Why would someone pay 3x20B to join an alliance which accepts 1-days old Rifter pilots unless he is a spy? "If it looks too good to be true, it probably is." Yes, I joined TEST to spy. No, not on their fleets, not to steal their forum content, their plans, to record FC rage, neither to steal from their hangars, bump out titans nor to drop their Sov. I was after their recipe of success. How could a bunch of "rifter retards" steamroll the oldest and "most elite" alliances? The red zone on the map is HBC/CFC land (I included Esoteria as their owners don't even resist the invasion). The black is NPC land. The rest is everyone else:
The 60B was well spent. It allowed me not just to be there (clean account would be enough for that), but draw attention to my posts, let me actively poke every hole, stirring the hornets. To know someone, you must fight him. So I went to the forums and fought.
What I found is great. The recipe not only apply to Goons (CFC), but it's completely technical. I mean "be welcoming to newbies" is a philosophical advice. You can believe that you are welcoming while the newbies disagree. The "anchor a can to newbie systems advertising" is a technical advice, leaves no place for opinions, you either anchored cans or you didn't.
The recipe permeates the TEST culture. They are clearly aware of it, even if just at an unconscious level. They named their logo (Middle Management Dino) after it. Their most often recited running joke tells how to fully implement it. If they'd take that joke seriously, they'd win EVE defeating/assimilating everyone else including CFC in a few months. The members (not just the leaders) vehemently fight everyone in the forum who'd try to break it. It's clearly dear to them, they love it, they live it, they just can't put into words. They went as far as a feeling, loving social person can go. To put it into cold, mean, heartless words, it needs an anti-social, 47%-hating guy who kicked people from his WoW-guild for saying "lol", who dislikes Ayn Rand for shunning initiating force, who gathered downvotes in TEST forum faster than anyone else in its history.
Type "middle management" into google and you get countless of economy articles how to get rid of them. Middle Management is considered a fat to the company, nothing but a dead weight sitting between those who make the decisions and those who do the work. They are the "boss" figures of comedies who are being bossy, abusing their power and make the life (and performance) of their subordinates worse just for their own amusement. Modern organizations try to empower even the lowest level of white collar workers and the foreman of the blue-collars, letting them use their own creativity, letting their ideas reach the decision makers.
In EVE the fleets operate on coalition levels. More than ten thousand of pilots are acting for the same goal. They win together or lose together. Their job is technical and while they might need experts to guide them (FCs, wiki writers), they don't need to be checked, disciplined, enforced, in a video game they play for fun and can quit any time. Even worse, in a video game where they can go back to highsec and be more rich.
Yet EVE Online has probably the biggest amount of middle management: the corporation CEOs and their trusted staff. An average EVE corporation is around 100 members. If we assume 3-4 directors, that means that there are about a middle manager for every 20 members. What do they do? Absolutely nothing useful. They don't make strategic plans, alliance or rather coalition military directorate does that. They don't lead fleets, fleet commanders do that. They don't gather reimbursement wallet, the alliance does that. What they do is living on corp tax and hazing the members like mean seniors the new students. They are supported by their inner circle and by the already "initiated" members who made themselves believe that their tribulations had any other purpose than amusing a bunch of nerds.
It's not that they are evil or even "mean". If a corporation is not part of a larger entity (like a WH or pirate corp), then its leaders are top managers and obviously useful and busy. But in nullsec coalitions all this work is done in alliance/coalition level, leaving them no responsibilities. Power corrupts, boredom makes one mean and we now have a full class that cannot do anything, but they have power to kick a player from the coalition.
When I got in TEST, I got in a random corp. Due to my 60B immunity I could mostly ignore it (and by doing so, almost ignored the recipe itself), but I seen its complete uselessness. The corp members contributed to the coalition goals, some of the leaders were coalition experts, but the corp as an organization contributed nothing. I won't name and shame them exactly because not the particular guys were especially bad, it was the corp itself being completely without function. What I almost ignored is the stream of eve-mails "suggesting" members to participate in a financially horrible plan that would provide "the corp" income that they openly planned to use on a "corp capital cache", meaning a bunch of dreads for the inner circle. What I couldn't ignore is that they started demanding Full API keys even for my highsec characters which would make my complete business easy target. So (with some drama), I left them and moved to Dreddit.
Dreddit is the core corporation of TEST. It has 4200 members, manages the towers, (obviously) provides the most PvP kills. And I've seen zero middle managers in Dreddit. No one asked for full api (not just from me, from no one), no one bossed around, no one demanded "to be a team player" (give resources to the leaders), no one wanted to include anyone into any social activity they didn't want. I unironically believe that Dreddit is the best corp of EVE (I can't talk about Goonwaffe as I haven't seen it from inside). As a member of Dreddit, you can mind your business and no one notices you as long as you don't do something harmful. The management of Dreddit is completely done by automatized software. You add your limited API key to the auth system, you apply to groups, you check if your skills are OK for capitals, you apply for reimbursement only interacting with a software.
Are Dreddit leaders and experts who get your applications and requests via the software are superhumans? Are they without flaws or malice? Far from it, some of them are horrible forum haters. It's unlikely that their average "goodness" is higher than the same quality of an average corp leader. But you are no one to them. They cannot know 4200 people, they have no reason to unfairly support or harm you, you are just another entry in the list to be processed. Dreddit is the perfectly de-humanized, automatized, a-social corp, unless you explicitly ask for social attention. Because of this it is a great social place as you are free to associate with people you call friends, instead of some guy giving you 30-200 random nerds and tell you "they are your clan now and I am your clan leader".
What miracle formed Dreddit and Goonwaffe? The external communities behind them created a huge influx of players who wanted to be together, in the same corporation. They simply grown too fast to allow closed social circles to form and fragment the whole.
How is Dreddit capable of projecting its properties to the totally average EVE corps of HBC (PL is exception, they are PL) despite being only 20% of it (4200 men Dreddit, 20K+ HBC)? Dreddit is simply the biggest. The various corps didn't form TEST, they joined with Dreddit which was 20-30x bigger than them. It was obvious that the CEO of Dreddit leads TEST, the others just tag along. The coalition is lead not by master-pet commands but simply going first. TEST deploys and the others are free to follow or not. Of course if they don't, they miss out on the fun and due to their size their options to run operations without TEST are very limited (again, PL is exception).
How could HBC turn into a galaxy-eater monster? Simply by taking the variations of the No1 running joke seriously. This joke is adding a "Kick X_corp" to random posts, usually targeting ENL-I , the second biggest TEST corporation. The joke exists in "Kick X_alliance" version, most popularly mentioning Thorn alliance. The joke is so widespread that one of the TEST corporations is called "Kick B0RT" (B0RT is the nickname of Dreddit). The proper action would be to kick all of the corporations and reorganize the members into B0RT2 and B0RT3, lead by TEST director alts (6000 corp size cap). Then reorganize the other HBC alliances into 1-1 corp each of them having their former alliance leaders as corp leaders. Finally join all these large corps (including B0RT and clones) into the alliance "HoneyBadgers". Obviously the new mega-corps would be managed by the same automatic software as Dreddit itself, replacing the huge middle management staff that now runs the hundreds of corporations.
How could any other coalition form a force that can fight back HBC/CFC? Since they don't have a Dreddit/Goonwaffe of their own, they must make it by disbanding all their alliances and corporations and forming one huge corp, managed similarly. The leaders should be the 5-10 top leaders of the current coalition. They will need lot of experts (like FCs), but won't need middle management. By merging 50 corporations, each of them having 100 members into one 5000 men corp, you remove 200-250 hazing, annoying, bossing funsuckers from positions of power.
Why the recipe is evil? Because it says that the most social members, the ones who hold little "families" together are actually just dead weight and the coalition would be better off demoting them into simple members (in some cases to experts). Still, the evidence is obvious, the two strongest coalitions, both rising from rifter newbies are centered around a no-middle-management supercorp.
The middle managers are often included to the inner circles, and some of them are also useful experts. To implement the recipe fully, these 200-250 inner circle members who are so certain of their own importance must be told that from now on you are just another line member. They wouldn't be happy about it at all, mostly because they are completely unaware of their useless and harmful nature, they genuinely think that they work hard to keep their corporations running and without them the coalition would fail. I seriously doubt that even Montolio or The Mittani have the power to dethrone the hundreds of middle managers littering their EVE coalitions. Maybe a new community, starting from scratch. But I doubt that anyone will bother. The nastiest part is that those who bothered to do organization work but lacked the skills to climb to alliance/coalition directorate are exactly the ones we are talking about: the middle managers.
There is no business report as it's stupid to collect pixel money in a game I'll stop playing with 99% chance. When I logged in to evacuate my characters to highsec I just stared at the screen and logged off. Which nullsec corporation could I go after this post, openly telling that the leaders of that corp are just dead weight, holding their coalitions back?
The 60B was well spent. It allowed me not just to be there (clean account would be enough for that), but draw attention to my posts, let me actively poke every hole, stirring the hornets. To know someone, you must fight him. So I went to the forums and fought.
What I found is great. The recipe not only apply to Goons (CFC), but it's completely technical. I mean "be welcoming to newbies" is a philosophical advice. You can believe that you are welcoming while the newbies disagree. The "anchor a can to newbie systems advertising" is a technical advice, leaves no place for opinions, you either anchored cans or you didn't.
The recipe permeates the TEST culture. They are clearly aware of it, even if just at an unconscious level. They named their logo (Middle Management Dino) after it. Their most often recited running joke tells how to fully implement it. If they'd take that joke seriously, they'd win EVE defeating/assimilating everyone else including CFC in a few months. The members (not just the leaders) vehemently fight everyone in the forum who'd try to break it. It's clearly dear to them, they love it, they live it, they just can't put into words. They went as far as a feeling, loving social person can go. To put it into cold, mean, heartless words, it needs an anti-social, 47%-hating guy who kicked people from his WoW-guild for saying "lol", who dislikes Ayn Rand for shunning initiating force, who gathered downvotes in TEST forum faster than anyone else in its history.
Type "middle management" into google and you get countless of economy articles how to get rid of them. Middle Management is considered a fat to the company, nothing but a dead weight sitting between those who make the decisions and those who do the work. They are the "boss" figures of comedies who are being bossy, abusing their power and make the life (and performance) of their subordinates worse just for their own amusement. Modern organizations try to empower even the lowest level of white collar workers and the foreman of the blue-collars, letting them use their own creativity, letting their ideas reach the decision makers.
In EVE the fleets operate on coalition levels. More than ten thousand of pilots are acting for the same goal. They win together or lose together. Their job is technical and while they might need experts to guide them (FCs, wiki writers), they don't need to be checked, disciplined, enforced, in a video game they play for fun and can quit any time. Even worse, in a video game where they can go back to highsec and be more rich.
Yet EVE Online has probably the biggest amount of middle management: the corporation CEOs and their trusted staff. An average EVE corporation is around 100 members. If we assume 3-4 directors, that means that there are about a middle manager for every 20 members. What do they do? Absolutely nothing useful. They don't make strategic plans, alliance or rather coalition military directorate does that. They don't lead fleets, fleet commanders do that. They don't gather reimbursement wallet, the alliance does that. What they do is living on corp tax and hazing the members like mean seniors the new students. They are supported by their inner circle and by the already "initiated" members who made themselves believe that their tribulations had any other purpose than amusing a bunch of nerds.
It's not that they are evil or even "mean". If a corporation is not part of a larger entity (like a WH or pirate corp), then its leaders are top managers and obviously useful and busy. But in nullsec coalitions all this work is done in alliance/coalition level, leaving them no responsibilities. Power corrupts, boredom makes one mean and we now have a full class that cannot do anything, but they have power to kick a player from the coalition.
When I got in TEST, I got in a random corp. Due to my 60B immunity I could mostly ignore it (and by doing so, almost ignored the recipe itself), but I seen its complete uselessness. The corp members contributed to the coalition goals, some of the leaders were coalition experts, but the corp as an organization contributed nothing. I won't name and shame them exactly because not the particular guys were especially bad, it was the corp itself being completely without function. What I almost ignored is the stream of eve-mails "suggesting" members to participate in a financially horrible plan that would provide "the corp" income that they openly planned to use on a "corp capital cache", meaning a bunch of dreads for the inner circle. What I couldn't ignore is that they started demanding Full API keys even for my highsec characters which would make my complete business easy target. So (with some drama), I left them and moved to Dreddit.
Dreddit is the core corporation of TEST. It has 4200 members, manages the towers, (obviously) provides the most PvP kills. And I've seen zero middle managers in Dreddit. No one asked for full api (not just from me, from no one), no one bossed around, no one demanded "to be a team player" (give resources to the leaders), no one wanted to include anyone into any social activity they didn't want. I unironically believe that Dreddit is the best corp of EVE (I can't talk about Goonwaffe as I haven't seen it from inside). As a member of Dreddit, you can mind your business and no one notices you as long as you don't do something harmful. The management of Dreddit is completely done by automatized software. You add your limited API key to the auth system, you apply to groups, you check if your skills are OK for capitals, you apply for reimbursement only interacting with a software.
Are Dreddit leaders and experts who get your applications and requests via the software are superhumans? Are they without flaws or malice? Far from it, some of them are horrible forum haters. It's unlikely that their average "goodness" is higher than the same quality of an average corp leader. But you are no one to them. They cannot know 4200 people, they have no reason to unfairly support or harm you, you are just another entry in the list to be processed. Dreddit is the perfectly de-humanized, automatized, a-social corp, unless you explicitly ask for social attention. Because of this it is a great social place as you are free to associate with people you call friends, instead of some guy giving you 30-200 random nerds and tell you "they are your clan now and I am your clan leader".
What miracle formed Dreddit and Goonwaffe? The external communities behind them created a huge influx of players who wanted to be together, in the same corporation. They simply grown too fast to allow closed social circles to form and fragment the whole.
How is Dreddit capable of projecting its properties to the totally average EVE corps of HBC (PL is exception, they are PL) despite being only 20% of it (4200 men Dreddit, 20K+ HBC)? Dreddit is simply the biggest. The various corps didn't form TEST, they joined with Dreddit which was 20-30x bigger than them. It was obvious that the CEO of Dreddit leads TEST, the others just tag along. The coalition is lead not by master-pet commands but simply going first. TEST deploys and the others are free to follow or not. Of course if they don't, they miss out on the fun and due to their size their options to run operations without TEST are very limited (again, PL is exception).
How could HBC turn into a galaxy-eater monster? Simply by taking the variations of the No1 running joke seriously. This joke is adding a "Kick X_corp" to random posts, usually targeting ENL-I , the second biggest TEST corporation. The joke exists in "Kick X_alliance" version, most popularly mentioning Thorn alliance. The joke is so widespread that one of the TEST corporations is called "Kick B0RT" (B0RT is the nickname of Dreddit). The proper action would be to kick all of the corporations and reorganize the members into B0RT2 and B0RT3, lead by TEST director alts (6000 corp size cap). Then reorganize the other HBC alliances into 1-1 corp each of them having their former alliance leaders as corp leaders. Finally join all these large corps (including B0RT and clones) into the alliance "HoneyBadgers". Obviously the new mega-corps would be managed by the same automatic software as Dreddit itself, replacing the huge middle management staff that now runs the hundreds of corporations.
How could any other coalition form a force that can fight back HBC/CFC? Since they don't have a Dreddit/Goonwaffe of their own, they must make it by disbanding all their alliances and corporations and forming one huge corp, managed similarly. The leaders should be the 5-10 top leaders of the current coalition. They will need lot of experts (like FCs), but won't need middle management. By merging 50 corporations, each of them having 100 members into one 5000 men corp, you remove 200-250 hazing, annoying, bossing funsuckers from positions of power.
Why the recipe is evil? Because it says that the most social members, the ones who hold little "families" together are actually just dead weight and the coalition would be better off demoting them into simple members (in some cases to experts). Still, the evidence is obvious, the two strongest coalitions, both rising from rifter newbies are centered around a no-middle-management supercorp.
The middle managers are often included to the inner circles, and some of them are also useful experts. To implement the recipe fully, these 200-250 inner circle members who are so certain of their own importance must be told that from now on you are just another line member. They wouldn't be happy about it at all, mostly because they are completely unaware of their useless and harmful nature, they genuinely think that they work hard to keep their corporations running and without them the coalition would fail. I seriously doubt that even Montolio or The Mittani have the power to dethrone the hundreds of middle managers littering their EVE coalitions. Maybe a new community, starting from scratch. But I doubt that anyone will bother. The nastiest part is that those who bothered to do organization work but lacked the skills to climb to alliance/coalition directorate are exactly the ones we are talking about: the middle managers.
There is no business report as it's stupid to collect pixel money in a game I'll stop playing with 99% chance. When I logged in to evacuate my characters to highsec I just stared at the screen and logged off. Which nullsec corporation could I go after this post, openly telling that the leaders of that corp are just dead weight, holding their coalitions back?
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