Fireside Chat Transcript 2 Aug 2k20

So we have, the initiative has withdrawn from Fountain. We have sort of contracted our battle space now. We have...
This is expected. We've said it's expected. I feel like I have to say something about it on a far side, even though we've seen this coming for a while,
and planned it for the moment that PanPan went to Hop Hib. The initiative was planning on doing a fighting retreat and making this take as long as possible before they had to withdraw to Delph,
simply because the Fountain area is basically indefensible. Like, if you bring up GARPA, or GTS I should say, and you take a look at the way the capital ranges work, you can figure it out.
The Bastion is also having to withdraw their assets from Fountain, down to where we are. And Fortress Delve is... you know, everybody is welcome here.
I'm robotting. Hang on a second, let me check on this.
That's interesting, it's probably because of mumble stuff. Hold on, guys. Bear with me.
Okay, well, whether I'm robotting or not, it sounds like things are okay. Who knows.
So, one of the things that's just sort of overall big picture stuff that I've seen over the last week or so...
Also, thank you guys for fucking holding down the fort. As you guys know, I have been moving house, and I finally got my piano moved in the other day, and now I'm actually done.
I only have my name on one place that I'm living, and so I can finally, like, I got my battle station working, and I can actually play some EVE again, and sort of get back in the swing of things.
So thank you all for not having the Empire implode when I was briefly distracted.
Okay, what else do we have?
Overall, I'm really just kind of delighted by the way that things are going. It sucks to lose a region, even one that we planned on losing.
But what we've seen so far, especially if you look at what happened today and you look at what happened yesterday, is that we are getting better and better at defending our territory, and that yesterday I thought it was quite significant that on a Friday, when our enemies are like weekend warriors, and they're supposed to be doing all their shit on weekends more than they do on weekdays,
we prevented any new reinforcements of our territory from the entirety of the legacy and test run.
Like, they just completely failed, and there have been a number of situations, not just in one time zone, but we're having days now where they try to do stuff and we stop them.
And I think one of the reasons why we're, you know, just practice makes perfect in the flitz, like, we're doing essentially the same sort of set of tasks every day.
People are understanding the need for speed. They're understanding the need to, like, when you log off for the day, make sure that you have ships ready to go such that you're able to undock immediately when FC says we have to burn down a TCAG.
Right? Well, you guys are getting really a lot better about just undocking and being ready to rock, which is key in a defense war like that. So that's kind of cool.
We're also starting to see just a bunch of dunks. Like, yesterday was entirely all through EUTZ, all through USTZ. It was just dunks, dunks, dunks. Like, we just annihilated these dudes.
So that's cool. Like, they know that they're getting their asses kicked. They're essentially just saying, "Oh, well, you know, after initiative retreats, like, you know, PanFam will come and we'll solve everything."
So, you know, whatever.
Post pics of my battle station. I think I actually posted pictures of this on Twitter earlier.
So, yeah, you can go find my Twitter account and you can see a picture of my thing.
Let me take a look here. So there's various things I need to ask you guys to do.
As you can see, I'm a little bit scatterbrained here because I just got done trolling, like, 1300 people who are watching the meta show, which was hilarious.
So let's try to get to brass tacks here. I think the war is going really well.
You know, we are on defense, so every day that we are able to hold our shit together and learn something new, we are in the long run winning this.
Our goal is to continue to beat these people's faces in at every opportunity and to keep forming up and keep doing the fucking work.
And I don't really have to say that because you guys have been doing it, right?
So at the rate that things are going, I'm pretty happy with the situation overall.
Now, various things that we need to be focusing on.
So one of the big innovations we've been having is that we are using rock walls to raise ADMs.
Many of this is not really a secret anymore because we're being pretty obvious about it.
And one of the things that GSOL has been doing is we're changing the moon frack list on the forums.
So, goonfleet.com, you can see a list of all the moons that are coming out of frack.
And we are going to be encouraging people to mine public moons because it is really good for raising ADM very rapidly.
We have more rock walls than anybody.
So when you're going on an ADM fleet in the way that we are right now in terms of war,
the ADM fleets usually are an excuse to break out of rock walls and to make some money in the process.
So it's good for the economy. It's good for the ADMs. They get up really, really fast if you're using a rock wall.
And so yeah, please do it. You'll be seeing me there because I love doing it, especially when I'm high as hell.
It's a lot of fun. And it's just sort of like the answer to the ADM problem is rock walls come a lots.
And I know that a lot of corporations are already in touch with GSOL directors.
Something that Nura Mori pointed out is that Muckdot is opening up their moons to the Alliance to Mine.
And there are also other corporations that have already been in contact with GSOL to help arrange this.
And I won't get into the nuances of that because GSOL is handling it and you guys know me when it comes to like gritty logistic stuff.
But I'll be there with my roll call to mine rocks.
All right, here is where we go. Let me take a look at this.
[mimics music]
I already talked about the need for speed and how wise and important it is for everybody to make sure that you have ships ready to undock immediately rather than faffing around.
But you guys know the drill. You obviously know the drill because we've been stopping the bad guys from reinforcing our space, not for lack of trying on their part.
One of the things that I do need to hurf about a bit is we do need more Black Hand agents.
We need people who are, you know, we have a lot of spies in action, but there's 103 hostile alliances to infiltrate, right?
Like we do not have that many active agents and if we did, I'd lie about it.
So please do join the Black Hand and if we can get the recruitment thread for the Black Hand linked in an Elysium, I would appreciate it.
So shoutouts. Obviously, the fact that the initiative managed to hold onto Fountain for like a month when it could have been rolled much faster is huge.
I want people to be nice to the initiative. Obviously, they are our fucking allies.
Welcome them into Fortress Delve. Fortress Delve is awesome. It's a lot better of a region than Fountain is.
High fives all around. Welcome to the party. And the fact that they spent that much time defending in Fountain has bought us time to do all of these other cool things that we've been doing down here.
And time is key whenever it comes to a defensive war.
Similarly, I want to, I talked about this on the Meta Show, but I want to give a shout out in front of all of you guys too.
PLA and Silvit and his crew with the United Earth Directorate Alt Alliance.
That was a project that he initiated. He basically came to us and said, "We're going to have this Alt Alliance and we're going to hold the line in North Quarious."
And my reaction was basically, "I don't think you can do this, but if you want to try, good luck, because Northern Quarious is just too far out."
And what actually happened was up until just a few days ago, they required an entire legacy form up on a weekend to be able to roll through those IHUBS.
And again, Fountain was held a lot longer than expected. North Quarious was held for a lot longer than expected.
So credit to the initiative, credit to PLA, Silvit and the United Earth Directorate. That was really fucking cool. I did not realize they could do that.
And it's interesting because the North Quarious stuff has now been hubbed by Evictus.
And Evictus looks like they're doing the same dumb mistake that Test made in Exe Tac.
So if you remember Exe Tac, that was the period-basis system that Borders stained that they test briefly had an IHUB and was super serious about, "We have this IHUB here. Now this is going to be something or whatever."
And we expected them to just snap the hub and move on. And what actually happened was they tried to ADM it up. They tried to do all these things.
Evictus is making the same mistake in North Quarious. So if you were randomly a GSFOE hacker or if you just feel like it, Evictus has been trying to defend their Quarious hubs today,
which is hilarious. I don't know why. But if you randomly feel like harassment hacking those nerds, go nuts because apparently we'll make them spurg out and try to form their entire alliance to defend it. So fuck it.
Let's see what else we got.
ADM stuff. Blackhand.
Okay. Yeah.
Let us -- oh, NGSA. So here's another thing. NGSA has been -- if people are unaware of what NGSA is, it is essentially a system that allows us to coordinate cloaking campers and then get the intel from our cloaking campers to people that will be murdering the targets that are found.
So we have like 50 or 60 people who are involved in it right now. And a bunch of spaces being cloaking camped in test territory. And we want people to join NGSA. So we have -- basically if you are an NGSA cloaking camper, that means that you would be having your dudes out in test territory.
And we have a system to make sure that you are not camping in a place that somebody else is, right? We have a whole system worked out. And then when you see a target that you can report into the NGSA system, that information then goes to angry, stained Russians.
It goes to the penis people who are mercenaries that we have hired for 11 trillion isk. That's wangs or penis out. Corpse Diplo calls them the penis people, and I think it's hilarious. I just like saying penis people over and over again. So there you go.
And yeah, so do NGSA, go ahead and join it. And there is a link right there in Elysium.
[silence]
People are talking about like why dotting and Ned or is it going to be relocated? No, guys, guys, come on, like, this is -- initiative is going to be in Delve for a bit. And then they're going to do something.
Oh, you're bingo baiting, motherfuckers. Of course, that's a future plans question. Sorry. Well, there you go. I'm not going to answer that question because future plans. There you go.
What's our stance on puppies? Fuck puppies.
Well baited, well baited, credit to you.
[silence]
Do we need to move ships from fountain J5A to Delve? I think that if we're going to do a J5A evac, we will send pings for it. If you try to evac J5A or something on your own before we call the need for an evac, you will likely die randomly.
So don't be stupid. Wait for orders. I'm glad that you asked that question, though. One of the things that's strange about this war is -- well, it's actually not that strange.
Our enemies don't want to fight us on our keepstars. They don't want to try to reinforce the keepstars. They're trying to avoid the keepstars. They're trying to say, oh, we snapped hub.
Hubs are significant. You don't want to have a hub lost on a keepstar system, but you still have to -- and the reason why the hubs matter in keepstar systems is that it'll enable you to have jump bridges and sinojammers there.
But if you get rid of the hub and you don't have jump bridges and sinojammers, you still have a keepstar that you have to siege. And so thus far, they did try to poke at J5A once. They lost a ton of fighters and then ran away.
So I don't know. I hope that they do start attacking our combat citadels more regularly because we have an entire doctrine dedicated for that, which is -- this is a pretty good time to pimp the Windrunner doctrine.
So essentially, we designed an entire doctrine to be pure, unadulterated cancer when it comes to citadel defense, and we have tons of citadels.
So what you're going to see here, if these guys do find their balls and start chewing on some of our combat sits, you're going to see Windrunner's ops.
And I think we have -- sorry, let me take a look at this numbers here. I said I was going to say this on the meta show, but it took a little bit to figure out.
So we have -- and this is just GSOL. This doesn't count member corps or allies, but official part of the state.
We have 215 Fortizar's, 83 Astra's. We have 1,236 Athenors and not counting allied keepstars, speaking only about, again, like WAF or DJ's Flag, GSOL, 42 keepstars.
So there's a lot for the bad guys to try to chew through when we're looking forward to that, because we're not planning on evacing, we're not planning on tearing everything down.
Like I said before, if it gets to that point, which I don't think it will, our evac point is NPC Delve, where we then will stay and fight.
And then when we come out of this thing, one way or another, I think we're going to win. We're certainly on track to win the way things are going.
Then we murder zone test. That is an important thing.
Let's talk about offense. So when we are seeing a test fail to get any reinforcements through, not for lack of trying, again, you guys are amazing motherfuckers and have stopped them day in, day out.
But the more the test fails, the more we're going to be gearing up offense. I'm not going to tell you what that's going to be.
There will be ops to do things in hostile territory. But every moment that these motherfuckers fail to put us on the back foot, we are going to make them suffer.
So I want you guys to start thinking in terms of that. Be ready for offensive ops.
There have already been a number like we've spammed their space with citadels. We've had a bunch of hilarious times already.
But as test continues to fail publicly, we are going to start doing more offense because it will also be really bad for their coalition to constantly have to build test out because they suck so much.
So the whole point here is that hard defense succeeds in keeping these motherfuckers out of our space, which we're getting better and better at, and they're not in our space.
And then as we're doing that, pivot to doing more and more offense and keeping that offense focused on test because fuck test and test is next.
They are the weakest link and nobody really likes them. So nobody's going to be like, "Oh, well, there's 103 alliances of blues. We really want to go help out test because we love ProGodLegend."
Nope. So that's the plan.
Let me take some questions here, guys. I'm also sure, again, I'm ADHD as fuck and I've been running around like a maniac all day in space around the Meta Show.
So a little bit less of a bullet-pointing fireside than usual, but I can't complain.
Shout out to Kord again. Yeah, the Kord team has been fucking amazing. The way that things have been developing in Kord land, to manage a battle space as complicated as this is incredibly difficult.
There are a number of enemy mass hack attempts where they will send one person and a Tristan to a whole bunch of different systems.
And to be able to keep track of that battle space is something that requires an entire team. And the Kord team, I'm fucking proud, especially because Kord's like, I have a Kord fetish.
I'm not ashamed to admit it. Back in the day, it was always a challenge because we believed that, or some people believe, I should say, that you had to have a Sky Marshal to do Kord.
It required one person as opposed to something that you could structure like a team, which is what real militaries do to coordinate battle spaces.
And I think that we're one of the only organizations that has a real honest-to-God coordination team and it makes a huge difference at a time like this.
Will there be any offensive stuff against the enemy Sovereign Quarry spawn people that are going there on their own to endosis things?
Well, I wouldn't answer that question, Columbo. It's a good question to ask, Columbo. You're on the right track.
But it's not the kind of thing I answer on a fireside because precisely if we were planning on doing ops to do that, we wouldn't say it in a public thing.
Future plans? It's a good question, though. And if we weren't planning on doing that, we would be kind of silly.
So that's why I'm not going to answer your question because you're already on the right track.
We can run around solo in hostile space like maniacs and reinforce their stuff, right?
Yeah, absolutely. Like if you were just like, I'm a man with a Bifrost and a Grudge and I don't want to join GSFOE, which incidentally GSFOE has been huge, please do join GSFOE.
DeClorian and their crew have like basically cut the Gordian knot of the confusion on global comms when it comes to trying to manage nodes in a battle space.
GSFOE has been fantastic. Please join it if somebody here can link the recruitment thread for GSFOE.
It has the single best Bifrost tutorial I've ever seen.
But if you are a solo hacking maniac and you just want to go hack hostile space, you do not need to wait for permission.
You can just go fucking hack their shit. Go after their IHUBS first. Ignore the TCUs. Puppies love TCUs because they care about flags.
You can still go for their TCUs if you feel like it, but IHUBS are the first priority.
Alright, let's see what else we got here.
Is the path to the Kord through skirmish commanders?
Thorn Snow asked that question and I think it's a reasonable one. Yeah, I'd say that being a reasonable skirmish commander is a good first step.
You have to get in there and understand how that stuff works before we can put you in the Kord team because you need to understand what's militarily necessary and how to prioritize targets to send fleets where they need to be.
The ghost says "Kinda funny that we had 3 fleets in fountain trying to save the titans and Tess failed to ref anything during that. Are they even trying at this point?"
Well, they are trying, they just fucking suck. They're definitely trying, guys. You guys saw those hack notifications.
One of the things that was really fun for me, instead of in the normal fireside slot, I was hanging around in a tingoo with Jay and we went to go snipe some hacker and there was some glorious motherfucker there already with a mccariel who had already murdered it.
So the headhunter program, both for synos and for killing hostile hackers, has been working out really well.
So in addition to the good work of the Kord team in terms of figuring out where we need to send these drama fleets, the interceptor fleets are super fucking important.
It's not like "ooh, it's an interceptor fleet, like whatever." Drama fleets are key because they are our first line of defense against hacks.
And when we get to a place where a fleet is attempting to get rid of a hacker and it turns out that some solo warrior has gone headhunting to collect the intosis bounty and already murdered the hacker, we are always delighted to find out that you guys have solo pvp'd or in a little group ganked the hacker.
So keep that up, we love that.
Will we have cap training on CC? That's a good question. I haven't thought about that because we're actually just at war.
We probably will not have time for a big cap training event but I will talk to the directors and see if they can jam one in.
That's a question I'm not qualified to answer at this juncture.
What's the status of fringe connection now?
Well, everybody kept telling us that they were part of the imperium so we started talking to them about whether they would be interested in joining the imperium and we'll have to see what they say.
Can alphas join blackhand? That's a question for the blackhand. I mean your spy account is probably going to need to be in omega. I don't know how you would have to, like, maybe you could put an alpha in horde or something, I don't know.
Talk to the guys in blackhand about that. That's, again...
Let's see what we got.
Do you feel like we have too many fleets or how would you recommend which ones to focus on?
I do not feel that we have too many fleets. We're at war. We have as many fleets as we need to have, right?
We don't spin up fleets just for fun in wartime, guys. Well, actually, sometimes we do. If nothing's going on, we'll spin up fleets because, you know, we can and there's something neat to do.
But in wartime when you're seeing pings about "do this, do that, do the other thing," it's because bad guys are trying to blow up everything we have and we're trying to stop them from blowing up everything we have.
Oh, he says too many doctrines. No, I mean, I'm pretty happy with the doctrines that we have. We have doctrines that are there for a purpose. I don't feel like we have too many.
Yeah, no, I don't think that at all.
We've been using, like, you guys have been flying, we have used, the only doctrine that we hadn't really used recently, we haven't used hurricanes much because we haven't had many attrition-style fights because the enemy tends to run away from us once we start killing their logi.
And hurricanes are something that you typically use when there's like a big, grindy attrition fight. But our enemies are bitches and mutants and we kill a few of them and they scamper back into their space and fail to invade us.
We hadn't used too many tornado fleets yet because those were designed partially for citadel defense and the enemy has been avoiding attacking our citadels. Hopefully now that will change.
And we had one of those up the other day for the first time and everybody loved it and that was pretty cool. So I feel pretty good about our doctrine spread.
Alright, what else do we have?
Can we have more workhaul ADM in EUTZ? They're awesome. They are absolutely awesome. I love workhaul ADMs. It's hilarious because you can rip up an entire system in like 30 minutes from like nothing to a very high number.
But EUTZ is primarily going to be focused on defense because that's where our vulnerabilities are. So I can't promise workhaul ADM fleets in EUTZ.
But on the other hand, if we keep succeeding in defending, maybe things will continue to be safe enough to do that. Who knows? Who knows?
Asher, if you're trying to speak, your mic is not on.
See if I can find Asher.
Try to talk now, Asher.
Yeah, he's not unmuted or anything like that. He's just...words not working. Mic isn't doing anything.
Can we get a shoutout for the market folks to see T2 Intosys links, please?
There is a pretty hilarious supply problem for Intosys because everybody in the galaxy is building them.
I'm not sure whether the reason why there aren't T2 links on the market is because they're all going to GSFOE already or what.
I did do a shoutout for NGSA earlier, so no worries there.
Hello.
There you go. What's up?
Yes, I was told that my microphone is like test. It doesn't do anything.
I have a few things to say. Probably the best skill in the game to train right now is Hack 5, Navigation 5, Acceleration Control 5, Go Fast, Fly Hacks.
There's going to be a lot of those doctrines. If they'd let me, I'd have three or four more doctrines right now.
Ball Tacks we use more for Citadel Defense. Hurricanes, same story.
For Citadel Defense, especially far out Citadels, we might start using Hurricanes as sort of baby Windrunners.
So expect to see more Hurricanes, but if you're looking for something to train, train towards Hacks. Get your Hack skill to 5 itself.
You know, one of the things that's been interesting is as we're doing more Mutant Fleets, we're not 100% on this.
This could happen when you do see Mutant Fleets do join them.
We have, at least as of yesterday, we had a shitload of them up on contract, which was kind of amusing because our enemies have had supply problems with Mutants.
We have not. But the fastest way we've always found historically to make CCB nerf something is for us to start using it en masse.
So you might be seeing more and more Mutant Fleets on our side in the future just because fuck you, that's why.
And we know absolutely that if Gunsworm finally says, "Alright, motherfuckers, we're doing more Mutants,"
then CCB will nuke them from orbit just like they did Sentry-ish Tars or anything else that the rest of the galaxy was using.
Then the moment we started using it, they nerf it.
So we'll have to see how that works, but keep your eyes open for that.
I know Mutants online is extremely annoying, and probably the fastest way for us to kill that is for us to use them more.
Let me see, I think that's about it for this Fireside. I need to go eat some fucking food.
It's been a wild day, guys. And with the exception of Init losing those Titans, that sucks.
But as far as defense goes and fun factor, it's been a pretty awesome day.
"Do I plan on bubble camping SNS tonight again?"
I don't know what I'm going to do on SNS. I'll get really fucked up on drugs and do something embarrassing and meme-worthy, probably.
I don't plan these things. We just sort of have to see where the winds of my whims take me.
And Columbo will have questions about the Achaemenid Empire, and I will probably be talking about satrapies, which is something that Scion and I had a thing for.
All right, so thank you all for coming. We're going to do these again next week.
I know that it sucks when we have later Firesides, but war comes first, and we must always prioritize war and defense.
So, you know, sometimes we have to do this. We have to fight during normal Fireside hours. That's fine.
Worst case scenario, we'll do one later, or we will do one on Sunday.
But yeah, next week, same shit. Let's keep on kicking ass.
I'm very fucking proud of this organization. I've just been delighted to see the way that we have held the line and just fucked these idiots.
Let's keep it up. Let's keep-- yeah, I'll see you guys on the fucking field.
That's it.