Goons, TEST and those who share their attitude are hated and despised in the EVE community. They are generally considered immature, anti-social idiots who derive fun from pointlessly harming innocent people. I had my share of Goon-bashing, based on the fact that an hour spent griefing people who were not your enemies is an hour wasted. While I stayed away from the "this is wrong, this is immoral, they are terrible people" moralizing, I considered them bored punks who has nothing better to do than being mean.
However "idiots doing random nonsense" don't win battles against a powerblock. SoCo controlled half of nullsec, has tens of thousands of pilots, lot of supercapital ships. While everyone can be defeated, SoCo is not losing a war. They are being roflstomped. Random idiots don't roflstomp a powerblock.
Unlike most people who adjust the reality to their theories, I thrown out the premise of the Goons being idiots who were simply lucky to have Tech moons. Claiming that they win despite of their defining characteristics is nonsense. Anyone who'd do the same as they are except the idiocies would be stronger than them. There isn't such group. Also, their other activities are pretty standard, they do what everyone else do when they are not "being Goons".
Goons must win because they grief and troll innocents. How? Thanks to my logistics misery, I learned it the hard way: most people are ready to throw away serious power upgrade (like a 80% effective logi) if it's not "cool" enough. It's funny that "play to win vs play for ego" is my core idea, I built the blog around it and I didn't recognize until it slapped my face. Most players seriously gimp themselves by refusing to do anything that doesn't "increase their e-peen". They max-out skills for cheap ships instead of learning strong ships, because with something cheap the PvP loss is a smaller shame and the win is a greater glory. They don't field or even self-destruct supercapitals in the fear of a supercapital lossmail. They refuse pilots on the basis of not being perfect, because having an non-perfect ship increases the chance of having a worse ISK ratio. They would rather not log in than throwing waves of ships to the enemy, even if they have more ships and would surely win at the end: the deaths would ruin their killboard. Of course we can add the standard stuff: logi is boring, ewar is cheap, neuting is cheap, all the usual social crap.
OK, socials are bad, most of my posts are about that, and you are surely bored by its repetition. How does it connect to Goons being Goons? Because Goons aren't coming from Krypton. They are recruited from the very same demographics as everyone else: internet-using young adults, mostly males. If they are the same kind of people, they must be exactly as socials as their enemies. They must care about killboards, e-honor, gaining respect and liking of their peers. And by default they would. Left on their own devices they would be just as "nice, friendly and sweet" carebears or "l33t PvP-ers with e-honor and great stats" as the rest of EVE.
But they aren't left on their own devices. Enters The Mittani and other Goon overlords who tell them to do bad things. They lead them to highsec to do the most anti-social thing one can do: bringing pointless and unprofitable suffering to innocent people who meant them no harm. I'm sure that the first time the Goon newbie feels bad when he does it. He only does it because of peer pressure, wanting to fit in with his Goon pals, or by distancing himself from his actions (it's just pixel ships).
After he does these things, after everyone hates him, curses him, tells him that he is the most despicable rat ever crawled the galaxy, he realizes that nothing bad happens to him. The ground doesn't open and swallow him to the Hell like his preachers, teachers and parents said. He won't be banned from the game as such actions are not against the rules. The rage and hatred of random people cause him no harm, actually they are just funny "tears"-posts. He recognizes that all the moral planted into his head are lies. Only objective things can stop him, words cannot.
Also, exactly because he done these things, there is no going back. A Goon can't return to highsec to be a carebear, nor he can be a "E-honor l33t PvP-er". The carebear/l33t communities wouldn't accept him due to his terrible sec status and killboard (there are always killmail whores on the concord reports who post them). They also wouldn't accept him simply because he was Goon. But above all he couldn't come back because he cannot accept the carebear/l33t philosophy without spitting himself in the face for the things he done.
The acts of griefing, scamming, trolling forces one to permanently reject the judgement and morals of the social herd. It forces the person to abandon the goal of being desired, loved, respected by random morons and slackers. It forces him to face the taboos of the society and experience that there are no consequences for breaking them.
Actually I used a similar, yet much less radical way: trading. Social people hate rich people and I want(ed) to prove that simply by not being moron or slacker you can be dirty rich too. I know it helped many people. They wrote me several mails thanking for my ideas. I did OK, but I surely liberated less minds than The Mittani.
The "standard" way of breaking away from the herd of sheep is rationally question their actions one by one. The social psychology books that started me on my way are collecting and analyzing clearly bizarre behavior like this. However it needs lot of thinking and reading. No wonder that Ayn Rand is considered one of the most influential writers - among academics. Her ideas had zero effect on the World since they never reached the general public. The "griefing way" is great because it's a simple "do it yourself in 1 hour for dummies" method. The shortest way for freeing people from the "e-peen/ego/love/liking" nonsense is to make them break the unwritten rules - even completely pointlessly - and let them see that there are no consequences for such actions. I did and published something like it, but I did not dare to go far enough. Making pixel money from selling crap to morons and slackers, breaking the cartels of 0.01 punks is nowhere near as radical - therefore effective - as blowing up carebears who cry "griefing" or "l33t PvP-ers" who cry "blobbing".
Summary:
Saturday morning report: 87.0B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
Sunday morning report: 89.4B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
Monday morning report: 92.4B!!! New daily record! (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
However "idiots doing random nonsense" don't win battles against a powerblock. SoCo controlled half of nullsec, has tens of thousands of pilots, lot of supercapital ships. While everyone can be defeated, SoCo is not losing a war. They are being roflstomped. Random idiots don't roflstomp a powerblock.
Unlike most people who adjust the reality to their theories, I thrown out the premise of the Goons being idiots who were simply lucky to have Tech moons. Claiming that they win despite of their defining characteristics is nonsense. Anyone who'd do the same as they are except the idiocies would be stronger than them. There isn't such group. Also, their other activities are pretty standard, they do what everyone else do when they are not "being Goons".
Goons must win because they grief and troll innocents. How? Thanks to my logistics misery, I learned it the hard way: most people are ready to throw away serious power upgrade (like a 80% effective logi) if it's not "cool" enough. It's funny that "play to win vs play for ego" is my core idea, I built the blog around it and I didn't recognize until it slapped my face. Most players seriously gimp themselves by refusing to do anything that doesn't "increase their e-peen". They max-out skills for cheap ships instead of learning strong ships, because with something cheap the PvP loss is a smaller shame and the win is a greater glory. They don't field or even self-destruct supercapitals in the fear of a supercapital lossmail. They refuse pilots on the basis of not being perfect, because having an non-perfect ship increases the chance of having a worse ISK ratio. They would rather not log in than throwing waves of ships to the enemy, even if they have more ships and would surely win at the end: the deaths would ruin their killboard. Of course we can add the standard stuff: logi is boring, ewar is cheap, neuting is cheap, all the usual social crap.
OK, socials are bad, most of my posts are about that, and you are surely bored by its repetition. How does it connect to Goons being Goons? Because Goons aren't coming from Krypton. They are recruited from the very same demographics as everyone else: internet-using young adults, mostly males. If they are the same kind of people, they must be exactly as socials as their enemies. They must care about killboards, e-honor, gaining respect and liking of their peers. And by default they would. Left on their own devices they would be just as "nice, friendly and sweet" carebears or "l33t PvP-ers with e-honor and great stats" as the rest of EVE.
But they aren't left on their own devices. Enters The Mittani and other Goon overlords who tell them to do bad things. They lead them to highsec to do the most anti-social thing one can do: bringing pointless and unprofitable suffering to innocent people who meant them no harm. I'm sure that the first time the Goon newbie feels bad when he does it. He only does it because of peer pressure, wanting to fit in with his Goon pals, or by distancing himself from his actions (it's just pixel ships).
After he does these things, after everyone hates him, curses him, tells him that he is the most despicable rat ever crawled the galaxy, he realizes that nothing bad happens to him. The ground doesn't open and swallow him to the Hell like his preachers, teachers and parents said. He won't be banned from the game as such actions are not against the rules. The rage and hatred of random people cause him no harm, actually they are just funny "tears"-posts. He recognizes that all the moral planted into his head are lies. Only objective things can stop him, words cannot.
Also, exactly because he done these things, there is no going back. A Goon can't return to highsec to be a carebear, nor he can be a "E-honor l33t PvP-er". The carebear/l33t communities wouldn't accept him due to his terrible sec status and killboard (there are always killmail whores on the concord reports who post them). They also wouldn't accept him simply because he was Goon. But above all he couldn't come back because he cannot accept the carebear/l33t philosophy without spitting himself in the face for the things he done.
The acts of griefing, scamming, trolling forces one to permanently reject the judgement and morals of the social herd. It forces the person to abandon the goal of being desired, loved, respected by random morons and slackers. It forces him to face the taboos of the society and experience that there are no consequences for breaking them.
Actually I used a similar, yet much less radical way: trading. Social people hate rich people and I want(ed) to prove that simply by not being moron or slacker you can be dirty rich too. I know it helped many people. They wrote me several mails thanking for my ideas. I did OK, but I surely liberated less minds than The Mittani.
The "standard" way of breaking away from the herd of sheep is rationally question their actions one by one. The social psychology books that started me on my way are collecting and analyzing clearly bizarre behavior like this. However it needs lot of thinking and reading. No wonder that Ayn Rand is considered one of the most influential writers - among academics. Her ideas had zero effect on the World since they never reached the general public. The "griefing way" is great because it's a simple "do it yourself in 1 hour for dummies" method. The shortest way for freeing people from the "e-peen/ego/love/liking" nonsense is to make them break the unwritten rules - even completely pointlessly - and let them see that there are no consequences for such actions. I did and published something like it, but I did not dare to go far enough. Making pixel money from selling crap to morons and slackers, breaking the cartels of 0.01 punks is nowhere near as radical - therefore effective - as blowing up carebears who cry "griefing" or "l33t PvP-ers" who cry "blobbing".
Summary:
- Social people are motivated not by personal interest but by the will to be liked and/or respected by peers
- Therefore in games they don't go for victory but for getting friends or "cool stats"
- So they are either a nice, helpful carebears or a small-gang "l33t" PvP-ers with "great killboard"
- Therefore they are unable and even unwilling to fight anyone who has effective fleet strategy
- In short: they lose the game
- This could theoretically be broken by elevating to a rational selfish level (Objectivism), but it's unreachable unless someone has academic level training
- So average people were/are/forever will be losers without hope.
- This can be broken by the "Goon magic": practicing socially unacceptable actions (griefing, trolling). Such act burns the bridges towards the social herd, openly rejecting their norms and ensuring their hate/despise.
- Such person has nothing left to lose on the social front, he has no chance to find friends or making anyone respect him from the crowd, so he gives up trying
- Internal social barriers out of the picture he will be much more effective
- He wins
Saturday morning report: 87.0B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
Sunday morning report: 89.4B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
Monday morning report: 92.4B!!! New daily record! (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
