test_war_update_6

“EVE is Dying”

People have been saying this since 2004 every time a major war concludes and general stagnation sets in for months at a time.  Every time they always get proven wrong in the long run.  They always forget what happened the last time, and they never understand why alliances are not at constant warfare with each other (but muh game mechanics!!!).  While the game mechanics do play a role in the pace of the cycles, the cycle of Hot War -> Peace -> Cold war -> Hot war has always been in perpetual motion.  It’s natural that one of the largest wars in EVE history (World War Bee) was followed by one of the longest periods of peace and cold war.  We’re still in that cold war phase, but that is rapidly changing.  Ever since we announced our intentions to deploy, the rest of the galaxy has begun to make their moves.  In most cases it’s usually detrimental to be the first to make a move, but by doing so we have actually put ourselves in quite an advantageous position this time around.  To explain this let me first go over the overall situation in EVE at this exact moment:

http://i.imgur.com/P8HYEio.png

 Since we deployed up North to get Guardians of the Galaxy to publicly embarrass themselves (turned out to be easier than we thought, they are now restaging for the fourth time by the way), there have been two major conflicts that have broken out in the past week:

#1: Citing some complicated diplomatic agreements over the split rental space in Feythabolis, CO2 has attacked Solar renter alliance Wings Wanderers on their own.  So far it’s only been large battlecruiser brawls over entosis ops, but that appears to be quickly changing.  More alliances are starting to show up to the battles on both sides, with Solar calling their gemco. Allies and CO2 poking local alliances nearby for assistance.  Gemco have even started moving their capitals down South, and this is looking like it’s going to escalate into a real war very soon.  Everyone knows that Gemco is already dealing with the possibility of war with Triumvirate, and I imagine they are not eager to be at war on two fronts, which is a real possibility.  Our own politics in this situation are complicated, as we blued Gemco to do our deployment to MTO before CO2 decided to attack.  CO2 are still our allies, but since we are blue with both sides at the moment this makes things complex.

#2: With Goons deploying North with 4 figures worth of capitals, a war has suddenly broken out in Tribute and Vale.  At first I thought Goons deployment would fall flat on it’s face pretty quickly, but this first week has shown me that they quite possibly have the staying power necessary to sustain this conflict for a good while longer, at least a month maybe more.  With Goons in Hakonen sending out fleets constantly, the new coalition that is forming in the north (lol, a northern coalition led by an alliance named to be a joke towards the last northern coalition) is completely busy defending their space, and as such we can see that PL has been much less active in the South.

As you can see, the galaxy is quickly descending into absolute chaos, and there is no better example of this than the sheer number of alliances who have contacted us in the past 5 days asking for assistance.  The only alliance/coalition that has not directly asked for our assistance is The Culture, every single other group has asked at one point or another for our help in their current or quickly developing conflict.

So what do we do?

Right now we are not officially involved in either conflict.  We as an alliance do not have any official agreements with anyone that will forcibly draw us into the Northern conflict, and although we are allies with CO2, they have offensively attacked someone that was not only blue with us at the time, but was also one of our main supporters in the catch war, and therefore one of the main reasons we now own rich space that has allowed us to build a large capital fleet.  We have not forgotten who kicked us out of the North, and we have not forgotten who helped us take the South.  Of the two conflicts going on at the moment, one is being fought between friends who helped us conquer the space we currently hold, and one is being fought by enemies who at one point or another have evicted TEST from their homelands, some more than once.

With that being said, I think it should be quite obvious why we are in Obe.  As you can see from the map above, Obe puts us somewhat in between the two conflicts but clearly stages us on the border of the northern conflict.  When faced with two wars, one involving our friends and one involving our enemies, the obvious choice is to terrorize our enemies and support our friends.  Staging in Obe is the perfect place to go further North or return to the South quickly if we so choose.  Besides being a fond memory for TEST where many of you still have ships, Obe allows us to shoot whomever we like in the Northern conflict, while we wait for the opportune moment to fully commit to one of these wars.

This is truly an amazing time, and something you should all smile at and enjoy.  TEST has not had an opportunity to be in this situation for years, one where we get to station our fleet on the borders of a conflict, receive pleas for help from both sides, and just sit back and offer a simple reply: “What’s in it for us?”

 So here’s exactly what we’re going to do for the next 2 to 4 weeks:

The Game Plan

Technically as of today, we still have 2 and ½ weeks left on the deployment using the original schedule announced during our original move op (roughly 5 weeks).  We’ve decided that in order to be consistent, we are going to continue the deployment for at least that long, however it’s quite possible that we could extend our stay in the North longer depending on how things develop.

This is still a full deployment, we are still not going to save any ratters or miners who get caught in Esoteria.  We still plan on using our full capital fleet on this deployment (in fact we have a capital form up called for later tonight).  Although our main objective is to maintain readiness and be able to fully join a conflict the moment one side seems more advantageous than the other, and even though we are no longer staged closed enough to GOTG space to harass them as we had originally intended with this deployment, we still have plenty of enemies and objectives we can achieve up here.

As I said above, we remember who helped us take our current space, and NCdot was pretty instrumental fighting on our side in the Catch war, and even though they were one of the initiators of the Tribute war, it’s unlikely we’d be living in Esoteria right now without them.  For that reason we are going to prioritize most of the other alliances over them.  We will shoot both sides, but seeing as how PL has recently tried to evict one of our allies in Catch, and GOTG shamelessly joined in the Tribute war without atoning for it later, we are going to focus most of our objectives and Tachyon lasers on PL and GOTG.  Fleets will be constant, and we are going to follow the same op pacing that was detailed in Deployment Update 2(go look at the graph and that section again if you don't remember).  We will post strat ops to the ops calendar, but we will not pre-ping strat ops unless they are super critical ops and we want to hype them.  Roams and flash forms will be constant as there seem to always be some fleets lurking about that we can go kill.

As stated in the title of this post, this will be the last update for this deployment.  We are going to maintain our position and our stance on this conflict until we decide to make our next move.  When we decide to make our next move, it will be announced in an alliance update on a Saturday and will be made a week later on the next Saturday at a full alliance meeting.  At this alliance meeting not only will we announce our next move, but we will also introduce some of the changes and improvements we’ve been working on thanks to all the lessons we’ve learned from having to make this deployment work.  Instead of announcing the changes one at a time (a.k.a incrementalism), we’ve decided to withhold them and make them all at once at the alliance meeting.  We feel this is a better approach than incrementalism, as the latter seems to always have us playing wack-a-mole with our problems, and that leads to frustration and leadership burnout.

We are entering chaotic times in EVE once again, things will move fast and fights will be bloody.  But, as a Game of Thrones character recently reminded us in this past Sunday’s episode, chaos is a ladder, and it’s important that TEST alliance is ready to climb it.  If you haven’t gotten established in Obe yet then you need to do that.  If you do not have your jump clones properly setup with doctrine ships in V-3Y and D-PN, then you need to do that as well.  Now more than ever we need to be able to operate with the full potential of this alliance, and to do that we need each and every one of you following our instructions.  They’re simple instructions really, and the sooner you get the boring work out of the way, the sooner you can join all the crazy battles that are going on around us.