Fireside Chat Transcript 6 Mar 2k21

Alrighty boys and girls, we're gonna get started here in a couple of moments.
We have some big announcements today, so go ahead and poke your buddies to join
in, please.
All right, so...
[PAUSE]
It has been two months, more than two months now, since January 3rd when we caught the pigeon.
After two M2 fights, where we blew up most of the bad guy's Titan fleet that we could get our hands
on, we have had a very interesting period of time. Two months, very long period. I'm not too
happy about the fact that they have chosen the most cowardly way out of this. We have been hanging
on to this pigeon in M2, and we have been waiting for more opportunities to take out the enemy's
Titan fleet. We got to nuke their Dreadnaughts, we have had a bunch of other people take the
Iron Ticket out of M2, they have suicided into us, they have essentially abandoned 130 of their
Titans. The moment that these guys got their leadership out of M2, that was that, and they
have just left the rest of their group to hang. We have been holding out hope that there would be
more bold attempts at breakouts or something more exciting that would give us an opportunity to
get their Titans logged on and killed. It appears now, though, that they're going to put up Jammers
there with the I-Hub they have. They might even drop another Keepstar once they have the Jammer
up to make it easier for them to be able to get their Titans out. The point is that they are going
to take the most cowardly way out of this, and it is time for us to move on. So that means what we
are going to be doing after this fireside is that we're going to be getting everybody together,
we're going to be going to 1DQ1 and digging the fuck in and beginning the next phase of this war,
which is preparing for the siege of 1DQ1. Essentially what has happened is that we've
been holding on to this pigeon this entire time, and now the pigeon has begun to stink.
So we're going to drop the thing and go back to our castle.
Boo, scary boo. Yes. So what's going to be happening here at the end of this fireside as
we go through this, we are going to be going to 1DQ1, we're going to be digging the fuck in
on our terms, and we are just going to leave M2. There are only a couple ways out of M2. One is
that they go the full coward strategy, they put the Jammers up, they drop a Keepstar, and then
functionally speaking we will not be able to stop that. They will be able to extract with no risk,
we will not get a Titan fight out of it, or we pull out, we let them out, we dig into 1DQ1,
and by doing so we line up more opportunities for Titan fights. They're going to be trying to blow
up our shit some more, and as they continue trying to blow up our shit, that lines up opportunities
for us to kill them. So that's what we're going to do. Eventually these things have to end. This
has been the longest hell camp in the history of online gaming. The PR attack hell camp lasted for
30 days, this one has gone way longer than that, and it is now time to move on. Now essentially
what we have to do here, this is the moment of "they have to fuck or walk," right? We're going
to post up in 1DQ1, we are going to have, I believe, a lot more impact on our main fleet forces,
because instead of being stuck in M2 and 1DQ1 and having to maintain both, we'll be digging into
1DQ1, that means all of our forces will be consolidated. I would prefer of course to keep
them hold on there forever, but they have choices. They have chosen the zero risk option, they have
chosen the option that requires them to sit there for months and do nothing to get their guys out
and abandon them, and it's time for us to just fucking go to 1DQ1, dig the hell in, and move on
to the next phase. I would prefer to end this thing on our terms rather than having them get
out because they got to do another coward strategy and that's how they did it. So that is what we are
doing. Now we're going to talk about the mechanics of that because Boulder is pointing out here it
feels like it's letting go of an ace up our sleeve. One of the things that we have to do here
is recognize that they have an ADM6 IHUB, one that we have not been able to break because it is away
from our Keepstar, it is not the kind of thing where we can get a hack through, and then when
it's time for them to do the defense they can hack those nodes in less than six minutes while we have
to do a much longer hack. It is an unpleasant truth, it is something that I want you to examine
the game mechanics yourself to understand why we're making this decision and why we are doubling down
on 1DQ1. So that is that, that's what we're doing.
How did M2 get to ADM6? It got to ADM6 because we had tons of people in it for a very long period
of time. So after this fireside we're going to be forming up move ops and we're going to be doing
that. Now what's going to be coming after that? That's going to be the big question.
I need people to process the end of M2, accept that it's going to be ending on our terms rather
than waiting for them to break out with every advantage that they can have. The whole reason
why we're doing this is to try to kill their titan fleets. If they are not going to put their
titan fleets at risk then what we really need to be doing is getting ready for the next phase of
the war which will be after M2 and that means the defense of 1DQ1. As Kunmi points out here,
one of the reasons why it has ADM6 is because they set it as their capital system which gives a 2ADM bonus.
So get your shit ready we are going to be moving out today. Now after that things get a little bit
more interesting because we are going to have everyone together in one system and we are no
longer going to be having to split our forces. At the same time we've also been introducing the
cultural revolution. I have a lot of good news to report about that because we have had a huge
uptake in people doing F2s. We have more Dictor alts, more Boosher alts, more applications to join
Insurgent Squad, more people who have joined the Black Hand than I have ever seen in one wave before.
You guys, when we told you that we were done with you being F1 monkeys and that you can do better,
instead of just going "oh I don't want to do the work" we have heard from across the organization
that many of you have been talking to each other, talking to your directors, and figuring your shit
out in ways that you can do more than just turning up and pressing F1. Are Twitch streams of a hostile
staging system a useful F2? I actually, potentially yes. Scouting in general is a great thing.
Now, here is the circumstances that we find ourselves in. I think that the enemy has been
hoping that we are going to break and go to Sarenin, or otherwise run for the hills in a
post-M2 environment, instead of digging deep into 1DQ1. As part of that, and as part of our efforts
to teach people to do more than just phoning it in and F1ing, we are going to be increasing the
Headhunter bounty program. Up until this point, we had an iHub bounty system that was restricted to
GSFOE. If you were in GSFOE, which is our hacking organization, we would pay you a bounty for every
successful hack that you had. However, we have realized that this is a sort of a backward system.
We are opening up the hacking bounty to everyone, and we are increasing that for any Delve iHubs
that are hacked to 100 million ISK. So if you want to get out there and develop your F2, we know a
lot of you are hacking like maniacs as it stands. Every single Delve iHub that is successfully
hacked for the good guys, we will be paying you 100 million ISK. This is a new bounty program that
we are introducing, and it's going to be bolted onto the existing Headhunter thread. We are also
investigating more ways to increase these payouts, because essentially what has happened is for the
last month, while these guys have been abandoning 130 of their Titan pilots to just rot for two
months after they got their leaders out, while that has been happening, Legacy and their allies
have been telling each other that we are going to give up and that it is over and it's all going to
be fine and goons are just going to passively sit in M2, in 1DQ1, and they're going to colonize our
space, and they're going to live here on top of us, and everything is going to be fine. Instead,
what we are doing is we are pulling out of M2, we are consolidating in 1DQ1, we are digging even
further in to prepare for a siege of 1DQ1, and we are going to be focusing on getting out there
and making it hell for these guys who are trying to live on top of us.
So, there is one question that I have been repeatedly asked about 1DQ1 and the defense
of 1DQ1, which is, can the servers handle it? That is a question that we do not know the answer to.
We cannot rely upon the idea that CCP is magically going to be, well, we can usually rely on CCP not
being too good when it comes to servers or anything like that. I do not want us to depend upon the
idea that 1DQ1 is magically going to defend itself just because of our vast goony bulk, right? We
have to do work. We have to make sure that we are actually dotting our I's, crossing our T's,
developing our F2s, and digging in to do this. We cannot assume that the enemy is just going to give
up on 1DQ1. We cannot assume that the servers will break in a way that favors us just because we live
there. We have to do the work. We have to find out whether Pappy is willing to fuck or walk by
leaving M2, dropping the stinky pigeon that we took several bites out of in the process,
going to 1DQ1, building our fortress defenses even further. This then puts the question to
Pappy. They have to decide whether they want to come at us or whether they want to do something
else. If they want to randomly blow up abandoned citadels, that's fine, but we are going to force
the question. We're in 1DQ1. We're digging in. We are not going to assume that the servers are going
to go bad, right? We're going to prepare as if the servers are going to work perfectly and go from
there. That is how we are going to prepare for the siege of 1DQ1 if and when it takes place. And I
want you all to assume that a siege of 1DQ1 will happen, because a siege of 1DQ1 is what we must
prepare for. Even if it does not happen, even if the bad guys blame CCP about this or that,
we must prepare for a siege of 1DQ1. That is why you must develop your F2s. That is why we must
do the move-op that we are about to be doing right after the fireside. That is why we have a lot more
work to do. During the last two months, we have seen people like Dictator Imperator stepped up
and has done so much. If there's anybody that I could just cover in fucking gold stars,
the amount of work that Dictator Imperator has done to hold that fucking pigeon and to show
the hundreds of pilots on Pappy that were waiting for their leaders to bail them out and rescue
them, we proved that they essentially were abandoned and everything that has been wrong
with the Pappy leadership and the way that they treat their line members was demonstrated to the
entire fucking galaxy because of the work that we have put into this. There have been a number
of ships that we have murdered. We took out their entire fucking Dreadnought fleet. We did
2 trillion isk of additional damage to them in the one breakout that they did. We have seen off
hundreds... Actually, I think I was about to say that was going to be hyperbole,
but it might have actually been more than... Because it was occasionally like two a day.
At the very least, more than 75 attempts at breaking out, possibly more. I'm not sure whether
we're going to go back and count, but it's been a fucking lot of them thrashing and trying to
get out of this thing. And then finally, they have just opted for the coward's way out.
So we are going to take our ball and go home to 1DQ1.
Now, this is an interesting question that Zed's Dead asks, and I'm going to answer it because I
want to clarify that this is not what we're doing. His question is, "Does turtling up in 1DQ1 mean
recalling forces that are out burning hostile regions?" We're going to talk about that next.
We are not going to be turtling up in 1DQ1. This is us dropping a stinky pigeon that we have
thoroughly manhandled and taken several bites out of. It is time to move on. And that does mean
going to 1DQ1 and preparing for a siege, but that also means joining irregular forces,
going on your corp ops, going on all of the ops that you have been seeing. And now we will not
have to both hold M2 and do main fleet ops at the same time. We can focus on main fleet ops. We can
focus on irregular ops. We can do what we've just done by increasing the bounty on hacking Delve
and generally set things on fire without worrying about having to stop a breakout through that
process. We are not going to be recalling any of our forces. The process of holding in Delve thus
far has been one of, "We sit here, we take blows, we've been holding onto the pigeon. Now we're
holding on to 1DQ1." And then while we have been doing that, our allies have been running around
Legacy's backfield, setting everything on fire. If we were not having our allies running around
Legacy's backfield, setting things on fire, this would be a very different war and would be a much
darker war. The fact that we are able to hold here while Legacy is telling everybody that they are
moving into Delve and they're moving into Aquarius, that goons are going to go to Sarenin at any
moment now, they can only convince their line members for so long that they are moving into
Delve successfully while their regions burn behind them. There was a Dr. Mimble's post I saw a couple
days ago where he went through and was pointing out that Legacy is in the process of losing five
regions. Those slopes are slopes that you cannot deny. Those are the facts. So while we are holding
in Delve, just as we asked our allies to suffer what we are suffering now, Initiative, Bastion,
our friends in Fountain went through this process. We are here now holding in Delve while the rest of
the Imperium that is on offense is putting the sword to Vili and all of the Legacy guys. The
Legacy guys, their situation is they are pot committed to this Delve thing. They have no
choice anymore but to essentially suicide into us because they have told their members that they are
not going to be actively defending their backfields because we are giving up and we are going away and
blah blah blah. Of course we're not giving up and going away, but they have to essentially hope that
we will while they are waiting to see whether their shit in Esoteria can be evacuated. The
Impasse situation is pretty dire. The Kats situation is pretty dire. There's a bit of intel that,
which I don't want to talk about yet. Anyway, hold on, let me take a sip of water here.
The intel I have in particular is just going to be further confirmation of what we already know in
terms of the Legacy entities that are sloping. It's just further evidence that one of them is
about to take a header, but I don't think it's come out in public yet.
It's one of the smaller ones, it's not one of the bigger ones, don't worry about that.
So in the middle of this process, because obviously we are doomed and it is all over
and blah blah blah, goons are going to give up and go to Saren and at any moment, we have two new
corporations joining Goons from Federation. We have Russian Thunder Squad, which I am very delighted to
have joining us. This sort of continues our investment in our Russian time zone, in our
Russian members and in our Russian allies. That is super cool. Old school AAA corporation joining us,
very happy about that. We also have Anzac Alliance who is joining us. They were previously in
Siberian squads and they're going to be reinforcing our Australian time zone.
So in the middle of this process, while you are taking a look at all the Legacy alliances that
are losing corporations, losing members and starting to see those early stage, actually,
not even early stage, at this point we're in middle stage and final stage cascades for the
ones that are really eating shit like Rosada, Worked Intentions, etc. We are getting people to
join us. It's pretty cool. So yeah, that is our overall situation there. Let me take a look at
these notes. All right, so when we were destroying Band of Brothers, this was back in 2009, we had
the PR-TAC hell camp and it lasted for 30 days. And it finally ended when the bad guys reached out
to some of their allies. In this case, our enemies don't really have allies because our enemies are
the rest of the fucking game. But that hell camp ended because they broke out. In this case, we are
just going to go ahead and take our foot off of their throat and go to fucking 1DQ1 and Monty
Python style, we're going to post up on the fucking walls of our castle and call them names
and call them cowards and point out that they suck shit and they should bring it and that we
would be delighted to fight them there. Let me go ahead and take some questions about this because
I want to make sure that people understand why we're doing what we're doing so that people don't
get the wibbles. "Is there a plan in case 1DQ1 falls?" Uh, yeah. We have plans within plans
within plans. One of the things about this war that has been kind of interesting since the get-go
is that it has been a very slow process, but it has not been necessarily an unpredictable process.
We have sort of essentially put a pause on the war by holding them in M2 because they had a
series of unforced errors that we then exploited by holding them there that has
sort of muddied that timeline. But in general, what we've seen through this whole process is
three blocks enter, two blocks leave. When three blocks go to war, one of them is going to die,
and it ain't going to be us, and it ain't going to be PanFam. And so what we are seeing here is
that PanFam is sticking around, partially because we have a bunch of their titans trapped, but also
because as Legacy is colonizing or attempting to colonize our territory and our space, this sets up
the death of a block. And it's not going to be us, but essentially Legacy is having their shit
burned behind them as they are colonizing or attempting to colonize our space. Legacy is
hoping that you all break and that you give up and run, and that's that. And we are betting on
the idea that we can murder them and thus win and survive, and that at the end of this there will be
PanFam, there will be us, and there's whatever's left over the bits and scraps that fed themselves
into the woodchipper. Questions about where you should have your stuff. We've been saying
since the beginning of this that the safest place in Delve is in 1DQ1. That has not changed.
Yeah, Rosada is basically toast. I think that we're going to see that alliance
implode or fuck off very soon. That is a link that Gloxier posted here. Rosada is definitely,
no further comments on that yet.
Am I concerned that if we hole up in 1DQ1 the enemy will just attack everything other than
1DQ1 at the same glacial pace? Not particularly, no.
Are we restaging capitals to the Imperial Palace? I am not going to be answering a question about
where we are going to be putting our capitals. We are going to be having move ops right after
the fireside, and for the capital fleets you will be told where you are going on those ops.
It's a good question, and I invite you to ask your FC in a moment when we get that going.
Can we blow up our own structures to speed Pappy along towards 1DQ1?
I would prefer not to. I think it is kind of hilarious that, well there's a rumor that
somebody took a lot of time off work in order to just grind abandoned structures, and I think it's
hilarious that somebody might hypothetically have spent their vacation time on doing such a thing.
So yeah. Not going to name any names there though.
Questions about a last stand? This is not like a last stand plan. I fully intend for us to
save 1DQ1. I want them to dash themselves against the walls of it. This is not a last stand. This
is something we've been planning. If we hadn't caught the pigeon, if we had not beaten the shit
out of them so hard in the M2 fights, then the logical next step would have been what we're
doing right now. This is sort of the path of a war of this sort, given the balance of forces.
We are allegedly, if we were like the puppies, supposed to give up and run away, which we are
not doing. I think that they will pay a terrible price to even try to take 1DQ1, and I think that
we want them to try, and we want to make them bleed for it. That's the plan.
Yeah, I mean this is essentially, you know,
the biggest siege in the history of online gaming. This entire process has been that.
It will continue to be that until our enemies break, or until we break, and we will not break.
Dictator says that he doesn't think that they're going to attack 1DQ1. One of the things that,
and it's possible, right, but one of the reasons why we have to prepare for this is that several
months ago, you may not remember this, but it leaked out that Gobbins had announced that their
victory condition was not necessarily blowing up the 1DQ1 palace, but they were going to be going
after the faction Fortizar's and 1DQ1 and whatever, but that was like the pan-fam war goal was
torching our capital system. We are going to try to stop them. Maybe they're going to walk away
from that. Maybe they're going to say, "Oh, M2 has proven that the servers can't handle it," or
whatever, but I do not want us to be in a situation where we are not doing our level best to do the
needful to defend this shit, and so we're going to take it seriously and do the work.
[silence]
I would give it, you know, it's a weird mix of odds. I would give it between 30 percent,
uh, actually I don't want to actually give people my estimations on it because I don't
want the enemy to hear my thinking. I do want to tell you my odds breakdowns of what I think
is going to happen, but I don't want to hand that on a platter to the bad guys. Sorry, dudes.
[silence]
All right, uh, we're still going to do Afghanistan and irregular stuff. Okay, so let me, let me make
this very clear. Sindragon is asking, uh, Sindrakan, Gorian says, "We're still doing Afghanistan and
irregular stuff, right?" The only thing that is changing here tonight is that we are about to
leave M2. We are going to drop the Pigeon, move our forces back to 1DQ1, and then we are going to
proceed further with the war. We are not turtling in 1DQ1. We are not stopping all ops out of sight
of 1DQ1. We are going to be doing more of what we have been doing because, again, don't forget,
you guys are developing your F2. We did a very big shift last week. If you are new and you think
that this is going to go away, uh, when we do a cultural revolution, it's serious. The standard
of behavior that we are now setting for our line members is that nobody gets to be an F1 monkey.
Everybody tries to develop their skills. Everybody tries to do more because our fleet commanders and
everybody who is in subdirector and support positions is already doing so much more that
it is no longer fair for our command layer. I can no longer look our directors and our fleet
commanders in the eye, hypothetically, because it's an internet game, and I'm not really looking
them in the eye, but you know what I mean. I feel bad as the leader getting up here and saying,
"Hey, guys, I want our fleet commanders out there doing X, Y, and Z and hitting F7, F8, F22," if
there was such a thing, without asking our line to do one thing more. And when we're doing the
cultural revolution stuff, most of you are, a lot of you guys are already, especially if you're
turning up on a fireside, you're with the most invested population. You're people that are,
in many cases, hitting F3, F4, or more. But the F1 monkey shit has got to end, and it will end,
and we're going to be doing our level best to make it as easy as possible for you to try to meet our
fleet commanders and crew halfway. That's what we're doing. All right. Our best case scenario,
what I am hoping for is this. The pigeon stinks, we drop the pigeon, we go to 1 to Q1, we dig in.
More main fleet activity, more people developing their F2s. The whole course of this war,
we have been looking for chances to do Titan fights, because we believe that we can beat them,
and so far throughout history, we have repeatedly beaten our enemies in those situations. We degrade
their strategic forces, because while they outnumber us in subs, we have at least parity
or superiority in terms of supers, as long as we can choose the ground and the opportunity is
correct. So my hope here is we go to 1 to Q1, we get out of M2, we get our shit correct, we increase
the bounties on all of the hacking, we shove people more into your regulars, more people develop their
F2 to do more, to put pressure on the enemy, and then when there are mistakes that the enemy makes,
we will capitalize on them and try to kill more of their Titans. So essentially, what I am saying is
I want everybody to be developing your F2s in order to make it easier for us to get another M2.
That's the goal. That is still the goal that has been the goal since the very beginning of this
war, is to set up opportunities to punish the enemy's strategic capacity by leveraging the fact
that we know how to win Titan fights, the bad guys seem to be bad at it, and we want to just
destroy everything we can. Okay, now we have a lot of work to do, and we're going to go do that work.
So there's going to be move-ops starting now, and we are going to... let me answer this one question...
Okay.
Right. Never mind, I'm not going to answer that question. I'm going to have a sip of water.
We've got a lot of work to do. We're going to fucking do it. Let's get back to 1DQ,
and we're going to move everything out of M2. We are going to dig the fuck in and get the
fuck to work. We're going to be raising our bounties and moving on to the next phase of this war.
Never let the enemy forget their cowardice, that they have chosen the easiest possible way out.
They claim that they want to fight. They claim that they are something that should be respected
in any way possible, and yet they abandoned their line members and their allies for months
through this process. Never let them forget it. Shove it in their fucking faces. Now it's time
for us to let go of the stinky pigeon. We're going to go to 1DQ1 and dig the fuck in. Ops
are going out shortly. Thank you for coming. We'll see you here next week.
Oh.