Fireside Chat Transcript 13 Feb 2k22

All right, boys and girls, we're gonna get started here in a couple minutes. It is good to be back.
I say it's good to be back, it's because Mirana told me to take a weekend off last weekend,
which is very hard for somebody who's such a obsessive workaholic,
and I managed to do it!
But it's good to be back in Hurf and Blurfs on a Sunday, and when the numbers stabilize, we will get going.
We got a comment here on stupid idiot fleet.
I'm gonna go ahead and do a little riff before we get into serious Prime Hurf territory.
I went on a roam last night with some of the gang, and it was fascinating to visit
the less developed sectors of the galaxy. Basically, it looks like a lot of the puppies out there are still behaving as if it's
2006, or some of them haven't even... some of them have managed to copy what we're doing,
like fraternity space is full of things that are kind of like a version of ours,
but it is a really stunning and interesting
opportunity to compare life in the Imperium to the
barbaric pappy masses out there in the great beyond, where they don't have optimized jumperage networks,
GZs, or all the cool shit that we have created here.
It brought a
few things to mind. Now, I want you guys to understand,
I have to be very careful about what I say and I don't say on a fireside, because one of the things that I've learned,
and we learned this during the war, is
the pappies aren't going to find things out
unless we tell them through a fireside or through a show or something like that. So a lot of times when we're in these
periods of "wretched peace",
we have to use euphemisms. We tell you guys to join SIGs and squads.
There have been new things in the zone of SIGs and squads, and if you are looking to get some blood on your hands,
I highly recommend that you do exactly that.
When I was doing this, when I was out there, I want you guys to realize that even if I'm not screaming from the rooftops
about a particular campaign or a Jeff deployment or this that the other thing, that we are...
I kind of want to do a macro level strategy update in such a way that doesn't give away
too much details and getting me yelled at by the entire directorate, which is the way it usually works.
I envision our current stance as being that of sort of similar to an ambush predator.
You've heard me use the analogy of an awakened empire or becoming a crisis.
These are both Stellaris references, but we find ourselves in a situation where periodically our enemies will all get together and they will reform Pappy
because it is their nature. At the end of the day, they are all still Pappies. They will always Pappy up. That is who they are.
But,
if we are quiet and we do our thing,
periodically, we will catch the lone Pappies separated from the herd.
And in those moments, we are able to drag them under the water and slit their throats.
Insert your appropriate violent spaceship analogy for a video game Eve Online here.
The point is that whenever the Pappies are in disarray, whenever they are not working together consistently, that provides us with opportunities.
And those are the kind of opportunities we can't spell out on the far side, but we can point to as recent examples of the kind of thing that we are after.
The kind of opportunities that allow us to take a big, fat hit and do some damage.
Like what we did to Army of Mangos. That's a scenario where you get them out, you get them isolated from the herd, you take them out, and you're dinging them for several years of development.
This is why I think, I tend to think in terms of doing damage in terms of years, in terms of time,
because it is a game that takes so much effort to build and organize things.
And then when you go on a filament room and you see what it's like for the other side,
you can see the differences in development and the opportunities that we've had to basically do negative expected value damage to these motherfuckers when they're not looking, when they're not expecting it,
and when they're just going "hahaha goons lost a war crawl, goons are dumb."
That's ideal. We want them that way. That is cool and good.
So, where do we go from this?
One of the things that also came up yesterday is I was very excited about talking about rapid light missile praxises,
because we encountered somebody had a homeland defense group that involved RLML, rapid heavy praxis I should say,
using a bunch of praxis in homeland defense, and it came out that we actually don't really have any need for anything like that,
because we have multiple groups within Gunstorm and within the Imperium that are basically fighting over the opportunity to murder things that come into our space.
I'm kind of pleased, a little bit surprised at how little we have lost in terms of stupid idiot fleet.
Those pings do exist. We are still doing a stupid idiot fleet. You need to be fast.
We have a situation here where there are multiple groups within the Imperium that are just like fucking piranhas
going after the first opportunity to murder puppies that come to delve when they do.
So, one of the things you need to do is keep in mind when there's an opportunity to kill puppies,
it's not a situation of wait for an invitation, somebody's going to knock on your door and send five pings.
If you see a ping to get into a fleet and murder puppies, there is a clock.
There are a bunch of other bloodthirsty fucking goons out there that are desperate to get some blood on their hands,
and so you need to get out there and fight for those kills because that's the current situation we are in.
There is murder to be had. There are SIGs and squads to join.
Martial Law is a full-blown SIG/squad, which is super cool.
We need to change the forum name for you guys so you can use your forums. That is on the to-do list if it hasn't happened yet.
And that's great. It's great that when we are visiting the Barbarian Lands and I see something like a group of Praxai,
and then it's like, "Yeah, dude, this is way too slow. Everybody else in our Homeland Defense system is going to be there way before that.
We don't need this silly scalable doctrine for that."
Oh, okay. Cool. Great.
So somebody had a question. What's the purpose of Martial Law?
Martial Law is a squad that is, I don't know if it's mostly US time zone.
It did start in US time zone. It's not like a "You have to be US time zone" thing, but it is Mike and the gang.
There is an EUTZ, and I'm sure they're recruiting.
This is an opportunity for me to say, "Join Sigson's squads, guys. Join Sigson's squads."
If you don't know what I'm talking about, take a look at the Recruitment Center.
There's a bunch of Sigson's squads. Get involved.
There's a couple other things I want to talk to you guys about.
We have recently been experiencing a lot of frustration with the ESI system.
If you have had to fight through our auth system, and you're trying to get your character or your corporation authorized in our manager,
and periodically CCP system bugs out, you get bad gateway errors, or you've had to log in five times to actually get the checkbox.
This is something that has been causing extreme frustration for us.
It has also been causing extreme frustration through the rest of the galaxy.
Our spies and our directors have been reading pings from our enemies.
It is throughout all of these orgs, all across EVE.
It is a huge problem, and I wanted to bring it up on a fireside, not to say, "Hey, we have a solution."
In some cases, there might be solutions, but most of this appears to be on CCP's end.
But I want you guys to know that I've been having frustrations with this.
We have been frustrated with it as well.
It is not a-- you're not alone.
It is not a Goonstorm thing. It is not an Imperium thing.
It is across all of EVE.
Every organization that relies upon the ESI endpoint has been just having a miserable time for several months of this,
whatever the fuck is happening in Reykjavik with the CCP ESI endpoint.
So, you're not alone. Your frustration is not a weird thing.
It is shitty. It is lame.
And I want you to know that everybody is going through it.
It's not necessarily a big deal, but it's like a-- it's a minor annoyance of the kind
that is a little bit less annoying if you understand that everyone across the entire goddamn game is struggling with this,
and that you are not alone.
I want to give a shoutout here to Soraka. Rest in piss.
Soraka has been promoted to be a Black Hand Director,
which is probably one of the most difficult jobs in the Space Empire.
Staring into the abyss and reading what the puppies have to say all day every day will scar someone's soul
almost as bad as doing CoWord.
So, rip.
Okay.
Got a few other little ones here that we're going to do Q&As.
We have a happy birthday to wish to Siberian squads who have turned five.
We have the other part of that ESI rant.
I got distracted bitching about how frustrating it was.
The flip side of this is, if you are having issues with that,
please make sure to check Auth and make sure that your main is still active in the system.
If you've been having problems, you can essentially try to re-auth your character or your alt corp.
Remember, there are two separate things.
There's the auth system for your character,
and then there's a separate one for whatever corporations your character may be in charge of in our system.
So, one of the things we have encountered is sometimes turning it off and turning it on again,
or re-authing, uh, unfuck some of the stuff from CCP, sometimes for a short period of time, maybe.
So, give that a try.
I'm obviously not promising high odds of success here,
but we have seen some success with the turning off and turning on again system.
All of those bad gateway errors that you're going to get are on the CCB side, unfortunately.
Speaking of the CCB side,
FanFest is happening,
and I got a question the other day about,
"Are we doing FanFest? Are we going hard into the paint at FanFest? What's our status?"
I believe that the world is opening up and that normal travel is going to be resuming,
globally, whether we like it or not, one way or another, which is fantastic.
And because FanFest is kind of important to Iceland's economy,
internet spaceships are like one of their main sources of international hard currency,
besides fish and aluminum.
I'm not making that up.
They have been very loud about the fact that they are not going to
fuck people over with quarantines or any sort of awkwardness for May.
So, I even have a link for that.
There you go.
So, essentially, Iceland is going to try to make damn sure that we're all able to get to FanFest
as planned.
I am planning on attending.
We also have Gunnberlin coming up in July.
That is an Imperium event.
It's not an official CCB event.
And if we could get a link to Gunnberlin posted in Olesium, that would be awesome, please.
If we could get that.
That is like the weekend of July 9th and 10th.
I think it's going to be super cool.
I have a very rare shoutout.
Almost, basically, throughout the entire war, I couldn't brag on these guys too much,
and I still can't brag on these guys too much.
But now that some of their stuff has been nerfed, I can make reference to them.
I am speaking, of course, about Insurgent Squad.
Insurgent Squad are a bunch of goddamn heroes.
Insurgent Squad have gotten the contracting system repeatedly altered because of the many
creative ways which Insurgent Squad have utilized the contract system to fuck Horde over,
which is always cool and good.
CCB has changed a quirk in the contract manager system such that it can make it an easier time
for Elfboy and his minions to try to keep Horde safe.
And I'm just so proud that this is-- it's not the first time that Insurgent Squad has
done things that have resulted in the contracting system being altered or tweaked.
And if Elfboy is spending his time on the CSM focused on fighting Insurgent Squad,
that is all to the better.
So shoutout, guys.
Well done.
As the adage says, it's just CCB continuing to assist Pandemic Horde directly,
which is same shit, different day.
All right, I've got one other thing here, and then we're going to take some questions.
We are working on a redesign of the Imperium News website.
And Sopleb is the lead developer now.
He's taken over from Keyboard.
And we are looking for a couple of WordPress devs.
So if we have-- let's see.
Two more people to do this in a sane way.
So if you have experience doing WordPress or web design or anything that would be relevant,
useful, or interesting for that, please do get in touch with Sopleb.
If you are available on-- I want to see if he's actually here.
Yes, he is.
Good.
Perfect.
We're not reinventing the wheel here.
It's actually going to be a relatively bog-standard project.
There's no custom, funky code on the back end.
It is a CMS.
It is a bog-standard internet news web page about spaceships.
And sweet.
Sopleb has already got Ice American Cosium and a few other people that he can talk to.
What about structure?
OK, we're going to do Q&A now, guys.
A question about structure policy.
Any ETA on when it will be announced?
We have a whole bunch of structure policy that's already on the wiki.
If you look at how to set up a citadel on the wiki, you will be able to find out all
of the information you could possibly want about how that works.
And if you have a more specific question, you're going to--
I invite you to ask it in more specific terms.
Let's see what else we got.
Can we kill tests now?
No comment.
I totally want to kill tests.
Killing tests would be awesome.
It's been really interesting watching them all sort of flail around.
There's been a lot of flailing on the chessboard, right?
And this was not anticipated.
I did not expect this shit show in VNL to be the shit show that it has become, where
NC and PL get involved in VNL trying to purge NPC space randoms.
And then it fucks up badly enough that they have to get fraternity in to help.
So that's kind of like a developing mess in the galactic Northwest, which we weren't
anticipating.
There's this power vacuum sort of in the galactic southeast because of the disintegration of
legacy and the unfortunate oopsing of AOM.
I don't know who did that.
We're clearly not responsible in any way.
And let me see what we got.
Locusts.
So the locust group has been doing very well.
They're not all in rock walls anymore.
There are some rock walls, some of whom forget how to panic.
Shit happens.
That's not a problem.
Locusts are looking for people to help with things like running sinos and checking out
wormholes to make sure that they're not going to get randomly ambushed.
If you're interested, please get in touch with Don Ray.
We are expanding the locusting program.
It's been working great with barters, exhumers and things that scale.
We are going to be taking more risks there and having some fun with it because it's a
lot easier for us to project the locust group where we need them when we're not sending
250 rock walls.
There are rock walls involved, but it's much more scalable, much more sub cap.
What happened to brave and the question about whether we think brave is still Pappy.
Pappy is as Pappy does.
I am not going to suddenly get up on a fireside and hand out notes of forgiveness, no matter
how many swords various people like dunk fall on.
They have not been actively grouping up with Pappy, which is cool and good, but certainly
they were some of the most aggrieved and bitter towards us during the war, and they allowed
sharded armor into their organization to run fleets against us and stuff like that.
So it doesn't really mercy isn't really my thing.
Right.
I don't sit there and go like, well, gosh, they've had a hard time.
Let's give them a free pass because that's what we did with brave for years and years
and years and years and years.
And how do they reward us trying to stay our hand when they would cross us or trying to
feed them or close them or give them regions repeatedly?
They repaid us by trying to purge us and being some of the biggest cheerleaders for a war
of extermination against our friends.
So fuck them.
What about snuff dropping on a Titan the other day to kill dropping a Titan the other day
to kill work?
Anything we need to watch out for?
That is a good question.
It's a good question because I want people to have the correct mindset about stupid idiots
losing things in Delve, especially if you're new to the Imperium.
There are two ways you can react to people dying stupidly or in ways that are preventable
or regrettable.
Uh, you can and also, hey, man, bingo bait perfectly legit.
Well played.
Going to answer the question anyway, which is, uh, basically some people cannot learn
for themselves.
And the only value that they can have when they make a mistake is by providing a negative
example for everybody else to say, don't do what that guy did.
Now, some people can learn after mistakes, but they're going to have to lose a work all
or two before they do it.
We I don't really care about that.
We have Homeland Defense operations with people fighting over kills to shoot the puppies that
are going after our various P assets.
And this is the normal cycle of peacetime life, right?
Like it isn't a situation of, oh, God, somebody lost a rock wall.
And gosh, it's more a scenario of why did he lose the rock wall?
Let's point a laugh at him.
If it was a dumb thing, if it wasn't, then obviously you don't point a laugh at things
for perfectly legitimate losses.
But you should always expect to be hunted in Delve.
One of the reasons why Delve is a fun region is it has NPC space, and it is never purely
safe.
If you look at what a region like Amist does to an organization versus what a region like
Delve does to an organization, the hunting and the sort of predator, you know, lock of
Volterra joke goes here.
The predator prey, whatever cycle is something that forces people who are living in Delve
to be alert, to be aware.
And for those that aren't alert and aware, they die and they die.
And maybe they learn, which is good.
And maybe other people learn from their mistakes, which is also good.
That is actually an interesting point Tedrick has brought up, which is, I guess, Doom Lord
had the point, which is that we haven't had cap training classes in a long time because
we had the war.
We stopped them during the war because we didn't need capital training because we had
war.
And I kind of forgot about that.
So thank you for bringing it up.
I'm going to write that down.
No promises on when that'll get going, because every time we do a cap training op, it's the
kind of thing where we need to line up with the FCs and shit beforehand.
But I'm going to write that down.
That is a good idea.
Thank you.
All right.
How to capital.
I like it.
I like it a lot.
As Zentar says, if your issue is fighter mechanics, even before we have a big training
class or something, get on CC and fuck around.
All right.
I think that's going to be it for this week.
We have a pretty solid time.
Join Sigson squads, guys.
We're at this pivot point now where there's a lot of opportunities.
We have a shiny new Sigson squad.
We have martial laws out there doing martial law things.
And we are gearing up to leverage these opportunities.
We have to murder the fucking puppies when another AOM apple falls from a tree.
All right.
I will be back next week to her blurfs, and hopefully I will see you then.
Thank you for coming.
Let's get back out there and keep murdering puppies.