War

[Phred]

 begging CCP to make just one more nerf (after the half dozen or so that James315 detailed). 

Link to James315 post please.

[Phildo]

Wait, Suas is back playin?

He's taken over Space Violence squad, too.

[Endie]

 begging CCP to make just one more nerf (after the half dozen or so that James315 detailed). 

Link to James315 post please.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=101626

James 315 is great for providing a way to fill a lunchtime on a slow day.

[Amarr HM]

That's a great read, having just pulled off three ganks over the weekend worth 3bil+ I can say I agree with a lot that was said there. Would I be right in saying the new war is in Hi-sec and I am somewhat taking part?

[Kitsune]

I flipped through the first few pages of replies and was a little amused at how they were universally flaming the guy for his post and calling him an idiot when I couldn't find any assertion he made that I fundamentally disagreed with.  The game now has so many outs for evading combat in highsec that it's approaching an outright ban.  I agreed with removing insurance payouts for people who get blown up by the cops for committing piracy; that never made any real sense to begin with and it makes a ganker have to choose targets carefully instead of just blowing people away at whim.  But playing corporate shell games to evade wardecs and botting to auto-warp from hostiles entering the system is just scummy.

[tgr]

The very best thing ever was someone else, several months later, thinking it wasn't enough that the thread got locked, nooooo, it had to be removed. So he began unironically comparing his "manifesto" to hitler's manifesto, with all that entails.

[Endie]

While PL and Goons have benefited greatly, at times the cost to Test of restoring the Bropact has been high

Delve Campaign Update

For the last couple of months, Test and PL have been taking advantage of the Nulli vs RA conflict in Delve in order to play gadfly and provoke a few fights.  Wearying of being the source of hilarity, the various inhabitants of Delve, Querious and Period Basis gradually aligned and agglomerated until they reached such a critical density of sheer horribleness - such a grotesque density of wrong-headed chucklefuckery - that they collapsed inwards into a black hole of bad-posting, pulling in the ex-IT and Morsus Mihi rejects of AAA into an inescapable horrorscape beyond whose event horizon the very fabric of logic turns in on itself and where up is down, retardation is wisdom, hiding is bravery and TrojanMan is an FC.

So the new "Southern Coalition" brought fleets of 700 to fight 250, while complaining about "Test blobbers" wth a straight face.  These people wouldn't recognise irony if you stroked it with a magnet and used it to find the north pole.  Montolio had been, for weeks, quietly asking us to stay uninvolved in order to preserve the hope of enjoyable fighting, but now AAA had amassed such a huge mass of gibbering retards, such an Ohio-filling expanse of wordfucking simpletons, that the time had come for Montolio to call in Test's oldest friends: us.

It helps that AAA are the single remaining natural enemy of Goons.  For our newer members, here is the bit of the movie with a montage that begins with us walking along a beach playfully with AAA, exchanging flowers in a meadow and giving each other meaningful looks over a bottle of rather dubious home-made potato vodka.

Four years ago, when we lived in the deep south, they were our neighbours and friends.  We would defend them and, although they were frankly shitty allies who would camp convoy routes to shoot our blues during joint ops, we gifted them and their leader Evil Thug, through our propaganda, a reputation that they may not have wholly deserved even then.

Then, one night in November 2008, AAA launched an invasion of us.  Without any warning, our systems were under siege by an alliance we still saw on our overviews as blue.  That was the Great Backstab, where their leadership was paid (in real-world cash) by Red Overlord to attack us, and where they joined with Band of Brothers in an attempt to destroy Goonswarm.  Like so many evidence-ignoring poltroons before and since, they were profoundly convinced that we were weak and that we would shatter.  Naturally, their attempt failed dismally, and, with the help of allies, we began to retake space.  But before we could properly exact revenge Haargoth destroyed BoB and Delve II broke out.  So we have unfinished business with AAA.


Week One

The campaign proper kicked off, last week, with a classic coup by PL's intel group: the Red Alliance staging system in Querious, 9CG, saw its sov drop and be transferred to PL.  The sov drop happened just before Russian prime, making their inability to save the system all the more humiliating.  Their staunch allies, AAA, advised them to accept the loss and refused to turn up in any meaningful force to help.  Trust me when I say that the GIA has seen the gauntlet thrown down by this deft piece of metagaming.

With the announcement that we would be joining in, convoy ops led by skirmish commanders and newbie FCs started wending their way south.  Thousands of CFC members piled into Delve, and GSOL ninja-dropped a station in F2O in Querious to act as a staging system for us.  From there, and from the Test and PL systems in NPC Delve, operations have run almost non-stop ever since, our enemies have already lost five stations, and will this week almost certainly lose every station in the key W-4 constellation.

AAA are being AAA, and refusing to engage even on those occasions when they have a big numbers advantage.  Yesterday, a Test fleet of 170 people were shooting a station on its final timer.  This was to take the station.  Two slow-moving CFC alphafleets were 28 jumps away in lowsec saving a POS.  I jumped in a titan and a supercap and helped speed things along a bit, with over 400 Soco members logged into 319 local.  And yet they did nothing beyond send a few bombers.

The key propaganda message that AAA leadership has managed to instill into its members is that it doesn't matter how comprehensively you defeat them, how prolonged a beating you give them, or how many miles you do with them tied to the back of your pick-up truck.  Because eventually you will get bored of pounding on their prone, suppurating body, and sooner or later their high-pitched, girlish squeals will begin to be really irritating, and you'll go and fight someone with balls, instead.  Or at least with balls that you haved kicked so hard that they now have three Adam's apples.

AAA promised their members that the fightback would begin this weekend.  Then they promised that while they would pass on the weekend (allowing their allies to lose sov that they had no hope of recovering) they would start fighting today.  We'll see if that gets delayed again.  Makalu, who passes for an FC in AAA and who is almost entirely toilet-trained, is claiming that his internet is down, a stage in the cascade trail with which veterans will be familiar, but maybe Perseus Kallistratos will step up to the plate.  After all, he was the self-proclaimed architect of IT's hellcamp of H-W during the Max Damage 2 campaign (until it collapsed after a few hours when it wasn't his idea at all and he had always said it was dumb as a pile of dung beetles).

RA's reaction has been educational, and has thus far fallen into three stages of coping with their grief.  Each of these is a fairly accurate translation, performed for us by Papa Digger

Stage 1: "We will fill Delve with Goon blood."

Stage 2: "They can take our sov but they can't hold it."  This is presumably founded upon the absolutely exceptional record of RA and AAA taking sov in deep US TZ.

Stage 3: "They gonna take more than able to eat."  Only someone who has never seen a the owner of an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet screaming out to his heathen Gods for mercy while a Goon consumes the value of his daughters' dowries would say something so foolish.

Presumably stage four will involve nodding at each other in a knowing and smug fashion as they reflect that with Test and Goons tricked into paying the sov bills for their space, their cunning and wily victory is complete.

Here is the latest pos.jog to show what will be coming out in the next couple of days:

Maybe AAA and their shambling pantechnicon of hangers-on will show up for some of these, and we will get to meat-grind away a few thousand drakes in the act of taking them.  Maybe they'll inject sufficient testosterone into their Arghyesque scrotums to show up and take part in what could be the biggest and most glorious war in years of Eve history.  Maybe we'll even have to ask Vee, Laz, Boat or Vily to FC some fleets instead of letting trainee FCs handle AAA like we have so far!  I know: crazy talk.  But we Scots are famous romantics: just watch Trainspotting for proof.

The Trail of Tears

The keener members of our supercap and capswarm groups headed to Delve on Saturday in a chill Raidek fleet that took no time to arrive.  Some feisty individuals even soloed down before that.  But last night saw a second, even bigger convoy (with caps being turned away to make room for supers) head down, with PL laying-on the cyno chain this time and Vily providing the coked-up descent into Apocalypse Now-style horror as things (geologically slowly) unfolded.  I have changed the systems, but I feel that this graphic best illustrates what unfolded to those of us who gravitated towards the op channel to listen in as word spread that they had decided to act out the entire Book of Exodus, apparently in Real Time, including the Jews' forty years of wandering in the wilderness.

It is fair to say that mistakes were made.  It is also fair to say that some of our newer cap pilots are slower than molasses on a cold day.  Fight us, maybe?

I know that there are still a lot of caps and supers left up north who will need a third convoy, especially in moontime, so badger Raidek, Frabba or Innom (I believe that cliched contentious McJocko Mynas is on strike right now) to get you moved.  PL supercap and cap ops are almost unbelievably chill, and the FC in last night's op hung out in his super speaking soothing words to those three of us who were stuck in a hostile system awaiting a cyno back to F2O, despite being buzzed constantly by various hostiles.  We also got to blap some very surprised subcaps who clearly believed profoundly that supers can't hurt subcaps any more.

There is also a real frissant of excitement in jumping to a penifsmash cyno, let me tell you.


This is my alliance update for Goonswarm from a couple of days ago.

Alliance Tournament X

Only Test's defeat at the hands of old foes T3h G0df4th3rs marred what would otherwise have been a clean sweep for CFC teams in the first weekend's bouts.  Well done Vily for making the Goonswarm victory seem easier than moving a single fleet between two points with help from PL.

Edit: turns out lawn and razor also lost(((

Ministry of Love

I like big fleets and I can't deny.  However, some of you don't.  Some of you even feel at home in highsec, a place that gives me the creeps.  If you want to grief those enemies of the swarm (and to be honest we mainly mean people who once said something rude about Mittens' hair, here) then you should sign up for Warr Akini's growing Miniluv sig, who will be interdicting our enemies' supply routes during this war, amongst other things.  They sometimes fly armour doctrine ships: even dominixes on occasion!

[Kageru]

40% of the fun in Eve was Endie's posting. Some might even think the map dialogue was comedic genius whereas I recognize it for the anguished cry it is.

It's sort of sad that AAA are the last remaining evil, but I can't think of any group that more deserves a repeated kicking.

edit:

Picture saved for future so I can remember the brutal machine-like efficiency of the goon death machine.

[5150]

I would so love to come back and participate in the revenge (I hardly play Eve anymore as it is) I just don't think I have an available character to do it with :-(

[Endie]

You need to view this at its full width to appreciate the scale of it.  This fight just finished, and involved some 1100 Goons, Test, PL and allies fighting some 750 AAA, Nulli and allied defenders.  We (the former group) dropped titans, supercarriers and so on, which you can see at the right of the picture, and held the field.  What you are seeing there is a battlefield about 400km wide.

Edit: updated numbers
Alliances involved: 54
Corporations involved: 374
Players involved: 2154

[Endie]

For those who are around back in the day, Jaroslav is back FCing fleets, Suas runs fleets every night, we're fighting alongside PL in Delve, if you log in you can get into fleets with Vee or DaBigRedBoat or Shadoo, Grath, Elise, JeffRaider, Vily and the rest.  We're living in great days, bros.

I would so love to come back and participate in the revenge (I hardly play Eve anymore as it is) I just don't think I have an available character to do it with :-(

Roll up a newbie and pile in and tackle stuff.  Remember, ships are free, hit me up for money when you are on jabber

[Simond]

For those who are around back in the day, Jaroslav is back FCing fleets

He finally managed to find someone who'd let him back in, then? 

[Kageru]

From reading Kugutsumen though it seems like the AAA resistance didn't take too long to crumble.

[MahrinSkel]

Any comment on the theory that this is Eve's last great war?  After this, there will be Goons (or AAA), their allies, and a bunch of tiny opportunists living like rats in the cracks they aren't bothering with?

--Dave

[Fordel]

They just need to lure in a new external community that numbers in the tens of thousands.

[tgr]

Any comment on the theory that this is Eve's last great war?  After this, there will be Goons (or AAA), their allies, and a bunch of tiny opportunists living like rats in the cracks they aren't bothering with?

I strongly doubt AAA'll factor a major role in any future coalition which has any wits about it.

[Endie]

Any comment on the theory that this is Eve's last great war?  After this, there will be Goons (or AAA), their allies, and a bunch of tiny opportunists living like rats in the cracks they aren't bothering with?

--Dave

People are always proclaiming the death of eve.  The same thing was said about the Drone Regions Federation last year, where you had White Noise, Raiden, NCDot, PL, Legion of Death, Solar Fleet, IRC, Ev0ke, Red Alliance and more all sweeping round Eve and at their peak in control of over half of nullsec.  That was painted as the invincible force that was stifling conflict, even after their wave broke on VFK and receded.  Then we picked them off, one by one.

Even if we succeed in taking Catch and everything west of there we will still hold fewer regions (11) as a loose, binary/trinary bloc than Solar's empire by itself (12). And a little less than a third of all of Eve's nullsec:

[tgr]

[MahrinSkel]

Any comment on the theory that this is Eve's last great war?  After this, there will be Goons (or AAA), their allies, and a bunch of tiny opportunists living like rats in the cracks they aren't bothering with?

--Dave

People are always proclaiming the death of eve.  The same thing was said about the Drone Regions Federation last year, where you had White Noise, Raiden, NCDot, PL, Legion of Death, Solar Fleet, IRC, Ev0ke, Red Alliance and more all sweeping round Eve and at their peak in control of over half of nullsec.  That was painted as the invincible force that was stifling conflict, even after their wave broke on VFK and receded.  Then we picked them off, one by one.

Even if we succeed in taking Catch and everything west of there we will still hold fewer regions (11) as a loose, binary/trinary bloc than Solar's empire by itself (12). And a little less than a third of all of Eve's nullsec:

So: Fewer "players" than there used to be, but not any immediate risk of a mono-bloc power?

--Dave

[Kageru]

It's pretty much mono-block now until the CFC breaks up or declines from what I can see. The game is pretty clearly declining in the number of viable and growing power groups, and the barrier for entry is so high that even a major flood of new players (TEST) still pretty much needs an elder patron.

It would be really fascinating to see CCP's numbers on null-sec activity. I suspect it's stagnant or declining, and it's why a lot of the elders powers are proving to be hollow shadows of themselves (barring the CFC which gains from having a strong culture so they can make their own fun).

[5150]

For those who are around back in the day, Jaroslav is back FCing fleets, Suas runs fleets every night, we're fighting alongside PL in Delve, if you log in you can get into fleets with Vee or DaBigRedBoat or Shadoo, Grath, Elise, JeffRaider, Vily and the rest.  We're living in great days, bros.

I would so love to come back and participate in the revenge (I hardly play Eve anymore as it is) I just don't think I have an available character to do it with :-(

Roll up a newbie and pile in and tackle stuff.  Remember, ships are free, hit me up for money when you are on jabber

Money isnt a problem but appreciate the offer.

My buddy (Ezzeckell, from when we were in LOVEU) and I had a chat last night and decided we could use our empire war characters which have been sat collecting dust (even moreso since the recent patch) I have a feeling these characters dec's Aces over Eights with Bat for those of you with long memories...

How do we get on board, put an application into Bat and post here/send an in game mail to someone?

[Endie]

I say some terrible things about Aborigines and Americans and various others in this update, so here are some Scottish honeys for you to critique
Delve Campaign Update - 4th July Freedomland Edition

Oh bright new day: it seems almost prophetic to be playing with spaceships on the day that scientists announced their confidence that they will soon be masters of the elusive Higgs Boson.  It can't be long, surely, before we find an antidote to this malign particle: after all, anything which imparts mass (and therefore fatness) is the scourge of the Goonswarm Federation community.

And let it be noted that Europe owns the only source of this terrifying new Higgsian particle, and that America will soon kneel before even the most effeminate of Spaniards when faced with our death-dealing, Boson Ray cannons and the threat of us dropping the nightmarish B-Bomb on NYC.  Don't think you can disarm our Higgers with platitudes.

Anyway, in the meantime you can enjoy one last, independent 4th of July before the long night of Portugese hegemony falls across the New World.  And what better way to do so than to ignore those tedious, so-called "relatives" (they only invite you so you feel guilty enough to look after them when they grow old, repetitive and frankly leaky) and instead to camp AAA into their stations (or "prisons", depending how you look at it) while dismantling their proxy empires as we march inexorably - if somewhat wheezily and at serious risk of aortic dissection - towards Catch?

We've been shitty at getting pos.jpg to you for the last few days, and people have been missing out because of it, so here is when you can expect fleets for subcaps and supers.  In fact, you can usually expect subcap ops, literally four or five at a time, for most of the day, unless your family was sent to Australia for tampering with a cow's privates in the 19th century, in which case take what you are given and count yourself lucky we don't call you an abo, make you wear blackface, and post you, blind-drunk, by the gates of each system as a warning of the dangers of devil-juice*.

I got carried away there in a frenzy of prejudice.  Here is the pos.jpg:



Admittedly it looks a little sparse with, heh, only two station systems to be taken amongst the timers today, but why not hang around, skip going out dancing to the mass-produced dubstep in some tawdry little jigglehut and instead stay in with your Test brosefs, or chill out in a supercap fleet with the easy-going charm of Elise, the chillness of Jeffraider or the primal and frankly disturbingly racist fury of Grath?  I was in their fleet for two hours last night and got tons of killmails, although admittedly every time they DDed something I was too busy starving my cap buddy (sorry "Radiogaga's Slave" :shobon: ) or bouncing at literally 11,000m/s to easily drink in the moment.

What's that you say?  You want to bathe in the misery of a fellow-human being?  To idly titillate yourself watching the pitiful and self-justificatory shamejaculations (it's a word: look it up) of mankind at its lowest ebb?  Why not tickle your fancy with tonight's installment of the comic extravanganza which is Makalu in the latest of his comic series on how not to FC:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOj0a3BJntY

Listen to Makalu's scrotum-blistering inability to grasp even the basics of FCing and his furious attempts to blame his loss on his allies, his fleet, blobs, the enemy's refusal to bring his choice of ships, his simple-minded sister, the star sign "Capricorn" and the premature collapse of the second Hittite empire.  Protip, Makster: in a fight against a fleet including huginns, lokis and frigates you shouldn't be confused when some dudes can't keep up!

An interesting side-effect of the eye-watering cowardice of "bloc leaders" AAA is the rapidly increasing alienation of their unfortunate allies: Nulli grunts are at the eye-rolling stage; Raiden's support was always half-hearted in the first place; while The Initiative, who it would be fair to say didn't exactly have AAA on their Christmas card list in the first place, and who were only present in order to circle Raiden's tastier corps while attempting to hide their salivating expression, are openly mocking Herc's Lords of the South.

-----

*I'm sorry Australians.  I love you and am happy that that woman was cleared and that it turned out in the end that the dingo really did get her baby.  Join Lucas Tigh's new jabber channel (someone post details) and build towards a new Anzac/Moontime squad in which people do things.  Although judging by history those things will usually involve Judaism on a scale not seen since that nice Mr Hitler got involved.

[Endie]

It's pretty much mono-block now until the CFC breaks up or declines from what I can see. The game is pretty clearly declining in the number of viable and growing power groups, and the barrier for entry is so high that even a major flood of new players (TEST) still pretty much needs an elder patron.

It would be really fascinating to see CCP's numbers on null-sec activity. I suspect it's stagnant or declining, and it's why a lot of the elders powers are proving to be hollow shadows of themselves (barring the CFC which gains from having a strong culture so they can make their own fun).

Eve has repeatedly seen large, multi-bloc level coalitions consisting of most of Eve fight it out over the past three years.  This time, with less than half of Eve involved, is certainly less polarising than the DRF vs NC war (with AAA attacking the DRF's rear in the east as a second front), where virtually every nullsec player of any note was involved on one side or the other.

[Sir T]

Thanks for the summary Endie. Ahh nostalgia.

I still have a bunch of fighters and lots of other crap in delve. If CCP ever offer me a free 5 days again I'll log in and contract them to one of you.

[5150]

For those who are around back in the day, Jaroslav is back FCing fleets, Suas runs fleets every night, we're fighting alongside PL in Delve, if you log in you can get into fleets with Vee or DaBigRedBoat or Shadoo, Grath, Elise, JeffRaider, Vily and the rest.  We're living in great days, bros.

I would so love to come back and participate in the revenge (I hardly play Eve anymore as it is) I just don't think I have an available character to do it with :-(

Roll up a newbie and pile in and tackle stuff.  Remember, ships are free, hit me up for money when you are on jabber

Do I (and other previous Socialite Ezzeckell, with a different character) just put in applications to Bat now? Do we need to mail anyone once thats been done?

[Endie]

For those who are around back in the day, Jaroslav is back FCing fleets, Suas runs fleets every night, we're fighting alongside PL in Delve, if you log in you can get into fleets with Vee or DaBigRedBoat or Shadoo, Grath, Elise, JeffRaider, Vily and the rest.  We're living in great days, bros.

I would so love to come back and participate in the revenge (I hardly play Eve anymore as it is) I just don't think I have an available character to do it with :-(

Roll up a newbie and pile in and tackle stuff.  Remember, ships are free, hit me up for money when you are on jabber

Do I (and other previous Socialite Ezzeckell, with a different character) just put in applications to Bat now? Do we need to mail anyone once thats been done?

Sorry did you get an answer to this?  I check the subforums for this sort of thing more often.

[5150]

For those who are around back in the day, Jaroslav is back FCing fleets, Suas runs fleets every night, we're fighting alongside PL in Delve, if you log in you can get into fleets with Vee or DaBigRedBoat or Shadoo, Grath, Elise, JeffRaider, Vily and the rest.  We're living in great days, bros.

I would so love to come back and participate in the revenge (I hardly play Eve anymore as it is) I just don't think I have an available character to do it with :-(

Roll up a newbie and pile in and tackle stuff.  Remember, ships are free, hit me up for money when you are on jabber

Do I (and other previous Socialite Ezzeckell, with a different character) just put in applications to Bat now? Do we need to mail anyone once thats been done?

Sorry did you get an answer to this?  I check the subforums for this sort of thing more often.

Not yet, no :-(

[Endie]

Submit your application with an API and a link to your profile here and we'll be able to do the security check thing from there to make sure everything is linked.

[Pezzle]

Ahh, making me so nostalgic..

[Phred]

Ahh, making me so nostalgic..

Me too. But what I do now when I get nostalgic is start up a free trial and see how long I last. Haven't lasted the 14 days in a long time.

[Phildo]

Because running level 1 missions is a good test for how much you'll enjoy the rest of the game?  Or are you using that trial to infiltrate random corporations and gank miners?

[Sir T]

I think I lasted 3 days the last time I logged in.

[Phred]

Because running level 1 missions is a good test for how much you'll enjoy the rest of the game?  Or are you using that trial to infiltrate random corporations and gank miners?

Just flying around is enough to remind me of the tedium of doing anything in the game.

[Comstar]

TEST has allied with the alliance SirMolle is in. They are deciding if they are going to send him north to "help" in the war vs NC.

[Phred]

TEST has allied with the alliance SirMolle is in. They are deciding if they are going to send him north to "help" in the war vs NC.

Does he even log in anymore? Last I heard he was leading a guild in SWToR