Fireside Chat Transcript 8 May 2k22

Alright boys and girls, I have generated my bingo card, the fleets are back, they have successfully hacked a crucial hub in Tenerife.
Oops, we're in Tenerife now.
Thank you for everybody that fleets and did the thing in 436 DP and hit that bridge as well. Those are our key targets.
We're going to be talking a little bit about Jeff things today, but I'm going to start with the fanfic people get a chance to get here.
I've been waiting in the wings to sort of match some patterns here.
All right, let's go ahead and get this on the road.
I'm going to start today's fireside with some irresponsible speculation about the patterns that we saw revealed at FanFest.
I'm going to tell you my thoughts about that and then we're going to get into more specific space business.
I know a lot of you are met easy be for perfectly good reasons and people were sort of under what with FanFest people were there seem to have a good time.
It doesn't really matter whether you enjoy it or not.
We're going to talk about some of the things that we saw and sort of put them into context.
One of the things really weird to me and to a lot of us watching from the sidelines was sort of the kind of random grab bag of things that we saw from CCP.
Now again, what I'm about to say the evidence for this is circumstantial the evidence being statements from Pearl Abyss to the media and to their investors the statements that CCP has made the fact that they put in FTS in the Alliance tournament and that Hilmar was hanging out with crypto bros and generally speaking doing all of this crap.
I want to let you guys know what I personally am taking away from FanFest.
If you remember many months ago, we took to the skies to riot to say enough was enough between the waste nonsense and the NFTs in the Alliance tournament people across Eve took to the streets and torch the monument for the first time since a decade past and in Karna.
And then after a few weeks of nothing much and more retarded nonsense and what have you then finally there was a dev blog saying oh NFTs are not for tranquility.
And then meanwhile, there's a few other things sort of happening with the tulip bubble that is crypto and NFTs.
There is a game called Axie Infinity that got hacked and lost a whole bunch of their special little NFT whatever's I don't give a fuck.
And generally speaking people have kind of woken up to smell the ashes.
If you were watching FanFest and you're wondering about the features that were sort of presented there things like heraldry and interbus credits and all this other sort of stuff.
I want to tell you what I think happened and I'm eager to be wrong.
I would love to have CCP come out and tell me that I'm wrong and that's all well and good.
What I believe has happened here is if you look at the heraldry system it looks like it was intended to be a NFT system.
If you look at a lot of the things they're talking about getting people to log on and grind and you know you're going to get your own personal heraldry and all this crap.
It just screamed plate to earn and if you look at the fucking interbus credit logo tell me that's not a shit coin.
Tell me that is not a fucking shit coin to be but it's not. It's not. It's not anymore.
My takeaway from FanFest is that we were supposed to be getting an entire fucking crypto NFT thing which is a very Hilmar thing to do.
And that because of the riots and because of the players getting together and protesting you see these little pieces of a system that if you just think like Hilmar, Trin Chaser that he is for a second, you go,
"Oh that's why they've made the interbus credit system so unnecessarily complicated. Oh that's why they're talking about how you are going to earn your kill marks and you're going to get your heraldry and all this other kind of stuff."
So I don't know if they were going to turn it into a shit coin immediately or if they were going to test it out there and see whether we would take it and then later turn it into a shit coin.
But my takeaway from all of this is that it could have been much worse. That's a great way to start a fireside mittens. It could have been much worse.
But at the same time if you're looking at this and you're going, "Heraldry looks like it was supposed to be NFTs. Interbus tokens look like they were supposed to be a fucking shit coin."
And this entire system was sort of aiming towards play to earn which the CEO, former CEO, I guess he's still the CEO, they got bought out.
CEO of CCP repeatedly talking about NFTs, crypto, and how play to earn is a good thing.
Pearl Abyss to their investors talking about how they're interested in play to earn and they're interested in crypto and NFT and all of this sort of stuff.
The entire games industry has for the last year or more gotten ever closer to trying to jam this stuff down our throats and fuck us.
And I'm proud. I am proud to see actually the wreckage, the smoking ashes of this false scammy ambition to turn our sandbox into some fucking crypto bro paradise.
It would have been a game killer. If they had gotten out there and Rattati actually gave the talk about Interbus credits that I believe that they wanted to give,
but for your rioting, but for you taking to the streets about this months ago, I believe that there would have been a very different presentation.
For a long time we've wondered what the fuck EVE Online's development is headed towards.
We've seen promises of, "Oh, there's so many developers that are working on the new player experience."
And yet we see very little developer work in actual things that we can point to and say, "Oh yeah, that looks like two years of dev work."
So at first, at first when I was processing all of this FanFest shit on Saturday, after processing it on Friday, and still not really seeing why did they lead with heraldry?
Why didn't they just tweak a fat bee? CCB has done this before. They make their own little dumbass fat bee.
Tweak a fat bee to make it a CCB owned thing and slap it on a skin and sell it and make money.
Why did they not want to do that? Because it was supposed to be a fucking NFT.
So I look at the disappointing presentations at FanFest, and I look at the hilarious price hike on subscriptions, and I see the legacy of your work.
Of the fact that we, and not just in the Imperium, not just in Gunstorm, but across EVE and across every game where they have attempted to do this.
This is an industry-wide issue that these fucks have been trying to ram crypto down everybody's throats into games where it has no place whatsoever.
If you like crypto, if you like NFTs, good on you. Doesn't need to be in our fucking EVE Online.
So the reason why I wanted to talk to you about this today is I'm not going to tell anybody not to be with CCB.
I'm not going to tell anybody not to look at the FanFest stuff with disappointment.
Not to look at it with disappointment and be like, "Oh well, this is great."
But what I believe we are seeing here, the patterns appear to match a "Oh shit, we can't actually do this damn silly thing because finally people have realized that oh shit, this is no longer a good trend to chase."
Now if you're new to EVE Online, and when new in a game that's this old is a variable target, this is not the first time that we have had to deal with trend chasing behavior.
If there's one thing that you could see from what Hilmar and crew have done over the years, it is that Hilmar loves trends.
It doesn't really matter what the trend is, whatever the coolness is, he wants to be in the room with the NFT dweebs or whatever.
And about 10-11 years ago, when Farmville and Facebook were a big deal. Farmville and Facebook.
Back before the whole Myanmar genocide thing and everybody woke up and smelled the ashes and realized that Zuckerberg was a fucking piece of shit.
Farmville was a big deal. At the same time that you got Planetary Interaction, Planetary Interaction was actually sort of the original version of it.
It was kind of like a stripped down "Oh, we're going to do Farmville." And it was released at the same time as they did what we mockingly called "Spacebook."
Where they had your EVE Online characters Facebook page and it was going to be this whole thing.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that it's an example of trend chasing.
There's all the VR stuff. And it is an interesting process where it seems like just after Hilmar decides that there's going to be a trend that he's going to chase,
and they go after it. Evegate, thank you, Kaznir. I had forgotten the name of Spacebook because I've only ever called it "Spacebook" just as I've only ever called Fozzy Sov "Fozzy Sov."
So, this is not the first time that this has happened.
And that is why I believe, kind of like with VR, kind of like Spacebook and Farmville, that they were aiming for some sort of an Axie Infinity style crypto thing.
And I'm also sure that I could be wrong. I would be delighted to be proven wrong from a company that has been issued repeated statements towards investors in investor calls,
talking about how the blockchain and play to earn is a good thing.
And tell me that this FanFest presentation does not look like it was originally intended to be some kind of a crypto NFT play to earn thing.
So, everybody's mad. Everybody's mad. Maybe some people aren't. If you're not, that's fine. Great. Whatever. You don't have to be mad.
But a lot of people are mad. And that is legitimate. And so, I just want you to know, before we head into the serious business, internet spaceship, herpity-blurp,
that you usually come here for, for a fireside, because we're going to be talking about killing pappies, we're going to be talking about what's coming next,
we're going to be talking about Locust fleets and the fact that pretty soon we'll be able to build capital ships again. That's cool.
But before we get to that, I want you to understand that while I am mad, I'm also, what I'm looking at here, what I believe we are seeing here,
is the smoking wreckage of a bunch of crypto bullshit that we, the EVE Online player base, collectively rioted loudly and angrily enough,
and other players and other games also fought back against this. This is not just like, just EVE players. This is a cross-industry issue.
And I believe that the reason why the FanFest presentations were what they were, you know, actually, Aurora's stuff about faction warfare was great.
The stuff about taxation? Also cool and good. There was some good stuff in there. But the confusing, weird shit, I believe,
is because we kind of stopped them from shoving crypto into this fucking game. So, one, angry at Hillmar for being a crypto road train tracer? Sure.
Two, really fucking proud that we stopped this fucking thing and that Interbus credits are just going to be a shitcoin wannabe that we can mock.
And happy to be wrong. Delighted to be wrong. I'm sure some people are going to come around when they hear that I said this,
and insist that, you know, it wasn't ever going to be a shitcoin and it's all going to be good and whatever. Anyway, fuck all that noise.
So, yeah, that happened, but it looks like we stopped it, and you're not going to have to worry about Axie heraldry or Interbus crypto or whatever the fuck.
Anyway, that's that. So that's FanFest, that's where we are. I'm going to move on to more direct business.
There's a patch! That patch is coming on Tuesday, some of the Siege Green shit is going to hit, and your medium structures are going to be losing their hull timer.
Also, there's no longer going to be a damage cap on shield timers. So that's cool.
What I want you guys to get ready for and expect is while we are on deployment, Sigs and Squads, Jeff, go ahead and check that out,
while we're doing our thing, two regions down, one more to go, while we're doing our thing,
[laughs]
keep in mind that come Tuesday, the puppies may all come for us.
I don't think they're going to deploy for us on Tuesday, but I want you to expect that,
"Oh, hey, we've changed the medium structure timers, we're going to go to Delve and we're going to have an easy time of it."
People are getting ready, we're making sure that we are going to be able to follow up on timers, on the armor timer,
we're not necessarily going to be able to stop every shield timer that hits.
Puppies may come to Delve thinking it's going to be an easy target, and we are going to give them the greeting that they deserve,
which is to say, stomping on their throats repeatedly until they beg and scream for mercy, which will never come.
There are variables, and I need you to be ready to respond to those variables.
We have several plans that are going to trigger upon what the pups do.
If somebody deploys against us, we will overreact spectacularly, as we always do.
It's going to be interesting.
The other side of this medium structure nonsense, you guys don't need to worry about that too much,
we just had a big Kremlin meeting before the fireside and before that fight,
where we were trying to get everybody integrated and generally prepare for the fact that maybe the pups will try to come after us
and use that opportunity, and generally get our shit correct.
But the flip side of that is, we might be able to build some fucking capital ships.
We might be able to take our money, our assets, our stuff, and turn it back into what it belongs to be,
which is to say, war and murder and the doom of our foes, i.e. carriers, dreadnoughts, supercarriers, and titans,
when maybe, possibly, CCP will unfuck them.
I think it is hilarious that CCP put on stage during their presentation, they had Larrikin,
I think Larrikin is cool, I'm not criticizing Larrikin at all,
put on stage with this presentation where they're like, "Here's the shortage phase,
and here's where literally we broke our endgame industrial content to the point that nobody is building anything other than freighters, maybe."
We will be ready. Me yelling about this stuff is us getting ready.
As you guys know, when we are deployed at war, our job is the doom of our foes.
But when we are not officially, or right now technically we're SIGs and squads, Jeff kind of stuff,
but soon, soon, when we are finished with our strategic objectives in the Jeff deployment,
there will come a time for "peace."
It's been a while since we had peace and also the ability to build capital ships,
because normally the cycle of Eve is you're at war, and then when you're not directly at war, you are preparing for the next war.
That's what we have always done, it has always served us well, because we know the puppies are always coming for us, because they always do.
It's only a matter of time.
So just as they said that the only reason why we have achieved what we have achieved is because of the Rorquals,
when it is time for us to shift into the Delve time unit mode that we know and love,
we will get rich, my goons. We will get rich.
And we will turn that wealth and those assets into the instruments of war.
And that means if you don't have a carrier, you're going to end up wanting a carrier.
If you don't have a dreadnought, please train dreadnoughts.
If you don't have a super, we're going to get you one, or hopefully we're going to create an environment where you will be able to get one.
In the run-up to the Vietnam War, I was telling people, "Okay, you got your setup, you got your Rorquals, you got your carrier, you got your dreadnoughts.
Oh, you got a Titan? Well, I want an armor and a shield Titan, one of each in every hangar.
We do this seriously because we know they will be coming for us.
And we have been sitting on our hands because Rattati fucked the economy with his utter incompetence to the point that nobody could build anything.
But pretty soon, the floodgates are going to fucking open, and I expect you glorious motherfuckers to, one, get rich, two, die trying,
and three, make a bunch of fucking capital ships with which we can kill the fucking puppies.
If you haven't trained for those, get training. That is where we are going.
Because you know, we are willing to drop capital ships and lose them. You have to train up capital FCs, you have to be willing to use the ships in anger.
And even when the rest of the game was cowering and hiding and being afraid to use them, when they are very expensive, we are still using them.
Because that is how we roll, that is how we will continue to roll.
So I want you to be prepared for when the screaming in the East dies down and we stop talking about Sigs and squads.
That is not happening yet. We still have a lot of work to do. We may have just slipped and fell and hacked the most important iHub in Tenerife, that being 4060p.
If you are old school, you remember we used to live out there before 2008.
But soon, soon enough, after this one little bit more, we got Faith Ambulance, we got Amost.
Hey, by the way, Amost is fucking gone.
One of the things I love about the controversy about CCP, even though it does anger me, is that we have managed to sweep two regions.
Amost vanished in record times, and by the way, you guys should fucking give yourselves some high fives for that. That was fantastic.
And, well, if you have a big boy toy, let's just put it like this. If you have a big boy toy, what's a big boy toy?
Super or Titan? I want you to look for pings in a couple hours.
I've been told by John Hartley I want you guys to be eyes on, because things are gonna happen.
We don't normally talk about those on firesides, but I believe around the 2200 hour, you're gonna want to have eyes on.
Because, yes, free intel for the baddies, as I was personally requested to give them.
It could be bait, it's not bait.
If our enemies are going to be visiting us, or in our tantrum radius one way or another because we moved our tantrum radius, I don't know what's gonna happen.
Actually, that's not true. I do know what's gonna happen, and I'm lying about it, because that's what we do on a fireside when we talk about the big boy toys.
But those of you who hear the future plans, enjoy your bingo.
This is definitely future plan territory, but it's near future plans. Next few hours, keep an eye open.
Okay. Let me check my notes, and then I'm gonna ask some questions, because GeneMin's got a good one.
We've got a few others. Amist is gone, we had a little whelp last night, big boy toy announcement, shoutout for the Black Order, which I haven't done yet.
They stole a Fortizar the other day, and that was super cool. I think I was supposed to give them a shoutout for that on last week's fireside, but I was petting alpacas.
And, uh, let me see. So let's take some questions.
If we get the option to join faction warfare without dropping goonswarm, will the alliance mandate a faction we're allowed to join?
We'll burn that bridge when we come to it, Harry Potter? That is a really good question.
Like, with a lot of things that CCP says, we are gonna wait until it gets sort of like now with Siege Green, where, you know, we're gonna have this patch on Tuesday.
I like to see more what the actual patch is gonna be before I start making policies.
Am I smug about kicking warp core stabilizers?
Honestly, we should have done it a while ago. I feel like I was distracted by war, murder, and my relocation, that I didn't really do a good enough job of shooting the unworthy.
That was long overdue.
Can we have a shoutout for defswarm? And this is very important. It's something that not a lot of alliances have.
It's something that we do very well here, which is we have three to five people who are doing a lot of the relays from our fleet commanders to our members, right?
So if you're here to Fireside, you're deaf, probably not.
But, you know, if you are able to help out this community, we are always looking for people who are willing to translate commands from fleet commanders to those of our membership who are hearing impaired.
So thank you for that. That is absolutely worth the Fireside shoutout.
Other questions? I got a lot of them on the Fireside stuff.
I mean, on the CCP stuff. So we're going to grind through it.
So you guys understand where we're at, right? The last thing you want is like, oh, well, the CCP grab happened and, you know, we're just going to hold our dicks and wait and see.
What are our thoughts on the nonsense about attributes and skill points rebalancing?
I think that they should have gotten rid of attributes a long time ago.
I think that's pretty good. You know, the thing is, is that amidst all of the general like people are righteously angry about CCP because they haven't really delivered much and they jack the prices up.
But that's probably because they were working on some crypto bullshit that we didn't want anyway.
So the fact that they didn't have much is actually a good thing.
If what we were going to get is fucking NFTs and crypto.
So there's some stuff in there like, you know, getting rid of attributes is something that's always been a weird, confusing thing.
There's also a bunch of really dumb prerequisite skills that are sort of legacy impacts of the game being born in 2000 fucking three.
So, you know, I don't have a problem with any of that. I think that's all perfectly reasonable and also overdue.
Are Balgorans going back in Baltech fleet now that blueprint changes are going through?
I do not know. We will decide that later. Can we give Pappy a keepstar T5ZI?
That would be hilarious. Then they just have to run away from it again.
Any plans for alpha compatible fleet doctrines now that we're unsubbed and discussed?
Well, fair boxes are great. There's a million tacklers and other things that you can use with alpha just fine.
And that's another thing is, is that, you know, if you are mad at CCP and you're like, gosh, fuck these people, but I still want to play games with my friends.
Keep in mind, one, you can play games with this community that aren't Eve to you can play as an alpha and three.
Everybody gets mad at CCP from time to time or on days that ends in Y.
And, you know, it's cool. We're not going to be like, oh, no, you're you're in a death pact with us.
This is a cult and you're stuck here playing Eve with us. Like, you know, do what you got to do.
All right. Let me see. Chicken minutes. P.I. is absolutely still needed.
We have requests from G.L. and suddenly I want to give credit to other people here.
I didn't suss out the whole IBC shit coin thing or the fact that the Heraldry thing looked like it was going to be an NFT.
I believe Rat Night and I mean, actually, a whole bunch of people were saying it in different areas.
It's just I I was late to that party that I was like, oh, God, the puzzle pieces fit patterns match.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Jesus. Because I truly believe that if they had gotten up there and announced a crypto scheme at FanFest, it would have immediately blown the fucking game up because these idiots have no idea what a third rail that is right now in the gaming community.
Or maybe they do because they were forced to step back from it. OK.
God, people enjoyed the wrestling. That was cool. And let me see. Home economics.
OK, one of the shout out I want to give the locusts have been doing something really cool.
So if you don't know what I'm talking about when I'm saying the locusts, I mean, we have a locusts sig where, you know, we used to use locust fleets with rock walls.
And now there is a variety of options, including cricket fleet, which is absolutely dirt cheap.
And Ragnar was reporting to me earlier about how much money people are making.
So I highly encourage those of you that are interested in mining.
CCB has completely fucked the economy with their incompetence here in null sex. So moon mineral prices are crashing. But if you're interested in getting other stuff that is in a different place and can get you 100 million an hour per dude, the locusts are up to some really cool shit.
And I recommend that you join that group. We're going to be pushing that really hard, especially once the Jeff deployment does come to a natural conclusion.
That's not going to be for a bit, guys. I need another few weeks of pubby murder like they're like we're in Tenerife is we're twisting the knife right now on the single most important core system in Tenerife.
That's a big deal for their fucking bridge network and a bunch of other things. And I don't want to just be like, oh, well, we got these two regions and then we ran out of steam and ran home.
There's more murder to do. But once that's done, I want you guys getting rich and then helping each other get rich. If you're rich and your friends don't know how to make isk and get assets in this game, I want you to help each other out because we are going to go on a massive bender of building as many fucking capital ships as we possibly can.
Once the retarded administration unfucks it, because nothing makes the puppies angrier than goons with caps and titans. Death to all super caps, including our own.
Don't forget, if you already have one, look out for the op pings are going to be happening soon. So basically, fuck them.
Should large scale T2 producers get ready to produce capitals? I am not qualified to answer that question.
You should listen to somebody who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about, about the nuances of production. Someone like me or the crew in G.S.S.
I appreciate you asking that question because it's a reasonable question, but that's one of those things where once these things hit, there is going to be spreadsheets, which I am too simple of a mitten to understand.
And those spreadsheets will tell you what to do. And we will be communicating that through our industrial, industrial experts.
I don't know. Indie goons, something like that. But yeah, go to G.S.S.
So I think that dictator imperator is bingo baiting because it's both about CSM and about Constantine the sincere.
I mean, hey, I said it right, so it counts, right?
So that is where we are. Just to review one fan fest was weird, but I believe that we dodged a bullet. I believe that we collectively, as players of EVE Online and players of other video games, managed to finally pop the nonsense.
That was the NFT and crypto bubble and these idiots trying to shove it into video games to exploit us and some sort of sharecropper play to earn system.
Just again, the way that you deal with people who are trying to scam you is you mock and you shame them, right? You just want to go, well, this NFT thing is very important.
You're dumb, gammer. Fuck you. Don't talk to me about that stuff. That is how you deal with people trying to sell you tulips that are worthless.
But so there's that could have been worse, could have been better, could have been a lot better.
But it is far superior than having crypto in NFTs and the latest dumbass Hilmar idea in the game when it comes to what we are doing in space.
The puppies may be coming on Tuesday because medium structures are getting nerfed. Also, we're having an opportunity to shit out capital.
So what we're going to be doing, we're going to kill the puppies. We're going to defend our shit. If they come, we're going to overreact spectacularly.
By the way, check your channels for Titans and supers overreact spectacularly. If they do deploy at us or do anything serious, which I am personally looking forward to, we're going to keep murdering fire in Tenerife.
And then once we're finally done with the Jeff deployment, we're going to get everybody as rich as possible and shit out as many capitals as we possibly can, because fuck you.
That's why. Thank you for coming. We'll be back next week. Continue joining fleets. Continue joining six and squads. We are almost done.
There's that bonus round. I want the knife twisted in Tenerife. Once that is done, then it is going to be.
The Dell time unit paradise of a sort that I'm sure see people get angry about a nerf again in a different way.
And that's it. Let's get back out there.