Fireside Chat Transcript 7 Dec 2k19

This is probably going to be a shorter fireside than usual because I don't know how long my
psyche can take this.
But whatever.
I just need to learn how to ground or shield or do something for my wires.
It's this new speaker system and...
You guys have had to hear me whining about this crap for a bit now.
I apologize.
[silence]
Ferrite chokes.
Excellent.
Thanks guys.
I'll take a look at that.
[silence]
Yeah, I'm getting some serious like, perumpupumpum shit going on in my ears right now.
It's driving me crazy.
[silence]
Okay, cool.
Well, let's get into the actual cool stuff rather than me whining and getting tech support.
I do appreciate the tech support though.
You guys are a shield for my sanity.
When am I coming back to Toulouse, France?
Probably sometime...
I'm going on a big European rampage in April.
We'll be at FanFest and then I'm going to do Venice and Rome for about a week there.
I've got some Canadian travel coming up.
I'm going to be in Toronto over Christmas and looking to visit Montreal in February.
I'm not sure if there's interest in like, gouda meat, or anything like that.
But it's something I'm exploring.
So I'll be in Canada in two weeks and then in February and then Iceland and Italy in April.
And then I want to make it back to France, hopefully by October of next year.
We'll see.
[silence]
Okay, so let's start out with...
I want to deal with the Locust Fleet stuff before we deal with the announcement of the
Wormhole campaign.
So the next Locust Fleet is going to be in...
Not this Sunday, but the next Sunday.
Our fleet commanders have been meeting and planning ways to make sure that we don't get
kicked in the dick repeatedly again.
It's kind of an interesting thing because the sinking of the Locustania took place on
Sunday of last week, so right after I'd given the fireside.
And earlier in the week, I was still kind of ass-blasted about it and whatever.
But weirdly enough, now that we've made it all the way to six days later, it does kind
of feel like yesterday's news.
But I do want to touch on that, some of the reforms that we're doing.
I'm not going to get into the tactics.
[inaudible]
But we did a huge amount of reimbursements for that.
We gave people who had well-fit rock walls, the Chad fit, 3.5 billion isk worth of reimbursement.
The people who had the standard fit got 2.5 billion isk.
And one of the things to keep in mind going forward is Locust Fleets are strategic ops.
We got lucky because nobody ever attacked them for like two and a half years or something
stupid like that.
It might have been two years, I don't know.
Times were a long-ass time.
Nobody made a serious run at them.
And they are a strategic level capital fucking fleet, right?
If you've got a hundred odd rock walls out there, those are heavy assets and it will
be treated as a strategic op going forward with all of the bells and whistles of a strat
op.
So yeah, that means that if you show up, we did not reimburse everybody who lost a rock
wall on the Locust Fleet.
And the reason we did that is there were some people that had garbage tier fits.
And as you guys all know, we changed our fitting doctrine when it comes to PVE during the blackout
era.
And we have not walked that back.
We have strategic PVE fits and you are expected to use them.
And if you don't use them, you will not be reimbursed.
But the good news is that the vast majority of the rock walls that were lost, I think
all but 10 of them were reimbursed, not just for the minimum level, but a lot of you guys
got Chad level reimbursements.
And that's pretty cool.
[AUDIO OUT]
Yeah, and if Pittsburgh told everybody that they could use trash fits like two Locust
Fleets ago, that's kind of hilarious.
All things considered, that was wrong.
Locust Fleets are a strategic op.
They will be treated like any other capital fleet going forward with all of the bells
and whistles on.
[AUDIO OUT]
And yeah.
[AUDIO OUT]
God, I think now it's like some fucking Christian music or something.
This is awful.
[AUDIO OUT]
In addition to Asher's little contribution there, but it's getting even fucking louder
here.
This is-- I'll find some fair art jokes.
All right, so will the rock walls also be getting patched during the fleets then?
[AUDIO OUT]
That's an interesting question, and I hadn't thought about that.
So I'll--
[AUDIO OUT]
Yeah, God, this is just-- ugh.
[AUDIO OUT]
So awful.
OK, I'm taking basically brain damage trying to--
[AUDIO OUT]
Let's talk about warbles.
So I don't know if people have any other questions regarding the Locust Fleet thing.
We did consider overreacting spectacularly, but for all the herf-glerf about Trigger Happy
being involved in this, they were like a tiny proportion of the number of people.
And I don't think Kendar had anything to do with it.
It was mostly the same old chuckle fucks that have been going after us off and on for a long
ass time.
So I think it would be kind of inappropriate to be like, oh, we're going to go wipe Trigger
Happy off the map when it was basically the usual douchebags involved in the hit.
And we had never gotten kicked in the dick before.
So yeah, we got kicked in the dick.
It's on us now to adapt and overcome.
That's what we're going to do.
[AUDIO OUT]
Yeah, I don't think having warbles is really a reasonable idea, all things considered.
The people who are bringing warbles are turning a useful economic function,
but they are also just pocketing all the loot for themselves, which is a good thing.
We want that.
We want people to make money.
That's why we do these things.
So yeah, I have never really-- yeah.
Yeah, no, we're not going to start patting works for Lucasfleets.
That is the decision.
[AUDIO OUT]
Mittens, if people are bored--
That's a good question.
I'm glad that people brought it up, though.
If people are bored, what should they do?
What's that?
If people are bored, what should they do?
Ah, if people are bored, what should they do?
Let us segue into that.
So Kathy Iron has been working with Pathfinders on a huge-ass project called the Wormhole
Campaign-- well, actually, I don't know what we're calling it.
The music is getting louder, and I'm genuinely getting fucking distracted by this bullshit.
I despise Christian music, and I despise--
the only thing I hate more than Christmas music is Christian rock music.
It's a consequence of growing up in Alabama and being surrounded by that shit.
And I don't know what is going to happen to my speakers, but it is driving me up the wall.
So let's talk about wormholes.
I'm going to blow a Will PowerPoint, and we're going to talk about wormholes.
This is a project-- the link to the thread has been broadcast earlier with the fireside.
We put it in Java again so everybody can see it.
And this is something that's really exciting.
It's something that we can do now.
We are founding something that we're calling the school.
And it's not just that Pathfinders are going to do this cool thing and then are going to
be responsible for running all the ops for us or what have you.
But there's a bunch of different things that skirmish commanders of all varieties are welcome
to do, six and squads are all welcome to do.
Kathy, if you could talk a little bit about how we're going to get things started,
what people should do, as well as what are the kinds of content that will be available
for skirmish commanders and crew in the school.
>> All right.
So I just actually had to restart my computer, too, because I'm having internet issues as
well-- or computer issues as well.
But skirmish commanders, you guys are going to be able to get in there and basically do
anything you want with regards to like nullsec blobs, small gang, assisting other SIGs through
our nullsec static, killing folks inside of our C5 static.
We'll basically be able to do anything at a moment's notice, roll to any area of space
that we really want to kind of go poke around in.
We can roll holes every 45-- 4 to 5 minutes, which is incredible.
The content is there as long as you can get a skirmish commander going and fleet up and
go.
What is with the internet?
I just-- my-- everything just reset on my computer.
It's incredible.
>> Yeah, that's where the shit stops.
It's chaos everywhere.
>> So--
>> What are some fun things that people could do with wormhole?
>> Inside the wormhole, not too much.
In our C5 static, you can go next door and crab.
You can hunt people down the C5 chain.
You can, I guess, learn about wormholes, rolling, all the basics of wormhole space.
And then we head out into nullsec to do the nullsec shenanigans, or we can head down the
C5 chain to find people to fight or hunt.
Like last night, we killed a bunch of dudes that were crabbing a couple jumps down our chain
that had no idea we were there.
We killed a couple of things.
We've also had opportunities to go out to nullsec, PVP warfare space, or whatever, do
stuff out there.
It's literally like anything you want to do that you can do in EVE, you know, within reason,
you can do from our hole.
We can go anywhere, and we can do anything that you guys can think of.
Yeah.
I do want to say this, and again, I lost it because I had to restart my computer, but I
know you've linked it in the ping there.
If you guys click the link in the ping, at the very bottom of that, you'll see the link
to apply.
It's auto-accepting, auto-joining.
You guys will automatically join the Into the Breach channel.
Once you get in there, you'll have access to the Into the Breach subforum, and you'll
see that there's a link in the Debra reading.
We'll have a ping in probably about an hour-ish, where we will start our first move-op and
get everybody rolling to inside the school.
Okay, so I want to talk about the overall vision for this sucker and why people should
give a shit.
You guys might have heard about this before, but here's the challenge.
We are very powerful here in the Imperium.
We have to make sure that we do not break the video game we all play occasionally, and
that also means restraining ourselves when we have the opportunity to completely annihilate
various other alliances.
The challenge is that when we are here in Delve, we have the best space in the game.
It's all good, but we need variety, we need novelty, we need a degree of small-scale combat
that doesn't rise to the level of a thousand titans fighting another thousand titans.
So how do we accomplish that, and what does this whole wormhole thing have to do with
it?
I'm going to make two nerd references.
One will be to the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time trilogy.
Not trilogy, it's an endless sequence of books, which I stopped reading after about
book seven or something, I don't fucking know.
[They're making a TV show out of it.]
Oh god, kill me.
So in that, you have the Waze, and then of course in 40k, you have the Eldar Webway.
And that's essentially what I want to do.
I see this wormhole project as an opportunity for not just to just go "hey, we're going
to go into a hole and maybe learn some things about it, and then next month that'll be
it and it's over."
The idea here is to essentially get everybody in the alliance comfortable with the idea
of using wormholes to teleport around the galaxy and skullfuck people at will.
So instead of going "oh man, we got, you know, there's some action in Amas, but we
can't get there, not like any action ever happens in Amas, it's fucking Amas for god
sakes."
You know what I mean.
When we see Fraternity and Legacy having a slap fight in Deterid or Innsmother, it's
kind of hard to deploy SIGs and squads into places that don't have NPC space nearby.
Of course, we're talking about Innsmother or Deterid, you would deploy a curse.
But you know what I mean.
For casual engagement levels, for skirmish commanders that want to take out 15 guys and
find some random shit to gank, the idea here is this.
Now that we have alliance-level bookmarks using the ACL system, we get enough people
into this wormhole that the Pathfinder guys have gone through a ton of effort in setting
up and arranging.
We essentially educate our skirmish commanders on up with the basics of how to use and abuse
wormholes to get from point A to point B.
The content doesn't have to be "hey guys, we're going to be fighting each other in
wormholes."
We're going to do that too, but I think one of the things that's really cool for us in
the long term, and I want this to be, if it works, it might not, but I think it will,
if it works, I want this to be a long-term part of our target acquisition system such
that goons get used to the idea of getting into a hole, using a hole to scout down a
chain, and then find a target in turbo and fuck it to death, basically.
So that's the idea with this.
It is not "hey, we're going to mess around in a wormhole, hole squad 2.0 for a couple
months, and then that's the end goal."
The wormhole space and this system is a means to an end.
And if we have some fun along the way in wormhole space, that's great, but the prize is using
wormholes and becoming knowledgeable about them enough to the point that we can reach
out and ruin whatever we feel like across the entire galaxy at any time.
And me and my guys will find a way to teach you how to do that extremely well.
Excellent.
So let me look at some of the questions here.
Ranger Gamma points out that there are wormhole classes that have been scheduled for this
week already.
See the calendar of the day and which topic you would like to come learn.
This is – let's see what else we have.
Waze references, that's good.
Oh wow, I really opened a can of fucking worms with the little time shift.
Gentlemen, we are – Bill, we are not – we're not in this for evictions.
I've had so many people say, oh, evictions are the most cancerous thing you do in wormhole
space and that is the last thing I want to do with a bunch of people that are fresh-faced
newbies popping into wormhole space.
It's not – no.
Like if they make an attempt on our wormhole, then yeah, yeah, maybe we'll have some retribution.
But other than that, no, it's not worth our time or effort.
Oh yeah, we can go smack stuff all over the place, dude, in wormhole space included.
Yeah, so in wormhole space there's loot pinatas and stuff, but I don't want people to – essentially,
we will be kicking over sandcastles, but we are not going to be going through a high effort
like let's destabilize the wormhole powers thing.
There's a variety of reasons for that.
One, because why fucking bother?
Two, because this – like I say, this is a highway, it's a webway, it's something
we're going to be using as a means to an end.
It is not an end goal in and of itself, and sure, we could go blow up some keepstars of
some random wormhole shitheads and maybe – and to be fair, if they mess with us, there will be
retribution, and that will be highly entertaining too.
But in a vacuum, we want to use the wormhole space as a method to get to the bleeding and
the screaming and the suffering and the fun stuff, not necessarily go like "oh, well,
we're going to –"
You know, initiative is really cool about picking – they're like mountain climbers.
They're like "we're going to go climb the tallest mountain, we're going to go
burn down rage, and it's going to be really cool, and it's going to be really technical,
and like whatever."
But we don't really do that as much within Goon Swarm.
Like a lot of times, our decision making is based around not "let's get the trophy"
or "let's climb the mountain."
It's more "how can we use this to get more at what we think is the fun stuff?"
Which is the chaos and the howls of our Furboos and the spaceship violence.
Yeah, it's got to be one of these cables.
I have no idea which one it is, and it's driving me fucking crazy.
Sorry, guys.
>> Bestos, you said is the wormhole group also for Alliance.
I'm assuming you're saying it's an Alliance-wide group.
Yes, it is.
If you go to the post that was in the ping, anybody can join it.
It auto-invites you, and it will auto-accept you into both the subforum and the Java channel.
I have a pretty detailed question here that I want to acknowledge, even though I don't
immediately have an answer for it.
So Masashi Nudome had a detailed question about contrasting the differences in SRP from
the first workhaul that was lost under the PVE system versus the way that we did reimbursement
for the Locustania incident.
It's a good question, and I don't have the answer right now.
I will look into it, or one of the directorate will look into it.
But it's a good question.
I'm glad you asked it, and I don't have the answer immediately at hand.
At which point will we consider the Koreans becoming strong enough to be a real threat
to the existing powers?
Beats the fuck out of me.
It's one of those things where we just have to keep eyes on it.
I think that it's a very good thing that the Korean player base is a thing now, and
it lasts.
More sand in the sandbox, more people playing the game is just great for us.
We talked about the Chinese two years ago, about being the new power on the clock, and
you could see how they've matured.
But it also happened that we ended up getting a lot of Chinese players joining Gunsword
Federation.
So I wouldn't say that it was—the same thing might happen for Koreans.
Yeah, so another question here, is there a possibility of going easy on Chinese corporations,
their PAP status due to the massive VPN ban/issues in China?
Yeah, basically, one of the reasons why whenever we're examining corporate metrics and stuff
like that—God, this is just so excruciating, it just won't shut the fuck up, sorry.
Every time it gets to the chorus of this stuff and I hear this soaring, praise-filled voice
just—nerve-inviting—without range.
This is why I left Alabama the moment I got out of high school.
Anyway, as I was trying to say—what the fuck?
Oh, PAP stuff.
So basically, we use the PAP metrics to examine activity, but there are a whole bunch of other
metrics in addition to PAPs.
And we don't just randomly kick out corporations.
So if it looks like a corporation is having PAP issues, hypothetically, if it's because
the Chinese government is cracking down on VPNs temporarily or something like that,
when we investigate and ask questions and this kind of thing comes up and then we verify
it, we let stuff slide a lot.
We aren't randomly just blowing corporations out of the empyrean because we feel like it.
So there's an investigatory process whenever a corporation gets to the level where we're
discussing removing the corporation.
And when we do remove a corporation, it is after a period of discussion.
It comes up in Illuminati meetings, we dig into these kind of things.
We aren't just randomly whacking corps.
So basically, if you're ever worried about your corporation having a temporary issue,
you can always ask your Kremlin representatives to say, "Hey, make sure the alliance leadership
knows about blah, blah, blah.
That's a problem."
And that's why we have the Kremlin.
That's why we have Kremlin meetings.
You don't even have to wait for a meeting.
Kremlin representatives can just be like, "Yo, dudes, we're going to be a little light
on PAP stats this month because some sort of shit happened."
And we'll go, "Oh, OK, cool."
That's how it usually happens.
Yeah, I think it's a commercial right now.
Yeah, I think it's a commercial right now.
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