Fireside Chat Transcript 19 Dec 2k21

Alrighty boys and girls, we're gonna get started here in just a couple minutes.
As usual, we do these in Elysium at conference.goonfleet.com if we're asking questions.
We have a pretty quiet fireside, I've got a few hurfs and blurfs involving Stupid Idiot
Fleet and some of the moves that the bad guys may or may not be making.
We're gonna get into that in a second after I refill my coffee.
Alright, important fireside question, what kind of coffee?
This is just like Yuban pre-ground, uh, Yuban?
I don't know, it's better than Folgers, but just as lazy.
Okay, so I have the coffee.
There is no bourbon in it.
I'm gonna apologize in advance, ladies and gentlemen.
I am a little bit off today, I woke up with the sniffles at 5 in the morning.
5 in the morning is not a proper mitten's wake up time.
And so I decided that it was kind of gonna be like a pregnancy test situation, such that
instead of wondering all day if I'd caught the plague, I would just shove a binax up
my nose and get the good word.
So I am plague-free, but I do have a little bit of a cold.
And then I was so happy that I didn't have the plague, I fired up the volcano way early.
So it's gonna be one of those firesides.
I am both tired and sideways high and caffeinated, so you know what, we're just gonna roll with
it.
I think it's time to talk seriously about very complicated doctrines like stupid idiot
fleet.
And in fact, moments like this are why we have stupid idiot fleet to begin with.
Alright.
So, where do I want to start?
Let's begin with the serious stuff.
Can I get somebody to put a link to the Secret Santa?
We had more signups this year for Secret Santa than we had in a long-ass time, or by long-ass
time I mean ever.
I don't even know if we need to link the thread anymore, but just to make people aware of
it and make sure that they're gonna do it.
We do enforce these, so don't fuck it up and be a bad Santa.
One of the interesting things about EVE Online is that sometimes it is better to hold your
cards close to your chest and let your enemies play their cards first, especially when their
cards are usually predictably dumb cards.
Or worse, actually, I would say in situations when your enemies are playing not predictably
dumb cards, but fantastically unpredictably dumb cards.
In fact, those are the sort of scenarios we dealt with in the war, right?
Like I would have never anticipated that they would have been dumb enough to put a Keep
Star in T5ZI, for example.
A good example of unpredictably dumb.
And it's that kind of decision-making that won Vili the prize as the stupidest thing
to happen in EVE Online in 2021, if you saw Fountain Frank's show yesterday on the Meta
Show.
So, TES deployed.
We think.
Sort of.
TES deployed.
They had an announcement that they were going to deploy, and we thought that maybe they
were going to get a curse.
Sort of a logical, normal thing to do.
And so they're in Faith Abylis.
Maybe some of them are in Faith Abylis.
Vili's Corp isn't there.
Vili's Corp, of course, missed the main TES move-up because Vili is totally not going
to be leaving TES for Horde any day now.
But they announced that they were going to be attacking Red Alliance in Impasse, but
it was going to be a revenge deployment, but it wasn't going to be for structure shooting.
It was going to be to get revenge for something that happened in the war that they're blaming
RA for.
But also, it wasn't going to be serious business, and it's just to provoke good fights.
So basically, they said it was vengeance during the Hell War, but also just good fights.
And a lot of you were able to participate in dropping on their move-up yesterday, and
you may have noticed that for a block-level entity that's north of 15,000 pilots, they
only had 250 people on the field to begin with for a move-up.
So as we've articulated it -- actually, I've only said this in public in the last two weeks.
So the cat's out of the bag with the whole zone of destruction thing.
There are areas where our enemies will simply rot away and turn on each other.
I think we saw that happen with both Brave and with Test.
Test is more toxic than Brave, which, you know, it's a different sort of flavor of the
stuff.
But we've seen these orgs get shredded just by them sitting in their own self-inflicted
wood chippers.
So yesterday, they came out of the zone of rot, and we threw 300 Kikimoras at them, because
why the fuck not?
We had a couple Titans tackled.
That was cool.
We ended up with three Dreads.
We lost a bunch of Kikis, and I don't give a flying fuck, because we can just churn those
things out very, very rapidly and easily.
Famous last words.
Of course, this is the same kind of not-give-a-fuck attitude that results in having a Black Ops
Battleship doctrine.
One of the changes that we've had over the last week since I gave the last fireside announcing
a Black Ops Battleship doctrine is, I guess it's not that crazy, because Elfboy couldn't
help himself from immediately copying what the guys had come up with.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's good.
It's not necessarily... it's kind of nice.
He's sort of gotten the phases down to a point where they just copy what we're doing immediately,
rather than waiting for a few weeks of insisting that it wasn't a good idea.
Now, this doesn't actually mean that this is a good idea, because who fucking knows
what's about to happen.
We might crash it into a tree.
We managed to lose a Marshal on something unrelated just a few hours ago.
I think that was last night.
Time's a fucking blur.
But, you know, stupid things are going to happen.
That's why we have a stupid idiot fleet, and I'm excited about it.
Let me check this.
Hold on a moment.
Now, one of the things I want to point out, guys.
Kunmi put a lot of work into trying to instruct Goo and Swarm and our allies on how to fly
the single most complicated sub-capitals that exist.
One of the things I love about stupid idiots is, you know, sins are fucking complicated.
All right?
Marshals at least don't even have drones.
But check out Kunmi's thread.
Actually, if we can get the doctrine thread linked here in Elysium, please.
There is a whole set of guidelines about how to operate a fucking fancy spaceship.
And I want you guys to understand that I recognize that we are a bunch of fucking dumbasses,
that anybody who loses a war to this gaggle of dumbasses is just really fucking stupid
and has no excuse.
But at the same time as acknowledging that we are dumb as fuck and we're calling it stupid
idiot fleet, these are literally the most complicated sub-cap ships that exist in EVE
Online, an internet spaceship game.
So please don't just get the sin and crash into the tree.
Read and study and ask your friends.
I'm unironically going to qualify this as being an F2 sort of thing, because if you
can manage flying a sin and get competent at it, or a redeemer, whatever floats your
boat, it's going to develop a lot of your skills in EVE knowledge.
Because this is a Swiss Army knife, it can do a whole bunch of different things.
And you can also turn it into extremely expensive lost mail, which I'm quite excited about.
There is a suggestion of a Blobs training fleet, which is actually a really fucking
good idea.
I don't have that ready and never hadn't thought of it until just now.
Thank you Quaggill, I'll make a little note of that here.
Before the war we used to do capital training ops, such that people who got carriers learned
how to use their wood chippers, etc. etc.
Who knows.
Go ahead and move me.
Alright.
Yeah, I would strongly suggest the mid-grade amulets at just a bare minimum.
They're not a requirement on the doctrine I believe, but it's just why the fuck not
if you're already spending that much on a sin.
Get the amulets.
Okay.
Essentially, let me see what else I've got for you.
Mainly, people have questions they'd like to ask, go ahead and frame out here.
The big points I have was don't fuck up the secret Santa.
Test is making moves.
The stupid idiot fleet is very exciting, please read the instructions and start practicing
that, and that we have next week off fireside wise because Christmas stuff.
ETA until the chat porn for the war will finally be released.
Well, as I've been telling everybody, I am literally Pappy Snowden, so I gave everybody
some with that to begin with.
Though I guess that's shattered armor now.
Is it true the test is imploding?
And what does that mean for their status as being next?
I think as long as Dreaded is a functional entity, there is always going to be a test.
Unlike Billy and ProGodLegend, we are not dumbasses and we don't say things like war
of extermination.
As long as they are fun to kick around the galaxy, we will give them wedgie and kick
them around the galaxy.
They have earned regular and routine fun times from us.
And there we go.
Or was the question as a really points out, was their implosion their strategy to avoid
being next?
Avoid them being next.
You know, it is hard to tell what's going on over there, guys.
It's one of those things where predicting stupid is just really hard.
If you are a chess grandmaster and you are playing, not that I'm a chess, I was trying
to get checkers versus chess analogy, and then I realized that that might imply that
I thought, you know, I'm a fucking dumbass.
I am not the chess grandmaster in this analogy.
But if you're really good at playing a certain game and then you go up against a complete
amateur, right, if you've ever read any of the like surlin.net articles from the early
days of the Internet about scrubs versus people who are playing to win, how people who are
absolute novices at things can come to completely fuck stuff up because as a more experienced
player, you will not be able to anticipate their patterns because you've been trained
to think in certain strategic ways, which do not include moves like deploying key stars
in T5CI or going to faith abolis to get revenge on red alliance, but not actually get revenge
on red alliance because it's just for fun.
You know, who the fuck knows, basically, like if they're just pissing and then shitting
themselves and smearing their stuff on the chessboard, that's where it's going to get
messy.
And that's how we like to mix our metaphors here.
What's the timeline for shares payback?
I assume that's a question related to bonds.
There is a I believe a monthly payout on bonds and has been this is definitely in the finance
territory.
I am not the head of the Federal Reserve of Space.
Please do not take any of my statements as being forward looking, backward looking investment
advice or otherwise.
The finance team have all that bond stuff on lockdown.
We have a bunch of capital allocated to it.
Like my understanding is it's Gucci.
You guys should know that I am, of course, very concerned about our ability to continue
servicing bonds and being able to get that done.
And I was really happy to see that the finance guys had that shit figured out a long ass
time ago because they are well aware of my tendency to get really excited about something
like stupid idiot fleet.
And they just made sure that all of the bond stuff is firewalled from my enthusiasm.
So everybody's going to get paid.
And essentially, we want it to be kind of like the the pound sterling of Eve, right?
Like the vision, I think, for the bonds are the most trusted organization and bank, I
guess, in Eve Online.
And I don't know what they'd be like, T-bills or what the analogy you would have for that,
because I'm not a finance guy, but we have the best finance guys in the galaxy.
So we are Gucci there.
Don't worry, I worry about that all the time.
Whenever I check it, it's good.
Plaid Rabbit is here.
You can answer his questions.
We have no specific payoff date.
I thought he was at a dividends, but in terms of like, actually paying the bonds off, I
think that like securities you can hang on to.
Not actually securities.
This is an internet spaceship game.
Don't SEC me.
All right, my incompetent ramblings have summoned at least two finance people who can answer
your questions.
We have a ranger popped up with an answer.
Plaid Rabbit is in chat.
Feel free to ask those guys stuff about the bonds.
Is Brave staying in pure blind?
What the fuck is going on there?
I have no fucking idea.
I really don't.
Can we buy more bonds?
You can buy them.
They're alienable, so you can buy them from each other, but we are not issuing them.
Goon NFT.
Man, you know, one of the things that sort of made me happy to see was the backlash from
actual people with functioning brains against NFTs being introduced to video games.
There was the thing that happened in Stalker 2 that came up the other week, and you know,
it's just, I'm sorry.
Like, I think that they're dumb as fuck and I have no business in video games and I don't
want NFTs in my spaceship game.
And yeah, I don't want to buy any LuLaRoe leggings either.
Thanks.
I'm old and crusty, so I'm very much on that Charlie Munger/Warren Buffett kind of view
when it comes to assets that don't directly produce income.
All right.
When will I be able to start buying SINs from the state?
I think there's been a huge rush on them.
I know that, you know, Procurement has a bunch in the cooker, though.
Procurement actually might have some available already.
I know that we spun up the supply chain for producing our own and getting a whole bunch
of extremely expensive fancy ships in everybody's hands.
Any info on the new mining doctrine?
No, not yet.
I also am not sure what we mean by a mining doctrine.
I'm assuming by that, it's like, hey, are we going to use exhumers at scale?
Are we going to try doing...
Actually I know that there was a fleet out earlier, so I know that the gang is working
on it.
I talked to you guys last week to put your collective brain trust together to find ways
to crack the code on this, right?
We know that CCP is regularly nerfing all sorts of stuff and incompetently buffing various
random things.
So as soon as the code is cracked, I will be informed.
Yesterday, we actually spent in the Illuminating, instead of talking about like mining doctrines
and stuff, there was a fair amount of like, okay, well, you know, chessboard stuff.
Like what happens if these nerds go here?
How do we predict power there?
And then, you know, Faith Avalos versus RA, right?
Didn't talk about the mining doctrine.
I asked everybody to crack the code last week.
It was all about putting tests in the zone of death and black ops battleships.
All right.
There is a...
Thank you, Apple, for the reminder.
This is why it takes, you know, why we have the Illuminati, why we have the Kremlin as
an organization, because when my dumb ass gets really high up here on not enough sleep
and have a cold or something, I do need help from people who know what the fuck.
Apple pair points out that the guys in Kremlin do have a thread where they're consolidating
information about how to best crack the most optimized mining after it got retarded system.
So that's good.
Do we have news about moons in the next CCP patch?
Not at this juncture, no.
I mean, one of my attitudes about the whole CCP thing is this, right?
You guys saw this in the last couple of days.
Gobbins, Vili, a number of our enemies who are on the CSM still, Gobbins, Vili, ProGodLegend,
et cetera, have been loudly insisting that all the CCP stuff is peachy keen and that
everybody loves all the stuff and that it's great and that we are big meanies for protesting
or saying that the dumb stuff is dumb.
And they've also said that anybody who is by implication that anybody who is complaining
about the changes is a goon.
And I think this is good.
I really like the fact that Gobbins and Vili have chosen to protect their own ego and alienate
everybody within their organizations that thinks that CCP is taking the game in the
wrong direction.
So what I've decided to do is essentially just watch and wait.
Right?
I think that we will know whether things are good or bad or whether the PCU is going up
or down by the end of Q4, certainly, which is in a couple of weeks.
And anyway, so this is one of those things that I'm very happy to be wrong on.
Right?
Like if CCP is rocking the new player experience and they've actually found a way to get people
to get into the game and stay and what have you, and the PCU stops declining, then great.
That's fantastic.
I cannot wait to be wrong.
Right?
And in this situation, I figure we'll just wait and see.
And if they're not stabilizing and whatever, we'll just see how it goes.
There are interesting times.
I thought it was very curious to see these guys getting so mouthy and so punchy about
things.
And we're just going to have to see how the cards fall, basically.
We're just going to find the data.
And when we have the data, we will let everybody know.
Are AOM still allied to TEST?
AOM is in PIBC and is not really allied to TEST in any way that I'm aware of.
Nobody really wants to be allied with TEST except for all of fucking Pappy, who turned
up to defend TEST's move up after several months of "Oh, you know, they're just renters,
just whatever."
But the moment that we try to lay a finger on one of their titans, all Pappy Pappy's
up.
There you go.
There's questions about what Frat is doing.
I haven't actually been paying too much attention to what Frat's up to.
They haven't engaged in any blood war.
The last time that they popped up on my radar was a few weeks back when they were skirmishing
with Snuffed Out and losing fights to Snuffed Out a bunch.
There's a future plans question about what we would do in certain scenarios involving
TEST's move versus Zara.
We do have opinions about it, but this is going to be for your future plans, bingo square
guys.
I'm not going to be able to talk about that here on this fireside.
All right.
Fraternity put a 4 to Zara and Esoteria.
That's pretty cool, actually.
Everybody cross their fingers for the Webb telescope being launched effectively.
We all want that thing up there and working, and Logan is participating in that like a
fucking badass that he is, so good luck.
What's up after tri-structure chewing is over?
Good question, Karthus.
I'm sure it will have absolutely nothing to do with TEST's attempt to deploy against RA.
We would never intervene in anything relating to TEST coming near us and serving themselves
up a platter.
Join Sigs and Squads.
Apple Pear is absolutely right.
There are Sigs and Squads.
If you are not out there killing things and you want to be killing things, there are lots
of people who are killing things.
You just have to join the Sigs and Squads.
Goon approved leggings link.
I'd have to go dig that up.
The last time we ordered those was essentially if you put TikTok leggings into Amazon, they
will pop up.
All right.
That is going to be it for today, ladies and gentlemen.
Study up on your stupid idiot fleets.
Like, don't just get in a Sin and Redeemer or in a Marshal and immediately fuck it up.
Do your homework.
These are actually extremely complicated ships.
Don't just assume you can press F1 and be fine.
Work on your F2.
Learn how to use the stupid idiot fleet, and let's have some fun.
Let's get back out there.
I will catch you.
I will be around on Jabber and such like that, but we're not going to have a fireside next
week because Christmas.
So I will see you in two weeks because we will have one on the Sunday after New Year's.