(This submission comes to us from former head of the GRR Goons Project, Gevlon Goblin.)
Hello minions of Evil noble Goonswarm members and valued allies!
You didn’t expect to see me here, right? Don’t worry, it will be a one-time show, motivated by the fact now I want Lenny to fail more than I want The Mittani and Sion to. I want to tell you why you have lost – and as the title shows – how can you get up and get revenge on the Band of RMT-ers. You’ll probably hate me more for this post than you do for your medium shield booster Chimeras, because I won’t be nice: to see the guy responsible, you only have to look in the mirror. I know we told you it’s the fault of your leaders. We lied. Sure, the yacht parties, the Kickstarter, the Fanfest speech and anything Sion wrote, said or thought didn’t help, but they didn’t cost you any battles either. We lied because we wanted you to stay as you are and only point fingers up. Let’s begin.
Slavery
This was my first point against you when I started GRR. I said that those outside of Goonswarm are just pets and slaves. You laughed. CO2 didn’t. SMA neither when TISHU massacred them while you were ratting. You think I’m exaggerating? All you have to look is Dotlan 2016 stats (For the suspicious: There is not a single link to my blog in this post). Deklein is #8 in NPC kills, with only Highsec regions before it, despite the fact that you were evicted months ago! That’s how hard you were ratting while your valued allies were slain like sheep. On the battle report of the largest battle, M-O, there are 456 Goons. TEST in 6VDT had 4x more, despite the alliances sizes were similar and they had no allies, no leaders, and no hope. CO2 fielded 334. Are you surprised they left? Dotlan says that more of you chose the other battle, against the Guristas of Deklein: 11 systems that each had over 10K rats killed on the day of M-O.
This shame isn’t on your leaders. The fleets were pinged. The FCs were there, waiting for you. The “Horn of Goondor” was sounded. But the ticks were more tempting. No, you weren’t traitors, just humans. Social people think in “us vs them”. CO2, SMA, LAWN were “them” and you didn’t feel the need to go dozens of jumps in tidi to save them when you could just rat for yourself instead. Your leaders are only at fault for not realizing this basic human nature and allowed different alliances to coexist in the “coalition”, despite obvious power differences. The lesser alliances must be merged into GSF or reset, so GSF would stand alone. Not because of Aegis sov, but because Goons will fight for Goons. MBC did it right: they weren’t even blue to each other, so each of them planned only ops that they could complete alone, knowing that they can’t expect help.
Poverty
This is even older than my GRR project. When I first arrived to EVE in 2012 Feb, the most shocking thing to me was the Drakes. You, the superpower of EVE fielded ships that I could easily buy from my newbie income. I expected the big strong vets flying ships I can’t even dream of, not shitty Drakes. And it was downhill from then, the Drakes were soon replaced with bombless bombers. And you asked for SRP for that crap. Jesus, after I was a year old, I made the price of the whole fleet faster than you could fill out the SRP form! After you were finally defeated and MBC claims to be financed by a single individual, you have to face it: you are dirt poor.
Don’t worry, it’s common among EVE, most groups are just as broke or worse and resort to begging for money. They doublespeak it into “being a mercenary”, but it’s the same thing: they need someone to toss them ISK to be able to shoot stuff. Instead of being in denial, fix it! There are number of industrious individuals among you and – as evidenced by Dotlan – many of you were champions of the great war against Guristas. You can harness their abilities by allowing them to pay their paplink dues by giving ISK to the alliance. It’s win-win: instead of jumping in TiDi, they can do what they are best at while you get money and can field something that isn’t slain by 6 times outnumbered MoA.
Elite PvP and Killboard
This is probably the worst of all, though I’ve found it pretty late. You laugh and despise small gang PvP and its metric: killboard efficiency. Considering that in 2015 you (GSF) lost 10722B ISK ships and only 1849B died in large battle, while 3480B died to a solo killer, you should reconsider. In 2015 MOA killed 1269B of GSF while the second best Black Legion did 450 and NC. did 369. Yes, I know all your damage control lines, but considering you are sitting in Saranen, maybe you need more than good slogans. Let me explain how ratter killing ended you: someone who loses his ratting or hauling ship has to rat it back. It’s not impossible, but takes time. If someone doesn’t have 12 hours a day playtime, he has to choose between ratting his lost Chimera back or going to an op. From the M-O numbers you can see which one happened. The leaders and opinion leaders didn’t see this, because they have 12 hours a day and can’t even think with the head of the line members.
Laughing on the killboard has a long history in GSF and you were right. Zkillboard statistics and ISK ratio are useless and watching it is a waste of time. The reason for that is inflation: if you get on a public titan kill, you get credited with 150B kills, keeping you in green forever. This ended to be true when I first calculated normalized killboard results, by distributing the kill among the killers: if you did 1% damage, you get 1% value. If you don’t want drama, you can go with “everyone gets equal share”, that’s almost as good. Here your leaders fell hard, the week after I published the results, they should have coded a real-time killboard for you which calculates normalized kills and ISK ratios for all of you from the APIs. But you didn’t demand it either. Actually, you mocked those who could be good on the normalized killboard: the small gang PvP-ers. So guess what, they left. This must be fixed, the normalized killboard must be made and paplinks must be awarded to those who fly out on their own time to kill reds (not freighters in Niarja).
Not Kicking Leeches
You had paplinks. But you didn’t actually kick those who didn’t perform. Result: 217 GSF pilots did 47% of the total normalized damage of the alliance in 2015. 1835 pilots did 43%. The remaining 14K did 10%, but they received 50% of the damage. It was great to have them right? If we consider that GSF is actually a 2K alliance, your M-O numbers aren’t that bad. Of course many of the 14K would have lifted their asses if there were consequences. Others of them are active PvE players whose skills could be used by the “paplinks for ISK” system. But most of them are just useless crap. But they couldn’t be kicked because Goonwaffe don’t kick members and the rest of the corps are measured against Goonwaffe.
The best time to kick them was the peak of your power, the day after B-R. The second best time is today. Implement proper metrics, including the paps for ISK and paps for small gang and kick every damn leech who don’t have enough paps in the next month. They just feed your enemies with kills and ego. I remember how proud MOA was for winning against 40x outnumbering enemy, despite actually MOA had 100 PvP-ers with equal stats of your 217.
RMT
The above were enough to prevent your defeat, but probably won’t be enough to win from your current sad situation. You need to address the head of the beast: RMT. I Want ISK is a huge RMT farm, not me saying it, Team Security chief CCP Bugartist does. He caught them, banned them, just to be overruled by (I need one guess). Have you ever considered why did Lenny and IWI attack you? I mean they were content to be apolitical for years and one day they woke up and declared war on you. Sure, the August push of MOA when they all alone took ION-FG, D2-HOS, Y-C3EQ, 7RM-N0 and GA-P6C clearly shown that it’s possible, but it’s also possible to plug a feather to your butt and march in the Pride Parade and most of us don’t do that. What was their reason? To become too important content creators and too connected in the community to be banned. Lenny recruited every Tom, Dick and Harriett to the MBC. Not because he needed them against you, I’m sure that MOA+OOS+TISHU+Culture were already overkill. He needed them under his banner to have more alliance leaders vouching for him at CCP higher ups. You weren’t even the target of World War Bee, you were just a power display dummy. The target was Team Security.
To do something about that, you must get rid of any RMT of your ranks. The “don’t report blues” rule must be reversed into “report every botting, RMTing scum and name and shame them on the forum too”. If you want to fight the largest RMT empire of EVE, you must be clean of RMT like snow. I know that most of your leaders monetize the game in various venues. If these are CCP compliant streams and ad-clicks, they should be explained clearly to prove that they make enough legitimately, they don’t need to RMT. As a bonus, if your members get ISK from legit PLEX sales instead of inter-alliance RMT, CCP will love you. They love nothing more than sales.
PS: when you do all that and start to get wins, offer a non-aggression pact with all systems and moons in Pure Blind to MOA. They are the strongest and most motivated of your enemies and are pretty upset with how Lenny treated them (hell, they were not even on the EN24 map for a week). Making them neutral would be a huge win.
