Fireside Chat Transcript Jan 20 2024
Asher Elias:
Alright, hello friends. How y'all doing? Welcome to the fireside. So, please put a X in chat if you read the director letter. That was linked by, from CCP. To the guy typing in a mumble. We use the Elysium channel on Jabber, Elysium in Jabber. Yeah. Can someone link the letter for someone who didn't get it?
https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/eve-online-directors-letter
But basically the TLDR is we are going to focus on nullsec. There is not a lot of information in there. So we've been chatting about it you know, in our meetings at the leadership level. And we think that there is Probably like the rest of you, that there isn't a ton of information in there.
The thing though, is we're, we're in general excited about changes, not because they'll necessarily benefit us. We don't know if they will, but because we believe that we have the best team to address them. For those of you who play other games, you know, when a new season comes out or a new patch, a lot of the fun is in like solving the issues from the new patch and getting the most out of them, and I really believe that we have the best team to do that, so we're excited in that sense, the actual, as far as the actual changes, we don't really know. We don't have a lot of ideas as to what they'll be doing, but they are putting us on notice that they'll be working on on NullSec.
So what does it mean for us on a practical level? It probably means that our time horizon for our plans gets shorter. We want to see what they're going to do. They'll probably announce something in the next few months, at least for the initial wave. So we probably won't be making plans much far, much beyond the next few months. That's a that's basically the long and short of it. So we'll keep our time horizon short. Right now, it doesn't change much for us.
We have one important timer coming up. That is the EX6 Keepstar. It's in Chinese time zone, but it comes out very late. So it's a 1500 form on Monday. So if you can be around for that, do that. That Keepster does flip the EU time zone in a relatively short amount of time, so they only have a few more opportunities if they want to give it a shot in Chinese time zone.
As far as the Keepster that they dropped in Catch and their "assault" on us they're basically using the same strategies they used up north, which is to have a smaller group do refs, and then try to sneak in armor timers. And the reason that worked of north was because they were much larger than the other group. So the other group, you know, B2 had to form for every timer because they could not have formed to -not afford to flash form. I don't think that's the case for us.
So, you know, we have heard that they're basically telling their members that their plan is to blue ball goons until they get bored. So I, I wish them good luck. Basically what we're going to do is we're going to form if they form. And you know if they want to try and pull that on us, they can try, but we're not B2. We're a lot bigger. We, we, we don't need to form for every timer. So we'll, we'll, we'll play off what they do. If they form, we'll form. If they don't, we won't. If they form a small group, we'll send a small group. It's really that simple, but I just want to let you know, guys know that is their current strategy. You know, make of it what you will. I, I often say that, you know, Pappy's, you know, gameplay is to try to win in the most boring way possible and this is certainly right up their alley.
How do PH even keep their members? So, Pat Mang, this is a question I was actually discussing in depth in a smaller group yesterday. And one of the things that I think is, you know, very interesting is the tribalism aspect of it, is that, you know, I have to believe that some PAPI members see what goes on, and they know that they're on the wrong side, but you know, that's what their friends are, or whatever, but a lot of them, they just get told what's, what's, you know, going on and it's not true but you, you just believe what your tribe tells you.
There is a, I know not all of you get to read the pings, but there is a I think probably disinformation campaign would probably be too strong of a term but there, there is a separate reality that is being fed to the line members of Horde as explanations through their pings through what their leadership says and it is not, it does not match the reality on the ground. Usually. I have heard this a lot. I have heard a lot from people who have joined us. They said, you know, Hey I, I joined because my corp switched and I really didn't want to join goons or I didn't want to join Imperium or like my friend came over here and I was sort of like forced to come here and I was really not looking forward to it because I had heard all the bad stuff, but like now that I'm here, wow, it's really not at all what I expected.
I hear this all the time from people who joined us and this is something that they reach out. They tell me Like, X up if this is sort of your experience, that you, before you joined, you were, see, there we go, before you joined, you were nervous, you were, you were like, oh no, this is gonna be bad, but you had to join, or you were kind of, yeah, you had a lot of X's, and then you learned out, you learned once you joined, you found out that it wasn't like what you were told. It wasn't like what you expected. I, I hear this story a lot. So I hope that answers your question that they're hearing something that isn't true. And if they had time to come over and then they, they did spend time with us, they would understand, but they, many of them probably won't. On the other hand, we don't want everyone to join us, you know, like you know, thank goodness for enemies. If they didn't exist, we'd have to invent them. The point of this game is to fight, is to have fun, so be thankful that they exist, even in the very boring form that they do exist in.
I don't know what you're spamming at me, LordTenchard, but I see it. Ghost, I haven't found any aliens.
Okay, so let me talk about a couple things let me pimp out a few things. Scouts. I really want to talk about scouts. This is probably something That's my fault is I don't talk about scouts enough and I don't talk about how important they are. Because they are like one of our most important groups. It's one of those jobs, I'm afraid to tell you guys, it is not super sexy. There are there are jobs that that you know are sexier jobs in EVE Online, but it is important. Scouting is super important. If you you know, if this sounds appealing to you at all, watching the enemy, seeing what they form, relaying that information, and having that information used to beat them, that's what a scout does. And it is a very important job. It's something that we need people doing. So, if you're interested in in joining scouts, please look at that. That's something we need more of. If we had, you know, ten scouts on at any one time, it would actually just revolutionize things for us. So, that's something I'd like to get more people doing.
https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/336499-sig-scouts-we-like-to-watch/
Yeah. CD Corps Diplomatique is closing their recruitment drive tomorrow. So, Shingly, if you want to drop that link in there one more time. If you are interested in the social aspects of EVE, this is this is another job where soft power is important. You need to know You know, what people do, who people represent, what they think. It is a very social and interesting part of EVE and I can recommend it if that is something up your alley.
https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/351078-corps-diplomatique-recruitment-winter-2024-edition/
Apple, are we doing Black Hand recruitment? A special recruitment, or is this the general?
Apple Pear:
Like, we're talking about all the cool things we're doing, like scouting and doing enemy things.
Asher Elias:
You just figured you wanted to ride that train too?
Apple Pear:
Yes.
https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/351093-sig-the-black-hand/
Asher Elias:
Alright. Black Hand is also recruiting. Okay I have one other thing that I have been asked to pimp, and honestly, usually I know what is Black Hand? I'll, I'll, I'll answer that before I go to this next one. Black Hand is our spy organization. They are the kind of people who put people in enemy fleets. They're sort of the opposite. of scouting, or not the opposite. They're like scouts, but for the enemy fleets. You, you join an enemy group, you report back on what they're doing. It is also a very important job. It is a little more sexier, that's why I say scouts. Scouts, you're, you're not, you're not being a secret agent man, Black Hand you are. So but the jobs are actually somewhat similar.
Okay, the next thing I have to mention, and usually I know what I'm talking about, but honestly I don't know what this is. Stickz is asking me to talk about Skill Planner. He says there are updates with new plans, and you can provide feedback on the forum threads. I will paste in the links that he has given me. I do not know anything about Skill Planner, so, perhaps, perhaps this is useful to those of you who do.
https://skills.apps.gnf.lt/plans
https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/350718-gsf-skills-planner
Snipereagle1:
He had to go to work, but I can hit it real quick.
Asher Elias:
Yeah, why don't you?
Snipereagle1:
Yeah, so Styx has been doing a lot of work of keeping the skill planner updated with with skills for relevant doctrines for us. So you can go on there, you can pick which character of yours you want to look at, and then you can see all the different fits. There's also things related to sigs, that if there's a skill plan related to a sig, like our capital sigs. You will see that one on there as well. And if you find something that seems weird, or something that's missing just comment in his thread and he will take a look at it.
I'm gonna piggyback on there because speaking of Skill Planner, one of the things we recently added is the Stupid Idiot Fleet Doctrine for Beehive. We do have a new sig that you can join if you are just in a Redeemer and want to shoot web at the bads. Toaster, can you find that link and spam that?
https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/351426-sig-stupid-idiots-beehive-blops/
Got it. Thank you. And yeah, so, so very soon you, if you wanna join the beehive comms, you will need to be in that sig, so make sure you do that.
Asher Elias:
Yeah. Stupid Idiot Fleet is a really fun way to play and to get involved in some fights. It's, it's, yeah, I like, I like Stupid Idiot Fleet a lot.
One last thing I want to talk about is that we have a lot of new members who may not know about this. We have an alpha home defense doctrine. Ranger Gamma has just link walled it. This is actually a requirement. It's something we haven't enforced because we haven't been on a campaign recently. But this is something where we want everyone to make an alpha alt. You just make a new alt, you make them alpha, you never need to sub them, and you train them into a Ferox. We These are super important. We aren't using them right now because we're staged in Delve, but we do use them whenever we we deploy away. So it's something that you can just do. It takes, you know, 15 minutes to set up. And once you're set up, you're good to go.
https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/330166-control-alt-delve-alpha-clones-to-defend-delve/
Snipereagle1:
And this is yet another one of our ideas that this is yet another one of our things that Horde has blatantly and shamelessly copied.
Asher Elias:
Hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Snipereagle1:
It should not be a PI alt you should do it on a separate account so that you don't have to, like, you know, move it around or whatever, we just need we need to have these characters available and ready to go and get into fleet, so, please make an alpha account for it.
Asher Elias:
Alright
Ranger Gama:
Join, sorry, when you join the corp guys for the alpha alts, all the fits, the skill plans, they're all loaded into the corp. Sniper put all that stuff in there when we first created it. They're all just sitting there.
Asher Elias:
All right, John Calidari says, Asher, what can a goon do today and for the next few days that will help the alliance other than strat ops, PI max, ship building, etc? It's a good question, John. I would say that probably, probably the best thing that the average line goon can do right now. You know, we've been talking about PI a lot, but I would say the other thing you could do is, is get those MTUs out when you're ratting. There is a lot of value, like about, I think about, I was told about 30%, which sounds about right from my experience, 30 percent of the value of the anomaly is just in the wrecks. So if you are ratting of any kind, make sure you're dropping MTUs, you're bookmarking them, and you're just scooping them up. That will introduce a lot to our economy. So that'd be good. If we got a lot more people doing that, that'd be super helpful. Yeah, 20 to 30 million of loot per Forsaken Hub. There you go. It's Rat Poop is super good. It's basically one of the better ways to mine in the game right now. So we're definitely encouraging people to drop a lot of MTU.
Ranger Gama:
For, we mentioned this to Kremlin, if you're new or you're, you know, you run at Kremlin, you've got newer people in your corp, that's an excellent way they can be out ratting and doing stuff with our skill training. Like getting an MTU, getting a Salvage Destroyer takes about a day worth of training. It's super easy to do.
Asher Elias:
You don't have to salvage, by the way. I know some of you, you hear salvage, you're like, oh, I don't want to do that. You don't have to. You can just grab the loot. The salvage is not required. If you want to, you can.
Mikulo says that they made up to six million doing just grabbing loot and throwing into the karmafleet buyback Yeah, that's the other thing is there a lot of people with buyback stuff. So, you know, you don't have to deal with all the loot yourself. You can just get paid straight cash homie for for your loot.
Alright so this will be a quick one, so let me give you guys about, I'll answer questions for like 2 or 3 minutes, then we'll call it. So, if you have questions, go ahead and throw it out there, I'll try to get as many as I can, but I do want to keep this one relatively quick for everyone.
Capital Simulators, we are working on the Gambleaces, that's something that is going to be coming out pretty soon, hopefully. But that was discussed today.
How close are we to the 3,000 Dread goal? It's a good question. We haven't run the exact numbers, but that's more, I'm going to add 3,000 new Dreads. So it's not that we want to have 3,000 Dreads. We already have 3,000. We want to add 3,000 new ones. We're seeing a lot of progress, if you check the thread, a lot of people are posting. But obviously, as far as our strategic goals, getting people into Dreads, getting new Dreads on new accounts, is probably the top one that we have.
Does the recent wardec of PH represent anything other than we are enemies with them? Yeah, I mean, we generally keep that up most of the time, so, I don't think you can read anything particular out.
Snipereagle1:
We added it for a timer that they surprisingly didn't go for.
Asher Elias:
There you go. I see a lot of questions about the Palantine. Guys, that's that's long in the future. So don't worry about it. Like, it's not like it's not like something we'll have to be worrying about next month. This is a really long term project.
Southeast agreement? I have addressed that many times, but that is set to expire in about a month.
Are you delaying it on purpose? No, it's extremely hard to build. We are acquiring the pieces for it, but you can't do that over a couple months. It's impossible.
Temperature in Florida, where I live, it's about 69 degrees right now. What is 69 degrees in civilized world measurements? I think it's like a 20 21 somewhere around there. 19. Okay. All right. There you go.
Is there a fax goal to go with our Dread goal? Good question, Zentron. We want you in faxes. We don't have a particular fax goal. Obviously that's just part of the capital progression. We want you guys getting faxes. Probably our most used capital is faxes because we use them essentially every day in the beehive. So faxes definitely have a use, but we don't have a particular number we're looking for right now.
Besides the Scout SIG, is there any Spaceship SIGs that we are pushing hard? I remember Reavers used to be real popular, but I don't see lots of talks about them. Partially because they don't exist, but still. Yeah, so Reavers is my SIG, and I already just, I don't have the time to run it as a separate SIG. I spend way too much time on this game, as is, and running a SIG separately would just be impossible. But there are a bunch of other SIGs, they do get mentioned here quite a bit, so if you want to join one of them please feel free to.
Is CFAX useful now? I don't know what that means, I'm not sure if I just read a joke or something. Is CFAX like UpDog or something, or is that, is that actually a thing?
Ranger Gama:
He means a Minokawa.
Asher Elias:
Oh, Caldari fax? Yeah, yeah, it's definitely useful. Minokawas are great. I mean, there's nothing wrong with any of the faxes, they're all fine.
Is there an active suicide gank sig? We do have one, but I would say it's not as active as it used to be.
Am I excited for GTA 6? Yeah, that looks cool.
What Titan should I get? That's a great question, Internet Knight. You should get whatever Titan you want. Please don't want the Avatar. That's really the answer. The avatar is definitely the least useful of all titans, but yeah, see he wants an avatar. That's fine. Get an avatar. They're fine
Apple Pear:
Some people just like the buttplug.
Asher Elias:
Yeah, that's fine. You know, I say you can get you can get literally any titan you want The avatar is the least useful of all of them But if that's the titan you want if that's what your heart is set on Do not let me dissuade you from getting what your dream titan is But basically Levi, Rag, Erebus are, are the, you know, better of those three, and the Avatar is the least useful. Zintage is just giving you the order there, roughly. Levi, Erebus, then Rag, then a long way off Avatar. Yeah, if the choice is between Avatar and not having a Titan, then Avatar's fine.
Which Battleship 5 should I train up? I assume that you mean first? That's a good question. I don't, hmm. I would say right now it's between Caldari and Minmatar. I'd probably flip a coin on that. Probably Caldari? Yeah, Amarr has Redeemers, but we don't really use Amarr battleships other than the Redeemers. It's really specialized. And, I mean, we already have plenty of Redeemers. I'd rather have BS 5 for our fleets first than Redeemers second. Yeah, Galante is probably the worst one to train five now, which is funny because for a very long time that was our number one because we were Baltecs, Baltecs, Baltecs. But Caldari gets you Super Trains, and then it gets you Ravens and Raven Navy Issues, which are possible uses too, so I'd probably go Caldari.
Apple Pear:
I think more important is Caldari Cruiser 5 and Logi Cruiser 5 so you can fly a Basilisk.
Asher Elias:
Apple, you're kind of like the doctor who always reminds you to take your vitamins and eat an apple every day.
Apple Pear:
You're welcome. For now, if you, if you go for the lots, you first go for the basilisks, then for the guardian, because basilisks, we need more we have a very low amount of basilisks lately in our rokh fleet, so we need more people in basilisks.
Asher Elias:
Faldo Galloway says, I have four dread pilots in training, how many PNI's and how many Zirns? If it were me, I'd go two and two. I think that's fine. Two and two would be fine, yeah? Yeah, weasel says four Zirns, that wouldn't be an issue either.
Snipereagle1:
There have been multiple questions in chat about more blops to the beehive sig, and no, we will not, because they don't fit in with it. It's marshals and redeemers, please don't bring your snowflake, widow, or panther.
Asher Elias:
Guys, I would love to fly a widow, I would love to fly a widow, but it just doesn't work for the beehive. I know, but widows are so much better, I agree, but you know, we let these other people have their wrong opinions, but Secretly we know widows are better.
Can we add logi frigates to the interceptor fleets? I haven't had the FCs request that, so if the FCs want to do it, then yeah. But I imagine there'd be several issues of making that work.
Does the alliance coalition buy Dread's off producers? Is a 3k goal spread among the people? No, I mean, we want It's, it's 3k new dreads to be used, not 3k dreads in our stockpile. We have a stockpile of dreads, but that's not, that's not, you know, the stockpile in 1DQ doesn't work in a fight. That's just for a replacement. We want people to have them. Yeah, Terrified Killer, that's true about Widows.
Snipereagle1:
I forgot something. I need to put it on the calendar. We're gonna do a move op next weekend after the fireside from Hophib. If you lived in Fountain at any point and want to get stuff out of Asset Safety, we will have all the things for an Asset Safety move op set up after the fireside next weekend.
Asher Elias:
Oh, nice. That's good. Is there any way to save important pings like the one just sent with SIG information for future reference? Not in the client, you just would have to put it in a paste file or whatever.
If you haven't found the elysium channel on Jabber yet (the chat channel for Firesides), here's a rollup of the links mentioned today for your perusal; see the wiki for help getting into this Jabber channel - https://wiki.goonswarm.org/w/Pidgin#Joining_Chat_Channels
- Scouts SIG recruitment thread: one of the highest impact strategic roles, no experience required, you can sign up and do this today: https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/336499-sig-scouts-we-like-to-watch/
- The CD (Corps Diplomatique; space diplomats) recruitment drive is closing soon: https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/351078-corps-diplomatique-recruitment-winter-2024-edition/
- Black Hand recruitment thread: be a space spy, the covert to Scouts SIG's overt: https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/351093-sig-the-black-hand/
- Thread about the skill planner tool: https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/350718-gsf-skills-planner and skill planner itself: https://skills.apps.gnf.lt/plans
- Alpha clone corp: required but not yet enforced, do this to join more important fleets and defend our home when we're deployed, takes just a bit of your time: https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/330166-control-alt-delve-alpha-clones-to-defend-delve/
Darth Raven, please use Elysium, but I'll answer your question. He says, are we going to use more carriers of fleets going forward? Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised for us to use more carriers. That's the one thing I, I think people, we haven't talked about much lately, but carriers do have a, a use in fleet fights and there's a reasonable chance that we use them.
Apple Pear:
Yes, please. Get, get a carrier for your super, super pilot.
Asher Elias:
Alright guys I did about ten minutes of questions, which is a little more than I wanted to do, but I appreciate you guys being here, appreciate the questions. Thank you for showing up, and I will see you all next week.
