The Mittani, on 31 Mar 2013 - 22:55, said:

guess who's back

CEO Update: Forgot About Dre

The past month has been one of the strangest periods in Eve Online I've experienced since I began playing in late 2005. Where on the surface and in public absolutely nothing of consequence seemed to be happening - besides the odd squad deployment south in search of comedy - in the smoke-filled backrooms of nullsec politics the level of scheming and metagaming reached a fever pitch. The balance of power in nullsec has drastically shifted, though for a bit there (Shadoo would accuse me of kneejerk paranoia, but just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get us) it seemed like an extinction-level threat could have manifested against us - SOLAR collapse leading to an N3 + PL + HBC combined invasion triggered by Montolio's passive-aggressive loathing of Goonswarm.

Instead, A Bunch Of Things happened, many of which cannot be discussed in the open. With the prospect of getting PL to do his dirty work dashed, Montolio discovered too late that he had built an overextended and barely-united coalition which required constant defense in two galactic quadrants; between external stress from Black Legion and Darkness of Despair, internal stress from his Remedial-esque 'retirement' and subsequent un-retirement, and infighting within the HBC (NORK, TRIBE, THORN, RDN, LI3 leaving, etc) the situation became intolerable and he opted to resign, handing the reins of TEST to Fras Siabi, who promptly said 'fuck this coalition leading noise' and asked Sort Dragon to lead the HBC while TEST takes some time to itself to navel-gaze.

Despite the inevitable accusations of metagaming, very little of what happened down south had anything to do with Goonswarm. Sometimes the hardest thing to do in Eve Online is to sit on your hands and wait - it's kind of boring - but it's what we did and it worked out. If we had rabbled more about Montolio it would have allowed him to distract his disparate anti-CFC coalition from their internal difficulties, so we clammed up. Is silence itself a political move in modern Eve? vOv

The point, gentlegoons, is that the Montolio Crisis is over and that our quarrel with Montolio does not extend to TEST as a whole. There are indeed some elements in TEST that Montolio recruited specifically because of their loathing of GSF - sort of a Judean People's Front situation - but we'd prefer to go back to our pre-Monty-goes-crazy-after-Delve relationship with Dreddit, at least. So: While we enjoy the fights the soft reset with TEST has created, and there are indeed a fair number of 'Grr GOON' crusaders left in the HBC and TEST who held Montolio's cape, let's all collectively calm the fuck down and get back to being chill.


Burn Jita 2.0: April 19-21st 2013

There are few things that we of nullsec can agree upon, but one of them is, inevitably, 'fuck hisec'. We will now wash away the frustrations of March's cold war by covering ourselves in the blood and suffering of the people of hisec, the weekend before Fanfest begins - just in time to remind these people who the fuck we are. As before, we will invite every null entity which wants to participate in our holy cause.

Last year there was a tremendous amount of publicity about Burn Jita, leading to a whole host of hisec movements and wardecs to counter our efforts. This year we will not be making public statements about the Burn or actively trying to advertise it. Yes, we are giving approximately 19 days of notice with this post, as well as coordinating across the CFC and the HBC if they want to participate, but the blind sleeping masses of hisec will not realize something is coming until it is too late. I am eager to see what happens to hisec if we show up without three months of wardrum-beating and hype, unannounced, and commence putting everything to the sword.

The first Burn taught us a lot. We know Jita has a population cap; we know there are only so many routes into the system which are traffic controlled. We know as well that goons in Jita enjoyed not only taking out freighters, but spreading the carnage by using thrashers to take out industrials of random passers-by. A Burn is fundamentally a terror operation; it is not so much about the isk value of each freighter destroyed as it is implanting fear into the hearts and minds of even the most humble industrialist in his Badger II. This year we will be not only ganking freighters and industrials within Jita, but Miniluv will patrol the lanes outside of Jita to destroy anyone trapped on the gates from traffic control. The number of humans involved means that it will still be a complete mess, but we expect our terror-sowing to be much more efficient than last year.

To prep for the Burn, you should read this thread by Warr Akini.

Galactic Politics Update: Eye of the Hurricane

If there ever was a month to sit on your hands and focus on squad deployments, March 2013 was it.

In the Northeast a simmering sov-war continues between SOLAR and N3, with Mactep leading a classic scorched earth defense, shedding territory slowly and forcing N3 to burn out on an endless structure grind in off-timezones. I'm not sure what Nulli and NCdot expected from Solar. Razor and FA briefly deployed to help defend SOLAR, but due to coordination issues - communication is a huge problem over there - they withdrew. N3 and PL have openly expressed a desire to set up a renter kingdom in the Drone Regions, as they anticipate a tech nerf and/or (in N3's case) don't have any sources of income except serfdom. I'm pretty sure we all would be miserably unhappy with an Eve Online throwing back to Great War-era serf societies like the GBC, except for the bits where we kill the serfs and extort from the landlords, so I hope that N3's bet on CCP's intended game design is inaccurate. Eve Online: Be A Renter isn't a sustainable business model.

The Southeast is a mess. To understand the 'Eastern HBC' you have to realize that most of the southeast is re-labeled Red Overlord holdings; Montolio 'conquered' the east and allowed everyone who lived there before to resettle under a different moniker. This has led to amusing situations, with alliances like EntroPraetorian Aegis - who have literally three active PvPers - holding swathes of valuable but barely-defensible territory. All well and good until a powerful foe begins attacking; in this case, Darkness of Despair is a pseudo-respawn of Stain Empire and the Russian parts of Against All Authorities, basing out of NPC and relentlessly hitting any eastern HBC towers within their attack radius. This means the western HBC - mostly Raiden and TEST - are constantly having to field-trip to the southeast to defend.

The southwest is also a mess, but more due to politics than to war. For a while there Black Legion was pingponging the HBC with Darkness of Despair by basing in Sakht on the Delve border, but they redeployed back to Venal after months in the south. Executive Outcomes has reset the HBC as of this week, but is keeping TEST blue; Sort Dragon of Pandemic Legion has abruptly been put in charge of the HBC itself, territory is being reshuffled, no one seems to like Raiden, THORN is rumored to be looking for the exits, and generally the whole Montolio-created mess is turning into a Superfund site. The general policy of the CFC is that we hope things work out for Dreddit and for a couple of corps down there, but we secretly are hoping against hope that the rest of the HBC wakes up and realizes how awful Raiden are so we can go kill them again. Personally, I think the western and eastern HBC are going to have to divide themselves up like the old Roman empire, simply because defending across two quadrants is not viable in the long term.

Venal and Pure Blind are heating up in a fun way; we have some PL looking for brawling holidays with T1 cruiser gangs, 401k poking at Platinum moons, and the odd fight against Black Legion; this means we have a lot of content close to home. Despite my relentless hatred of anything with an EVOL or RKK ticker, 401K under Zeroniss (an ex-Morsus guy) doesn't seem so awful, and have limited themselves to hitting Plats instead of touching the Neo/Tech tripwire - at which point we'd probably stop playing and hellcamp them.

The CFC itself is undergoing a few leadership changes. Convicted got the boot, posted a whole bunch of drama on Kugu, and according to that forum the CFC lost an incredible PvP alliance in trade for Lost in Eve, who also according to Kugu and Montolio are completely useless. Yet Convicted has ceased to exist entirely and Lost in Eve recently topped the percentages of strategic ops on a per capita basis, so we must be living in some kind of alternate reality where I'm a better judge of alliance value than random 'Grr GOON' kool-aid quaffers. Li3 seem to be settling in nicely; though they'll have to suffer the usual badposter hazing, they seem to understand the whole concept of stratop participation and doctrines (and/or they don't understand it, but they know our penchant for flaying alliances that don't participate, either way). Zagdul has just stepped down from Fatal Ascension, leaving FA in Loquitur's hands. SMA is getting picked on a bunch by the Kugu crowd for being SMA, but since pubbies like Mostly Harmless have shat on SMA from the era of the Northern Coalition, we've had a perverse desire to defend them.

The Squad Renaissance

While politically March was a whirlwind with essentially no large-fleet action to speak of or any real military campaign whatsoever, we have enjoyed a renaissance in combat squads. Space Violence, European Goonion, Topgoon and Blackops have covered themselves in gore, and I think that Miniluv is at risk of being written up for war crimes against the civilian Freighter population. We have two relatively new timezone squads, Freedom Squad and Arsehole Squad (US and AU respectively) that are staffing up/trying to find their stride; we have also implemented squad funding, where each squad that actually kills things gets 5b a month in play money to fund stupid hijinks beyond our existing generous peacetime reimbursement. If you're not a part of a squad, you're probably not having much fun in Eve Online; you should fix that.

Take My Carriers - Please

If you look at the ugly situation of the East/West HBC - holding two galactic quadrants and the risks of territorial overreach - and you read the above blurb about squads, you might feel a tingling in the back of your head which isn't the weed. We've been pushing everyone into carriers to the point of giving the damn things away, along with their skillbooks; I'd like to remind you about this again, because it all ties together. The military reality is that the CFC isn't taking more space, as we've reached the natural borders of our ability to defend what we have. This means that our war options amount to 'Wait for someone to attack us', which is the old Northern Coalition strategy that ended in failure, not to mention boring as shit.

The alternative is 'get everyone a carrier and mobile deploy' which is something that our squads have increasingly been doing on their own. An alliance like Pandemic Legion has it 'easy' (save for their insane logistical/fuel issues) because almost every member has a supercarrier which functions as a mobile base/space Winnebago; while we can't put everyone into a supercarrier, we can put almost everyone into a carrier. Bounce around the galaxy, always have fitted ships on hand, shit in cheerios far from home: that is our goal.

You're not going to see a 'CFC-local' campaign, except for the mostly-arranged Venal/Pure Blind brawls we're currently enjoying with our frenemies, unless we abruptly get invaded. So get a carrier (for free) from us and get used to the mobile-deploy lifestyle.

CSM: The Silly Season

When writing on my website I aim to be equitable and restrained when commenting on the CSM, but on GOONFLEET DOT COM I can state the obvious: CSM7 has been either (charitably) a damp squib or (uncharitably) a goddamned joke - and not even a suicide joke. I'm not sure what a year of arguing with Trebor and Issler Dainze does to a man, but the short history of CSM7 seems to be summed up as 'Seleene and Trebor conspire to steal the chairmanship from Two Step in the first week of their term, succeed, and then nothing much gets done as the whole group has been poisoned with betrayal right out of the gates'. Of course, everyone involved publicly claims that the initial Chairmanship Conspiracy had no impact on CSM7 and that they're all just the best of friends, so perhaps I'm just completely wrong about both politics and psychology.

While CSM7 backers are vehemently claiming that a lack of candidates running for CSM8 is absolutely not an indication of broad disinterest in the institution (My favorite rationalization is that due to 'education' suddenly everyone realizes that the CSM is 'real work' and that thus fewer people applied to become a candidate, heh), the reality is that we can expect to see less than 30 candidates on the actual ballot for CSM8.

It is in our best interest to ensure that we vote in an organized fashion, even if it seems that CCP is shuffling the institution off towards irrelevancy. I personally believe that CCP only responded to CSM6 because of my media connections, which is one of the reasons I put so much effort into My Dumb Website ™ rather than running for CSM8. That said, the most ideal setup is for us to both have influence in the media space as well as have voices on the Council, so we're running two candidates this year, Mynnna and Kaleb, as well as several CFC candidates. Because this is a STV election, our ballot will be a cross-nullsec roster of 14 names per ballot, because for some reason CCP went with STV even after we warned them that this would allow nullsec to completely rig/sweep the CSM.

Inside baseball aside, the STV change means that by working together with other entities it is possible to entirely lock out the CSM for null candidates only. Whatever you may think of the purpose of the CSM in the modern environment, making earnest eve-o pubbies lose their shit about the CSM for an entire year is well worth our most strenuous efforts. Here's a bit from Weaselior about the stakes:



I don't give a shit about the CSM, tl;dr me: When the election begins you will be given a list of 14 names to put onto your ballot in a priority order. Put the names in, mash button, and if enough of us do so in an organized way we'll get to enjoy an entire year of hisec pubbies crying about a total lack of CSM representation.

The Media Empire, E3, and the June Goonp

When we began the deathmarch of development for My Dumb Website back in May 2012, I worried about the risks of wearing two hats - to be both the CEO of GSF and running an external gaming news website. Every time I broadcasted a link to the site, I would worry that I was crossing lines or - somehow worse - engaging in self-promotion. I have since stopped giving a shit as My Dumb Website has succeeded beyond my wildest expectations; we now have a consistent 200k+ uniques a month, have been nominated for the Games Journalism Prize (which is 1500 pounds sterling, if we win, so not just an empty accolade) and we've just been validated for media passes to E3 this June. 'Games Journalism' pissed me off so much with its shittiness that I am now among them, and it seems that I still have this axe to grind.

Anyway, the E3 media passes means an excuse to party in Los Angeles in June on the Friday after E3, and since it's California that means enough legal weed to rival the Amsterdam/Paris debauchery. Our man 48 will be hosting the party, which right now includes two kegs, a house, and a taco truck.

We are also looking to hire more writers and streamers for My Dumb Website. If you're interested, send a writing sample for a writer spot or a link to your past streams to staff@themittani.com. We could also really use someone who's good at video creation so we can make some intro/outros for our streams/media.

Fix Your Skills Or Mister Vee Will Kill You

The arrival at CCP of Raivi and Kil2 has opened up a new era of competence when it comes to ship rebalancing, and that means a host of new skills and viable hulls. Mister Vee wants you to train the following stuff, or he'll fucking kill you.



Blops, GARPA, Scouts, and Miniluv Recruitment

We have three 'extra special' combat groups that require recruits and love; each of these are open to allies, so if you're interested it doesn't matter what alliance tag you have.

Blackops: With much of the galaxy racing to set up renter empires so they can play Shantytown Online, Blackops has had its budget massively increased and is beginning to prep for massive area-denial fuckery such that GSF can shut down the income of any would-be space landlord dumb enough to fuck with us. Blackops particularly needs Euro players. Do you like killmails? Fucking look at this.

Miniluv: Where Blackops cleaves through the weak and foolish in null, Miniluv is nearing its first anniversary of nonstop freighter-slagging, ice-interdicting hisec atrocity. The entire purpose of Miniluv is to wreak vengeance upon those who howl about 'nullbears' on the forums, to hunt down Unpersons, and pass the idle moments blowing up freighters which often contain everything a player possesses, knocking them out of the game entirely. Miniluv will be at the vanguard of Burn Jita 2.0 and has an inexhaustible need for gankers, bumpers, and those who can lead small groups of Ministers as they carry out their sacred duties.

Recon and Allied Scouts: In a galaxy where blocs jump across the map willy-nilly with carrier convoys, eyes are more important than ever. Scouts find us prey and notify us when the Venal locals are feeling uppity. Allies can join Allied Scouts to help out, and there's GSRecon for GSF.

GARPA: GARPA wants Django devs for some mysterious reason. I don't even know what Django is, or what it will entail. Here's a note from Pmchem:



Introducing the Welpclone

Everyone still wants to use welpcanes even though that doctrine is deprecated and technically no longer exists. Thankfully, due to Raivi, we now have Welpclones. Behold: It is cheap, spits dps, neuts, and has a much nastier tank than the old welpcane.

Spoiler




Intel Tools and You - ADashboard

Hfo Df of TNT is a goddamned wizard; he's made a whole host of amazing tools, including our participation tracker, statistics crunching tools, and now a scout tool. If you see a bunch of bad guys in local, c&p it into this app and link the result to our FCs on jabber - instant, accurately sorted intel. No more 'uh guys i guess there was a gang with some stuff' intel - civilization!