View source for Fireside Chat Transcript 14 Mar 2k20

 Last week we spent 20 minutes warning people about COVID-19. We are not going to be spending 20 minutes.
 You are now either warned and you understood the warning that I gave you.
 And I want to thank everybody who has reached out to me, who has confirmed that they took action to protect themselves and their families.
 It is actually very cool organizationally that we got ahead of the curve and of the rest of the general human population.
 So thank you to all of you who heeded my warnings and protected yourselves and your families.
 Now the second bit of this is related to free speech.
 Effective immediately, virus denialism is considered to be goon-fucking and a result in a purge from the imperium.
 What does the virus denialism mean?
 That means it's kind of the same thing that we do with the CSM election stuff.
 So for example, you guys have all been through CSM elections before and you know that we regulate free speech, which is basically as follows.
 In CSM elections, if you're new to the imperium, this is we've been doing this for years.
 This is a sort of technocratic autocracy. We kind of run this shit like Singapore, I guess.
 I've never spent time in Singapore and I think they ban weed there, but you know what I mean.
 During CSM election seasons, the state asks you to exercise your freedom to vote exactly the way that we tell you to.
 And we have a ballot that we give you and in CSM election season, we regulate free speech by saying that you can disagree with the ballot that we give you.
 You can disagree with the candidates that we give you. But if you try to spread dissent, if you try to disagree by publicly talking to other people in the imperium about how they should ignore the ballot, we shoot you.
 And every CSM election, we have to ban a couple of motherfuckers such that everybody else understands that we're serious about this.
 So essentially, when we're talking about virus denialism, we want people to share information, particularly in Elysium.
 We want people to feel free to link articles and stories, particularly in Elysium.
 But we are banning any kind of it's just a flu.
 You know, don't worry about it. I'm still going to shake hands. I'm defying all of the science.
 That is something that will actually help kill people. And so to prevent that, we will shoot you.
 And I expect a couple of motherfuckers to just like we do with CSM section to try to defy us and whatever.
 If you encounter anyone engaging in virus denialism, i.e. the it's just a flu, don't worry about it stuff.
 Please report it to a nominate just like we do any other goon fucking. We already have an existing system for this.
 You as individuals are not allowed in any way to enforce this.
 There is an existing structure for goon fucker affairs. We have a whole system for policing goons, which we always do.
 And this is just one more thing. So you are not allowed to spread dissent about the CSM ballot.
 You are not allowed to spread dissent about the danger that is threatened by COVID-19.
 Now, that does not mean that you have to panic and run for the hills and do everything that like if you see me freaking out about stuff,
 you do not have to take my prediction seriously, right?
 We're not saying that you have to buy into everything that I say.
 We are all saying that you are not allowed to deny that this is a thing that we are dealing with.
 You can think that yourself. You are just required to keep it to yourself or you will be shot out of fucking airlock.
 This is the will of the state. Your snowflake feelings about what you think is really going on about the virus are of no interest to the state.
 So if you encounter any heresy regarding the virus, please report it up the chain to a nominee.
 We're not going to spend any more time on this. You are either with the program or you are not.
 You can indeed disagree if you want, as LeJaiJai just points out, but if you publicly argue with people about how they should not take the pandemic seriously,
 if you publicly try to say, "Don't worry about it, whatever, we will shoot you," you can keep it to yourself.
 And if you cannot keep it to yourself and obey the state, you will meet the same fate as those who have defied us when it comes to CSM election ballots.
 Okay, if there's anything else we need to talk about that, we're going to move on.
 Okay, so in terms of EVE online shit, we're in a very interesting period, which is that we have just undeployed the Jeff and it worked out very well.
 We had a lot of fun with it. We're going to do it again.
 Whenever you finish a deployment, it is very important for the leadership and everybody who really burnt the candle at both ends to have an opportunity to rest and recover
 because a lot of these things do fall very heavily upon a leadership cadre of people that work together to do cool things.
 So even if we are all going to be stuck at home, quarantined or whatever, we can't just snap our fingers and deploy the Jeff again immediately
 because we need to let the folks that made that awesome deployment happen rest and recover such that they can then do it again.
 So usually speaking of these things take like a month to a month and a half, maybe a little probably I think at most a month and a half in this case before we can sit it out again.
 We also need to have a target that we can sit it out at.
 So like I understand that a lot of you guys are like, hey, I want an FC tournament, which is also something we are looking into doing.
 But again, the people that ran the FC tournament last time we did it are pretty much the same crew of people that ran the Jeff thing.
 So it is something that we discussed at the loom meeting.
 It is something that we are looking at, but I am not going to promise or commit to doing the FC tournament idea until the military leadership tells me that they are ready and that they are not burnt out.
 Right. So we hear you. We know that you guys want that.
 And it's on our calendar and it's just a matter of managing burnout to make that happen.
 And with all the other shit we have going on. So we hear you.
 We want to have some shit get shot. We're all on the same page.
 So related to that. Some good news.
 The sacrilege doctrine was so successful. Hold on to your sacrileges.
 If you are somebody who was on the Jeff deployment and love sacrileges, we're going to have to do some tweaks, but we are working on bolting that into being a formal like coalition level doctrine.
 We're not ready to post the doctrine shit today, but if you have a sacrilege from the Jeff deployment, hang on to it.
 Okay.
 So a couple of other things I want to talk about here.
 So, yeah, like after we do deployments, usually if you're new to the organization, this is kind of a normal pattern.
 We do military deployments. We come back. Everybody compares notes as to what went right, what went wrong.
 And then we will usually update our doctrine. So we expect that you're going to hold on to your sacks, boys and girls, which is oddly enough, not a cyber apocalypse joke.
 And then there's probably going to be some other tweaks as to what our doctrines look like.
 So our guys are now in the after victory bureaucracy phase.
 We had a very cool deployment and now we're comparing notes of what's going to be permanent and what's going to go.
 So hold on to your sacks and love your sacks.
 And actually, amusingly enough, I don't really want to wrestle with this right now, but I just got signed out from all of my fireside notes.
 So somebody who was on the loom meeting could copy and paste the fucking fireside notes into a loom, please.
 I don't want to wrestle with my last past manager.
 Thank you, Delta Flux. I appreciate that.
 OK, so a couple of other things that are going on.
 The Corps Diplomatic Corps Diplo is doing applications to become a blueberry.
 It is a lot of work. It is very important.
 Our diplomats are probably some of the most powerful and influential people in all of EVE Online.
 Being a diplomat for Gunsword Federation often means that you have more sway than the average alliance leader out there outside the Imperium.
 So it's very serious. It's a lot of work. And the last day for applications is tomorrow.
 Part of CD being a big deal is that we are not going to hold your fucking hand and say, please apply to CD because you need to have the motivation to actually be a fucking adult about it.
 But last day for applications is tomorrow.
 I want to briefly discuss Vegas. Lots of things are getting canceled all the way around.
 Again, predictions are still on track for July peak of the viral surge, maybe a little bit faster in some countries.
 We're not going to spend too much time talking about that. But travel in general is going to be fucked sideways probably through July.
 But Vegas, Vegas, Vegas, Vegas, our amazing Vegas party is going to be in October.
 And Hyper Viper has done a tremendous amount of work making sure that we have hotels and all this other cool stuff.
 So that is still going to happen because the cyber apocalypse shit is going to be on the other side of that.
 Life will go on and we will all meet up together in October partying in Vegas as planned.
 So sign up for that still. It's going to happen. We're going to be there.
 And if people have links to the Vegas shit such that they could drop it on Elysium, please do so.
 OK, a couple of other different things I want to talk about now that I have my notes back.
 We do not know exactly where the viral surge peak is going to be.
 It will depend upon more information based upon what I was seeing last week.
 I was predicting it and whereby me predicting I mean relying on the experts of my network July.
 But I will tell it. We are obviously hoping that there is some sort of scientific miracle that comes and everything becomes fine.
 We will see. But I can tell you that Vegas in October is still going to happen.
 I am planning on going to Vegas in October. All right.
 So next stuff.
 One thing that I forgot to do when I was talking about the free speech policy is when people are discussing the virus and shit in Elysium and sharing information, I saw an outbreak of politics.
 People around the world, when they are scared, politicize things.
 While we do want people talking about the virus and sharing information in a scientific and ideally cold hearted, put ice in your veins kind of way.
 When people try to politicize it in Elysium, we do not do real world politics in Elysium.
 Internet spaceships are one of the last bowling leagues where people can disagree with each other politically and still be friends.
 I will purge you from Elysium, not from the alliance, but I will purge you from Elysium if you are caught repeatedly violating the no politics rule.
 So do not argue about, oh, this country is doing this because it's a conspiracy or that or the other thing.
 It should be relatively obvious and clear what is political.
 If you have to ask questions about what is political, then maybe you should just shut the fuck up.
 And find a way to deep politicize what you intend to discuss.
 So all the same, while we are banning virus denialism, we are maintaining and emphasizing that the no politics rule in Elysium holds true no matter what.
 I have already had to throw Boat and Anshou out of Elysium, and hopefully those will just be the two examples that are necessary.
 I mean, they're not thrown out of the alliance or anything.
 They just can't be in Elysium for until I feel like it because no politics rule.
 I want to make that clear. The no politics rule is an Elysium thing.
 We are not enforcing like, you know, Theta people talk about politics all the fucking time.
 This is just for Elysium, but I want Elysium to be a clear headed, relatively place for us to share information internationally using a vast network, which is what we have, which is cool and useful.
 And there you go.
 Did I miss something today or is just the fireside about rude words?
 Eat my ass.
 There's some fucking rude words.
 All right, let's talk about something more fun. Let's talk about making money. Let's talk about making money in space.
 So here's the deal, guys.
 Life imitates art. Art imitates life.
 We are in an interesting situation. We are between military deployments and we have a number of weeks.
 We're not exactly sure how many weeks before CCP takes our glorious moon mining fun times away from us.
 We don't know when exactly it's going to happen. We don't know exactly what they're going to do.
 So just like stocking up on toilet paper, we are going to spend the next little while mining like fucking maniacs.
 And the reason for this is not just because we're between deployments, but when CCP made that move where just one day we woke up and they nerfed anomalies by like ninety nine percent without telling anybody.
 That's a signal that we do not know when CCP is going to yank the rug out from under us.
 We have no idea what they're going to do. We have no idea when they're going to do it.
 And it's pretty clear that they are not intending to communicate to the player base what they are planning on doing, which, you know, that makes sense, right?
 Like they don't want to signal to the NullSec empires that they're going to nerf this, that or the other thing.
 And but we know some sort of economic disruption is in coming. We just don't know when.
 So what I want people to do and we also have a couple of other projects that we're working on.
 So next week we're going to be announcing a project that is unrelated to mining, but it's also a critical strategic necessity and possibly spinning up a new organization to acquire that.
 So we have a bunch of shit to do that we are working on as a directorate that we're then going to be revealing to you guys.
 But for now, what I want people to do and this will be going through this, like not all of you like mining, not all of you like doing this.
 But because CCP is potentially going to yank the rug out from under us until they do, I want us to be on just like, you know, fucking smoking meth and don't actually smoke meth.
 Don't smoke stuff. It'll actually if you can try to quit smoking, please do.
 But you know what I mean? I want people to be hyperactive about just strip mining everything that's not nailed down.
 Because we do not know when CCP is going to turn that faucet off and we want to make sure that we are well prepared compared to everyone else.
 You can of course smoke meth if you want. I just don't think that smoking is a really good idea right now because respiratory illness. You get the idea.
 All right, let's see what we got.
 Okay, I believe that is all the major point. We spent an hour plus talking about a cool new project in a loom, but it is not ready.
 I have a tendency when we come up with something cool and when I say we, I mean not me.
 This is something the director came up with and I was like, "Oh, cool new project. This is going to be awesome."
 But because we are at relative peacetime and we want people working on mining stuff, we're going to be taking a week to make sure that we plan it out accurately before we reveal it.
 But we do have a cool thing that's going to be neat to do that I hope to reveal next week.
 Again, what matters is delivering on what we say we're going to do, not just coming to you next week and saying, "Oh my god, here's a half-baked thing. We're going to try to do it right."
 So in the meantime, mine like fucking crazy.
 There is no Locust Fleet tomorrow.
 Okay, so a couple of other different things. Let's take questions now. Those are the main action items for the fireside today.
 Again, hold on to your sacks. Free speech is limited when it comes to virus denialism.
 How do I think the reopening of Serenity will affect the game, especially in the event that it is a clean slate? That is a very good question.
 I think that it will not really make that big of an impact at all because Serenity is, from what I understand, not going to open with a clean slate.
 I think it's going to still have people's stuff from before, but people have become much more invested in EVE Online on Tranquility.
 And on top of that, there is so much regulatory risk that if they go back to Serenity, then at any random point, the server might get turned off or fucked up.
 And it's an older version of EVE, so I do not actually--it's a very good question, which is why I'm answering this in some detail--I do not believe that this is going to be a whole thing.
 We're watching the Meta Show for more on Serenity. Apparently we are doing a whole bunch of things involving the Serenity question on the Meta Show.
 And we're actually doing a big wormhole thing on the Meta Show. Okay, that's good. Those are the guests, Loraseco and Azokis.
 We're going to be analyzing what the hell happened in wormhole space over the week on the Meta Show.
 And the point of it is going to be basically to explain to people like me, who don't really ever get involved in wormhole politics because it doesn't involve the NullSec chessboard,
 these guys are going to be basically explaining to people in NullSec what happened in wormhole space, why they're so mad at each other, and just what the hell is going on.
 Because I'm going into this not really fucking knowing, because it's not really my territory.
 Alright, let's take some more questions here.
 "Can we go glass, PL, and NC in response to campers?"
 Campers are an important part of you learning how to die and survive. There are always going to be campers in our space, and that is a good thing.
 That is one of the reasons I like us living in Delve is because there is NPC Delve, which means that there is an opportunity for constant harassment.
 Syndicate is where we were born as a people, and the culture that came out of SU-84 was so densely packed with both goonie idiocy and essentially constant danger every time you would undock in SU-84.
 It's very similar to 1DQ1 right now. So it weeds out the weak and the stupid, and it provides an example to everybody of what not to do from those who fail to learn.
 So I always want Delve to be at least a little bit dangerous constantly, because otherwise you will grow weak and foolish.
 "What are ways we can voice our disdain for the mining nerfs?"
 I don't know. You can go shitpost on the forums. I really don't care.
 The thing about the mining nerfs is this, guys. If you've been playing this game for long enough, you realize that CCP always hits stuff with a nerf bat eventually.
 This is not the first time that CCP has swung a bat and nerfed stuff heavily out of nowhere.
 Eventually, you just get used to it. That's one of the reasons why instead of going, "Oh, guys, let's fight against this," or "Let's stop this," I'm saying, "Hey, they're probably going to yank the rug out from under us in a couple weeks, so just go ham on mining."
 Because the goal is not to yell and whine at CCP. The goal is to beat the other motherfuckers in NullSec and to do better than them and to outmine them and to out-Supercapfleet them and to crush our foes and build the greatest empire in the history of internet space.
 Or at least that's what I like to do.
 So I don't really give a shit about broad-based nerfs to the game itself. I care about beating the shit out of our competition.
 So when I see a big nerf coming, I don't think, "How do we stop the nerf?" I think, "How do we out-compete the other guys that are not going to weather that nerf?"
 And this is the bodybuilder analogy. Now, a lot of you have heard the bodybuilder analogy a zillion times before, but we have a lot of new people in the Imperium, and so I'm going to repeat this because some of you, maybe this is the first time that you've really been nerfed and you're scared or you're mad about it.
 But here we go. Bodybuilder analogy. You've got two people. You've got two people. One of them is a powerlifter. They deadlift. They're on steroids. They're doing all their things. I don't really know how all that shit works, but they're used to carrying hundreds of pounds of weights.
 And then you have, I don't know, me. I went through a lifting phase, but I never got super serious about it. But if somebody handed me a hundred-pound weight and said, "Carry this thing around all day," I would be really miserable, and I'd probably end up just crushed on a couch.
 I actually had to carry a 70-pound rock for a bit during a GoRock challenge five years ago, and that fucking sucked, but I think a hundred pounds would probably break me. Of course, at the same time, I had a rock on. Anyway, it doesn't matter.
 The other person, you hand a hundred-pound rock or a hundred-pound weight to a bodybuilder, and they're like, "Okay, well, this sucks a little bit." One person is on the couch broken or can't even carry the thing, the other person can handle it, and then you compare who is handling it better.
 So that's basically what's happening, how we weather nerfs, is that we always want to be the person that is trained, that is practiced, that is understanding how to handle it. And when we get handed a nerf and our enemies get handed a nerf, in many ways, this results in what we call a differential buff.
 On the face of it, everybody has been nerfed, but because we handle the nerf better than our competition, functionally speaking, we get nerfed like, I don't know, 5%, but they get nerfed like 25% because their organization cannot handle it as well as we do.
 So that is how, in many ways, when Eve gets hit with a nerf bat, I'm not going, "Oh my god, CCB, how do we handle this?" My question is always, "How do we handle this better than our enemies?" And that is what I want you guys focused on, not stop CCB from nerfing it, but, "Okay, CCB is nerfing everybody. How do we come out ahead?" That's what I want people thinking on.
 Because if you handle a nerf better than the other guy, it's a buff. That is how you need to think. If everybody gets nerfed and you do it better than the other guy, it's actually a buff because we're competing with each other, not with CCP.
 And conveniently, this is one of the reasons why we've conquered the fucking galaxy so many times, is because we grok this, we understand it, and our enemies do not.
 Okay. Let's take some other questions and then I'm going to have to set up for the meta show and get ready for that.
 All right, sweet. Well, it looks like we don't really have any more. Oh, never mind.
 Yes, there will be a suit on the show today. I am wearing a suit as before, but I'm wearing a new suit.
 I'm going to try to make sure that my white balance on my webcam is not as whited out so I can get some more fashion advice.
 So relatively speaking, no major deployments for a foreseeable time. I would not anticipate us going on deployment for, I mean, we just undeployed Jeff, and usually speaking, when we undeploy people, it requires at least a month before you deploy again.
 Just because of burnout and needing a military target.
 That is why I'm telling you guys, I want you to be mining, and we have a new project we're going to be announcing next week, if it's ready.
 But this is why I want people thinking in these ways. We just got done with the big ass deployment, and we need to actually crab.
 I know that talking about crabbing is really fucking annoying. If you're like me, my eyes glaze over when we talk about important and necessary PVE things.
 You guys hear it, when we're talking about moon rentals, my poor little mitten's brain shorts out, because if it doesn't involve empire building, war, murder, espionage, metagaming, crushing our foes, I just get distracted very easily.
 But this is important because we need to mine. Why do we need to mine? Because that is how you build super capitals and other ships.
 We need people mining like crazy compared to the other guys, because when everybody gets nerfed, I want us to be like, "Ha ha ha, fuck you, here's another 200 fucking titans, eat my ass."
 So it's not just mine because mining is a thing. I want you guys mining such that we have a huge mineral stockpile, which we can turn into warships, such that when our foes, who have failed to mine as assiduously as we have, find themselves at a strategic deficit.
 Because, again, bodybuilder analogy.
 There's a lot of questions about things involving the nuances of mining, and Tuzzy and the crew can actually answer them, because I do not know how to do these things.
 And you guys know I do not know how to do these things. PVE is not my thing. My thing is war and murder, but at this point, war and murder requires that we do this PVE like we're going to war until CCP yanks the rug out from under us.
 And it could be any day. Again, remember, CCP nerfed anomalies by like 99% one day. They didn't tell anybody, they didn't warn anybody. Just suddenly one day, the shelves were empty, so you gotta prepare.
 Have I considered a dark red suit and tie with a lighter red shirt? That's actually pretty interesting. I don't know whether that would work well with my complexion, though. I hadn't considered that. That might be fun, though.
 Can we make life miserable for high-sec refinery owners? No comment on future plans.
 All right, guys, cool. I think that we are good to go on this. Again, relatively light fireside in terms of action items, because it is relative peacetime, but in that peacetime, I want you to mine as if it is war.
 We need – and this is not just guys in the Locust Fleet, this is not just guys with the Roarquals – I want every single thing to be ripped apart PVE-wise, because we have no idea what the next nerf is going to be, we have no idea when that nerf is going to be.
 We just want to make sure that we are approaching this like it is a military problem, because the things that you mine and you produce get turned into warships, and if everybody else in the game has our mining turned off and we cannot get these things, but we have the stockpiles and the ability to do it, that means we have more warships, we have bigger fleets, we have more titans, we have more victory.
 So this is not just crabbing for the sake of crabbing. This is crabbing – I've never done this before. I've never gotten up here on a fireside and told you guys I want you to mine like motherfuckers, because we do it peacetime. We say you make more titans, do all this stuff before.
 But this is a scenario where we know that CCP is going to turn this shit off. So that means we're doing it very seriously, because we know that the party is going to have to stop, and we want to make sure that we are the last people sitting on a chair if it's a game of musical chairs, and I'm mixing my analogies.
 If moons get rerolled, question about that. I'm not answering that question, because who fucking knows. It's a hypothetical, and we don't have a policy about that yet. We do not usually pre-announce policies about hypotheticals. It is a good question, so while I am telling you I'm not going to answer the question, it is a reasonable and a good question, but we do not pre-change policies on the fly on a fireside relating to that.
 We make our policies based upon the evidence we have available to us when that comes to pass, so it would be pointless basically to design what we're going to do if moons get rerolled without knowing how moons would get rerolled. That's basically how one makes policy for an organization as vast as this with tens of thousands of humans.
 All right, and to make it official, there's going to be no announcements on moons or anything until we actually know what the ground truth is.
 All right, boys and girls, thank you for coming. Stay safe. Look out for each other. Obey the state, and we will proceed onward. So let's get to mining, and let's do our thing.
 We will be back for the fireside next week at the same time. We also have the meta show coming up in 20 minutes. I know that there is a weird European versus US time to change because daylight savings time fucking sucks, and it's not coordinated between the US and Europe.
 We live in hell, but the meta show starts in 20 minutes, so I will see you all there if you feel like tuning in. Thanks for coming.