Fireside Chat Transcript 24 Oct 2k20

Alright boys and girls, we're gonna get started here in a moment once the numbers stabilize.
Good question, when did they get White Castle in Madison?
They did not have White Castle in Madison.
I had some on my Michigan vacation and then, this is terrible, but it turns out you can
get frozen White Castle and just have it in your freezer whenever you want and last night
I had the urge and I ended up having four sliders and that was enough to interrupt an
Illum meeting to have my ass explode so that was fun.
The frozen shit is absolutely inferior to the real thing but any port in a storm.
In Wisconsin we do not have legal weed and we also do not have the castle so it's a little
uncivilized around the edges I'm afraid.
I can handle the White Castle, you just end up, I mean, they're sliders dude, they slide
in they slide out, that's how it works.
Here's at least real fucking cheap here.
That is true.
If you don't know what White Castle is, I guess you didn't watch Harold and Kumar go
to White Castle.
Alright.
Jokes about butt stuff, notwithstanding, we're gonna go ahead and get into this.
I already made the obligatory pegging joke.
Okay so I want to start things off by zooming all the way out and talking about like war
progress or situation etc.
As an alliance leader one of the most terrifying things that can happen is to be willing to
fight to the last and then the fear of course is that when people, when you read spy reports
and you see that the enemy is saying goons are out of morale and that we're evacuating
and that everything is over and that goons have given up and the war will be over in
a week is, you know, you read all these reports of people saying this and you wonder to yourself
okay well I'm here to fight to the fucking last but you know if people don't turn up
to fight then what do we do, right?
That sort of ends things if that happens.
So this week has been very inspiring for me because we had the phase, the enemy is in
Delve, obviously they have YZ-9 with their little bubble hilarity.
I don't think there's too much value in dwelling on the whole bubble incident because I want
people to be riled up to fight and continue fighting as opposed to spending too much time
going "Grrr CCP."
We did get rat fucked, it's not the first time, it's certainly not gonna be the last
time but the war goes on.
So what did I see?
Well two days ago we had incredible turn up to contest the IHOP, we lost some IHOPs, we're
going to continue to lose some IHOPs but I want you guys to know how, why and we're gonna
talk about the participation grind and the overall strategy.
I'm gonna go into a fair amount of detail about this because I want you guys to individually
understand this so you can apply it to like your daily activities in the war and what
to expect.
So from an all the way out perspective, the enemy is now sort of like top decking, right?
Like we're making card game references on this but essentially every time the enemy
hits a sort of a checkpoint in the war, they get a surge in their participation, a brief
surge, right?
They finally get a key star up, they get a surge in their participation, they get more
numbers, they have more dudes to throw at us.
When this war began they were outnumbering us 3 to 1.
And the truth is that when you're getting outnumbered 3 to 1, even if your strategy
is to grind the bad guys down, we've been very successful at that, when you grind the
3 to 1 odds down to 2.5 to 1 odds, unless you're defending a keep star, 2.5 to 1 and
3 to 1, you're still probably fucked, right?
Unless you have a force multiplier like a keep star to defend, there's not too much
of a difference there.
Now what's really interesting about the last several days of fighting is, and you can follow
along at home, right?
Like you don't have to, again, goonie spin, but on these battle reports you divide their
numbers by our numbers or do whatever math you feel like.
And you can see like last night we had them down below 2 to 1, it was like 1.88 to 1 on
the fights yesterday, and two days ago we had similarly they were below 2 to 1.
Now, especially on these node contests, one of the reasons why it is difficult to defend
iHubs is the nodes spawn in the constellation battle space in like the FaziSav environment,
and if they have more fleets than us, they can essentially park a fleet on this node,
on that node, on the other thing.
And if they have too many more fleets than us, in many cases they can sort of win by
default.
We can do lots of fuckery and things like that, but they have a tremendous advantage
simply because they have more fleets that they can park on these nodes.
Now, now that we're getting down to like 1.8 to 1, my theory, and I don't know whether
this is true or not, but this is what we're aiming for and this is what we're seeing,
is that we have been steadily grinding them down to the point where now that they're at
1.9 to 1 odds, and we keep doing this for another couple weeks, then we're at a situation
where maybe they're at 1.7, 1.6, 1.5, and at that point a lot more options open up for
us militarily speaking.
So what have I seen?
You guys are still turning up in droves.
There are 1,065 of you in a fireside chat right now, which is pretty fucking cool.
And their participation is dropping, right?
Their participation is not dropping catastrophically.
It is not a big, huge drop off, but we are going to slowly and steadily continue to grind
these fuckers down.
At the start of the war, they had 3 to 1 odds, and now again, 1.8, 1.9 to 1, that is the
kind of progress we want to see.
So when I'm telling you guys that we are going to make them pay, we're focusing more on ISKCOR
stuff now, like we're just trying to be fuckers and try to make them bleed every step of the
way on every op that they take and every opportunity we have, while preparing for the long war,
which is what this has been since the beginning.
But it's very clear that we are grinding them down, we're bleeding them out, we're going
to keep doing that.
And when we get to a point of more rough military parity, I don't think we're ever going to
end up in 1 to 1 odds, but we have been at war against these people for so many months
now that I'm pretty confident that when we get to the 1.5 to 1 odds, their progress is
going to be in deep shit.
And they know it, and they don't have any more cards to play really.
If we feed titans to them, if we fuck something up, or if there's some sort of big, dramatic
whelp, then they would have another surge of numbers.
But they can't like, "Hey guys, we dropped another cube star in NPC Delve."
That's not going to get them a number spike.
"Hey guys, we're really, really, really invading Delve this time."
That's not going to get them a number spike.
What I believe has gone on with the bad guys is that they still don't seem to really have
much of a plan to actually get rid of us.
I'll tell you what their plan is right now.
Their plan is right now is to blow up our IHubs, to blow up our bridges, to hit our
beacons, and then to make loud noises and hope that you guys go away.
And that we stop defending.
And I think that they're also hoping for a Sarenan.
What they don't realize is that the moment that we blew the horn of Gundor, I am essentially
like chained to the fucking mast here, right?
As the leader guy, having sounded the horn of Gundor, retreat, escape, evacuation, these
things are not options.
You cannot ask thousands of goons to come back and fight and do this all day, every
day, and then just give up and go away.
So I think that their strategy, and we saw this from their messaging after the YZ9 thing
this week, was essentially, the war is almost over, guys.
Goons are about to break, goons are gonna evac, it's gonna be all over, because they
put down a Keepstar and NPC Delve after we blew up the first four.
And magic in rainbows is gonna happen, and somehow 1DQ1 is gonna get sieged, I guess.
I'm not entirely sure.
So essentially, we had, I think, a pretty important turning point in the last three
or four days, right?
They played their card, which is, "Hey, we now have a Keepstar and NPC Delve, and we're
gonna start attacking Delve, da da da da."
And instead of giving up, going away, or running for the hills, or whatever it is that they
expected us to do, you motherfuckers turned up to fight.
And as long as we turn up to fight, every day, to bleed them and be shitty to them,
their numbers are gonna continue going down, and we're getting to that point.
Now again, I want you to follow along at home, don't just take my word for it.
When you see these battle reports and time zones, you can compare things.
Some of these days, they're gonna have spikes, especially if I tell everybody about our participation
grind strategy.
Some days, they have surges, some days they don't, blah blah blah.
Be reasonable and nuanced about it.
But I'm pretty sure the math speaks for itself.
You guys can see, if you look at it, their participation is steadily continuing to go
down because now they are in a place where they have to grind 2,000 citadels.
It's like, okay, you're invading Delph, welcome to Delph, here you are, there are a thousand
screaming goons, we hate your guts, and you have to grind 2,000 citadels.
We'll always shoot on you at every opportunity.
Now they don't want to do that.
They want to do the IHUBS, they want to bang the pots and pans, and they want you guys
to run for the hills.
But that is clearly not happening, so things continue apace.
And I'm pretty happy about that.
We are very much in the cool zone, and that is interesting, because, again, I don't know
if they have any other cards up their sleeves that they're going to play to surprise us
with and get a number surge or something or other, but I think at this point it's pretty
much just fuck or walk.
They have to grind Delph, we have to fight them as they try to grind Delph, and good
luck, god bless, right?
So, one of the things I want to talk about on that, we've already done this, right?
You can see we're going to trade IHUBS.
We traded IHUBS in QueryX, we traded IHUBS in Period Basis, we're going to trade IHUBS
in Delph.
They are going to blow up our IHUBS, we're going to fight them every step of the way,
and then when they do blow up our IHUBS, we're hacking them, we're reinforcing them back,
and we're going to take them away from the bad guys.
Almost all of the IHUBS that our guys put down initially we have either already hacked
from the ones in QueryX, I think the only one that they still have standing is 49, the
other ones that they had that were threatening our Keepstarers we already took back away
from them.
So, yeah, one of the things that I want you guys to keep in mind when we're talking about
trading IHUBS is the imbalance, and we ran into this in the Casino War if you went through
that, the imbalance in attacker versus defender, right?
It is always to the advantage of the attacker in FozzySoft scenarios because it is poorly
designed, thank you Fozzy, but that means that in this situation where they, the reason
why it's, sorry let me back up, the reason why it's imbalanced in favor of the attacker
is that anyone can hack, but only the defending alliance can defend.
So usually it is a disproportionate burden on the defending alliance in a FozzySoft contest,
which is one of the reasons why Delve is like all goons for himself, because we learned
from our lessons of the Casino War that having a whole bunch of different alliances with
different IHUBS is functionally indefensible because of the way that the soft system is
designed.
So Citadels are basically soft in practice, but for the underlying soft system, when they
take something from us, it has been thus far, again pointing to 49, is the only one that
they're like still have that has one of our Keepstarers in it.
Like they had the W6V hub and we took it back, and I think we did GOP, but yeah, so there
you go.
The main thing is that when they take hubs, we hack them back, we take them back, we make
them bleed at every step of the way.
And we know that making them bleed is working because you can look at the numbers from these
battle reports yourselves, you don't have to take it from me, you can just look at this
and go like okay, well now, 1.88, cool.
That's better than 3-1.
So, is Asher on vacation?
We - he is communing on a mountain with the spirits of the Wulp gods and scheming.
No comment beyond that.
This is actually one of those things that's kind of tough is - he's almost back, guys,
don't worry.
I can't really hide when somebody - like when I was in Michigan for a week, we are
trying to basically be sneaky about when we are going places, but he is going to be back
in a couple days, so it's all good.
And has been in contact with us and told me about some of his schemes, so yeah.
It's tough, like you know, when you have A-Team people and you want people on your A-Team
to cycle in and out so that they don't burn out and be like "hey, you need to go on vacation,
you need to do this, oh you're gonna go hiking, oh you're gonna do this, you're gonna do that,
okay cool."
You can't hide it from your dudes because the last thing you guys want to think is that
you've been abandoned in a time of crisis, but yeah, no, don't worry about it.
Ash will be back and in action in a matter of days.
The only reason I'm talking about this now is because it's on the flip side of - if you
had asked me earlier in the week I would have deflected the question.
Yeah, I mean he's like "hey, he's hiking."
We have to disguise our pre-planned vacations.
Like I was gonna be in Michigan, people go places, people do things, but we don't want
to be like "hey guys, I want to be gone for a week and don't do anything."
The only reason why you guys found out about me being in Michigan was because y'all motherfuckers
started blowing up Keepstars and I couldn't hide the fact that I was secretly smoking
weed in Michigan and taking a week off.
Exactly, as RDevs points out, it's a bad look for alliance leaders to go on vacation even
if it's a pre-planned kind of thing.
So I tried to keep my Michigan thing secret because I didn't want people to know that
I was going to be slightly away from the keys when shit went down, but it didn't matter
because you guys proceeded to blow up a bunch of fucking Keepstars, so I'll take it.
So I then was like "hey guys, the reason I'm not here fighting is because I'm in Michigan
and we're going to try to keep it secret, but there it is."
So, we are going to talk about something that you know that I don't normally talk about,
but it's something I've seen some questions about and so I want to address it, which is
PVE.
Brace yourselves.
Brace yourselves.
Here we go.
I'm only going to do this for a little bit because as you guys know I can't really talk
about this shit without my brain leaking out my ears.
Or after the White Castle out my ass, I don't know.
So real quick, let's do it.
So a lot of goons are super rich and are doing just fine.
Obviously we're doing just fine because we've been able to recover our war chest after spending
trillions of ISK on blowing up hostile Keepstars.
And again, we are supported by one of the reasons why we can't retreat, we can't give
up, we're not evacing, there is no way out but through this war, is because we do have
the support of all of these ancient elder goons turning up and donating their time,
their assets, their characters, all their things to keep us in the fight.
And so as part of that, depending on what era you came from in EVE, like if you're a
RetVet from the battle days, before they installed the ADM system and things like that, back
in the day there could be a conflict between people doing PvP and PvE in old school Nullsec.
And what happened, the game changed to where PvE contributes to our ADMs and it's very
important and you just need to do that.
So one of the reasons I'm talking about this is in the midst of all of the bad guys are
in Delve stuff, I want you guys to know that particularly for the goons who are not rich
as hell, that we do have actually a variety of things that we're going to be introducing
this week to show you how you can make sure that you are still making money and you are
not poor and starving and unable to fight.
Because again, this is a grind strategy and that means that instead of, we have like two
weeks of set piece battles and now we are very much back to the grind and that means
that we need to make sure that people aren't like flaming out or are broke or feel like
they're being abandoned by the organization.
So what we're going to do over this next week is we actually have I think four different
options of guides.
Some of these things we already have guides that we've written that are getting improved
and we're basically going to be like, here are like four things that you can do in order
to make money even during wartime.
And one of the fucked up things is that because CCP has like rapidly nerfed Nullsec income
in various ways, is that now some of these things like we have like a really cool abyssal
guide that Saren wrote up for university.
There is like some wacky shit involving wormholes and like solo farming and a vagabond and a
C3 that like Dodd is writing up from the whole squad days.
There's of course burner stuff.
And now there's all this wacky like high sec mining orcas thing that I barely understand
Theta has started diving into it and I'm not going to speak knowledgably about it now.
But the point is, is that we actually have a variety of options that we're going to be
introducing like a guide series.
Here's how you do this.
Here's how you do that with a support structure such that people can like get their hands
held and ask questions and what have you such that if you are concerned about PVE during
wartime, we're aware and we have some options that we're working on and we're going to be
introducing these things hopefully within the next seven days.
And that's it.
That's all I can talk about this right now.
Otherwise, my brain's going to melt.
Okay.
I am currently wearing a red shirt.
I was thinking about doing like last week I was saying I was gonna be all black shirt
from now on, but after the White Castle incident a little bit ago, I don't think I can really
maintain a black shirt kind of thing if I'm periodically going, Oh Jesus Christ, what
did I do to my guts?
All right.
What I explained the red shirt black shirt thing and it's just a it's a meta show a joke
basically like a red shirt is like my default thing that I wear a lot.
Blue shirts on the meta show or be like being nice and kind.
Black shirts are like were blood murder and just trying to be as mean as possible because
I'm a douchebag.
All righty.
Here's an interesting question after the great events of YZ9 I felt that we as the line members
should not have to wait on after any other FCs to come up with plans.
If we the line members have ideas to do stuff is there something we can talk to or can we
just do them?
Well, that's a very dangerous question.
I don't you know feelings are weird.
I don't know why you would have that feeling like we have a strategy we're executing it
like I think that the there's a lot of magical thinking going on on the side of the bad guys
or they think that because they have an NPC delve keep star that that radically changes
our strategy.
When I went to Michigan, I thought that the bad guys would put a keep started in NPC delve
and I was not depending upon the crazy schemes that the FCs had come up with.
I didn't know that whether they would work and they did work and then we blew up a bunch
of their keep stars, but our overall war plan did not depend upon keeping them out of NPC
delve because you know, they could put down more keep stars.
Eventually they would get one and we blooded their noses a bunch and that was awesome.
And that was fantastic.
I think one of the reasons why we are now and I was worried about this.
I think we were all a little worried about the idea of was it worth it to blow up four
of their keep stars in a row.
It felt really fucking good.
Was it worth the price in terms of the isk that we paid and the commitment and all the
effort and I think now we can say that it was and the reason I can say that is not because
of any sort of random emotional thing, but because you can see now on the field in the
last couple days that they are below that two to one odds number, right?
The fact that they are starting to consistently and again, maybe they'll hear me hurfing about
this on the far side and they'll turn up more to try to prove us wrong or something.
But as it stands right now for days in a row now after these keep star fights, we are fighting
at less than two to one odds and that is really refreshing and I think that we would not have
gotten to that point were it not for the fact that we just relentlessly fucked them at every
opportunity on those keep star fights.
But in terms of the question you're asking, which is like, you know, the bad guys are
in YZ9 and what are we going to do about it?
Well, we were sort of planning on them being an NPC eventually and doing this, right?
They planned that they were going to invade Delve and that's where you invade Delve from.
So no, we're not going to, we're not going to authorize people to just randomly go off
and do whatever, like follow the normal rules and regulations of how we manage the organization.
It's not like, I think that the bad guys generally believe that like, oh, we've got to keep starting
PC Delve and now it's over.
And now it's like, okay, well, you're now a little bit closer than you were from when
you were in AQT.
It's harder to defend some of our I hubs when they're based in PC Delve.
If I was invading Delve, I would have dropped five keep stars at once in NPCs Delve on day
one and started helicopter dicking, but they dicked around for three months.
So here we are.
All righty.
Let me take some questions here.
Questions about numbers declining and stuff like that.
How are Imperium numbers?
We're doing fine.
Like the fact that we're at like 1.8 to one after sounding the horn of Goon Door, like
our numbers have in some cases either been steady or even gone up a little.
Proportionally speaking, we're doing great.
Like goons are holding, especially the dudes who are used to Hellwar are used to like the
guys that like resubbed from battle days are extremely aware of how bad this game can get
in terms of like fuckery, in terms of CCB bullshit, in terms of the grind at a level
that the summer children aren't really used to.
So I think that we are in a much better position to be able to adopt a grind strategy.
That is why since the beginning of this, when Vili has been telling people that, "Oh, why
is the Matawni saying that defensive war is the timeline is better for the defender?"
The reason why the timeline is better for the defender is as you can see on the field,
the defender is more committed to the defense, at least if they're like us, if they're like
puppies, maybe they would have run for the hills by now.
But in our case, our dudes stand and fight every single fucking day because we're here
to fuck and the bad guys are not so much.
So that's why we're seeing this participation grind strategy begin to bear fruit.
Is it a good time to be an FC to learn how to do it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Like, join Scarbash Command and there's more, like there are tons of opportunities for Drama
Fleets and Cormorant Fleets and shit like that.
As you guys can see, we have ops going every single fucking day.
And one of the nice things about this is like, if you crash a Drama Fleet or you crash a
Sniping Cormorant into a tree, nobody cares, right?
Basically you can't lose the ISK war, you can't fuck up too badly.
There's never been a better time to learn how to FC.
There's ops constantly.
So yeah, please, absolutely.
We want to encourage people to get involved with Scarbash Command, get stuck in and see
if they have what it takes.
FCing is one of those things where, I guess there's a lot of things in life that are this
way, where you have to just kind of start, right?
You got to jump into the deep end of the pool and get stuck in.
And until you do that, it'll be hard for you to tell whether it's really right for you
or not.
So I encourage more people to give it a try.
Yeah, like don't spend three months like reading forum posts and doing this and doing that.
Like at a certain point, you've got to get in, you got to make mistakes, you got to get
a bloody nose, you got to get kicked in the dick, you got to do the necessary thing.
You learn a lot more from failure than you do from success in general.
And so getting stuck in, crashing a drama fleet into a tree, that is really the fastest
way that you're going to find out whether you have what it takes, whether it's right
for you.
So basically when it comes to that, shit or get off the pot.
White Castle will help.
Is it helpful to attack the enemy in their space?
We have been pretty consistently messing with us.
That area, the bad guys keep having to go back over to us, that area to defend.
Pappy in general does not like to defend test.
Test is next.
They are right next door to us.
They are pretty much the weakest member of the Pappy coalition overall.
So yeah, those questions about like, can we attack another direction?
We have been.
Bastion has been doing just an amazing fucking job in general for weeks now, making test
bleed and jump clone home in Esoterio.
So all of you talking about opening second fronts and things like that, we agree with
you.
We think that that is an absolutely awesome thing to do and way to go.
And that is why we have been going after the bad guys in their backfields for some time
now.
All right, so let me see if there's something else I want to answer here.
I need to make sure that I leave a little bit more time before the meta show this week
instead of running my mouth to the very end because I need to make sure that there's no
more White Castle in my system.
I don't think that's a problem though.
It's the first time I've had to interrupt an Elune meeting to go take an explosive shit,
and now you all have to hear about it.
All right.
Thank you all for coming.
Thank you all for coming on.
Thank you all for not being what the puppies think that you are.
They thought the war is over.
They thought that you would all run for the fucking hills, and it is God damn inspiring
to see more than 1100 of you in a fireside chat channel and still being here.
You need to turn up and fight every day, and the way that you win a defensive war is you
turn up and you fight every day for one day longer than the bads.
That's all it takes.
You fight hard, you keep fighting for one day longer than the bad guys do, and then
you win.
Thank you for coming.
See you on the field.