Fireside Chat Transcript 27 Jun 2k20

Saturday, you know, talking to 1,100 of your buddies about Spaceship War, no big deal.
So if you're new or you haven't been to a fireside for a while, we do these in Elysium
at conference.gunfleet.com.
That is where you can ask questions.
We have a bunch of shit to go over today.
So first things first, I want to congratulate everyone.
We have made it to the first save point of this campaign.
That being the successful withdrawal of our forces from Cloud Ring and from the Galactic
Northwest and pivoting to deal with this invasion and getting our asses safely back to 1DQ1.
There are still going to be move-ops.
Obviously, not everybody is back to 1DQ1 yet.
There will be move-ops after this fireside and going forward, but I do not anticipate
that we will be leaving 1DQ1 anytime soon.
Please make sure, as a reminder, to put your jump clones in J5A.
You do not need to leave ships behind in J5A, but you absolutely must have jump clones in
J5A because if shit happens, we will be back.
Okay, when I say the first save point, essentially, if you've been in the trenches this week,
the way that we do things when it comes to Hellwar is we burn the candle at both ends.
Every hour that we spend in preparation before this war starts will be worth 100 hours of
effort after the war begins.
The enemy has given us a lot of time.
One of the reasons the enemy has given us a lot of time is that we have intercepted
their plans and ruined their plans, so now they're having to draw up invasion plans because
their whole Cloud Ring dogpile did not exactly work.
So what does that mean?
That means ADM fleets.
That means...well, actually, let me pivot here.
I want to talk about something else.
It's tough because I have all these really cool plans that I've been talking about for
like the last several hours, and I can't talk about all of them on a fireside because they
don't start until the NIP ends.
Let me back up here.
Just give me an idea here in Elysium.
Mix up if you have never been in a Hell War, like the Fountain War or Great War.
If you've been in wars before but you've never been in a Hell War.
Okay, alright.
So we've got a lot of summer children here.
Now some of you might be offended by me calling you a summer child.
I don't mean it in a dismissive or in a bad way, but the truth is that for the last several
years we've had a lot of regular wars, and there's a difference between a regular war
and a Hell War.
If you look at the Fountain War and if you look at the history of the Great War, I highly
recommend that people refresh themselves, particularly of the Fountain War.
The link in the first sentence of the War Update thread is an amazing Scott Manley video
going through everything that happened in the Fountain War.
You can play this game for many, many years and feel like you're an expert PVPer and you
can be very good at EVE Online, but until you have been blooded in a Hell War you are
still, as far as our organization is concerned, a summer child.
But this is an opportunity for all of us to realize why it is that goons say "fuck puppies"
so often, because you're going to find out.
Now the reason why this is a Hell War, what's the distinction, is people like to say that
they want to bring anger and hate and things like that to EVE.
Even the Casino War wasn't a Hell War.
The Casino War started because of a spat that had nothing to do with Goon Swarm.
It was an internal fight between three people in Space Monkeys Alliance who got mad at each
other.
One of them happened to be running a casino who then funded 20 trillion worth of free
isk for all of our enemies to attack us, but it started originally as a weird Space Monkeys
drama that was not at all related to what the puppies started calling World War B. We
are calling this one World War B because fuck puppies and it is actually all of them trying
to come at us for real.
So there you go.
What is different about this?
What is different about this is that we know that they have planned to backstab us.
We caught them doing it and then, and I love this because I've watched these guys try to
make excuses for days now and all these shows they're going on, they spelled out the fact
that they had planned this backstab months in advance on Talking in Stations like last
Sunday or two Sundays ago, whatever it was.
Time is a blur.
But these motherfuckers, they wanted to backstab us.
They planned it.
We caught them doing it and then they admitted that they were planning a backstab months
in advance, which means that they have personally gone after us and that we must personally
make an example in the video game of Eve Online such that people realize the consequences
for coming at us in this way.
And yes, they want to wipe us out of our space.
They want to get rid of us.
They have made it personal and we are going to see that through.
This is a hell where this is different.
Test is next.
So while all of these motherfuckers in the game, and I want you guys to get this in your
heads because this is key.
All these motherfuckers in the game are going to come at us.
They always do.
This is what puppies do.
They did in the Fountain War.
They did in the Great War.
They did in the casino war.
This is their nature.
All of the puppies are coming after us.
But all of our guns, all of our schemes, all of our vengeance is focused on Test Alliance.
Please ignore.
Test is next.
They can have NC dot allies.
They can have horde allies, but the pain we are going to bring is going to be focused
laser focused on Test Alliance.
Please ignore.
We are going to fuck these guys.
We are going to make them regret the day they ever even dared think about backstabbing us.
We are going to make an example out of these pieces of shit.
So that the rest of the galaxy knows because the puppies have fucking forgotten.
They have forgotten what happens when you provoke us.
They have forgotten the consequences of what happens when you come at the Imperium.
We are going to step our game up.
By the time this war is over, we will look like a completely different organization because
whenever these motherfuckers come at us, we change into something that is even worse.
And it's going to be a lot of fun.
This is a hell war.
Things are different.
So, there's going to be some changes to reimbursement.
I don't care about running off to go attack Horde.
That's not Test.
Test is next.
I don't care about you randomly ganking your fraternity guy in bumfuck nowhere.
Test is next.
I legitimately do not want us to blame brave newbies for this idiotic test plan, right?
So like we're not going to be hurting brave newbies or anything like that.
They didn't do anything.
Even if they like send random ass fleets.
Test planned this thing.
Test owns this thing.
And Test will pay the price for this thing.
All right.
Let's get into some of the crunchy details.
The puppies might say, "Oh, they're triggered.
Oh, they're mad," or whatever, but they don't realize that it's actually a shitload of fun
to genuinely despise your foe when your foe has planned to backstab you ineptly.
There's just this sort of degree of, I don't know, emotional, the mojo, the feel, the vibe
of a good hell war when you know that your enemy deserves it and that you're just going
to fucking grind their face into the mud.
It's glorious.
Hell wars only come around every five or six years for a reason, guys.
Do not miss out on this opportunity.
What happens if Test ends the NIP early?
Well, then we'll launch all of our plans that we've been planning for when the NIP ends.
I'm not concerned.
I hope a motherfucker tries.
All right.
So we need to talk about some gritty things rather than me just hurfing blurfs.
But I hope you guys get the idea of the hell war.
If you heard me yelling at people on the fucking move op and you haven't heard me in like purge,
burn, kill, pay the fuck attention mode before, it's a wakeup call.
So let's get to practical matters.
We have a lot of returning vets.
A lot of you have not used a capital ship in anger recently.
We want returning vets.
Tell your friends, water's warm.
It's a hell war.
This is not going anywhere.
Even if Test and them do not invade, we will be flaying Test.
We will be making an example of them.
It will be brutal.
It will not stop.
There will be a hell war.
We have declared World War B. World War B is a hell war.
Puppies are mad about us calling out World War B. Good.
Fuck puppies.
They do this shit.
We owe them nothing.
Fuck them.
So there will be war.
Get your friends back.
And as a result, we're going to be trying to jam in a capital training op this upcoming
weekend.
I know it's the July 4th weekend, but Europeans don't give a shit about that.
And in the US, you should probably be staying inside and not getting the plague.
So we're going to be trying to do CC cap training ops.
So if you're like, fuck, I came back for the hell war.
How the hell do I even use my Titan?
What do you mean I can't put a sign on my Titan?
That kind of shit.
We're going to do training ops.
We're going to plan those for next weekend.
And there'll be more information about that as things come.
Couple other things.
You're going to start seeing now that we're back in 1DQ1, you're going to start seeing
Sternovik fleets, Kikimora fleets.
The reason we are going to be spinning up more of these, if you see a Kikifleet spin
up, that is going to be a long range strike on Test assets, most likely.
We have renewed our, it turns out that some of our old friends from the Halloween war,
the guys that were running the Russian org that we were allied with, our old friends
have been living in Stain and hunting Test this entire time.
So the Stain Russians have eyeballs on Test.
They know their doctrines, they know all their weak points, and they hunt them for support.
And now we have established a diplomatic and coordination embassy with them in our embassy
discord and our coordinators are plugged in with these dudes who are ancient friends of
ours.
They're on the same side together in BR5 for God's sakes.
And those guys have, we will be able to provide the heavy hardware.
Like if they catch a Nyx but they don't have the dudes for it, we'll be able to send a
Kikimora fleet over there to fucking kill it.
So there's lots of, if you see Kikifleet, that's probably some like crazy Russian allied
bullshit in deep enemy space.
So go for that.
Should be fun.
Are the Stain guys set blue?
I don't know if we've set them blue yet.
We probably will end up setting them blue, but this is, things are happening very quickly.
So it's a good question, I don't have the answer for it.
This is like some old school like Red Storm Federation shit guys.
Again it's a hell war, like it's a gigantic sign of a hell war when it's like Goon Swarm
and friends and like the whole Imperium getting together and we have scary fucking Russians
on our side.
It just, it just adds to the vibe.
It's good shit.
Do I find it weird that we're not in the Blue Donut anymore?
We've never been in the Blue Donut.
Puppies always do this.
I never trust puppies.
Left to their own devices, again going back 15 fucking years, at every opportunity, puppies
drop everything that they're doing and they try to wipe us out of the game.
This is why fundamentally speaking they can never be trusted, they can never be relied
upon, they can only be put at odds by a delicate balance of fear.
They must be taught, they must be reminded what happens when you betray our organization.
Do we have an ETA when the T2 Alliance revs are going to be out of the oven?
We have like a bunch of fucking revs firing out of various factories everywhere.
I can't answer that question because there's so many revs getting shot out everywhere that
I don't know specifically where to point you, sorry dude, hopefully somebody here knows.
What will happen to Perimeter?
TEST will adhere to the deal of the TTC.
I do not anticipate that TEST will mess with the deal of the TTC because it's the only
thing holding up what's left of their economy.
If they mess with the TTC deal, we will destroy the TTC, we will make an even further example
of them, and then maybe we'll put our own version of it up, or we'll just make sure
that nobody gets it because if we trigger the puppies in Hysak enough, they will not
invest in Perimeter or Citadel.
Vili knows this, everybody knows this, so we are not going to fuck with the Golden Goose,
but if they try to keep us from getting the eggs of the Golden Goose, we will slit that
Golden Goose's throat.
That's why I don't anticipate that TEST is going to have a problem and I'm not worried
about Perimeter, but we know that we can take it out if we need to, which means that I don't
expect that TEST is going to be that dumb.
They have already fucked up tremendously.
Maybe they'll fuck up more, who knows, it's fucking TEST.
Anything is possible, but we have plans.
Almost anything that we have asked questions about, doesn't mean that you shouldn't ask
these questions because maybe we haven't thought about it, but in most cases because these
fuckers have given us three weeks of notice because they told the entire galaxy their
fucking plan because they couldn't keep their dumb mouths shut, we have had an opportunity
to scheme up moves and counter moves and things like that.
Once again, every hour that we have to prepare and get ready for war is worth 100 hours after
July 5th, which is why we are delighted that they have decided to give us so much notice
for their little backstab plan.
I don't know why you would ask what about Initiative, are they on our side?
Initiative is a member of the fucking Imperium, dude.
Like we literally spent the last several days covering Initiative Keepstar Extractions because
they're a member.
So this is the thing that drives me crazy about Puppies.
One of the things that Puppies will do is they'll try to say, "Well, Initiative isn't
really part of the Imperium," or whatever.
It's probably bullshit.
Like the whole, again, the Casino War, they don't like us calling it the Casino War because
it reminds everybody that the only reason they were able to do things in the Casino
War is that they had infinite cheated isk.
And they don't like people knowing that their little special snowflake crap only worked
in the Casino War because they had infinite isk.
They like to make fun of the Fabian Strategy.
The Fabian Strategy works pretty well when you deny and delay and destroy your enemy's
assets, but it doesn't work at all if your enemy has infinite assets because they have
a fucking RMT casino shitting out things.
So Puppies are fucking dumb.
Initiative is part of the Imperium.
That last war we fought was the Casino War, motherfuckers.
And this is World War B, which we are going to win, and we're going to ram World War
B in their faces at every opportunity because fuck Puppies and fuck anything that they think
matters.
These people think that their thoughts, that their hopes, that their dreams matter to us
when they come at us every few years.
All these fucks come at us and try to kick us out of the game, and we are supposed to
care what they name things?
We are supposed to care what they think?
We are supposed to care about what they feel about us?
Fuck 'em.
When we go on the offense, will we completely remove Tess?
I have a number of ideas, but most of them involve harvesting them for an extended period
of time because it would be too easy to take their space, and their space is shit compared
to ours.
But we have a lot of delightful, delightful ideas that I'm eager to show them.
We have such wonderful, wonderful things to show them.
I want their screams.
There will definitely be a lot of heavy assets destroyed.
Like we're going to go over there and we're going to fuck 'em sideways, guys.
We're going to blow as much of their shit up as we can get away with, but I don't think
that we're going to take their space because I want to continue to make an example of these
guys.
One of the reasons why this thing is so stupid from Tess, I'm going to explain the grand
strategy shit.
One of the reasons why Tess has really done fucked up here is if you bring up GARPA, and
again for some reason a lot of people don't necessarily use GTS, but I highly recommend
as you go into this hell war to download and install GTS.
It's on our forums.
It's a very, very important and very useful tool because it will show you the real chess
board of this game.
And so if you bring up GARPA and you take a look at how close Esoteria and Paragon Soul
is, which is Tess's core, how close their core is to us, and how difficult that sort
of gap of space between Paragon and Perry Basis is, they can be allied with NC.
They can be allied with Hort.
They can be allied with Tess.
But no matter how many other puppies that they ally up with, the same crew of idiots
that came at us in the casino war, the same crew of idiots that always comes at us, those
allies cannot defend their core regions when you look at the map.
There is nothing that PL and NC. can do to help protect Esoteria and Paragon Soul or
any of the rest of Tess's backfield from us.
If they are hacking us in Cloud Ring or something, they can stage together and all ball up in
a big shit pile of fucking puppies.
But when it comes to this buffet of idiots who backstabbed us that we can just flins
for our amusement over a period of time, they can't get PL and NC. to help them as easily.
The geography, I'm sure for big ops, if we hit their keep stars or something, you would
see PL and NC. turn up for some of them.
But over a long period of time, it's going to be very hard to convince PL and NC. and
Hort and FRT to ball up deep in Tess's base to protect them from our invasion vectors.
As Rommelkost says, we hold the interior alliance.
It's absolutely correct.
Do we expect our enemies to take advantage of NPC Delve?
Potentially.
I mean, that's great.
If they want to stage an NPC Delve, like in previous attempts, we will do what we did
in PRTAC and we will sit on their fucking faces for a month if it's necessary and make
an example of them in the exact same way that we sat on their faces in PRTAC for 31 days
and made an example of Band of Brothers.
I hope a motherfucker comes to NPC Delve.
I don't think they will.
I'm pretty sure they're going to come through the Aquarius invasion salient.
But if they come into NPC Delve, bonus.
What comes after Tess?
We'll find out.
Again, like when it gets to war, you can only predict what's going to happen at a pretty
like a week by week kind of thing.
That's why I was saying like we made it to the first save point.
Step one was successfully withdrawing from Pod Ring and getting our guys back to 1DQ1.
Why do we wait for them to end the NIP?
Why couldn't we just end it ourselves?
Because we stick to our deals and we knew that they were going to do it and we knew
it would be to our advantage because we got their plan weeks before they even told us
that they were going to be ending the NIP.
We stick to our deals.
Like one of the, you know, we are able to strike deals with our enemies because everybody
in the galaxy knows that when the Imperium gives its word, its word is its bond.
Like the guiding light of our organization is always best possible friend, comma, worst
possible enemy.
And this is the bit where we remind everybody what worst possible enemy looks like.
Should we focus on capital or skills or subcap skills?
That's going to depend upon your preference.
If you don't have a capital ship, you should probably get one.
But if you do not, if you're a newbie and you don't have the skills yet to fly our mainline
doctrines, I recommend that you do that.
They already had people solo hacking in Quireus.
So let's talk about Quireus.
If you look at the war update thread, if you scroll down, we have pinged the war update
thread multiple times because it has standing orders at the bottom.
We have updated those standing orders.
They include a list of systems that are in Quireus that we want the ADMs raised in.
There's a whole bunch of systems in Quireus that we do not care about the ADMs being raised
in because a huge chunk of Quireus is a floodplain.
So here's what's going to happen.
There are certain systems that we will defend.
There are certain systems that we do not give a flying fuck about.
And I want you guys to get this into your head long before they invade us.
So when you see some bumfuckistan system in Quireus that we do not give a shit about,
and you say, "Oh no, like we lost the system, which we literally did not defend," you know,
expect it.
It's a floodplain.
After we lost the Casino War, we designed Fortress Delve around the idea of defense
versus floodplains.
And so in the war update thread, there is a link to the systems in Quireus that we give
a shit about.
And everything else in Quireus, what the fuck ever.
By contrast, Fountain Delve and Varia Basis, we need all of those systems getting their
ADMs up.
Like there's no floodplains in that.
Just do the fucking work.
Those are our core regions.
We're making sure the ADMs are maximized in those regions.
And we're going to need to do ADM fleets basically every day.
You know, this is going to be a thing.
We are building a space fortress.
A space fortress needs trenches and bunkers and artillery platforms and all the other
good shit.
We are turning this whole thing into a fortress planet.
And that means that we need to get out there and dig some fucking trenches.
And that is what the ADM fleets are about.
We are updating the ADM fleets.
We have got a lot of people doing ratting remittance, which is great.
We're going to be including mining.
I think we're using procurers for that.
And there's going to be a thread posted with information about that.
In a lot of these systems, they'll have a military index of four.
But when we are mining for ADM, you don't even really have to care about the ore.
You just rip it out of the rocks and dump it in a jet can and forget it.
The idea here is cheap and cheerful.
It's not like let's run a real mining op where we're trying to maximize the amount of ISK
value we're getting.
It's just like rip the ore out as cheap as possible, throw it away, do whatever the fuck
you want with it, and be as enduring as possible.
Actually, can somebody, one of the directors who knows what the fuck about the mining stuff,
talk a little bit about the procurer thing we're doing?
I got to unmute Atrium here.
Atrium, can you talk about this, please?
Yeah, so two things.
Myrmidons, which up until this point have been only reimbursed in Delve, they are going
to be reimbursed in Quirious, Period Bases, and Fountain as well as Delve.
Same fit.
There's a new PVE thread.
And it's the same one you've always been using, but we made it easier to see.
Second thing, the ADM mining fleets, it's going to be procurers and porpoises.
If you die to an enemy, like not an NPC because you're dumb, but if you die to an enemy fleet,
you will get reimbursed as under shitstack reimbursement.
And again, I'll drop the link in Elysium to the new thread.
Thank you very much.
A couple other things I want to mention.
So again, these firesides are going to be sometimes less me herping blurps and more
me communicating things like meetings and orgs and stuff like that.
Look forward to like if we have emergency firesides, that's a thing that happens in
war.
So always keep your eyes on broadcasts.
So later tomorrow, 1900, we're going to have, if you're a cap pilot, if you are a super
pilot, if you are in HEAL Team 6, there is going to be a general meeting at 1900 tomorrow
for cap pilots, super pilots, HEAL Team 6 members, that means fax machines.
Yeah.
Can we look forward to a State of the Union?
I don't know.
We'll see.
It's a facts and circumstances thing.
A lot of times I do State of the Union when it's like a moment that we're about to like
launch an invasion and strike.
But at the same time, we keep having firesides and like OP firesides, whatever, where there's
like more than a thousand people here.
So we'll do what's necessary when we feel the time to strike.
Do we want Red Vets to jump up to J5A and plop in a jump clone there?
Yeah, you can just add in a taxi scepter, like use a malediction.
Don't be an idiot about it.
You can scamper up there, slam in a jump clone, and come on back.
We will absolutely want to have jump clones in J5A because if the bad guys try to make
a serious attack on J5A, we will go up there, we will distribute caches of dreadnoughts,
and we will skullfuck the bad guys.
Can non-cap pilots join the meeting?
Probably not.
No.
I mean, this is for people who are--it's a meeting for capswarm people, so if you're
not there yet, you're not there yet.
Karthus points out that the CTEKN/KVN gate is camped, assume it's always camped, they
have been feeding all day on the gate sacks and such.
Yeah, like, one of the things you guys are going to see here as we go into Hellwar is
that we are an organization that believes in sort of Darwinian learning.
People are going to be fucking dumb and they are going to die and we are going to point
at their deaths as an example for you to learn.
When we go into Hellwar mode, it's no longer like hand-holding kumbaya kind of shit, it
goes purge, burn, fuck, kill.
And that means if you're going to be a dumbass, instead of going like "oh, well you should
feel reimbursed" and we're going to say "well, they're fucking idiots and they died and that's
their problem, hopefully they learned something."
At the same time, we are going to be training our fleet commanders to, like, you know, set
traps for these cloaky camps, but at the same time, you are going to have to assume the
entire galaxy is trying to kill you, which the entire galaxy is trying to kill you and
kick you out of your space, so you will have to die until you learn to use some basic survival
skills and if you cannot learn some basic survival skills, your idiocy will be used
as an example for everybody else to learn from.
The essence of wisdom is learning from other people's mistakes.
Will there be a move-up from J5A after the fireside?
Yes, we're actually going to be spinning a move-up shortly.
Are most of the dumb people in any one alliance?
No, human stupidity is universal.
There are always dumb people.
Some dumb people cannot be reached or ficked and life gets a lot easier and a lot less
stressful once you realize that some people are just dumb and cannot be reached and instead
of getting mad about "maybe we can teach the dumbest of the dumb to learn," you just accept
that the only value that they have is that their death might be an example of value to
those who can learn.
In US time zone, so there's going to be move-ups after the fireside and US time zone tonight.
So 030 eve time, 030 eve time for US time zone tonight, we're going to do a move-up
from J5A.
So there's going to be your time move-up after this fireside and there's going to be a J5A
move-up, another J5A move-up at 030 tonight.
Now on these move-ups, you fucking listen to the FC.
He's going to tell you to move at certain times.
We are moving the fleets when we move the fleets during a move-up as those of you who
were with us yesterday when I had to yell at everybody.
There's a reason why we're doing things and if you fuck up or you're dumb, you're holding
everybody else up.
Now I'm not going to be able to go on the move-up immediately because I've got to do
the meta show here and I should probably set that shit up because it's starting in 20 minutes,
but I will probably go and ride herd on the US time zone one because we're going to fucking
commissar people until they wake up and smell the hell war.
This is not no longer nice, happy, snuggly Mittens firesides.
Like these people are going to kick us out of our space and camp us into NPC delve unless
we fight them off and punish them for trying.
So shit's serious in a way that it is not normally serious in the last several years
of the warfare.
Get that into your heads now.
If you want to understand what it's like, go watch that Scott Manley video about the
fountain war because you'll realize if you watch that video of the history of the fountain
war that it was a near thing.
There were fuck-ups.
We were on the back foot.
They were talking about invading us all the way up to the FK.
These things can swing one way or another very rapidly, which is why we are preparing
like fucking psychopaths right now or every hour we can.
Atrium, yes, they did no comment.
All right, guys, so I got to get ready for the the meta show.
We're going to have Asher and me and January.
We're going to be talking about a lot of the history of test backstabbing the Imperium
or a good swarm and should be fun stuff.
So thank you all for coming and we will see you on the field as you guys have seen all
this week.
I'm usually in a trench in the evening in an ADM fleet, so you will see me losing mermadons
or being an idiot.
I'm going to try mining in a procure.
I think that's going to be my thing for tonight.
Next couple of days, I'm going to try the mining side of the aisle.
I'm going to be visiting basically almost every part of this organization.
So if you see me like pop into a channel or like come on a black ops fleet or come on
a mining fleet, it's because I'm trying to make sure that every single thing is handled
and understood.
Lyndon Johnson was a piece of shit, but he had one line that I really sort of learned
from reading his biography many years ago, which is if you want to win, all you have
to do is everything and that's what we're going to do.
So thanks for coming.
Let's get to work.
Let's get back at it.
Things are going to be coming out for ops.
There's going to be the meta show in 20 minutes and yeah, let's do it.