Fireside Chat Transcript 2024 10 05

Asher Elias:

All right. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the State of the Goonion.

I'm going to give you all a little more time to get in. Just so you're aware, we are live translating this. So, I believe into 5 languages. So we will be talking a little slower, so I will have some pauses in here. This is just to accommodate the people live translating. So if you hear a long pause, we're just gonna let it, we're letting the translators catch up, and then I will keep going. I know a lot of our directors have been excited about this announcement. I know a lot of line members have been speculating on what it, what it means. And, uh, I'm excited to tell you. Once again, I expect that there may be mumble issues, uh, with jut the amount of people that we have on. So go ahead and load up the INN stream on twitch.tv. I have put it in the, I put it in the broadcast. If you did not see the broadcast, twitch.tv/imperiumnews, twitch.tv/imperiumnews.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2268477685

I'm going to give everyone a couple minutes just to load it up, get in channel, get yourself some hot chocolate, whatever you need to do, and then we'll get going. Then once again, remember we are live translating. So I will be pausing to let the translation catch up. And thank you to our translators who volunteered to do this. I am sorry in advance for the idioms I will use that are hard to translate on the fly. Also Conrad Jacobi in the, uh, twitch/german channel. Make sure you aren't keying up to here. All right. Stickz you good?

Stickzability:

I was just, did you hear him? I did some testing earlier and, uh, there shouldn't have been issues, but

Asher Elias:

I heard him like hit, hit a button twice. I don't know what it was. Might've been a direct that thing is I'm not sure. We'll see. If he pops in, I'll, uh, I'll mention it. It's not a big deal. All right, let's get going.

Okay. So I want to start this out by talking about history. Uh, I want to think back to 2015. I know a lot of you weren't even here then. Uh, some of you weren't playing the game. We have a lot of old heads who are here, but a lot of new players who are not. If you don't know, in 2015, Goons were living in Deklein. And, but we were rotting on the inside at that point. Um, we had really embraced the hell balls, hell balls, blue balls, or hell dunks, um, that had been, you know, our, our mantra and it wasn't a fun way to exist. Um, and basically the entire galaxy united behind casino money and evicted us. And, um, at that point, we were forced out of our home of Deklein, which was the home that a lot of people, you know, only had known.

Uh, and then we moved South. Um, we were followed to Delve and a lot of, we were, we were, we were in bad shape. Um, the only leader from the casino war coalition who had, you know, evicted us from Delve that followed us down was PGL. Everyone else, um, everyone else just got tired and didn't finish off when we could have been finished.

So. We have moved to Delve and we rebuilt constellation by constellation. I personally FC'd a fleet that put up the first Fortizar on the 1-SMEB gate. And it was a big deal for us. I remember people like cheering and hollering. I want you guys, could you imagine, like, can you imagine anchoring a Fortizar today and anyone, anyone like whooping and people clapping? Like that was, that was the accomplishment for us was putting up a Fortizar, one Fortizar. Those were, those were fun times. I mean, it was, uh, it was new and exciting. Um, and as we built, we added allies who lived around us and this was just sort of by necessity. So this led to a shape where Goons were at the core of the empire and our allies were at the end and it didn't make sense to have them on the edge, um, because Goons are generally the strongest group in the Imperium.

So, two years ago, uh, when I took over, I wanted us to be more in the action. Um, our finances and our general structure were pretty bad. They were in shambles. Um, I want to thank, I want to thank the leakers for showing that stuff so that you guys know, it's not just a talking point. You actually could have seen the evidence. So we have been in a rebuild and I want to thank all of you today, because you guys have been part of that. In the last two years, even with our relative poverty compared to others, we deployed our supers to fight twice. Uh, and both times Panfam found some way to run away from them. For the last two years that group, when it talks about how wealthy they are, has never undocked their super fleet.

I want to go back into history for a little bit. A lot more of you here fought with us during World War Bee, and they began that war with a three to one advantage, and probably in my opinion the most guaranteed war victory of all time in EVE, even more than the casino war. But that time we held. We fought tooth and nail, we held our space, and we threw them back from our castle.

And now for us, Delve has become the place where we told the best possible story. And it's also become a small place for someone as big as us. We lived here for nine years, and no group in EVE has held space for anywhere near that long. I do not think it's ever been done that someone has held space for as long as we have.

So, here's the big announcement. It's time for us to make a new story. Goons are departing from Delve. This plan has been in development for a long time, even before CCP announced the NullSec changes. We set out to capture space in the east, and we allocated several months of time because our enemies told their members that they were looking to fight. Uh, after they ran away, we were left holding the space. We won it too quickly. Uh, so I do want to apologize to you guys. We have been sort of spinning our wheels for a little bit. We did not expect to, you know, oops into four regions as quickly as we did, but we did. And so we've been left sort of spinning our wheels for a month or two now, um, and apologies for that, but, you know, things have to go on the schedule. They have to go on. We expected them to fight and they didn't. That was probably my bad, probably bad planning on that part. But that's the case.

So, where are we going? Starting immediately, Goons will be preparing to move to our new capital of UALX in Tenerifis. I'll explain to you guys the reasons that we're moving. There's multiple reasons. The first one is it'll put us on the edge of our empire, which I feel is the appropriate place for Goons to be. Uh, we should be tanking the bowshock of SOV warfare and not asking our allies to do so. This is very important to me. I think that we should be, uh, at the edge of space, not in the center of it, because of our previous configuration, our allies grew around us and that just happened because of circumstance and it never really made a ton of sense. Um, where we are going, we will have more space, more moons, multiple types of rats to hit. We'll have more opportunities to respond to roaming game... gangs, and we will make our enemies have to work harder to fight us.

Our enemies, speaking of them, respond to the changes by demanding Venal moons from their allies. We have responded by doubling our allies space. And enemies are a big part of this. Um, we are moving much closer to Panfam. It's no secret who our most important enemy is. They had four years of opportunity to come after us, after we were weak following World War Bee, and they can never find the guts to do so.

It's uh, it's been pretty funny over the uh, the last few months. Uh as they ran away from their space, Gobbins has bragged to his guys about his master plan of not fighting and taking the space back from us when we left. We were, we were loving this guys. We we thought this was hilarious And but it is the type of leader and enemy that we fight, like he was happy to share this information publicly with his guys that his plan was to not fight and take space back when it was uncontested, and Delve, we were on the opposite end of the galaxy from these people. Now we will be much closer. That's good for us and bad for them. So that is the macro level announcement. I will explain some of the details right now. And then for Goons immediately after this, we will be going to a fleet.

Right after this, we will be taking our Ferox Navies and our Raven Navy Doctrines from U-Q to UALX. We will immediately move those right after this. We will set a jump clone there. We are not moving death clones there yet. After we do that, we will return to UALX and we will return our capital ships and the rest of the doctrine ships to Delve. So that's ships that are not Ferox Navies and not Raven Navies. We will be staying in Delve for a few weeks. We're going to pack up everything. We're going to unanchor structures and we are going to, once we've done that, we will move our, our staging and our capital to UALX as the final move. Uh, Delve will not be abandoned. Allies will be taking over that space. I will let, uh, allied leaders, uh, inform the line if they're grabbing new space, if they're changing space, I'll let them tell their line numbers, uh, whenever they choose to do so.

So I expect their enemies to attempt to slow us down. That's fine. We will lose some things. That's also just the cost of doing business. Do not be worried about that. The important thing is that we get the job done, not that we get the job done perfectly. That is a unreasonable goal. So we're going to do this. We're going to do this as best as we can. This is going to be the biggest move up that has ever happened in EVE Online, and it won't be even close. Uh, we have an incredible plan. We have an incredible amount of hardware ready to go, ready to move. We have been working at this for a very, very long time. This has been gestating for a long time.

Um, do not move your main capitals or any other doctrine ships by yourself. We'll be doing move ops very frequently. When you are ready, you can start once you're packed, you can start bringing extra ships during move ops. So that means something that is not a doctrine ship, um, or is a Ferox Navy or Raven Navy. If you have extra ones of those, you can start bringing those during move ops to UALX. So what that means is, say you have a Cynabal lying around, if you want to take your Cynabal to UALX during a move up, that is totally fine. But if you have a Rokh, that's going to stay in Delve until we move the Rokh doctrine.

Um, for capitals, we will be running safe cynos, uh, very frequently to get you to 49-U, which will be the kickoff point for a lot of the move ops, and for sub capitals, we will be having FCs run move ops, um, through very frequently to either 49-U or all the way over there. Please do not move yourself. I guarantee you this will be camped. So don't move yourself.

I need you guys to spread the word. There are a lot of, a lot of people have lived in 1DQ. So if you are in a server, uh, with EVE players, this is the time to break out those @everyones, you know, hit them up, get yourself, uh, those, those reactions that where people are like, no all pings, uh, let, let Goons know we're moving if you're in a server with Goon friends.

I just want to say, I'm going to close with this. It's a monumental undertaking. It's never been tried before in the history of EVE Online, this kind of move. We've been planning it for many months and I mean, I mean, that it's been it's been a long time in the planning and it's been fun to watch from this perspective. Now, I want you guys to know that the directorate has had a lot of time to come to terms with this. You guys are just learning about it. So I understand for some of you, it'll take a while. To, to come to terms with this, that's okay. Um, it is a, it is a big deal. The directorate is extremely excited. It started out with some people being a little anxious, a little unsure, but right now, before this announcement, everyone was incredibly hyped, uh, in our meeting before this, we were just, people were just brimming. It was, it was like a buzz. It was crazy. It was really, it was a really good feeling.

We need from you guys, we need everyone to be here to defend our space. Uh, it's going to be lots of effort, lots of action over the next few weeks. I expect that there will be lots of efforts and attempts to slow us down. That'll be okay.

But what I need from you guys is I need you guys, I need a dedication from you guys right now, unlike anything we've had in the last year or so. So be there focused, be there ready. I've told you guys that telling your story in EVE Online is my main goal. And so this is the next part of the Goon story.

So thank you all for being here. We're going to be doing move ops right now and, uh, FCs will be there. I'll be there. People will be there. Directors will be there to answer your questions. So hop on fleets that are going up right now. We'll be sending out pings. That is the end of the State of the Goonion. Thank you so much.