It’s entertaining how people who vow to destroy us somehow feel entitled to ‘content’ from us…
-The Mittani, comment on the Cold War CEO Update
The current Goonswarm Federation CEO update, which also stands in for an update for the CFC, says there will be no summer war.
But there is always a summer war, right? I am not sure why. You would think some of us would go on vacation. Instead, when school is out, wars flare up, and I don’t think it is just because of DBRB alone. (Didn’t I hear he graduate recently?) So summer tends to be a campaign season.
The thing is that wars, big wars, wars over sovereignty in null sec, tend to go badly in the end for those opposing the CFC, at least during the last two and a half years I have been in the coalition. (That is correlation, not causation.) When a sov grind is at hand, we win.
Go ask the remains of White Noise, or Raiden, or TEST how things went for them. But don’t bother looking for them on the sovereignty map.
White Noise in Branch
As for those left on the map, ask Northern Coalition why they no longer live in the north. Or ask Nulli Secunda about their time in low sec. (Though they did bounce back from that.) Or ask Pandemic Legion about what happened to a quarter of their titan fleet back in January or about the B0RTlord agreement. You can say the CFC is bad at EVE, but we seem to win a lot.
So nobody is going to come get us and try and take our space.
And we are already spread out enough that we aren’t exactly dying for some more sovereignty to hold.
So unless there are plots afoot… and for all I know, there may very well be plots afoot, since none of the few remaining players in null sec are dumb enough to telegraph their intentions in advance… the prospect for a summer war sovereignty war seems to be pretty small.
Which is, of course, an issue. The problem with The Mittani’s statement at the top is that it cuts both ways. While he was responding to somebody who wanted to know why the CFC wouldn’t play ball in such a way to ensure the elusive “good fights,” it is still incumbent upon him and the leadership of the CFC to provide content for its members. I wrote previously that the CFC is a coalition of the willing in large part because the leadership provides content… wars and conquest and victory… and perks to the membership. Owning all that space doesn’t get people into fleets. The possibility of battles does.
So what will we do this summer?
I have been lucky so far this month. Black Legion, no longer on the CFC payroll, has been reinforcing towers and running around Pure Blind from their base in X-7OMU. So, rather conveniently for me, every evening in my time zone there seems to be a fleet op under Reagalan to go defend a tower, or shoot a tower, or otherwise try to tangle with Black Legion. The rumor early on in the month was that Black Legion was itself facing some sort of crises of content, as Elo Knight can only get people to log in and be active if there are people to shoot regularly. So Black Legion keeps coming out to play on the same schedule.
I haven’t been there for any big fights… except for the trap at Daras… but have been around enough to get on a few kill mails when I haven’t been flying logistics. It has been a good time to get used to flying the Guardian, with its cap chain requirements and such. Otherwise we nibble at each other most nights, catching the sloppy or unlucky, while we warp around this system or that. Occasionally somebody makes a mistake and one side gets a clean shot at the other, but mostly it is marching and counter marching to gain some measure of advantage, almost like Wellington during parts of the peninsular campaign. Most nights there hasn’t been much to write home about, so I haven’t even put together a post about those ops yet. (Tentative title: The Same Thing We Do Every Night Pinky; Shoot Black Legion!) But they keep coming up.
How long Black Legion will provide a distraction I do not know. They do persist, and I suppose they have nowhere else to go.
Another option seems to be Providence. Much is being written about that as the place to be for content this summer. And a region is certainly a big enough place for a small war of entertainment. But if you start pulling in the three big players from imperial null sec, the ante tends to go up. “Good fights” rarely trumps “playing to win,” and those with masses of capital ships and super capitals will tend to use them if that is what needs to be done to win. N3 and PL are already deployed down there, and while there has been no official CFC-wide deployment to the region, some groups have been flying down there looking for fights. What happens if all three of the big groups deployed in the region is an open question. Does it automatically have to escalate to capitals? If the elephants jump in the pool, will we push out all the water… and the fun with it?
And that looks like about it. Nothing like last year’s war in Fountain… some of the best entertainment ever… seems to be in the offing.
What other options are out there for the imperial coalitions this summer?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Never underestimate the power of righteous indignation. After all, that’s how wars for the sake of wars get started. :)
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god, you cartel line members are sickeningly stupid whiners. You bitch about the fact that you have won Eve, and null sec is now a stagnant mess, yet you want your leaders to provide you entertainment.
Here is a concept: Revolt. Attack the hand that feeds you. Yes, you will lose, and likely lose everything. But, all that precious “content” that you crave will be delivered to you.
And if Eve is just a game to you, is fighting but losing not greater entertainment than doing nothing and “winning”?
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Dins, your rhetoric is tired mate. It’s the same raging BS over and over, and it doesn’t even make sense. Every post is like reading an emo kid’s diary. It’s embarrassing.
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@Dinsdale – There has to be some bizarro world irony achievement for being called out for whining about null sec by somebody whose schtick it entirely built on whining about null sec. Are you worried about competition?
That aside, the current state of affairs ought to be a Dinsdale Pirannha wet dream. A stagnant and boring null sec will have to drive CCP and a bulk of the null sec players to look for some way to change the way null works before it all becomes a giant rental empire.
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@ Wilhelm – The issue is that CCP is NOT considering the stagnation a crisis. Look at the long term flowchart put out by seagull. Read the posts by the dev’s. Null sec is looking at minimum 12 months, likely longer, before any large scale changes are officially proposed for public consumption. So in the meantime, you guys complain about the mess you have made like you had no hand in it, and look for any opportunity to break up the afktar grind.
The real fear is that you guys will get so bored (you are already rich beyond comprehension for most) that you will start a large scale griefing campaign on high sec, because you have no one to shoot in null. Of course, the campaign against high sec has been going on within the CSM for years now, but that is not as overt as Burn Jita/Amarr/ Dodixie/Rens/Hek for say, a month.
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@Dinsdale – Where to start?
First, how much time has to elapse before we can safely assume that null sec is actually in a phase of stagnation? There is a pretty reliable record of quiet times between wars. Just a year ago we were bitching about being in a lull, and then the Fountain War broke out. The year before there were months of quiet around various wars. That something is not happening this minute, that nobody is obviously in a fail cascade or gearing up for a war this week doesn’t mean null is going to be quiet forever.
I would be appalled if CCP felt they had to jump in and “fix” things because there wasn’t a null sec war for a few weeks. That would be insane… unless, of course, you believe null to be broken already regardless of activity. But that is a different argument.
Second, any time somebody blames the players for playing the game… any game… “wrong,” it smells like bullshit.
Telling the winners in a war of conquest that they’re the problem because they played the game laid before them can only get the response, “Well, what did you expect?” My experience in life is that people in general will optimize for whatever environment you lay out for them, and expecting them to do anything else is folly.
Third, my gut says that griefing of high sec by null is overrated. The people from null who want to do that regularly are doing it already, and are outnumbered by the high sec players who grief. Who do you hear more about, MiniLuv or James315 and scammers in Jita?
You can occasionally get more people out for a special event like Burn Jita, but it is a pretty short term effect and participation, as a percentage of the whole, is pretty low. CFC line members seem more likely to just stop logging in than to embark on a new career in high sec griefing.
Finally, and this one isn’t directed at you as much as it is a general question that is always in the back of my head, how much attention should a developer pay to customer requests? As a developer, I always want to fix bugs and resolve real problems. But over the last 20+ years, I have heard my share of “You need to do this!” sort of comments from people that have been way off base. Where is the balance between catering to customer wants/needs/desires and keeping true to the reason and vision that drives your product?
As an example, I used to work on a GUI based development environment for creating speech applications. Once a system was configured, it was pretty easy for non-programmers to create and maintain applications with a little training. We used to have training classes for it, and I would attend the “meet the devs” lunch for every class I could and would write down comments and questions that the people in the class posed. Every few classes there would be some “serious” developer with a CS degree who had been given our product to use who would tell us that he hated the GUI and wanted to do it all through the command line. I would hear that request a few times a year. How much weight do you give such a request, which is essentially, “I want you to alter the very fabric of your product design so I don’t have to change my own habits?”
How much weight should CCP give requests that they change EVE into whatever alternate vision some people have for the game? When is it okay to say, “Sorry, that just isn’t the game we are making?”
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