Quotes from TEST forums

Two quotes from the thread discussing the op that ended with serious capital losses for TEST against BL:

Callduron, on 07 Aug 2013 - 22:42, said:
Woo hoo we just blew up EloManRus in PR-. My point!
This fleet is awesome.
Test + Tribe + Boobs v BL + Pizza + Riot

Baki Yuku, on 08 Aug 2013 - 00:11, said:
Anybody thinking this was great should fucking kill himself. That we lost 19 dreads and 2 carrier is not even the issue the issue is that we FAILED TO FUCKING KEEP EM ON THE FIELD 1 FUCKING JUMP FROM OUR STAGING SYSTEM. WE FAILED TO FORM ANY SORT OF FUCKING DECENT FLEET I'M SORRY BUT LIKE THIS MIGHT AS WELL FUCKING DISBAND!

After these quotes I asked the question:
Guys, do you seriously think that there is a chance to keep these two people (and those who agree with them) in the same alliance?
It's quite obvious that I'm on Baki's side, and I'm not going to argue over it. I'm not saying that we are right and you are wrong. This is a game, everyone plays the way he wants.
I'm just asking: do you really see common future? Wouldn't it be better if the "Callduron people" go left and the "Baki Yuku people" go right?

This is what's been eating TEST: there are clearly two parties, one that aims for competency and victories, and another who honestly believe that defeats are awesome fun. The tensions between the parties are rising and several former leadership members like Beffah and Ingen Kerr left for Pandemic Legion or Nulli.

TEST - while still having the largest membership and only a week away from the record-breaking 6VDT numbers - barely have any FC left, especially since Kurator has announced that his corporation will leave TEST (that's why "Boobs" was mentioned separately on the first quote). Donations went to complete halt after reaching 350B in two weeks.

The forums are burning, especially after Dysphonia Fera who was kicked when connections between PL and TEST broke and went awoxing (actually the awoxes broke the connection) was invited back. His posting quality got him kicked in a day by BoodaBooda (TEST leader) again, only to be re-invited by another leader and instantly set forum mod.

I think the inability of TEST to failcascade due to most of its size provided by one corp is now a curse, as solutions cannot be forced by corp CEOs. The usual "fix it or we leave" that forces alliance leaders to make changes is openly trolled here. -A- died by corps leaving one by one. TEST can lose half of its corps without visible mark on the Dotlan statistics.

It's clear that fire and ice can't be in the same bucket. The "defeat is fail, we must do better" and "defeat is awesome, do it again" people won't last in the same alliance. However the question rises how could they last for 3 years? The solution is simply: because they didn't have to mix. TEST was lead by Montolio and his close and separate staff. He aligned TEST first with Goons, than with PL. The coalition fleets were lead by outside FCs (I don't remember flying under a single TEST FC in the campaign against -A-). This meant that TEST members did not need to be more competent than being able to press F1 and also that competent members could always find like-minded leaders to work with.

However TEST is now alone and the former leadership is gone. Now TEST must use self-grown leadership and it doesn't seem to able to grow any since as soon as you are competent enough to have other options, these options look much better, as nothing annoys a competent person more than "defeat is awesome".

One can ask where the top leader is? I mean even if the whole military directorate and all the FCs left, someone need to be the formal head of the alliance and the corps. The head of alliance is BoodaBooda, the head of Dreddit is Dovinian. What are they doing? Well, BoodaBooda isn't a bad leader who makes bad decisions. BoodaBooda is a horrible leader who makes no decisions. When practically the whole military directorate jumped ship, what did this blessed soul do? Renamed the leadership forum group from "Shortbus" to "High command" and even made a lengthy forum post about it. No doubt that the former name was stupid. But probably this wasn't the most urgent change. But still this was the only change BoodaBooda made in the last weeks. Dovinian, who has proven his worth by being the most AFK CSM of the history is keep being AFK and does absolutely nothing. Ever. TEST has no one left who could give orders and handle problems. Let BoodaBooda explain it himself:
"I MEAN DID YOU EXPECT ME TO READ THIS AND BE LIKE OH YEAH MAYBE GEVLONS RIGHT AND I SHOULD GET RID OF CALLDURON OR BAKI YUKU HMM MAYBE I SHOULD PICK ONE"

Yeah, his all caps anger is understandable. After all the idea to choose between two absolutely conflicting opinions within his own alliance is too much to ask from a leader. I mean such action would be ... leading.

My prediction: TEST won't lose visible amount of members, but it will lose the competent members and their corps. The remaining mass of "for fun" leeches won't be able to hold Delve against Pizza (a small pirate alliance), and will eventually transform into Brave Newbies 2 (without being cute) somewhere in lowsec.

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Business Thursday: Interdict your mum!

The Goons have announced Caldari ice interdiction.
What is it? A gank campaign in Caldari space, killing ice miners.
Why do they do it? For fun and for profit: 400 ISK price increase while the daily volume is 0.15B. That's 60B/day damage to every Nitrogen isotope user and you can bet that Goons have stockpiles. The Goons plan to keep it up for a month. Even if the price doesn't increase much more (it will), the profit of the Goons will be around 2T.

You might remember that for one month, I was the most effective ganker of EVE, probably also holding the record of solo kills. In that month I killed 659 ships all by myself. 53B ISK damage, 98% ratio, most valuable pod killed and other records. During that week I alone caused 1/20 as much ISK damage as the whole 12K TEST alliance. You guessed it, I was ganking in highsec. I know the ins and outs of highsec ganking probably more than anyone in this game.

It's time to use utilize this knowledge to turn this year's ice interdiction. White Glaze prices already skyrocketed, you can sell it for 1/3M and you can mine a unit in 40-50 seconds depending on skills if you have Orca boost. So 25-30M is achievable while sitting in this:

[Procurer, Interdict this]
Damage Control II
Ice Harvester Upgrade II

Medium Shield Extender II
Thermic Dissipation Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II

Ice Harvester II

Medium Ice Harvester Accelerator I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I

Hornet EC-300 x4
Hobgoblin II x1

90K EHP against Catalysts, 108K if you overheat, 130K if you have an Orca with shield harmonizing link. The pricetag of this ship is around 30M, much less than the catalyst horde needed to destroy it. Keeping Orca on the belt is probably not the best idea, because even a max-tanked Orca has just 340K EHP against Catalysts, so a 70-80 Cata fleet can take it out and they cost about the same as the Orca.

If you are a pro miner, in the upcoming month Caldari ice is what you should mine. Keep your boosting Orca next to a station so you can dock up if anyone tries to attack that, and unleash your multiboxed Procurers on the ice. While the smaller ore hold of the Procurer increases docking count, the income is still higher than any other mining. Don't try jetcan mining, they can just steal the cans!

If you want to rack up some kills and/or mess with Goons, you should be in an ECM ship. The gankers go flashy and attackable by everyone. Catalysts don't have too much sensor strength, you can jam several of them, practically destroying them, as they can't carry on with the gank but still die to Concord. To avoid counter-gank or counter-ECM, just make an offgrid safe 6-800 km from the ice, sit there aligned and warp in when you see Catalysts coming on Dscan. ECM frigs are cheap, so even if they can counter-gank you, you still have lot of kills.

All previous anti-gank movements failed because the ice belts were infinite and the ore belts were so numerous that they could be called infinite too. It means that the miners were scattered, so you could camp a belt all day without seeing a single ganker, despite they were very busy in the region. Since the amount of dumb miners is huge, no matter how many anti-gankers were patrolling, vast majority of the belts were always unpatrolled and housed dumb miners where gankers could feast.

The new system made ice belts limited and depleting. If an ice belt is mined out, no idiot miner can go there in his 4x civilian booster fit Mackinaw to feed the gankers. So a mining fleet is needed that eat up the belts and forces dumb miners to move to patrolled belts where the gankers are massacred. Such mining fleet can be formed simply by patrolling that belt. Miners who died otherwise come there by chance and can keep mining safely.

The above operates without coordination. So if you, as a miner move a bunch of procurers to a ganked ice belt, the gankers can't just ignore you and kill untanked Macks, as you are destroying their hunting field. They must waste insane man-hours ganking your procurers that you can easily replace from a few million, practically griefing the gankers. What about AFK? Just set your clone to a nearby system and have your pod empty. You lose the overheating ability, but you are still griefing gankers by costing them more in ISK and man-hours than to yourself.

You can fire up dotlan and check ice belt systems with lot of kills. Move there either as ECM or miner, kill gankers and remove the belt itself, forcing them to pack and move.

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Need to beat the NPC corp

I'm struggling with the "Just hang out and let's have fun" people in TEST, just like I had struggled with them all my MMO play. Today I try a different angle defeating them, removing opinionated elements.

EVE is a video game. Games are played for fun. If you are playing a game, you are having fun on average. Of course you can have upset moments, but the general experience must be fun or you simply stop playing. Every activity players do in the game is therefore fun for someone. If it's not, then no one plays that way and that aspect of the game dies unless devs fix it.

So "playing for fun" is a meaningless statement, since playing is fun. Of course we can take this statement as "I want to play in a way as I want in that moment". This is a valid statement and a valid form of playing. However the corp/alliance formed under the ethos of "everyone can do whatever he wants" has a problem: it's worse than the NPC corp. The NPC corp (or 1-man corp) is the ideal form of "do what you want": no one is capable of limiting your play. No one stops you from mining, ratting, missioning, gatecamping, roaming or whatever you have in your mind. A player corporation cannot be so completely free of interference. There are activities needed to be done and it forces players to do things even if they don't want to. Also, no player corp can be as big as the NPC corp. At the moment I'm writing this, the Science and Trade Institute has 4x more players online than TEST, the largest player alliance in the game. And STI is just one of the several identical NPC corps, so the amount of players you can randomly interact is much larger. The main problem with "for fun" corps is that they are naturally worse than the NPC corp.

The NPC corp isn't a corp. It's simply "the game". You can do everything in it that the game allows. "Having fun" is playing the game. The corp that allows and welcomes every activities is simply equal to the game itself. What is its recruitment slogan then? "Join us and play EVE"?

Of course the situation is different if you want to interact with people but in a repeating manner (having friends in-game). However to do so, you need to play similarly. You can't hang out with people if they are in different regions doing different things. Or actually you can, but then the game is just annoyance. Shut down the client and go to Jabber or Mumble and focus completely on each other! To interact with people in a game-relevant manner, you need to play in a connected way. If you want to play with an ice miner regularly, you need to be an ice miner or someone who uses ice. You can't have fun together with ice miners without somehow connecting to their defining activity (ice mining).

To have a regular fun with other people, you need to be in a player organization that plays in a structured way, either having a common goal or a common rule of conduct.

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Why can't TEST live without Sov?

One of the most defining criteria of "being TEST" is that very new players and veterans play together. There is TEST_FREE, a completely donation-based newbie helper group, there are EWAR doctrine ships flyable with very-low SP, there is ship replacement program to keep those in ships who can't keep themselves and there is a general love towards newbies. However one must ask, why does someone support newbies he doesn't even know? I mean it's understandable that someone helps a friend, but when you donate to TEST_FREE or pay your tax for SRP, you are helping a player you might never-ever chat. It is a 12K alliance after all.

The solution is that 100 battleships are weaker than 100 battleships + 1 Rifter. Every new player, no matter how incompetent he is, gives the fleet power, without real costs. When you do something for the new players, you invest into your common future, into your upcoming power. However such power can only be harnessed in Sov warfare. If the timer is up, you have to form or lose Sov, you don't have the option to stand down and hope the enemy just goes away.

If you are doing either PvE or PvP in lowsec, highsec or NPC null, you want to keep your numbers to the minimum. Someone doing PvE obviously want to hide and has no reason to share his income. Someone doing non-Sov PvP wants to get fights and you don't get any if you enter with a 200 men fleet. The best is a numerically small gang which is attacked by hostiles and then win due to superior skills. If the enemy is stronger than you, you can always choose to not take the fight, you aren't forced to rageping more people.

The point is that even if everyone would have fun in NPC null, TEST would still break, as the high-skilled players have no reason to be in the same fleet as the low-skilled ones. Adding new players to your fishing fleet will just scare the fish away. Similarly, if someone is making ISK from missioning in NPC null or low, why on Earth would he pay tax to any corp? He gets nothing in return as everyone can dock in stations and no one can upgrade systems.

The problem isn't that new players can't survive in NPC-null. This is how TEST started and the oldest members remember it. However back then everyone was a newbie. The problem is that in NPC null, the new player is nothing but a burden and annoyance to a skilled player, so he will quit, even if he does the very same things as the newbies. Every single non-sov PvP organization is high-skilled, focused and numerically small. You can't get in Rote Kapelle or Black Legion with a 2 weeks old pilot.

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How to make 4000+ fights smooth without supercomputers

CCP Veritas gave an interview about the server-side of the 6VDT fight. He admitted that the server lagged and also that they aren't upgrading because such fights are extraordinary, therefore a supercomputer would run with 5% load in 99% of its time. But we not only do "have" large battles but also they are pinnacle events of EVE, they can't be just cut down as outliers.

I already had a suggestion, to kick out smaller ships, but it would cut down exactly the 4000 players playing effect. So here is the better one, which doesn't exclude anyone, and designed to the realities of the large-fleet combat.

In large-fleets most players are in doctrine DPS ships, shooting the same broadcasted primary. In 6VDT TEST Prophecies and Zealots fought CFC Megathrons. They are trying to shoot the same target, at the same time. Let's use that!

When TiDi reaches 30%, grouping is enabled on server side (players can't initiate or stop it). In this state, the DPS ships of the same types and on the same grid are moved into N-ship groups. One out of the N pilots is randomly chosen to pilot the group, he has the same interface as normal. Technically, the other N-1 ships are removed from the grid and the leader ship gets its damage increased N-times. So if N=10, where were 10 Megathrons, each issuing commands and moving, there will be just one. The players on the other ships will get the same data as the actually piloting one, they can rotate the camera and observe the battle, they can chat, but they can't issue commands, besides a "leave group".

To not turn these players into complete spectators, the leader role rotates between them. It is also needed to average out the different skillpoints and fits. Since the leader is random-selected, the DPS of the group is equal to the DPS of the sum of the individual ships on average (if a max skilled and an noob is grouped, half time the group has 2x great and half time 2x noob DPS). If the grouped-ship is attacked, it is always the actual leader's resists that matters. If the ship explodes, he is in his pod, the killers see it flashing and disappearing as target, but the group (unless it was down to 1 ship) will live on, with 1 less power and another leader.

Due to this change, the battle participation number will be decreased to 1/N for the server. The group is one ship server-wise, and also one ship on the overview and brackets, with only a number next to it showing that it shoots harder and needs to be killed multiple times. It looks atrocious to take control away from players, but remember, they are willingly shooting broadcasts anyway, so they are actually better off. To avoid any kind of player dissatisfaction, this can be made opt-in, players can choose to be grouped with other ships of the fleet. I'm sure all FCs will order their pilots to activate this feature for maximum alpha (the group shoots in the same millisecond).

The server can automatically play with N, and reorder ships to balance performance and maximum number of independent pilots. Of course lot of problems has to be addressed, mostly with E-war and smartbomb damage, but I'm sure it all can be balanced, and allow smooth, 50-60% TiDi battles with 10K participants.

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Blogging is for a long term

I've started my blog about WoW and it grown pretty well. But then WoW started to decline in playerbase and for a reason. I also started to lose interest. Found EVE Online and started writing about that. Lost lot of visitors who couldn't care less of EVE. It took more than a year to replace them with EVE-visitors. Now I can tell that finally my blog is a successful EVE blog. Let me give a few advices to fellow bloggers:

• Don't be nice! People can watch pretty pictures everywhere. Your only selling point is your unique set of ideas. Tell them proudly.
• Moderate aggressively! To have a useful comment section, "First", "this is awesome", "I wish you die in cancer" has to go, along with derails and 3 pages long essays why the blog author is Hitler.
• You are writing to readers and not commenters! 99% of readers never comment.
• Ignore the "community"! If you are trying to get links from other sites, you will self-censor to impress the other site owners. You don't need links. 90% of my visitors come directly or read from a feed.
• Don't jump on bandwagons! If everyone writes about "how to get newbies to mining" this month, don't! Bloggers find these banthers cute, readers find it boring.
• Work on content, not design! I doubt if your blog is uglier than mine.
• Pre-write posts, give yourself time to think it over again and again!
• Rather be wrong 10x than silent once! Bad ideas make people think. Empty pages not.
• No one cares about your feelings. You are writing to your readers, write something they can apply.
• Be patient! It will take years till you get your own readerbase.

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Fun-selfishness

The anti-social in me tells that people cannot be trusted, they would harm me if it serves them and possible for them. The things I've seen never disproved this. My social studies shown me undisputed research on the existence of altruism, friendship and love.

Playing games a lot and dealing with the "play for fun" crowd finally allowed me to combine the two into a new concept: fun-selfishness. People are completely selfish and interested only in maximizing their fun, ignoring the others. However, this doesn't manifest in material selfishness, since most of them do not find material wealth fun. Depending on their feelings, their mental state can move them to do things I'd consider selfless, like helping out a "newbro" or enlisting to the army of their country. However they never did these for the "newbro" or the country, but from the fun they gained from feeling generous or patriotic. When that fun disappear, they'd stop doing it.

People wrongfully assume such "selflessness" towards them to be trustable. "My wife loves me and will stays with me" - they say, while the truth is that she is only with you for a selfish reason: she is having sexual and emotional fun with you. As soon as she finds someone who offers more of these, she jumps ship. Similarly when groups find "loyal" members, they merely found ones who kept having good fun in the group. If anything changes and they lose this fun: there goes your Revenant!

So the situation is neither social or anti-social but rather objectivist-materialist with a twist: using an unmeasurable currency "fun". You are safe in a relationship while the other party has more fun via cooperating than he'd have by defecting. So to secure yourself you need to make sure that the other party is having enough fun, and especially your negligence doesn't open a way that would give them more fun by messing with you. Let me give an example: in an EVE alliance you can be sure that no one sets up a scheme to awox your T2 fit T1 ratting battleship or fleet ship. Why? Because the fun of having a battleship killmail is much smaller than you can have by chatting and flying with other members. But if you start mining in a titan, you will be awoxed, since killing a mining titan is more fun than "having bros" in this alliance, or to be exact, the cost measured in fun of moving to another alliance, setting up new services and enduring the initiation period.

The good news is that you don't have to "catch them before they catch you". The bad is no one can be trusted. The truth is that you are in a constant marketplace of "fun" and you have to keep your eyes on the rates to not lose customers. You can manage your risks, therefore assume control of your situation and well-being by offering the people around you fair trades.

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