Fireside Chat Transcript 2025 10 18
Asher Elias:
All right. So what is a fanny pack in the uk? It's a bum bag, dude. Yeah. They don't, they don't call it a fanny pack. Hip pack. Hmm. I've definitely heard bum bag before. Per pouch. That's good. That's good.
All right. All right, all right. All right. We'll have more time for questions later.
So I told you all last week that you would be given a great honor. That is the honor to vote exactly how the state dictates and tells you, and the state now will tell you and dictate how to vote. We are gonna release our ballot here. The voting won't start for another eight days, I believe, but so you can start ingesting it. What I would suggest is that you take this list, you print it out on a white piece of paper from your ream of paper, you put it under your pillow and you sleep on it just for osmosis to really get this ballot going through your head. This is gonna be an really important ballot for you to know up and down, we will have a link so you don't have to know anything about it. We'll make it as easy as possible to vote as democratically as you wish. What if we don't own any paper? Get out a Sharpie, write it on your hand, and then sleep on your hand. You'll wake up, your hand will be asleep, and you'll have a list of the CSM ballot on it. A tattoo? Yeah. That's great. Can you imagine explaining your CSM tattoo in 40 years from now? What are these names? Sir Maximus? I was thinking about mentioning that, but we have a level of decorum here. We're only talking about fannies.
Zintage Enaka
Hyprviper1
Angry Mustache
Youngpuke2
Rots Mijnwerker
Dujek Oneye
Yilifaerr
The Oz
Ariel Rin
Drake Iddon
Alright friends, there it is our ballot from top to bottom that you'll be given the honor of voting from top to bottom exactly as you are given.
Would you guys like to hear some juicy trash talk of the other side? So the other side has had this line, like in the last week, and they've been telling their guys to resub their accounts and the reason why, this is what they're telling their guys. The reason why is because surely the goons will have to attack in the next few months, or sorry, the next few weeks, in the next few weeks because no one would attack in December, which is a dumbass line. But the reason they're doing it is they're gaslighting their dudes because if the accounts are resubed, then they'll have more votes. Obviously, they're not saying this to their guys, they're saying, no, this is like a war thing. You know, the war that's about to happen. The resub right now, there's no other reason behind this. It's not to increase our votes. They're not paying for their account indeed. Subbing my 10 horde alts to vote the goon ballot right now. That's the way to do it. We actually have like a really draconian way where we could actually assign everyone a ballot and then check to see if you voted the ballot. It like there is a way to do it, but we're like, you know, that sometimes is not worth it.
Managed Democracy. Indeed.
Kazanir:
I'll clarify, don't they have to be active for 60 or 90 days before voting eligible? That is not true. There are a variety of myths. The rules are you have to have an account that is, yeah. Right? 60 or 90 days old. I forget which it is, but that you have, so it's already over, right? This is why everyone thinks about it a month beforehand. The account has to have already existed long before election season, and then it has to be Omega when you vote. It doesn't add, the Omega doesn't have a timing. If it's Omega, you can vote anytime during the CSM period, but it just has to have that age on it from July or whatever the month is.
Asher Elias:
Yeah, so as long as your account is like whatever, the 90 days old, as long as it's omega during the vote, it counts. Yeah. Well, I mean, it makes sense. Like Kartra says it's a very CCP thing, but you, if you let Alpha Accounts vote, it would just be, it would be ridiculous. It would get it very insane very quickly.
Kazanir:
Right. I don't know if the weekend pack works, but if it does, good for you.
Asher Elias:
That'd be, it'd be interesting if CCP ever allows Alpha to vote, you know they're trying to juice the numbers for some metric for like a sale or something. Right. Because so many accounts will be made. They'll be like, oh yeah, we're making 3 million new accounts a month. Right. Just for the, their metric.
Kazanir:
I bet the weekend pack does work. The thing that the weekend pack is, it's not available for Plex, you have to buy it. So I think that they don't mind.
Asher Elias:
For $4. Okay. Right. Yeah. Uhhuh. We do think the CSM is important. Like we put a high value on it. So our strategy for a very long time, and when I first came into the inner sanctum of Goonage, I thought, oh, of course I will now be able to hear all the leaks. And I was greatly disappointed that I was not able to. But I have grown to understand the wisdom of building trust in people because you get one leak and then you lose all trust forever, right? So we don't. We're actually kind of super annoying about how little our guys will even weigh in on, like if we're having a strategic discussion, we kind of actually hurt ourselves because some of our smart dudes will just sort of tap out of the strategic discussion because that what they know could influence that discussion. However, the CSM is not a game design committee. It is a life raft and a game saving committee. They're there to stop the worst excesses of CCP by screaming at them before they happen. And so the stuff that the CSM does that's of great value is that the stuff that you never see, it's the stuff that you don't hear about. That's the value of the CSM.
Apple Pear:
And talking about not getting told things. It's even so bad that we get more information about CSM stuff from the Horde CSM channel. Yes. On the Discord than we get from our own CSM members.
Asher Elias:
We genuinely get more stuff from our spies and what horde leaks to their people than what we get from ours, which is fine. Like that. There is a short term advantage to doing that and a long-term disadvantage. And I mean, you've seen, they got one of their guys banned. They, in my opinion, they should have had more banned over the last few years for various stuff that we know has happened.
Kazanir:
Right. They were flying really close to the sun already. And then, whoops.
Asher Elias:
Yeah. Yeah. And I'm talking about, I'm talking about stuff that Kaz is not talking about. Stuff that I know very specifically was leaked that they knew ahead there. There was stuff like the Maelstroms, like maybe they knew about that. That's just something I'm just guessing. Right. I don't know when that was announced or not. Yeah. Lord Ballast brings it up. That's, like a, that's an inference, right? And so I would never say that you should get banned for that. 'cause I don't know when the CSM got told Maelstrom changes were happening. But there is stuff that I know for sure that I can't say, but I knew for sure a hundred percent was leaked. So anyway, our strategy is a long-term strategy. We build trust. They trust our guys, our relationship with the CSM and CCP is so much better than it used to be. If you remember a while ago, we had some issues with CCP and we elected to send a foot fetishist to the CSM to annoy them because we were mad and we had sort of a tantrum. I am saying we in a corporate sense. That turned out to be a bad choice, right? It turned out to be a bad choice. It ruined our relationship with them and it built a lot of distrust and it didn't help. It was just throwing a temper tantrum. And so we have learned and reevaluated our behavior a long time.
Now, you'll note there are some people who are not on the ballot, I'm sorry, who are on the ballot, who are not in imperium. That's very intentional. We're not trying to say, you know, oh, 10 imperium guys would be the best. What we're trying to say is that these guys are smart people who work well. So the number four guy, YoungPuke2, he is on the CSM. He is a low sec dude. He is not aligned with us. I don't think I really have ever had a conversation with the guy ever. He made a post on the EVE subreddit a couple days ago for his candidacy, and I like disagreed with like half of it. But our CSM reps say like, Hey, Young Puke is a guy who is a smart dude who's good to work with, who's someone who is a benefit to the CSM. So that's why he's there. He's on, he's there number four because he's good for the CSM, which is good for the game, which is what we support. Yeah. His, his username is terrible. Many such instances.
Kazanir:
We get a lot of milage on that with ccp, right? Yeah. Calling him YoungPuke2 in a work setting as often as possible is extremely entertaining.
Zintage Enaka: It was very fun calling him Fresh Vomit Dos.
Asher Elias:
The Oz is someone who's mentioned there. Yeah. So there's some questions. You know, why, why are there some outside people here when we could put at number, you know, eight or nine or 10, or we could put someone who's in Imperium. And the reason being is because we are sending signals to CCP to the game as a whole. You know, these are people that we care about. These are people that we respect, and these are people who do a good job, right? And for as much value as 10th on the ballot has, it's probably not gonna get anyone elected. I mean, there's always the chance, right? Probably not, but it sends a message to the game as a whole and to CCP about these people. And we think that's an important message to send. So if you're wondering why, oh, why is this person that's running in goons, why is that person that's running in goons or imperium not on the list? It's a balancing act between those things. So that's the, hopefully answers your question. People who are in imperium who want to be on the ballot are, you know, we want to support them and we are happy to support them, but it's a matter of put your time in, you get to the right position, show that you have, you know, the wisdom, discernment, everything you need to be on the CSM, and we'll be happy to support you. And for a lot of people, you'll notice HyperViper1 is a number two on the list right now. HyperViper ran unsupported and anonymous ballot from us several times before, so you know, it certainly can happen where you don't get on our ballot one time, and you get a lot of official support later on because you show that you have the right stuff. So that's, it's a really good example. I think Hyper ran at least twice before, and neither time was he put on the ballot. So that's the situation with, if you're wondering about that, it's a signal and it's a, it's an important signal for us to make.
I'll answer questions about CSM stuff after I go through the rest of the agenda items. So if you have questions, just jot 'em down, hold them, keep 'em in your head, whatever you want. I gotta talk about a couple other things.
This is a cool one. So if you know about Lending Bee, you know that you can get 5 billion uncollateralized ISK, that means you do not have to give us anything to get your ISK. We have raised the number to 10 billion.
https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/336306-lendingbee-the-bank-of-goonswarm
As you can see Beyond succeeded on five of his six pastes, but he got the CTRL-V little too early on number three, six of seven. He's six of seven to that very well. So if you would like to get 10 billion uncollateralized ISK for a project that you have, that is available now with no, no collateral, so you will pay interest on it just like any other loan, we offer an extremely low interest rates. We have basically pulled the interest rates down on loans and eve just by existing, and you will need a what it's for, we are going to be introducing templates as well. So a template will be like things that are really common to do with like 10 billion isk. So I want to get my first dradnought to run beacons. You know, that'd be a template thing. And says, I need a loan for exotic dancers. If you're gonna need 10 billion for exotic dancers, you need to make a business case for why that would be. So for instance, maybe you could show, hey, the market in C-J it, they buy 38 exotic dancers daily. 'cause goons are degens. And you're like, I could get in this market and make this much money so I could really go with a business case for exotic dancers. Hey, there you go. Maybe we're loaning you 10 billion ISK for exotic dancers, but for the, for more normal stuff like running a crab beacon, we will have templates available sort of for, you know, plug and play so you're not writing a business case for something exotic dancers.
Speaking. Speaking of exotic dancers, no. Speaking of crab beacons. Horde finally got off their ass and dropped on one of our dudes last week, right after I went on a rant about them. Super happy about that. That guy who died would've lived if he had not thought for himself, much like the goon ballot. We provide you with mandatory fittings that you should use none of your brain power to alter. And he was a goon turbo genius who altered his fit. Also ran two of the same, for some reason, two of the same boosts. Either one of those would've saved him. So yeah, we were really close. We were really close to saving him, but congrats to Horde for getting off their ass. One kill in, what is it, like 1.5 years now? Good for them. We have seen two of their supers die in the last week. One from us. So well done. One in, one in a year is a good rate for you guys. We'll see if you can do some more. We'd love for you to do it. You guys still fucking suck, but our guys are happy to receive your next drop.
If you are a person who would like to save these people, our response was really good. We would love to have you ready in a fax. You know, be sitting in a titan like you're in the launch tube of the Battlestar Galactica, like waiting to get shot out. That'd be ideal. We'd love for you to have like, just have your guys sitting there and ready to go. Nova, go ahead and save that question for once we get the questions, so I'm happy to answer it.
And yeah, Black Ops is recruiting. Shout out to Black Ops. They're doing a great job.
And then one last thing on my agenda that I wanted to talk about is Sky Mules. Sky Mules is a really important thing. Basically, they go around in space and suck out our goo. If you are a German, this is probably your job. You know you're playing truck simulator in your spare time, why don't you go out and help the Space Empire do it? Okay. So Alhazred. If you want to do it, I'm vouching you. You're good to go. If you're looking to be a Sky Mule, we will, we'll skip the six month waiting limit for you. But yeah, if you're a German, this is like a hundred percent your thing. Who else are known for like being, you know, good at this kind of thing? I don't know. I'm real, I'm painting with broad strokes. This is, no, it's not only for German. Yeah. Dutch people too. If you like, you know, playing truck simulator, anything like that, this is your kind of thing. It's a really helpful job. It's a task oriented job. It's satisfying to get something done and know that you're contributing. If those things appeal to you, then being a sky mule might be nice. And there are some benefits as well. Like for instance, you get open to an ACL that will let your Titan bridge to various places and I dunno, other, other stuff like that too. So we appreciate Sky Mules and they are recruiting.
https://goonfleet.com/index.php/topic/363184-sig-skymules/
By the way, Battlestar Galactica is 20 years old. Thanks for ruining my day. Appreciate you very much.
Ranger Gama:
Make it worse, Asher. The new Battlestar Galactica is 20 years old.
Asher Elias:
Well, right, yeah, that's what I was referring to. Yeah. The original one is getting the original one is 40. Yeah. Yeah. Oh no, no. That's late seventies. Yeah. Yeah. It was 79. It came in. Wait, original little one. Nothing but the Rain Faros Warrior.
Beyond. There's original one. Yeah. I missed that one. But the, if you guys didn't watch it, like, honestly, I imagine that most people in here have done it. But if you're at all a sci-fi nerd, which I imagine that is a lot of you, please go watch Battlestar Galactica. Like at least seasons one and two right now. So good. So say we all.
All right, friends. Lemme open up to questions. I know some of you had questions before. Go ahead and throw 'em in there and I will try and answer them for you.
I paused Independence Day for Fireside. Happy Independence Day. I didn't know it was the 4th of July in New Zealand, Casador, but awesome. Good for you.
What did you eat today? I'm not eating anything.
Init War update. Yeah, so there's been one fight in the last week and it wasn't part of their war. The air quote war, I guess we'll call it this week because, you know, it's, it's basically, I asked Zintage earlier about that and I think that's what he said, the air quote war, which was a good name for it so far. Basically they both got called by a third party and they showed up in their dreads and they shot each other and init beat up frat pretty good in that fight. Other than that, I have not personally seen any sort of, you know, big engagements or small ones really. So nothing much going on that war this week, but I wouldn't, you know, it's, we're one weekend, A lot of times people are feeling each other out the first week and, you know, gotta go on a couple first dates, ask what you do before you really get to the big questions.
Zoe, I'm not going to fanfest. No.
Charlotte says Asher, regarding our alliance ballot, which of our candidates have shown support for cat ears? I'm just trying to think of who would be the biggest cat ear supporter amongst our people. I'm not sure. Kazanir yep. He's not on the ballot anymore. He is a term limited.
Zintage Enaka: I like how everyone's calling me out.
Asher Elias:
Yeah, I didn't say anything but it was in my mind.
Apple Pear:
Since, since hyper viper is a real life spod brain, I think they assigned this role to him.
Asher Elias:
Okay. Yeah. Hyper Viper is currently mining, but in real life.
Asher, I got the death glow skin for the Hubris. Would you be interested? Yeah, I would be.
Are we gonna war soon? That's a future plan. Sting orka. So war is on the horizon. No one knows the time and the place, but the father.
Can we change the name of the home system from C-J to B-Hive, that's pretty funny.
Your silence speaks loudly, Zintage Enaka. Exactly.
FRT lost four hundred and sixty-five billion yesterday to init. Yeah. John Har Tale. That's the one fight that we're talking about.
What other SIGs are recruiting. We have a lot of active SIGs that are looking to do stuff right now, so I'm sure that they will be piping up.
Thoughts on the Zkill oops eagleclaw asks. Dude, I honestly think the game would be better if Zkill was deleted. And this is someone who likes to go through their old kills and look at them 'cause I have a terrible memory, but I know that they're backing it up and it'll be back up soon. But I think that there's this thing called Goodards law where when the metric becomes the measure, it ceases to be a useful metric. And so that means that like your boss says, oh, we need to make 40 of these a week. That's like a, that's like a goal. But when you see, like, when they start measuring like CPIs and stuff like that, and those become, it, those CPIs start being useless, right? And I think that's what Zkill sort of does is like you get, you get this sort of measurement based culture that we try to avoid and it's something I accuse Horde of quite regularly and I think it's shown that is a bad way to live your life. So I guess in a way it's good for us that exists because other people compare it to. There is always the temptation to run all fights through that. And then I think that's where it really becomes bad.
How's the state of PH losing more corps? I don't think they've had anything happen this week.
Any comments on the pan krab post over on r Eve? I read that one. I commented a little bit. I mean, it's pretty self-explanatory. You know, I think that the points are generally correct,
Zkill is why we cared about efficiency instead of objectives. Let's get back to objectives. I mean, that's the point, Zoe, is that we want to focus on objectives, not focus on efficiency. I think a lot of people fall into a trap where they start listening to that efficiency side, and that's almost always incorrect. You know, efficiency can mean you did something right, but it's often the wrong, like if you're playing for efficiency, you're probably playing incorrectly. If you win an objective and have good efficiency, you probably did that fight correctly. But if you lose a fight and have good efficiency, you lost the fight.
Kazanir:
Right? Yeah. It's a metric. It gives you information, right? That's what a metric does. It explains something that happened, right? But when you take it and say this thing, well let's this, I'm gonna magically add it up across multiple and tell myself that that has the same meaning, right? That's the critical errors. It no longer means that same thing. And you try and compare corporations or pilot or alliances on the basis of their overall efficiency, as if that's meaningful and make that into a religion that defines how you recruit. I'll stop. I could rant for a long time.
Asher Elias:
Yeah. It's that. I hear what you mean.
Asher you simply have multiple people typing in mumble. Where are people typing for the fireside? Yes. If you are typing into the sidebar in mumble, you're typing in the wrong place, please go to Elysium on Jabber. It is a channel that you can join. Elysium on Jabber. It is the general chat channel for Jabber.
Okay, so I wanna address something here 'cause I do want to have a balance and I think that is important. Someone says, I play for fun. Fuck efficiency. Pascalero says that, and I think this is a good attitude, but I think that could be taken too far as well. It's the opposite problem, like I strongly, very strongly do not believe in setting out with an objection or a, an expectation of failure. So if I'm gonna go into their space and I don't have a way I think I can win, then I think that's really setting yourself up to fail. And I don't think that's fun. Now, obviously different people can have different opinions and I've seen people set off in like 10 dreads to go into enemy space and then say like, Hey, we had fun. And to me that is the opposite of fun. That's not in any way fun at all. I can't tell you what your fun is, but I do believe that that sort of attitude is also can be taken too far. And I think that there are a pretty large amount of people who don't agree with it. So I try, one thing I try not to do, and I don't always succeed at this is I try not to just say it's just pixels because it's just pixels takes away the meaning that we assign to something. And legitimately, almost nothing in life has meaning if you didn't assign it to it. Like, you know, if your elected representative wasn't given power by you. Like, there's no like mandate from heaven that says you have to have, you know, democracy in Belgium, right. Whatever. It's because you say it, it becomes true. So, and for the same reason. This game matters to us because of our relationships, because of the people we care about. Because we decide to fight for each other. And I feel like when you say, Hey, it's just pixels, it puts those relationships on a lower level. It puts the value that you assign to something on a lower level, and it feels like cope a lot of the time. So if you hear me say it's just pixels. I'm probably coping a little bit, and I'm sure that our enemies will clip that probably the next time I say it. But in general, I care about this game. I care about you guys, and I want to do well because I want to give you guys my best. So that's the balancing factor to don't play for efficiency, but also you should try to win and you shouldn't try to dismiss, you know, what happens as, oh, it doesn't matter. Soak you can try to give it a shot. Go ahead.
Is there a SIG based on kill efficiency? That's kind of a funny idea that's, I would love to see that SIG fall apart really fast.
Apple Pear:
There's at least a SIG about the opposite of your idea. Like, whelping all the time, sir.
Asher Elias:
Dude, I, and that was probably my least favorite SIG for a very long time. I don't like that idea. Just I am morally opposed to it.
Silk says I'm losing my job in January. I'm hard looking now for a new one. So we have a Goon jobs forum. It's a good place to post if you have jobs and if you are looking for a job, go ahead and post your skills, post what kind of job you're looking for. Generally, almost everyone who is hired from amongst goons has pointed out that they, that hire exceeded their expectations. I think it's sort of the same thing that you, people who have already shown that they can work in a system that they're committed to a cause and that's generally a good thing. In my experience, almost always the worst kind of jobs I've been at is the places where no one cared. The, it's just pixel's jobs are actually probably worse than the Horde you know, efficiency jobs. I dislike both of those. You need to find one with a better balance, but pretty much the feedback that we have always gotten is that. Goon hires almost always exceed the value above replacement player hire. There's this, there's a statistic, this is gonna be pretty powerful, but there's a statistic that people who attend church make more money than those who don't. Accounting for almost for every other variable. And I think it's sort of the same thing. You know, people who are playing in an organization like ours are showing that they can be part of an organization. Work with other people. These are the kind of like, you're just eliminating certain things that you have a hard time testing for and that you are already interviewing for anyway.
https://goonfleet.com/index.php/forum/615-goons-with-jobs/
Aoife says, man, I hate networking. Yeah. I mean that's the thing is if you put yourself in a place where you enjoy it, then you do the networking without having to be there. Like if you go to your like local, you know, business organization, everyone's just there to network and no one's there 'cause they want to be. If you were at a place like this, or your church or whatever it is, or, you know, whatever third place you go to because you like at your game store, there are, there's people there that want to be there. And so the networking isn't hard. If you set out to go anywhere to network, it's setting yourself for failure.
Zoe, sorry about your immolation issues.
Kazanir recommends hiring goons.
When is the next Sumo tournament? So gonna start in about less than a month now. Less than a month.
Does anyone have a link for the incursion group? That's a good shout out. So if you wanna make money, incursions are doing really well. We just have so much more space. We have a ton of incursions.
Alright guys, I'm gonna do a couple more minutes of questions, so if you have anything, go ahead and get 'em out here otherwise we'll wrap it up. But I wanna make sure I answer any questions that I meant missed.
Aren't the Sumos in London right now? So yeah, Sumotori or wrestlers, sumos is not the proper terminology. I don't really care. But anyway, they're doing like, they're doing like a display, like a thing. It's not real fighting. It's more just like, here's Sumo and we do some sort of like 80% fights. It's sort of like a preseason or a friendly is sort of, would be the way, you know, you could look at it.
I like how the incursion squad, their actual title says PVE and ISK making with friends. Kind of funny, we just talked about network effects and you know, being with people that you enjoy being with. There you go. Right there.
Why does Pan Krab use super and titans, while we don't. So you'll note Vostrop that when they dropped on us last Saturday, we dropped like, I don't know, 80 supers and titans that we formed in like a minute. So it's just an opportunity thing. If they wanna show up with more dreads, we'll be happy to show up with more supers and titans.
Have I taken part in my first Sumo match? I do not believe I have.
Alright, and Zoe, asks Asher one question. Is this the last question? Yes, it is.
Have a good day. Talk to y'all next week.
