauses about how to handle it if a 4th party (not BoB or the client) attacked MC space during the contract.

Remember, BoB respects military capability above all else, and they've understood MC's nature since the beginning.  When Seleene said they really wanted the anti-BoB forces to come to them with offers, he was dead serious, it was the best chance they ever were going to get to prove they really were independant.  But they got no offers at all, no responses to their inquiries.

--Dave

Try not to do that: it comes across as extremely condescending.  And I suspect that everyone gets the "Fix really, really aren't Bob slaves" line, not least since you have stated this in many, many posts for as long as I remember.  We're not your audience for that argument anyway.  None of us are the ones deciding where the Swarm or NC attack next.  I, for one, was discussing why the reasons you originally gave weren't ones I'd read much of at all.  I suspect that outside of COAD, most people have a more nuanced view in any case.

And the "straw men" you say I am going on about were pertinent.  This is what they are (http://www.answers.com/topic/straw-man) (definition 2).  My frustration was that you kept criticising me for saying things I have not said.  To be clear, I do not think that you could not make separate arrangements with GF etc..  Other people disagree.  But I can certainly see a number of reasons why, to the coalition, you might be more useful on Bob's side for the moment than neutral.

Edit: spelling.

Hi there, we obviously haven't met, I'm Dave Rickey, aka "Mahrin Skel", aka "that pompous, arrogant prick".  Nice to meet you.
And I was pointing out that most of the reasons seem to be rooted in believing their own propoganda.  I've seen a great deal of it thrown around.  There's definitely different flavors, the RedSwarm propaganda efforts center on the "corruption" of the "Band of Developers", the northern propaganda about their imperialistic degradation of subordinate alliances.  *Both* appear to be projection, RedSwarm pointing out "See, we may have exploited the 8/10's for nearly two years and making it a point of pride that we grief and scam everyone, but BoB had CCP developers cheating for them," and D2 saying "We may be excercising a veto over all your decisions, but BoB is demanding tribute and not letting them own any stations."

All of these lead to subordinate conclusions.  If BoB has only been winning all their wars for the last two years because developers have been cheating for them and really aren't that good, then now that the light's been shown on it and CCP won't help them they'll be easily beatable, especially if outnumbered.  And if the subordinate alliances accept such humiliating terms, they can't have any pride and won't fight very long or very hard to protect stations and space that aren't even theirs.  And having made the decision to attack on propaganda that was half lies, they make decisions for how to conduct the war off these fantasies that have nothing to do with what's actually happening.

So they don't offer MC a contract, and put *the* elite PvP organization of Eve on the opposing side.  And they attack FIX's ED- station, one of the most defensible hardpoints in Eve with one of the most determined defense forces, with a strategic plan that calls for a quick walkover, easy taking of 9CG, and a launch point against Delve and Period Basis.  And they drive their own allies to the opposing side, by acting precisely the way they accuse BoB of acting, because they believe everyone knows BoB is worse.  It's a classic case of military/political blunder through belief in your own propaganda, and although I find myself on one side of it in-game, I am still trying to understand where it is coming from and where it will lead in an as objective as possible fashion.

What *should* they have done, assuming they had assessed the reality and not the propaganda?  Hire MC, send them against LV or some random scapegoat if they didn't trust them to fight against BoB, just take them off the board.  Ignored Querious and Fountain, blast straight down the A2 pipe to Delve, FIX and Xelas might harass the reinforcements but they wouldn't have laid in the tracks to try and stop a 400 ship freight train.  Neither is an option now that they've attacked directly against Fountain, Querious, and Period Basis and made true what they had believed: FIX, Xelas, and MC have no future separate from BoB.  Even if it wasn't true from the beginning, all three would have *wanted* to believe it was.

--Dave

But people did, back before the destruction of LV started. The general response from the BoB serfs at that time could be summed up as 'LOL'.

The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.

Well yeah that's the MC party line.  But I, along with a mob of other people, heard Seleene say on one of the Burn Eden TS sessions that they wouldn't hypothetically attack BoB for less than trillions and a relocation deal to comparable space.  Basically a "go fuck yourself" deal.

What would even be the point then?  :wink: That is totally why you hire MC, so you gain their very effective capital fleet to augment your own fleet. In every meaningfull way, MC is tied to BoB and vice versa. Though I suppose someone could cough up a trillion ISK and have MC shoot the odd BoB empire hauler (if such a thing even exists).

Which is my entire point, MC isn't neutral, they want to be, they may even think they are, but once you start making deals like they did with BoB, you've "picked a side" as it were. Once you get all these provisions and clauses about what you can and can't do so you can keep your corner of space, you are tied to someone else.

"Hey, since you so obviously love being BoB's bitch, why don't you let us show how a real man keeps his ho's in line?"  That was the tone of the stuff FIX was hearing back around the time of Prohibition, if we *immediately* turned our coat and attacked BoB, later when they got around to following it up they might help us.  It was an obvious invitation to weaken both ourselves and BoB in exchange for a promise not to beat us to death if we survived BoB.

--Dave

You'd get their current capital fleet, just not any motherships or titans that were still under construction when the contract started.  And like I said in another post, the smart thing to do even if you didn't trust MC's integrity would have been to send them to attack someone else.

--Dave

But that would be the catch, if you don't Trust MC's integrity, why would you trust them to attack someone else while you are clearly going for BoB? Which is why the situation is as it is, since no one really does trust MC in that regard towards BoB, because of the previously discussed relationship with BoB.


So have we officially gone full circle on the MC/BoB topic?  :-D

So you think that MC is so completely without honor that if you attacked BoB while they were on a contract against someone else, they'd drop the contract and go defend BoB?  Even if that were true, wouldn't the PR value of that equal the cost of the contract to make it happen?

Eve is a game, people don't always behave "rationally", in pursuit of their self-interest, but instead act in accordance with their self-*image*.  MC really does see themselves as hired guns, available to the highest bidder, and would collapse internally if their leadership put them in such a position.

--Dave

Our resident SC drone has a good point -- the smart thing would have been to hire MC to do something far away from contested space. If nothing else, putting them on the other side of the map and getting paid means they're not helping BoB. Between hitting whatever poor bitch had the bad luck to be the maximum possible distance from your BoB target and keeping enough at home to secure their own systems, you could have taken MC out of the fight.

If they reneged, they lose all the PR and rep they've built up. I'd have a gambled billions of ISK to try to keep MC neutral, and probably sweetened the pot by telling them that their space was safe as long as they played ball and did what they were hired to do.

Why pay for it when the coalition has already gotten it for free? As far as the coalition's PR goals are towards MC, they've achieved what most of them probably already believed and suspected, that MC would align itself to BoB and show itself to truly be yet another BoB 'pet' etc...

 But honestly, yes, I do believe MC is capable of ditching a contract to defend BoB, or its own space in BoB space. It isn't a matter of honour really, just practicality. With all the various meta gaming, spying, alts and social engineering in EVE, how can anyone with alliance responsibility NOT take that kind of thing into consideration? The Devil you know and all that.

It comes down too, is it worth the risk to rely on MC's honour to stay out of the war? If you already think MC is in bed with BoB and you know there are in fact stipulations and clauses to MC's involvement in contracts against BoB, and there has yet to date been a MC contract taken against BoB AND your fighting arguably the largest War in EVE history date against BoB... why gamble? It isn't just the ISK, it's the very real possibility of getting a MC cap fleet up your rear when you aren't ready for it.

In the end, it comes down to MC's word that they wouldn't get involved... and since we established I (as the theoretical coalition alliance leader) don't trust them, why beat around the bush?

But the coalition hasn't gotten that PR coup.  Those who already believed MC wasn't neutral see it as confirmation, but it didn't sway anyone who was undecided, and it didn't demoralize MC internally the way that the real thing would have.  A situation was created where MC had *no* choice but to come in on BoB's side (their shipyard systems being attacked, no counter-contracts being offered, everyone making it clear that as far as they were concerned MC was already with BoB).  MC would have gone to great lengths to at least appear neutral, if it had even been an option.  But the direct attacks removed even the possibility of just sitting it out (as they did in the ASCN war, even while the front line was right on their doorstep).

If the anti-BoB metagaming kung-fu was truly strong, they would have played on the weakness of the BoB coalition: The obsession with the appearance of strength.  If someone has to ask for help, they are showing weakness.  Asking for BoB to reinforce us when the ED- egg was under attack cost FIX points, it said we weren't coordinated or strong enough to get an outpost up on our own.  If BoB had been forced to *ask* FIX, Xelas, and MC for help in this war, it would have been a demoralizing humiliation for them.  They might have been willing to die alone, rather than reach out for it, and certainly would have to be taking a bad beating first, one that would have seriously tarnished *everyone's* belief in their invincibility, including their own.

But when 400+ ships on each front hit both Xelas and FIX, nobody loses face or morale (except for the forces who can't win even with odds so heavily tilted in their favor).  Nobody expects FIX or Xelas to stand alone against that kind of force, and the military and political neccessity of BoB to move to defend them is obvious and welcome.  We get points for holding the line against overwhelming odds, BoB gets points for a systematic demolition of the attackers.  FIX and Xelas are irrevocably committed to the fight, where we probably would have tried to sit it out otherwise.

--Dave

Can't believe I managed to miss this one.  WTF?  FIX isn't pure carebear or PvP, never has been.  Delve markets might be another story, but BoB has never said anything to *me* about what to do in the markets, and I'm probably the biggest buyer and seller in Querious.  Including hundreds of millions of units of minerals.  And Q space is generally only as secure as FIX makes it ourselves, we see BoB ships south of the A2 pipe *only* when there's a significant territorial threat, before the recent events that had been a total of 3 times since the end of CODA.
BoB couldn't survive such a victory, they need an enemy to fight against as much as the Goonies.  Create a "Blue Doughnut" of BoB control through all of 0.0, and within 3 months BoB would be an empty shell and the police alliances would be ignoring it and making their own powerblocks.

--Dave

Indeed. The Empire collapsing from within is a timeless story.

Also, there'll be more when I do a full article, but I did get a good quote from Magnus (CCP Chief Marketing Dude) yesterday. Apparently there's CCP devs in all the top 20 alliances in the game:

"We have a very even distribution of CCP employees in the top 10 alliances, or top 20..."

Take that as you will.

Less theory and if-then talk, more war updates!  :hello_kitty:

Another station was taken apparently. http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=487892

Choo Choo.

And unannounced on CAOD: BoB/MC/FIX forces have destroyed several IAC POS in the FAT system and placed several POS of our own, apparently we're taking FAT.  Again.

--Dave (god, I *hate* that system)

Yeah, one of the guys on SA reported the Catch thing most ricky-ticky on the forums:


I'm no pos-warfare strategist.  In fact, like most people, my grasp is tenuous at best.  My own thoughts would have been that BoB can take that system if they want, but that they really expose their cap fleet to AAA inparticular by doing so, and that that sort of size of fleet indicates an unsustainable tempo of operations (in terms of players' real life shit more than the ISK, I mean).

Am I reading this wrong?  I'd also have thought that them sticking everything in one place is an invitation to their enemies to do exactly what they did: go somewhere else and take a station in Feyth (BOB + Ragnarok titan turned up eventually, but couldn't swing it by then).  Is a station for some PoS's a good trade?

Does Catch have some huge strategic significance that would make taking it (at the cost of losses elsewhere) worthwhile?  Is it a choke system or a cap shipyard or something?  Would taking it mean that a large number of coalition systems were opened up to raiding, or that the coalition would for some reason be forced to counterattack at great cost?

Or are BoB just looking for a good fight in Catch?

Edit: fixed my stupid quote-nesting

It's really, really shiny.  The FAT area has roughly 50 or so belts of Arkonor (the most valuable ore in the game) *and* a 10/10 complex.  It's also more than 20 jumps deep in 0.0 and more than 10 from the nearest refinery, which makes the damned thing a tar-baby, FIX has owned it 4 or 5 times and it's brought nothing but pain and frustration in the end for everyone who has ever owned it, unless they gave it up voluntarily.  It's the Hope Diamond of Eve.

AAA isn't there anymore, they moved to Impass and handed it over to IAC, who, no offense, isn't nearly as scary to conduct capital ship ops against (they've never won a battle involving capital ships without being a minority chunk of a bigger fleet).  It's also *way* out at the end of their turf, about 20 jumps from their home systems.  IAC is over-extended right now and in no position to defend it (which, frankly, describes just about everyone who ever owned it).

Needless to say, I'm hoping FIX isn't planning on taking over that miserable hunk of gold-plated shit.  Get in, get the 5-6B isk worth of ore we've had sitting there for over a year, and turn it over to some other set of poor bastards who don't know any better.

Strategically, it's not worth much, you can't reach anything from it in cap ships but Empire and Stain. It's a potentially useful stepping-stone for reaching the BoB regions in the far south, but not essential.

--Dave

It's essential if AAA want to keep the 10/10 and 6/10 complex nearby. It's not essential to IAC by itself (though it's nice to have an entire -1.0 system to myself, I never got an office spawn :( ) but as Marian pointed out, it's quite nice to have to NPC out of.

It's also a dooway into Gunboat Diplomacy (a BoB pet south of FIX) which makes it an essential jump of point for the Goonswarm when and if they do want to attack FiX or GUN directly.

It's also quite far away from IAC home space, or even IAC empty space (N-5 and V2), but attacking it means IAC no longer has to make 30 jumps to an enemy system.

I don't belive FIX can take it without BoB anymore than IAC can defend it without our friends either, though FiX vs IAC would probably be an even fight. AAA if nothing else will want to defend it, if they want to keep the nearby 10/10 complex. I have no idea if Goonswarm or other friends will show up or not, but I'm sure BoB will (unless FIX owns a couple of motherships and a titan, it was BoB+friends, not FIX+friends).

It's giving me practice at being a smal gang fleet commander, I help lead a small 10 man squadron in getting a first real kill, a Stain Empire Tier 2 battlecruiser. Yar.

This is where I just simply disagree, I do believe the coalition got what they wanted out of the 'coup'. Confirmation for them is a good thing, it creates polarization and I believe that is the ultimate goal. The whole bit about the train and what not. With us or against us. No fence sitters  :-) . Looking at the 0.0 landscape, who was really undecided about MC one way or the other? Well, who was undecided and mattered.

It was something of a Chicken and Egg scenario. MC says they would be neutral if given the opportunity, but no one believes them neutral enough to give them the opportunity.

It was all a giant If, maybe, could be. Now it's a sure thing. Certainty is easier to deal with.

In this case no - its a harder thing.

I don't understand the whole MC neutrality debate. It seems rather pointless. From the outset of the campaign it was generally known that we would attempt to destroy MC as part of our campaign to destroy BoB. We never attempted to hire the MC because we planned on taking them down and frankly most of us believe their PVP abilities are vastly over rated. They have been hired against GS 7 times and have not yet had a noticeable impact in any of our operations. In the huge 1v- meat grinder their cap ships sat behind a POS shield and watched as LV and V fleets were slaughtered.

Even before MC's declaration, I am confident the Northern forces had no intention of stopping at BoB and letting MC walk away untouched.

A little over-confident maybe?  Hope you have contingency plans for a political meltdown among your northern allies and BoB + Friends being able to focus on you.  Not to mention that if you're depending on your southern friends to hate BoB more than they fear you....don't fail.  Ever.

Yes, it's has certainly removed a lot of uncertainty.  Nobody on the BoB side of the table has *any* doubts about whether we stand or fall with them anymore.

--Dave

We could argue you *HAVE* to be overconfident to bring the fight to BoB, history does seem to favor them in terms of victories.

Verify does bring up a good point, I did make the assumption that the coalition didn't already decide to take down MC regardless of any perceived neutrality or not. For all I know, Seleene stole someones cookies and they want them back.  :-) Could be as simple as "I never liked those MC guys anyways".

As I said before, I could list plenty of reasons why the coalition would want Bob to be prvoded with territory-holding allies, especially ones like -Y-, Xelas, Rise etc.  But Fix too, come to that.  Everyone loves to make WW2 analogies, so here's one.  Hitler himself stated that Italy's entry into the war was a drain on Germany's resources.  It was another front (two, in time) which needed German resources to defend, instead of a neutral blocking position.  Similarly, had Fix stayed neutral, then that direction would have been safe from threats: one less front.  As it is, Bob have repeatedly had to send massive fleets round their tenants, sometimes two distant ones, in an evening, to shore up defences.

MC are the exception.  They add a lot without requiring additional defensive commitments, due to their location.  But really, the Coalition hiring them to patrol the drone territories or something equally distant was the only safe thing to hire them for, and the price would have been, in Seleene's own words, trillions.  It is a ridiculous idea.

If I were a coalition commander, I would be delighted to see the PvP core of the Bob hegemony being forced to keep up a high operational tempo night after night, week after week, and being committed to territorial defence of their alliance's Rumania, Bulgaria and Italy, instead of the repeated, powerful, destructive and well-timed counter-thrusts which could have utterly demoralised D2, and which they are well capable of.  This geographical dispersion will become the case more and more as the threat on the Southern front grows.

Everyone seems to assume that Bob are late-1944 Germany, looking for a Battle of the Bulge type gamble to drive off one enemy. To me, Bob seem more like 1914-era Germany: surrounded by threats, with a smaller logistical base, but still capable of strategic offensives and with the potential to knock an opponent out if they focus on the right place.

The addition of -Y- strikes me as a dumb Bob move on an amazing scale.  -Y- Leadership grudges aside, presumably they were paid or given territorial promises in order to declare and cause havoc on the enemy's supply lines.  In fact, they served as an example to others of the stupidity of their actions, and as a morale boost for the opposition, as well as drawing several other forces in against them.  Other third-tier alliances will surely have taken note.

I lolled.
Seriously Endie, what kind of world you're living on?

The -Y- defection seems to be, at least in the short term, an amazing "perfect storm" of political and military benefit for BoB.  The northern coalition is in disarray, having decamped completely from their failed assault.  RedSwarm's focus has been split, the goonies scenting the blood of an old enemy and chasing *completely* across the map in order to pursue it.  And -Y- doesn't seem to have any plans to actually keep their old territory, already dispersing from it and becoming a guerilla force. one that will significantly reduce the northern capacity to project power.

-Y- stiffens the resolve of the northern coalition's less enthusiastic members only if they are completely and immediately crushed.  If their treason prospers, or even survives, the northern coalition may never put itself back together.  In exchange, RedSwarm has taken BoB's most distant outpost, and that can be traced much more to the assault on FAT than to anything related to -Y-.  I'm sure BoB would be happier if they hadn't given it away like that, and frankly I think it shows the FAT curse continues.  But hardly a body-blow.

--Dave

Except -Y-'s proclaimation of "We're going guerrila" seems to be, at best, reactive. (Example: The Moros - allegedly piloted by an alt of a YouWhat director - that got popped trying to flee with a hold full of BPOs/BPCs & named loot the day after their system started getting camped).

-Y- did not expect the Goons to drop anything and jump halfway across the map to fight them, and they certainly didn't expect it to happen within a couple of hours of what will probably become viewed as -Y-'s suicide note on EVE-O.

Besides, it's not like RedSwarm has anything else to do at the moment - LV are all-but-dead, and the southern invasion of BoB's serfs hasn't started...yet. :)

Had Fix try to stay neutral the front would simply be staged *from* Fix space and straight into Delve. Neutral space in EVE isn't something like RL country that no one moves through because it declared no involvement.

Any way you slice it, BoB is no longer on the defensive, the coalition has lost the initiative.  Whether that translates into a delay of the inevitable or a turning point depends on what *BoB* does with the initiative now that they have it.

--Dave

I hope you are right because after only two weeks playing the game and reading up on the politics I really like it.  The absolute worst thing that could happen to ruin my enjoyment of the game would be BoB crumbling within a few months.  Personally I don't see them having a high chance of survival against the goons and RA, the external factors of GS being based on SA members and RA being crazy close knit funny language speakers seems like far too much of an advantage against any normal type of English language in-game clan.

Attacking FAT doesn't effect anyone except AAA and IAC. Granted it's useful to stop AAA, but all it's served so far is that a lot of the IAC PvP's who were camped at Doril (who the only target to ever fight was YARSK hunters, a russian pirate coward corp who the other russian alliences dont like) are now moving down to FAT.

If BoB/FiX wanted to, they could have taken FAT by now if they'd blitzkrieged it. I suspect BoB dosn't really want it, and it was the only place they *could* attack with ease. Strange thing is, BoB can dived their forces, but instead choose to show up with everything including the kitchen sink as far as capatil ships, but only a smallish support fleet.

BoB won't have the initative until they stop Goons from attacking, and -Y- comming seppuku won't count for long.

Another war twist: SMASH alliance that not so long ago helped RED alliance and Goons to overcome LV and conquer their territory is now actively attacked by RED. Apparently because RED wanted full access to 10/10 complex originally promised to SMASH as reward for the war effort.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=489824

Not much of a twist, this war is all about the 10/10's for RA.  They want them all, letting someone else hold them for a bit is just a temporary arrangement.

--Dave

Translation?

You forgot to mention a SMASH member stealing a mothership from RA.  I thought RA set SMASH to RA about ten days ago over that?  All that whine about "we warned them not to deal with him" is crap.  They didn't kick him out of their alliance, they admit they knew what he was like, ergo he is their responsibility.

The most concentrated form of wealth generation in 0.0 are the complexes (basically dungeons in space).  They are worth from hundreds of millions to billions per day, and 10/10 rated plexes are the most valuable (it's *very* concentrated, because only 4 people can run it each time).  Red Alliance built an incredible wallet (estimated to be from hundreds of billions to trillions) off some bugged 8/10's they exploited for well over a year (spawn timers on certain NPC's inside were messed up), when those were fixed they began their war of conquest, the goal of which is to take over control of all of the 10/10 complexes before the money from the bug exploit runs out.  They used to "squat" a lot of them, but as the population of 0.0 has gone up even being 6 hours ahead of everyone else and having the daily downtime (when the plexes reset) come during their primetime isn't enough to beat local alliances to the spawn.

Smash was foolish to make a deal with RA that involved Smash owning or sharing the 10/10.  RA has let their intent to control the 10/10's leak out several times, both directly and via the goons.  RA has no interest in the rest of the space they control, hence their bargain with GoonSwarm (RA money and Goon manpower is a pretty potent combination), the RA capital fleet backs the goon horde and the russians take the 10/10's, the goons get everything else.

--Dave

Thanks, that makes sense.

Plus the SMASH offer to 'repay' RA was only 5 billion...while the scam cost the RA member 10billion ISK + a headful of good implants. Bear that in mind when reading the EVE-O thread with the bleating of "We settled that debt!!!1" The lesson of the story is: Don't fuck with the Russians.

Cheers, Mahrin: good background.

Two minor additions would be that the downtime isn't exactly weekday primetime for RA, since most of European Russia is at +3 to GMT/Eve Time.  But it means that any of them whose lifestyle supports running a plex at 3pm (more than enough) certainly have a huge advantage over people in the US.

The other is that GS (as opposed to RA: I wouldn't even know where to find that out...) deny having made the offer to SMASH that they're claiming.  Of course, both sides are now saying pretty much what you would expect them to say.  I expect that the mood in Bob's Fuhrerbunker is not exactly downheartened by the results, either.  It couldn't have worked out better if they'd paid the scammer themselves :tinfoil: ...

Remember when RA jumped a dread fleet next to a bunch of LV in siege mode?
They just did the exact same trick to BoB - Ten or eleven BoB dreads down for two RA/-A- ones.  :-D

Edit: Actually 9 dreads plus 1 carrier.

Looks like BoB just suffered the fourth biggest loss of capital ships ever in the game, at the hands of Goonfleet* et al.  9 11 (?!!?) dreads in one engagement.  Earlier, GF had suffered a large number of T1 losses in the same system to a nicely placed DD, but it looks like they pulled it back big time.

If the link isn't hammered into the ground within minutes:
http://dl.eve-files.com/media/0703/2007.03.12.15.12.34.jpg

Edit: dammit, beaten again.  I knew i shouldn't pause to find a link, let alone one which is, indeed, already DDOSed...

*Further Edit: Goonfleet opened the cyno, RA+AAA warped in their dreads.

I've noticed some very sloppy behavior from BoB and friends over the past few days. This, along with a few other mishaps that have yet to be made public, are quite puzzling. BoB knows better. Hell, on the same day, they've had some smashing victories involving DD-camps that are rather difficult to break through.

I can't help but think they're up to something.

Oh I'm sure losing 35 billion's worth is all part of a cunning plan.

At least the destruction of a 80 man IAC fleet yesterday wasn't a complete waste of time, it apperntly allowed the Goons in who dropped the Cyro field.

BoB's got to have a limited supply of solid pilots and decent tacticians. They've probably got enough to plan fleet ops around the clock, but you really need skilled people there when the guns start firing to deal with surprises.

And also, there's the matter of experience -- what sort of warfare does BoB have the most experience with? I expect that when they go busting up a camp, they're sending in their best pilots and best field commanders. POS seige's are probably planned out by good tactical commanders, but handed over to field commanders with less experience (unless they're seiging something critical or expect heavy resistance).

Obligatory "They're losing their dev help" comment.  :evil:

All things considered, probably the best thing BoB's got going for them in this way is the fools who believe that. The clever ones who don't are the ones doing damage to BoB.

What do I need to have for EVE to not run like shit in big engagements? I've got a 6600GT and only a gig a ram but EVE never seems to use more than 400 megs. We had a 30v18 (http://privateer.griefwatch.net/?p=engagement&kill=27963) yesterday and it was 1 FPS and less.

Turn details down, turn turrets + effects off, turn trails off, sun not occluded by ships. Basically, turn off all teh shiney.

Isn't that how RA survived the original coalition formed by LV+Friends? LV wouldn't (couldn't?) chase RA down into the complexes and RA basically having no space outside of 1 station did nothing to their money generation and backbone.

More or less, yes. When F13 was in -V-, RA still held and did all the complexes in -V- space. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the higher-ups about it.

BoB is also 4 (maybe 5 now?) different 250+ member corps that operate mostly independantly, as self-contained miniature alliances.  Seems like what happened is one corp was detailed out to deal with the KOS situation, and their commanders forgot that if you don't have the OMGWTFBBQ capital ship blob, you need a support fleet to prevent just such an occurrence (50+ dreads can take down a battle POS *without* entering siege mode).  You can operate dreads without a standard fleet, but not without a significant number of carriers (and BoB definitely does not emphasize carriers the way that, for example, FIX does, actually FIX may have more carriers than BoB).  You need *something* that can deal with ship fleets when the dreads are in Siege mode (in Siege, dreads do incredible damage but can't track moving targets, or maneuver themselves).  BoB doesn't do fighter bombing, their non-dread battle doctrine centers on the biggest T2 sniper blob in the game (in general fleet doctrine, RA, -A-, and BoB are all much alike) with a support element mostly consisting of HAC's (too rich for most people's blood, even for how effective they are).

On the other hand, 9 dreads is not the loss to BoB that 21 was to LV.  9 dreadnoughts is less than 20% of BoB's dread muster (probably about 15%), where 21 was about 75% of LV's total strength (and left them with too few to take down a POS, which triggered their rapid collapse).  A very expensive lesson in why you don't operate dreadnoughts without support, but not a disaster.

FIX has learned the hard way to plan our wars around sustainable losses, we lose a lot of cheaply fitted ships in the opening phases, but 2-3 months later we have a qualitative advantage over our opponents (who blew money on lots of T2 and faction gear early on to kick our butts).  So people come in, beat us on the killboards by margins of 2 to 1 or more for the first week or so, then start getting pwned a month later because they were actually losing twice as much money in half as many ships (yes, inspired by Goons).  BoB, RA, and -A- all insist on going to war in the absolute best ships they can afford, with the intent of not losing significant numbers of them because of the qualitative advantage.  But 500M+ isk officer grade modules don't save a ship that's been outmaneuvered into a position where all it can do is die.

--Dave

SMASH offer was 10B, not 5B. They also explained pretty well why they kept well known (so RA knew who they are dealing with, unless we assume that RA are blind, deaf and stupid as rock)  scammer: basically the motherships he fly were worth the risk of carefully watching him.

Regarding 9 BoB dreads, that's what happen when you get 9 dreads jumped by 30. BTW, look at Edie's post - not only he claims 10-11 but also death from hands of Goonswarm (both lies - it was 9 and from hands of RA dread fleet), really cheap propaganda attempt.

Don't be a dick.  I posted as soon as I saw the news, and updated very quickly afterwards when I saw more of what had happened: that GS had opened the cyno and RA and AAA had done the killing.  Your assumption about "propaganda" is bollocks, too.  I'm not a member of GF, though I have been pushing for F13 to get into the FTZ.  I've never been a member of any corp but F13.  I post on the SA boards, sure, because thy're fun.  But I utterly fail to see what difference it would make if GF had done the killing instead of their allies (except that, since they don't have dreads, it would be something of a miracle).

As regards the 11 thing, I openly admitted to the uncertainty in my original post, posting 9 and 11 and "?!?!".  As I now gather, the confusion might come from it being 11 capitals, 2 of which were carriers, but I'm not even sure of that, so didn't add it.

SMASH say it was 10 billion, RA & Goons say it was 5 billion.

/shrug

Endie, ok I overdid a bit. Mainly because first post on EVE:O forums stated 9 dreds from the start (or they're master edit ninjas;-).

No worries... confusion of current events and all that  :lol:

Edit:

The much maligned "they're scared to do anything" D2  alliance just launched a 48-dreadnought attack on Bob "they're honestly not a pet they're totally independent" footstool MC's capital shipyards, rumoured location of an in-progress Leviathan titan.  Someone could end up hurting badly because of this: who depends on how rapid the Bob response is.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v386/Numismancer/2007.jpg)

Judging from CAOD on EVE-O, BoB are concerned.
Oh, they're still not posting there...but their alts, spies, and muckrakers are out in full force.  :mrgreen:

BoB showed up in force (100+ BSes, titan, couple other caps) elsewhere earlier today.

Scooped me some nice tech2 drones.

Edit: Aaaaand I just helped pop my first carrier. :-D

I love shots like that, you can really get a scale for how big some of these structures and ships really are. So is yard in reinforced and when does it come out?

Can't make posts like that without a link to a km! :-D

Oh sure, be that way (http://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/22828).

Also, MC may have a Leviathan titan cooking in those yards... Internet rumors ftw.

You mean the MC shipyards? I've just read that thread, there's something like 5 posts with no alliance tickers whining about D2, and 40 or so from D2 allies patting them on the back and flaming the alts.

Maybe we read different CAODs, but that looks nothing like full force to me.

3 more carriers downed on the way home from the original op. Sadly, [SNIGG] got all the killmails. :(

Scratch that:

http://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/22939
http://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/22938
http://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/22936

Generally kills get cross posted if multiple alliances are involved, I know I've posted 1 or 2 on Goon kb where there pilots were involved but I got km.

Oh, I dunno, looks like quite a forum-push to me:

Fall Angelus: Goons leaving coalition? (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=490389)
Gnulpie: The end of great southern war? (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=489940)
Wylker: Who to believe in the coalition? (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=490585)
Blitz'Krieg: Can BoB truly be defeated? (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=490729)
Lord Guffy: The feasibility of longterm Bandwagon stability (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=488730)

And so on.  The oh-how-very-odd thing is that the writing style of most of these posts is eerily identical: a title which is a question; a passive-aggressive approach which seeks to damn the coalition with faint praise; lengthy posts with frequent use of short paragraphs but sloppy, faux-foreign grammar; similar character-creation and corp-founding dates (not the last couple of days, usually: more like two to three weeks ago, with a single post on non-controversial stuff).

Of course, in recent weeks, there have been some goon ones too: the most obvious Goon alt was such a retard that he was told to shut up by all sides, in a rare moment of forum consensus.  Both sides do it: it's just interesting who seems to feel the need to spin at any given time.

Well,

you'd

soon

be

able

to

figure

out

if

any

of

them

were

DBPreacher


-dbp
 :lol:

And on a slightly less irritating note, is anyone else getting a faint sense of deja vu here? Coalition hot-jumping a dread fleet to tear apart a bunch of their enemy's dreads in siege mode (said enemy previously having an aura of invulnerability), swiftly followed by an overwhelming strike against capital shipyards where a titan is rumoured to be cooking....

Ah, thought you meant that MC shipyards thing since it was mentioned right before. Overall there's quite a few of these yes. Though they sound so naive, I have to wonder how much of it is simply clueless observers jumping on topic du jour just to feel more important.

There is much laughter on the goon forums about this supposed split with RA.

We practically screw each others' sisters.

Practically?

Yoru you're missing out!

Russian mail order brides for all the goons!

A major dread fleet just destroyed the Mercenary Coalition (Bob Vassals, although laughably claim to be independent) capital shipyards, with a mothership (one step shy of a Titan) 22 days into construction, with 8 days to go.  As usual, there's some confusion about the results, but the exchange was five coalition (and/or AAA?) dreads for the shipyards, with what seem like some substantial battleship losses, but that's still to be confirmed.  Evil Thug doomsdayed, and the aftermath of the engagement was the coalition controlling the battlefield:

A big hole (http://img.waffleimages.com/244c27d3be90aea2aef331a71a43a834f7597c4e/L5D_6-1.png) where there used to be 20 billion worth of brewing mothership and capital shipyards.

Like i say, this one is still shaking down, so info will doubtless change.  Seleene's responses are pretty measured and informative, but the change in the thread (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=490798&page=10) from "ha ha D2 you failed" when they second attack is launched is fun.  Expect a bazillion Bob alts on the Eve-O boards.

I can't help but wonder if two attacks were always planned, although obviously the Coalition couldn't have expected the servers to mess up as badly as last night.  But it would have been wise to keep up such a high operational tempo: Bob and Vassals had, i gather, 600+ defenders online for the initial attack that was disrupted by the servers.  The second one, presumably, saw rather fewer defenders available as a result.

Edit:  It seems to have been a mainly RA/AAA operation.

What the fuck is with people on that forum posting in...

HUGE FUCKING LETTERS?

Makes shit god damn unreadable.  Where the hell are the mods?

The Mods have their work cut out deleting all references to BoD and general developmental cheating.  They don't have time to make it readable.

Eve-O is all but unreadable anyway, even without the huge letters.

I'd say both were planned, apparently D2 organized and moved down close to 40-50 capital ships, and the russian alliances had similar numbers ready as well. Both coupled with few hundreds of support ships total. You don't muster up and move such numbers if you don't intend to do something with them.

That or the first was planned and the server lag got in the way, and the second was spur of moment thing that seized good opportunity to get something actually done (see below)



According to Seleene's report attack happened right before the downtime, in fact split in two by DT (POS was taken to sliver of shield, then servers went down, then finished when they went up)  That means very few people available, with eastern Europe getting upper hand. Either unfortunate timing on MC part, or very good timing on coalition part, or just stroke of luck with the initial strike that put the yard in reinforced. No idea how these things exactly work so hard to tell.

So they did end up getting the yards in the end. I was only informed to the point where D2 was ready to finish it then pulled back due to lag+BoB MegaFleet.

There was two yards, one came out of reinforced yesterday evening (GMT) the other today around noon. BoB/MC and D2/AAA/RA/etc fleets formed to battle over the first yard but nothing came out of it due to lag et al, and the first yard was repaired/refuelled. The other one was attacked and killed today by AAA/RA operating on their own if I read the forum reports right.

Primary yard was saved. Secondary yard -- which had an almost-complete Mothership, but not too much else it looks like -- was lost. A pricey lost, but whether it was worth it depends on what was in the primary yard.

I guess we will see if they go back for the first yard then?

I have no idea what was in the first yard.  The second was a classic russian DT blitz.  It was about 15-18B of POS and mothership for about 8-12B of dreadnought (depending on how they were fitted).  Disappointing after stopping the northern assault cold the night before, we didn't think they'd have the balls to go after the second.  Obviously, we forgot the russians have larger stones than the germans.

--Dave

I think ET got a hand full of Bships and support with his DD as well.

Fakeedit: This has been sitting, unposted, on my PC since yesterday, so it's now almost a day old.  Damn meetings.

Bob pulled an alarm-clock operation today, after weeks of fighting in KoS's C3- system, and managed to take a PoS there which will flip sovereignty on the system at last.  It's been a real meat-grinder for them over the weeks, not so much in terms of ship losses (for which they care not a jot) as player time at horrible hours.  KoS had repeatedly pulled the trick of, when BoB killed a Pos, sending in a suicide industrial right into the middle of the dread fleet, which would pop, fuel and online a Pos before it could be destroyed.  As it is, BoB turned up with multiple titans and literally dozens of dreads, and the coalition really didn't have an answer in the end, and got pretty much wiped.  I don't know what exact losses on each side were.

Interestingly, one coalition dread managed to tank 26 enemy dreads for almost 15 minutes until his friends could wipe off the inties long enough for him to get into a PoS shields.  His setup must be startling.

Seeing that there were ~300 ragoon+addons present and only 130 bobbites, the simple fact bob managed to survive amazes me.
They also killed 6 POSes, put into reinforced another 5, downed one carrier several hundred support ships.
All of this while being outnumbered 3 to 1 by defenders.

Numbers like that are pretty meaningless: Bob won because of coherent organisation and supercapital assets, and you could have added another 300 GS T1 frigs and cruisers on top without noticeable effect beyond lag.  Remember that they could press the Iwin doomsday button every twenty minutes and account for huge numbers of lagged-out pilots with no chance of escape.  And the fact that the titan has been given an invincibility buff this patch makes exposing them to do that almost entirely risk-free.  That's not a dig at Bob, by the way: they didn't get the titans in a rigged event.  It's a  :roll: at CCP for continuing lousy game design.

Anyway, even when Bob started to suffer towards the end they had a titan already set up 8 jumps away to retrieve the fleet.  Very nice organisation, and an even nicer number of dreads, motherships, carriers and titans.

I maintain that the coalition's best hope is to be in multiple places in multiple timezones: an alarm-clock op like this, with Bobites having to skip classes and work in some cases, is not a sustainable way to wage war for them, for all that they'll continue to win most set pieces for a while yet.

One funny thing the same day was a chatlog of Shrike speaking to an Outbreak contact.  The Outbreak bloke was asking Bob to set them to blue for a day so they could help their friends in MC defend the capital yards last week.  Shrike said, pretty clearly, not unless you give us something pretty impressive in return.  What will you do for us?  No helping your friends unless you bow to the masters.  That attitude is pretty dumb, and is just the sort of blind short-termism that Mahrin pointed to on the other side.

Uhm, DD kills every support in the grid, so using is requires a lot of skill, unless it's your own fleet you want to burn. Besides, to my best knowledge they didn't use much DDing during the whole op.

On the Outbreak thingy, you're reading things that aren't there.
The point was they wanted standings for just few hours, which when you take into account logistics required with setting alliance and every ally's standings back and forth is pretty much pointless (and before you say "it's simple slider, remember how many FF incidents you got due to bad standings yourself:D).
All that was asked for is little longer commitment instead of drive-by shooting. I'm pretty sure if Outbreak said week, or three days they would get their +v no problem.

Off-hour raids are not a sign of good pvp and are not a good sign for BoB.

I read that they used it a bit, but that's not really what I meant, thus my use of the word "could".  Now that they can safely cycle titans at will, they've got a big advantage in certain situations (of which dread-centred pos warfare is one, as Evil Thug showed).  And the fact that they could time their DDing with not nuking their entire support fleet is what I meant when I talked about their great organisation.

Basically, I can't help but think that CCP consider the titan buff to be "working as intended", in that they couldn't fix their fleet/wing/squadron code to stop ultra-lag, so they've made large fleets pretty much suicidal when a titans are around.  Of course, that's up there with SWG's jedi design in the Stupid Ways to Balance Your Endgame stakes, but I doubt if they care much yet.  At least the new contract screen shows "jump scramblers" as an option.  That may rebalance things dramatically.

If anyone doesn't know what CCP did, they gave titans the ability to fit rigs.  Where, previously, the only in-game ways titans had been killed was to either do so before it hatched (LV) or edge-of-exploit (kill logged-off titans, as in ASCN or D2's cases), there was the theoretical danger that someone could deploy a large group of battleships using energy-draining devices to stop the titan jumping out, while also pounding it with someting like dreads to wipe its shields/armour/hull.  It was always unlikely, but just about possible, which placed restrictions on the use of such strategic assets.  Now, with the right rigs and fittings, a titan can reduce the recharge-time for its capacitors (which hold the space-mana needed to jump out) dramatically, to just under a minute, which makes holding it in place pretty much impossible.

As regards Outbreak, what i meant by saying Bob's attitude was short-sighted agrees with what you say about the difficulty of churning through setting standings: for the price of that effort they could have had Outbreak on their side for that set-piece, which (given, again, what Mahrin said) could very well have seen them slide rapidly through neutrality to Bob-aligned.  At the moment, the coalition seem ill-inclined to view such an act with detachment worthy of Realpolitik, and they'd have tried to get punitive on a group currently killing Bob quite happily when they get the chance.

Also, with the undocumented "Log off inside POS shields" change (exactly what it sounds like - log off inside a POS shield even with an aggro timer and your ship won't warp anywhere), Titans (and to a slightly lesser extent motherships) are now all-but-unkillable.

Sabababawha? Skill?

No, not really. Warp in a cheap frigate (BoB and pretty much everyone else use Probes) with a cyno gen, pop a cyno, yell over teamsqueak, DD goes off. It's easy enough to scanprobe out the enemy support fleet in a covops if they're not already at a POI - takes about 2 minutes with decent skills. Cynofrig warps to covops, covops warps out while cynofrig is in warp, see above.

The DDs have been used primarily to decimate gatecamps, station camps and the occasional support/sniping BS fleet, from what I hear. The losses inflicted are rather difficult to fully replace in under 20 minutes.

What the DD will do is force the coalition to dramatically shift tactics and find some way to either evade, bait or tank double DDs. If BoB gets 3 titans, it's going to become very difficult on the coalition to make uncoordinated advances. What they'll need to do in that case is focus far more on eliminating BoB vassals and allies while keeping the main fleets tangled up in large engagements elsewhere.

Fortunately, the coalition has the multi-timezone advantage and can thus keep making BoB stay up late or get up early - particularly the Russians. Goonswarm can continually throw meat into the BoB-grinder to keep them occupied, but in the meantime, Evil Thug and friends are free to wreak havoc on the support infrastructure behind enemy lines - taking out T2 production chains and such.

We all knew it wasn't going to be a fast war.

No - that's what we all hoped for.... :)

You don't get to choose hours when you are attacking enemy POSes, the time of final fight is up to the defender. So it's at best sign of defender's (in)competence.

The final time is determined by the amount of strontium in the POS. Sure, they could put in 20 hours worth. But that doesn't allow them to decide what time the POS will come out of reinforced unless they know the time they will be attacked in the first place.

Basically, neither side can truely pick a time.

And besides besides, it was Coalition prime-time:P
Well, at least more goon prime than BOB prime.

The Goonswarm capital fleet is still in its nascent form at the moment, though (and the tactics that worked against LV won't work against 2+ Titans).

Or the existing Goonswarm tactics, I should say....

Amount of strontium can be adjusted in the time between beginning of attack and the time shield level hits reinforced state, thus giving defender ability to determine time of fight. The recent destruction of MC yard raised some eyebrows for this very reason, unless the yard that came out at DT was the first being attacked, they could've adjusted the timing to more convenient for them.

Or MC were more happy to lose those shipyards and the mothership cooking inside them rather than whatever was in their other shipyards (which has also been put into reinforced).

Triage, of a sort.

Can it be done remotely? Otherwise, its a lot easier said than done. Support should have entrances bubbled since they cant be at the POS for fear of death. A good cap fleet will put a tower into reinforced quickly.

Either way, if someone puts some POS in reinforced during some off hours, there would be no choosing the time.

Yes they can, if someone from the POS-owning corp with POS permissions is online.  Plus, you can pre-set things like making sure there are 6-8 hour gaps in your strontium levels, so that as long as the enemy doesn't know precisely what your schedule is, *some* of the POS will be coming out at their worst time. Strontium management is a critical element of defense, you can't control when the enemy will attack, but you can control the timing for the strategically essential Round Two.  Doesn't matter how many times the enemy put a POS *into* reinforced, as long as they never get to follow up and knock it out all they've cost you is strontium.  Trying to stop someone in a covert from getting through the blockade to the POS is an excercise in frustration, I've taken mine past gate-camps of 200 ships with multiple large bubbles.

In theory, the coailition's numbers advantage means they can put together a POS-buster force at any hour.  But in practice, there are only two forces capable of fielding the critical mass, and they have been unable to rely on their allies to pump up the numbers and keep their logistics in order (D2 themselves, and RA/AAA).  And thanks to their diplomatic short-sightedness making sure that every in the BoB camp knew they had to stand and fight, and the steady erosion of their own ranks, they don't have much, if any, of a numbers advantage anymore.

Something you need to keep in mind that BoB has had a "Hardcore only" recruitment policy for years, it's not the hardship for them to pull an alarm clock raid as it is for a less militant alliance like D2/TCF/IAC/IRON/....basically everyone but AAA and RA.  And they aren't as weak in any particular TZ as the typical alliance either, they have a sizable contingent of Aussies/Kiwis, and MC is *very* heavy on the europeans.

In the end, it comes down to morale and momentum.  You win wars in Eve by making it not fun to be the enemy, and the coalition isn't having much fun from their war anymore.  The northern coalition's assault has fizzled, Fountain was a complete failure and Querious is a stalemate.  D2 is supporting IRON and company with a few dreads but damned few smaller ships, when the enemy musters less than 70 FIX fights them and generally gives as good as we get, when they roll with more than 100 MC and BoB join the party and they get hammered, and in between we just bunker up and wait for them to go away.  FIX is probably the hardest alliance to try and break via a siege, both because of the easy logistics offered by the geometry of ED-, and because we've been through that particular trial so often everyone who can't handle it left long ago.

This has freed up BoB and MC to go on the offensive, and they're taking full advantage.  Northern industrial POS are getting taken down almost every day, FAT is about to fall, and the RedSwarm advance has been stopped.  Agressive anti-pod scanning has made AAA and RA leave their good implants at home (and the coming patch that will stop people from logging out to escape bubbles will finish off the days of 3B isk clones), which has cut a lot of their military advantage and they're getting outperformed tactically.  Meanwhile, the turnouts from all the second and third tier alliances in both coalitions are in the toilet, both because of the fracturing of those coalitions and because many of them are waking up to the fact that this war is going to leave the surviving 2 super-powers even stronger and with no counterweights for them to be played off against, while doing little or nothing for them.

As for BoB and Outbreak, consider it a religious thing.  Both are composed entirely of hard-core PvP'ers, but where Outbreak hates alliance politics and is formed of people who just wanted maximum pew-pew without concerning themselves with diplomatic entanglements, BoB considers diplomacy and politics as "war by other means" and embraces them.  Outbreak doesn't *care* what the coalition thinks of them, pro or con, they're going to keep doing their thing regardless.  Their participation in the MC cap-yard defense had nothing to do with their relationship to BoB, and everything to do with their relationship to MC.  It's entirely possible they'll be fighting against BoB next week, and it will mean precisely as much in terms of their long-term intentions: nothing.  Because their long-term intentions have nothing to do with territorial warfare, and are all about the pew-pew.

--Dave

Don't be too proud of the technological terrors you setup in FAT (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=496880).

Granted apperntly BoB payed for the POS's that just got destroyed, so it didn't cost FIX anything bar a couple of tech 1 indys. I am somewhat surprised BoB didn't come to do anything about it, but I'm guessing the'll be back after downtime to put another 10 deathstars down.

Goons came to help at one point and killed some of the POSs, but the majority were IAC (and I don't think AAA particapted either).


It's going to be a long war.

Yeah, when I saw that news about FAT I couldn't help but think back to Mahrin's post.  Better comedy timing for an extended "we r teh killahz and all your bases will shortly belong to us" spiel would be hard to imagine.

Rumor has it that a carrier was also, uh, unfortunately misplaced by a random FIXian.

It somehow later showed up in the Goonfleet inventory.

The darndest things just seem to happen these days. :)

So can any of you Goonie types confirm or deny  this Eve-O thread (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=495639)?

The short of it is that Burn Eden got wind of Goonfleet treachery, stole 3 motherships, some BPOs and podded Remedial.

edit: Fixed link to go to right thread.

I don't think you linked to the thread you thought you linked to.

It's all true, except for the parts which aren't.

It's a joke.  BE have left(on good terms) however, but only because they were sick of having so many blue.  Some goon suggested cooking up a scam story to get Eve-o all a flutter and that's what we threw together.

Unless there was more than one that's IAC, not Goonfleet. Tyrrax had it shown on screenshot posted on eve-o forums.

Same difference. Just another small laceration.

If it's same difference then may as well tell it how it really is, rather than try to take credit for someone else's doing.

I didn't actually know the guy was IAC. Christ. Remove sand from vagina, please.

Sanitized chatlog:

Just skimming through BoB's killboards to get a feel for what's going on, I saw this (http://killboard.net/details/143935/).  :-o Anyone got infoz? I don't have the time to browse through scrapheap-challenge :(

As i understand it, he got jumped by a well-thought-out BoB trap, decided to tank instead of try to escape, and got popped (along with some other ships that tried to help him out.  The post I saw from RA about it said something like "We make mistake.  It no happen again."

Russkies though they were smart, ambushing RISE forces sieging  their POS, little they knew entire attack was part of a plan to ambush the ambushers :mrgreen:
Moment RA forces engaged, BoB titan opened warp gate and cunning ambush become slaughterhouse. I believe 2 Carriers and one Mothership was downed.
Two days ago 6 D2 dreads were atomized, however that seems happening so frequently those days it's not worth reporting.

On FIX spy scandal:
Uhm, if RAgoon has to use spies to fight against "pet"* few orders of magnitude smaller than them, it says a lot about their fighting skills, or rather lack of thereof:P

On BE:
Birds say Goons hired BE (they're mercs after all) and at this fake drama-bomb is just a smoke screen.


*this one got teeth:P

Sun Tzu said: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.
Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy's army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.

;)

AFIAK, and rembembering Tyraxx is/was a member of the GHSC so anything he says is a lie anyway....Goonswarm Intel Service had nothing to do with the FIX FAT spy, it was a FIX pilot who decided to come over to the good guys side (my guess is was "Hey Tyraxx, I have access too the FIX POS's in FAT, how much will you bid for them?", and Tyraxx paid the ISK needed).

It was cool when I was undocking from FAT to see 3 OHGOD Caldari Dreadnoughts warping out to one of the POS's. The IAC fleet outnumbered the Goonswarm fleet though. I used about 5000 rounds of torpedo's myself and spendt 1/2 the battle AFK, just alt-tabing to rearm more torpedos.

Tyraxx also stole the carrrier I think using the same agent (while he had an IAC lockdown the system while he quickly trained "Carrier 1").

I do not know if the agent was discovered or not, I think he was, but I'm not sure. I'm sure FIX isn't sure either.


I do think it's a pity that many FIX pilots will die for BoB's and T20's mistakes.

Speaking of mistakes: The ISS Convoy scheme listed in the EVE-O news - [Img-Ackbar] or genuine stupidity?

From what I've read, FIX doesn't know who the spy/spies was/is/were/are. At least, not as of early yesterday, I haven't paid attention since then.

And anyway, the use of spies is just another form of warfare. In fact, it's often a better one since it costs less than fielding ridiculous numbers of capships and can actually turn a profit if the spies are good at quietly funneling assets away.

It's also amusing to see how, even on this neutral board, people aligned with either side, either in fact or in mind, are utterly convinced they're the ones winning.

I'm aligned with the coalition and I don't think we are going to win.

The reason? Its a massive clusterfuck :)

Agreed. I think we're just going to have a giant stalemate for a long time. The current target has had its ass against the wall several times before, for extended periods of time, without breaking down into the cascade failure the leadership is expecting.

But that just means more shooty for me. :)

POS warfare is too inherently stalematey. Maybe the deadlock will be broken with Revelations 2.0, but the devs really haven't given out sufficient information to make that call yet.

This was too good not to post here:


This is from FIX director forums.

Holy shit, I actually just fell out of my chair laughing.

Are they an RP guild with some sort of futuristic church cult leaning or was he serious about all the God and Jesus coming down to help him in an MMO stuff?

He is serious.

We will definitely be using that post in our future newbie recruiting drives.

That is friggin great.

Just know this.... God can't save any of you when my gank crew rolls through ;)

This was apparently culled from the EveO boards. He's a total carebear nutball.


Oh yeah, and that sound you just heard? That's the morale of every ganker in the coalition, as well as every single Goon, reaching orbit.

FIGHT LIKE JESUS WOULD FIGHT.

This guy missed his calling. He should have been in Darkon the movie.

Are non-wardecced freighters now being ganked regularly in empire?  What brought this on, exactly?

Uhh the change that made freighters drop loot when asploded?

Well, seeing how it takes 20 battleships to suicide-gank a freighter, I figure even 3-4 battleships as escort would throw in enough of a delay for Concord to finish off the suiciders before the freighter explodes, no?

Not if you have a hauler buddy in a newbie-corp or neutral corp scooping the loot in a WCS-equipped industrial. He should be able to scoop n' scoot before being blown up, despite the kill rights.

Indy size: 17k to 30k cargo hold.  Freighter size:  900k cargo hold.  It would require 25+ industrials to get everything.  I guess you could have a few haulers around to pick up the best stuff, but most of the time the freighter would be full of T2 modules, T2 ships, and/or minerals, and all of that stuff is valuable.  Maybe the 20-25 battleship pilots that are required to suicide to bring a freighter down can immediately jump into haulers and go collect the booty, but likely it'll just be a free-for-all for everyone in local to come get the free loots and ISK's.

And what I meant was, the escorts could either shield-boost the freighter, repair the freighter, or provide decoy targets for some of the drones attacking the freighter, thus lowering DPS on the freighter long enough for Concord to finish off the attackers.  The 20 attacking battleships only have a limited time to pull the attack off, because Concord spawns right away and jams/blows them up; even a small reduction in their DPS will mean failure. 

I spose they could bring 200 battleships and 30 haulers and take the freighter out with an alpha strike, and then loot it, shrug.  Empire fleet "warfare."

That is definitely true, it will be a very long war.  But BoB didn't pay for the towers, I know that for an absolute certainty, the claim they did was apparently another bit of social engineering to go with the rest of the betrayal (they were defueled by the alt of an apparent goon, and The Mittani takes public credit for arranging it), just like the claim that they had been allowed to run out of fuel through incompetence that starts that thread.  It's definitely driven home the lesson I've been harping about for weeks (the crappy quality of our security when it comes to who has POS roles).  Ideally, we'd have the capability of giving POS permissions on a case-by-case basis, or at least restricting them when the POS was strategic rather than economic.  Having people who just were setting up industrial or field-base POS able to turn the tide of a battle like this is a major flaw in Eve.

5-6 billion worth of POS is not exactly chump change, but the loss of momentum is of greater concern.  However, IAC should really think about who they've jumped in bed with (did you ever wonder who it was that paid for Prohibition 1?).  Having allies for whom betrayal and grief is not just a means, but a desirable goal in and of itself....  Up until this, FIX respected IAC, we saw them as okay guys that the tides of politics had happened to put on the other side of the battlefield.  The "you're just jealous you didn't do it to us first" attitude displayed by the IAC posters in that thread will come back to haunt them someday.

As for the slightly over-the-top rhetoric about the betrayal on our internal forums, no, we're not some bunch of RP-ers.  However, we do believe that even though the game is only a game, the relationships inside of it are real, and in-game betrayal is as much a testament of character as any other.  If you're playing a game of Monopoly, and you find out the "banker" is cheating, do you make a judgement about him/her as a person that goes beyond the game?

This guy came to us whining about what assholes AAA were, worked his way into a position of trust, then used that trust to give the goonies/IAC by betrayal what they would have had great difficulty taking by other means.  The meaninglessness of what he gave away only underscores the weakness of character that caused him to do it.

--Dave

I'd do it to your corp in one second flat, WAR is WAR, it's a pretend starship game and you can pretend to be a spy in it.  The whole in-game actions reflect RL personality argument is a crock of shit and always has been.  Praying to God to help you because your corp is about to get their arse kicked is just as valid a playstyle as going undercover with an alt, I'd personally chose the 2nd playstyle just because I'm fairly sure God has better things to do.

Stepping back and putting on my "designer" hat for a moment, you have to admit this: Everyone in this fight *cares* about it in a way that no operator-created content could ever hope to inspire.  Even the goons are being seduced by it, if in a very "dark side" sort of way.

--Dave

Agreed. I've always enjoyed a good spy or conspiracy story. If I can act one out on the grand, meaningless expanse of the internets, awesome. It's like being the center of a little novel that I write with my own wits. And it's something you can't get in most other MMO contexts, too. :-D


This is what the Biz people call "stickiness". Or "barrier to exit".

Or, with CCP's present case, "Would you like to stay for lunch? ..."

Its the only way to go. You can only whack a foozle so many times before it becomes old. If you give me a reason to whack a foozle, like helping support my PVP, then I'll do it forever. "Meaningful PVP"... Only experienced it in a few games and Eve is one of them.

It seems that the coalition just destroyed the BoB capital shipyards, complete with pre-natal titan inside.  Quite a few attacking titans down, as was inevitable.

Gotta be a blow for Band of "You're all dead, you just don't know it yet" Brothers to have it driven home that, if their enemies can stick to it, there's nothing that they can't take.

I honestly thought that there was no way that this would happen: the sheer volume of defenders and their titans, motherships etc seemed too huge.  The lag seems to have been horrible for just about everyone, too.

Edit: The attention of the massive cap fleet the coalition brought has turned onto the Bob supercaps.  Presumably there are going to be tens of thousands of dollars of damage done tonight to all concerned unless someone scarpers, soon.

Further Edit: Goodness knows what's happening.  Seleene (shudder with repulsion) is trying to claim that all the coalition dreads involved and left will die.  Sounds like "Go! Please! Or we'll start trying!".  It'll be a while before anyone knows, I imagine.

Apparently you had some nasty friendly fire incident:D
No Titan under fire, nor a single MS dead on BoB side at the time of writing.


This obviously might change later.

Joe, you really need to calm down with the "propaganda!  propaganda!" stuff.  I edited that bit out fully ten minutes before you replied.  And when it was there I said "this is people getting over-excited.. titans don't die"

Edit:  With the servers stuffed, I gather the order to log off for now has been given.  I wonder what will happen when the north-american primteime comes round in a couple of hours?

I wonder if the dreads attacking the POS managed to log or were destroyed. Initial count suggest around 40 "missing" dreads:)

Lag is awful and reports are fragmented, but on one side you've got a dead POS which probably contained a Titan under construction (60-75B, not even default insurance because it's not completed), on the other you have a huge number of coalition capitals killed.  Reports that 3 coalition titans were killed (only default insurance of 40% since they can't be docked, so roughly 40-50B each) and an unknown but apparently large number of dreadnoughts (roughly 600M-1B each after insurance, depending on fittings).  Reports that one of the BoB titans might have been killed as well (which have been denied inside the BoB camp, and they have never tried to spin that way internally).  And probably a few hundred lesser ships on each side, call it 20-40B.

If losses on the attacking side are as bad as indicated, this would not be the kind of victory the coalition can afford, the objective was accomplished but the cost was incredible (we're talking hundreds of billions, equivalent to tens of thousands of real dollars).  And we've established once and for all that the servers, high-end and beefed up as they are, cannot support fleet fights of this scale.  The really interesting question is what CCP does about reimbursement, normally in such laggy fights they reimburse ship losses, *but* they have a policy of not reimbursing super-capitals under any conditions.  If they don't reimburse anything, on the grounds that everyone knew this was going to be a lagfest and jumped in anyway, the coalition war machine is pretty much wrecked for the next month or so even if they have the funds on hand to replace all those ships (takes a lot of time to build that many capital ships).  If they reimburse everything but the titans, the battle goes to BoB but not by such a crushing margin.  If they reimburse everything but the titan that was still building, it's a defeat for BoB.  It's complicated by the fact that many of those capitals did not die to lag per se, but because they were deliberately jumped in without support to assault the POS (and indeed were able to kill it, which argues against the lag theory of reimbursement).

And overall, the fact that who wins or loses in this battle will be decided by how CCP handles the reimbursement is a major problem for CCP and the Eve community.

--Dave

Titans died? What?

I thought everyone believed, up until now, that the bastards were nigh-all invincible? Or are we talking about the titan pilots experiencing client crashes, and thus highly vulnerable uncontrolled titans?

I cannot confirm any titan loss or kill tbh. Though with this lag it might have been possible.

I'd be amazed if titans died.  I'd also be amazed if there was any reimbursements.  Everyone came to that fight knowing what would happen.

And even the upper end of Mahrin's estimates, which seem way more than other reports, would still surely be worthwhile to stop another well-nigh indestructible ship appearing, not to mention proving that any system, anywhere, can be attacked.

Edit:  Joe's right, I suppose if a titan were to die, these would be the conditions for it.

Alternate version:
Somewhere over two dozen coalition dreads down (plus a handful of carriers) - mostly T1 fitted. No Titans. RA took the brunt of the losses, but has replacement dreads cooking already.

BoB: Down one titan-under-construction (i.e. no insurance) plus one capship yard. And one aura of omnipotence.

Yeah I'd go with that version from what I was reading, crazy lag, I was one gate away when I got popped.

Idon't get what you're saying about the coalition train being derailed by these losses, Mahrin.  I mean, I think that the capital losses (although more t1 fitted) will be higher than you're suggesting, but these are spread across the biggest alliances in the game.  And RA are infamously rich, thanks to the complexes.

Edit: I meant to say, the screenies from the various staging sites showed hundreds of caps.  Like, hundreds.  And people were complaining that only a small percentage got through the lag to reach the target.

My best friend from highschool pilots one of the goonfleet dreads. I'm at work, on IRC, here's what he tells me -

               
(him) ffff
(me) ?
(him) crazy stuff about to go down in eve
(him) there has to be like 200+ caps on our side
(me) yeah? secret shit?
(me) how did that happen
(me) big change from last week when you guys were in the pos shields and iraf was tanking 25 dreads
(him) shitload of alliances, plan in to pop a bob titan being made
(him) ha yeah
(me) oh that'll be nice. is it still opsec?
(him) i'm sure
(me) system coming out of reinforced soon?
(me) er, station
(him) still setting up think it's like 20-30 mins till out of reinforced               
(me) oh that'll be rad
(him) hopefully the game doesnt just instashit itself
(him) well, looks like we aborted another titan
(him) the screen never loaded for me but oh well
(me) hahah
(me) you being there means that one of their guys had a black screen too
(him) yeah, i'd say maybe 1/4 of our fleet was able to actually load
(me) they need to fix that shit. how many people did they have in system
(me) guess you got out alive?
(him) not really
(him) I tried to jump out, and it took all my cap away but i'm still in the hostile system and all the enemy dreads just loaded on my screen
(me) haha fuck
(him) show 400 in local now but who knows how many there actually were
(him) something like 300 ready to jump in

The cherry on top: The titan-under-construction was about three days away from launch.
Ouch.

Edit: Seleene claims coalition losses closer to 50, for the little that's worth.
Edit2: vv If that's true, it couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke. :D

Here's the numbers from the map in the three main battle systems.

F-TE1T 198 ships exploded in last 24 hours (124 last hour). Pilots last 30 minutes 405.
K-6K16 164 ships exploded in last 24 hours (102 last hour). Pilots last 30 minutes 152.
D-3GIQ 58  ships exploded in last 24 hours (37 last hour).Pilots last 30 minutes 65.


Apparently, DigitalCommunist (BoB guy) lost a Nyx.

D2 View: http://freenet-homepage.de/winchip2/2007.03.29.21.25.25.jpg
BoB View: http://dl.eve-files.com/media/0703/f-t_battle.jpg

Are all those dots ships or are some of those just drones and other stuff?

I've never played Eve, but I have to imagine that walking into BoB's lair and successfully kicking them in the nuts is a victory for the other side, almost entirely regardless of what it cost.

Yeah, but now the catch is whether  there were nuts to be kicked. Newest spin is that POS in question was producting nothing of value in which case it wouldn't be kick in the nuts ut rather running into minefield and beingblown up in the middle.

Rectangles are ships, X'es are drones.

http://static.griefwatch.net/gallery/51b1a0a94578e49d68aa4b90a7f3d6e1.jpg
http://static.griefwatch.net/gallery/87a96d71d6268caafe126831a425b12e.jpg
http://static.griefwatch.net/gallery/8eb26c01f33d4d1467bdd941104588a7.jpg

Dunno if this last one is from the battle.
http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/6541/hello2ad5.jpg

Well, final tally seems to be 57 enemy capital ships (50 dreads 7 carriers) with no capital losses on our side, conventional ship proportions are nearly as bad (all the systems on the regular routes were heavily camped by affiliate alliances, which is why the capitals had to jump in without support).  As for what was in the array: Nobody who knows seems to be saying (but indications are that the RKK leadership seemed pretty pissed when the POS went down).  Not long ago it would be impossible to conceal if it were empty or not, as it took hundreds of trips to load the components, but for the last few months it's been possible to unload freighters in space (from GFC's, but you can't load in space until the next major patch) so once horrendous logistics ops are now pretty easy.

No word on enemy supercapitals, so those reports may have been just over-enthusiastic rumor.  Anyway, it's by far the biggest and most costly battle Eve has ever seen.

--Dave

I can't imagine a supercapital blowing up without the mail getting priority and/or being spammed everywhere with much gloating.

This is false. The system was capped at 400 ships. No more ships could enter the system. The coalition claims to have had 1000 ships.

SHC has the system cap as 700.

Any kind of cap is pretty damn lame. That could totally mess up the already screwed up PoS war mechanics. Want to take/defend a system? Just fill it up to capacity, no chance for retaliation!

The people in the EVE-O thread claim CCP anticipated the battle and put in the 400 cap so it wouldn't crash the node. The "198 ships exploded in last 24 hours (124 last hour). Pilots last 30 minutes 405." numbers I took from the map at the time seem to back this up.

I've checked into it, the cap was 700.  BoB could have crammed the system full, there were 400-500 friendly pilots in neighbouring systems, plus at least 100 non-BoB capitals on standby.  They apparently chose to keep all but actual BoB pilots out (except for about half the capitals), blockading in nearby systems.  And apparently it never actually reached the 700 cap, the attackers chose not to use the Titan jump-bridge to bring in support ships with the capitals, and about half those capitals never finished their jump in-system.

Hmm....  I wonder, if BoB puts another POS back up on the same site, is it going to be wtfpwning late arrivals?

--Dave

The claim that there was nothing but a dread in that Pos is pretty lol: I thought that they would claim this as soon as I heard the attack was going to go in, and BoB alts started that before te pos popped.

The funny thing is that, even if it is true - and there is always that chance - the reaction on the SA boards is that it's hilarious, and that if it's true then they just get to go in again.

Mahrin saying that BoB deliberately kept numbers low is fist-bitingly funny, though.  These are the logged-off tian killers, after all: they don't play LV e-honor games. They did what most people who had advanced notice of such a tactical advantage would: kept ship numbers at a proportion of the cap which they thought would let them deal with a slow feed of ships.  They just thought that there would be less of a commitment to do it and damn the losses, through a second unsupported cap jump-in.  Far better to churn through the enemy a few at a time in a Stirling Bridge engagement, they thought, than have them find they can't attack at all and force CCP to remove their protection next time.

One thing for certain: This battle resolves nothing.  At best, both sides have taken a large hit to their materiel, of approximately equal scale.  If BoB actually did pull a fast one and that POS was a decoy or contained a lesser ship, we'll never know for certain (unless another Titan hits the field in a few days).  57 capitals are not replaced overnight in spite of the rhetoric, neither is a capital shipyard.  Neither side seems very demoralized.

--Dave

I don't have a dog in this fight, but you're making me root for the other side.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xiUQ1soqQQ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xiUQ1soqQQ)
Footage! of what I wish eve combat really looked like.

Hey, give me a break, I'm the *only* one on my side here.

--Dave

EDIT: You know, I've gone back and re-read everything I wrote, and I don't see the cheerleading.  I'm just trying to report how things look from this side of it.  BoB could have put more numbers in and saturated the system, I didn't speculate as to why but merely pointed out the fact they didn't.  If it was a "Stirling Bridge" strategem, I would think they'd have left less headroom, but does it matter?  BoB lost a cap shipyard and won't say even to their own members what was in it, the coalition lost a whole crapload of standard capitals and says they'll replace it out of petty cash by tomorrow.  Somehow, I think neither side of it is being completely honest.

I don't know any more than what I've been reading on SC/SA etc, but RA and D2 are both reputed to keep very large (in the case of RA, several per cap-capable pilot) reserves of dreads.  I'd not repeat the numbers per pilot that RA are alleged to have in reserve, because it sounds ridiculously high, but it can only be explained by, oh, I dunno, several years of massive and long-term, pre-nerf complex-exploiting :-o

I imagine we'll start getting some half-reliable info on what happened today.

Linky (http://myeve.eve-online.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=1407&tid=7)


Well it was fun while it lasted but it appears the Coalition don't have a backbone or a capital fleet anymore.  :roll:

tbh I love how Molle speaks. He doesn't care if he comes out as an asshole or an arrogant prick.

And Mahrin please don't stop writting updates from your POV, they help put the big picture together. I for one enjoy them. But what do I know, I'm just a bob fanboi  :-o

I totally agree.  It's not just that I'm interested to see how someone Bob-aligned (Note that I didn't call Fix slaves, renters, bobalts or anything else there!) rationalises the same events: I also pick up a lot of stuff on big-ship stuff at the same time.

It's going to be funny watching the next news item about the war - "OK, ignore what we said last time - this time we destroyed all of their capital ships for sure!"

If they have a reserve of dreads, fine -- but now they've dipped rather heavily into it, which means they can't afford victories like that too often. If BoB lost a fetal Titan, same deal.

Dreads -- even if you got all the ISK in the world -- take time to cook, and need to cook in targetable structures -- and the longer the war goes on, the more expensive each replacement dread is going to be.

I suspect the best way to find out who really came out on top is to watch the events of the next few weeks.

My personal thought was: In terms of morale, it was a pretty big victory for the Coalition. Doesn't matter whether a Titan was cooking or not -- they'll believe it, and it'll boost morale and give them a sense of victory. That's pretty important. In terms of ISK or actual strategic positioning --  if a Titan was cooking, it was a wash in terms of ISK and probably a slight BoB victory in terms of positioning (IF they manage to take advantage of coalition's losses). If a Titan wasn't cooking, clear BoB win in terms of cash and positioning.

I've not an industrialist - again I defer to comic shop guy - but I'm sure dreads can build in a low-sec factory slot.  Building more, if "you got all the ISK in the world"*, is safe.  And they insure, which matters a lot more when you're doing a suicide op like this, fitted with T1 stuff.

*cf D2 and complex-kings RA

Yup. As long as you have access to a low sec factory station and enough cash/raw materials, you can churn out dreads (& carriers) until the cows come home.
Yup. A fully-insured T1-fitted dread works out (very) roughly to about a 1billion isk loss...which is a lot of cash, but significantly less than a T2 or officer fitted dread (which tend to be uninsured as you don't plan to lose them) or a supercapital loss.

In my corp (industrialists and PVPers), we had been asked (a few weeks ago) to build 10 dreads for a mid sized coalition alliance. Imagine that each of the coalitions mid sized alliances have deals like these, and then throw in what the biggest players are producing and it has to be a little disheartening to be a BoB. I saw a spreadsheet about the number of Goonies capital pilots (kind of a time table) and that was pretty ridiculous.

Bob somehow just has to keep this at a stalemate and keep blowing up ships. I think the longer it goes on the worse off they are, and all the pressure of being sieged for so long stops the game from being fun. But if the coalition truely wavers they are done.

STAY ZE COURSE NOOBS! :)

Wish I'd invested in minerals right before this; I imagine the price of trit is going to go through the roof again.

I was just thinking the cost of money should start going up fairly soon. Now might be the time to sell your gamecards.

He's telling truth. At the time coalition ships started to bridge into the F-T system the bulk of BoB support fleet was in the "blockade system" next door. They went there 20 minutes earlier to keep coalition support fleet of similar size from entering the shipyard system from what I hear/read in the battle summary thread. I figure with number of capital ships they had in the system BoB command saw it a sensible tactic, as that would mean their own dreads would be less lagged while shooting coalition capital ships, meaning more kills before shipyard death. I.e. nothing to do with e-honor, but simple calculation. It's not like support ships are of much use when most of them can be wiped out with single DD.

Some complain about supposed stealth population cap, but it's more sensible to chalk that up to lag combined with titan bridge mechanics -- titan bridge lasts for 1 minute or so, and the lag in F-T is reported to be anywhere between 10-30 minutes. Which could mean once the initial coalition force entered the system, things became too laggy to squeeze more people in -- the bridge to destination would no longer exist by the time destination node was ready to receive ships trying to jump. A very different situation from earlier attack on LV titan shipyard, where attackers used regular jump gate, something that never goes away even if it takes hour or more to get through.

SirMolle admitted losing Leviatan class titan....

...then he posted fake screenies to prove it :evil:

On April 1st, no less.

In another part of EVE (system P-2TTL in Pure Blind, northern area of the map) there was apparently large battle between D2 + allies and MC/YouWhat forces. Multiple motherships and a handful of capital ships were used together with lots of regular ships. Eventually D2 withdrew, having lost 5 capital ships and 60+ battleships. Losses on MC side were large number of automated fighter drones (quite expensive) and few battleships.

Re the titan thing, I for one am happy to admit that I am no wiser, after several days, as to what happened to whom, nor how.  I would be unsurprised to find that there had been no titan in the PoS.  I would be only marginally less surprised to find that there had been.  Evil Thug, Molle, the Mittani and more have all said both that there was and that there was not, some on April 1st.  I await some masterstroke from GIA, or some extra DD from BoB, with no real clue as to which.

 :|

Molle posted today the POS was empty and the OTHER POS in the system just finished building a mothership.

Ugh.

What's Goonswawm doing these days? They seem to have dissapered off the galactic war map.

Yes, but he would say that, wouldn't he?

And GS have probably been absent due to their directorate having been at the meet in Boston.

Hippoking from Goonswarm confirmed that it was empty. He said that he knew from a Mittani post on the goons' forums. lol is all I can say atm :)

From what I've pieced together, it appears the Coalition has admitted:

1) They lost 50+ dreads to blow up a POS that was -- as it now turns out -- cooking a Mothership.
2) They blew up the wrong POS.

Um, net win for BoB there. I'm sure it's the Devs fault. :)

Not the devs' fault, at least as far as SA forum opinion goes.  The very latest post in the relevant thread as I write is, for instance:

I kind of expected this.  BoB was acting the way I would have expected if the whole thing was a ruse, especially with the public TS meltdown by RKK leadership when the POS went down, which was *very* out of character.  When they held off on saying what was in the POS, refusing to say anything at all, I figured the highest probability was that another shoe was going to drop in a few days.  But speculating publicly about it would just have screwed it up, or increased the embarassment if I was wrong and there had been something in it.

Just goes to show, a spy you know about can be as much of an asset for you as for the enemy.

--Dave

I should have posted that in green. You know, whole Band of Developers? BoB only wins cuz Devs cheat? It was kind of a little dig at that.

I'll betcha if BoB manages to win this war, nobody will ever bother fighting them again.  I mean they can win completely on the up-and-up through organizational brilliance, and thousands of sore losers are just going to say that nobody beats the developer's pet alliance.  And thanks to the company's utterly buttfucked and stupid response to actual developer interference, way too many people would end up believing it.

Both answers are right.

If BoB wins no one will fight them in organized conventional warfare again because of their strengths in PvP and logistics. This is as big as opposing force as you'll ever get with the south east + North all fighting BoB. If numbers and total sizes of alliance can't beat BoB, no one else ever will, beyond BoB imploding from within. And I'd say BoB will only implode *after* everyone else has givin up, and it will for a lack of targets and boredom.

'Corse, one of the many reasons BoB GOT to be so strong in the first place is developer influence. Even taken away (and T20 *rejoined* them at least once already before getting exposed *again*) from them now it gave them a boost other players did not, and never will now, get. The amount of power and wealth they get from being givin Delve comes from that. 

I think BoB will be forgotten, along with everything else about this game, a lot sooner than you imagine.  What's the difference between e-peen and "building reputation within a game"?  In my opinion, only those who are way too involved within EVE give a damn.

I think this war is happening so that the accumulated wealth (in the form of stockpiled minerals) gets taken out of the game, with CCP controlling both sides, driving them to keep at it until resources are depleted.

BoB really can't win, or the 0.0 game is basically Toast. 0.0 is already pretty retarded as it is with barrier to entry and how xenophobic (is that the word I'm looking for?) it makes the people in 0.0 already. In the past two years, the only new blood in 0.0 is Goonfleet and if the requirement to gain a foothold in that area of game play is a pre-existing community of tens of thousands? /shrug

If BoB can beat off most of the 0.0 universe at once, then what chance do any of the individual alliances have against them? It's already been shown time and again BoB can dismantle single 0.0 alliances at will. Pretty much why the whole deal is going down to begin with, if not Ra+Goons+D2+Friends now, then who and when?

Theoretical numbers and total sizes mean very little if the forces in question are completely unorganized. Northern alliances have been left on their own to bleed themselves dry in outer BoB space for something like two months now, waiting for the promised second front that just keeps failing to materialize. At this rate by the time this second front actually happens (if ever) there will be no first front left.

When half of the "as big force as you'll ever get" doesn't even bother to show up, it's small wonder there's no results to speak of. It doesn't mean BoB cannot be beaten with these numbers or even with smaller ones perhaps. But it will take people who both know what they are doing and are willing to follow some sort of centralized command with the clue. Quite like BoB itself.

The hell are you talking about? I know Goonfleet has been sending forces into Querious for the past two weeks (and not accomplishing dick), and KOS/TCF have been raiding Feythabolis the whole time, with, last I heard, two stations taken.

What did you think the second front was going to be - Delve?

I don't know where it was going to be. Given results so far it just doesn't seem to actually be anywhere seeing how BoB seem to have all time in the world to play whack-a-mole with people trying to do something in their space.

Btw iif what I read elsewhere is correct Goonfleet is already pulling out of Querious. confirm/deny?

I will neither confirm nor deny, as that would concern current fleet movements.

Well, they have been training our new generation of FC's, so that's *something*.

--Dave

I was never in the V phase of F13's existence, but I think I gather that some of you would be delighted to hear that Light Darkness lost a faction-fitted carrier last night during a GF curb-stomping of YouWhat's battleship fleet.

Ah, fair enough. People who aren't in Goonswarm afaik talked about it on IRC and in-game channels, so thought it's been made public to some extent, sorry.

This, maybe? (http://pewpew.info/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=22105) Good ole LD is in CoW now. :( I was... surprised to see him in a shared intel channel.

Hahaha. That's a pretty good tactic.

Well, this hasn't been updated in a while so I figured I'd throw a few words in: Last weekend saw -YW- finish reclaiming Cloud Ring and they're now encroaching on FLA and D2 space in the far northwest, supported by MC.  I think BoB took back one of the stations taken by GoonSwarm a month ago in the far southeast, and the invasion of Querious has pretty much fizzled out, there was a series of battles in 9CG in which the north lost 6 dreads and all the Razor POS were removed (again).  IRON and PURE have pretty much disappeared from the south to deal with threats closer to home (the MC/-YW- offensive for IRON, and some ex-ASCN backlash for PURE), which leaves Razor and Morus Mihi plus odds and ends all that's left of the enemy in Q (which are annoying, but not a territorial threat).  The southern coalition is conspicuously absent, unknown if they are staging for a renewed offensive in the far south or if they're going to redeploy along with the Goon expeditionary force in the north.

Generally, the tide seems to have shifted from the southwest to the northwest, with the coalition on the defensive.

--Dave

Well, from what I hear...

Gunboat Diplomacy, a BoB vassal, has quit and retreated to empire from somewhere. Not sure where. I think Fountain? YW/MC are pushing into Fade, which looks pretty bad for D2/IRON's continued commitment. In the south, Feythabolis is more or less a gigantic battleground with BoB renters getting endlessly griefed by coalition gangs while the Reds have taken control of most of the complexes as far out as Delve. A few stations have been taken in Feyth, but not a huge amount of progress. BoB sends a big fleet once-daily into the southeastern area, wins a smashing victory somewhere, then returns home while the griefing and general disorder continues unabated around them.

It's looking like D2 will pull back to try to defend against MC while the southern forces push into Feythabolis and begin displacing the renters there.

Edit: Thing is, nothing huge or exciting has happened on either side since the last major engagement. A progression of trends and a shifting of tactics on either side, mostly. Two opponents circling each other.

Would have been Querious, but they're still there (FIX is currently helping them firm up control of H74 after a AAA incursion).  Warped Mining left their alliance, and it was never the largest or most militant (little capital strength).

Yeah, in general nothing conclusive is happening right now, the north is a shambles and the southeast is the Eastern Front, too much territory and not enough entrenched defenses left after the ASCN war for any conclusive actions.  All three alliances are fighting in non-critical turf with considerably less than their full strength, after the wet firecracker in F-T (well, mostly, D2 seems to be suffering battle fatigue and isn't really making much of a showing even in the north from what I've heard, except for one incident where they Doomsday Deviced their own fleet).  All the forces involved in that except BoB seem to be stepping back and figuring out what should come next.  Not that surprising, it was a *massive* effort for all parties.  Can't do that every week.

--Dave

Pretty obvious tactics, really - fight head to head against BoB's horrifically broken multiple Titan + fighterswarm fleets*, or cut off their remaining revenue stream and bleed them to death?

Complexes - either shut down due to a 'bug', or being contested.
T2 market (previously a good moneyspinner due to all of BoB's BPOs) - in freefall.

What's left to do? Harass the serf alliances until they go back to mining veld in Empire, taking their multiple billions in ISK of rent with them.

*No, not bitterness. Titans are stupidly overpowered right now, and as force multipliers they get even more broken the more you get. A nerf is pending** if CCP has any sense whatsoever, and I suspect that fighters will be next on that list.

**Probably after the first BoB fleet gets double-doomsday'd. This is bitterness - see the difference?. :D

Nice spin Sim :-D

RA got your whole offensive where sun doesn't shine and are whoring every plex they can find, so let's call that war effort and pretend everything good.
You know, it might have made some sense, except that you don't burn spent iskies/hour of playing. To hurt BoB financially, you would have to do some damage.
Unfortutnately, with north being bloody mess, RA uninterested and your general lack of capital fleet, you are unable to inflict noticeable loses on BoB side.

Oh and stop whining about Titans. They are anti-blob device, so I suggest you stop exploiting game mechanics with cheap ass lag 'tactics' (newbie frigs spammage ftl) and get yourself a smart FC and fleet that can follow his orders.

Joe, look at Mahrin's posts and then your own.  I disagree with his interpretation in some substantial areas, but he's calm, informative and I'm always keen to see his view on things, for the same reason that I sometimes read the Independent or the Guardian instead of the Telegraph.

Your posts, however, are just a mass of name-calling unsupported assertions.  Not to mention being bloody hard to make head or tale of.

And, re your one, semi-substantive point, CCP have clearly dropped the ball on Titans.  Yes, with officer fittings, rigs and the like they come out at horrendous cost (Evil Thug reckons about 120billion+).  But then you have a superb logistics platform that can sit inside PoS shields, pop one metre outside, remotely doomsday, head back in, and face no threat because even if you do happen to have a bunch of dreads sitting around with heavy nos's on them and ready to bump, the cap recharge rate is about a minute, they'e immune to ewar, etc....

An invincible (once built, I admit) ship with an I-win button is too much.  I actually agree that Goonfleet's ability to bring large numbers of new players to the table made combatting them too hard due to lag issues.  The mere fact that they have brought lots of new players to the game is not something to be punished, of course, but the lag issue had to be dealt with in the short term.  Otherwise, as Mahrin has mentioned Fix doing, there are ways to combat such tactics by adapting and copying the best features.

Whether it was designed with this in mind is arguable, but the DD is one way of dealing with the lag issue, and I think that when GF work out how to use many fleets in many places the bob renters in particular will be in a bad place.

But the platform should be vulnerable.  It should be a risky manuevre that lets you win a fleet battle in seconds by committing two or three titans to create untankable hellblasts.  Evil Thug shouldn't be happily swanning around battlefields in his titan looting wrecks, ffs.

You'll notice my examples are not Bob ones.  All titans are unbalanced.

Edit: spelink

They're not anti-blob devices, they're anti-everything devices.

I'm sorry, but an EWar immune, jump capable, incredibly tough, etc, etc. capital ship that can regen its own cap from zero to full in under twenty seconds* is broken to begin with. Adding the doomsday device, jump arrays, etc. on top of that moves it from 'broken' to 'horrifically broken and needs to be fixed ASAP'. Especially as they can cloak as well.

Currently the only potential way to kill a titan in fleet combat is a couple of hundred nos-battleships gimped with a DDD tank and a bunch of dreads - and then the side with the titan will just use their other titan to gate in an interceptor-with-fighter-escort blob to tear the nos-ships apart.

Kill the interceptors? With what - the support fleet which got wiped out by the DDD in the first place?

Titans will get nerfed. Fighters are probably going to get nerfed. Alliances with Titans should be trying to steer the changes via discussion instead of saying "LOL learn 2 play" and then acting surprised after CCP cripples them.

*Not exaggerating - a fully officer-fitted & rigged Avatar piloted by a top-end pilot with the right implants can go from empty to full cap in 15 seconds. That's quicker than the cycle time of a heavy energy destabiliser, for those folllowing along at home.

I haven't logged my main in for a while (been having a blast on my alt with an empire war against some carebears :-) ) but I understand that MC is currently attacknig FLA space [Deklein] I've also heard rumours of the odd Bobbit with them as well but no mention of YW

While FLA were massively invovled in the cloud ring offensive (dont ask me what happened, I missed the whole thing) and while it makes tactical sence for MC to want to base out of FLA space (slap bang between IRON and D2) they did just manage to bring another group to the party who wasnt previously attending (or at least FLA leadership has never, to my knowledge, organised any offensive against BOB-space)

Holy fuck.  I gotta get me one of those.

.
.
.
IRL.

Before the -YW- conversion, FLA was heavily represented in the normal fleet component of the forces sieging ED- and 9CG.  I'd say they were 70-80 ships of the 450 ship enemy fleets we were seeing back then.  Not sure if they had any capitals on scene.

--Dave

If it's the empire war I'm thinking of, then the 'carebears' inflicted a lot more damage, in terms of ISK, than they received.  8-)

Heh.

From the current SHC 'Nerf Titans' thread (http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/viewtopic.php?t=4535&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=150), posted by....a MC pilot. Even the people getting the most benefit from them at the moment thinks that they are stupidly overpowered and need to be nerfed.

This isn't Eve-O. Let's keep it that way.

Anyhow. In my mind, the problem isn't really what happens when you have one Titan in play - a single DD has a fairly long cycle time, but most battleships/well-tanked BCs can take a single DD. Yes, it wipes out support. Hopefully you have more in-system and can get to it despite the crippling lag that fleet battles seem to cause. Double DDs are ridiculous. They can pretty much wipe out any BS fleet that isn't specifically tanked to handle double DDs, and that makes them extraordinarily vulnerable to anything else.

I don't even want to fathom triple DDs, which are more or less inevitable as time progresses.

Oh yeah, and let's not forget that, even without the DD, the jump-bridge they provide to bypass gatecamps is exceedingly valuable for getting a large support fleet into a warzone without it getting popped due to lag.

MC doesn't have a titan themselves, and they are currently on receiving end of D2 titan. So no, they aren't exactly these who get the most benefit.

On the other hand people who do own one and do get benefit (like Evil Thug in that very thread) are quite outspoken against the nerfs. Which isn't surprising really, just a bit different picture than what you are painting.  :-)

You also don't really see D2 people ask for titan nerf, while at it. With very few exceptions the division between opinions is clear -- these who have titans want them to stay the way they are, these who don't have them demand a nerf.

From my understanding of the situation Titan's (with a pilot at the helm) are virtually impossible to kill.  As time goes on the Titan numbers are going to increase and that will lead to a major nerf, it just will. 

I feel sorry for those that have invested so much energy in obtaining a Titan but with solar systems that currently can't support fleet battles above 450 ships, a single ship that can kill a fleet of 200 with virtually no risk to itself isn't going to be a popular item or even a positive factor for the game in the long term.

The war's going to drag on for a while which suits me fine.

Probably yes, though Evil Thug in that SHC thread makes interesting point -- current POS warfare is almost strictly capital ship game. Bringing battleships or something smaller is literally bringing knife to the gun fight with titans around, and that can be considered bad... but alternatively if CCP manages to succeed with their plan to give smaller gangs some meaningful goals in territory warfare, then it could as well lead to something different -- current POS warfare limited to capital ships just like it is at the moment, but at the same time smaller ships still get to play meaningful role, just operating on their own rather than cram few hundred of support + capitals into single system in order to have fight. That would indirectly diminish role of titans and their DD, because there wouldn't be large blobs of regular ships for them to nuke, and the capitals can shrug off the DD pretty well.

POS warfare is the root cause of blobbing anyway - you have fleets of moderately expensive capital ships (dreads) which are very vulnerable when in siege mode.

Well-fitted medium+ POSes all-but-require dreads to bring down.

System sovereignty is determined by POS numbers.

So defenders place as many 'death star' POSes as they can, which require dreads to kill. If the attack brings X dreads, it will take Y minutes of those dreads being sitting ducks in siege mode to bring down a POS. Bring 2X dreads, and it takes Y/2. Bring 4X dreads, and it takes Y/4, etc. And, of course, you need an escort fleet to defend your dreads from the defender's counter-attack...and if the defender has a titan or titans, you'll need reserves either in system or in a nearby system.

If CCP were serious about being anti-blob, they'd drop POS shield/armour/etc strength by at least half.

It probably isn't, we aren't a known merc corp (no we're not in Privateers) and the target was no one worth speaking of (in the 'grand scheme of things' sence anyway)

Over 33% of their members quit the corp towards the end of the war in addition to having had more ISK destroyed by us than we received so I'd say we did more damage. Plus we were getting paid to beat up on them :-)

Definitely not the same one then.  I was thinking of Privateers deccing Ivy League.

Do Privateers have a kill board? Now that would make for some interesting reading.

Privateer Killboard (http://privateer.griefwatch.net/)

I don't know how accurate most killboards are.  I know E-Uni tends to be as accurate as possible (if something isn't posted, it's most likely because the pilot was very new and didn't know how).  The Privateer KB seems to be hit or miss.  Some corps and individuals are very good about posting all KMs but a couple of corps seem to never post their loss mails.  I'm sure that's not an uncommon problem with a lot of alliances.

Privateers don't exist as single "real" entity so such board is rather meaningless. It's just a number of separate corporations which join and leave common "privateers" banner as they please, so they can get access to large amounts of empire space targets through declared alliance-level wars.

Because of this they don't also have some common kill posting policy, and it's up to each corporation and their members to post kills, losses or nothing at all. So you can expect such board be also very inaccurate...

So anything happen this weekend, or has it been status quo?

We (IAC) put a BoB transit medium POS into reinforced. I was with the force of 70 or so who went back to kill it...

...And we got there just as a BoB cap fleet that was nearly equal in size as our entire fleet arrived from pounding KOS POS's in C3. Our FC was quite good and AFIAK we only took 1 loss before escaping with our tails between our legs. Read some nice Haiku's in the chat channel.

There's not much you can DO vs 4 motherships, 40+ cap ships and a Titan 2 jumps away. They don't need a support fleet.


Miners with Attitude were kicked out of the BoB Pets because they couldn't pay the 6 billion a month BoB bill. IRON I think took the station but probably won't hold it. This is in southern Queroius, south of FIX so the logistics are probably too hard to hold it (it's next to IAC space, but 30(?)+ jumps from empire through us). The tactic of stationing cloaked raiders in MWAs Home systems apperntly was what did it, and there was little actual fighting.

I wounder who BoB wil let move in in MWA's place?

Outbreak has moved into Curse and is....taking up a lot of IAC's time (and ships).  However, it's not POS warfare, but I wonder how much BoB paid them (I know the standard denial is Outbreak only works for themselves, but nothing occurs in isolation).


The current situation appers to be stalemate, but BoB have the initative and the Coalition has lost it after LV's collapse. The BoB pets can't stop the Coalition, but the Coalition can't stop BoB if it decides to show up. If BoB can force D2+friends out of the war, they win because the'll be able to concentrate on one front, where as right now they have to go from one front to another too often to get a decisive victory. For example, BoB *could* have taken FAT for FiX, spies offlineing towers or not.  But after the inital attack BoB has had other fish to fry. Yesterday I didn't even see a FIX in the FAT POS's for severel hours.

That smells :(


Have we really reached Capitals Only Online?

Only when you're fighting BoB proper. But it's moving that way, yeah.

More reports: RISE has had their complex stolen out from under them for four days in a row (and counting) and lost every battle about it, some quite impressively (up to midnight EVE time last night/this morning).

Hope their rent isn't due soon. :)

Edit: I suspect that D2 isn't as close to defeat as BoB's alliance keeps trying to portray them as, either - the further north they retreat, the longer MC's supply lines get stretched (and motherships, while powerful, are actually killable in combat unlike Titans), plus I'm not exactly convinced with YouWhat's ability to hold regions. I mean, the only reason they had space in the first place is that D2 gave it to them.

My info was wrong: Miners with Attitude got booted but is SEPARATE from Gunboat Diplomacy who lost their station to IRON in Querious. MWA was down in the south part of the map. And it looks like Gunboat got their station back.

I think RISE is going down next, if they can't get the complex back.

Doubt it's going to work like this, as MC+YW can well base off the D2 stations they take over while pushing north, which keeps supply lines short. EVE isn't Eastern Europe where you could burn your own infrastructure to the ground, retreat all way to Ural and just wait for enemy to bleed themselves on barren land as they try to get to you.

And nobody in Eve has more experience in long-range logistics than MC.  If D2's best hope is that MC will outrun their supply lines before D2 runs out of room to backpedal, I think D2 has a serious problem.

--Dave

In the same token, MC is known for it's clear, decisive plans of action, not its occupation of conquered territory. I'm half certain that is one of the things MC doesn't take contracts for, being a meat shield.


The real question is, does D2 still show up with fleets? Cap fleets in particular. LV lost its major cap battle then didn't commit any cap resources to the defense of its space after that point. D2 has lost more cap ships at once and overall then any other alliance to date, yet as far as I can tell, they still seem to keep them coming out.

News update : Shinra is disbanding - Chowdown and the management/capship pilots are joining RKK, the rank and file are...not.

Edit: More news - D2 has a Leviathan now, to pair up with their Erebus. I think the YW/MC offensive may have a few more issues in the future. (Wild speculation: D2 has at least one more titan cooking, as they've definitely got at least one more Titan-capable pilot.)

This is a Good Thing, because when CCP BoB starts being on the receiving end of multiple remote doomsdayings, nerfs will suddenly appear. :wink:

Everything I hear indicates that the political meltdown of the northern coalition I warned about is happening.  FLA has their back against the wall (may not have any stations left), Razor is dicking around in Querious, Morus Mihi is dicking around in Fountain, Iron can't seem to stick to the same strategy for more than a week running (and is losing turf up north as well), Trimuvirate (former ASCN and originally part of the coalition) is attacking Pure, Roadkill/Smash are fighting a separate war against RA, and D2 is fracturing along language lines (germans vs. english speakers) and seems to be just trying to delay long enough to carrier-jump their stuff out of the northwest (leaving Iron and FLA swinging in the breeze).  Meanwhile, there's a stampede of formerly uncommitted alliances cutting deals with BoB for pieces of the north.

--Dave

>>>
News update : Shinra is disbanding - Chowdown and the management/capship pilots are joining RKK, the rank and file are...not.
>>>


That isn't terribly surprising. Smells for the grunts, but grunts always eat it in the end.


Which part of D2 space is going away exactly? That chunk near fountain?

I believe they've lost two stations in outer Fade, one to MC and one to -YW-, and the other two are under a mostly uncontested siege, along with all of Cloud Ring (not sure if it was D2 or FLA that had taken sovereignty there).  That leaves two D2 stations at the edge of Deklein, and one (EC-?) in Pureblind at the entrance to Empire.  There's a couple of stationless alliances wedged in there as well (Next Level and Forces of Freedom, I believe).  Primary effect is that Iron, FLA, and D2 are now on the defensive on their own turf, which makes it hard for them to manage any kind of offensive.

--Dave

EDIT: Oh, and FLA has one station left, in Deklein, which is probably next up on the chopping block.

EDIT 2: BTW, I may be over-optimistic.  We had half of the enemy forces parked on our doorstep so long, *only* having 3-4 alliances still attacking us has me downright giddy.  But any way you slice it, the north is in trouble.

Down south Rise appears to be next on the Southern Coalition's chopping block. KOS got C3 back last I heard, much to my surprise. I think BoB has decided D2 will be eaiser to kill.

Outbreak appers to be siding with BoB completely, and are probably having too much fun to leave Curse for the foresaleble future.

IAC is having some internal issues, which I think is being caused by Outbreak and having a fleet of  T2-ships-only enemy show up on our doorstep and killing IAC defence gangs with ease. The problem is Outbreak isn't going for POSs so there's no great need to defeat them like there is vs BoB et al, so there's little willingness to commit cap ships aginast them.


It is alleged FIX is having as many issues as IAC is, dunno the reason.

I don't envy Rise right now, they're out on the edge of BoB space, surrounded by hostiles and with a *long* supply line. On the other hand, they aren't facing nearly the numbers we were, and BoB is in that theatre for now.

Outbreak has a lot of ex-FIX (although they'll fight us as readily as anyone, they don't pile on when we're already facing hostiles).  FIX split down three lines at the end of CODA, the ones who wanted a military dictatorship went to PURE, the ones who wanted no part of the politics of alliance maintenance and diplomacy went to Outbreak (which also picked up the remnants of an *earlier* FIX diaspora, we've had a lot of them).  When our admirals get fed up with leading a militia, they join either BoB or Outbreak (the Outbreak ones often come back).

FIX has been leaning into the wind so long on this war, we're a little overbalanced right now.  We had a democratic change of leadership a bit over a month ago, and the new administration just finished settling in.  We got so used to continuing to operate with craploads of hostiles in our space, we have divisions of opinion over whether it's even neccessary to meet the enemy directly when there's no territorial goal at stake, because our methods for operating without space control work almost *too* well, the lower numbers of hostiles we currently face are no more of a hindrance than the ordinary raiders we were dealing with 6 months ago.

Really, our biggest internal argument right now is over whether we should clean out the remnants of the invasion force, or just wait for them to get bored and go away.  The best case against clearing them out is that action attracts attention.  If FIX starts fielding larger fleets, it may draw more hostiles in, and we're still badly outnumbered.  There's also a camp that wants to go offensive, make the current attackers go away by launching a territorial attack on their home ground, in cooperation with one or more of the disposessed alliances still running around.

FIX is filled with individualists, always doing their own thing, and the alliance is perennially appearing to being on the verge of flying apart.  A political condition that in most alliances represents a pre-cursor to dissolution is our standard operating procedure.  We've gotten so used to the pattern of burning out our leadership we've incorporated it into our system, Chairmen serve for only 6 months, by the end of which they're overjoyed to be rid of the headaches.  Before we instituted that system, we had a recurring pattern of leadership getting more and more frustated until finally they left, usually taking a corp or two with them (ESA and PURE are both the result of exactly that).

We recuit and train some of the best PvP'ers and fleet commanders in Eve, then they get frustrated at the part-time PvP attitude of the general FIXian, and leave.  We greet week after week of raiding with apathy, then fight like rabid weasels when there's a serious threat, throwing away months worth of isk-earning in one grand orgy of destrction that leaves the enemy wondering what the hell happened.  What can I say, we're a study in contradictions, I like it here.

--Dave

All that speculation is assuming that MC is happy to be double-doomsday'd repeatedly, of course. Judging by historic precedents (c.f. MC's 'defense' of ISS) that's not such a certain thing. If they start losing all their non-tanked BS and fighters every time they launch an attack, declaring 'Mission Accomplished' and moving back down south to defend Feyth against an titan-less opponent would probably sound a little more appealing to a supposedly mercenary alliance.

Unless BoB kick Chowdown and friends up north to support MC, natch.

Yep FLA is pretty screwed right now, had this been several months ago I'd have cared more about it but I havent played my main for a while now

Unfortunately as much as Mahrim is having a blast I dont see how the BOB side winning this can be a good thing for eves future (no one wants to play a game where winning is for all intents and purposes impossible, and playing as a 'pet' isnt palatable for alot either)

I was under impression MC operates mainly using capital ships nowadays, so double DD isn't much of issue to them as it doesn't really kill anything save maybe for some fighters.

That said, there's rumours on another forum that D2 has sold their Erebus, possibly to RA or other yet unnamed party. Either that or the corp which owns it is splitting from D2, it's difficult to tell at this point. D2 people posting there aren't denying it, and if it turns out true then the double DD thing isn't going to happen at least in the near future.

Oh, and "historic precedent" had nothinig to do with titans, but with much larger than their own capital fleet logged off in position to jump MC capitals stuck in siege and murder them all, IIRC. If anything it says MC has enough common sense to not put themselves into equivalent of F-T attack without payment matching the risk, for the reasons F-T highlighted so well.

Fighters are expensive; and an unescorted, titanless capital ship fleet that's just had all of it's fighters DD'd is more accurately known as a 'target'.
But yeah, grapevine says RA or AAA got the Erebus - either of which should scare BoB a lot more than D2 having it. :D

I love this thread. Is there a good newspaper style site which has news about the war? I think this is one of the great things about Eve. Even though I rarely did more than potter around Empire when I played, just knowing that these huge conflicts were being fought by other people (not as huge as this one I think) added to the fun.

http://www.eve-tribune.com/

Eve Tribune isn't awful. Their war coverage is spotty.

For general war news there's 2 places I go:

Goonfleet at War's current thread (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2411615). Thread get restarted evert few weeks. From the Goonswarm side of the war mostly, but comments from some other players too.

Scrapheap Challenge's war thread (http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/viewtopic.php?t=4657). Usually has the news of whats going on where.


In other news, the top two IAC corps are leaving in the next week, saying that after 2 years they're board of running the alliance. This is probably because they are tried of it, but also a lot of new corps have joined since the ISS war and have changed the...content of IAC.

I fear I will be looking for a new home soon :(. Anyone in Goonswarm want to mentor me?

IAC's losing the old-time corps doesn't surprise me, it's the FAT curse at work again.  Seems to happen to everyone who takes FAT, it's oh so very shiny (especially with Zydrine in the toilet) and looks so very close, but it's 20 jumps deep and so damned hard to hold.  Everyone over-extends themselves for it, and the only alliance who ever owned it and didn't break was the one that gave it to you.  Huzzah went *exactly* the same way, the "old guard" split off and made their own alliance around Huzzah's pre-FAT space in Providence.

Outbreak doesn't want your space, but they will eat you alive in standard fleet engagements.  They're backed by Marko's nearly bottomless wallet (he had the CovOps Cloak monopoly, and now has a comprehensive collection of T2 BPO's) and they live to fight.

--Dave

Scrapheap Challenge is saying that D2 is splitting in half, and half the corps are effectively disengaging from the war

Bad math follows:

IAC is losing 20-50% of the PvP pilots
+
D2 is splitting in half and the PvE's are leaving the front for NPC space where they won't be bothered.
------------------------------
= BoB wins, Eve Loses. 

Granted IAC isn't doing much right now, but this appears to be The Shape Of Things To Come. Perhaps BoB's tactic of not concentrating on one target and killing it is deliberate, designed to keep the game going over winning completely and killing everyone, including their own, fun. BoB can't *kill* Goonswarm/RA/AAA, but they may well kill enough of everyone eleses morale to be able to no longer worry about what GS+allies left do.


I hope I'm wrong.

I wonder how much of the current interest in the game is because of the war.  I would assume that (since we're 3 years after launch) newbies come to the game whenever they hear about it, but perhaps news that a big war is going on provides some incentive for them to try it out.  The biggest impact, I thought, of the war, was on the veterans who might be enticed to re-subscribe in order to participate in it.  So, if the war fizzles out, would interest in the game also die out with it?

I fear I don't have the postcount on SA that they'll demand to allow me to sponsor you in. You might try some of the newer corps to join the Swarm, like ARSeD (the Ars Technica guys) or WANG (Penny-Arcade).

Edit: Anyway, yeah, things are going very poorly for the coalition on pretty much every front but Feythabolis. KOS booted BoB out of C3 finally and there's still a lot of pressure on RISE et al., trying to keep them from making rent. The situation is pretty grim for the cause of Not BoB.

This eve COAD thread (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=508577) allegedly gives a list if alliances BoB hopes to deal with, and alliances BoB plans to destroy.


TCF is with RA/GOON as RA and GOON are with each other.

IAC survived the McFIX invasions because of RA/GOON/AAA, and IAC would be committing suicide to fight against AAA (who own the 10/10 complexes in IAC space). Though Tyrax is now in charge of IAC so if BoB offered Tyrax 100 billion, Tyrax might do it. (Tyrax is the master of offlineing POS's as FIX can tell you).

IRON I don't know about.

As for *destorying* Goons etc...we all rembember BoB saying Goons were already dead...about 6 months ago. Lollerskates. BoB will never defeat RA or GOON, even if all other hope fades.

Gratitude doesn't exist in EVE especially when weighted against self-preservance, and I don't quite see why ability to whore complexes in one's prime time is some decisive military strength argument. IAC "commits suicide" just the same by declining BoB offer, and this kind of posting that makes it rather clear the "core coalition" that's TCF, RA and Goons sees them to large degree as outsider willing to sell them out for enough ISK isn't likely to make IAC choice any simpler. Or maybe it does, but not in way one would expect.

IRON on the other hand, I don't see it happening. They've been fighting BoB while allied with D2 under one name or another for their whole existence. Would rather expect to see some kind of merger between either half of broken D2 and them, to who knows what end.

Being the Rebel Alliance is  :mrgreen:-er than being the Empire, anyway. :D

Still haven't figured out who paid for the Prohibition contracts, have you?

--Dave

EDIT: I should say Prohibition 1, although Prohibition 2 wasn't *just* ISS

Last I heard someone did it to annoy Tyrrax persoannly, but I don't know who. So from what you're saying...no I having figured it out. Do tell.

I shouldn't be a tease, but I was never supposed to know myself, and the person who told me would be in a very awkward position if I shared.  Let's just say that you're hugging a viper to yourselves like it was a life preserver.  Somebody wanted to push you into bed with RedSwarm and AAA, and they got really devious, downright byzantine, to make it happen.

--Dave

Let me guess - his name begins with 'I' and ends with 'stvaan'. :)
RISE had a bad day yesterday, by the way.

For all those people getting depressed about how the war on CCP is going, this is a laugh (http://eve-files.com/dl/100142): one bloke in a smartbombing mega pvping bob+pets.  The final score at the end is startling, whether you count kills or money.  He's quite the one-man wrecking crew.  Of course, molle(probably embarassed at the gaps in the killboards it reveals in one lengthy section) complained to his tame moderators who banned it from being linked on the forums.

Also, Rise can't have enjoyed losing this (http://killboard.goonfleet.com/km/32082).

Ouch. Those things are crazy!

I've always thought IAC was the front man for Istavaan's plot to kill ISS, so if the conspiracy was to hire MC to attack Tyrrax and IAC to then force IAC to kill ISS where MC was staging out of...

if it's true, I hope Istavaan never really quit and is still pulling the strings somewhere. I know the GHSC has been a power behind IAC since it's entrance to 0.0 (at least since Tyraxx joined it and stopped fighting it directly) but IAC losing it's 2 most powerful corps may mean IAC is no longer needed for the GHSC's plan....

There's a movie waiting to be writtin here someday,

Can we cut the BoD shit, please? This is neither Eve-O nor SA. It's a pointlessly inflammatory pejorative, and I've already yelled at JoeTF for doing the same thing from the other perspective.

Is that James315?  He's been doing that forever, he got one of my covops during the ASCN war up in the A2 pipe.  It's a gimmick, one that works well as a surprise but once you know to expect it whenever you see him in local it's pretty easy to avoid.

--Dave

Yeah it is. And the video makes BoD and T20 jokes later on. I'm sure that had nothing to do with it getting banned.  :roll:

This is a little EVE-O though:  every now and then someone bothers to explain what all the acronyms mean, but 2 posts after everybody goes right back to using them extensively, to the point where an outsider has absolutely no clue WTF anyone is talking about.  So, pretty much, this thread is by those involved in the war, FOR those involved in the war, and thus a little EVE-O'ish.

Want a real laugh? Look up James315 on the BoB killboard.

I'm not talking about the acronyms. I mean, this forum is generally for Eve enthusiasts, you don't expect us to type out everything all the time. I suppose I could create a sticky thread where people can post acronyms and such for general explanation.

What I'm referring to is the tone of post, which is largely meant to inflame members of the opposing side and has no real value in discussing the war itself. I'm trying to avoid having the thread derail into an Eve-O "LOL BoB vs RAGOON" flamewar.

/Moderation Derail

I've counted 13 or so BoB kills in that video (rest was other alliances or newbie corp shuttles), BoB killboard lists 17 ship kills by the guy plus some pods.

Where's the funny part?

Try matching the names up. ;)

Ah I see. I tried but the video is pretty poor quality, I could tell the corp tickers in damage message boxes but names are pretty unredable to me. Sucky EVE font isn't helping either.

edit: in other news it sounds like D2 put up successful fight today in their area. According to report on SHC forums a battle against MC/YW resulted in D2 killing 5 carriers or so, with no capital ship losses on D2 side.

No it wasn't intended to inflame anyone.  Frankly, it just wasn't inflammatory at all.  If you were complaining about the term "war on CCP" then that's what a lot of people are pursuing.  Not all, but some.  The privateers have done the same thing in a funnier way.  Otherwise, I don't get why you'd thing so.  Sir Molle did complain, and did pull strings to get the clip banned and the poster warned.  Fair enough: if you know CCP staff as well as he does - God knows he's played with some of them often enough - you get some useful email addresses.  But I really don't see how mentioning that he got it banned - factissimo - is intended as inflammatory.  The video is funny.  the guy is hardly changing the face of Eve, but it's a laugh.

Actually did he? As in, was it quoted somewhere?

I ask because eve-search doesn't list any Sir Molle's posts made after very early April on EVE-O forums, and the original complaint as posted by the movie maker on SA forum just said "some BoB member complained to GM and my video got pulled" which immediately became fact. Now it's not just some BoB member but Sir Molle himself, so curious if there's some insight into forum mod mails, or it's simply conjecture.

Wondering if there actually might be something to the "BoD" stuff, I went to Kugutsmen's site and checked out the evidence.  What I found was somewhat...underwhelming.  Yeah, unsurprisingly there were some CCP employees and ISD employees in BoB.  A few of those (from clear back in Beta) were known to the BoB leadership, or at least some of them.  One of them, T20, abused his position in ways not connected to BoB, was forced to retire from the game, and left his BPO's with his corp (not an unheard of thing when someone is leaving or taking a long hiatus).  There was *nothing* in all of that material that showed BoB leaders or members knowingly and willingly participated in any malfeasance.

I might add, the Kugutsmen poster base isn't what I would call the sharpest set of tools in the shed, even for tin-foil-hat conspiracy spinners they're pretty sloppy.  As near as I can tell, the chain of evidence against BoB runs like this:

1) Kugutsmen goes through tens of thousands of posts and PM's hacked from the BoB forum servers.

2) He strings together a mildly incriminating set of same with dozens of barely related and mostly irrelevant messages to create a huge thread of quoted material, which he summarizes, sloppily and in ways that draw conclusions not really warranted by the evidence (often pointing to the *lack* of evidence as proof that BoB was covering something up).

3) His readers take the summaries, add supposition, interpretation, and just plain wacked out nonsense, and draw unfounded conclusions.  Most of them apparently don't read anything *but* the summaries.

4) These conclusions are then taken to other boards, mostly of BoB enemies, and reported as fact, the Kugutsmen threads pointed to as proof.  The readers, being both predisposed to believe bad things about BoB *and* apparently too lazy to check the source material, accept them as such.  Then they start adding their own impossible to verify or debunk fantasies to the body of myth.

--Dave

Heh. I read "war on CCP" as a coy way of referring to the BoB/everyone else war, particularly since recent posts noted that the war was turning in BoB's favor and you mentioned people getting depressed.

And it doesn't really take "pulling strings" to get that video banned - it has material in it that's been banned from Eve-O (T20 joke, as noted above). Granted, he probably complained, in part at least, because it does portray his alliance in a poor light. However, had anyone else petitioned it, I'm betting it would've been banned just the same. Also, what tmp posted.

From what I've made of the Kugu threads and conversations with CCP folks, there's a tiny kernel of truth to the accusations of malfeasance - T20 did leave BPOs with BoB after being forced to retire his BoB character. Whether the BPOs are legit or not, I don't know - I'm disposed to saying they're not, given some of Magnus' comments, but I don't actually know. Whether he rejoined under another name, I don't know. CCP did a pretty piss-poor PR job of handling it, as most of the senior staff was on vacation at the time it occurred (mid-06), but there were large segments of the population already disposed to disliking BoB - Kugu was just a spark in the power-room at the right time when he dredged it all up.

He gave them BPO's that were illegal

BoB knew he was in CCP (and he's not some part time GM mind you)

He was in charge of their capl fleet, while BoB was abusing rules (such as sharing characters, and using passive targeters through shields)

The head of CCP events team was in BoB, BoB knew it, and he gave them warning and special events for BoB

There is no way to know how much...information...CCP gave BoB not released to other players, but the stench is thick of it.


Anyone one of these charges is a hanging offence. Any Jury of Eve Players would (and did) demand a hanging. If you go by CCP's words, they *would* have hung him if someone...senior...had known about it at the time. And if any of these things were to happen now, it *would* mean an instant hanging, that's what CCP's publicly said.


I wounder how many CCP Devs Privateers ganked in the last 3 months. Someone probably lost a Freighter to them or something.

Nah, I just thought the war on CCP was a funny euphemism.  If it's misjudged, my bad.  And I thought the people getting depressed bit was better than making a post saying everything was great for the coalitions and that Bob was dead and just didn't know it yet...

What

Better late than never, huh?  :roll:

I can't absolutely swear at this point, but I think CCP confirmed in one of their dev blogs these BPOs were actually, like alleged, obtained through manipulation of game database. It could've been that "apology blog" posted by t20 now that I think of it. It was probably quoted in some detail in the other thread here, the one focused on the whole dev drama thing.

Yea it was definitely in a Dev blog, that is why there was (is) so much ongoing drama about it. It went from the realm of tinfoil asshattery into actual fact.

Thanks for the update.  As I am predisposed to believe good things about BoB *and* too lazy to check the source material; I haven't read anything but your summaries and I accept them as fact.

I believe I've just been pwned. :-o

--Dave

So in the last 3 days or so,

Goonfleet killed and looted a RISE freighter carrying 6 billion's worth of stuff. GS got about 1 billion in loot. RISE is probably going to have towers running out of fuel, as about 3bil was reported to be POS fuel.

D2 killed 4 YouWhat carriers and a MC Dread and Carrier. The YW carriers were using named T1 gear! The MC carrier dropped another billion or worth of stuff allegedly. MC Mothership jumped out when it was in some danger of getting killed. A clearcut victory for D2.

The D2 side of the spilt that left, the one who took the Titan, are apparently going to become low sec pirates. With a Titan.

And if that doesn't get Titans nerfed, nothing will.
Random, tangential question: Can cynos be opened inside deadspace?

Miz Cenuj(sp?) has been ganking people with mothership in low sec space for months now, there was numerous cries about that on the official forum. There's also at least one another group doing the same in 0.0 space, I think they're called Establishment.

It didn't get nerfed much cheaper motherships even though they are just as invincible in low sec, it won't get the titan nerfed either. Low sec pirates rarely get to fight enough ships at once to make DD anything but pointless money sink anyway.