The Delve Campaign
Like me, gentle reader, I am sure that you have often wondered why the leader of Brick Squad chose to name himself Darius III, a short-lived and basically incompetent ruler of 4th Century Persia who poisoned his courtiers, couldn’t control his directorate and finished his career dead of a backstab after being royally steamrolled by an invincible invader called Alexander (the Great, not Gianturco, but you catch my drift). He is, however, a man of mystery. I cannot properly describe him, although I suspect that if I had I should be forced to have frequent recourse to the word “corpulent”, and very possibly to “lesions”, too.
As previously discussed in these fair forums, DariusIII couldn’t sell the whole freeporting agreement he made with us to his members, and tried to spin it as lolol only joking we stalled for time. The time it bought him turned out to be exactly the same few hours as it took for his next station system to come out. We took that fairly effortlessly (it might have been the one I stayed up until 4am for but I’m a bit hazy on details on that front) and now we are lazily eyeing the rest of his empire, wondering what to take next.
In other Delve war progress, we took the entirety of Morsus Mihi’s constellation in a matter of days, complete with all four of their stations. Showing an impressive inability to draw conlcusions from data, Morsus Mihi (memership 2427, and now “led”, in the loosest possible meaning of the word, by TraitorJohn following the forced tranquilisation of top-ranking loony Vlade Randal) has now decided that moving a handful of jumps and attempting to take the space of The Polaris Syndicate (population 385) looks like a walk in the park. Except that all they have to show for their efforts is a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of everyone from Ev0ke and ourselves through The Polaris Syndicate all the way down to my mum and a cocker spaniel just barely capable of tapping the F1 key on command.
Once more, operations will be posted for the next few days, so watch out for broadcasts and op posts by Vee, and also keep an eye on any ship doctrine announcements in case we want to mix things up. By “mix things up” I am afraid that I am not yet foreshadowing the return of Rokhs, nor is that coded language for flying badly fitted muninns in the Nug-op of that theme (on which he will be lucky to get 40% muninns at a push).
The War in Catch
I believe that the term we are looking at here is “fits and spurts”. Which is good because “spurts” is an inherently funny word. That aside, AAA and their friends lost no fewer than nine station systems last week, after which billions of hit points of structure-shooting the combined forces of Russia and Elite PVPery needed a bit of a rest and a lie down. To put things in context, AAA held thirty-five stations six weeks ago, and half of those are gone, now. To be fair, however, their membership has actually risen slightly over the same period, so they don’t seem to be losing too much heart at again losing their space.
The same cannot be said for their allies. I am moderately confident that we can all contain our grief to discover that Red Overlord are suffering far worse, despite hardly being under attack, yet. They are losing members by the hundreds. Oh dear still never mind life goes on.
Blue-On-Blue Violence
One of our illustrious members (let’s call him “Ibertizzle”) keeps losing Tengus to Russians and French people. This is a sensitive – even a touchy – subject, so let me say that while he is, indeed, a keen ratter – a [i]very[/i] keen ratter if we are honest – we have one rule in Goonswarm: we don’t fuck other goons. Oh and we don’t play cop for CCP in their own game by reporting or petitioning goons, either: that’s Darius Johnson’s job. So two rules. And there’s the one about how nobody mentions the Mittani’s occasional chin tuft; and the localised No Digis or DBRBs rules. I could go on. Ok, on reflection we live in a hidebound and overly legislated nanny state. But we definitely don’t fuck goons. Now I know that “Ibertizzle” has probably just been insulting people constantly in local and challenging them to 1 v 7s at the sun. Which is fine: honour demanded that he repeatedly die for his offences.
But if it were the case that he had been ratting just a little [i]too[/i] exuberantly for peoples’ liking, or if he had offended them by consistently ignoring their conversation requests for a brief window of, say, seventeen or eighteen hours, for instance, then it would be goon-fucking to report him or to kill him. This will land you and your corp in trouble as all we know is that someone shot blues. And by allowing one, well-justified blue-shooting case to go unpunished we basically open the portal to a hellish other-dimension of horror and chaos which ends with “hilariously” wrecked amok freighters on the VFK undock. Which sounds good but involves a lot of paperwork.
The correct approach is to speak to your CEO, who will submit form 240a together with the mandatory handling fee of 150 million ISK to the overworked diplomacy team, who will curse me loudly for putting that in there then go about finding a solution. Trust me: they have his number on speed-dial by now.
The Directorate Merry-Go-round
Our supercapital leadership team has expanded, and if I can’t work out who is in charge of who while actively looking at an org chart then what hope have you? Illuminati is basically a seething, roiling cauldron of politicking and bitching wherein every change of perceived status is noted and judged as if it were the court of some Japanese Shogun. Unfortunately, stating that the Sun of Heaven shines brightly on the fields of the wandering oxen, but that a cloud obscures his view of the man coupling with a donkey, may be seen a a touch obtuse. So I shall try to put the latest changes in layman’s terms.
Innominate has definitely been promoted, which means that he has gone from Important to Very Important. Frabba has been added to the team and is now Quite Important: one to watch for the future! Bring remains important in some sort of capacity but there is no longer a dotted line from Vily (who has gone from Quite Important to Important) to Bring. DBRB remains Occasionally Rather Important but has been busted down from Very Important due to being Very Talkative When He Shouldn’t Be. Spookydonut is now a GSOL director after basically running regions of towers for ages and has been rewarded by elevation from the Grand Order of Who The Fuck Is Spookydonut? to the Ancient and Imperial Chapter of Oh That Guy.
I suspect that The Mittani is actually pulling a Hitler and invoking Darwin: telling a group of people that they are in charge of a thing and seeing who out-competes, out-gossips and out-performs the rest and ends up in charge of it. You see, Goonswarm is a lot like Germany in 1944. Except that Mittens has yet to poison his wolf-dog and shoot his best gal. And we’re winning.