This is the SomethingAwful Goonwaffe recruitment thread post that I just did, but you can’t see it there because you are not one of the blessed brotherhood of the :tenbux:!
Goonswarm was born of grief and shaped for the infliction of misery. Once exposed to it ourselves we adopted it, refined it, and loosed it upon the rest of Eve. We were seen as untrustworthy, vicious, and irrational. Any outsiders’ discussion of us would feature the same few, furious, confused, desperate allegations: griefers, cheaters, hackers, scammers… To us, each was a compliment.
But for a long time this basic cultural identity of ours was put aside. We had a war to win – against Band of Brothers – and that took up all of our efforts. Taking years, it was the greatest act of planned griefing in the game’s history. We won, and were rewarded with such forum porn as dreams are made of. But it required us to be ordered, focused and efficient.
That time is past. We have returned to our roots. Take a look at the official Eve Online forums and you will find page after page of threads complaining that we are ruining the game for miners, industrialists, mission-runners and more. Our victims lose scores of hours and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of the tedious, dreary effort they have put themselves through every time we strike, and they simply cannot comprehend why or how it occurred.
They accuse us of exploiting; of hacking the official forums; of being CCP developers.
Join Goonswarm in Eve and you can do all this: within a day or so of starting you can have a character that can help destroy some hapless soul’s pride and joy. And the alliance will pay for you to do so, replacing your ships and rewarding you for your efforts. And you can try it for free for at least two weeks.
The winter patch is coming: Assault Ships will be buffed; gallente ships will be improved across the board; hybrid weapons are improving dramatically; supercapitals are being hit hard; T2 ammo is being ungimped; tier 3 battlecruisers fielding battleship weapons are being introduced; Time Dilation is being introduced to improve your ship’s responsiveness in fleet fights; nullsec is being enhanced. The list goes on and on.
Join Goonwaffe. There is no time like the present.
WHAT IS EVE ONLINE?
Titanreaper > I hardly get to play the fucking game and you come blow me up
Titanreaper > thats bull shit I havent been on in 3 weeks manage to get on for about an hour maybe 2 and you come blow me
Titanreaper > i got your number fuck face
Guillaume LeConquerant > we going on a date?
Titanreaper > no im going to rape you bitch
Eve Online is a Sci-Fi universe simulation. The universe in which it exists is staggeringly huge: around 8000 star systems containing hundreds of thousands of celestial bodies: planets, moons and belts. Within this single, unsharded world exist almost four hundred thousand active players, each of whose actions can affect any or all of the others. At any given time there may be forty thousand people active in the Eve Universe. There is nothing in the world of entertainment that even comes close, in scale, to an Eve battle involving over a thousand people. One of CCP’s recent promotional videos, although a little stylised and stripped of the waiting around that often happens during the inevitable pre-fight jockeying for position, actually captures the feel of big fleet combat quite well. For an ultra-realistic portrayal of a fight from our past, try this animation instead.
You, the player, are a capsuleer: an immortal being, above the level of humanity, who can control spaceships kilometres long using no more than your thoughts. The Eve Universe contains far more possible pursuits than can be dealt with here: you can fly combat missions; mine; run planetary industrial empires; play the markets through anything from hauling, through arbitrage all the way to the sort of inside information and market manipulation that would, in the real world, leave you facing seven to ten years as the cellblock’s well-worn, white-collar glove-puppet. You can explore hidden wormhole space, living alone or with a few friends in your own pocket dimension for days or weeks if that’s the way your autism takes you. Look at this picture (you’ll need to zoom in): there is a lot to try in Eve. And as one vast, unified universe, your actions can ultimately affect hundreds of thousands of others.
But really, when it comes down to it, this is Eve Online:
Britt-Erik > why the fuck are you killing miners?
Benjamin Hamburg > cause i’m jealous of that mackinaw, I always wanted one
Britt-Erik > well, now i can’t buy a new one, just 10m left
Britt-Erik > thx alot moron. i wasn’t even a threat to you
Britt-Erik > i’m gona make u payt for this
Britt-Erik > like taking candy from a child…
Britt-Erik > fuck of, all of you. i’m quiting this game now
Britt-Erik > FOR REAL
You want to kill things and hurt people. Shush… I know you do: it’s OK. Things that belong to real people who will usually be very upset, and will very often tell you so. If you are even moderately lucky then occasionally they will be so upset that they tell you that they will hunt you down and kill you, and you will then get them banned for life. Goonswarm is built to help Goons have fun in Eve. Fun just like this.
WHAT ABOUT THE SPACESHIPS?
Molacus > In real life, id beat the shit out of a little bitch as urself, but in a game, you can pretend to be some badass lol
In order to destroy the treasured possessions of others, Eve gives you the ability to fly spaceships. Some are industrial in nature, but ignore those: you would be better-off pleasuring yourself wearing wire-wool gloves than mining. The rest are warships: sleek, armoured dealers of imaginary internet death. You will start in frigates only a few tens of metres long: with those you can lock down a ship costing a thousand times as much for your fellow goons to kill. We love nothing so much as a foolhardy newbie tackler in a frigate. Then there are destroyers: still fragile but able to kill a pod or a miner’s ship in seconds.
And so on as you grow steadily more experienced: cruisers are still fast and fairly small but are capable of standing up to more punishment, and some people – I’m one of them – almost never fly anything bigger than a cruiser. Cruiser-class hulls are the best tacklers in the game; the best logistics ships (“healers”); the most nimble and agile hunters; the best anti-support and the best electronic warfare platforms. Does that sound like a lot of options? Eve gives you options.
After the first couple of months, you will be able to fly a battlecruiser: a key ship in our fleet doctrines, and one which we use in order to destroy the mightiest, most expensive and overpowered ships in the game. From there, the path continues: battleships; carriers; dreadnoughts, supercarriers and even titans the size of space stations and capable of destroying even capital ships with a single shot from their doomsday weapons.
You may discover a niche you enjoy. Logistics pilots – including some of our most skilled members – keep our battleship fleet alive and killing. ECM pilots enjoy knowing that they are causing several hostile fleet members at once to pound their keyboards in frustration at their inability to do anything at all. Interdictor pilots – a few recklessly suicidal individuals whose flimsy, hit-and-run ships can prevent the escape of a hundred enemies at once – are favourites of our fleet commanders without whom we wouldn’t even bother to undock. Covert Ops scouts demoralise the enemy simply by being there, cloaked, watching their every move and acting as the eyes of the FCs.
Bittervets should note that CCP finally seem to have got it. The leaks surrounding the winter expansion sound like a Goonswarm wish list: supercapitals are hit hard; subcapitals are enhanced virtually across the board; Caldari and Gallente see bonuses; new battlecruisers mounting battleship weapons match our doctrine perfectly and so on.
WHY JOIN GOONSWARM?
Viandamor red > it’s goons what could you posibly expect from the one group that has nothing better in there lives to do than join games and try and make the game unplayable to everyone
If you play Eve alone, you will quit. If you play eve in a group but don’t PvP, you will probably still quit, but it will take a little longer. If you join your fellow Goons in Eve and PvP, there is a very real risk that you will play for years, because no other game on the market offers the possibility of visiting meaningful, measurable damage upon those you fight. The only way you could get a more immediate and satisfying capability to hurt your opponents in meaningful ways would be if they voluntarily wired electrodes to their scrotums and let you deliver repeated shocks to their testes.
To give an example, just last week we were betrayed by some members of our coalition. Goons take betrayal badly. So we destroyed five supercapitals that they were building. Since we know the rate at which the dollar trades against in-game currency, this means that we can say that we destroyed around 9,000 dollars’ worth of their belongings in two short operations. They tried to bargain, inquiring if we would buy the supercapitals from them at discounted rates, instead. That would be the calm, rational response. But you can’t put a price on sending a message. So it all burned. There was no fair fight, because we don’t care about fair fights. They never had a chance.
As a member of Goonswarm you have a unique opportunity: scamming. Thousands of pilots want into our alliance. They greedily eye our generous ship reimbursement program that lets you fly for free; the rich space that lets members make money easily; even just the chance to be on the winning team. So long as they are not our allies you can sell them the chance to join, offer to move their ships and possessions, and promise them safe passage. You will be lying, because you are a bad person and want to become very rich for no effort beyond a little social engineering. But we promise not to judge you.
Where else can you be lauded, praised for being vindictive and duplicitous, and gain fame amongst your peers for the heartless nature of your scamming? Well, apart from Nigeria and Wall Street, obviously.
SPACE COMMUNISM
fuck off you faggot you can choke on all the ice dicks you want just STFU and stop spamming you filth of a human being
That’s all very esoteric and nice but I can hear you asking what we will actually do for you.
From the moment your newbie ass hits the ground until your girlfriend issues you that final “it’s me or Eve” ultimatum you are protected and supported by the Goonswarm Welfare State. We are a space socialist alliance, where the vast wealth that we bring in from our moon wealth, our taxation and elsewhere flows back to our members in an attempt to ensure that nothing need come between you and the chance to kill vile outsiders.
When you join the alliance, you will be given ships, money and skillbooks. When your grotesque incompetence and inability to stop watching hentai during fleet fights gets you killed, we recompense you for your ship, whether it be a frigate or a battleship. Our contract team moves pre-fit ships into combat areas and our logistics team sets up and fuels jump-bridges to ease your movement. You cosseted, entitled drain on society.
I AM NEW HOLD ME I’M SCARED
Madam Epicus > i always knew goonswarm were fuckheads
We love newbies. Last year, Eurosquad needed a new leader. We picked a Goon who had been playing the game for a matter of days but seemed keen, and said “ok, you do it.” He has turned the squad into one of the most active and successful groups in the alliance, which runs its own operations, takes strategic objectives, gets drunk together on slosh ops and more. Don’t believe the bitter vets who claim you need years of training.
You’ll be given access to our newbie forums and you’ll have a team of mentors available to help you from day one. You can join a Squad, who will give you free ships, skill-books and money to get you going. If you want, you can be adopted by an experienced pilot who will keep an eye on you and help you find the fun. Nobody else in Eve looks after you like we do with our cradle to grave space communism.
WHAT CAN I DO?
Crystal Solette > just wanted to thank you for showing me that this game really IS a complete waste of time and rl money… saving for months and months, barely getting by but looking forward to advancing myself.. and all gone in less than 2 seconds. Really cool game.. anyway, have fun in your lil cartoon world. Maybe you will grow a penis some day?
Right at this moment we have two big projects running in parallel. For those who enjoy the drama of nullsec sovereignty war – of taking space and killing alliances – we are running an invasion of the Delve region. Again. With an official war aim of liberating Mister Vee’s Cruor frigate from the NOL-M9 system, this campaign is aimed squarely at getting fights and parting horrible posters from their space, just because. We have announced rather humiliating terms of surrender for anyone who wishes to keep hold of their space, but otherwise we are taking a region we don’t even want, and each station we take has been opened up for anyone to dock in, including the people we took it from, in what works out as a rather effective and humiliating slap in their collective faces. From the time that you sign up for Eve Online to your first fleet fight can be a matter of a day or so if you really want.
Simultaneously, many goons are involved in a highly successful campaign of griefing aimed at choking off the supply of certain vital goods used to fuel the production of many advanced items needed in the game. This is done by carrying out suicide attacks on defenseless mining ships, and has provoked thousands of outraged posts by offended victims. A new pilot can be involved in this in a destroyer inside their first few days in the game, and your squadmates will help show you how if you ask them.
Once you experience the game a bit you might decide to try some of our special interest groups. Here are just a few of them:
Black Ops: these experienced players specialise in shutting down the travel and money-making of entire hostile alliances, through equal measures of patience and bullying.
GS Recon: these people are the eyes of the fleet commanders and of the directorate. They hunt down our targets. They detail every weakness in their defences. Before each fight, they watch, patiently, every move of our enemies.
The Goonfleet Intelligence Agency: we run agents in virtually every major alliance in Eve. We have a division that is dedicated purely to automated intelligence gathering from an even wider range of targets. After a lean period, now nobody else in Eve has as large a stable of spies scattered across the game. Our FCs know what the enemy is doing. Our directorate knows what their plans are. Our diplomats know what deal they will cut. And we always need more spies.
Goonswarm Offensive Logistics: are you autistic? Does your loyalty to the alliance go so far as to involve actual self-harm? These goon heroes are the sinews of our space empire.
Bomberwaffe: using cloaking stealth bombers a couple of dozen ‘waffe pilots can wipe out a fleet of hostiles a hundred strong in a matter of seconds. Mister Vee, our FC, is the best bomber commander in Eve.
Extreme Finance: you have heard economists talk about the Invisible Hand. In Eve, it is probably attached to a Goon. This group plots financial manipulation on a scale that even CCP’s in-house economist takes note of. Market PvP on the grand scale.
WHAT HAVE GOONS BEEN UP TO?
Goons… It’s them fucking yankees. Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Somali and so on – all of it is their style, their politics. We’ve got to soak them sooner or later, everybody is well fed with them
For starters, we finished the Great Eve War for once and for all. At the time of the last Newbie Drive, SirMolle and the rest of Band of Brothers were still squatting awkwardly in Delve and Fountain. This was offensive to Goonswarm, and represented unfinished business. So in December we invaded their home regions, starting with Fountain, and within about ten weeks or so we destroyed them utterly with a mixture of massive fleet fights, spying and propaganda. They are shattered, their corps scattered across half of Eve, and our victory is complete. The only way Band of Brothers is reforming any time soon is as a four-piece, free-form jazz band aimed at letting Finfleet explore new musical directions.
We also took Cloud Ring from ze Germans of Ev0ke, in some grudge-settling from when we were still weak after losing our space. As a result of these campaigns, our bloc now dominates the entire western side of the Eve universe, from Deklein down to northern Delve.
Our erstwhile allies in the Northern Coalition refused our advice and as a result died to a massive coalition containing more than half of Eve nullsec and headed by the Drone Russian Federation. We were held by all to be next: hapless victims in front of an unstoppable juggernaut. Pandemic Legion, at the head of many of the self-proclaimed “Elite” alliances of Eve assemble into one giant, preening coalition, launched a huge invasion with little warning. But we successfully defended against them and, retaliating at once, destroyed their offensive in a single weekend. Over the following weeks and months their coalition gradually broke up.
All in all, we find ourselves in a very strong position, secure and wealthy, and able to send our foreign legion and our allies around the map to attack others on a whim.
Find out how to join or rejoin us here.
Much credit is due here to Stahlregen: the Last Goon Artist, Lord of the Bongs, Space Wizard and Intergalactic Cowpoke without whom this massive wall of text would have been a terrifying and uninterrupted waterfall of ASCII.