In a week dominated by the news that REM were breaking up while U2 still, for some reason, refuse to hang themselves in a garage with the strings from the Edge’s guitar, a far more important story has been overlooked: a man has been sent to prison for 18 weeks for trolling on the internet. A man described thus “single, male, introverted-looking, a sad loner who spends hours upon hours on his laptop feeding that great cyber gulch with what he apparently believed to be his dazzling wit.” What’s that? I thought I heard a couple of thousand people suddenly say “oh shit…”

Delve

So far we’ve taken three systems in Delve, including the M2- station system near the Fountain border, during the fight for which we killed a Morsus Mihi supercarrier. We have put other systems in reinforced, won a bunch of fights and are inexorably working our way south. In the last few days there haven’t been a huge number of posted ops, with people generally jumping into fleets from jabber broadcasts, but I am assured that this will change as we approach the weekend, and that we will now start turning the screw.



As the campaign began, mistakes were made. Mainly by Morsus Mihi’s goonhating spylord TraderJohn (modus operandi: if you know nothing, hide it by making up intel) and well-known grammatical butcherer (and ace gullibilist) Riverini, who between them loudly proclaimed a series of Mitteno-centric conspiracies: Goons were being paid by White Noise to distract AAA’s Delve allies from helping them; Goons had secretly allied with xDeathx to destroy the NC; Goons had secretly combined with the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians to plant a bomb in the second tower and in order to pin it on laundry-headed extremists Stahlregen later edited in footage of a plane (which is why you can hear Nine Inch Nails playing in the background just before the impact).

Despite our benign tolerance, Morsus Mihi and their little pals posted in a manner that suggested that they were mad. No, I mean mad mad. Vlade Randall was one of the three leaders of Morsus Mihi at the start of the attack:

Vlade > lets just say my RL job makes me good for this kind of covert work

Vlade > one thing

Lacco > are you a ninja

Lacco > as in real life

Vlade > hahahaha

Vlade > something like that

Vlade > i have combat and martial arts training

Vlade > ill let you guess the rest

Vlade > because the law forbits me from revealing anything furthe

Vlade > but im one of the “good guys” in RL

Vlade > sent to do the dirty jobs

Vlade > and keep it hush hush

Vlade > understand?

So remember, when I go on, later, to ask each of you to show up in Delve for fights, nobody can force you to put yourself at risk fighting real life covert ninja assassins such as Morsus Mihi have at their disposal. This is a personal choice and I won’t hold it against any of you who decide that this is a step too far.

The other mistakes that were made were by angry Dutch racist Vee and keen gravitational anomaly Dabigredboat, who spent the run-up to the Delve war strolling round the north picking off supercapitals belonging to people like PL and Raiden. Which did have a teensy dampening effect on the willingness of the Delve targets to show up en masse. A reluctance only reinforced when we killed another supercapital and its protective capital fleet, this week. But as of last night they have worked out that we are serious about this and that they are losing their space (again), so show up in your disposable welpfleet ships and rediscover fun fleet fights in Eve.

Operation Freeport

Here is the deal: Goons have, since at least 2007 that I know of, asked for a Thunderdome region. Delve is going to be that region. This isn’t “lawl guys guys let’s put Gallente outposts in every system in Cloud Ring”: every station in Delve is going to be a freeport, with docking open to everyone (terms and conditions apply, offer subject to status, the value of your supercarrier may go down as well as up). Morsus Mihi and Brick Squad (with their refugee camp membership of Majesta and Rage goonhaters) have spent months blaming us for every ill in their badly-planned and poorly-thought-through lives. This time they are right.

Normally, taking sovereignty under Eve’s Dominion mechanics is about as pleasant as attempting to achieve masturbatory release with two rusty crucifixion nails protruding, jagged end inwards, through one’s palms while imagining a naked Lady Scarlet on a binge/purge cycle. But it turns out that taking sov in 250 hurricanes while a handful of bitter ex-Majesta victims whine loudly in local from the temporary safety of their dying station sovereignty fairly makes the time fly past.

Delve will be open for everyone with -9.8 standings and above to dock in. Anyone in Delve right now who doesn’t want us booting them out can accept our terms and do likewise, which will lead to the hilarious sight of our victims teeth-grindingly watching our roaming gangs docking up to refit while ganking their ratters. This means that any enthusiastic young scamps with stars in their eyes and a cocky grin can come out and live in Delve, so long as they don’t mind the fact that we – and just about everyone else – will shoot at them. Think of it as Providence at its peak. If CVA had been run by a sociopathic ant-farmer with a blowtorch, a grudge and the motto “six legs bad, no legs good”. Delve will, with luck, become the PvP cockfagging heaven we dreamt of, but without the bit in the dream about the loping, grey dog that stalks you menacingly while sporting a massive erection and wearing a mask made of your mother’s hastily-stitched-together face.

To make this happen, we need you, Gentle Goons, to get to Delve, preferably tonight, and to x up for fleets. Mynas has been taking unauthorised groups of supercaps out and surreptitiously reinforcing everything from towers up to stations in order to save the rest of us the trouble of doing so, so we will get fights. Get your ass to Mars, and you get to help create Eve’s newest and most unpleasant zone of NPC space, with Goon Pirate sovereignty. Now we just need volunteer groups of four or five to sit in belts and pay 1.35 million a time to anyone who kills them.

The Drone Clusterfuck Confederation

A funny thing about Eve Online is that the trolls have a habit of coming true.

For months, AAA, Red Overlord and Nulli Secunda have been alternately wheedling us to save them or accusing us of being the willing allies and cohorts of the Drone Federation. To paraphrase Eco, Eve breeds a special sort of idiot: everything is a conspiracy against them, and no matter what happens confirms them in this belief. You can tell them by their dubious spelling, their liberties with the truth, and by the fact that, sooner or later, they always blame Goons. Now, they have banded together with Vlade to proclaim that a massive conspiracy exists to take over all of nullsec sovereign space. We’re through the looking glass here, people.

At first, we tried to explain that this wasn’t true, but you can’t reason with these people. We might as well have been posting that Durr Hurr Durr had raised thousands for charity on a two-week sponsored silence, for all that we were believed.

I ask you this: if there was such a foul conspiracy between us and the Drone Confederation, would we have left each others’ tech moons alone? If we were intent on splitting all of nullsec between us, would we have deployed to take Delve, Period Basis and Querious, taking down our sov in Tribute the day after killing RaidenDot supercapitals there? And would NCDot have deployed south the very same day to help finish off AAA for good?

More to the point, would the Russians have laughed at AAA’s hilarious decision, as they were losing Catch, that they would beg forgiveness from the Drone Federation leadership by invading Deklein and sending us running back to Empire? It just doesn’t make sense.

Well, let’s all just take a moment to put up a wee word to the Lord that this rumour isn’t true. If it was to hit the gaming press that CCP’s neglect of Eve Online and the hideous nature of their game mechanics had reached the point where the two remaining superpowers had decided to splt the galaxy down the middle then who knows what might happen? I can only imagine that “The End of Eve” would make a dangerously seductive headline. And if we were to concentrate on exacting vengeance on those who had wronged us before turning on Empire and griefing pubbie mission runners and industrialists into oblivion while indulging in massive-scale market manipulation then I can only sit here and shake my head at the possible fallout. Not all press is good press.

Gents

Gents have been on deployment for the last few days. This is as a result of discussions I’ve had with each of our Pure Blind and Fade allies over the last couple of weeks about developing their capabilities. While this was couched in terms of a request, and not an order (they are their own alliances, after all, and we don’t have pets), various alliances took it in different ways. To be honest, Gents basically did the teenaged boy thing and stomped off shouting “Fine! We’ll do your stupid deployment!” But after the best part of a week deployed against same-sized IEGEX they have shut down their space all day every day, killed many hundreds of hapless victims, forced much panicked tower-unanchoring (during which they stole a freighter and the tower, mods and fittings it contained), rapecaged or disabled their jump bridge network and reinforced systems and stations. They are having a great time and their gangs are gradually turning into bona fide fleets. They’ve also done other stuff which is pretty awesome but remains opsec.

Goonswarm Shrugged: An Empire Drama

You may not be interested in Goonswarm. But Goonswarm is interested in you.

Once our victims in Delve slump into dejected acceptance and we start to race through their sovereignty, Weaselior (with help from Kazanir and Aryth amongst others) has come up with a plan to inflict some amazingly widespread misery on those we hate. “Those we hate”, as you know, includes (but is by no means limited to) everyone in Eve, including ourselves. And so it is with this super-secret plan. Stage one is already underway, and if you respond to my nagging and grant Vee and Dbrb some sizable fleets over the next week or so then we’ll roll it out and you will see some hilarity.

We have been warned of the terrible consequences of abusing our position to grief empire by a pubbie on Kugutsumen:

What do you guys do when the corporations of empire space just decide fuck it, drop their corps and everyone migrates to the NPC corps in a mass exodus? All this really does is cause a headache for people who want to be in empire, who will have to abandon one of the features of the game (corporations) in order to be able to do their thing.

…

After a while though people will start leaving the game. Not the bittervet assholes like us who post on k.com or fhc either… the people who love the game despite its flaws and still play, and who played all through the bad expansions. The people who kept a positive attitude during the rough times because they had faith in the devs and fellow players as well that the game would get better. Maybe for them it never got bad at all. These people start leaving in droves because they can’t play the game anymore. Griefed out by the fucking Mittani. Melvin the Mission runner and Kevin the Carebear. You never gave a shit about them before — they were just ships passing by. Little people playing the game in a small way and enjoying it. When those people leave because of this it won’t be CCP they blame. It won’t be the expansions or monocles or engine trails or MT. They will look to you as the reason. And that is how Eve Online will finally die. It won’t be because of CCP’s unfortunate design choices – it will be because the biggest power bloc in the game got bored and decided to break it for everyone.

To which I think each one of us can only react by leaning forward, narrowing our eyes a little and saying “I’m listening, go on…”

Newbie Drive

We have this perfect zyzygy aligning, consisting of griefing people in Delve, griefing Eve with the DCF, and Weaselior’s upcoming plan. This makes for a great time to do a newbie drive, and so I’m again tasked with writing the OP for that. Rather than recycle the old posters yet again I could really do with some section heading banners and one or two pro pieces of artwork. If you are a good artist/designer and can do one of these then let me know by PM and I’ll give you a draft outline of what would really help.

Twitter

I’m not a proud person so I’m just going to say that I tweet at @Endieposts where I am followed by half a dozen IRL friends, 26 or 27 eve dudes and, for reasons which remain obscure, an apparently genuine celebrity dress designer :iiam: Maybe she read my blog and realised the huge, Eve-shaped hole at the centre of her being.

Share this: Facebook

Twitter

Email

Print

Reddit

