Fireside Chat Transcript 14 Nov 2k20

I've been smoking way too much weed.
Alrighty, as people filter in, I'm gonna refill my coffee and we'll get going when the numbers stabilize and my throat stops being quite so fucked up.
Alrighty.
So as usual, we do these in Elysium at conference.goonfleet.com, if for some reason you have not gotten that memo.
And we're gonna go ahead and get started here.
So one of the first things I wanted to talk about involves something that Tuzzy is gonna discuss, and I think he just went AFK.
Because a child needs something.
So here's the deal. We need to have a better way of getting people in and out of Helms Deep in a way that is responsive to the industrial needs of our dudes.
Starting out with things involving industry is the weirdest start to a fireside, but I want to talk about some of the things I've seen over the last couple weeks.
We introduced Helms Deep, we moved our caps to E3, and then we shoved a whole bunch of jammers online.
And one of the things that we got from Elysium was, "Hey guys, this is a pain in the ass, how do we get people in and out? What is the system to have life in Delve go on with jammed systems?"
And we said we were gonna do something about it, we're gonna figure out a way to make that more manageable, and we have.
And hopefully Tuzzy gets back.
So here's what we're gonna do.
We have just had a meeting with the Kremlin, and what we're gonna be doing to get people in and out is if you need to get into Helms Deep with something that involves sinewing into it, you need to get a jammer cycled.
Tuzzy has posted something, I believe it's stickied in the War Room. Let me make sure it's there.
Yes it is. Okay, excellent. Has he already broadcast it?
No he hasn't. Okay, cool.
Alright, well it'll probably be pinged out when he gets back.
So here's what we're doing.
Look.
I'm a little bit disorganized because when we went to the break here between the Kremlin meeting and the fireside, I had two big people that were gonna be talking to you guys about the economy situation and the jammer situation.
One of them was Tuzzy to talk about how we're gonna be managing the jammer situation, which involves basically you guys are gonna talk to the Kremlin and read what that thread says, and by way of Kremlin we will figure out a way to manage corp ops as well as individuals.
The Kremlin representatives, if you don't know who the Kremlin is, Kremlin is corp directors, corp CEOs, sub directors across through the organization.
Most of you, if you've ever talked to anybody who is anybody in your corporations, are used to talking to Kremlin members.
So this is a more subtle way of us communicating when we need to get the jammer cycled up and down.
That doesn't require like an all broadcast or anything like that.
If you have trouble getting in touch with people who are in the Kremlin, one of the things that you can do, and I encourage you to do, is just ask an Elysium or GS-ISC or something.
If you're like, "Fuck, I need the jammer cycled, but I don't know who's a director in my corporation and who's a CEO in my corporation,"
if you ask for help, people will point you in the right direction.
"Will the same process be for DTAC-W, which is not in that section?"
So DTAC-W is currently still jammed because we jammed it up for a defense op last night, I believe.
My understanding, because somebody did bring this up in the Kremlin meeting that we were just in, is that we were not planning on keeping that jammed.
That was a hangover from the op.
So we are going to look into that and either get it unjammed, but maybe I'm lying because this is the kind of thing where my little simple mitten brain is not really up on the specifics of the DTAC-W thing.
We did talk about it in Kremlin, though.
And I'm waiting for Tuzzy to pop up.
Okay.
Failing that, when he does turn up, we will have him talk about the system and the process of how to get in and out of Helm's Deep.
Why are we talking about this?
One of the things that we need to do when we're talking about the war situation is we need to show people how it's possible to survive and delve, how we're going to be doing it, what is life going to look like while we fight through this phase of the war.
So part of that is getting in and out of Helm's Deep. That is the GSOL thing.
The other part of it is, generally speaking, updating our economic situation.
Kazimir, are you here?
[laughs]
This is a fun way to start the fireside.
Hey guys, I want to go AFK. I want to go take a piss.
Oh, now I can key up. Okay, hey, hi everyone!
So in case you didn't notice, in the fireside, they start out as muted.
So now you can talk. There we go.
Woohoo, okay, hey everybody.
So yeah, taking out the broader point of the jammer situation, we know that this is painful.
We have a military necessity of keeping all these systems jammed, and this is the only thing keeping a lot of our structures alive.
But we can tell that it is difficult for people, so we want to explore where the difficulties are, where is life painful in Delve, and what can we do to help.
I used to run Jump Raiders.
If this means a new Jump Raider service that's moving stuff around within Delve, that's an option.
If this is something where we need to make the pain less for industrialists, specifically to keep producing stuff, we want to analyze that.
If this is an issue where really the big fish are fine, but the line members are suffering, we want to get at that.
So we've invited all of your corp leadership to gather that feedback from people on the line.
If you are logging in and you're having difficulty living in Delve every day, or you don't know what to do to make money,
all of this sort of stuff is things that we want to address, because we're ready to hold out.
We have this war in front of us.
They have a long way to go, and we believe that we can hold out and keep paying reimbursements,
and take several shots at them that are going to cost them a lot of money and hopefully break their back.
But we need everyone to be logging in for that, and we need to be ready.
So we're trying to gather feedback on what is painful right now, and how can we make the Helm's Deep situation something that we can live under,
and be ready to fight this war whenever that opportunity happens for us to take a big shot.
Alright, and good timing, Tuzzy is also back now, so I...
[laughter]
That was not how I wanted to start the fireside, guys, but here we are.
Now Tuzzy is back, and he can talk about the Jammer stuff.
Once he unmutes himself and finds the microphone.
There's like a long list of people, and it takes a lot of scroll to get to my name to right-click to uncheck the mute button.
Yeah, so let me guess, you said like, "Hey, here's Tuzzy," and then there was like 30 seconds of awkward silence where no one talked.
And then I was like, "Hey, okay, well Tuzzy's not here, Kaznier can talk, wait, Kaznier's gone too."
It was basically the two things that I came to the table to talk to the guys about, and then introducing both of you.
Awkward silence!
Right as the fireside was going to start, my wife got home with the kid, and I had to go help for a second.
Alright, so I just posted a link in Elysium that is to like an ad hoc Jammer policy.
I know a lot of you guys may need to jump jump-readers in or caps in to systems that are jammed, and we've came up with a system.
You should read that post to know the details, but the short of it is we've came up with a mechanism
for you to get in touch with the right people to ask for Jammer to come down.
We will work with you to get it done, and there's like a nominal cost of $50 million ISK,
which is basically like the fuel blocks cost to online the service module on the Jammer when we cycle it.
We put the cost on there not because we're short of money or anything like that, that's not the case.
It's just that my worry is that without some sort of...
If it's free, people will abuse it.
Yeah, people will abuse it.
Right, so by putting a small fee on it, it'll make people...
You won't request it unless you actually need it to make it non-trivial, right?
Because the GSOLer has to do this, right?
This is the thing I want people to understand.
We want to have an organized system of getting people in and out in a way that they can live while Delve is under siege.
But keep in mind that when we're saying "cycle the Jammer," what that means is several people
and a GSOLer has to actually go out there personally and man the Jammer and then basically turn it on and off for you.
So it's not like a button click involves a human being moving to an item and doing a thing for you.
So that's why we don't want this to be just like...
If it was just a flick of switch and it would be easy, it would be a lot simpler than that.
So that's why we need to have this kind of thing.
I don't think people really realize what they're asking for when they're saying "cycle the Jammer"
and thinking that's a casual thing, but it involves a GSOLer has to go do a thing.
And the in-game mechanics, basically, CCP, the minimum time it takes to online a Jammer module is five minutes.
So in general, what we do is we just turn it off and turn it on again, and then it takes five minutes to turn back on.
So you've got a five-minute window to do two Cyno cycles and jump things in and out.
If it needs to be longer or something like that, you can talk to us,
and depending upon the circumstances, we'll work something out with you.
Also, this is contingent upon if there are certain strata going on at the time,
we may say, "Well, look, we can't do this right now," or if hostiles are formed up or something like that.
So my guys will be keeping aware of the military situation.
It may be the case where we're like, "Look, we can't do this right now, but we could do this tomorrow in the EU time zone,
or we could do this in two hours," or something like that.
So just be ready to work with my guys when we do it.
And it may be the case where we have a lot of people that can do this, and we have pretty good coverage in all time zones,
but it may be the case due to weird circumstances that for whatever reason there's no one available when you need it.
So just try to be flexible and work with everyone.
We'll try to accommodate your requests as best as we can.
Sweet.
Oh, that's pretty cool. Okay.
Hold on a moment.
Okay, so let's talk about a few other things.
I suppose, actually, I need to get into smug, jacking myself off mode about the Requiem Eternal disband or whatever.
We disbanded one of the past PLO alliances. It's great.
The main value of that is the fact that we nuked 50 systems worth of Jump Ridge availability for several weeks,
as well as, apparently, this is just kind of random,
but I didn't even realize that those guys had been in the Casino War,
because Requiem Eternal is like those guys and those other guys and those other guys.
It's like the also-rans, the hangers-on, but every group like that is like 20 to 40 bad guys in a fleet.
But Requiem Eternal was so unknown to me in terms of like the who.
Like, I knew that they were in fucking Legacy, but the funny bit, I think, was finding out after we had disbanded them
that they had existed for seven years and had participated in the Casino War.
So I'm pretty happy to have gotten rid of another Casino War criminal alliance.
That is fun and good.
I think it was Jay or Asher, one of the first comments that they had after the disband was like,
"This is literally the only thing that Requiem Eternal is going to be written in a history book about is getting disbanded by us."
[laughs]
But, yeah.
Alright. So I want to take questions and stuff like that.
One of the things I want people to understand is that the situation of trying to move people into Helms Deep
and move people out of Helms Deep and generally deal with the fact that the enemy is sieging our hubs
and we're sieging hubs back and that it's a back and forth and it's an ugly back and forth is...
I forgot to talk about the Sov change. Shit. Sorry.
I got three hours of sleep last night because one of the reasons why I was talking about the Requiem Eternal stuff
is we timed it such that their directors would be asleep, which meant that I was basically staying up until 8 in the morning
or a couple of nights in order to find the window where we'd be able to pull the trigger.
And we had kind of a long watch with our defector, who we're very happy to have on board.
As usual, our policy when it comes to defectors is when they come on board, like with Hargoth,
is we give them red carpet treatment. A new life awaits them in goons form.
And I kind of want to talk about how this happened, especially because our enemies typically listen to the fireside.
And on top of it, when you're trolling in local, so you guys know what's up.
The reason why we were able to disband Requiem Eternal is not because of some sort of amazing spy that had been infiltrating forever.
The reality is that in these legacy alliances, oftentimes they're very shitty to their logistics people,
their industrialists, or the people that are actually keeping the trains running on time.
And that is the story we have seen play out many times over the course of the years in hot sell organizations.
They're just shitty to their people. And then eventually somebody goes, "Wait a second. You guys are way cooler. Can I come play with you?"
So that is sort of the level of pressure that we are seeing amongst the legacy alliances.
As you guys saw, Evictus started to fill your cascade and was actually starting to move into corpse into Requiem Eternal.
Requiem Eternal was talking about poaching corpse from Evictus as Evictus was disintegrating.
And then we disbanded Requiem Eternal because their alliance leadership was so toxic that they basically did the work of creating a defector for us.
And of course, we always welcome defectors with open arms.
So there are other people in legacy that are disenfranchised, that have been abused, that are in a shitty situation.
And our doors are always open. So that is where we are with that.
I wanted to talk also about the Euro time zone change.
So what we are doing now, the US time zone was handling both Sov and SITs for about as long as the Euros were handling Sov and SITs at the start of the war.
And we got to a point where we're like, "Okay, this is not sustainable due to high burnout Fuzzy Sov stuff.
We're going to shift the Sov vulnerabilities back to Euro time zone while we're going to be keeping the Citadel vulnerabilities in dead zone/US time zone."
So instead of putting the obligation of burnout of handling both Sov and SITs, which is something that the Euros had to deal with at the start of the war for several months and it was a huge pain in the ass,
and then the US time zone had to deal with for several months and it was a huge pain in the ass,
now we're doing a split where Euros have Sov and US is going to handle Citadels.
This is not to say that there is not a shitload of work for the US time zone to do,
because we have, particularly tonight at around 1.30pm, we have several faction Fortizar's that are coming out of reinforced and that we're going to be defending them.
So look for US time zone ops tonight. That is something I should have been talking about at the start of the fireside, but not enough sleep.
So that is what I want you guys to expect is a Euro Sov defense and US Citadel defense,
and that's how we're going to try to avoid the mistakes that we have made in these last two cycles where one time zone gets doubled up on everything.
As you guys have seen, our Euro time zone is very much on an upswing because certain people have been back and very engaged and very active, which is awesome.
Thank you for stepping into the breach. And so we feel pretty good about moving some volns back into Euro.
It is a tough thing when we had to take the volns away from the Euros when we did,
just because Euro time zone is our strongest time zone in terms of numbers and in general, and we would want to typically have volns there.
So I'm hoping that now that you guys have had a chance to recharge and get back in action that all should be fine.
Yeah, the whole three hours of sleep thing is going to be really weird for the meta show when I'm supposed to be smug and I'm just like, "grrrr."
I'm like a fucking weed zombie right now.
All right, so let me take some questions from people.
Oh, that is a good one.
So for someone whose primary income was carrier routing and rorqual, since mining is dead and non-supercap routing is probably not safe, what can we do if we don't have 50 accounts to throw myrmidons at?
This is something that we were just talking about in the Kremlin meeting. Kazanir, can you speak to this for a bit?
Yeah, so I haven't tracked which thread is where, but we have several different threads about how to make ISK right now.
There should be one about C3 wormholes that you can do pretty independently.
There's Hi-Sec mining, which is like AFK type thing, but will feed ISK.
We were working on, there's the old burner thing, and there's one more I forgot.
So we've been working on these. I don't have a complete list of where they all are, but I will go over all that and we'll get a new post up in the War Room consolidating stuff, or maybe in the Home Economics Forum.
So there are a variety of things that people can do. It's not as easy as just going and carrier routing.
So it is again like siege mode. It takes a little more work and a little more prep.
But this is something where we've asked Kremlin, the corporate leadership, and squad leadership to be super engaged with getting people the ability to make money.
So if you are suffering pain, go look in the Home Economics Forum, talk to your corporate leadership.
We can get you stuff to do no matter what you were doing for income before.
There should be some analog to it where you can continue getting ISK in your pocket beyond what we're doing for military reimbursement.
And supporting that's important to us. We know that that's painful.
Oh, that reminds me. Something that did come up on the Kremlin meeting, and I'm not sure there's an action item yet on this because a lot of our corporations stepped up and covered the gap.
But one of the things I wanted to acknowledge is that when we were doing dread reimbursements, several people ended up getting less dread reimbursement during the big Keepstar fights we were having.
When we were losing those dreads to blow up the Keepstars, when it came time to reimburse some of those dreads, I think that the ISK value had changed due to the mineral fuckery that's happening because CCB has completely fucked the economy.
And some people did not get the payout that they were expecting.
So we talked about that at the Kremlin meeting, and I want to acknowledge that that happened. That sucked, and that was not an intentional thing on our part.
I was told at the Kremlin meeting that most people that had gotten shorted, like 300 million ISK or whatever from that, did get covered by their corporations.
But it is something that was not intentional on our part. It is certainly a bad look to be like, "Hey, guys, we're going to throw 800 dreads at a problem, and then when it comes time for you to get a reimbursement, you're going to get less than you expected."
So that was a fuckup. I want to acknowledge that openly in front of everybody, and it's something that we are looking to make sure does not happen again.
So yeah, that sucked. Whoops, sorry about that, guys.
"Any word on more regularly scheduled move ops into Helm's Deep?"
So we have been doing a lot of pinged ops for getting people into Helm's Deep, and I've seen several questions about this.
And so I need to have people understand how this works and why we can't just send an all-ping about a planned time.
A sinojammer keeps the enemy out. It keeps their caps from coming into the system, and that's one of the reasons why we're doing this thing.
There are ways around it, but one of the easiest ways around us having sinojammers is if we send a ping that said, "Hey, guys, at 1800, we're going to all form up and we're going to take the jammers down," the enemy just looks at that, and then they jump us while the jammer's down.
So this is one of the reasons why we have this thread. This is another reason why it took us a bit to get this up and running, because we had to come up with a system.
How do we manage jammer cycling in a way that doesn't completely hand the information to the enemy so that they can just come in as well when we've cycled the jammer?
And that's why we're doing a Kremlin system, and please do look at the thread that Tuzzy posted to handle that.
But one of the things we have been doing all through this week is after strat ops and just when the coast is clear, we are sending pings.
I understand that sitting around and waiting and looking at things to see if an opportunity for that might be a pain in the ass.
So if you have stuff you need to get in, again, follow Tuzzy's thread that he's posted for arranging a jammer cycle if you need it.
And if you don't need a jammer cycle and you don't need to jump freighter stuff in yourself, but you're just looking to get in and out, you just have to look for pings, unfortunately.
It is what it is. We can't have a pre-scheduled jammer cycling for reasons that I hope you now understand.
I don't like telling people "no" without giving them context as to why we have to say "no" because jammer mechanics, kind of like Fuzzy Moussav mechanics, are not exactly well understood because it doesn't really impact most people's daily lives until it's a situation like this.
"How do we plan to prevent spies from coordinating with directors to schedule a time of the jammer to be done?"
Well, I never talk about our counterintelligence methods in public, and I am not going to answer that question because it should be obvious why I shouldn't answer that question.
But it is a reasonable question, and as usual, we have ways of doing that.
And that is why we have the system involving Kremlin rather than a more open and easily gamable one.
"Are we allowed to go take special item in enemy territory?"
I assume you're talking about stealing--oh, so Dictator Imperator is asking, "Are you allowed to go steal complexes and stuff in territory that the enemy is in?"
Yes, absolutely. Go fucking do whatever the hell you want in enemy territory.
I mean, it's enemy territory. Nothing, no rules apply to any of these people.
"Has Asher talked about how much fun he was having stealing ESS from bad guys?"
Oh, that's right. Yeah, we've been doing a lot of the ESS ops recently. That has been a blast. Those are very open for fuckery, and we've been doing that.
So here's what I want to do. Nina has a good question, because I remember Nina was one of the people that was complaining about this originally.
So I was talking to a MUC director who was saying that a MUC had handled some of the top-up on CAP SRP from the situation I was addressing earlier.
But if you are in that situation where you have not been compensated appropriately for a dread loss, get in touch with Kazanir. I want to put this at his feet.
So contact Kazanir, and he will do what he does as an auditor and a spreadsheet maker to determine what our total population there is.
Now again, if you've been compensated at a corp level, because I was just told in the Kremlin meeting that a lot of the people that got left $300 million short ended up getting topped up by their corp.
So we want to make sure that people are handled.
Questions about Stain? Don't go into Stain, they'll fucking shoot you unless you're there for an op.
Like, if you go and you mess with Stain Russ, they will fucking kill you and then they will be very angry about it.
We have said this repeatedly, Stain Russians are Stain Russians. Don't piss them off. Don't be stupid.
This was test pissed off the Stain Russians, look what happened. Don't piss off the Stain Russians. It's not rocket science.
I've been saying this for my entire Eve career and it was kind of funny to see over the course of Empires of Eve Volume 2 how many times I was quoted making some sort of commentary about "don't piss off the Russians, it never ends well."
I've been very consistent about that my entire Eve career because it seems like the most obvious thing in the world.
Don't piss off the Russians. For fuck's sake. Why would you want to do that? Don't piss off the Russians.
Alright, take a look here.
Alright.
So I've got to scrape myself together and make sure that I look pretty on TV for the meta show which is apparently in 18 minutes.
So I need to get ready to smug about the Requiem Eternal stuff and what have you.
Yeah, my schedule is so fucked up. Sorry about this guys. Normally speaking on a first item I'm a little bit more together but we basically did a stakeout on the puppies and so that meant a lot of late nights and waiting.
And I'm in some sort of like really weird ass vampire schedule. I don't even know.
Alright, so that's going to be that for today. Thank you for turning up. If you have further questions, anything about economy, if I want to push people towards GS-ISC, if you are hurting for ISC, a lot of people have found ways to pivot to the CCB economy changes.
I know that Theta is doing a whole lot of work on mining in various places. So if you are screwed, if you are looking for ISC, if you are feeling like you are in trouble, instead of just sitting there feeling like you are in trouble, please do ask for help.
We are not in financial trouble at the alliance level, but we are worried about the line members and that's why we are doing all of these things to try to reach out to you guys to find an easier way to get in Palms Deep and to get the memo around of how can people make money.
Because it's a situation not just of us being at war, but CCB has essentially torpedoed the Null Psych economy as far as we can tell almost everywhere with all of these scarcity changes. So it's a general organizational challenge independent of the war stuff that we need to deal with.
Alright, thank you guys for coming. The war continues. Let's keep on keeping on. I will see you guys later and the meta show is in 15 minutes. So I should probably put my green screen up. That's it. Back to the front!