I’m always amused when organizations in EVE behave like organizations in the real world. Faced with what was essentially a press-release and pep-talk delivered by Sir Molle to his faithful troops, the Northern Coalition leaders prepared their response. Not content to let the South lay out its plans and attract attention, Vuk Lau, the leader of Morsus Mihi and nominal head of the Northern Coalition, organized an address to the pilots of the North.

Compared to Sir Molle’s wandering address a few days ago, Vuk kept his address short and sweet. In front of 1600 members, he announced a contest to produce the best propaganda posters on the theme “Best Friends Forever”. If Molle’s goal is to break us up, our goal is clear – stick together.

Then we got a duet of Never Gonna Give You Up starring Vuk Lau and Plague Black (another alliance leader) and that was it. You can hear a clip of it in this wonderful propaganda newscast produced by a Morsus Mihi member. The singing starts at 3:17.

The message was clear – no matter what happens the North sticks together. I was a little let down at first. I kinda wanted a big inspirational speech (this video is linked all the time in our forums), internet spaceship-style. In retrospect, though, this works even better. While Molle didn’t clearly articulate a reason for this campaign, Vuk made it pretty simple and clear. Even in the face of daunting numbers (the Southern Coalition outnumbers the North by nearly 2-1 in members), we’re in this to have fun, kick ass, and keep the North united.

Unsurprisingly, war in the North is going to entail a bit of a change of pace here. At the very least, you’re going to have to put up with a bit more cheerleading than normal. I’m hardly a dispassionate observer here. I’m happy with my home in the North, and will do whatever I can to defend it. I’ll try to provide even-handed coverage, but lets not forget where my allegiance lies. In any event, it should be a wild ride and I hope you’ll follow along!

After the fall of Goonswarm in Delve, and the nearly-complete campaign to kick CVA out of Providence (some notes on that here, in the first item), the major forces in the South—IT Alliance (-IT-), Against All Authorities (AAA), Atlas (ATLAS)—needed a new scapegoat. It has long been rumored that the southern alliances might band together as a sort of ad-hoc “Southern Coalition” to counter the long-extant “Northern Coalition” made up of Morsus Mihi (RAWR), RAZOR (-RZR-), Tau Ceti Federation (TCF), Mostly Harmless (-42-), Majesta Empire (ME), Wildly Inappropriate (WI.) and assorted smaller organizations. These major political players will be the major political players on the blog for the next few months – I’m sure there will be stories to tell about each of them as this campaign rolls out.

Northern Coalition leaders have pretty publicly exhorted us to spend March building up our coffers of money so we can afford weapons for the coming war, projecting that we would see a major offensive at the beginning of April. It’s now April first, and their predictions were right on target.

Fleets of Southern Coalition freighters and carriers have spent the last few days moving war materiel into position in the low-sec space adjacent to the Northern Coalition’s borders. IT Alliance’s leader, Sir Molle announced the outlines of the plan in his address to the Southern Coalition on Teamspeak. In front of 800 pilots, he laid out the goals for this operation:

The end goal of all this is not to take space. The end goal of this is not to take stations, not to take space, not to take moons. The end goal is simple. It is to break up the NC.

You can read the whole thing here, but it kind of drags. It has some details about the organization of their attack and logistical plans for deploying a forward base close to our territory. Preparations should be complete sometime today, and combat will likely commence in earnest over this coming weekend.

I’m not really clear on the casus belli here. He doesn’t even lay anything out any particular grievances, not even the obvious realpolitik attack-the-other-superpower justification. Can’t say this sort of unspecified grudge match would be that compelling a reason for me to fight. We’ll see if it sustains the SC’s pilots for what may well be a long fight.

Our motivations are much more basic – defend the North. That’s something I can get behind. Bring it.

0.0 Politics Update

The 0.0 political updates written by Murr over at Kugutsumen are really phenomenally good. I know I linked to these last week, too, but since then he’s written another one. They’re super dense and might be overkill for non-players, but they’re well researched and detailed and give at least a flavor of the high level geopolitics that I don’t really see that well.

The chunk of the report about Providence is particularly interesting. Providence is a region owned by an alliance called CVA, and it’s run by role-players, and has a pretty solid role-playing base. This may seem like a sort of weird notion if you’re not familiar with it, but being a role-player in a world like EVE means you talk from the perspective of your player and strive to maintain the fiction of the world as much as possible. I have no idea how this works in practice. In World of Warcraft, role players get segregated onto their own servers, but in EVE’s single shard, role players have to coexist with everyone else. What complicates this role-playing perspective is that CVA is role playing racist, slave-owning, expansionist, religious zealots. Their stated goal is to annex all of the known EVE universe for their religious dynasty. We can only assume that the CVA leadership holds their meetings in-character, so playing the role of Hitler-denying-his-imminent-fall feels entirely appropriate.

They can’t expect their non-role-playing allies to put up with it though, and it looks like they’re hemorrhaging member corps faster than they’re losing systems.

Scouting and Fleet Communication

Very much enjoyed a pair of articles at A Scouts Domain this week. The first was about how to be an effective fleet commander over voice-chat. There’s a lot of practice advice there for people thinking about trying to FC. It’s also a window into what that role is like for people who don’t play.

The second article was a similar treatment of the role of the scout. Scouts are critical to a fleet’s success, and the article does a great job clearly deconstructing what a scout needs to do and how. More than most roles in fleets, scouts don’t rely on having a great ship. For scouts, it’s all about their skills and knowledge and instincts. It’s a tough and often thankless job, but a fascinating and challenging one.

“Asset Liberation”

Mynxee put together a wonderful story about a heist she pulled, stealing a freighter and command ship from an unsuspecting corporation who were storing them inside a player-owned-structure. It’s a great story, and she does a wonderful job of capturing the emotions and worries of these kinds of pseudo-criminal activities. She may well convert me to piracy yet.

So, back to links:

0.0 Political Updates

As far as I can tell, most of the really great reportage about what’s going on in 0.0 happens in the EVE forum ecosystem. This post has a really fantastic summary of what’s going on around New Eden and a healthy dose of interpretation and speculation. It’s some of the most readable 0.0 politics writing I’ve read in a while, although it does assume some history knowledge.

Alliance Social Network Diagram

Also over at Kugutsumen, a poster maintains a list of Alliances that are affiliated with each other through mutual non-aggression pacts – so-called “blue lists”. Basically, all organizations in EVE have the ability to set “standings” with other organizations. These standings are numbers that range from -10 to +10. In past posts, you’ve seen screenshots with people shown as different colors – these are graphical representations of the relationship between my alliance and the alliance the other person is in. Blue means they’re friendly and I shouldn’t shoot them, red means they’re enemies and I should shoot them. This is a map of people who agree to set each other as blue. You can see in the upper right hand corner there’s the tightly linked Northern Coalition. On the left are the murky politics of the southern bloc. I’m working with the original author of this visualization to produce some more complicated ones that more clearly show who are renters, which alliances are the major power brokers and (mayyyyybe) who’s actively attacking who these days. Found this via Manasi at A Mule In EVE.

Update: Great link in the comments to an influence map at EVE fail showing which alliances historically work together. See also, this perspective from NC: that’s a whole lot of people who don’t like us very much.

Essays for New Players

One of the commenters in the Metafilter article about Jump On Contact was inspired to publish a series of emails he wrote to a friend who was just starting out in EVE. They’re a great read, and cover a lot of the really basic stuff that new players care about. If you’re thinking about playing yourself, it’s a great place to start. The author covers a bunch of specific topics (low-sec space, for example) that I haven’t talked about much. All in all, I think it’s a really nice complement to my blog.

NThraller, Morsus Mihi pilot, wins a silver medal. He's the guy on the left.

Think you know who plays MMOs? Pasty-faced teenagers in their parents’ basements, right? Or maybe disaffected college students looking for lulz? How does Olympic Medalist fit into your picture?

NThraller, a Norwegian pilot in hirr (a corporation in Morsus Mihi, my alliance) took home a silver medal from the Vancouver Olympics in the Giant Slalom last week. Don’t let his sparse killboard history fool you. He’s been super active in the RAWR forums for the last few years, even when Olympic training and competition have taken over most of his time. He even provided support on a Vagabond kill the day after he placed second in the world. Now he just needs a matching medal in-game.

Contrary to the stereotype, most MMO players are older. The data’s old, but the last time CCP talked about their player base, they claimed that the average age was 27 and most players had “some kind of degree”. This is broadly similar to World of Warcraft’s demograhpics (although that data is quite old and I suspect skews older now). The one big way that EVE diverges from other MMOs is gender: 95% of EVE players are men, compared to less than 85% (depending on who you ask and when the data was taken) for WoW.

I’ve also been taken with this recent EVE-Space campaign started at Chocolate Heaven. EVE Bloggers have started posting lots of pictures of the spaces in which they play EVE. There’s a huge amount of variety (and I’ve posted a bunch of them below), and I think you can get a bit of a window into the way that EVE pilots live and play. I think they might not look how you expect.

You can find a full list back at CrazyKinux’s blog.

That’s exactly right private, wars over, we won, turns out you’re the big hero. They’re going to hold a parade in your honor. (Red versus Blue)

It’s probably an open secret now that the Northern Coalition has pulled back from its base in ROIR. Pure Blind has quieted down pretty significantly, and I just finished moving all my stuff back home to Tribute, the reverse of my trip a few weeks ago. I never really got settled there before the hostilities started, so it’s going to be a bit of a change of pace in my EVE-life to learn about how to make ISK in 0.0.

This was my first campaign, so it’s hard to really know if we won. I’m not even sure I know what winning would look or feel like. But at least internally, people are pretty happy with how the campaign went. There’s a lot to learn and practice for our next big fight, but there’s definitely some celebration and relief that we can get back to being the professional carebears everyone thinks we are.

For your amusement, I’ve embedded a bit of NC propaganda footage below. I think the message is pretty clear – don’t screw with people who have 40 titans at their disposal. I’m sure the NC haters (and they are legion) have plenty to say about how this is wishful thinking, but it’s still a pretty mighty thing to behold.

IT Alliances Reclaims Delve

Last week, you might recall that Goonswarm failed to pay their sovereignty bills and essentially lost control of their sovereign space in Delve. I posted the “State of the Goon” speech which outlined their plans for the future. All did not go according to that plan.

As reported by Massively, “in the early hours of February 3rd, 2010 the GoonSwarm CEO karttoon kicked out almost every corp from the alliance, effectively disbanding it.” This was really the end of the story, not the beginning. You might recall that Karttoon had been on vacation, which is part of what triggered the Goons’ loss of territory. Regardless of whether or not Goonswarm had disbanded, their role on the political stage in EVE was essentially over with the loss of territory. The loss of resources, income, morale, and easily defendable space combined to be a nearly insurmountable obstacle to future progress. At that point, the status of the alliance itself is somewhat of an afterthought; any serious new Goon-affiliated alliance was going to have to rebuild itself nearly from scratch anyway, and it was pretty clear that Karttoon couldn’t be in a leadership position after triggering a failscade of this magnitude.

The goons are exceedingly adept at stirring up drama and generating lulz, and their current misfortune is no exception. There’s quite a bit we still don’t really know about what happened. Apparently Karttoon stole quite a bit of money from the corporation wallets (which some are suggesting he should donate to Haiti), as well as invaluable blueprints from corporation hangers before he disbanded the organization. Some people are claiming that the whole thing was intentional – staged because the goons had become complacent and needed more wide-ranging lulz than owning Delve gave them. Pilots from IT Alliance (the goons’ mortal enemies) have claimed that this was a way to avoid losing a proper fight for Delve, denying their enemies the pleasure of winning in battle. Even within the Goons, there is confusion about what happened and why. Karttoon claimed on the alliance forums that “this was the only real way to get rid of the pubbies” – lower-tier “public” corporations that had latched onto the Goonswarm alliance but which were reviled by some members of the core Goon corporations GoonFleet and GoonWaffe.

Moving forward, there are two big questions: what’s going to happen to the goons? what’s going to happen to the geopolitics of the south?

The Goons are by no means gone. The core corporations are still alive, the question is now what their goals are and can they rebuild a large-scale alliance. Two organizations have emerged. GoonFleet is now a member of the Band of Brothers alliance, and GoonWaffe is now part of the newly-created SOLODRAKBANSOLODRAKBANSO alliance. The “Band of Brothers” name was historically owned by the Goons’ long time enemies – the people from whom they stole Delve before (and who now has Delve back again) but was stolen during what was essentially the biggest espionage coup of EVE history. (You can hear GoonSwarm’s The Mittani explain how it happened here – audio NSFW.) Resurrecting this old name is a slap in the face to the organization now known as IT Alliance, which would really like to have that name back. The other alliance name is an allusion to some Goon in-joke that I don’t know, but its members seem to take particular glee that the name is so long that it messes with width of the tables in the forums which have to grow to fit it. These two organizations have declared war on each other, but it’s almost certainly just for show, since it means they can post threads like this where they can talk about how great it is that Band of Brothers is back and fighting goons again.

The larger issue is how this will change the political landscape of EVE. Traditionally, Goonswarm has been the punching bag of the big southern alliances – IT Alliance (née Band of Brothers), and Against All Authorities, among others. With Goonswarm out of the picture, what’s going to happen to the alliances who were allied against Goonswarm? A big part of what keeps alliances from staying allied for too long is that their pilots hunger for conflict. If there is ever too much peace in the south, alliances may well turn on each other just to have something to do. In the north, (where I live), it seems like the Northern Coalition has survived for quite a while by being just about the perfect size – everyone can find enemies relatively close to their home space, so no one gets bored. But it may well be the case in the south that too much peace is what kills them. On the other hand, IT Alliance may try to start pushing up against the Northern Coalition who were historically allied with Goonswarm and are the nearest (although still pretty far away) obvious enemies. Only time will tell! In any event, it’s going to take a while for all of this to unravel.

Goons Losing Sovereignty Throughout Delve

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

When the history of GoonSwarm is written, it will be a delicious irony that their lust for Delve led to their downfall as a space-holding 0.0 Alliance.

For most of EVE’s history, GoonSwarm has been one of the major power blocs. They have a lengthy, storied history. Most of their pilots come from the Something Awful forums, and they are famous for bringing in hordes of new, inexperienced pilots and overwhelming alliances that no one expected them to have a chance against. This article about their history with the Red Alliance is a really great start, and it links to other EVE articles by the wonderful Nick Breckon.

Most recently, GoonSwarm was in the news for disassembling “Fortress Delve” – a famously un-conquerable region in EVE owned by GoonSwarm’s long-time nemeses Band of Brothers. The history between these alliances is a very long story, but there are some summaries of mixed quality on various EVE wikis. The Mittani, GoonSwarm’s famous spy-master, arranged for a defecting member of BoB to disband the alliance from the inside. When the alliance disbanded, BoB lost “sovereignty” on all their systems in Delve. This is essentially like losing your electricity – all the infrastructure that makes it easy for an alliance to secure their borders, move quickly through their space, store their assets, and construct capital ships instantly shuts off. This triggered a dog pile, in which all nearby alliances descended on BoB and tore them apart. The Goons came out on top, claiming Delve as their new impregnable home.

Today, the exact same cascade hit GoonSwarm. The culprit this time? Goon leadership was a combination of on vacation and not logging in frequently, and forgot to pay the upkeep costs for claiming sovereignty over Delve. The due date passed this morning, and the shit hit the fan.

The Alliance forums exploded with topics like “Karma is a *****” (From SirMolle, BoB’s former leader), We didn’t want that space anyways, “Goons have the most dangerous logistics team EVE has ever seen.”, “Sins of a Solar Paymaster” (a spoof on The Mittani’s regular excellent column on EVE intrigue and politics), “death2goonswarm” (which is populated largely by GoonSwarm members mocking predictions of their own death).

My favorite thing to come out of this whole disaster is a State of the Goon address. I’m not sure if it was leaked or intentionally released, but it was given to over four hundred GoonSwarm members on teamspeak, and describes exactly what happened, why, and what’s happening next. It’s shockingly similar to a speech any other leader could give to their semi-defeated and demoralized team – part call to action, part apology, and part blame-shifting. It’s clearly a prepared statement that’s the result of deliberation among the directorate of GoonSwarm. It’s a great (but a little long) listen.

Some quick vocab that might help you – any letter/number combinations are systems in 0.0 . So when he says “A2”, “JL”, and “NOL”, those are systems. “Caps” is short for capital ships – dreadnaughts, carriers, and titans. “Sov” is short for sovereignty. ISK is EVE’s in-game currency. Most of the rest of the words you won’t recognize are player names. They’re not important for getting the general gist.

Plus, if you make it six minutes into the speech, you get a very questionable comparison of Delve to Haiti.

Enjoy! No doubt there will be lots of great coverage of this, and I’ll try to keep up with it.

State of the Goon, Dealing with Delve Meltdown Redux

A fleet of stealth bombers about to jump through a gate.

We’re at war!

This news story lays it out pretty well. The battles I fought in last week were just the initial skirmishes. We’ve now relocated a huge chunk of our Coalition supplies into ROIR in Pure Blind. There are pretty much constant large Northern Coalition fleets operating in the region now.

Most of last weekend was spent managing relocation logistics. Moving hundreds of ships and associated materiel into the system takes a long time. Every hours or so a convoy would leave from our home area so that no one got ambushed en route to the new staging area. On top of that, we had regular Titan bridges operating that could basically teleport our ships directly into our new home system. Friendly carriers can store our fully-fitted ships in their docking bays and drop them off in ROIR.

None of this is particularly expensive, but it does take quite a bit of time. There are other disadvantages to not being in your home region, either – we don’t know the terrain as well, don’t have easy access to modules and ammo, and it leaves our home region somewhat undefended.

All in all, it’s kind of a dull process, but it’s strangely gratifying to be part of a big operation like this. It’s a new feeling to know that there are probably enemy spies watching our movements and if we start to slip up they could descend on us at any moment.

The irony of all this is I still haven’t had a good fleet fight since that first one. I’ve spent most of my time staring at gates like the one above waiting for a red ship to fly through, or camping red cynos to report on TRI ship movements. It’s not glamorous, but the more elder players insist it’s important.

Most fleets these days are going out to knock over enemy moon mining modules (like the friendly one above), trying to draw out enemy fleets into a more decisive battle. It hasn’t worked that well. We’ve taken out lots of TRI towers, but they don’t reliably take the bait and bring a defense fleet. I’m not sure how critical the money is to them; they seem to care more about winning fights than winning the war. Now that a big chunk of NC is based a few jumps away from their traditional home, it’s much easier for us to gather and sustain large fleets. They could muster similar sized fleets during the P2-TTL battles last week because it was mega super drama, but I haven’t seen much of their EVOKE allies in Pure Blind now that there is constant mid level combat.

I’m getting some interesting footage, though. I should have a video about voice communication and fleet movement this weekend. Maybe one about Stealth Bombing, too, but it would be nice to actually land a bomb on an enemy before claiming I know anything about how that process works.

I dawdled for a while, not really realizing that I could just fly to P2-TTL on my own. I was in an interceptor, after all — the one thing my ship was exceptionally good at is getting places quickly.

When I arrived on-grid in P2, the battle was well underway. I had literally never seen this many ships before in my life. I hadn’t really been shot at, outside of a few controlled circumstances. I half expected to die as soon as I arrived. Surely someone’s job in this 300 person enemy fleet was to shoot at me, right? I fired up my microwarp drive and ran very high speed circles around the enemy fleet, relieved to discover that, in fact, no one really cared about me at all.

Getting noticed is actually kind of tricky. With this many people, you don’t actually click on your targets in the world. You spend most of your time staring not at the world itself, but at something called the overview. The overview is just a sortable table. Each row tells you how far away the ship is, what kind of ship it is, who’s flying it, and potentially a bunch of other optional information like velocity, alliance, and corporation.

On top of the overview are filters for different combat situations. For battleships — the fleet ships of the line in situations like this — all you need is a Hostile Battleships view. This scopes your world down to just a list of your counterparts in the enemy fleet. The picture on the left is a support-only view of the battle. Unlike the battleship-only view above, this view is much more sparse. Battleships are clearly eh backbone of any fleet. Battles are won or lost by taking out enemy battleships. The rest of the fleet exists to keep friendly battleships alive, make it hard for the other fleet to target our battleships, and keep wounded enemy battleships from retreating to safety.

That last bit was my job. I was was flying an Interceptor. Faster than any other ship on the field, I watched for retreating enemy ships and jumped on them with a warp disrupter. That way when their armor started to wear down, they couldn’t start their warp drives. When our battleship fleet wore them all the way down, I would bounce to the next target. If I attracted enemy attention, I would burn hard away from the enemy fleet until their target locks broke and they shifted their attention elsewhere. When I’m actively tackling someone, it looks like this – my “locked” target is in the upper top part of my screen, with two icons just to the right of it showing that I’m using my missile launchers and warp disrupter on the target. On the bottom, you can also see my micro-warp-drive is on, and my current speed is nearly 5k/s.

The most striking thing about this kind of combat is how abstract and slow it is. There are no formations, just amorphous blobs of purple (my fleet), blue (friendly fleet), and red (enemy). These blobs drift slowly through space, with dots occasionally warping off and warping back, trying to avoid death by breaking enemy target locks on them. There are no football-style plays; no delicate formations, daring gambits, or flanking maneuvers here.

Instead of calling plays, all we get are names of enemy targets. The Fleet Commander calls out the name and ship type of our target, focusing all our battleships’ fire on one enemy ship until it buckles under our attention. The support ships flit around the edges, doing our jobs independently, hoping not to attract any attention while we carry out specific side missions.

It’s all quite lonely. I swap between a list of enemy battleships and enemy support ships fading away all the friendly ships until my screen is just angry red. I haven’t the faintest idea if we’re winning or losing, all I know is that there’s a lot of red and no one’s shooting at me.

Until, all of a sudden, I die. It happened fast and out of nowhere, and I was knocked out of the fight. If I was really dedicated, I would have slow-boated back to Tribute in my pod and jumped in another ship and made my way back to the fight. But it was late, and I’d spent 3 hours in fleet already. This, in the end, is probably what decides fights more than how fancy your ships are: who has work in the morning and needs to get to bed.