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.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.

Like the gods of creation stories, designers of a new virtual world face a fundamental cosmological question: how will the world be organized? What will the natural laws of the world be? How will people move around it and effect other residents of that world? These questions encompass the entire problem of designing a virtual world, but the very first question you have to decide about is how many worlds you’re going to make.

In the beginning, there was only one model, and it’s difficult to describe it because anything else seems so alien: every visitor to a particular virtual world like LambdaMOO was visiting the same version of LambdaMOO and could see any other visitor to LambdaMOO. This seems so obvious as to be confusing; if you plan to meet someone at a local coffee shop, you will end up in the same place.

This model quickly fell apart, though. As virtual worlds gained popularity, it became harder and harder to fit everyone into one world together. So like a coffee shop owner that realizes she could profitably open another location and start a franchise system, virtual world designers developed a new way to organize their universes. Instead of having just one world, virtual worlds started having multiple copies of their world. These copies are typically called “shards” or “realms”.

Unlike a coffee shop, it seems like you could just make a virtual world bigger to fit more people, right? There are no real estate constraints online to hinder expansion. Instead of physical constraints, virtual worlds that want to grow face two related problems. The first is technical. In general, the bigger a virtual crowd gets the more unresponsive the world becomes for everyone. Imagine that every time you move your character, you have to tell everyone else nearby about every step your character takes. If everyone’s moving at the same time, the number of messages for everyone to tell everyone else that they’re moving rises very quickly. So when you have a world with lots of people in it, you’re usually really scared that they all end up in the same place at once because then that area slows to a crawl as it tries to pass messages between everyone in the room.

The second problem is one of design: how do you keep people from all going to the same places at the same times? You have to give people lots of places to go that are interesting and lots of places to do things that everyone needs to do, like go shopping, so they never fill up too much.

A game like World of Warcraft sort of punts on the second issue. You can get away with having a laggy, unresponsive world for things like shopping because it’s not a particular immersive experience anyway. Plus, players get smart at regulating their visits to busy places like that to avoid heavy traffic. The first problem is harder to deal with. If there’s a really important mission that everyone wants to do, how do you handle 1000 people who want to do that mission at the same time?

The traditional answer to this problem is to do the franchising trick again. In this context, it’s known as “instancing.” If I want to go do a popular mission with some friends, the world creates a copy of the mission area that’s just for us. These areas typically have a fixed number of people who can be in them, which solves the messaging problem from earlier; if you can set a ceiling for the number of people who can simultaneously participate in something, you can just design experiences for a number of people you know you can easily handle.

Instancing solves another problem, too – griefing. When doing a high stakes, high risk task, there are lots of opportunities for a malicious player to ruin other people’s chances. Instancing separates these tasks from the rest of the world. You choose who comes with you into the instance, so you’re largely safe from unfriendly players.

Almost all modern worlds use shards or realms to split up their player base, and almost all modern worlds use some form of instancing. Some worlds, like Guild Wars, are nearly entirely instanced, and the only shared spaces are towns. Perhaps the only other world that doesn’t use shards is Second Life, although they set hard limits on the number of people in an area, too, so essentially they have the same problem, they just choose to avoid it.

EVE doesn’t use realms or shards at all, and uses only a lightweight form of limited instancing for missions (which don’t play nearly as central a role as they do in other worlds). The result is that when you look at the EVE login screen and it says 35,000 logged in pilots, that’s 35,000 people you can talk to, shoot at, and team up with. If you want to put 1000 people in a system together, you can. It’s laggy, but this kind of flexibility has a major impact on the kind of world EVE has become.

This article is continued in a second, more EVE-specific, part.

“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space”

In no virtual world is this quote more true than in EVE. EVE is big. Really big.

Unlike real space, EVE-space is organized into discrete systems. Each system contains planets, moons, asteroid belts, stations, and gates. You move between systems using these gates. Each gate connects to exactly one other system, and if you nestle up close to it you can select the gate and press “jump”. A few seconds later and you’ll pop out on the other side. Then you “warp” to the next gate in your path, hit “jump” when you get there, and you’re on your way.

Clusters of systems are known as constellations (~5-10ish systems) and sets of 5 or so constellations make up a region. New Eden, the galaxy of EVE, has 67 regions.

All of these systems are laid out in 3d, making EVE’s map a sort of terrifying beast. And that’s before you start visualizing live data on it, a topic we’ll talk about later.

The other way to think about the galaxy’s scale is by how long it would take you to move across it. Its max diameter is maybe 100 jumps, i.e. if you charted a path from one corner to the other, you would have to jump 100 times, passing through 100 different systems along the way. Depending on how fast your ship is, this would easily take a few hours. In reality, you’d almost certainly never make it all the way, because most of the galaxy is a very unfriendly place.

Each system in EVE has a “security status” ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. There are 3 distinct ranges on this scale: 1.0-0.5, 0.4-0.1, and 0.0.

• 1.0-0.5 (AKA “high sec”, “empire”, yellow-green on the map) is the safest part of the galaxy. There are police ships guarding jump gates between systems, and if anyone attacks you the police will show up promptly to blow them up. Of course, you might be dead by the time they arrive, but at least your attackers paid for their aggression, right? Most EVE players spent most of their time here, running missions, mining asteroids, producing items, etc. There is some player on player combat, but it’s relatively prescribed.
• 0.4-0.1 (AKA “low sec”, red-yellow on the map) is the seedy underbelly of EVE. Pirates are king in low sec. Systems are usually pretty empty of people, and you can make good money living in low sec because there are more valuable asteroids here, and missions pay out more. The trade off is that there’s no police, so pirates make a good business of jumping unsuspecting ships and demanding money not to blow you up. There are also, of course, people hunting the pirates. This is where you go to fight other (potentially unsuspecting) players without the police getting involved. If you kill enough other players, you might not be allowed back into high sec, but otherwise there are few consequences to bad behavior here.
• 0.0 (AKA “null sec”, “zero zero”, red on the map) is where the big alliances play. Unlike the rest of EVE, corporations and alliances can claim “sovereignty” over systems in 0.0. Practically speaking, this lets corporations build a variety of kinds of in-system infrastructure that boost their income, let them build capital ships, etc. Alliances usually have relatively strict rules about who is and isn’t allowed in their space, and there are usually roaming gangs of ships that enforce those rules. Wars between alliances are usually over territory, and battles are fought one system at a time, with alliances expanding and contracting their borders over the span of months and years. More territory means more money, and more money means more ships and equipment for your internet navy. There are no formal consequences to killing anyone in 0.0, although you might cause a diplomatic incident if you kill someone your alliance is friendly with. Huge areas in 0.0 are essentially uninhabited, but running into the wrong people can mean instant death.

These three kinds of space are arranged like a donut. High sec is the squishy center, surrounded by pirate infested low sec, surrounded by the Wild West of 0.0. In the image, the red systems are 0.0, and systems get more green as they become higher security. The player experience in each of these three regions is dramatically different. I’ve spent almost all my time in High Sec so far (check out the figure on the left for a map of where I’ve been), but I’m moving to 0.0 in the next few days, so I’m excited to explore a whole new world, and whole new style of play.

Today, I’m doing the third category. It’s packing time.

I’ve spent about nine months in EVE, on and off, and I’m joining up with a corporation that lives in a different part of space, and I have seven days to move all my assets I want to bring with me to a rallying point at the edge of Empire space.

It’s kind of astonishing how much junk I have strewn around the galaxy. A quick skim of my asset list shows stuff in probably 40 different stations. There are thousands of these stations in EVE, and each one has, effectively, a storage hangar with my name on it.

Looking through these asset lists reveals a lot about what I was doing at these stations. At Rens VI, there’s about a million credits worth of miniature electronics, remnants of a side career in trading commodities. I made money looking for items that I could get cheaply in one part of the galaxy and sell for more in another part. I must have bought these and forgotten to move them to a place where I could sell them. There’s lots of this stuff around the galaxy – ideas I had to make money that didn’t pan out fast enough and I was left holding the bag.

Another station has what amounts to space dust – left-over bits of ore from a mining operation. Most systems in EVE have asteroid belts that contain a bunch of different kinds of asteroids. With the right ship and the right equipment, you can extract ore from these asteroids. Take the ore to the right kind of station and you can get the ore refined into minerals. Those minerals, in turn, can be sold or used for manufacturing items that can in turn be sold or saved. It was good money for a while (and I could do it pretty much with my eyes closed), but it was going to be quite a while for my character to learn the skills to be effective at it. The bits left over from this processes were the remainders from refining – small amounts of ore that were too small to be refined into something else.

My most recent way to make money was running missions. I would go ask a character in the world for a job to do, and she would tell me to go somewhere, kill some enemy ships, and come back for a reward. After I blew up a ship, I could go look and see what was inside – often there would be an item of some sort that I could take with me. I’ve accumulated these items in my hangar. Some of them are worth a lot of money, most of them are worth nothing. Figuring out which is which is trickier than it sounds, and the subject of a whole other post.

If I really cared about squeezing every drop out of these items I could spend a week running around collecting this stuff and selling it off to someone who can make good use of it. But most of this stuff is from my inefficient youth as an EVE player. When you start out, you don’t have any good ways to earn lots of money quickly. I might make 200k ISK on a good day in the first month of playing. Now, I can easily make 10-15M ISK/hour running missions, so the opportunity costs of picking up a few hundred thousand credits worth of items here and there just aren’t worth it. I’ve moved into a different league, financially, so I’m going to leave almost all of these items to collect virtual dust forever.

I can’t ignore my fleet of ships, though. I have lots of different ships to do lots of different kinds of things in EVE, and I want to bring most of them with me. Moving ships around the galaxy is much harder than moving items. Ships are really big. It’s like trying to put a car inside your moving van – it takes a much bigger kind of ship than I own to move anything but the smallest kind of ships: frigates. All my larger sized ships–cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships–I’m going to have to fly myself, one jump at a time. It’s tedious work, but it becomes a kind of lifestyle. You can set a destination and your ship will auto-pilot its way there. It’s slow way to travel, but you’ll get there eventually, and you can do other things while you wait. This is how EVE starts to pervade your life; you start viewing chores around the house as things that will be easy to do while you’re waiting for something to happen in EVE.

I know it seems kind of stupid to play a game where you have to spend hours moving your virtual space ships around the galaxy. Like a lot of the type 2 and type 3 tasks in EVE I’m always a little embarrassed to tell people what I spent my evening doing. Why do this kind of tedious work when I could be doing something that’s straight-up fun? It’s not a question I can answer now, but it’s something I’ll touch on in future articles. EVE is satisfying in a bunch of hard to explain ways, and part of writing all this out is my own quest to better understand what it is that makes it so compelling, even when I’m staring at the engines of a freighter for hours.