RhoA posted:

Where's Ben Smash?

Despera posted:

Lol they set us red, buncha butthurt

Despera posted:

Lol they set us red, buncha butthurt

Recoome posted:

Wasn't CO2 the poo poo-tier alliance which let in some dude who went completely gently caress goons?

I remember we formed a Theta space police kill-team to fly down and dunk this dude while he was ratting.

Glory of Arioch posted:

WHAT’S GOING ON, I READ SOME ARTICLE ON REDDIT / PCGAMER

(Written 3/29/2016)

While the following novel is mostly aimed at returning veterans to Goonswarm, lured back to the fold by media coverage of recent events, it is a recommended read for everyone.

Short version: We are at war. Agitators have galvanized literally the rest of the entire population that plays Eve Online: Noted Space-themed Spreadsheet against us. Recently, they convinced one of our allies to turn traitor against us in a failed bid against our supercapital fleet. We’ve been forced to cede one region, half of another region belongs to the traitors, and yet more may fall as we engage in a painful journey of self-discovery with the new Aegis sovereignty system. There has never been a better time to return to the swarm.

IF YOU HAVE CAPITALS OR SUPERCAPITALS ANYWHERE BUT OUR CURRENT STAGING SYSTEM, DO NOT TRY TO MOVE THEM YOURSELF. Jump ranges have been cut to five light years, and jump fatigue limits your ability to move. Get your access and roles restored, then talk to the relevant handlers to arrange a move-op. More than anything, the enemy wants your capitals and supercapitals dead. Do not allow them to take what belongs to you.

Long version follows.

First, we must lead with some history. After winning The Bloodbath of B-R5RB, we retired to relative peace. In the interim, perennial enemies of ours, Northern Coalition. and Pandemic Legion retired to rebuild their lost supercapitals and lick their wounds. CCP, in two separate game expansions, introduced Jump Fatigue and Aegis sovereignty (affectionately dubbed “fozziesov” in honor of CCP Fozzie, the man who was in charge of communicating the details of the new sovereignty system to the public.)

BACKGROUND: Jump Fatigue affects any jump drive travel; capital jumps, blackops jumps, blackops bridges, and even use of Titan bridges and Jump Bridges suffer the Curse of the Blue Mushroom. (Look at the icon in-game and you’ll get it.) Performing a jump accrues a quantity of Jump Fatigue commensurate with not only how far you travel, but how much fatigue you already possessed. The current value of Fatigue institutes a recovery timer (orange mushroom) that you must endure before you can jump again. Some hulls, like industrials and blackops battleships, enjoy a reduction, but everyone else suffers 60 minutes of fatigue for executing their first five light year jump, and must wait six minutes before jumping again. This patch also reduced Jump Freighters to a max of 10 LY per jump, blackops BS to 8 LY, and all other capitals to 5 LY. Repeated jumps make your Jump Fatigue (blue mushroom) increase geometrically, up to a cap of five days.

BACKGROUND: The Aegis release radically changed the face of sov in Eve. In fozziesov, as it is lovingly called, sovereignty is no longer contested by structure shoots. In its stead, you fit a module called an Entosis Link to a cheap, disposable ship. This module prevents you from warping or receiving remote assistance while active, and capital ships are burdened with a hefty multiplier to its cycle time. Using the entosis link on a sov structure (infrastructure hub, territory control unit, or station) eventually causes the initial reinforcement phase to complete. Once the RF is up, instead of returning to the structure to contest it, Command Node anomalies spawn throughout the constellation of the reinforced structure. These nodes must be captured in a game of Benny Hill style grab-rear end by attackers or defenders in order to destroy an ihub or TCU, or freeport and then subsequently capture a station.

The new capture system has a few caveats:

The only people allowed to count as defenders in the system are the alliance who owns the structure. Everyone else counts as an attacker. This means that coalition allies can lend only limited support to defense.
All defensive structures will slowly auto-complete. This means that uncommitted attackers do not immediately endanger your stuff.
How hard nodes are to hack are dependent on strategic index (how long you’ve had sov,) military index (ratting,) and industrial index (mining.) This means ratting and mining are now directly relevant to sovereignty security. This puts absentee landlords at a disadvantage; systems that aren’t being ratted or mined are comparatively trivial to flip. These factors sum up to create a figure called the Activity Defense Multiplier, or ADM.

With this in mind, fast-forward to October 2015. One of our allies, SpaceMonkey’s Alliance (SMA) stole a fairly trivial amount of ISK from “I Want ISK” (IWI), an Eve gambling site. As a measure of revenge, IWI hired some fairly non-noteworthy lowsec-dwellers to camp SMA’s sov in the region of Fade and reduce their ADMs. This continued for some time with mixed success. However, this action, more than anything, put the chum in the water; other players became attracted to Fade. Most notable of these was Pandemic Horde. Pandemic Horde is an organization belonging to Pandemic Legion, born out of their castration of Brave Newbies Inc. following B-R5, notable for its “everyone allowed, no questions asked, no APIs required, not even from Dabigredboat’s alt named ‘awox mcshootblues.’” With their numbers bolstered by Pandemic Horde’s thousands, ADMs in Fade quickly dove off a cliff and sov began being hacked all over Fade.

This tactic continued for a number of weeks, causing rapid evolution of our military doctrines and staging systems (which eventually settled on the lowsec system Saranen in adjacent Lonetrek.) Results were mixed; a few systems were lost, but quickly reconquered. However, more than anything, the amount of chum in the water increased, drawing more and more actors into theatre. As hostile morale started to break, they began looking for alternate targets. Eventually, they settled on our eastern border and began to attack Vale of the Silent, primary home of Get Off My Lawn (LAWN) and The Bastion, with a notable single constellation held by Circle of Two (CO2). Keep that last name in mind for later.

Hostile forces began amassing a significant amount of numbers. Favors were called in; previous grudges pardoned and other hypocrisy abounded in order to cause the conglomeration of the single largest anti-Us force in the history of the game.

Here is where the lessons on jump fatigue come into play. Due to the geography of solar systems in Eve, it is very difficult to reach Vale of the Silent from anywhere else in our dominion. Abuse of lowsec systems in Black Rise and Lonetrek allowed us to cover the regions of Tribute, Deklein, Fade, and Pure Blind, but Vale of the Silent required at minimum one bridge for subcaps, and two jumps for capitals to even get to the border systems. These jumps come at the cost of a large quantity of the dread Blue Mushroom of jump fatigue. Because of this, when hostiles began to attack Vale in earnest, it quickly became apparent that a proper defense was impossible. Vale of the Silent has 118 systems, making it one of the largest single regions in nullsec. As such, ADMs in Vale of the Silent were, at the time, complete dogshit. The call was made to abandon Vale entirely and evacs began.

While goods and subcapital ships are easy to evacuate using the almighty Jump Freighter, capitals and supercapital assets are quite another. Due to the hostile activity, the prospect of moving supercapitals out of Vale was a tricky one, to put it lightly, especially with the supercapital forces of NCdot and PL recently arriving in theatre. Enter CO2 -- they reached out to LAWN and Bastion, and offered their assistance to cover the evac of supercapital assets. Towers along a specific route were provided to allow supercapitals to safely wait out their Blue Mushroom fatigue plague.

On March 28th, 2016, two timers for CO2’s main staging system, M-OEE8 were due to begin; the station first, then the infrastructure hub. The station timer was defended uncontested. After the station was saved, an evac op for LAWN/Bastion supercapitals occurred. Kcolor, the FC of the move op, elected to take a different route than the one CO2 had offered due to factors that are not yet determined. (Ignorance of the offer, fatigue management, gut feeling, random chance are all potential reasons. What comes later, however, was not.) The move-op was fairly uneventful and supercarriers were safely moved to Saranen. However, the circumstances of the move-op were unusual; NCdot had their entire supercapital force online, in range of the path the supercapitals took to Saranen. Yet, they didn’t engage. We’ll come back to this later as well.

Time passes and the IHUB timer comes due. In one of the largest Time Dilation tarpits in months, 3000 people were press-ganged into the constellation housing M-OEE8. While the M-O node was reinforced, the neighboring systems were not, and as the fight spilled into those systems, the server promptly began making GBS threads itself. However, not only were hostiles losing ground on the capture of the sovereignty contest, but NCdot and now PL once again had their supercapital fleets online. This is unusual because of fozziesov; supercapitals cannot meaningfully contest command nodes due to their cycle time penalty and their inability to meaningfully interdict typical entosis link ships. As the fight raged on, more curiosities emerge; PL drops triage carriers with entosis links fitted to contest nodes, despite the capital penalty to them. High profile members of the hostile community are doing the scutwork of contesting nodes. Hostiles are making almost no progress on the actual contest, despite outnumbering us 3 to 1. Nothing about the fight makes sense. Then, a metaphorical cyno beacon is lit on Reddit’s Eve subforum: CO2 To Reset The Imperium. CO2 performs a classic backstab in the middle of the conflict, and CO2 defense hackers quickly abandon their nodes, allowing their own IHUB to fall.

As the dust settles, we begin to piece the situation together.

CO2 approached LAWN and Bastion, offering them a highway to evac their supers. We find out later that CO2 allegedly seeded the safe towers offered with logged-off interdictors. CO2 also suggested that LAWN and Bastion stage in the system of TVN, which is notable for being a complete deadzone in terms of capital geography. Any forces staged there not only would be vulnerable to bubble-supported hellcamps, but would be completely unreachable from neighboring lowsec. Due to kcolor’s serendipitous decision to avoid CO2’s route, the LAWN/Bastion supers do not use dictor-seeded towers, and evade the eyes of potential hostile scouts along their cobbled-together route. In effect, kcolor affected the Eve equivalent of the Miracle of Dunkirk by extracting supers from what should have been a complete shitshow and out from under the notice of NCdot supers, which have been logged on and in range since the station timer.

The decision to contest the IHUB rather than the station is also strange. M-OEE8 is CO2’s primary staging system; freeporting it leaves their assets extremely vulnerable. Conversely, M-OEE8 is CO2’s designated Capital System, and any such system enjoys 33% of the maximum ADM handed to it for free. Destroying the IHUB in this system only has a moderate effect on its defensibility as a result; mining and ratting contributions to the system’s ADM were nil. Yet, more than 60 alliances showed up to M-O’s theatre to contest one of the least important timers in the war.

The choice of tactics for the IHUB contest were also strange. Dogpiling 3000 people into one unreinforced system is a poor tactic for winning a sovereignty contest; nodes spawn in systems across the constellation battlespace and creating a gigantic fuckfest from which no one can escape is stupid, at best. This also makes their triage capitals a poor choice for hackers; one such triage carrier was rapidly evaporated by the 125 man machariel fleet that skirted along the edges of the Time Dilation tarpit while any potential support was stuck therein. Supercapitals from NCdot remained logged in, and were joined in being logged in by PL’s supercap fleet. Supercapitals can only provide limited support to a node contest, and shoving them into the tarpit would have been extremely risky, with node death already occurring.

CO2, for whatever motivation they had to execute a backstab, chose a very strange time to do it. Positive progress on the node contest had been made; constellation control swung up as high as 70% before the backstab was made public.

After we fit all the pieces together, we come to a horrifying conclusion: the events of March 28th, 2016 were designed to ensnare our entire supercapital fleet and murder it, satisfying vengeance for our victory of B-R5RB. CO2’s suggestion to restage LAWN/Bastion to TVN would have made their ability to contribute to their own defense hampered. CO2’s evac route towers were seeded with interdictors. The plan of the hostiles was simple: tackle LAWN/Bastion supers along CO2’s route, to bait a response from our supercapitals, including support from CO2. Once we bit on the bait, CO2 would log in dictors, bubble our fleet, switch sides, and slaughter our supercapital forces along with NCdot and PL. However, this tactic did not come to pass; the Miracle of Dunkirkkcolor, and an IRL meeting by Dear Leader The Mittani with LAWN/Bastion leadership in San Diego, on what was a completely unrelated social call convinced them to reject the TVN staging plan in favor of ceding Vale and evaccing their members to Saranen along a route counter to CO2’s suggestion. The cost of this betrayal could have been much, much worse -- not only would we be down one region, but we’d have no supercapital fleet. The strange peacocking behavior in the M-O IHUB fight was an attempt to salvage the earlier lost opportunity; again, we failed to bite on the bait.

This brings us to today. Even now, as of this writing, hostiles are rallying to strike into our remaining Tribute holdings and increase pressure in our inner holdings. We are on the back foot and poo poo hasn’t been this real since Darius JOHNSON called for the abandonment of the southeast to strike Band of Brothers in Delve. I, Querns, author of this post, have stood up once more to be counted amongst the defenders. Won’t you join me?

Ben Smash posted:

I'm with you always. In your heart and in your butt.

Kirs posted:

Got myself a VPN, so I can poo poo up a new thread now. Yay.

Gropiemon posted:

Someone invade Dek please. Thank you in advance.

DisgracelandUSA posted:

I meant to ask you a few days ago, how did you recruitment efforts with a certain Russian highsec hauler go? People are dying to know.

Kirs posted:

Well, I got 32b off him and left him with 10b he did not wished to give me at all. he spinned the situation that he was TESTing goons if we still scam...fun thing is that he told me that he was dying in all that freighters in order to test fittings and game itself. What a puppetmaster. Last week he offered to educate me so I can scam better.

Kirs posted:

Well, I got 32b off him and left him with 10b he did not wished to give me at all. he spinned the situation that he was TESTing goons if we still scam...fun thing is that he told me that he was dying in all that freighters in order to test fittings and game itself. What a puppetmaster. Last week he offered to educate me so I can scam better.

Neobdragon posted:

Not with us in EVE though, but you'll always be in my heart and butt.

DisgracelandUSA posted:

I guess he learned a-type adaptive nano platings and slaves in a Providence don't stop 40 talos.

avatarinwin posted:

is this who I think it is?

Glory of Arioch posted:

~Favors were called in; previous grudges pardoned and other hypocrisy abounded in order to cause the conglomeration of the single largest anti-Us force in the history of the game.

Glory of Arioch posted:

Vale of the Silent has 118 systems, making it one of the largest single regions in nullsec. As such, ADMs in Vale of the Silent were, at the time, complete dogshit.

Glory of Arioch posted:

NCdot and now PL once again had their supercapital fleets online. This is unusual because of fozziesov; supercapitals cannot meaningfully contest command nodes due to their cycle time penalty and their inability to meaningfully interdict typical entosis link ships

Glory of Arioch posted:

PL drops triage carriers with entosis links fitted to contest nodes, despite the capital penalty to them

Glory of Arioch posted:

High profile members of the hostile community are doing the scutwork of contesting nodes.

Glory of Arioch posted:

Yet, more than 60 alliances showed up to M-O’s theatre to contest one of the least important timers in the war.

Glory of Arioch posted:

The choice of tactics for the IHUB contest were also strange. Dogpiling 3000 people into one unreinforced system is a poor tactic for winning a sovereignty contest

Glory of Arioch posted:

Supercapitals can only provide limited support to a node contest, and shoving them into the tarpit would have been extremely risky, with node death already occurring.

Glory of Arioch posted:

After we fit all the pieces together, we come to a horrifying conclusion: the events of March 28th, 2016 were designed to ensnare our entire supercapital fleet and murder it, satisfying vengeance for our victory of B-R5RB. CO2’s suggestion to restage LAWN/Bastion to TVN would have made their ability to contribute to their own defense hampered. CO2’s evac route towers were seeded with interdictors. The plan of the hostiles was simple: tackle LAWN/Bastion supers along CO2’s route, to bait a response from our supercapitals, including support from CO2. Once we bit on the bait, CO2 would log in dictors, bubble our fleet, switch sides, and slaughter our supercapital forces along with NCdot and PL. However, this tactic did not come to pass; the Miracle of Dunkirkkcolor, and an IRL meeting by Dear Leader The Mittani with LAWN/Bastion leadership in San Diego, on what was a completely unrelated social call convinced them to reject the TVN staging plan in favor of ceding Vale and evaccing their members to Saranen along a route counter to CO2’s suggestion. The cost of this betrayal could have been much, much worse -- not only would we be down one region, but we’d have no supercapital fleet. The strange peacocking behavior in the M-O IHUB fight was an attempt to salvage the earlier lost opportunity; again, we failed to bite on the bait.

Glory of Arioch posted:

poo poo hasn’t been this real since Darius JOHNSON called for the abandonment of the southeast to strike Band of Brothers in Delve.

dragonstalking posted:

This really shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the forces arrayed against the CFC.
To quote powers:
"They are chasing the next good fight. Chasing killboard stats. Their leadership's decision making process and future planning revolves around the next 1-3 weeks, not the next 6-9 months. They don't care who they play with as long as they are getting dank kills."

This is kind of an exaggeration, the ADM's were nowhere near as bad as what Horde had left Fade with after their extensive cloaky camping.

This is a really strange thing to say, as supers are still retained as the ultimate counter to a blob of dreads or slowcats, which are not an illogical escalation to a grid full of BS, which was present.

Anyone who'd bothered to take part in the Entosis testing on SISI would know that triage carriers are the ulitmate entosis boat for a hot system, regardless of the higher spool-up time.

I think Grath would sooner hang himself than be another F1 part of the blob, when he could be running around in a Vaga or Vargur, bringing-solo-back.

Blood in the water and all that, what did you honestly expect from a hint of collapse for the CFC?

People go where the fight is; there is no over-arching command structure for the dozens of alliances involved in this, so how would one force them to not show up for frags?

See the above post about supers still being cap-counters, and why would it be risky when the Allies had complete subcap dominance?

Why would our super fleet be logged in and waiting if it was a trap? Why would you be stupid enough to jump supers into what you admitted was a total shitshow? Why in the world do you imagine PL would actually rely on C02 of all people to successfully execute a trap like that? Hell, you say that supers are useless for entosis fights, yet you insinuate that the CFC might have jumped in supers were it not an obvious trap?
You were definitely fortunate to evacuate your supers from Vale without incident (except that titan RIP), but why bother turning some good luck into, frankly, sheer paranoia?

The irony of this last bit, considering DJ is opposed to the CFC in it's current form, should not be lost.

k3dj posted:

sound the horn

dragonstalking posted:

CFC

dragonstalking posted:

dragonstalking posted:

dragonstalking posted:

This really shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the forces arrayed against the CFC.
To quote powers:
"They are chasing the next good fight. Chasing killboard stats. Their leadership's decision making process and future planning revolves around the next 1-3 weeks, not the next 6-9 months. They don't care who they play with as long as they are getting dank kills."

This is kind of an exaggeration, the ADM's were nowhere near as bad as what Horde had left Fade with after their extensive cloaky camping.

This is a really strange thing to say, as supers are still retained as the ultimate counter to a blob of dreads or slowcats, which are not an illogical escalation to a grid full of BS, which was present.

Anyone who'd bothered to take part in the Entosis testing on SISI would know that triage carriers are the ulitmate entosis boat for a hot system, regardless of the higher spool-up time.

I think Grath would sooner hang himself than be another F1 part of the blob, when he could be running around in a Vaga or Vargur, bringing-solo-back.

Blood in the water and all that, what did you honestly expect from a hint of collapse for the CFC?

People go where the fight is; there is no over-arching command structure for the dozens of alliances involved in this, so how would one force them to not show up for frags?

See the above post about supers still being cap-counters, and why would it be risky when the Allies had complete subcap dominance?

Why would our super fleet be logged in and waiting if it was a trap? Why would you be stupid enough to jump supers into what you admitted was a total shitshow? Why in the world do you imagine PL would actually rely on C02 of all people to successfully execute a trap like that? Hell, you say that supers are useless for entosis fights, yet you insinuate that the CFC might have jumped in supers were it not an obvious trap?
You were definitely fortunate to evacuate your supers from Vale without incident (except that titan RIP), but why bother turning some good luck into, frankly, sheer paranoia?

The irony of this last bit, considering DJ is opposed to the CFC in it's current form, should not be lost.

Eonwe posted:

same

literally same

all of this, the exact same

Eonwe posted:

same

literally same

all of this, the exact same

Eonwe posted:

same

literally same

all of this, the exact same