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[Draegan]

 
I'll pay you 5 bucks a month if you keep me updated about the game with stories.

And how dare you stop there. 

[Surlyboi]

It gets better.

[Endie]

I'll pay you 5 bucks a month if you keep me updated about the game with stories.

And how dare you stop there.  

Being in Goonswarm means that you have stories to tell.  For many of us, that is the most scintillating, dazzling attraction.

[Endie]

This lengthy history of the great war was a lengthy monologue more suited to my blog, so I moved it there: http://www.endie.net/wordpress/?p=14

[Murgos]

 

[Xanthippe]

This is completely sucking me in.  Plus, the UI doesn't seem nearly so bad as it did the first time I tried it.

[Nerf]

Countdown to Avaloc getting this story printed and selling it in this very thread.

[Endie]

I'm running a frigate op on Saturday, so anyone thinking about this can come on that if you pod yourselves to Delve in time.

Countdown to Avaloc getting this story printed and selling it in this very thread.

I'm in talks about him recording it as an audiobook.

[Der Helm]

Fuck, guys. Stop tempting me. I don't have enough times as it is. 

[eldaec]

I don' think this has been posted in the thread yet...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDVEHE10nHc


That's the latest CCP trailer. Unlike many CCP trailers it isn't far off how a good fleet op goes down. Key things it is missing:

Swearing
Dogs barking
Idiots who jump through gates too early
Rifters
Swearing

[Murgos]

That's incorrect.  Everyone knows that the dog is the best FC in the whole alliance and some idiot keeps talking over him.

[Nerf]

I'm running a frigate op on Saturday, so anyone thinking about this can come on that if you pod yourselves to Delve in time.

Countdown to Avaloc getting this story printed and selling it in this very thread.

I'm in talks about him recording it as an audiobook.

I don't think most people understand just how funny this is.  My first experience with avalloc was on teamspeak, when he joined the fleet, said something, and I immediately yelled into the mic "What the fuck, why is there a deaf guy on teamspeak?"

Someone find a recording of him, please.  Don't they record the CSM vent meetings?

[Draegan]

I'll pay you 5 bucks a month if you keep me updated about the game with stories.

And how dare you stop there.  

Being in Goonswarm means that you have stories to tell.  For many of us, that is the most scintillating, dazzling attraction.

I'm too much of a cynic to think that's true. :/

Good story though, what was CCP doing exactly to help bob cheat?

[UnSub]

I'll pay you 5 bucks a month if you keep me updated about the game with stories.

And how dare you stop there.  

Being in Goonswarm means that you have stories to tell.  For many of us, that is the most scintillating, dazzling attraction.

I'm too much of a cynic to think that's true. :/

Good story though, what was CCP doing exactly to help bob cheat?

There were devs in BoB and they were helping them with rare and expensive blueprints, iirc. Also possibly tipping them off to upcoming changes, but I'm not sure if that was ever proved.

[Draegan]

Where do rare blueprints come from?  Farm em from pirates and stuff?  I never did any of the industrial stuff in the game.  I thought they were learned via the skill system or just sold on random planets.

[IainC]

Where do rare blueprints come from?  Farm em from pirates and stuff?  I never did any of the industrial stuff in the game.  I thought they were learned via the skill system or just sold on random planets.

Way back all T2 blue prints came from a lottery. You earned R&D points by doing missions for R&D agents and periodically a random T2 BPO would be raffled using your R&D points as tickets. Remember that these were BPOs and not BPCs so that they could be used for an infinite number of production runs and could be researched to make them more efficient. The guy responsible for designing and overseeing this system happened to be the Cap Director for BoB. There's evidence that he rigged the lottery in BoB's favour as well as directly spawning BPOs for them.

Nowadays, T2 BPs are created from invention, your R&D points are used to purchase datacores which are used up when you attempt to invent a T2 BPC. You put in a number of datacores and a T1 BPC and there's a random chance (based on skill levels) that you'll get a T2 BPC out of it. BPCs can't be researched and invented ones have a negative material efficiency so anyone with a T2 BPO still has a massive advantage in the T2 market, not only can they save themselves the (considerable) costs of invention, their T2 production is a whole lot more efficient than their competitors who are using BPCs.

[Draegan]

Your first mistake would be that you thought I knew what a BPO and a BPC were.

[Amarr HM]

A BPO is a Blueprint original with this you can makes copies or BPCs. You research the BPOs to make the BPCs better quality.

[Thrawn]

Countdown to Avaloc getting this story printed and selling it in this very thread.

I would probably actually buy that as opposed to the crappy one he's asking about.

[Endie]

I'll pay you 5 bucks a month if you keep me updated about the game with stories.

And how dare you stop there.  

Being in Goonswarm means that you have stories to tell.  For many of us, that is the most scintillating, dazzling attraction.

I'm too much of a cynic to think that's true. :/

Good story though, what was CCP doing exactly to help bob cheat?

I'm perfectly serious that the biggest draw for me is that I get to play a role in some huge, sweeping storylines.  I've even played a noticeable part in some of them, even on the big scale.  Quite a few people here have, too.  I'll get to those bits.

And for me, the biggest problem with CCP wasn't the free BPOs, or the free supercapitals, or the rigged in-game events that were revealed.  It wasn't the advanced access to game developments on the private test server (before hitting the public test server), nor the MSN access direct to senior developers when they needed a corp thief stopped (that was a bad one, though) or a problematic POS cleared up immediately.  It wasn't even the heads-up they got about a region being hugely buffed and their resulting move before anyone else knew.  It was simply the fact that their capital fleet commander was a developer - one who we now know cheated and gave himself money and rare goods - with potential access to perfect knowledge about the location and attributes of anything in the game.  Funnily enough, he won all the time.

I skimmed over that in the story because it's in the past, and hey! We won despite it all!  And because I didn't want to start Himo off.  But it remains the case.

I knew one of the people who broke the details behind the story, and it made him into an insufferable, ranting fanatic about the corruption in CCP.  I wouldn't like to end up like him.

[Draegan]

POS is such a terrible acronym for something serious.

[IainC]

Your first mistake would be that you thought I knew what a BPO and a BPC were.

Hmm well as Amarr says, a BPO is a blueprint original and a BPC is a blueprint copy. Any item that can be built by players is built from a blueprint for that item. Originals can be researched to make them more efficient and have no limit to the number of times they can be used. Copies can only be used a limited number of times before they are used up and cannot be made once more efficient once created. When you invent a T2 blueprint you get an inefficient blueprint copy (typically they take 50% more materials to build than an unresearched original blueprint). Producing these invented BPCs is also very expensive and not guaranteed to work. Someone sitting on a T2 BPO can make an unlimited number of those items and can research the blueprint to make it even more efficient as well.

As an example, it costs me 130m to build a Hulk (T2 mining barge). About 8m of that is invention costs and the rest is materials, plus I can only use that blueprint 9 times before its used up. Someone with a researched BPO for a Hulk could build them for as little as 65m and has no limit to the number they can crank out - even an unresearched one would only cost ~80m to build.

[Sir T]

Good story though, what was CCP doing exactly to help bob cheat?

As mentioned above, the guy who was designing capital ships for release was the head of BOBs capital ship construction program.

Bob were allowed to wargame with the devs on the private developer server when they were developing Pos mechanics, a privilege afforded to no-one in eve. This is probably where they found the bugs they used to shoot through tower shields.

When Bob left/were driven out of the north the place they moved to, delve, was utter junk. Within months it was upgraded to the best area in the game.

In 2005 CCP announced they were upgrading 0.0. This project began with Delve and some of Fountain. They then forgot about the rest of 0.0.

Delve was upgraded with NPC space, uniquely among all regions. BOB insisted that this was terrible as this would interfere with regional sovereignty (which has never been implemented and never will) To compensate them for this horrible loss, CCP gave BOB a mass of faction ships and items for free and set their standing to the blood raiders at a very high level. This meant that any member of BOB could immediately access high level missions without grinding through the lower level missions. Thereafter every member of BOB had pirate implants that came from those missions, vastly increasing their power in combat. A letter was published from Dianabolic to CCP demanding even better standings and Kieron, CCP lead dev and public relations guy, personally responded and said he would take care of it. Kieron has since resigned very quietly under mysterious circumstances.

As NPC space combined with normal space, Delve had the highest amount of static complexes in the Game. However these complexes were all bugged and fully respawned every hour rather than every 12 or 24 hours. This continued until a member of FIX (one of my enemies at the time), Dark Shikari, published this on the eve-o forums after months of trying to get ccp to fix this privately. After this the level of faction equipment in BOB fleets dropped like a stone.

When Dark Shikari was examining the Database dump of CCP he noticed unusual. Every outpost has a unique descriptor in the database, which is normally funtional like "yz-9 Caldari reserch outpost" The station in NOL, which was originally a conquerable station, which means it became a fully upgraded station for free, had a very strange descriptor. "Tis mine biatches" Guess who set up the outposts in Eve and where they are? The same guy who was head of BOBs cap fleet and told BOB how the t2 lottery really worked...

Delve has the highest amount of high value moons anywhere. Aradia beside Delve has almost as much high end moons as the rest of empire combined. These moons were seeded after BOB moved to Delve.

BOB got a high ranking member of ISD kicked out when he refused to obey their orders in local during their war with KOS (which they lost). In local was the sequence "Petition him" "No Petition. MSN is enough" The next day the guy had been thrown out of the ISD program. The senior dev that ranted at him before he logged off was the same guy that said to BOB after the destruction of D2s titan "Enjoy killing some D2"

CCP later published what they said was the petition against the ISD member, but oddly they forgot to include the time and date of the petition.

In response to this Dianabiolic posted an arrogant post about how the Devs and the BOB leadership were personal friends and people always complain about bias but they never see how many things are fixed because of their feedback "Devs need friends too". In a desperate attempt to smooth over that shitstorm DBPreacher started talking about the fact that its fine, he knows Devs as hes a game developer and he can separate that. But in the same post he started talking about Grand theft auto and how great it was to have devs of that game on hand to answer questions...

I can go on and on about this but you get the point.

Too late Endie  

[Comstar]

It's not every day that a group of players get so fed up with the dev's outright corruption that they declare war on their chosen people and after years of blood, sweat and tears, win.  Personally I think there's a franchise just waiting to be created.

3 movie blockbuster SciFi trilogy by Michael Bay. Episode 1 starts in the east with Lokta Volterra and the destruction of their baby titan. Episode 2 with the BoB counter attack and ends with the destruction of Molle's Titan (and the revealing of the gods working on BoB's side) and Episode 3 with the culture victory of Haggorth's betrayal and the final destruction of the Evil BoB empire. Lots of CGI space battles and explosions.

A Saturday morning kids cartoon where every week the poor Newbee learns one of Eve's lessons from a more senior smurf Goonswarm Bee (LogisticsBee, CapBee, POSBee, RepairBee, TacklerBee, FCBee, DBRBBee, MinerBee, BLOPSBee, BusinessBee  etc etc etc) while simultaneously foiling  Gargamell Molle's plan of the week to destroy Goonswarm.

Live Action TV series:  Agent of Goonswarm. An member of Goonswarm Intelligence Service goes under cover to foil GS's foes. With help from Q Branch GARPA and overseen by the Mittani (External threats) and Vio (Internal threats). Sometimes working with and somethings working against French Galentee super spy Krugsman.  Half the plot is taken up by not knowing if Vio is working for or against Goonswarm.

[Xanthippe]

This sounds just like playing a mud, only with better graphics!

So how long ago did all this vice and corruption come to light?  Is BoB still intact?  Does the scandal continue or is it over?

[Sir T]

I'l let Endie finish his story of the war. I will say that CCP has become far more professional in the last few years.

I want to tell you a little story of mine, if I may.

I was a member of IAC at this time. We were squaring off against the whole of the south in FAT-6P. What Endie didn't mention is that When BOB abandoned the south they invaded Catch to try and quickly knock IAC out of the war before the Redswam could reach their new borders. 25S had fallen in a week and everyone expected FAT to follow fast. BOB ahd allready dropped towers there. I was the favoured covert ops scout of every IAC FC at the time, and I was in FAT. One of the CEOs contacted me and asked me to sit over the station and check gates as he was going to start dropping our own towers to fight back, and I was the only scout he could trust and I had a good scouting rep. I wound up hovering over the op to drop towers for the next several hours relaying intel and telling him when it was safe to come out of hiding and plant another tower.

Becasue of me bieng there they were able to plant those towers and start fighting back. When the system did not fall everyone took heart and started fighting back hard. This was the beginning of the 3 and a half week fight for FAT that stalled the BOB invasion and allowed Goons to devour Bobs territory. It burned all their precious time in a Stalingrad style fight, that sucked in all their allies and alowed Razor to deploy in Querious and start knocking out FIX while BOB was demanding their ships in FAT.

One person can make a difference.

[Slayerik]

T's E-credit has skyrocketed! ;)

Only thing I've been a part of is killing shit. Some minor wars, but fleet battles used to be giant lagfests back when I was into it.

I am very close to joining you guys.

[Comstar]

One person can make a difference.

It really does. When Molle lost his 4th(?) Titan in Delve on the day of Gotterdammering (the day they lost 10 carriers and a mothership at a gate, and the day before the start of the month long PR- siege) it was because some random Goonswarm HIC pilot warped himself to the wrong spot, at the right time, and locked the $US5000 ship down long enough for the rest of the fleet to arrive. Molle lost his 1st Titan to a random MERCHI Inty pilot who saw him cloak just at the right moment and burned in the right direction.

[Segoris]

It really does. When Molle lost his 4th(?) Titan in Delve on the day of Gotterdammering (the day they lost 10 carriers and a mothership at a gate, and the day before the start of the month long PR- siege) it was because some random Goonswarm HIC pilot warped himself to the wrong spot, at the right time, and locked the $5000 US ship down long enough for the rest of the fleet to arrive and save the day. Molle lost his 1st Titan to a random Inty pilot who saw him cloak just at the right moment.

$5k USD? Is that just the cost it would be to convert in game currency (isk?) to IRL dollars at the time, or what's up with that number? Is that common for people to drop a lot of RL money down?

This thread definitely has me signing up and learning more about this game, but this has me curious.

[Jayce]

For those entirely lost in the acronyms, check this out:  http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9832.0

Also, some of these are place names, like FAT-6P and 25S which are star systems in the Catch region.  IAC is a now-(mostly?) defunct alliance.  FIX (Firmus Ixion) were residents of Querious (next to Delve) and BoB renters for a long time until they had a falling out at some point.  Our very own Mahrin Skel was associated with them.  Maybe he can shine a light on some of their history.

fake edit: MRCHI : Merch Industrial, a Goonswarm corp from the Penny Arcade forums.

The 5k USD figure comes from the conversion of timecards into isk, which varies based on market conditions. You can pay someone in game currency for a game time code.  When I was playing it varied from 500 million to around 750 million isk for a 60day code.

real edit: url-ification

[Thrawn]

$5k USD? Is that just the cost it would be to convert in game currency (isk?) to IRL dollars at the time, or what's up with that number? Is that common for people to drop a lot of RL money down?

It's probably the cost to buy that much in game currency with USD.  The game has a legit method of buying time-cards with $ and then selling them in game for in game currency so things like that can be figured out very accurately.

[Segoris]

Thanks, about what I figured but $5k is one of those outrageous numbers imo for in-game stuff. Damn that must have felt good to destroy 

[Jayce]

To further the breakdown, a 60d timecard is about $30 USD.  That divides out to between 15-20 million isk per dollar.  That puts T2 (tech 2) fitted battleships at in-game current market prices at $2-4 each (60-100 million isk).

Someone translate that to L4 missions or ratting isk/hour. I forgot how to make money in EVE that way since I usually played market games, import/exported, and occasionally ganked for my cash.

[Comstar]

Ratting in Delve goes around 15 to 30mil an hour. Level 4 agents in empire space works about the same, but empire is safe from random hostiles stopping you doing it (and is probably really more like 20 to 40mil an hour).  A time card costs about 500-600mil a month.

Some people play the game by ratting for long enough (about 15 to 30 hours) to afford a time card per month (meaning they don't pay for the game except in their own time). However, most people who make enough money in game to cover the time card do it via trading/large scale manufacturing/scamming and you still end up spending a lot of time to do it (though once you get your trading empire setup, it can be only a few minutes a day work to keep it running).

Joining LOVEU means you get full access to Delve, the richest and easiest place to make money ratting there is in the game. The Goonswarm and LOVEU infrastructure in place means it's also pretty easy to be a small scale or large scale manufacturer with easy access to empire and a large market to fill with nitche's still to be found and some moongold still to be mined.

[Soln]

Doesn't the hike up to a Level4 agent take weeks/months though?  Is it faster now?  That's post-Battleship, correct?