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Tweedle Dum
Gallente Empire Quality Control
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Posted - 2007.03.03 07:47:00 -
[1]
Quote: A year is a hell of a long time in Eve. Less than two months ago we had just applied the final screws to -V- and captured their capitals. Four months ago we were heavily entrenched in fights involving -V-, KOS, LV, and every other ally of the entire Southern Coalition. Six months ago we were just beginning to move our stuff down to C-J, our new base of operations. A full year ago we had not even begun the Outer Ring / XZH campaign, nor even heard of Sparta or NFC.
Political boundaries are fluid because CCP have designed the Eve universe to be volatile. Capturing a station with no sov and locking an enemy out of their capital can be done in a matter of minutes once the necessary POS groundwork has been laid out ahead of time. Because gamers are free to leave an alliance and travel to any other, and because this is an internet game where you aren't likely to ever really meet any of your space buddies, allegiances in Eve are fluid and subject to extreme fluctuation under stress. That's why we get the "cascade failure" - or what I'd like to christen the "Mittani Effect" - of alliances that are fighting, fighting, fighting... and all of a sudden they begin to implode as stress fractures the core constituency and collapses the alliance's ability to fight off invaders.
There are only two ways of dealing with the Mittani Effect if you are an alliance chief. One is to simply not get beaten to the point where stress fractures may occur. If you win constantly and project an aura of confidence, your troops will be more likely to take minor losses in swing (and perhaps even some major losses) and keep on fighting. The downside of this is that getting really walloped takes away that aura of confidence and exposes the membership to fractures - like LV losing the JV1V Titan POS. The confidence disappears and is replaced by bitterness and cynicism, which decreases member participation and solidarity and ultimately results in defeat.
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Tweedle Dum
Gallente Empire Quality Control
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Posted - 2007.03.03 07:47:00 -
[2]
Quote: The other method is to tie your members so closely together socially, economically and politically that they have virtually no choice but to stay together even after major defeats. One expression of this is the kind of ethnic solidarity found in German, French and Russian speaking alliances in Eve. There aren't a ton of people who speak these primary languages fluently, so if you want ease of communication and you're a German, you're almost bound by default to end up in a D2 German speaking corp. Even if that corp undergoes major problems, your alternatives are limited because the German speakers in Eve are limited, so you are more likely to stick together through hard times. This is how G survived and reformed D2, and how RA survived a 10,000 man coalition that took 99% of their space.
A further expression of this prong of the theory would be economic self interest, like ASCN's appeal to carebear corps: "If you don't come and fight, you'll lose access to all of this arkonor and then it's back to Empire to mine Veldspar." This is only effective so long as the monetary rewards for fighting exceed the cost of fighting. As soon as Carebear X loses enough battleships that it will take him weeks of mining or ratting to pay off his debts, he's thinking about cutting his losses and running. Since Eve is a game, and people value their gaming time quite highly, enticing corps to stay and fight against overwhelming odds (and sometimes even underwhelming odds) on the promise of future income is difficult.
A last expression of the social/economic/political ties might be dubbed Cultural ties, where everybody in the group shares a particularly strong minority viewpoint, while the majority of people outside the group do not. BoB and GoonSwarm are good examples of this. BoB believe that they are the elite in the game and that everybody else should be their slaves, and in so doing relegate everybody else in the game to subordinate status - so they naturally wouldn't want to leave BoB and join those subordinates even if things looked bad for BoB. GoonSwarm similarly embodies the SomethingAwful culture of self-referential mockery. GS considers most of the player base of Eve (and indeed most online games) to be fundamentally clueless and funny to exploit and mock, reserving friendship status to those groups who "see through" the SA culture and like us anyway.
Ultimately the first method of dealing with the Mittani Effect (not losing) isn't viable in the long run. You cannot win forever in Eve because 1) everybody is human and mistakes will eventually be made in warfare, and 2) CCP will eventually set up the game so that you have to lose, in order to stop the product from stagnating.
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Tweedle Dum
Gallente Empire Quality Control
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Posted - 2007.03.03 07:49:00 -
[3]
Quote: So the only way to keep an alliance from imploding under stress is its economic/social/political ties. GoonSwarm doesn't rest its member participation on the argument that they'll get more money for the most part, but rather the argument that it is culturally independent from the rest of Eve and thus its members should all pull in the same direction to benefit that culture.
The question for GoonSwarm, then is: "Is GoonSwarm's SomethingAwful culture able to avoid more of the Mittani Effect than BoB's "Elite" culture?", because in answering that question, you'll answer who is likely going to win the upcoming war.
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When I founded GoonFleet, it was done with the intent that GF be the best place for Goons to go in Eve from SomethingAwful. And every newbie drive stressed this over all other enticements to join: "Play with more than a hundred other goons and shoot****gots in space with us!" What would later amaze me was that once Goons joined GoonFleet - even if they lapsed their accounts for awhile and came back later - we would never have to beg veteran GF players to "come back" to GoonFleet.
Very few people left at all, and those who did leave usually came back within a few days or weeks with complaints that every other Empire corp or 0.0 alliance or Roleplaying group was full of people that they couldn't stand. A lot of evegoons became GoonFleet members in the long run, but very few GoonFleet members became evegoons, or Lotka Volterra members, or BoB members, or anything else. GoonFleet, once it got going and became big enough, was the center of the universe for Goons and very few would even try to escape its pull.
This elevated GoonFleet to one of a select few corps/alliances in Eve that had this pull. It also fulfilled the second prong of the theory I advanced above about dealing with the Mittani Effect: even when the war with D2 over XZH went south for lack of funds and we were cast back to Syndicate, we didn't break apart. Even when BoB then came in opportunistically to "excise" us as cancers from Eve, we just jumped into frigates and had fun taking a break from POS warfare until they declared victory and left. Immediately afterwards we went right back to S-U8 and started rebuilding, and eventually moved South with RA and destroyed the largest coalition in Eve history in 4 months.
I would posit that only a handful of alliances could have pulled that off. I would further posit that the common feature of those alliances would be that they don't speak English, are a language-minority in Eve, and have almost nowhere else to go that speaks their language - so they'd be sticking by their guns almost by default. I would finally posit that GoonSwarm is the only alliance that is so culturally connected that it could avoid the Mittani Effect after a disaster like XZH-BoB and be back in just a few short months to conquer about a fifth of the 0.0 universe. Virtually every other corp or alliance in the game would have given up the ghost if not immediately after XZH, then immediately after BoB declared.
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Tweedle Dum
Gallente Empire Quality Control
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Posted - 2007.03.03 07:51:00 -
[4]
Quote: It is a testament to how powerful SomethingAwful culture is that GoonFleet survived. It is also testament to how strong we are as a people in Eve, and how we can shape the universe with our desires and commitment. I have never lost faith in Goons in Eve, and even at my weakest moment, when I resigned my CEOship last summer, it was because I felt that I was not the best person to lead GoonFleet; that by remaining in command when there were others who could do better than I, I was being selfish. But today I know better, because I understand that it isn't the CEO that makes a corp strong, but rather it is the membership. Without the will of Goons, the directors and I would be nothing. We merely give shape to the common Goon desire to bring the universe in line with our philosophy. We are the servants, it is the common Goon brotherhood whose will is imposed on the world. Even if we were terrible leaders, Goons would find a way to triumph without us.
And because I believe so strongly in Goon culture as uniting us all in eventual dominance, I intend to lead us down a path which no other alliance has ever succeeded in walking. First, we will conquer the rest of LV's space, bringing us to 17 stations, the second largest holder of stations in the game. Second, we will begin a newbie drive that swells our ranks to more than 4000 active accounts and draw more Goons close to our fire. Third, we will dispossess BoB and all of its allies of their space, and see if they can withstand the Mittani Effect as well as we have. Fourth, we will conquer the South of Eve and extend the Free Trade Zone to a hundred different stations held between us and our allies: we will draw forth Empire into 0.0 as CCP has always envisioned it. And we will build an army with the proceeds that is utterly invincible. Hundreds of dreads and carriers, Titans, motherships, and fleets of ships to support them.
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RedSwarm One
GoonFleet GoonSwarm
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Posted - 2007.03.03 07:51:00 -
[5]
POSTIN IN A GOONFLEET FORUM RIPOFF BOB ALT SPY THREAD
ibtl
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Taison
Russian SOBR Red Alliance
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Posted - 2007.03.03 07:54:00 -
[6]
So?
IBTL
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NATMav
F.R.E.E. Explorer EVE Animal Control
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Posted - 2007.03.03 07:54:00 -
[7]
Edited by: NATMav on 03/03/2007 07:51:11 Good post.
(the original you stole, not yours)
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Sigmorhair
Gallente Eisenmetal
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Posted - 2007.03.03 08:36:00 -
[8]
Nah, this won't be locked, rules don't apply if you are trolling goonfleet.
This will stay open for a day or so then it will be locked because replies were offtopic or some lame crap like that.
And people wonder why eve-o is such crap.
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Dong AppreciationStation
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Posted - 2007.03.03 08:38:00 -
[9]
You cannot simply spy your way into goondor.
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fightnkill
The New Synergistic Collective Combined Planetary Union
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Posted - 2007.03.03 09:25:00 -
[10]
It's true in a way. The Goons have a huge potential while BoB + allies and other alliance has had already reached their max.
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Sarah Meiskin
Fatalix Inc. Schism.
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Posted - 2007.03.03 09:48:00 -
[11]
Hoo-RaGoonFleet! Hoo-RaGoonFleet!
The original post is outstanding, and so true. Too bad for BoB, Think their spindoctors need a bit more training. --- Those who say the blind cannot lead cannot see beyond their own noses. |
Anaximander Monk
Mandala Group
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Posted - 2007.03.03 09:53:00 -
[12]
Tldr, tbh I suggest murder/suicide. Totse > SA imho.
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Mattduk
Gallente Universal Army
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Posted - 2007.03.03 10:25:00 -
[13]
Good read. Although I don't agree with the methods in which it was made 'public', I did find it a very educational read.
Kind regards Mattduk
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Culmen
Caldari Gekidoku Koroshiya Buntai
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Posted - 2007.03.03 10:28:00 -
[14]
Edited by: Culmen on 03/03/2007 10:25:21 Nope your not bob your not allowed
IBTL _____________________________________________________
Why do i even need a sig? |
Sairait
Amarr 47R Privateer Alliance
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Posted - 2007.03.03 10:49:00 -
[15]
Good read.
I would add that empires tend to stagnate and collapse once they reach a certain stage and size; it's happening to BoB, and it could happen to Goonpire too.
/Sairait
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Armois Delgato
FATAL REVELATIONS FATAL Alliance
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Posted - 2007.03.03 10:51:00 -
[16]
Interesting read, but your vets really should give turning bitter a try- it is much more fun on the other side. GS is a great place for newbie crokite-lovers, but so boring once you can use even the smallest bit of t2.
See you in space, pew pew. I do so relish the thought of ruining your little sandcastles in space.
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Jacques Archambault
Forum Moderator Interstellar Services Department
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Posted - 2007.03.03 11:07:00 -
[17]
Topic locked as it is not in accordance with the CAOD rules for the Posting of external links and chatlogs.
Quote:
The material linked to must have a constructive purpose.
This means some kind of constructive text worthy of a discussion must accompany said external links/chatlogs.
Threads with no comments and with the intention of flaming/trolling will be locked and/or deleted, as is the norm with threads of this nature.
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