Fireside Chat Transcript 25 Jan 2020

There's like 800 people here, so we're going to go ahead and get started.
First things first, there is a project that a bunch of our guys have been busting their
asses on for several weeks now.
We are about to be announcing it, and it will get started next weekend, and it involves
typhoons and war and a bunch of really interesting shit.
And so instead of mangling this, I'm going to hand over the fireside to Asher, who is
going to be introducing this as our first order of business.
So Asher, why don't you take it away?
All right, great.
So this is the official announcement for the Goon Fleet Expeditionary Force.
We're calling it Jeff, or Yef.
You have to decide which one it is.
It's going to be a SIGGRAPH squad, a super SIGGRAPH squad.
Anyone can join.
It's like a SIG with no requirements.
And it's going to be deploying next weekend to the north.
We're going to be fighting against PanFam with a number of new doctrines, some new,
some old, some stuff that you guys haven't seen before.
The top of the line doctrine is going to be sacrilegious, which a lot of you guys haven't
flown in before.
It's a hack.
It's an armor hack.
Someone will be screaming "armor hacks."
So get your sac puns ready.
Get your armor hacks ready to yell.
There's going to be a second doctrine, and Mittens has already mentioned it, is typhoons.
This has usually been a top of the line doctrine.
We are doing it a different way.
Any skirmish commander that comes along can bring out typhoons.
If your first fleet is a typhoon fleet, we will let you go out on it.
It's going to be pretty exciting.
So we'll have that.
We're bringing that.
We're bringing bombers and jackdaws as well.
We're going to be fighting in the north.
We're going, like I said, we're going to be fighting against PanFam, and we're going to
be outnumbered.
We will be the underdogs here.
I want you guys to understand that.
I want you guys to think about how much fun it's going to be.
For some of you, you've never been the underdog.
It'll be a new experience for you.
Other people have fought against much greater numbers before and know how much fun it is
to be there.
We're going to be able to choose when and what we want to engage.
What we want to engage.
We'll be doing a lot of stuff to be very annoying.
So I'm excited to see how some of you respond to sort of the tactics that you have to adopt
in the new situation.
This is going to be a deployment that's open to anyone, and we want to encourage everyone
who's interested to come along.
It's all time zones, and it's everyone in the Imperium is welcome to join.
So the main talking points are fun new doctrines, fighting outnumbered, and fighting against
PanFam.
I don't think I have to sell a lot of you on that.
Fighting NCPL is sort of our reason for being.
So I'll throw it back to Mittens, let him discuss some of the more finer points about
why we're doing this and what the thinking is behind it.
But that's the point that we want you to get out there, enjoy some new doctrines, enjoy
different ways of fighting and deploy with us.
Thank you, Asher.
So one of the first questions that I see here in Elysium, and it's a great thing to clarify,
is that a lot of SIGs and squads have requirements to join.
Like you might want to join Black Ops, but you can't get in for whatever reason.
This is open to everyone who wants to.
Think of it as kind of like an opt-all deployment.
We don't really have an easy terminology for what we're going to be doing here because
it is different.
As you guys know, we like to try different things as long as it results in the bleeding
and screaming of our foes.
And so the GEF as being sort of like this meta SIG for this deployment that anybody
can join and get involved with, it also has a bunch of resources behind it that most of
the time the SIG or a squad deployment doesn't have.
Because it is like a meta squad, essentially.
And we're making this up as we go along.
We will probably get stuck in, make some mistakes, figure out things we can do differently.
You guys know how this works.
You watch us.
We're like the Borg.
We adapt to adversity.
So essentially, this will have the GSOL will be involved, the coordination team will be
involved.
There's essentially all of the normal assets of the formal command structure like an alliance
deployment, but not because it's optional and it's going to the Northwest.
So if you really want to sit on your ass and delve, you're welcome to.
But everybody who is interested, we're going to do some crazy shit in the Northwest.
Now speaking about that, I want to goals and expectations appropriately for this.
The Northwest is a clusterfuck.
It is a whole bunch of people, many of whom we don't like, right?
Like we don't like NCNPL.
We shoot NCNPL.
It's what we do.
But then there's also they're attacking Sword Dragon, who we fight on his side sometimes
and sometimes we make him pay us 40 faction Fortizar's as tribute.
Sword Dragon and Army of Mangos and Ranger Regiment are essentially getting picked on
and bullied by NCNPL, which is sort of the NCNPL idea.
And so those guys are the underdogs right now.
Sword Dragon, Ranger Regiment, Army of Mangos, those dudes are the underdogs.
They are getting picked on and we are going to go up there and shoot the people that are
bullying them.
But at the same time, let's not delude ourselves into thinking that anybody who's involved
in the Northwest is like our best friends or whatever, and that we're madly in love
with them and we're going to, you know, whatever.
There are a bunch of motherfuckers to shoot up there and we are going to shoot motherfuckers.
We are not drawing any lines in the sand.
Go for it.
Cool things.
You mean Siberian Squadron, Army of Mangos.
Oh, sorry.
My bad.
No worries.
And a big question we've been getting asked and I'll throw it right back to you is, yes,
you can bring your carrier.
Yes, you can bring your dread.
Sweet.
I need to make a note about the Locust Fleet.
There is a Locust Fleet tomorrow.
I guess I don't actually have to make a note of that.
I should just let everybody know about this.
You can talk about what we're doing as far as the Umbrella Mittens, because we're getting
a lot of questions about that.
I think it's important that we let people know.
We're not taking the umbrella down unless I missed a memo.
Nope.
That's the whole point.
Yeah.
I mean, this is no, we're not doing a big like stop the bullying kind of thing.
Like I don't want to mean there's this classic speech by remedial.
I was just making a reference to this a few minutes ago.
One of the first state of the union, not the very first, but when the Great War kicked
off remedial said, you know, our enemies are bullies, but we are monsters and monsters
eat bullies.
I don't really want to be all, Oh my God, we're the bestest people.
And we are where, you know, we're not fucking white knights.
We are, you know, ideally we're the monsters in the fucking outer darkness.
So let's not get on our high horses about how, you know, whatever.
One of the reasons why I'm resisting, it would be easy to say in CNPL or bullying, poor sword
dragon, we're going to go intervene and be white knights and whatever.
Most of the time when good storm goes to war and the Imperium as a whole, we have this
policy of best possible friend, worst possible enemy.
And I want people to understand this to set expectations appropriately.
Essentially everything in the Northwest is stuff that we kind of like to see on fire.
Right.
And so we're going to be fighting on the side of the underdogs through a lot of this, but
this is an opportunistic shit show and there is no real good guy up there.
We're going up there and we are hardening our forces up because we want to make sure
that we are prepared for some of the things that we are anticipating.
And you know, we want to try out.
There's a whole bunch of shit I can't talk about on a fireside going on, which is interesting.
I'm glad that there are things happening in Eve and that we have a bunch of motherfuckers
to shoot.
But, you know, I don't think that don't get into the mindset of like, "Sword Dragon's
the good guy and we're going to go defend Sword Dragon to the death," because that's
not what's happening.
We are going up and essentially using all of these people in the Northwest as, you know,
it's a live fire exercise.
All right.
So.
Can I just talk about a few more cool stuff?
All right.
So I told you we're going to do Typhoons.
Day one, Squad Commander, sorry, Scrummage Commander can take it out.
Typhoons will have T2 Logifrix.
They'll have Prophecies as boosters and command ships.
So the whole fleet all in is going to be very inexpensive, but man, it's going to punch
really hard.
T1 cruise missile launchers or Meadow cruise missile launchers, for the price and the amount
that they insure for, they're going to punch really, really hard.
So people really like...
I'm going to throw this to Jay after this too.
He's got something to talk about.
People really like Typhoons.
People really like battleships.
So you'll be able to take battleships out infrequently.
It's not going to be like, "Oh, we'll have one battleship fleet a week," or something
like that.
You're going to be using battleships for a lot of stuff.
And some of the stuff that you're going to have to do, especially when you're on an underdog
type fleet, underdog type deployment where you're the small guy, you're going to have
sometimes that you just fade away into the mist.
And it sounds funny with battleships, but we're going to be able to do it.
There's going to be some cool stuff that we can do.
We also have some tricks, like if you're going to get some Supers and Titans dropped on you,
we have some ways for you to get away from that.
So overall, it'll be really fun to see the Typhoon doctrine used.
And we are aware, you're going to go out with Scrummage Commander, he's going to freeze
up, you're going to get bombed.
It's going to happen.
That's fine.
We have SRP, we have insurance.
We are really happy to give FCs experience with the Typhoon fleet, with the battleship
fleet.
We think that's something cool that Goonswim can do.
Like, say, "Yeah, my first fleet was a Rome with some Frigs, and my second fleet was a
battleship fleet."
But it's going to be really fun.
Jay, I'm going to throw it to you to talk about caps.
I shouldn't be rebutting anymore, so hopefully that's a good thing.
But we mentioned bringing carriers and dreads.
If you are a competent FACS pilot, in that you know how to run triage, and you know how
to locally rep tank fleets, then yes, you can bring your active tank FACS.
Apart from that, not interested in FACSs on this deployment.
Keep your FACSs at home.
Your FACS pilot should be trained into a carrier or a dread.
Bring that instead.
We do have a new Nidhoggr fit that we are going to post in chat now.
This is the armor Nidhoggr fit.
This is new for this deployment.
This will soon be the standard Nidhoggr fit.
If you've still got a shield fit, you're welcome to bring it, and they'll still be SRP'd for
the next six months or so.
But if you're just getting a Nidhoggr for this deployment, or you've got a spare hull
laying around, get into this new armor fit, they're crazily good for application, fighter
speed, and the damage is basically that of a Thanatos.
So, they're really good.
Dreads should have long-range guns and a set of T1 Haw guns packaged in their fleet hangars
for the move up.
And yeah, there'll be more info on the CAP group for the deployment over the week.
Okay, so a couple questions here I want to answer.
People are asking about Homeland Defense.
Now this is an optional SIG deployment.
It is a cool SIG, and we do expect that a lot of people are going to get involved, but
we are, as far as Delve goes, things are basically normal.
The people that really want to get stuck in on this, and I want to set expectations, guys.
This is not going to be easy.
We are going to lose Typhoon fleets, which I think is going to be adorable and hilarious,
especially because we're using T2 frigate logi, which means it's just crunch all you
want, like who gives a shit?
Great training opportunity, but we're going to be outnumbered.
This is a fuckfest, but it's a fuckfest full of people that we genuinely just are like,
"Whatever, man.
Let's blow some shit up about."
We need to get back into the war mode.
So there's people that are going to want to go up there.
Homeland Defense remains the same.
This is not like a full-blown Alliance deployment.
This is an optional deployment.
And of course, there's a question about allies.
Allies everywhere.
Everyone in the Imperium is welcome for everything.
I can't remember a time when we've ever done a goon swarm only thing.
Our allies are our allies, so of course, please, for God's sakes, come on this.
I mean, Initiative has an involvement in the Galactic Northwest.
They're off doing their thing, but if in it dudes felt like turning up on the Yef or
the Hefe or whatever we happen to be calling it at any given microsecond, everybody's welcome.
As the leader of this deployment, I would like to be referred to as El Hefe, please.
Thank you very much.
El Hefe, leader of the Yef.
I have to try not to make too many asher for yolks, but there you go.
Please, I don't want to be bluffed.
All right.
So yeah, we have a bunch of shit going on.
So somebody had brought up a question that dovetails into another thing.
Things are heating up in Eve, and we are doing a lot of work, right?
So part of that is, I need to talk about NGSA, but I'm going to talk about the Bomberwaffe
first.
So there is a recruitment thread that's going to go up.
I'm not sure whether that is up yet or not.
If it is, please link it.
Okay, so there is a Bomberwaffe whole thing that's going to be happening here.
So look for it.
We are basically spinning that back up again.
Simultaneously, we are turning NGSA back on.
And so if you've been involved with NGSA, that's happening thanks to a shitload of work
that Boris and the crew have been putting in.
And I'm delighted by that.
And so while that is happening, the NGSA is going to a totally different area from where
we're going with the Yef, right?
So we're making some fucking moves here, guys.
And we've told the Kremlin about it.
I can't necessarily tell everybody what's up.
But sometimes we have farsights and we're like, "Oh, yeah, there's Locust League.
Not too much going on."
And this is a get everybody together.
We're sending these dudes to this section of the galaxy.
We're sending these other dudes to this other section of the galaxy, rebooting an entire
completely new thing over here.
There are wheels within wheels now.
That's sort of the scenario we're in.
So also, as Don Hartley is reminding us, I mentioned this briefly earlier, but because
we do have a Locust Fleet tomorrow, please bring lots of Titans for it, all of the heavy
equipment such that we can guard Oracuals as we do our thing.
Okay, let me make sure I'm not missing stuff.
All right, let's see what I got.
So we're going to take some questions and answers.
For people that aren't aware, NGSA is an automated system that allows us to lock down an entire
region using previously AFK cloaking bombers and stuff like that.
And it was turned off for a bit and essentially NGSA turning back on and doing a big bomber
wafa, reboot, re-recruiting, let's get back out there and make some magic happen, where
by magic I mean the screams and frustration of our foes.
That's sort of, it's all kind of tied together.
But essentially using NGSA in an automated system, we can blanket a given target region
and massively degrade its productive capacity, which is kind of important when it comes to
kneecapping your foes.
This vacuum cleaner guy gets very angry at Firesides, I guess.
He sent me some PMs about a year ago that was really amusing, so there you go.
Goodbye vacuum cleaner.
[laughter]
Do you remember that?
I'll just talk about it in a little...
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
But he said that he didn't want to hear any rambling and he only wanted good content at
the start of the Fireside, so apparently we're at the boring rambling bit in this phase of
things.
I have failed all of you.
If you can't handle Mittens rambling, you can't handle this alliance.
I'm sorry.
Dare you run this Fireside during an office hour, Mittens.
All right.
Anyway, so let me check to make sure I haven't missed anything.
I can take some more questions here from guys, because...
And also I want people to bear with us.
What we're doing with the Jeff is, as you guys know, we're always trying something new.
We tried the whole wormhole deployment thing.
We're constantly spinning up new orgs and testing, and sometimes things work and sometimes
they don't, and sometimes they don't work at first, but then we unfuck stuff and things.
You start trying to grow one thing and it turns into something else, and as long as
it's useful, fuck it, who cares?
So we might be altering the system as we go.
And expect that, and expect to be outnumbered.
Expect opposition.
Expect to lose Typhoon Fleets.
Expect to look around and go, "Wow, there are so many motherfuckers that we don't like
in the Northwest.
It's actually, today, kind of hard to operate, so we're going to have to be sneaky.
We're going to have to be assholes in different ways.
We're going to have to go over here."
It is a mutable situation, and the goal is not a stalwart defense of the Northwest to
defend our dear friend Sword Dragon.
It is to find opportunities to make our foes suffer and make them pay a blood price for
every step that they take.
And we have some other machinations going on behind the scenes.
So there you go.
Questions about why T2 frigate lodges for repairing the battleships.
Is it actually a cost efficiency thing?
Asher, can you talk about that?
It's a good question, Mordred.
Thanks for asking.
[T] Yeah.
Do you know that Chesty Puller quote, where he says, "We're surrounded.
They're on the right, left, front, and back.
They can't get away this time."
"The situation is excellent.
We are attacking."
That simplifies things.
"We're surrounded."
That simplifies things?
Yes.
So T2 Lodgy.
Okay.
Frigates.
T2 Lodgy frigates.
Good questions.
He says, "Why not T1 cruisers or real T2 Lodgy?"
Real T2 Lodgy are very expensive.
We're giving this fleet to, like I said, it's sort of an example that probably won't happen,
but the day one Skirmish Commander could fly it.
So we expect some of these fleets to fly.
The T2, the Guardians, the Lokis, the Command Ships, the Legions, those are all the things
that make battleship fleets expensive when you lose one.
If you lose all the Typhoons, which insure extremely well and are relatively cheap for
Goon Swarm 2020, and the T2 Lodgy frigates die with it, then they're actually, like,
the cost is minimal.
The T2 Lodgy frigates also tank things better because they're really small sig.
The T1 Lodgy get blown up when you just look at them, T1 Lodgy cruisers.
They don't actually rep that much more.
It's actually a very small amount.
So the T2 Lodgy frigates are actually better in about all ways other than slightly lower
rep range.
So the worst case scenario, right, worst case scenario is this entire fleet gets lost, which
we don't care about, but it'll probably happen.
If an entire fleet gets lost, you're talking about, like, $15 billion down the drain.
I saw Mitten sneeze and $15 billion flew out of his nose.
So it's actually a great thing that we can -- it was sort of a good way for us to let
-- what our goal was to let skirmish commanders, let anyone take out battleship fleets, right?
And I'm not saying these fleets are going to not hit hard, because they're going to
hit very hard, but we've built them in such a way that we could lose an infinite number
of them, and it will never be a problem for us.
And so that's why we've gone with the T2 Lodgy frigates.
Yeah.
So speaking about the idea of setting expectations regarding loss and how $15 billion here and
there is nothing, I think that at this moment, right now we are the 1,000-plus-pound gorilla
in the galaxy, and I think that our biggest strategic danger is actually just sitting
on our asses and not finding a way to get into some kind of fight and train up new people
and expand our FC bench and, you know, just fucking play the game and blow some shit up.
So again, this is not good ground we're going into.
We're not going to a scenario where the sides are clearly defined -- well, actually, the
sides are clearly defined.
We shoot fucking NCNPL, and anybody that is on the side of NCNPL, that is always the answer.
However, it's a shit show up there, and knowing it's a shit show, I'm like, "Well, look, let's
send typhoons.
Let's send newbies and battleships.
Let's break out the fucking sacrileges.
Let's break out some shiny toys.
We'll get stuck up in there.
We will see what happens, and we'll throw some punches, and maybe we will -- I mean,
we're going to lose fleets.
We are going to get -- there are going to be times where we're going to be frustrated
or we're going to get our asses kicked.
We are not used to fighting outnumbered.
We are not used to not having overpowered strategic force, but I think that we will
stand to lose more organizationally, and it'll just be fucking boring for us to continue
to sit on our asses here in the Southwest.
So it's not necessarily everybody's ideal concept of a war, but I think precisely because
it's not ideal and it's weird and it's different, we get to use weird and different ships.
We get to try new stuff, and pretty much no matter what happens up there, we're going
to hurt the bad guys more than we get hurt, so why the fuck not?
I can't wait to see Nekosis take out a battleship fleet.
That's going to be a real joy.
And another thing, guys, is I want you to understand that if the Jeff thing works, this
will be a continual thing.
We might take breaks or stuff like that here and there.
I don't want to make any promises about continuous action, but if this test case works in this
context, I don't anticipate the war in the Northwest ending anytime soon, so I want people
to prepare for the idea that we will be refining our ability to inflict suffering and strategic
damage on our foes through this.
You guys know the drill.
If you're veterans, you've been on some of these long-term SIGs and squads in the Northwest
for like six months.
So expect this to be a process.
This is going to be a whole thing and we're going to keep at it and keep refining it and
see what we can do.
We've given a ton of ink to the Typhoons.
We've barely talked about the SACs.
Tell us why SACs are cool.
SACs are really cool.
This doctrine is going to have a lot more risk.
And if we go with this one, we'll be paying more SRP than the Typhoons for sure.
This is going to be the doctrine you're going to want to apply if you like flying fancy
ships, if you like flying really blinged out stuff.
SAC religions are, if you don't know, they're AMAR hacks, they're missile hacks, they're
armor hacks, and they match up really well against the current hack doctrines that are
out there.
So they haven't been run in a long time, and there's a reason for that.
Heavy missiles just got buffed.
5% damage, 5% explosion velocity.
They're pretty big buffs actually.
And so we were kind of looking at them before, and when those buffs came in, we were like,
"Oh, that really seals it."
So we'll be the first people to break this doctrine out in sort of the NullSec alliance-wide
meta.
They're also really cool looking, and they're just a great ship.
So they should be a lot of fun to fly.
They're also really high skill from a line member's perspective and from the FC perspective.
So if you want to test your skills, you want to get better, this is a great doctrine to
fly in.
Everything we're doing is going to be high skill to one degree or another.
That was one thing that I wanted to get away from was our alliance-wide doctrines are sort
of designed to be, I'm not going to say simple, but easier to run.
These ones are going to be harder to run, so it's going to be a good way to test your
skill.
There'll be a spot for everyone.
We're not keeping newbies out.
I'm not saying that at all.
I'm just saying that there will be definitely room for everyone who wants to of all levels.
Yeah, it's a doctrine that has a high skill cap, right?
And we have low skill cap options in the form of Typhoons.
I think that Asher has a really good point, which is that a lot of times you're looking
at macro scale warfare, right?
When you're talking about tens of thousands of human beings playing EVE Online, you need
to have sledgehammers that are effective.
I mean, oh my God, it's a 40K analogy.
It's the fucking Imperial Guard versus the Space Marines.
I mean, just straight up.
The sledgehammer of the Emperor versus a spec op strike team.
Use whatever analogy you want to have.
But it's that kind of scenario is that we need to have an opportunity to not only develop
new FCs, but we also need to include some of these high speed, low drag, high skill
cap doctrines such that we can really develop those kind of talents who can fly the really
high skilled FC shit.
So I think it's a great opportunity.
We have the ISK for it.
Fuck it, let's get stuck in.
Okay, so I need to wrap things up here.
We might have missed some stuff, but actually no, I don't think we did.
Home defense Asteros, we talked about that.
That's real quick.
Can you go through the Kuhn Misha, please?
Yeah, that's just another new doctrine.
We're doing home defense Asteros.
Like, you'll see what happens a lot with home defense is these dudes are doing bombers and
they're just just bridging over and over and over again.
It's sort of the dumbos who don't pay attention.
With the Asteros, we're just going to bridge along with them.
We get the same reduction in fatigue as they get.
So we can do it as often as they can.
It won't be like Harpy Fleet where you get five hours of fatigue stacked up.
And we'll just, and they easily beat bombers.
So that's a home defense doctrine.
They're actually super fun to fly.
They're so much fun.
And they will just absolutely nuke bombers.
If they have 150 bombers and we have 50 Asteros, we win that fight every time.
Unless we get bombed.
So it's a pretty fun fleet.
So that's something new we'll be adding for home defense only.
And those are on the market already.
You'll see them mostly called on the weekends when you see like the big bombers bar and
people like that trying to kill our dudes.
That's going to be a response to that.
That's everything else I think from the notes, Mittens.
Yeah, it's kind of funny actually.
So I love Asteros and it's kind of funny that there is so much shit going on that incident.
I also am excited about the fact that we've had like a fucking typhoon doctrine.
But back in the day, last time I got a chance to really use Asteros at an alliance level
was with the stunt doubles, Hornet Squad situation during the casino war.
They're beautiful ships.
They've got some of the coolest skins of the game.
So it's kind of funny.
I missed the segue.
I was answering the question about like, what are we going to do about homeland defense?
And I'm like, well, it's an optional SIG and squad deployment.
So Delve is still going to be the same.
But I overlooked the fact that we're deploying a fucking Asteros home defense doctrine, which
is bad ass as shit.
There's just a lot of a lot of shit is going on, guys.
And that's fantastic.
So thank you all for coming.
I know it's a big fireside.
I know there was 30 minutes of hearing us use our words.
There can be a bunch of broadcasts and shit going out about this.
The El Jefe process begins next weekend is when we're deploying this.
Everybody has a chance to get their shit together, make plans, get ready, blah, blah, blah.
Bomberwaff is the reboot is coming out today.
The NGSA reboot is coming out today.
We have a locust fleet tomorrow.
Bring your heavy equipment.
It's time to time to get serious.
It's time to get off of our asses.
Shit is happening, and instead of waiting for shit to come and get all over us, we're
going to go fuck with people elsewhere and get ready.
So yeah, thanks for coming, guys.
I'll be doing the Meta show in 23 minutes, and we're going to be talking about Chinese
alliances and Chinese alliance politics and Eve because there's a whole bunch of wacky
shit happening there that we're going to dig into a little bit.
And yeah, so we will see you next week.
Thank you for coming.
Have a good one.
Have a good one