Fireside Chat Transcript 26 Aug 2k23

2023-08-26_20-01-53 [00:00:00] Ranger Gama: All right, everybody, we'll just wait for numbers to finish stabilizing there. Looks like they're with, uh, Kazanir's improved, ping, uh, since he was slow and didn't want to hit enter first. Totally not 'cause he typed it in the wrong channel. I hope Suraka is here for the, for the announcement of the most important news today. All right. I think we'll, we'll go in just a couple of quick things. We're gonna leave it for Kaz to do, uh, most of the talking 'cause you all know he hates talking. Um, we'll, we'll leave his stuff for the end. Um, First thing we got some ESS robbing you all have probably seen the notifications, uh, past couple of weeks there. So big shout out to the crew who's been doing that. Um, Brodog's been doing a lot of it, uh, Kontan has been doing a lot of it, and Mr. Ranger has. They've pulled a huge amount of isk out of our reserve banks. And as Dynax is with us, we always have our usual, uh, PI of all the things. He's gonna link those for you all. We still need PI. We need all the PI, uh, put on the market in 1DQ. It's gonna get bought. It's gonna get used. We use PI with so many things. Um, there is a nice planet management tool that our very own Sniper has made. It's in the links that Dynax put in there. Uh, it's a very cool program. If you guys have not used it, you should. It's, uh, really neat, really kind of effective. Uh, my last one, I've got a note from Ankh who's just too lazy to actually unmute himself, but Gooniversity has got a buyback program where they're getting loot, minerals, all the kinds of things to help build our newbies ships, ammo, all the stuff they hand out. He just linked it right there in the channel for you all. Um, He did put a specific note on there. Hey, this is a not for profit program. Everything that they do goes for Gooniversity to hand out to our, uh, newbies. Making sure everything with them is good and they can go and shoot all of the bad guys starting on their first day. I don't know. What do you think, Apple? Should we do Suraka's thing or should we wait for the very end for that?

[00:02:16] Apple Pear: No, we just do it now, then Kazanir can talk as long as he wants because he loves to talk. Fair,

[00:02:21] Ranger Gama: Fair point. Apple and several other people asked me to make sure to tell everyone today that, uh, Suraka is our Imperium Mining Director. He loves mining. Any mining questions, please do send him an in game, people, in game email to Suraka about your mining questions. Uh, Sniper, I'll turn it over to you, um, for our cool new doctrine.

[00:02:50] Snipereagle1: Cool, uh, I will spam the link a couple times real quick. So, we have a new doctrine that's actually like a combination of 2 existing doctrines, which you've probably seen us flying a lot and, uh, we just haven't had an official name for it. So now we do, uh, our new Void Ray Doctrine, which all of our StarCraft enthusiasts will enjoy the name and it's pretty fitting, uh. So it's basically Kikis with Microwarp Drives, and then the support is everything from the Flycatcher Doctrine. So you won't really have to buy much new, but it will be clearer when a ping goes out what doctrine we are talking about so that you can continue to forget to fit the right prop mod on your ship.

[00:03:37] Ranger Gama: Yeah, good point on that one guys. Please do take a look at it. It is MWD fit, not AB. Make sure you refit your Kikis with MWDs.

[00:03:45] Snipereagle1: We, we do still have both. Like, so we're not getting rid of the AB Kiki doctrine. Uh, but the only change between the Kiki and the two is putting a micro warp on and offlining the neut

[00:04:00] Ranger Gama: uh, Kaz, you're up, man.

[00:04:02] Kazanir: Wait, really? We got through all the crap already? It's less than ten minutes. What are you guys doing? Hey, everybody. It's CSM season again. How's everybody been this year? How does everybody feel about Eve? Put in Elysium whether you feel good or bad about Eve in the past year. Got a checkbox, that's good, I like this. Eve attic. Okay. A lot, a lot of good, some bad, some ambivalent, right? Uh, I'm going to link my post if I can find it. All right. So this is the Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance reference. Cause I'm going to actually read this post. It's very long. I apologize. All right. So here's what's up. A year ago, we got elected. And if things were not good in the game, I don't know if anybody remembers last summer, uh, but the player count was in the toilet. Uh, the CSM got elected in the middle of the summer, and that's what we were all essentially talking about, not just the Imperium CSM members. Uh, really, the entire CSM was, was borderline panicking, I would say, right, uh, about where the game was. And it turned out that CCP was sort of actually receptive. We have a pretty good relationship with them. We have not, you know, our relationship has largely been positive. I think, thanks to that, right, they could see that the numbers were not in a great state. They had just done this price hike which, uh, to them, they felt like they really couldn't get out of. Right. Uh, so we've had what has felt like a good year, and it seems like they've gotten a little bit of their group back. Previously, we had a lot of smaller releases during the pandemic, and all of a sudden we have 2 really full expansions with a lot of new content. Right, uh, yeah, as NoobShot just said in Elysium, for those who weren't, player count was down under 20k a lot of the time. The average was right just above 20k, uh, a lot during the end of last summer. Uh, no one, I'm not gonna fully quote that question. I don't think anyone's gotten fired. No, I think they got a little bit of their stride back because the company actually was not very good at the pandemic. This is sort of inside baseball, but CCP has a big office culture. Everyone almost moves to Iceland. They were not ready for like the, I think, stay at home type thing. Uh, work from home that we saw during the pandemic. And they also, I go into this a little bit in the post, right, they did scarcity during those couple of years. It was very unpopular. Uh, in the end, and I think they regretted it. Uh, but the stuff that they did for scarcity was very popular with some slices of the player base at the time and had a lot of backing from certain slices of the CSM. Right? So I went into that in the post, and I wanted to make that clear because. You know, I can also put a lot of blame on CCP for how that went. They, uh, wasted some big opportunities with the amount of people playing video games during the pandemic and what they could have been doing instead of dropping two years of crashing nerfs. But nevertheless, they needed to do something to unwind. Um, but as we've seen, their expansions that they had planned were not focused on NullSec. Uh, the past couple, although in spite of that, we got a lot of changes that we thought were actually awesome, especially in Viridian. The tax changes that we saw. One was the fixing of market taxes, which had been broken for several years, a new set of taxes with LP and really revamping and fixing industry taxes were all great. Right? And there have been a lot of quality of life and small things. As Vasanth Kumar Kalm says in chat. Yeah, I am proud, Diogenes, right? I mean, how can I complain? Great, you know, one fixed tax, one revamped tax, one totally new tax, can't complain. But it's not, we can also see that things are not fundamentally changed with NullSec, right? We've been engaged in this war up north for a long, long time. Uh, now, really since March when we deployed. The time zone tanking is heavy, even the highsec objectives that our enemies have that are hypothetically controlled by Horde uh, they've put into Chinese time to now to tank that way. There hasn't been a lot of substantial change in the meta. And I could, I could see that happening, or at least predicted that as long as a year ago. If you go into the post, uh, there's a document I wrote for these guys. Uh, about a year ago. Let me see if I can successfully link it. Standby. Now watch if we can goon rush Google Docs. That'll be very exciting. So this is like 3, 000 words about the history of EVE Online. So what I decided when we took office is there was really no risk in opening the kimono anymore. Um, the game has been alive for 20 years. We had just, we had won the war, right? But the game was also not going to die. In that situation, right, uh, there were enough people playing that didn't want to quit, and that wanted to continue, and we had also ended up in a situation where PanFam was substantially larger than us, just because of absorbing test, uh, and all of the capital and super capital pilots sort of migrated into PanFam, or in some cases into Fraternity, but largely not into the Imperium, uh, And I tried to think for a long time about what would actually be necessary to really bring some gas back to the metagame and in thinking about it and and going through what I did to assemble this document as I read the patch notes in reverse order from essentially end to the beginning all the way back to Exodus and Caster and realized somewhere in there that they had very strong balancing mechanics um in the game originally even though those were mechanics that we In various periods of our history, and not just us, but many other sections of the player base that ended up hating. Uh, and I go into this in the post. The big, the big two are what were called harvester moons or passive moons, right? Those, am I only at eight? I've been trying to be good. Thanks, Jerrod. Passive moons were a fundamental part of the game for a long time. For those who don't know, these were towers that you could anchor. They were called pos. They still exist, but they don't mine moons anymore. You have to frack a moon. But in previous days, the moon would just extract a certain amount every day via harvester. And this was how you would get money for conquering space even without going and farming it. And moons had so much value in them because they're the way you get T2. And tech too was You know, the original version of EVE was very rare. It was not commoditized in the same way. Uh, and, and it was, Logan Jekyll says, it was good for content, changed my mind. And, but that's exactly the point. So we, and not just us, by, by the middle of EVEs, or really the end of the Great War, say 2009, 2010. At that point in EVE's history, POS were so hated by everyone that they removed Sovereignty mechanics from them because everyone was tired of fighting over POS moons constantly. Uh, there were too many of them. There was, and Sovereignty was based on who had more and, and they just decided it was, you know, it got unpopular. And then they tried to rebalance them, and by accident, led to the Technedium era where... Certain moons in the north were, were super OP in value term. They just screwed that up, right? So, but what Logan says is actually correct, that these things, that the ability to conquer space and have it produce value for you, even if you're not there, was central to EVE's original design. It's in the Exodus patch notes, if you go and read it. What also happened is that our enemies invented, uh, a meta mechanic. To transform the rest of these value into passive income in a similar way called renting, which, of course, we've also hated, even though we did it for a little while as a CFC late in the CFC era, right? It has the same effect. It transforms the space into a sort of conquest income that you can get just for holding it. But the problem with renting is it's a. It's the worst mechanic because it's actually really just three crappy settler mechanic, you know, farm mechanics in a trench coat. It's all the same content, and you have to get a bunch of schlubs to execute it for you in a sort of indentured servitude. And so, of course, we have hated that. It's antithetical to how we operate, right? Goon Swarm is composed of a whole groups of corporations full of the same sort of morons that don't want to rent. And that's how we've made our bones, is bringing those people together and making something awesome out of it. So of course we hated that mechanic, but the principles involved, and this is what I have been trying to cook for the last year and also trying to explain to CCP that this is a way they can address NullSec, uh, without having really to change a lot of the existing mechanics, uh, and go and, you know, there's a ton of talk in the community about, oh, nerf this or change this or buff this. I really don't want them to do that. I want them to build a new thing that represents this sort of archetype. Of the, the playstyle that, that we fought against for a long time, but make mechanics that are better and are not just absolute shite like renting, uh, and cover more of the game. Right. All right. I'll stop at a dozen and take questions. I asked, I asked, I said, we can take questions. I didn't mute myself. So Jeremy asked, where is this going? Uh, in the post, what I, what I say is that, and I guess the first question, the first answer to that is, I'm not sure, but the initial document did get. Uh, certain CCP people to start quoting me on other shows about EVE Online, and I woke up to pings a few months ago. So I've been very active, even though it's kind of, you know, quiet and only surfaces occasionally. And I think I've gotten a hearing, right? I definitely got through when I explained. That renting is passive income. It's a way of creating passive income and turning your space into a conquest sort of space that you don't have to farm yourself and that what they need to do to beat the floodplains effect is to give that opportunity to really every celestial, the possibility of conquering it and saying, This is not going to get farmed. I want to exclude every other player from it somehow, and that it can print me money and then can be assaulted or stolen from. But they can build this up in parallel, not replacing any of the existing farms and fields mechanics that we have, and that this will create the necessary tension. In the game and, and really remove floodplain from, uh, from being a thing that exists, essentially. So Konrad asks, what is the intention to create incentives? I, I mean, yes. The, the problem right now is that with farms and fields mechanics in the game so dominant, and there not being anything to compete with them, then if you don't have enough people to farms and fields all the regions, Then you end up with what I call the floodplains. It's like Da Baschti asks, when you say floodplains, what do you mean? And it's really any region that is not getting far in a sufficiently valuable way that it's worth defending. Right? Lord Trenchard I cannot double your isk I mean, I, well, these mechanics, the. Okay, sorry. I would need the yeah, the conquest mechanics are the counterbalance to this by allowing players to extract, to exclude everyone else from the resource, whatever it is belt moon planet. I don't know. I told them to really just do it for everything and I don't know what that will look like. So that, that's part of why the answer is I'm not sure. Um, but if you do that for everything, then you will get a sort of tension where for some resources it's more valuable for players to conquer them and farm them themselves, whereas other resources, maybe not, and there, but there is some other group who is willing to try and conquer it and just put a passive extractor on it, whatever that is. And if you can have that in tension all across NullSec, then you won't have these regions that are just empty all of the time. And I told what I've been trying to tell, and I hope that we will see some movement, not, you know, not even immediately necessarily, although they did start with new lore just a couple of days ago, which is exciting. But what I hope is that they will be able to do it across all the different resources, celestial types that NullSec has, and that it can be self balancing, no matter how many people are playing the game. And that you will have people mixing and matching mechanics depending on how they want to sort of base build their space according to how they play as players. These are about playstyle interactions. Uh, so as I said at the end of the post, to expect CCP to succeed with that sort of big grand vision, I don't expect that. That would be foolish. Uh, but they might try to address NullSec because I've been working on them all year and the stage is set. Uh, so I'm going to run for re election. Angry Mustache is going to run with me. We are going to interview other candidates. We will certainly have several that are either within or friendly to the Imperium on the ticket, but there will be a bunch of trades also. And the real thing that I want to bring the rest of the community around on is that NullSec isn't an important part of the game still, and that it used to be the game's endgame, and there used to be even more dynamic competition over it than there is now. And I would love to bring other people around to that and try and get CCP to love us again. All right. All right. I got a phone call, so I have to take my headset off. I'll be right back

[00:16:51] Ranger Gama: Like people ever talk to Kaz. Um, the 1 thing you mentioned this earlier, always make sure you, uh, vote your free will and do exactly as the state tells you to once we get the ballot done. We'll theory craft all of it and it will be a very nice, um, set of things that you don't have to really think about. It's really, really pretty easy. So does he not do that on the fireside? I'll be honest. He doesn't. Um, he has interrupted any number of our other meetings for it though. So, um. Let's see, I put the...

[00:17:23] Snipereagle1: For anybody that's... Oh, go ahead, Ranger I put the lower post in it. Okay. Um, obviously talk about this when we have the ballot published. Um, but the way that the voting works for CSM, for any people that are, like, new to the Imperium and our way of doing the voting, uh, basically the way that it works is votes cascade once they hit a certain threshold. And so, instead of, uh, instead of just being like, hey, make sure you put these people on your ballots. Uh, that could cause chaos so instead we get people in order and the goal of that order is to get as many people on that ballot elected as possible [00:18:05] Ranger Gama: To our next thing that we had that Kazanir can talk about until, you know, yeah, the audacity to answer a call during the fireside Dreads, I sure talked about this last week. We decided that the original number that Asher came up with was like a couple of hundred and that's that's rookie numbers. If you're all on discord, I would be linking the GIF you know, the GIF that says the rookie numbers. Let me just say that 3000 was a better number. Um, there's more than a little tongue in cheek on that, but more dreads are always better. Take a look at that thread for a dread. So when you guys are doing that, um, yeah. Please, please do keep getting your dreads, get your dread alts, um, CCP is doing sales on Plex on Omega Time quite often. Uh, so Alterrari says, where can they, where can I purchase a dread? Uh, there are people selling dreads on, uh, the forums and everything like that. So, there's a number of people who are doing those. Ask in your respective channels and I'm sure somebody will do it. I uh ended up with uh, Zintage I'll just throw Zintage under this bus. He uh challenged me to get a couple of new Uh, Zirnitra alts because he made fun of me with how many Zirnitra alts I had so Fucking Zintage conned me into getting like four more alts, that damn guy. Uh, is the problem of all my dreads are Revs? Um, you know, I don't like to make fun of people's life choices, but Hakari yes. Get you some, uh, Zirnitras man they're cooler. And one thing you guys

[00:19:31] Snipereagle1: The non memey answer there is use the dreads you have, because a dread that you have is better than a dread that you don't have. Uh, but if you're very locked into like one type of dread, you might want to think about diversifying a little bit.

[00:19:44] Ranger Gama: And that's why Sniper's the fleet commander and I am not.

[00:19:47] Kazanir: Hey y'all, I'm back. I'll answer one last question. Which is do we have a ballot yet? And the answer is no, that'll be officially announced next week on the fireside or maybe shortly before. It's not, but the actual voting does not start until the 4th of September. And then it only goes for a week. So we're, we're coming up on the actual election, but the campaign is this week, the election is next week.

[00:20:09] Ranger Gama: Uh, so there's a question there for you guys. What is the next dread to have too many of?

[00:20:13] Snipereagle1: We'll let you know when we get there.

[00:20:14] Ranger Gama: So apparently all of the dreads, right? Some dread always good. Um, But the, uh, the Navy Ones guys are, are really cool. And, and Zirnitras not the T2s, we're not talking about those Dreads. Oh, Navy Dreads and all that kind of stuff. Kunmi just put it in there?

[00:20:28] Snipereagle1: No, if you sold a shield Nag you need to refit it to fit on the forum.

[00:20:31] Ranger Gama: It's a good point right now, right? You know, Kunmi took out a, a, a big loan to be able to make Dreads, make sure you guys buy Dreads. So Kunmi doesn't default and we don't have to take his, uh, GEZs away from him. Uh, tell you this, Kunmi has buybacks on Dreads. If you're really looking to do that, uh, Kunmi does some buybacks on those.

[00:20:47] Snipereagle1: Kaz, did you have more, uh, more CSM rambling to do?

[00:20:51] Kazanir: Uh, no, I think I was done rambling. I looked over the questions. I don't think there's that much more. Uh, but yeah, look forward. If you look over EVE media, you may see me or Angry in various places throughout the week. I don't actually know what's happening with the meta show in half an hour. There might be more of those, et cetera, et cetera. Should be exciting.

[00:21:06] Ranger Gama: All right, guys. Any, any more questions and then we'll let you all go and we'll call it a Saturday. Uh, yeah, what was the final count on Kaz's rights? I saw 12 pinged out. Did he get more? 15?

[00:21:17] Snipereagle1: Oh, I just saw a question. Uh, yeah, for any the, the cord applicants, sorry, I've gotten bogged down with other stuff. You'll hear from me by the... By the end of the weekend,

[00:21:26] Kazanir: The way you guys can help me win that is, Thadeus McMaster asks, how can we help you in your CSM campaign pickets bumper stickers? No, all you need to do is vote exactly as the state tells you coming up in a week. Yeah, Alterari has got it. There are the right to vote exactly the way the state tells me to.

[00:21:43] Ranger Gama: Yes, you do. Alterrari we appreciate you voting the way the state tells you. Uh, there's a question on Dread, SRP, Sniper, do you know that one off the top of your head? Just as, is ship replacement for those like it is for the faxes? Uh, so it's...

[00:21:56] Kazanir: We've been vacillating on this, right? Uh, we, we have a substantial Dread cache that we can use to do reimbursement with, and if we were in a situation where we needed to reimburse a lot at once, that's the option that we would use. Uh, in a situation where only a few dreads are lost, we often opt to try and do ISK reimbursement because that allows us to just keep juicing the economy and have people buy another one and, and not dig into the cash if we don't need to. Uh, however, we should make that better clear as a policy. I know it hasn't always been clear and it is sort of case by case basis. Uh, so we, we need to, we know that that's a weakness in policy terms we need to address. But that's the basics of how we think about when dreads are lost.

[00:22:39] Ranger Gama: Uh, Kaz, do alphas get to vote? It's omegas only, isn't it?

[00:22:42] Kazanir: Omega's only get to vote. Yes.

[00:22:44] Ranger Gama: Do they have to be omega for like a week or something? There used to be a time.

[00:22:46] Kazanir: No, you just you just need to be omega the the 10 day omega thing that they did Uh was a few days ago and will run out shortly before the voting period starts So that one won't work. Uh, you have to be omega during the voting period every every account

[00:23:01] Snipereagle1: They usually had something where you had to be subbed a certain amount of time before the election.

[00:23:06] Kazanir: I think that's actually account age, not length of sub duration. That is the requirement. I think your account has to also be older than 90 days. So no making new accounts just about resubbing old ones. Definitely works. I think

[00:23:20] Ranger Gama: Uhh Sniper do we, do know the, uh, SRP for the amulets on on that piece. How are we doing that? I don't remember the process for it.

[00:23:28] Snipereagle1: Uh, yeah. So as far as submitting it, uh, you have to submit the ship, the Escape Bay frigate and the pod.

[00:23:36] Ranger Gama: I think that's it. And as everybody has like, one more thing and then

[00:23:40] Kazanir: I guess I'll throw in. If you're still sitting on any of the old original war Bond Gamma or Sigma, I'm gonna buy you back, hit me up this we're pushing this last month, but it's still a thing. That's it. Thanks everybody.

[00:23:51] Ranger Gama: You join the shares, the word shares channel on Jabber and finance guy will get you sorted. All right, thanks for coming out. Asher we'll be back, uh, next week. He was asleep after the fleet this morning that ended like 7am his time or something crazy like that. Have a good week, everybody. We'll see everybody next week.