Fireside Chat Transcript 11 Dec 2k20

So, first things first, the position the game is in right now is that it is recovering in
kind of a post-Great Recession, Lehman Brothers kind of went under and things are getting
a little bit better, but they're not back at 100% sort of way.
We are seeing the PCU of EVE Online increase, which is good.
We are seeing some slap fights happening in the Northwest, which we are participating
in, which is good.
We are actually having heroic people like Natalia Svega actually going out of their
way to FC Bombers.
We've been trying to get people to do more Bomber FC stuff.
So this is yet another please do Bomber things invitation because best case scenario, learn
how to wipe out hostile fleets like Nat just did the other day, last night I should say.
And worst case scenario, some sub caps get blown up, like whatever.
So definitely if you've ever been a Bomber fleet member and want to give Bomber FCing
a try, do it.
Okay.
What are we doing with Paps?
We want to get people playing the game and having fun and we're at peacetime here functionally.
Like we are having the slap fights in the Galactic Northwest and that's fun and all.
But one of the concerns that we have is we don't want playing EVE Online to feel like
a weird and shitty obligation.
And as an experiment for like the next month or so, and we might turn this off if it looks
like it's a bad thing, we are going to stop making any distinction in terms of corporate
stats between peacetime and Stratop Paps.
So what does that mean?
Like, if you go on a Stratop, it'll still be flagged in our system as a Stratop and
stuff like that.
But we want people to just play the fucking game and have fun.
So for this next while, and if it turns out that there's no like negative impact on our
Stratop numbers and stuff like that, then we'll just keep this way permanently.
It might be that this system that we've set up is a relic of an earlier era in EVE Online.
So basically right now, like if you're like, "Hey, like I'm kind of on the fence about
EVE, like I'm sort of playing, I'm doing stuff.
I don't really want to go on a Stratop, but I do really want to go on a peacetime op,
the peacetime pap will count just as much as a Stratop as far as your corporation is
concerned.
So you are no longer under any obligation, imagined or real, to participate on Stratops
over peacetime ops.
Just have fucking fun."
Now, hopefully that fun will include Stratops and blowing up the bad guys.
But one of the challenges about games and life in general is that if people feel guilty
or they feel pressured or they feel responsible about things, even if it's not a real pressure,
even if it's not a real responsibility, if there's this sort of whiff of obligation or
responsibility or guilt, then that really burns people out super fast in an MMO.
So that's the big news is just have fucking fun, go on Stratops, go on peacetime ops.
It's all the same as far as we're concerned.
And if our policy on that changes, we will let you know.
So you will still see, "Hey, this is a Stratop, it's a Strat pap, blah blah blah," but you
just don't have to worry about anybody in your corporation breathing down your neck
about getting Stratops versus peacetime paps, go nuts.
And yeah, paps will still say Strat versus peacetime because there's still an isk difference
depending on what's being used for what.
But just in terms of you as a line pilot, if you hypothetically felt like, "Man, I need
to go get a Strat pap as opposed to a peacetime pap," you don't have to worry about that shit
anymore.
And yeah, these are good questions, so keep them coming.
How are we going to know the fleets that really matter?
We are going to still be identifying which fleets are strategic and which ones are peacetime,
so you'll have every understanding of knowing.
We just want to get rid of the feeling of guilt and obligation about the game.
And if suddenly everybody stops going on Stratops and then we lose the empire overnight, then
that actually tells us quite a few things about our organization and our goals.
And also, I think that this will make it easier.
I hadn't really thought about it in that term since somebody mentioned this.
Hopefully that'll help inspire people to become skirmish commanders and give it a go because,
"Hey man, it'll be easier maybe to get dudes on peacetime fleets if people don't have to
make a question of whether I should go on a Stratop for pap purposes or just go do what
I want to do."
Okay, so what else do we got?
Speaking of fleets and things like that, we have a Locust fleet tomorrow, so go there
and turn up with your bells on.
Please do remember on Locust fleets, ever since we got kicked in the dick with the sinking
of the Locustania, that the fittings on your orc walls actually do matter a significant
amount.
We do expect these ops to get attacked and they are a big formal official Stratops basically.
So yeah, go on the Locust fleet, but make sure your orc wall is not shit-fit.
Let's see what else we got going on here.
I want to talk about filaments briefly and actually I want to see if this is a super
common thing.
So I've been told that CCP has sent a survey out via email to certain players and on that
survey are questions regarding whether you liked the filaments.
And I'm wondering if people have received that survey.
And so if you have gotten a survey of some kind from CCP, let me know.
And when CCP does this, it's not always a 100% thing.
Like some people, maybe they send it to everybody, maybe they send it only to some people.
But we're in sort of a weird position when it comes to the filaments.
I think they're the best thing that's been added to the game in a long-ass time.
I'm a big fan of the filaments.
I don't necessarily want to take to the skies on the meta show and hear a whole million
blurfs about how important they are and how good they are, precisely because they are
important and good.
I'm afraid that if I am seen as too hearf about filaments that somehow paranoid idiots
are going to be all "Oh my god, there must be some sort of conspiracy behind this."
So what I'd like people to do, the position of the state is that filaments are cool and
good and that CCP should be making them a permanent aspect of the game rather than a
one-off.
So please vote your conscience the way that we tell you to, and respond to the filaments
survey if you are willing to, and say nice things about the filaments.
And Sugar's position is actually a pretty nuanced one, which is that they're great for
the game but a sign of problems in EVE, and I couldn't agree more.
The fact that filaments allow you to essentially get teleported to mid-range content is a
piece of duct tape over the fact that the game has neglected methods of easy access
to small-scale, mid-scale content.
But given that they are a bandage and a piece of duct tape that actually works and holds
pretty good, I think that we should support it.
From then on, will straddle peacetime changes be effective now, or a couple hours ago, I
guess, whenever we made the decision to do that?
This is something you only really need to worry about from a corporate level, basically.
For the monthly Atrium compilations where we're going through and looking at all the
stats and things, we're no longer going to be distinguishing peacetime or stradop for
corporate activity.
So we're going to be keeping track of what's a strad and what's a peacetime, but you don't
have to worry about corp directors or just yourself, the cop in your head or whatever,
making you feel bad about the choices that you make.
Apparently some of these surveys may be lurking in people's spam filters.
All right.
Let me see what else we've got here, and then we're going to do some questions.
We did the bomber shoutout already.
We talked about Locust Fleet.
We dread stuff.
Okay.
So we're going to be throwing dreads around.
We are already throwing dreads around.
We're going to do it more.
They're cheap, they're fun, and there's this slap fight of the Northwest that we are going
to get involved in in one capacity or another, which we may or may not already have been
involved in for some time now.
So if you are interested in using dreads, make sure that you have jump clones set up
as per the post in the Capsule Reflow forums.
And also as far as dread projection goes, we talked about this last week, and this is
going to be like our new every weekly thing.
We want everybody to get Titans, but once you have Titans, if you haven't already done
that, we want you to take those Titan alts and train them into nag over rev with T2 Siege.
So basically Titans, Titans, Titans, and then make sure those Titans can also use dreads,
and then get those jump clones seated in the place that the thread in the special place
tells you to, which I'm sure is going to be a big surprise to everyone involved.
Words are hard on cocaine.
Unfortunately, I am not on cocaine.
Actually fortunately, that's one of the...
I'm a control freak, as I'm sure you're all shocked to find out about, so I try to avoid
cocaine.
It's one of the few drugs I have avoided in my life.
I do love me some dopamine, don't get me wrong, but being ADHD as shit, I'm functionally always
on Ritalin anyways, so...
Whatevs.
Okay, so let's do some questions here, guys.
We have a...
So I'm going to need to go in about 10 minutes and start prep for the meta show.
This week we're going to be going into this heavy sort of Great Recession special, where
we're talking about a bunch of the fundamentals of the EVE economy that Riva is an expert
on.
Incidentally, Riva of course is the editor-in-chief of Imperium News, and we are always looking
for writers and people to be interested in things.
Because EVE is in sort of a weird place, if you're interested in writing for INN, you
can totally do that and write about your own little area of EVE.
If you're interested in writing, it does not have to be reporting on big, huge, gigantic
fuck-off battles.
But between now and the meta show, or at least the next 10 minutes or so, we can take some
questions if people have them, and we will go into those.
So will I ever FC a fleet?
I have repeatedly FC'd fleets over the years, usually when something hilarious is happening
and I'm having one of my enthusiasms, be it like Ninja Dreads or space garbage cleanup
like in MNC or what have you.
But generally speaking, it happens either because I have some weird bug up my ass or
because something has gone hellishly wrong and it's dramatically appropriate.
What happened to the LeShack Doctrine?
The LeShack Doctrine is still there.
It's something that we haven't really used yet because we created it in order to grind
through structures very effectively.
I think the genesis of the LeShack fleet actually came around a time either after or in the
tail end of the Tribute campaign.
So we basically created this ultimate, sexy, structure-bashing fleet and we were going
to get ready to deal with it for people harassing the TTC setup.
But then one, we all kind of burned out on structure-bashing and two, all the people
that we could be using it to bash structures on it stopped putting structures down.
So it's there and I'd really like to use it to swat something, but it's not for lack of
trying.
Let's put it like that.
That's a good question though.
How's the job forum thread going?
I'm glad that you keep bringing it up because this is something that I would like us all
to be annoying AnomNade about.
AnomNade is currently, I think, on a yacht actually in Florida.
Apparently AnomNade has caught the yachting illness from me or from some other goon.
But he is the one who has the badge on that and when he gets back from his yachting adventures,
we will continue to annoy him about it.
And I thank you for bringing it up because the job hunting board is something that I
legitimately want to do.
I think it is a cool project.
We've had the holidays.
There's actually a fair number of things guys that we talked about, org wise, either in
a loom meetings or on firesides or in Kremlin meetings before the holidays.
And we are pretty much as of really this week have begun the process of going, Oh, Hey,
we should do this thing.
Yeah.
We talked about doing this thing like four weeks ago.
Yeah.
We should totally do that.
Oh fuck.
Yeah.
I forgot about that.
Lather and repeat.
So one of the valuable things about firesides is actually you guys going like, uh, yeah,
dude, where's the fucking like job hunting board.
And us going, God damn it.
I nominates on a yacht.
ProGod legend is thinking about purging us from delve.
Um, I think that would be great.
I would really actually, when do we primitively attack tests?
That's an interesting idea.
Um, if they actually had anything of value for us.
So first of all, I don't think that's true.
I don't think that pro God wants a piece of this at all.
Uh, and if he did, it would be awesome because then we wouldn't have to commute.
One of the challenges that we have strategically is that, uh, legacy stuff all sucks compared
to our stuff.
Like at a fundamental level, there's no real reason for us to take anything from legacy
because they don't have anything that's better than what we already have.
Uh, and in general, that's kind of one of the strategic challenges that we have when
it comes to having content delivered to our doorstep is that people like we have built
this amazing, like if we want to get all like super nerdy legend of galactic heroes, which
I haven't actually watched all of it.
I watched only a few episodes, but enough to get to the whole Easter Lauren is there
a lawn fortress kind of thing?
Like big space, death star kind of thing.
And post drifters, that's Delph.
Like, uh, the drifter shit, the blackout shit meant that we as an organization went through
it and very particularly created fortress delve in a way that it hadn't existed before.
Like before the drifter stuff, before the blackout, you know, uh, when we actually looked
at our Citadel fits, like it was a disaster.
We didn't have like the ACL gunner system set up like we did, uh, when the drifters
that were there.
So like we have built this just incredible fucking space fortress and we have all these
keep stars and I've like looking around going like, we'd go over to war over here.
We do over here.
I'm like, you know what, you know, why can't we just get people to fucking attack us?
Like, uh, they do sort of drag.
And of course the answer is that they don't want to get utterly slaughtered by our incredible
space fortress.
But we do have an incredible space fortress and if it gets to a point where people get
mad at us and want to attack us, I think that would just be fucking peachy and bring it.
But you know, please somebody.
Anyway, uh, yeah, I mean, I, I don't think that legacy, uh, wants to have a go at us.
I don't think that anybody really wants to have a go at us.
I think most people are kind of like, you know, they have the fear, which is fine.
All right, let's see if we got any other questions.
Oh, Cynthia was just kidding in the first place about how was the jerk from the last
one to show I was really like sleep deprived at the time last week show.
So I sort of derped my way through that.
Kind of a good word about blazing daily.
I have so many things to say about different weed strains that I'm not going to talk about
it because otherwise I would spend the next hour doing it, but smoke weed every day.
I think it's interesting that now they're starting to sell CBD flour and I spoke to
CBD joint, which I didn't even realize was a thing the other day and it was actually
a pretty pleasant experience.
I can't tell whether that was because of, you know, just the novelty of smoking a CBD
joint or just because smoking joints in any form just is always sort of like cool and
relaxing due to like a placebo effect or just habit or whatever.
But it was a pretty chill experience and, you know, I liked it.
Oh, venal blazing.
I thought we were talking about weed.
I'm not talking about like burner missions or anything like that.
Yeah, also Canada's as Prias points out, Canada's weed is really good.
I was in Toronto over the holidays and man, they've got some good shit up there.
Can we bring back Arty Avedons?
Well, one of the things that I think would be interesting to see with us getting rid
of the restriction between or the distinction between peacetime and strategic PAPs is, you
know, there is shit stack reimbursement for a variety of crap basically where essentially
you can if you really want to have some sort of like wacky non-strategic doctrine and you're
able to get, you know, 20 of your closest friends together to zoom around and Arty Avedons
and drive them into a fucking wall.
You know, that's kind of the neat thing about the peacetime stuff and the shit stack reimbursement
is that, you know, you can just go fucking do it.
It's probably not a good idea, but we're not going to stop you.
And if that's what makes you and 20 of your closest friends happy, then just fucking give
it a go.
And also, you know, this is a sort of goes for everybody.
Like one of the things and we really just sort of want to incentivize people into just
like doing shit that they want to do and like trying stuff.
Like there's a lot less in the way of like rules and regulations and restrictions between
like, hey, I want to, I would like to be a bomber FC.
Okay.
So, but I want to run around with the Arty Avedons.
Well, you're not necessarily going to get like fleet level reimbursement for it, but
there is shit stack reimbursement.
So there's really nothing stopping you from making that happen with your friends.
If you or your buddies get together and do that, just give it a fucking whirl.
Total defense and subcastle has been stepping up its game.
Is it good for us that we're learning how to fly our ships and coordinate better?
Yeah.
I mean, one of the reasons why we enjoy living in a region that has NPC space and gets harassed
all the time is, is that it does keep us sharp or in theory keeps us sharp.
We always have to worry about stagnation and lassitude and basically getting fat and lazy,
which is one of the things we're trying to shake off.
A pineapple on pizza, yay or nay?
I'm fine with pineapple on pizza.
And one of the things that's interesting about the pineapple on pizza stuff, and I'm not
sure whether this is true or not, I could be wrong and I'm not going to bother Googling
it, but somebody can let me know if they already know the answer is that, yeah, I thought it
was really strange when there was this seemed like a meme war about pineapple pizza stuff.
And I remember hearing that that was actually like used as a test for like a social algorithm,
Cambridge Analytica style to see what you could use to divide people.
But I'm not sure whether that was just a horseshit conspiracy theory after the fact or whatever.
Are we ever going to go take back Declan?
Well probably not until it doesn't suck.
Like again, Declan, like we've been up there, we killed everything, we got 44 desires worth
of tribute about it.
And then we left because again, like CCP was talking about like resource depletion and
all this other stuff, and then they like nerfed Spod slightly.
But currently like Delve is just about the best region of the game.
The only other region that can compete with Delve is Malpay.
And then it's a question of do you really want to uproot all of your shit and drag ass
to the galactic northeast to take Malpay when we have so many trillions of keepstars and
shit invested here in Delve?
But I mean hypothetically, if somebody does come to Delve and kick us out in a grand defensive
war, that's exactly what we'd do.
If somebody comes here and blows up all of our shit, then we'd go take Malpay for novelty's
sake.
But first we have to entice somebody to come here and actually try to attack us, which
I kind of don't think is going to happen.
But you know, if it does, that's where we'd go.
Does the state have a position on the Alliance tournament?
Not really, no.
What is the keepstar count at?
You know, I don't even know anymore.
We actually had to move to a different system of managing the damn things because there
was too many of them for me to hold them individually and then we sort of consolidated them all
after the drifter incursion.
Something north of 50 at this point.
Definitely way north of 50, which is kind of terrifying, but it is what it is.
Like it seems like every other week there's a new goddamn keepstar.
All right.
Blackhand is recruiting.
Thank you, Boris.
Okay, so I think we've mostly covered it.
Again, we're in this weird state here where lots of people are playing Eve, but people
aren't super engaged, so we want to make it easier for people to engage, have wacky ideas,
run around on arty avadons if that's what floats their boat.
So there you go.
Is the naming convention for SRP paps going to be changed so it's less confusing for live
members?
Probably not.
I mean, you know, the issue with strat paps versus peacetime paps is not the naming convention.
The issue is that if people feel weird pressure to do one or the other, and that comes from
a corp director perspective, because we have told people that we only count strat paps
when we're judging corporations against each other every month in the alliance.
So we still need to know what's a strat op versus what's a peacetime op from an operational
perspective.
It's more about how they're weighted and how that weight is communicated to the line.
I don't really understand what's the confusion there.
Like, strat and peacetime ops are both good, go on them based upon what you want to do.
That's all you really need to worry about.
Where previously speaking, you would only get corporate credit in terms of your corp
being good or bad vis-a-vis the other corps for strategic participation.
And if you really want further details on this, you can just dive into all of the atrium
threads when he goes through the monthly statistic.
And that shows you how the old system worked.
All right.
Yeah, I think we covered the dread clone thing, which was look at the post in Capswarm about
where your dreads are supposed to be and put them there.
I think that's going to be it for this week, guys.
We will be back next week, same time, same channel for more fireside action.
I'm going to go get ready for the meta show.
We're going to have Rivra on.
So Brisk, Rivra, and I are going to be talking in great detail about a bunch of really kind
of surprising and disturbing fundamentals about the EVE economy that normally this isn't
like an MER show.
It's like basically if you created a consumer confidence index for EVE, you could actually
see in the data in terms of the Plex volume and some of these fundamental baskets that
it is this like great recession post layman style situation.
So hopefully that's interesting.
We will see how things go.
And thank you for coming.
See you next week and see those of you that watch the meta show in 25 minutes.