Winter

First off, goodbye Eve: Dominon, Eve: Tyrannis and Eve: Incarna.  You were all shit and nobody will miss you.

Well.  Maybe a few alliances will miss you…

…

Delve

Brick Squad and Morsus Mihi should feel no shame at their humiliating defeat at our hands.  They shouldn’t castigate themselves for losing to the most casual and half-arsed campaign that Goons have run since Karttoon decided that Esoteria was lovely in the spring.  Surely there is no shame in belonging to a list which contains such prestigious names as Black Star Alliance, RISE, Kenzoku and Babylon5DotDot?

In retrospect, the campaign seems a little unfair.  Morsus Mihi may have proclaimed their position as evekill’s “number one pvp alliance” but in Vlade Randall they were led by a genuine, swivel-eyed lunatic who believed that Goonswarm were agents of the New World Order and stood out as a natural candidate should trepanning return into fashion in modern psychiatry.  When asked to fight us in unjammed systems their gigantic titan fleet disappeared into the realm of Faerie.  Probably because, whatever else you may think about Dbrb, he is like a truffle pig when it comes to finding killable supercaps.

With Morsus Mihi reduced to staring at the inside of NPC stations, Brick Squad looked hard and long at how they could turn the tide in the face of vague Goon interest.  Since their only practical suggestion was “ask Ev0ke to do it”, and since both the Germans and Nulli Secunda had announced that they would rather endure a hydrochloric acid eye-bath than work with the northern refugees again, they were faced with the reality that their best chance of avoiding further defeats lay in being a very long way away indeed.

Thus, they have headed for Curse and the South-East, which is a very safe place that they can rebuild while not being even slightly bullied into tearful oblivion by hordes of dedicated Russian station-campers.  They have sent out tentative enquiries about setting one or two select, nearby entities blue – by which I mean only those alliances with letters in their names – but have so far failed to impress the locals.  The most likely bet right now is that they have been promised space by AAA in return for help in their fight against RA, White Noise and the rest.

You should probably expect corps to start defecting from Morsus Mihi soon.  Based on recent communications the betting probably starts with Fusen and Macabre Votum but others are having internal discussions, too.  One corp had a vote which only saw a handful of members vote to stay.

Test and PL

Our brethren in Test, weary and exhausted from their long and grinding Vernichtungskrieg against the overwhelming forces marshalled by Fatal Ascension, have wisely decided to move somewhere with less allies to fall out with.  They have, therefore, deployed to Providence where they are conducting a gruelling struggle against pubbie idol and icon of eHonour Chribba and his bloated, sprawling alliance Otherworld Empire.  When Pandemic Legion’s long struggle to take space paid off with the seizure of 9-F in Providence, it became inevitable that conflict with Chribba would erupt sooner rather than later.  His aggressive expansionism alone guaranteed that words would escalate into a shooting war, even without his station in 9UY – a mere two jumps from the tenuous PL nullsec foothold – which represented nothing less than a dagger pointed at the heart of PL’s long-dreamt-of ratting (and plexing!) bonanza.

PL therefore called in the numbers and keen young FCs which only Test could offer – no doubt hired at eye-watering cost – and their combined forces have managed to stem the tide, albeit at terrible cost.  It is, of course, impossible for would-be Nostradamuses to confidently call the outcome of this campaign, but it seems that all of New Eden has paused, awaiting the outcome with nervous watchfulness.

Unrelated in almost every way – including that it involves actual fighting and I don’t have to tell two paragraphs of lies about it to try and make it interesting – I spent a lunch hour at work watching, initially with great scepticism, this video of Rooks and Kings’ year-long struggle against Aperture Harmonics, and I didn’t regret it for a second.  Well, except during the playout by his mate’s dodgy band at the end.

Nulli Secunda Forums

Wusti had a Nulli Seconda agent.  He wanted to use the alt for something else and we have S2N accounts coming out of our ears so he gave the forum details to Midge Mo’yb – a member of Bat Country who not only does a lot of GIA work but who also has an apostrophe in his name – and you can see the results here in this rip of their forums: http://dumps.eve-leaks.co.uk/forum.nullisecunda.com2/

A note to any Nulli Secunda members: well done on having forums that you actually post on and on being, in general, far better posters than others from Delve like Brick, Morsus Mihi and especially FAIL.  But you really need better hosting since we had to cut the page requests to one per second to stop it timing out :colbert:

Gallente Ice Interdiction

Goons, everyone said, lacked the staying power to disrupt the market for Gallente ice; our analysis was flawed; we were unable, we were told by all and sundry, to impact such a massive marketplace with so many sources.

Well, have a look at this bad boy of a graph:

The green bars are supply, which tails off to a fraction of what it was.  The yellow dots are the median prices for the day.  The red shaded area is the Donchian channel, which is the spread between the lowest and highest prices.  The red and green lines are the seven- and twenty-day moving averages.

You do not need to be a great economist to spot that the price has leapt from about 450ISK per unit to almost 1500ISK.  A great deal of misery has been caused so far, multiple titans’ worth of empire pubbie botting chariots have been destroyed, while a lot of goons have made eye-watering amounts of money, through protection rackets and market speculation.  Which makes us the 1% so we should expect some repulsive, bearded-hippy-filled tents on the lawn in Deklein some time soon as part of the Occupy VFK movement.

Amarr Victor

Fun in Eve depends in large part on betrayal.  So much kudos to Bat Country member BouBoul57, who has numbers in his name and is so dyslexic that I advised him to pretend to be Russian if he ever plucks up the courage to post on here, for setting up what turned into a three-way betrayal fest with Dbrb at the weekend.  Between them they provided entertainment for a couple of hundred Goons and friends while backstabbing both sides of a fight we had no interest in beyond reaping chaos.

Despite combining everything that Goons are worst at: logoff traps, five hours of waiting, highsec travel, factional warfare, a lowsec fight and Dbrb negotiating a cunning ploy with a conscious and even sentient opponent, the outcome was delicious: around a dozen dreads and carriers killed, with even more furiously self-destructing to deny us the satisfaction of a killmail

If you want to see a video of it then you can do so here but I would only recommend the first couple of minutes if you like videos of people with terrible overview settings and awful mumble overlays jumping through gates while a fight happens elsewhere.  After that it feels deliciously 2007 with subcaps fighting a trapped capital fleet.

I had hoped to announce that this intervention marks our entrance into the factional warfare struggle, and that we would not rest until all of Minmatar space was purged of the oppressive slavers and their Caldari lapdogs.  Goons, after all, are natural candidates for the Minmatar block: our fleet doctrines are based around their ships, for one thing, while we also enjoy watermelon, fried chicken, and tastefully rolling our eyes while playing the banjo and belting out classic Al Jolson tracks with a thin sheen of irony to make it barely respectable.  Let us consider, however, the fact that we could find our way back from Dbrb’s op without autopilots by following the chain of shattered goon wrecks on every low- and highsec gate between Delve and Domain.  Many more such victories and we will be bankrupt.

Dear CCP, Please Die, Love GSOL

CCP have decided to swap from shipping eight different pos fuels for a tower to only one for each race.  This move was aimed at helping logisticians in Eve, and in the long run will be a positive change, while being incredibly wasteful and expensive for those running towers without many mods (they presume 100% grid and CPU usage).  However, they have done it in the most horrible way, with apparent reluctance to announce the changeover date but a refusal to convert fuel in towers, meaning that every single tower in Eve needs to be refuelled to contain both old and new fuel between patchday (when the BPOs are released) and the crossover, which may only be a matter of a couple of weeks later.

This boils down to the GSOL team having to do a massive amount of work and we all owe them.  I would suggest that they post in this thread and receive rep for their Stakhanovite labours but most of them are extremely bad posters so we’ll take a raincheck on that.

Exeunt Band of Brothers, Stage Left

Heh it’s the kooky little story about the fat, dancing dog at the end of the news.  SWTOR has no nasty sov system to let Goons take your stuff from you with.  Yeah SirMolle you better get out and you better stay out.

Eve: Crucible

I’m really excited about the winter patch, which is due out on November 29th.  Remember to set long skills, and don’t forget to then post about what you set on each of your eleven characters in one of those daft threads in the War Room.  Don’t pull out of Delve yet: we have a few things still needing done there.  But be aware that Eve is going to erupt over the next few weeks, and we will be an important part of that.  After all, that attention coal won’t mine itself.