EvE Devs play with BoB. Investigation in progress....New Scandal page 9!

[Comstar]

Well seeing as everyone who matters knows about it, what was it?

[Simond]

Oh, all right then. Read, ye mighty, and despair at just how close BoB and/or CCP came to beating Goonswarm:

Originally Posted by That Fat Fuck
Recommendations from an old CEO:

Having been out of power for a few days, and examining our situation with a more objective look, I have a recommendation that a lot of goons are going to hate. Before I begin, let me just say something: this isn't me being emo. This isn't me being melodramatic or pessimistic or depressed. My finals are over, I'm getting happily married, starting my dream job now, and I only play a little Eve as it is. I'm just giving this advice but that's my new role: advisor. I don't make anyone do anything, I can just recommend and let them make up their own minds, and I figure that Mittani can just lock this thread if he hates it so here goes:

We should evacuate absolutely everything we can out of conquerable space, sell it for corp funds or mothball it for the future, and go live in NPC space once again.

-------------

"What the christ what are you talking about faggot?" you say. Well, let me explain my rationale.

I believe that the following facts are not in dispute:

1) Capital ships are the new battleships in fleet combat
2) Without considering support fleets, Whoever has way more capital ships present at a battle than the other side is almost certainly going to win that fleet fight.
3) You need more POSs than the other side to keep Sov and thus control over station systems.
4) You can only avoid fleet combat over POSs by timing stront so long as you have more POSs than the other guy and can block the rest of the moons in a system.

Now let me advance some more facts that aren't in dispute for anybody who knows GS

well:

5) GS/RA/TCF/etc. have far fewer capitals than BoB/Slaves/Allies/etc.
6) As they are now, Titans make almost all support fleets irrelevant.
7) Virtually every one of our station systems has dozens of moons.
8) We do not have the money to spam small offlines on every moon.
9) We certainly do not have the money to spam large deathstars in quantity.
10) BoB/etc. have plenty of money, and they have begun to large POS spam.

If you take accept points 1-10, you will soon realize that we are fucked. Not "fucked" in the "we are all going to die and MORALE FAILURE CASCADE and BoB are INVINCIBLE", but "fucked" in the sense that the game is broken to our detriment. Points 1-4 make this game Not Fun. I'm not sure if CCP intentionally designed these balance changes in order to try shit out and use this war as a guinea pig for improving their game, or if they just didn't realize how retarded they made capitals in fleet combat, but in a real sense it doesn't matter.

So, I think that there are a couple of things that are going to happen.

First, I think that BoB will begin POS spamming our hubs. GoonSwarm will levy a bunch of taxes, and raise a lot of money from donations, but ultimately we either have to empty the entire Titan fund into POS spamming to keep up with BoB, or begin losing hub sov.

Second, our combined Coalition shortage of capitals means that we can really only win in non-Euro TZs, so BoB will just time all of their POSs to come out in Euro time. RA and TCF and GS will have a series of great fights... in the US/Russian TZ, and BoB will time stront, and it won't mean shit because they're not going to fuck up their stront timers like the other chump alliances we've killed. And even if they did, they have more money so they can just buy more, and we can't keep 200 larges online for very long.

Third, given the POS spam, unless we can afford more large POSs than the Alliance, we're ultimately going to lose sov basically everywhere important outside of SP. And then the FTZ will die, our member income will begin to dry up, and we will become concentrated in the remaining full-deathstar systems like KZF, RYC, etc.

Fourth, BoB/MC/whoever will park about 3 Titans and 5 motherships between these systems, and basically make them totally unliveable with constant DDs, over and over and over, plus huge swarms of fighters. They'll sit capitals just outside of POSs, and camp every last station we have while they wait for us to fuck up and lose some moons to more POS spam.

Fifth, the game will go from Not Fun, to "I'm paying $15 a month so that Eve can be balanced like THIS?" and GoonSwarm will begin to lose a lot of players to other games, to boredom, to frustration, and to the general anger that people feel towards CCP for ruining their own game with retarded capital shit.

And Sixth, we will end up moving back to Syndicate anyway.

So my argument is: skip all of that bullshit, and just move back to Syndicate now.

Take all of our extra towers, hand them to RA so that they can POS spam the systems they own so that they make BoB's life miserable trying to take the last X RA systems. Take all of our portable assets, and jump them to RA space and put them up for sale. Take all of our director hangar items like dread ammo, fighters, fuel, whatever, and dump it right into Nync's lap. Pull down every single last tower in our space, mothball all of them in the stations, tell the FTZ to gtfo, and leave. Let people stay who want to fly with RA, but just get out.

Eve has been fun for me when GoonFleet/GoonSwarm had goals and the willpower to achieve those goals. At the moment, we don't have willpower because we don't have realistic goals. You cannot beat somebody at chess when you start with six pawns and a king, and that's what Eve is like right now. We weren't rich before, so we didn't have the cash to make 60 carriers and 60 dreads and 2 Titans. Not even RA is that rich and they (according to BoB) lol 10/10 plexed for months and months. We don't have the money to play SPAM THE POS and we don't have the capitals to play SPAM THE CAPITAL and we don't have the titans to play SPAM THE SUPPORT so there is no reason for us to continue to punish ourselves like this.

I think that we should take a break from alliance politics and POS wars until this game is fixed again. It may be a long break, but eventually CCP will pull its head out of its ass and realize that people are refusing to play their alliance warfare simulation because it sucks. In the meantime, we can go back to griefing, to teaching newbies how to live in Syndicate, to laughing like assholes while drunk in 20-30 man gangs, and by turning S-U8 into a hive colony again. Plus it'll make Hoegaarden shit a brick when 2000 GoonSwarm people show up on his doorstep one day and that's worth the whole effort right there.

So, tl;dr: fuck conquerable space, it's really boring right now, go back to Syndicate and become a gigantic terrorist state that does whatever it wants. Better that than sit here and let BoB masturbate over DD/Mothership kills night after night as they slowly POS spam all of our space.

And in conclusion,
Fuck Goons.


SINCERELY,
Remedial J. Crabs, III Esq.

NB: This is after Remedial quit, btw. Fortunately, none of the directors were listening to him much by this point.

It's also interesting to compare this with Suas' summary (copy here) of the defence of XGH/retaking of 9-9 - Remedial seems to have bought in to the "BoB has infinite ISK" line fully.

[Miasma]

How dare he try and take the J. Crabs name, I hate him already.

[UnSub]

I've missed this thread, and am greatful at its return.

[Arthur_Parker]

NY Times

In an Ever-Changing Galaxy, the Action’s Starting to Get Intriguing

One of the strengths of an online computer game is that what you see when it first appears is not necessarily what you get if you pick it up years later.

With most media, of course, precisely the opposite is true. The content of a novel’s ninth printing is the same as the first. Likewise, it is considered sacrilege for a painter to lay so much as a drop of pigment on a work once it leaves the studio. “Remastered” is a common marketing hook in the music business, but ultimately that version of “Crosstown Traffic” on the umpteenth Jimi Hendrix compilation is much the same as the rendition that hit the airwaves four decades ago.

Online games are different. Inhabited by thousands or even millions of players, online worlds are constantly evolving, and not merely because of the ever-changing cast of characters within them. For their customary fee of $15 a month, players of what are called massively multiplayer games expect developers to add new features and rebalance old ones constantly.

That process of continual refinement has never been so effective as it has been for Eve Online, the science-fiction game first opened to the public by CCP of Iceland in May 2003. More than four years after its debut, when most games are either a distant memory or provoking burnout among longtime players, Eve is only now hitting its stride as one of the most interesting games in the world.

After all, what other game has a Ph.D. economist on the staff who publishes a quarterly newsletter about the game’s virtual economy? What other game recently announced plans for an elected player council with ideas drawn from philosophers from Aristotle to John Rawls?

Eve takes place in a fictional galaxy in a far future, where humanity has splintered into four competing factions, the theocratic Amarr, the militaristic Caldari, the liberal Gallente and the rebel Minmatar. Players choose a side and find their own path.

With its formidable depth, complexity and Kilimanjaro-like learning curve, Eve will never rival World of Warcraft and its nine million customers for mass-market appeal. But at a stage when most games have long since stagnated, Eve continues to grow, recently passing 200,000 subscribers. Today, CCP plans to announce a major graphics overhaul scheduled for Dec. 5. Just this past Sunday, Eve set a record for any game when it recorded 37,729 simultaneous players in its common virtual universe.

Explaining that statistic should go a long way toward explaining what makes Eve unique.

In most online games, players are split among dozens or even hundreds of identical copies of the game world, known as servers. Each server generally has a total population of around 10,000 players. In World of Warcraft, for instance, the game’s roughly 2.5 million United States customers are divvied up among about 220 servers. At any given moment, each server has at most only a few thousand users actually playing the game. (People do have real-world obligations, after all, like sleeping.)

Moreover, in most games users are segregated according to language and nationality. Because the total population of each server is so small, it is vital to provide a critical mass of players who speak the same language and play in common time zones.

In many ways Eve is more like the real world. All 200,000 of Eve’s players exist in one huge virtual galaxy spanning thousands of solar systems. About 40 percent of Eve’s players are European, another 40 percent are North American, and about 20 percent are from other continents. They all share one polyglot community around the clock, and at any moment tens of thousands of users are logged on.

More important, the economy and politics of Eve are almost entirely driven by the players themselves. Miners drill asteroids and sell their ore to industrialists who construct spaceships and weapons at orbital factories. Industrialists then sell their wares to vast fighting forces that battle for control of entire regions of space. Other players make their living as full-time traders, scrupulous or otherwise. If another player cheats you, you can take it lying down, retaliate on your own or hire mercenaries to exact revenge.

“There are basically two schools of thought for operating an online community,” Hilmar Petursson, CCP’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview yesterday.

“There is the theme-park approach and the sandbox approach,” he continued. “Most games are like Disneyland, for instance, which is a carefully constructed experience where you stand in line to be entertained. We focus on the sandbox approach where people can decide what they want to do in that particular sandbox, and we very much emphasize and support that kind of emergent behavior.”

The most compelling aspect of Eve is that once players control a region of virtual space, they bear the responsibility of policing it, setting taxes, establishing diplomatic relations with neighboring groups and waging battles to protect their territory or take more. In most online games, the advanced content involves getting together with a few dozen friends to battle computer-controlled dragons and demons. In Eve, major battles involve hundreds of players fighting in starships in vast “Star Wars”-like firefights.

At the strategic level, coalitions involving tens of thousands of players struggle for months over strategic objectives or simply to wipe out their enemies. For at least a year the most powerful group in Eve has been an alliance known as Band of Brothers, a self-appointed evil empire with the stated objective of taking over the galaxy. Against them is arrayed a motley batch of self-styled freedom fighters with names like the Red Alliance (mostly Russian), Tau Ceti Federation (mostly French), GoonSwarm (mostly obnoxious) and the Interstellar Alcohol Conglomerate (mostly drunk).

As in any war, propaganda can be as formidable a weapon as a gun. Earlier this year a scandal erupted in which a CCP employee in Band of Brothers (known far and wide as BOB) was found to have improperly given his group technical blueprints that could have helped decide the war.

GoonSwarm, however, turned the incident to its side’s advantage by using the scandal to undermine confidence in the legitimacy of BOB’s achievements. Since then, BOB has lost vast swaths of in-game territory and remains on the defensive.

“We did a survey in our database at the point of the controversy, and it turned out there were actually more CCP employees in GoonSwarm than in BOB,” Mr. Petursson said yesterday. “What happened first and foremost was that the controversy created demoralization within BOB and a downward spiral because they started to doubt themselves and the legitimacy of their achievements. GoonSwarm’s P.R. campaign was effective in creating this impression, and a lot of people left BOB, I think, because of this idea. And kudos to GoonSwarm for having good P.R.”

Tiny drama bomb.

[Simond]

Devswarm poasting ITT. 

Edit: Just for the slow of thinking, the difference between devs in BoB and devs in Goonswarm (or IAC, Tri, RA, or any of the many other alliances that almost certainly have CCP employees in them) is that BoB a) knew who the devs were, and b) got handed advantages by their devs (BPOs, advance warnings for game changes, access to CCP's internal alpha test server, etc, etc), while nobody else did. Any CCP employees that were discovered outside of BoB were removed from the corp and had their character renamed.

Hell, we had a 'pet' GM who maed poast (and nothing else) on our forums for all of a day before he was told to quit it and given a name change. That's the closest we ever came to in-game help from a CCP employee.

[Sparky]

NY Times

“We did a survey in our database at the point of the controversy, and it turned out there were actually more CCP employees in GoonSwarm than in BOB,” Mr. Petursson said yesterday. “What happened first and foremost was that the controversy created demoralization within BOB and a downward spiral because they started to doubt themselves and the legitimacy of their achievements. GoonSwarm’s P.R. campaign was effective in creating this impression, and a lot of people left BOB, I think, because of this idea. And kudos to GoonSwarm for having good P.R.”

FWIW the hacker dude who uncovered the T20 stuff came to the goon forums and said when he cracked them (on behalf of LV) there were no @CPP IP addresses except for one GM who registered during the fanfest to say hi.  Might have been a bit of social engineering to get the goons even more ravenous or maybe Goon CCP employees were a bit more discreet and only played from home, who knows.

Ancient history now though as CCP really have made a big effort to clean themselves up.  But just thought I'd share that titbit. 

[TripleDES]

NY Times

Tiny drama bomb.

Good PR my ass. If that was so obvious that time, why didn't they say anything about it to effectively defuse the situation? Also, from what I know, during the Band of Developers drama phase, Goonswarm only allowed select outsiders into the alliance, while keeping up the SA registration requirement. I really doubt that GS would have had a higher ratio than BoB at that time.