Fireside Chat Transcript 28 Nov 2k21

Alright boys and girls, we're gonna get started here in a couple minutes. We're gonna wait for the numbers to stabilize.
There are now north of a thousand people on Mumble.
And I think there is at least one Sig Op still out from the fights today or doing their own thing.
Good question already. The first thing out of the gates before we get started was a Ermelin move op question.
So AFCs will know that people are asking by the time that the fireside is over.
I don't know if anybody noticed on the Meta Show, but I've been powdering my face the last two times.
I've been trying to put a little makeup on so the shine in my forehead isn't quite so loud.
But Brisk, as usual, looked way better than me.
I looked very rested on the Meta Show. That's good to hear.
I've finally been getting some sleep in the last few days. It's been nice.
And somebody asking, "Who is this that is clearly bingo bait?" I know what you're up to there.
Got a clown ring question. We're going to be doing that.
And yes, I am in fact still microdosing.
"Where do we do the chat for these meetings?" That is in Elysium@conference.goonfleet.com.
Okay, we're going to go ahead and get started here.
And that was definitely bait, but it is good to know for people that haven't heard it.
Yes, if you are new... Actually, I used to say that at the start of every fucking fireside,
and then during the war and everything, I just sort of assumed that everybody knew.
But we do these in Elysium@conference.goonfleet.com.
Don't ask questions or anything in the Mumble sidebar, because I have it closed and will not see it anymore.
There you go. You fireside who dis.
I wonder if any of the Mayhem guys have bothered registering on our services yet.
I know that they are joining in it as of, like, yesterday.
Yeah, there's a minimal view for Mumble. And for those of you that are new to navigating Jabber,
you can also get your conference rooms on Jabber tiled vertically to the left or right of your client.
They do not have to go top across the way, which is the default.
Yeah, I know. It's fucking mind-blowing.
Minimal view for Mumble. You can also get a dark mode for Jabber, which is a Goonie hack.
And that is cool and good.
Alright, so there are two different tracks of discussion to have here today.
One, of course, is relating to the CCP scenario and all the riots and R4s and P1s.
And what are we doing about that? Who's doing what? Blah, blah, blah.
The other is Goon Swarm, the Imperium and the Empire.
And these are two separate topics. Right.
And they need to remain somewhat separate, because while we are unhappy with some of the things that are happening from CCP,
whereby unhappy we mean really fucking mad along with the rest of the player base,
there is also the scenario that I am not going to set our fucking space empire on fire merely because we are butt-blasted at Rattati.
Right. Like the trains must run on time.
The enemies of the Imperium need to be destroyed and puppies have to get the boot.
Right. There is a whole galaxy out there and we have been fighting all day today.
And it's been lovely.
So I want to sort of dance between these two zones so people kind of get their heads straight about where we are, where we stand, what to expect in the future, blah, blah, blah.
Right. Now. On the one hand, I'm going to start with the Empire.
On the one hand. Yeah. A lot of the stuff that CCP is saying looks really dumb and it's changing on an almost hourly basis.
So step one, I would say, is don't extract your work calls. Don't panic about the work calls.
We're going to let you know when we believe that it is safe to make decisions one way or another about the value of those ships.
You can actually run crab sites in work walls.
There's a whole thread for that, which I was linked earlier in a Kremlin meeting.
If somebody could drop that and unleash him, it was pretty cool.
So there's a lot of options out there. We are making money.
We are killing puppies. And in the meantime, I have received a lot of questions about the health of the video game and where are we going?
What are we doing? Is there a path to victory?
There's like five or six things that Angry Mustache and the rest of the finance guys have come up with that could be implemented to change the course of the game in a way that will bring it health and happiness.
Right. Like, I'm not too concerned about that.
The issue that we are facing with CCB is that the guy who's in charge of it right now has no idea what he's doing.
And he's like a dust console guy. And it's bad. Like, it's bad.
You can't negotiate with people that don't understand the topic of negotiation.
But I don't want you buying a bunch of skill extractors and doing bad things to your characters.
I would suggest that CCB has left a lot more vulnerabilities in terms of pressure points from the player base than they had back in the incarnate days.
You don't have to buy skins. If you're going to buy plex, you can do it on sale.
There's a lot of things that you can do to kick the company in the wallet and vote with your wallet in a way that doesn't take combat means off the table.
And that's the consequence of CCB's microtransactions is that there's a lot more ways for people to protest the way that things are going while still murdering puppies and playing EVE Online and having fun with each other.
So that's sort of where we are.
I think that we have seen these cycles before over time.
And, you know, they're in a bunker right now.
Like they said that they were going to have a dev blog out to address all this shit that didn't happen.
And so who knows when it'll come down.
But, you know, I think that this is something that, well, I'm happy to see our numbers.
I'm happy to see us fighting. I think that in any scenario where CCB fucks the game up to the point, like, let's say that there's a 10 percent haircut on the player base.
I believe and I'm I don't just say this casually because our strategies are based on this, that in any scenario where CCB fucks up the wider game, this has resulted in a process of consolidation of centralization and of more power networking and oomph amongst the great powers.
One of the fundamental issues with the game right now is that CCB has pulled up the ladder after us.
We did not ask for this. Right. We did not ask for 350 billion titans.
We did not ask for 10 billion ish dreadnoughts.
And the irony of the situation is kind of like with Omeka Gold thinking that he's going to stick it to the goonies and removing his entire play style.
In many ways, the things that CCB has done in theory, because they're butt blasted at goons or whatever is going on in their heads have resulted in us being the people of the biggest Titan fleet.
They're 350 billion ish. It's ridiculous. It's dumb.
But if we're going to have to live in a galaxy that has 350 billion titans, you bet your ass I want the most.
We're going to live in a galaxy with 10 billion ish dreadnoughts. I'm going to want the most of those two.
Right. That's just how this works. So I don't like the fact that they pulled up the ladder behind us.
But I want you guys to understand as members of Goonswarm and as members of the Imperium that we are in a scenario where CCB has fucked the game into guaranteeing our preeminence for the near term.
Now, to be fair, we guaranteed our preeminence on the fucking battlefield.
We blew up the bad guys titans. We blew up the bad guys dreadnought fleet. That whole M2.
Can we just pause for a moment? Because it's been so long since the M2 breakout.
And that was like a fairly traumatic time back in February or whatever it was when they fed us those 411 dreadnoughts.
That's good. Good times. Good times. Wonderful decisions on the part of the bad guys.
Dreadnoughts was a funny fucking Freudian slip. I appreciate you calling me out for that.
I said that. Anyway, so this is the paradox, guys.
And I want you to understand when you're like, you know, I was talking to the Kremlin before and like, you know, when there's stupidity and chaos under heaven, when CCB is being managed by people that think that putting P1s in our force is a good idea, the bottom line question is, where do we as a space empire stand?
Is the game fun for us? Where is our position vis-a-vis our enemies? What the fuck?
Well, I will fight for a game that I think is better and more fair if I believe it results in a better ecosystem overall.
And in many situations, that'll be like, I will fight against our interests in some situations because I think long term.
I don't like our short term interests. I want our long term interests.
And so sometimes that means saying, hey, I think that these are changes that we need to make and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah in the video game itself for the wider game.
But for Goomswarm and the Imperium, if they're going to hand us some ways to make ISK and succeed and have the biggest strategic super capital force in history and keep it that way because they're preventing any of our competition from building more.
Great, great. You play the hands you're dealt and the hands that we have been dealt are pretty fucking great because just before they fucked all the stuff up, we beat the entire goddamn galaxy all at once over a year and a half.
So on the one hand, be mad at CCP. If you want to protest about CCP, that's fantastic. I'm mad too.
But internally, from our longer term perspective, I believe that the game is fixable in ways that could happen if they get their head out of their asses.
I don't think that the game is broken currently in a way that fucks us over.
I'm mad about stupidity. I despise incompetence and I despise inefficiency.
Few things may have made me angrier than the recognition yesterday during the meta show, because for some reason I just hadn't put it together, that either the CCP dev team didn't know that in 2014 they had removed compression to great fanfare and they didn't ask anybody and they didn't remember it.
So either one, they didn't know.
And that's real bad. If you're a developer of a video game that's been around since 2003 and you put something out in 2014 that said this mechanic is really dumb and bad, you would at least hope that the development team currently knew that they had done that.
But one option is that they literally just didn't know or remember or talk to anybody about why it was removed in 2014.
And that's bad.
The alternative is they did know.
They did know.
They knew.
Maybe they knew completely.
And they looked at the 2014 situation and was like, "Yeah, yeah, this is a good idea. Let's allocate some developer resources to it."
Now, I want you guys to understand that pointing out the stupidity and protesting against CCP fucking a bunch of shit up is different from our shit being fucked up or our situation in the video game being a bad one.
Because unfortunately, when we are dealing with old mecha-tier stupidity, the classic scenario is they will do things that are dumb and bad, thinking it's going to fuck us over.
And what actually happens is Nerf Goons results in a generalized nerf, which results in, "Hey, look, Recon," which was actually putting more people on the field during Vietnam than PL did, because PL is just run by some jacked-off C now, "Recon folded into NC."
You saw Mayhem join the initiative.
Welcome aboard, boys and girls.
We hope you like it over here.
We try to run a just and fair nerd society.
And I think you're going to see more of that kind of consolidation as a small and medium alliance leadership groups.
Because to run an alliance or to run a corporation, you've got a leader and you've got a team, a core team of people that make it happen.
And they're looking at the scenario.
They're looking at what CCP is doing.
And they're like, "Nope. Let's go to a place of order and sanity in a world gone mad."
So the paradox of the scenario.
I want you guys mad at CCP.
I want you angry in a just and righteous way.
But I want you to understand that P1s and R4s is not like, "Oh, gosh, we're militarily or strategically incapable."
This is a scenario where CCP is fucking the broader game up.
But paradoxically, while they are doing it, they're doing it in such a way that it is going to result in more strength and more talent coming to the Imperium.
Because this is what always happens.
If you're new, this is a classic bingo square probably.
If you're not, you've heard the bodybuilder analogy thousands of times.
But yet again, here we are.
In any scenario where CCP is going to go to an entire room full of people and say, "Here's a weight of 100 pounds."
You give it the 100-pound weight and say, "Hey, dude who's never lifted before, carry it."
And you can't carry it very far.
You give it to a powerlifter who's used to carrying 500 pounds around.
An extra 100 pounds sucks, I guess, but it's not really a big deal.
And so what you're seeing again as CCP puts collective pressure on the galaxy through either intentional scarcity or unintentional stupidity, which is really what we're seeing with Age of Prosperity stuff, that collective pressure results in a differential buff to us.
Because if we take a 3% haircut and the entire game takes a 10% haircut, in practice, we got an 8% buff.
The math is not realistic, but you understand the principle I am attempting to articulate.
So that's the scenario here.
On one hand, buttblasted at CCP, stupidity is bad, incompetence is bad, future of the game needs to go in a different direction.
For Goon Storm and the Imperium, gosh, how about those crab sites?
How about those cloud ring slap fights?
There is shit going on and we are in a very good strategic position, which is why this is one of the reasons why in the meta show I'm like, "I'm not going to take to the skies to this.
I'm not going to put my name on any open letters or try to rally the people as a whole."
Because one, I don't think that would actually do anything in the current circumstances.
I think it would actually make things worse if I was all, "Herfety Borg, let's try to get out there," or whatever.
On the other hand, some of these stupid decisions that they are making are making sure that our strategic preeminence is guaranteed,
and I am perfectly happy to keep punching downward on Elfboy and his fellow travelers as long as the strategic opportunity presents itself.
And conveniently, some of that strategic opportunity is presenting itself on these recent ops in Cloud Ring,
and this little slap fight we're having with Tri and Horde's there now, and shooting Bastlis and their rocks.
It's good. It's their spaceship violence. I'm glad that our enemies are coming a little bit closer to us again, such that we can put the boot in.
Yeah, I see a lot of people talking about Jeff deployments.
Well, the good news is you don't necessarily need a Jeff deployment because we have a fantastic Jump Ridge network,
and part of that Jump Ridge network would be even better if it was extended through certain areas in Cloud Ring,
which is why we are up there doing that thing.
So essentially, look for fleets. There are fights. We are going to be doing this thing.
We are in a position where I'm very comfortable with our SRP.
The finance team has been a fantastic job managing all of this chaos, and yeah, the situation is excellent.
We are surrounded by enemies, and we're on the attack. It's our happy place.
All right, I have a few more options here. I want to lay in front of people.
This is some older business. We need everybody to log into Geist and check that their characters are showing OK.
If they aren't showing OK, they need to fix the registration. This is a CCB thing.
And Rat Knight is a goddamn hero and copy and pasted it and dropped it in the chat,
so I don't have to try to operate a computer while hurfing my blurfs.
So click on that and make sure your stuff is OK.
I guess it's about to get goon rushed, and who knows, we might fail over. Hilarity.
We also have Secret Santa. I mentioned this at the start of the fireside.
There's more people here now. I want to mention it again.
Secret Santa is a thing. We are doing it like we do every year, and there is Secret Santa.
In addition to that, as Imnar just linked, CCB, the audio.
I know Eve having sound is something that every old-school ancient vet will make the obvious joke about Eve having sound,
but they added something that fucked some stuff up.
So check that thread that Imnar linked and turn your sound off,
because the warp sounds do bad, bad, bad things to your FPS if you're not already in full potato mode.
If Mayhem crosses over, are they leaving brave? Yes.
Mayhem is leaving brave and joining the initiative, and we are happy to have them.
And as Jonas points out, the great thing about Secret Santa this year is gifting a dread is totally baller.
It is. It is. Absolutely.
Is there much left of brave after they leave?
That's Dunk's problem.
And maybe after this they will purge their inactives or whatever it is.
Again, this is one of those scenarios where after M2, we blew up what, like 300-odd Titans?
We blew up hundreds of their dreadnoughts.
And the deep irony of all of this, I don't want us to get distracted by what I'm going to distract us with right now.
So this is going to be like a sensible chuckle kind of thing where we ha ha ha and don't get too caught up in it.
But one of the hilarious ironies of the current strategic situation is we won M2,
we blew up their dread cache on the M2 breakout,
we have generally kicked their asses six ways from Sunday,
and then CCP changed things in such a way that it requires freighters worth of water to build a fucking dreadnought.
So while all that was going on, you know, you have attached to the penis and testicles and butthole of of Rattati are Vili and Gobbins and Kenneth Feld.
Right. So the reason, you know, history repeats itself versus tragedy, then as far as we have this Omeka Gold situation where he annihilated his entire play style in a fit of obsessive gurgoons.
And many of these changes were things that the papi CSMs were pushing for and have been relentlessly defending.
Now, Vili, of course, was loud and proud about how people should not be protesting against CCP on the day of the protests a couple of weeks back.
But he has since fallen silent. But I just want us to remember and have a sensible chuckle about the fact that our enemies have advocated for defending CCP and pushing through gameplay changes that have raised the ladder behind us after we utterly annihilated their combined strategic forces.
Rendering it. I mean, I guess they could try to make up for it.
They're just going to have to haul a lot of freighters of water and build those treads back at 10 billion a pop.
So one of the things with test is next or the thing with brave or what we're doing with Horde is here are these scenarios where our enemies put themselves in such a terrible position, a terrible position that in many cases they advocated for, hoping it would fuck us over.
And they've just owned themselves. And so now they're going to corn cob and insist that they're not being owned.
But, you know, I'm happy that the people from brave that want to come over to what I hope to be a good civilization have made that choice, just like they did originally in the form of Karma Fleet, which is a core part of our fucking culture.
We love former brave people that got sick of the drama and the leadership challenges. Right.
Dunk is now a full leader. And I love dunk. Dunk is great. But I'm very happy to have him over here. And I hope that we live up to our hype as being a cool place.
So, yeah, this is this is why it's complicated, guys. On the one hand, girl, CCP, I would buy any skins. I would not buy any extractors. I would not unsub any of your combat means because we have puppies to kill.
You know, if you're mad and you have all that you want to like unsub and park, that's great. There are a lot of different vectors to show CCB or show Pearl this that they're headed in the wrong direction.
But strategically and militarily and from a overall perspective, many of these dumb things that they've been doing are just making us stronger. Great. Wonderful. Fuck them.
Like if they're going to if they are going to push for gameplay changes through their licks, little sycophants, CSMs that result in them all making themselves.
I am not going to stop them. So on the one hand, your CCP protests, do whatever you want to do. Stop giving them excess money.
On the other hand, we're having a great time today, blowing puppies up. And we're going to keep doing that because while CP is fucking the game up, they're doing it in such a way that is giving us more power.
And I love that. I like power. What can I say? Power is the only defense against the puppies, because otherwise they will always come against us after lying about it like they always do.
So, yeah, let me take some general questions from people. I think I've hit most of my line by lines here for specific Firesidey thing.
And I haven't really given people an opportunity for bingo bait, so we can work on that. Let's see who joined from Dreadbomb.
There was another corporation that joined from Dreadbomb, and I'm spacing on the name right now. Brisk had it on the Meta Show.
Looking at some of these other things here. Multiple requests for an asset safety op. I was out last week. I don't know if we got an asset safety in last week, but if not, we will attempt to get one done today.
Would GSF ever push into Aridia for low-sec mining? If things change in such a way that it might have value, all options are on the table. I don't know if that counts as future plans bingo bait.
The immediate joke when I saw pushing into Aridia for low-sec mining was actually Gobbins related, because during the late phase of the war, Gobbins was obsessed with having people going and mining at Aridia.
And we looked into it and it turned out they only had like four platforms active, and he had turned into this whole like, "Oh, we're gonna go to Arr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr-rrr." You know, Elfboy shit.
So, I do get a "heh" whenever I see Aridia low-sec mining mentioned.
Any interesting cliff notes on the intra-Chinese and intra-Russian conflicts that are brewing elsewhere in the galaxy? That's a good one.
You know, I don't think that there is ever going to be an end to the AOM versus FRT hell war. Hopefully there'll be a start to it. I would kind of like to see that kick off. I think it would be interesting to watch that happen.
Hope springs eternal. In terms of the intra-Russian conflicts, we don't really get involved in that because it's dumb. It's really, really dumb to get between Russians who are fighting each other, right?
Like, they're scary enough in the first place. Like, "Don't piss off the Russians" has always been one of the rules of thumb in EVE Online. I have never gone wrong with "Don't piss off the Russians," and it's always served us well.
It is interesting to see some of those RMT scandals breaking out into the open. There's been a lot of that lately, and we're going to have to see if there are any impacts or shakeups from that.
But, you know, fire has been flying around with Pappy. Severance from Pappy joined fire, and so it's Arcadia's soul and his wolf fleets, and they're all the same dumbasses that we know and despise.
What are our strategic accomplishments with the recent battles and what's next? Well, some of them have just been what I would call fortiser slap fights.
We're attempting to build some bridges in Cloud Ring to head to the Northwest and take those from Triumvirate, so that's been the order of a lot of the stuff today.
In terms of big picture stuff, a lot of times we need to go out there and get kicked in the dick to remember that we don't have plot armor.
I kind of like it when I see us go out there and we have a little feed or a little whelp or a little fuckup or a big one or whatever, and then people kind of shake the dust off and go, "Okay, we can't just assume we're going to beat Pappy."
You know, whatever, and remember how to play the game and come back and win.
So especially after periods of relative quiet, it's nice to see the action kicking up. I'm very happy about that.
I despise peace. You guys know me. I have nothing really to do in peace besides tell everybody to prepare for war, which is my whole thing.
So yeah, did I ever get my Fudge Stripe cookies? Thank you, Orandas.
I did get Fudge Stripe cookies, but it was actually a present from Ranger Gamma. He brought them to Vegas and I got to unwrap a box of three packages of Fudge Stripes together, but Elfboy himself did not deliver them, so it's not quite the same.
I do love Fudge Stripes, though. Alrighty. Battalion of the Lost. That is the cork we got from Dread Bomb.
So there's a comment and suggestions about what to do with what characters that are under what I'm going to call regulatory risk.
In Lawyer land, we would call the question of what the roar calls are going to be and what CCB is going to do with Exumers.
One of the things that grinds my gears is why the fuck did they fuck with the Procurer?
I really like the idea of the Procurer being a fucking tanky, null-sec combat thing. It was just unnecessary and stupid, just like a lot of these other things.
But in an environment of regulatory risk where you don't know what they're going to do and they're changing their tune every hour, the answer is to sit tight.
The paradox of the scarcity nonsense that Rattati has been ramming down everybody's throats is they say that they want to get rid of stockpiles, but nothing creates stockpiles like regulatory risk.
If you don't know the value of your work wall tomorrow, maybe it'll be 10 billion isk next.
What's the value of our Dreadnaughts going to be? What's the value of any of this going to be?
The behavior in society after society that has gone through an economic crisis is to stockpile, is to sit on your stuff, is to not actually make any sudden changes because stuff's changing by the hour.
So CCB is all, "Oh, let's try to get rid of stockpiles. These stockpiles are going down."
And they're behaving in ways that if you had two brain cells to rub together, you would recognize are going to incentivize stockpiles.
So I advise you to sit on your stockpiles. If you don't know what to do with a character, don't extract it, don't panic.
Just wait for a week or two. I will loudly tell you from a fireside what the state believes is the optimal play.
And right now the state believes that the optimal play is to sit tight.
Not make any sudden moves in terms of fucking with your characters because CCB doesn't know what the fuck they're doing.
And maybe next week it'll be something completely different.
There is a real world analogy going on. The Turkish lira is in a free fall.
And it's because apparently the leader of Turkey believes that you should keep interest rates really low in a scenario that they're in.
So it's like an inflationary spiral and he wants the interest rates to stay low despite all these things that are happening.
And it's getting worse and worse on an almost daily basis.
And I've been kind of making jokes about that, like who it's sort of like a race to see who can destroy their economy through insisting that they are right.
And everybody else is wrong in the face of all criticism, all theory, all understanding and all other examples.
So, yeah. All right. I'm going to go ahead and call it for this week.
I want to thank you all for being here. Get out there, kick some ass, beat up on some puppies, run some crab sites.
Theta has been doing that recently. It's actually pretty cool. You can make a lot of isk.
Hold on to your stockpiles. Enjoy your 350 billion isk titans. Enjoy your 20 billion isk, your 10 billion isk dreadnoughts.
You know, if they're going to fuck things up, we should, I guess, be thanking them for making us so overpowered while they're fucking things up.
High fives all around. And we will see you next week.
I'm going to try to get us an asset safety op for our Malin spun up.
I'll just check in with Cord here in the Jabber channel and we'll get some pings out if that's going to happen.
So, yeah, let's get back out there.