Fireside Chat Transcript 31 Oct 2k21

Alright boys and girls, we're gonna get started here in a couple minutes.
Please be mindful that I expect fewer people this week because not only is it a Halloween weekend,
but right now our devs reminded me that we're in between two time zones.
Some of the heroes have shifted for daylight saving time or whatever it is over there,
and we haven't done that yet here in Freedomland, and so things are getting a little wacky here.
Every year interlude is a bit funny because meetings get wacky, firesides get wacky,
and it's just a pain in everybody's butt.
Just as a reminder, there is always the Imperium, because one of the perks of being in charge,
it's not necessarily fair, but my dumb ass is the only way I can keep track of things,
is usually key to Wisconsin time, so whatever time it is in Madison, Wisconsin,
that's what I'm operating on here.
I am a simple creature, so I apologize, and thank you for bearing with us.
I'm generally anti-saving time because statistically it's been proven it results in more people dying,
because if you fuck with people's circadian rhythms, which is something we didn't really understand
very well when they were implemented 100 years ago or whatever it was,
but I think saving time has scientifically been proven to be harmful to humanity
and should be disposed of immediately, but I am not in charge.
Alright, so I'm going to start this off with some really fucking good news.
Every time I have ever asked GSOL to do something,
they end up turning around and accomplishing it way fucking faster than I had any right to expect,
and I've got some pretty fucking high expectations.
One of the reasons why I whined like a little bitch when I got back from Vegas
because I had to encounter normal airport difficulties
is that all through the war I have been spoiled to encounter any kind of logistics situation,
supply chain situation, any kind of that sort of thing.
For the last two fucking years, I've interfaced with GSOL, and GSOL gets it fucking done.
And I'm delighted to report that all of our planned fucking bridges are back online, boys and girls,
and working as of yesterday. So that's pretty fucking cool.
So hug your fucking GSOLers, guys. Hug your fucking GSOLers.
One of the things that we are dealing with here strategically is a inter-war period.
I want people to understand this big picture such that we don't get sucked into it like we're stupid.
My takeaway from Vegas is that hubbies are in general sitting on their hands
expecting that magically scarcity is going to disappear, that CCB is going to change things,
because surely they must, and that then people are going to start making moves and doing stuff.
I want to just go ahead and remind you that hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.
If you're old school, you are very well aware of the CCB song and dance routine,
and you know that this is not something that can be relied upon or trusted.
So instead of thinking, "Hey, it's Q4, surely CCB is going to turn scarcity off and things are going to change,"
I want you guys thinking the old way. I want you to put ice in your veins.
I want you to understand not just should the chessboard change, but what are our moves if the chessboard does not change.
And we couldn't beat the entire fucking galaxy in a gigantic war.
We're in a pretty good position one way or another.
Do I wish CCB would see reason such that I could stop talking about fucking wyverns on firesides and metashows?
Yes, but I'm not going to say here to you guys on a fireside that magically everything is going to turn around.
I want us prepared mentally and in terms of the assets we have available to fight whatever conflicts are necessary,
regardless of what move CCB makes.
Now the good news is that y'all motherfuckers done good, right?
You guys know the score. You guys remember the Dell time unit?
You know that when it is time to crab, we crab like motherfuckers while also trying to rain hell upon our enemies
using filaments, using any other kind of fuckery we can imagine, joining the blood.
Okay, I want to get into some of the other strategic big picture shit.
So what we have here is a scenario where there is a possible power vacuum opening up in the galactic southeast.
There's this whole wrecking crew, AOM, Evictus, whatever, versus fire and maybe some papyremna.
There's a bunch of stupid shit happening.
I want everyone to remember that all these people are our enemies.
Every single fucking one of these people are our enemies.
Because what's going to happen here is I'm going to start watching fire, killing, wrecking crew,
and people are going to start coming to us and going, "Hey, why aren't you getting involved?"
They're all our fucking enemies.
I want you making money. I want you making isk for your friends, your corporations.
I need you guys out there preparing yourselves.
And don't get sucked in to any dumb shit.
Don't go, "Oh, no, what happens?"
Because what happens, let's fucking play it out.
What happens if wrecking crew and AOM decide that they're going to close the entire galactic east
and they actually suddenly go on offensive and start pushing up into the drone regions?
Great. I don't fucking care. We're going to do our thing over here.
And then maybe we'll do the entire thing.
What happens if fire, which has a dear friend Arcadius Soul and his fucking wolf fleets,
decide that they want to push down and they want to come closer to us,
they want to attack wrecking crew and attack AOM,
and they want to exhaust themselves coming closer and closer to us?
Fucking great news. I like that, too.
I don't go, "Gosh, I want to help wrecking crew."
I go, "Okay, okay, because remember, boys and girls, all of these fucking people are your enemies."
They have always been that way just because they're going to turn around and ask for help
in a stupid dumbass proxy war between our fucking enemies doesn't stop being the foe.
So as you watch this no-man's land open up, I want you to keep in mind who are our three biggest enemies.
Horde, Test, Brave. We've run Lawnmowers over Brave and Test.
They don't really have anything for us to fuck with.
They're already getting filamented on by basically everyone.
Elfboy's still there. Elfboy's still there.
I don't give a fuck about Brave right now.
I don't give a fuck about what's left of Test because we bled them out so badly there's barely anything there.
As soon as there's something more that we can do, there's more that we can do.
But these guys are going to be making moves here soon,
and I want you to understand where our negative objective value needs to be directed.
Right?
Never lose sight of the real enemy.
Never forget that all these guys are going to try to get you to take their side against each other
are still your fucking enemies.
So, as Ian says, the curse does not discriminate, and that is exactly the case here.
Alright.
The expected value stuff is something that I've had to explain a few times,
so if you're new to listening to my bullshit, at the macro level of the metagame,
it's an organizational competition.
And part of what we do is we attempt to deliver bad stuff.
You can call them debuffs, you can call them maluses, in poker terms you'd say,
I just say minus EV, negative expected value, whatever.
It is do bad shit, arrange for bad shit to happen,
project your negative expected value at the target that we need the most on.
Right?
Like, if somebody's like, "Oh, I'm going to go attack Brave,"
that doesn't do a fucking thing for us.
It's easy, everybody else is already doing that.
I want you to keep filmenting out there and fucking with Test,
because Test is in a situation where the regular harassment that we have,
and everybody else has been delivering onto them, has been very effective,
and I'm very comfortable with that.
And, you know, Horde, Elfboy has not given me any fudge stripes.
There's no fudge stripes here.
He hasn't given any of us.
Remember that when you're choosing your targets and you're thinking about this,
make sure your guns are pointed in the right fucking direction.
Okay, so these are actually some really good bingo bait.
I'm going to give a shout-out here to [inaudible]
He's, like, going for a full bingo.
If I say that shout, it's going to set off the entire goddamn channel.
I am impressed.
And this is also something I couldn't give you guys.
I think it's actually the free square on most firesides is no future plans.
But, yeah, that's exactly what it is.
You're getting sort of a window into some of our bigger chessboard thinking
about why we're sending who we are sending where.
Obviously, I will not disclose any of the reasons that we're sending where or why,
but I will promote please get involved, you know, not just with the AI stuff.
That is very important.
Find ways to develop your skills outside of main factions, right?
Like, even I'm out there learning how to do some fucking small gang bullshit
and learning how to kite and ramming stuff into trees like an idiot.
So if I can do it, if I can learn my way around PI,
if I can start trying to do some elite PvP crap, you can, too.
Get out there.
All right, we got some bingos.
That's excellent.
Let me take some questions from people because I think that we are still
sort of getting over all of the Vegas stuff.
I'm proud to report, if you didn't hear on the show yesterday,
we've had a little bit of a, to be not a crisis, after Vegas.
It's always kind of scary when you get 400 of your closest friends together
and smoke a bunch of weed with them for almost a week in Vegas.
And we had a little bit of a scare.
So if you heard about this, two of our people caught it randomly.
Like, one of our guys got stuck in an elevator with a, like,
sketchy professional gambler when the power went out at Circa.
He got it from that guy.
And then the other -- so we did a contact tracing, and it's cool.
I am proud of that.
The big scary one, one of the false positives turns out to be --
it was a false positive.
I'm clear, we had two people and a fucking dumbass who trapped our dude
in an elevator.
So that's about as good news as you can get in the year of our Lord 2021,
as far as I'm concerned, after a convention like that.
I'm delighted by that news.
As the boss guy, it would be kind of my worst nightmare if there was an
honest-to-God fucking COVID outbreak, like a true cluster kind of scenario
at a Goonmeet.
So I definitely feel like we dodged a bullet there.
There has been too many Sino memorials for my comfort.
Speaking of Sino memorials, it's an ugly, awkward topic, but unfortunately,
we live in plague times, and so this is necessary.
If you do see neutrals, and it's a Saturday, you see a bunch of neutrals
in 1DQ1, and they're Sinos, don't -- get a fucking dumbass.
Right?
Like, just get with the fucking program.
Don't fuck with memorials.
All right.
Shout-outs to the Alliance Tournament team.
We have the first rounds this weekend.
That is going to be pretty interesting.
We also have questions about a Burn Jita.
No, not at this time.
And if we were running a Burn Jita, we would absolutely not give warning
about it in advance.
CCP keeps changing the mechanics there, which makes it a little bit difficult.
That is up to Joe and Jason, basically.
What about the TTT and the new taxation policy from CCP?
That is a very -- thank you, Oliver.
So here's the deal.
When CCP changed the taxes, basically the TTT stopped, functionally speaking.
The treaty is still there.
The Keepstar is still there.
But the income generated from it shifted to, like, less than 50 billion ISK
per share, maybe a little bit more.
But basically, it went down from being a pretty big faucet for us
to essentially crickets.
Right?
So we're monitoring that.
I checked the ratio yesterday.
I personally hope that CCP would just nuke the whole fucking thing.
I don't think that it is really cool that there are markets in HiSec
in the first place.
I'm surprised that CCP decided to roll back in any capacity.
Obviously, if it turns into a huge money sink, it goes into the territory
of something that we can't discuss on a fireside.
But what you do need to know is that we are monitoring the situation.
And beyond that, I will-- it's going to be fun.
If they try to make it the whole thing again, it's going to be fun.
We will make it fun for us.
I have a quick one I forgot to tell you about yesterday.
As of yesterday or the day before, GSOL now has all the jump bridges up
that we were planning to put up.
We're still working on beacons, but the jump bridge network is done.
I mentioned at the start of this fireside, thank your followers, boys.
I was going to fucking-- I was about to say nice things or something.
But yeah, Tuzzy, the first thing I did when I got up here was brag
on your fucking boys in front of the whole crowd.
What an amazing fucking effort.
Beacons. We'll keep doing beacons, guys.
There were way more beacons to put out than there were bridges.
It was taking us longer to do those.
And we were prioritizing bridges first.
So give us a couple more weeks and those will be done too.
Do you guys still need broadcast nudes?
I don't-- off the top of my head, I don't know which PI we're short on.
We actually have been doing okay on PI.
The PI market's gotten a little better in the last couple weeks.
It was just really hot and heavy there in the month of September,
particularly because we were trying to do beacons and bridges and citadels,
and we were building some keepers stars, and that demand has really dropped off.
And I think our hostiles that were also buying up PI, they have stopped as well.
So there's now a really supply in the market,
and we're not tanking the price all the time we buy it all up.
So I think we're okay.
Excellent. All right.
So that's what we're doing, basically, guys, basically because--
and this is what I told you right after,
is we are in a race scenario strategically to beat the bad guys
at competitively building a more effective infrastructure than theirs
and then, again, delivering that minus CV dings aimed outwards
towards Elfboy and all of his ilk and just doing it right.
I don't want you to depend upon the idea that CCB is suddenly going to fix things,
but certainly in the environment that will be a sensible thing to do
in an environment where CCB is trying to get rid of stockpiles,
it is actually to stockpile like motherfuckers,
which is what I think we've all been doing since the moment we had the opportunity.
One of the reasons why this whole scarcity situation is so frustrating to me
is that these dumbasses have publicly said, "We're trying to get rid of stockpiles,"
and then they implement economic systems that are sort of known to anybody
that can even remotely understand human behavior
are only going to incentivize more stockpiling.
Like if a Wyvern is costing $90 billion ISK,
why wouldn't you just hoard assets and sit on them
waiting for the maddening?
I just want you guys to always, if CCB comes over the top
and does something cool and good, we will give them gold stars
and we will praise them in public.
But when you and your corpse and everybody's sitting around
and we're talking and we're thinking about what the next few months are going to be,
I would much prefer that everybody has a more sort of cold-hearted perspective about it
and is like, "Okay, well, prepare for the worst.
Assume that the chessboard isn't going to change too much.
Don't expect that suddenly sanity is going to prevail in Reykjavik
and plan accordingly."
So if they do something great, wonderful,
but I want our guys understanding the ground truth even
and especially when that ground truth is ugly.
All right. I think that's going to be it for this week, guys.
We have sort of a--it's a Halloween weekend.
I think people are out doing their thing, and we've got these time zone changes.
Thank you all for coming.
We will do this again next week.
You fucking nerds.
I'm so glad that we got a chance to hang out together in Vegas.
Man, I needed that.
It was great seeing everybody.
We had a great fucking time.
Can't wait to see people in D.C.
And in the meantime, Fireside next week.
So let's get back out there.