It was announced earlier today on coms that SpaceMonkey’s Alliance would be leaving The Imperium.
SpaceMonkey’s Alliance – April 10, 2016
The problems between SMA and the online gambling site I Want ISK at the end of 2015 led IWI to hire mercenaries to attack SMA’s home territory in Fade, one of the trigger events leading to the wider war going on today.
After months of fighting in Fade, SMA is down to a single system in the region, HHK-VL, along with 10 systems in Pure Blind, including two stations. That at least puts them two stations ahead of my own alliance, TNT, which is fresh out.
SMA is the second alliance to leave The Imperium during the war.
The Imperium – April 10, 2016
Unlike CO2, which agreed to swap sides to the Moneybadger Coalition and join the war against The Imperium before the battle at M-OEE8, SMA is leaving on good terms and is not being reset.
The SMA plan currently is to retire to the NPC null sec region of Outer Ring, home of the NPC faction Outer Ring Excavations, in order to rebuild. The region is fairly barren of stations, but has connections to the Syndicate, Cloud Ring, and Fountain regions, . They take with them a roster of ~2,400 capsuleers, down from ~4,000 at the beginning of the year.
And the war goes on.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
The question now is if the alliances that IWI hired will head to Outer Ring after they finish burning the rest of SMA’s sov.
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EXE doesn’t need a red cross, they were never part of the Imperium. After all, if you don’t log in… :P.
Any reaction to the confirmed Director channel leaks about GSF’s attitudes to their allies?
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There isn’t a war going on anymore. It will be a slow burn to failure cascade for the rest of the CFC, and tbh we’ve probably already reached that point.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if the CFC showed up for one last charge of the light brigade, but that doesn’t seem likely given their risk-averse play style.
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@Rob Kaichin – We’re likely going to consolidate into GSF.
@Streblo – So The Imperium isn’t fighting the war the way you want us to?
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Oh, a sad day :(.
I might not’ve liked your tactics, but TNT had a good long history, and I’m sad to see that disappearing.
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I don’t think they’re fighting at all at this point.
Mittani’s strategy consists of hiding till the storm passes and poaching the collapsing CFC corps as they fold one by one under pressure.
It’s not a particularly good strategy, not only because it relies on the same thing not happening again when they try to come out from hiding, but also because it firmly establishes Goons as a few rungs down on the ladder of space empires. The CFC is full of people who like to play for the winning team but don’t have much interest in playing from behind — I flew with them for years and it is painfully obvious even in the way that CFC member alliances need Goon FC/logistic support so they can just show up and press F1.
Mittens is right in the sense that it’s the only “winning” strategy, and I use that term loosely because I don’t think there’s much winning to be had at this point. But I just don’t think it’s the right choice.
The Goons of old wouldn’t have just slowly crumpled into the night so that there was a chance they could come back without too many missing pieces. They would have lit the castle on fire and forced their enemies to take it from them one step at a time. The “risk-averse” “weaponized-boredom” that a monetized Imperium demands is terribly unfun, and who really cares about “winning” if that’s what winning involves.
Ride out Goons, ride out one last time and show the citizens of EVE you can still take it on the chin and give what you take.
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The Imperium is fighting. They’re not doing much in prime time but there’s been some fierce battles in the vulnerabilty window. A combined Waffles and CO2 assault on YA0 was defeated by a spirited CFC defence with not much time to spare this morning.
And my attempt to solo entosis afterwards met with mixed success – I reffed an ihub, persuaded an aggressive little Test ranis not to shoot me while I was entosising Goon sov then died to my old nemesis from 2013, Scooter McCabe.
We’re also starting to see Goon soloers. Some pilots have started trying to take matters into their own hands.
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Lemba: “Maybe we got ’em demoralized …
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I would argue that, should TNT decide to collapse into GSF, any sense of obligation owed to the CFC would end with that move.
Would you really want to be part of an organization who sold you a line of BS about the CFC protecting your alliance, only to fold you into them and destroy that very alliance?
I don’t get how anyone can view GSF as anything but a giant bunch of self-serving con artists at this point.
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@Talvorian Dex – Is this the part where you tell us that TNT should change sides? That we should throw away five years of being allies? That GSF hasn’t done enough for their allies when the whole coalition is under assault by overwhelming forces?
If TNT decides to collapse into GSF, which is only my estimate of what might come to pass, it will be our decision and will come out of a desire to remain with allies who we have worked with for long time, during both good and bad times. If TNT changed sides, it would no longer be my alliance.
I don’t understand how you don’t get the whole loyalty thing or how you fail to see that we might not welcome NCDot and PL as our new overlords.
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What war? It’s not really a war when one side surrenders all their shit without a fight.
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You’re only under assault by overwhelming forces because most of your coalition won’t log-in or stop ratting and join fleets.
The CFC of two years ago wouldn’t collapse after such a pathetic defence. Look at the fight Provi put up to defend their space.
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I think one of the problems with the loyalty thing is that many people hate the Goons enough that they don’t agree that loyalty is warranted. As an extreme example… and stay calm, you know I’m not out to insult you… some countries and armies allied to the Nazis stayed loyal until defeat, but was loyalty a good thing there, or would have betrayal been the more honorable option in that case?
Goons might be hated so much by many that they see loyalty to them as an immoral act.
I personally dislike them, but I don’t hate them. I can understand people may feel loyalty to them, even though it takes some effort.
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Yeah, flosch has pretty well tapped why a lot of us don’t agree with the ‘going down with the ship’ attitude.
Like the disloyal captains who plotted to kill Hitler, the oaths were to a unjust power, exacted by force, under duress. As with the British army, where ‘an illegal order’ (there’s a proper term for it) shouldn’t be obeyed, loyalty to a person who betrays you and what you stand for (my interpretation) should not be upheld or encouraged.
Good for you that you feel loyalty to Goonswarm/The Mittani is laudable. We feel differently.
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@flosch & Rob Kaichin – Hitler. Always Hitler. If I had the energy I would go dig up that Downfall parody video that has Hitler complaining about how people keep trivializing what he did by comparing it to mundane things.
The Hitler analogy is probably the most inapt of all the WWII analogies that we cannot seem to shed. The Mittani is more like that person on a reality TV show, the one who says, “I didn’t come here to make friends” that everybody hates and roots against and drives up ratings so that every such show has to have one. This is, after all, a video game, an item of entertainment, and not 1940s Europe.
As for loyalty, you seem to assume, despite what I have said in the past, that it means to The Mittani. I spelled this out at the end of a post. There are a lot of people between line members like me and The Mittani, who setup and maintain infrastructure, keep the forums running, maintain the SRP system, gather intel, and run fleets so that line members like me can play fairly casually. If I logged in tomorrow and they said, “Wilhelm, your turn to run operations!” we would be closed for the day, because I wouldn’t know what to do.
FCs like Asher and Laz and Boat matter far more to me than Mittens. I fly for them. And, it just so happens we are now in a situation where fleets are running all the time and content comes to our doorstep. Granted, it is not the same doorstep it was two weeks back, but I was in 93PI last night with a Hurricane fleet fighting Slepnirs and watching a supercap fleet. Great stuff! Why would I change sides now? The people attacking us have never done a thing for me, except show up and fight.
Or, to put it another way, the war is better than the peace, at least in a video game. And I keep hearing our foes complaining about the peace as well. Why do you want to get back to it so badly?
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More jabber leaks:
(7:47:33 PM) nymblar: querns: kcolor: yeah GSOL has hhad hardware and staging plan for taking SMA and TNT sov in pb/fade ready to go for a couple monhts
(7:47:43 PM) querns: :toot:
(7:48:17 PM) nymblar: but i think we need to put some more ihubs in the cooker for that
(10:41:15 PM) the_mittani: i think sma and tnt are finally on the verge of widotting
(10:41:25 PM) the_mittani: the pressure is working
:(
This is what your allies are ‘doing for you’.
I specifically said Goonswarm/The Mittani for a reason :P
It should be obvious to you why we’re picking WW2, I think. There’s been no other war which occupies the common conciousness and shared memory of Eve players the world over, which they know enough about to make analogies to.
Think of it this way, if there was a sport the whole world watched which had a team captain who kept insulting and belittling his allies, we’d be making analogies to that too.
“Or, to put it another way, the war is better than the peace, at least in a video game. And I keep hearing our foes complaining about the peace as well. Why do you want to get back to it so badly?”
Because once we’ve killed the CFC, there won’t be more peace. Hopefully, there’ll be more and more war.
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@Rob Kaichin – There are few things as annoying as somebody being insulted for you and telling you that you should feel so as well. And making The Mittani out as Hitler ad nauseum just turns the analogy into a meaningless background hum.
Besides which, I read the PL/NCDot coms leaks as well. Who is Stalin in that mix, if you want to push bad analogies? GSF at least wants us in the fold and not just as some more content they can farm at a later date.
All of which really doesn’t change my previous statement. I said in that post if TNT left the war I would join Karma Fleet. Almost all of those leaders and doers between me and The Mittani are in GSF anyway. I feel far more loyalty to Asher and Reavers, because I fly with them regularly, than TNT. That probably makes me a bad member of the alliance, but it is the way things have played out.
As for your post-war dream… we shall see. Gotta win the war first. And, after that, I don’t see a reason that people won’t blue up into coalitions again, especially if they feel the need to protect themselves from bigger alliances.
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By the PL/NCdot leaks, do you mean the BOSON chatlogs, or are there others I’ve not seen? (The perils of living in the EU).
Fair enough that you don’t feel insulted, I can’t change that, and I respect you enough not to try.
Your whole last paragraph is the ultimate tribute to the Sigs/asset-strip-and-disband style of CFC leadership, which I find very depressing, but if it works for you, v0v.
“And making The Mittani out as Hitler ad nauseum just turns the analogy into a meaningless background hum.”
If we were making him out as Hitler, he’d have a toothbrush moustache and a crazy hairdo. :P
Who would you suggest we use as an analogy?
Lenin/Stalin/Trotsky/Bucharin in Russia?
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@Rob Kaichin – “If we were making him out as Hitler, he’d have a toothbrush moustache and a crazy hairdo.”
So using Hitler as the analogy for The Mittani isn’t making him out as Hitler? You have to actually draw a little mustache and part his hair right or it just isn’t happening? That seems to me like splitting hairs, to go for an unintended pun.
And that analogy wasn’t just chosen because it was accessible, but because it also sends a clear good vs. evil message… if, as noted, we forget about Stalin. Besides which, I bet you can find a picture of Mittens on Reddit done up with the appropriate mustache and hairstyle. The internet would literally be incomplete without it.
It reminds me of a scene from Crimes & Misdemeanors where Woody Allen complains, “What is the guy so upset about? You’d think nobody was ever compared to Mussolini before.”
I’ve already been on my “analogies are bad” horse. You can go back and find that.
Anyway, you might find the SIG thing, which puts people with similar interests together within the coalition, a bad thing. But without it, if I had been required to just fly with my alliance and corp, I probably would have wandered out of null sec around B-R5RB. I was kind of done with main fleet and huge battles and tidi before that, had cancelled my second account, and wasn’t logging in all that often. Six titan kills is all I can show for that month. But Reavers was a new adventure, and I could still go back to main fleet if something big came up. And now this war is another new adventure.
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Analogy: a comparison between one thing and another, typically for the purpose of explanation or clarification.
Metaphor: a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else.
Using Hitler to describe the Mittani is a metaphor, not an analogy.
“I bet you can find a picture of Mittens on Reddit done up with the appropriate mustache and hairstyle”
I bet you can’t :P.
“if I had been required to just fly with my alliance and corp, I probably would have wandered out of null sec around B-R5RB. ”
I don’t get this. You don’t like TNT now (and presumably didn’t then). Why don’t you leave?
There are many, many different Eves (like CCP Denebola says). Why is yours tied to Nullsec space? (Reading “wandered out” as something containing a negative association)
Live a little, reinvent yourself!
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Did you edit your post?
(is confused)
I thought “All of which really doesn’t change my previous statement. I said in that post if TNT left the war I would join Karma Fleet. Almost all of those leaders and doers between me and The Mittani are in GSF anyway. I feel far more loyalty to Asher and Reavers, because I fly with them regularly, than TNT. That probably makes me a bad member of the alliance, but it is the way things have played out.”
was your last paragraph, but it isn’t any more.
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I was curious, so I looked it up (for anyone’s edification who may be reading this):
“widotting” refers to Wildly Inappropriate (dot), an old northern alliance that folded into GSF. From the eveinfo copy of the goon wiki:
“WI contributed considerably to war efforts, paving the way to the closing of the alliance and the merging of members into a single unified corporation which would fly under the flag of GSF.”
So apparently, SMA did not widot, but TNT still might. Elsewhere in the pastebin he says that Exe, Lawn and Init are holding steady, FCON and Razor are “??” which, from other rumors going around, I interpret as they may failscade or leave the alliance.
Meanwhile others (Laz) feel they should widot all allies. That seems like it could be a solid plan, assuming together they can defend Deklein, and it has enough space for all of them in the long term. Assuming they can’t, that is a pretty large power bloc at loose ends.
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@Rob Kaichin – When you posed it as German officers plotting to kill Hitler, it moved from metaphor to analogy.
Yes, I added that after I hit post rather than adding it as a second comment, as further explanation. The joy of hosting the blog, I can edit my comments. But I do not think I undercut or changed anything I was saying. My intent was to expand upon it.
I do not dislike TNT. I do not dislike my corp. Our CEO reads the blog and I click on enough PAP links that I am useful to them in hitting the monthly quote TNT has set. He comments when I show up at corp meetings or am actually in what was our local space. I even made little TNT buttons for EVE Vegas and all. I just have a stronger attachment to my SIG. I made buttons for Reavers as well, and I ran into more Reavers than TNT folks. Actually, I didn’t run into anybody from TNT at EVE Vegas.
Meanwhile, I am nine and a half years into playing EVE Online at this point and I have reinvented myself a few times already, as the over one thousand related blog posts will attest. Reavers was reinventing myself, from my point of view, and I am not done with that yet.
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It made my “your last paragraph” comment look a little stupid :P.
“The joy of hosting the blog, I can edit my comments.”
Fight the power! Down with the system!
I didn’t realise you had such a crazy amount of posts. I’ll be sure to read through those soon enough.
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Sorry, I only to edit when nobody has referenced or responded to a comment. I try not to use my power unfairly.
Yes, I started playing EVE Online just a few days before I started the blog, so while I have written about many games, few have seen a story arc the way EVE has. It all starts with post five, wherein I write about the tutorial of the time.
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Pingback: A Tale of Two Tales | Random Waypoint
Oh boy, what did I start? I thought I had made my comment sufficiently Godwin-proof for that not to happen. Of course it wasn’t meant as a comparison of very similar entities (“Goons are almost like Nazis”), but as a “to see why people react this way, let’s look at an extreme example (Nazis: almost universally hated), take deductions from that (loyalty might be seen as bad) and see whether they can’t also apply to a less extreme example (Goons: hated by many) if we limit the circumstances (people who really really hate Goons)”.
Anyway, I started an answer here, but it got way too long, so I made out of it a post of my own: https://randomwaypoint.fajs.de/2016/04/a-tale-of-two-tales/
And now you have to excuse me, I have to get into Deklein. :D
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Tbh I found it quite shocking to read on jabber leaks that GSF didn’t care for SMA (and for FCON) in the first place and has been deliberately pushing them for quite some time to collapse and cascade into GSF. Not so “valuable allies” after all I guess.
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@rolf ski – Yes, I’ve seen the full pastebin… or the forged edits, depending on your point of view.
Also, literally 30 comments so far on a post that I tried to write as neutrally as possible so as to simply note the date when this happened.
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Forged chat logs are hard to do when you’re quoting an email sent from CCP.
I’m sure “fucking c–t” Ned aka CCP Manifest is not too fond of the pastebin. CCP employees have also commented on the Reddit thread and because I’m sure the email leaks are the talk of the water-cooler I really doubt they’d be wading in there unless they knew it was true.
I mean do you even believe yourself anymore?
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We hold these truths self evident that any man has a right to post as much as he pleases, wherever it is possible to post.
:P
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@Streblo – I am an unreliable narrator at best. I can only write about what I think I see.
@Rob Kaichin – Still not the quality of comments I get when I post about WoW though. That gets real passion flowing.
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Some of this stuff you’ve posted in the ‘harmless’ pastebin is pretty bad tbh. It’s not the “full” pastebin because it occurs at a completely different time :P.
If FCON was deliberately ordered to hold UQ9, then that guy is exactly right: they were being ordered to wither on the vine.
Mittani’s “not a crazy guy” bit is hillarious, especially: “there’s no debate anymore about defender disadvantages for smaller alliances”. Shock horror, we know that there’s a disadvantage for being small. It’d be less of a disadvantage if your allies were helping you and not bouncing around Saranen undock counting made up points as ‘victory’.
Anyway, with all these lines about how “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” you’d think he’s just save us all a lot of bother and post the full set of logs from that time.
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Man, more leaks, more derogatory attitudes to allies, but now CCP is involved.
Joy.
Hopefully CCP will tell Mittens to piss off.
They’re here:
http://pastebin.com/W4CZA0Vk
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@Rob Kaichin –
(3:38:53 AM) the_mittani: tnt has been thinking about widotting forever
Probably true. Wibla has been very pro-GSF and makes sure we support the various Imperium SIGs. There has never been any problem getting SRP for any of the Reaver fits in TNT, but other alliances have balked at them from time to time.
(3:39:30 AM) the_mittani: however they have to see the light themselves
(3:39:53 AM) the_mittani: if we tell them to widot they will hate us, while if they see for themselves how much fozziesov sucks they will come to the conclusion on their own
Basically, they would like us to fold in but aren’t going to force us. Our decision, as I noted in a comment somewhere up the chain. Not all that disrespectful in my book. They could certainly be talking a lot worse trash behind our backs.
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The Widot thing: not sure how many of you commenting were playing when the first war happened; I assume a few in this comment section. Wildly Inappropriate moved into GSF voluntarily, and were not forced–same would be for TNT or others. The advantage is anyone can attack in fozzie, no one but the attacked can defend.
The other problem with all these distinct alliances in Imperium is numbers–the fozzie/jump mechanics and age of the game have taken a toll on players everywhere, and certainly those who are in “end game” ships like supers/titans etc. CCP has tried to use this war to boost flagging sub numbers, so certainly the CFC is not the same as it was 2 years ago. KF has done much to buff GSF itself.
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This is the point where I say “you wouldn’t be in this position if they’d really helped you”, and you say “Well, they did help us and we’re still in this position”, and then we go round and round and round and round :P.
So, instead I’ll say, think up non-insults to post on Rixx’s comment here: http://crossingzebras.com/blurred-lines/
I missed out on the Python reference, but I think my whimsical insanity won through :D.
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@Rob Kaichin – Oh no, Rixx is posting comments again? He just doesn’t have the temperament for it. I tried to inject some humor into his last run at TMC, but he remains steadfast in his belief that he can actually change somebody’s mind in a comment thread on the internet. It was heartbreaking to watch last time.
Well, at least he is going for a softball topic this time. I cannot imagine what somebody was thinking over at TMC when they took that gambling post as a submission, aside from maybe, “It’s Sunday, nobody reads our site on Sunday.”
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