~Thought of the Day: Hatred is the Emperor’s Truest Gift~
CEO UPDATE: THE WAR OF SOVLESS AGGRESSION
Break out the 40k gimmicks, recite the Litanies of Hatred, and prepare to spend years burning the galaxy to ashes: after five years of relative quiet (whereby ‘relative quiet’ we mean ‘us ruthlessly oppressing everyone dumb enough to get in our way since the final dissolution of IT Alliance and the victorious end of the Great War), the gibbering pubbie hordes – many of whom have never known the Goonfear – have provoked a hellwar. The entire galaxy is now formed up against us, minus our Imperium partners, our Russian allies, and our contracted mercenaries in White Legion. C02 has made their backstab attempt and failed, TEST and the r/eve droolers attempted a hit on VFK and failed, and now we hear the shrieking howls of outrage, moral condemnation and breathless hypocrisy from a frustrated enemy that has made a terrible error.
Hate has returned to New Eden, and these summer children are completely unprepared for the blood-soaked engine of vengeance that is the Swarm at hellwar.
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE ASHES: BABBY’S FIRST HELLWAR
“The rewards of tolerance are treachery and betrayal.”
Goonswarm has always been at war, but a true hellwar has only broken out once before: the invasion of Syndicate in July of 2006, BoB’s declaration that ‘There Are No Goons’ followed by backstab after backstab – where’s our battleship fleet, CYVOK? Our newbies and allies may be wondering what the hell is going on that has made us so abruptly sociopathic. It is simple: regular spacewars are fought over interests, with the customary diplomatic scheming and maneuvering; after these wars, no one is particularly upset and everyone is still drinking buddies. Hellwar begins with an outrage, and that outrage fuels the Swarm towards a deeply personal grudgefuck that engulfs the galaxy in a cataclysmic war of annihilation that does not end until everything that stands against us is broken and whimpering.
Until the C02 backstab, the past few months of the Casino War were obnoxious but business as usual – blowing up spaceships, eyerolling about Fozziesov and how none of the entities attacking us have any space themselves, and doing our best to defend our space and that of our allies. The betrayals of the Easter weekend changed everything: hatred has returned, that outrage demands vengeance, and every single entity which has come at us during this affair must now be deliberately and systematically crushed out of existence, even if it takes us years.
CIRCLE OF TWO AND THE BAND OF BACKSTABBERS
“While faithless traitors still live, there can be no forgiveness.”
If you’re just returning and wondering who these people are and why it’s Hellwar time, check Querns’ fantastic thread here, as well as the gory chatporn details about C02’s descent into self-interested treason over the last four year care of Corps Diplomatique.
We now know that in addition to flipping sides after we spent months defending C02 assets in Hakonen and in M-O, C02 had cut a deal with OSS – actively attacking our allies and our own towers in Venal – weeks before the Easter Betrayal. As long as OSS was hitting our allies and not C02, C02 wouldn’t hit OSS. However, a traitor cannot change his colors, and C02 eventually broke their secret deal with OSS, backstabbing the enemy weeks before backstabbing us.
Returning Great War vets will notice that in 2016 your old friends RKK, EVOL, Finfleet and DICE are spread across PL and NCdot. Throw BAT, OSS and C02 into that gaggle of shitlords and you get the Band of Backstabbers – credit to Nymblar for that work of genius.
FABIUS AND THE TRAITORS NEXT DOOR
AKA: Why Johnny’s CSAA Is Turbofucked
Then there’s the vulnerability window: we had shifted across the coalition to a EU Prime vulnerability midpoint of 19:00 in reliance of C02’s proximity to Saranen from M-O, and their backstab has forced us to shift our vulnerability windows yet again to the hour with the lowest number of players online, 7:00 EVE. That shift was not instantaneous in these new game mechanics, and in the days since the backstab, not only have our CSAAs been hit, the enemy has been able to augment their numbers with C02 in EU Prime to rapidly reinforce whole swaths of our space in advance of the vuln-shift.
In response to this treason, the Imperium has withdrawn to Saranen to plan our brutal vengeance. We have successfully relied upon the Fabian strategy when on the defensive in the past, and it serves us well today. Our new vulnerability window is particularly ideal for a disorganized enemy with no central leadership; very few of the enemy are even awake at 7:00 EVE, and unlike the Imperium they cannot easily combine their forces as they lack federated jabber and comms or leadership. Some CSAAs have been saved, some of them have been punted; the enemy will have to do a tremendous amount of miserably un-fun work to take our space, and as they attempt this we will break the will of their pilots as individuals, not merely blow up their spaceships – that is the fate of traitors as well as anyone foolish enough to provoke us in a hellwar.
Note that the one factor which unites our enemies is that they do not hold any sov themselves while attacking ours, meaning that until they actually take any, there is no place for us to hit back. With the Imperium withdrawing towards Saranen, the last of the great powers have completely abandoned conquerable sov as a concept in favor of lowsec staging, something which NCdot and PL have done for years. This makes the irony of CCP’s PR attempts to show the success of Fozziesov all the more laughable: the only reason this war is possible is the sovless aggression from tens of thousands of players basing from unconquerable staging areas, like our own in Saranen, who have chosen to opt out of this ‘improved’ system entirely.
The goal of the enemy was to break us without having to do the hard work, first with the C02 betrayal and then with their failed attempt on VFK. Now in the aftermath of their backstab, failed weekend push and our regroup in Saranen, we will see how much they enjoy defensive Fozziesov gameplay after the vulnfuck.
STANDING ORDERS: ASHES IN THE BRIAR PATCH
“Hannibal’s second weakness was that much of his army was made up of mercenaries from Gaul and Spain, who had no great loyalty to Hannibal, although they disliked Rome. Being mercenaries, they were unequipped for siege-type battles; having neither the equipment nor the patience for such a campaign. The mercenaries desired quick, overwhelming battles and raids of villages for plunder, much like land-based pirates. As such, Hannibal’s army was virtually no threat to Rome, a walled city which would have required a long siege to reduce, which is why Hannibal never attempted it. Hannibal’s only option was to beat Roman armies in the field quickly before plunder ran out and the Gauls and Spaniards deserted for plunder elsewhere. Fabius’s strategy of delaying battle and attacking supply chains thus hit right at the heart of Hannibal’s weakness; time, not energy, would cripple Hannibal’s advances.”
Our fleet strategy is identical to every other defensive war we have fought for the past decade. When outmatched we will harass with Siegefleets and Swordfleets; when we have the advantage we will destroy the enemy with unmitigated savagery. Hostile FCs will spend hours in TiDi being harassed by Swordfleets or will be systematically headshot off the field using intelligence from our Black Hand agents. Hostile logistics will be strained by focusing our Siegefleets on the towers of a particular enemy – C02 is first on the block – until they ragequit from constantly repping, restronting, or replacing towers.
Outside of fleets we will be relentlessly working to raise the ADMs in our core territory around Saranen. Individuals are encourages to pop hostile cyno frigates outside of their staging systems (Obe, Hakonen, Vlill, PF- Oka, – the War of Sovless Aggression is no mere pun), engage in relisting and market fuckery in those same hostile stagers, and nuisance-hack the low-ADM systems which have fallen to the enemy after the C02 betrayal. Certain constellations with crap ADM that are too far from Saranen are simply to be dropped, such as the territory around 7D in Pure Blind.
EU and US pilots will primarily be on hacking offense, siegework, and ADM-raising duty going forward, with the occasional CSAA defense when possible. The higher the ADMs across our territory the shorter the vulnerability window is for our West Coast Insomnia crew + AU pilots., who will be manning the Wall and the Night’s Watch for the first time in our coalition’s history. Already they have done a fantastic job and have had a blast with Caracal fleets zonking overconfident T3D gangs.
For all timezones it is critical to bring proper ships to fleet. A 256-man fleet should include six boosters, 150-180 DPS ships, 40 logi, and the rest support. If you can’t bring a proper ship for some reason, ask your friends for assistance in the form of hulls, injectors, or advice. We will be fighting unfairly at all times, playing tight and refusing to feed.
Now is an excellent time to join a critical SIG: Skirmish Commanders, GSOL Hammerbees and Black Hand operatives are all needed.
THE SUMMER CHILDREN
“Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.”
So who the hell are these people? To returning veterans, the vast rabble surrounding the Band of Backstabbers looks nothing like e-honorabu space samurai with kickboxing girlfriends we fought during the Great War. There’s a good reason for that: after we won the Battle of B-R5, the last major Event to happen in this game and the equivalent of Ragnarok for the supercap-obsessed, CCP heavily marketed that event through promotions and the gaming press. Their next big push was the ‘This Is Eve’ video, which went viral on Youtube. In each case single engagements rather than grand bloc-war narratives were spotlighted, attracting a much younger generation of players to Eve Online. This is a very complex way of saying that our enemies include thousands of younger entitled players who feel that Eve is about ‘dank frags’ and ‘good fights’, who disdain metagaming and will run to reddit to shriek at the drop of a fedora the moment the going gets tough or you don’t play by their rules. The post-BR-5 generation are the summer children who have never seen a bloc war, much less a hellwar; they legitimately believe that our coalition has never fought a defensive war and never in history been outnumbered.
I am not making this up: go to Tweetfleet slack, talk to them in an environment where they can’t downvote the mean words away, and you’ll see for yourself. An example:
eddict if you cant play the game in a way that your enemies want to play with you again tomorrow you are doing something wrong
Essentially, the same core of foes we have fought for years (PL leading NCdot) are using the same fodder (TEST/TISHU) but have now added traitors and turncoats (CO2/OSS/Darkness) and the post-BR-5/This Is Eve summer children (Spectre Fleet/Horde/Brave/Concordiat/etc) into the mix. Until the C02 betrayal this was an amazing plan, because PL has enjoyed idiots from I Want Isk (RMFHorus, Lenny Kravitz, Ironbank) to fund a grand campaign against us, gotten their mooks to do the heavy lifting, and then they can swoop in and claim the credit for all the grinding of Janurary through Easter.
But then some dumb motherfuckers in C02 decided to play Judas and the old hate has reawakened. Elysium is flooding with Great Warriors joking about Cube’s portrait packs, how badly NapalmKid needs this girl, how to best giv missl and how FNLN always gets his. Our timescale is different than the summer children; we grew up camping Ted for seven days 23/7 and then PR- for thirty days 23/7. One does not hellwar for a month, one hellwars until every last skull of those who thought they could take us down is on a pike and the galaxy trembles with Goonfear.
FLAK EVERYWHERE: CCP, R/EVE AND THE MEDIA METAGAME
“An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded.”
The Imperium as a whole has been under attack since early January, and those attacks have been concentrated on our allies. Yet after the C02 backstab, CCP has for the first time decided to try to ‘name’ a war after Goonswarm. This war began out of a conflict between SMA and I Want Isk four months ago; our allies in the Imperium have primarily been under attack instead of GSF, and shockingly enough CCP Manifest (who, politely, has been hostile to us since the dawn of time) and his crew have opted to call this ‘World War Bee‘. It appears that CCP has again chosen to genuflect before the altar of r/eve, a platform full of redpillers, moderated by an unironic Swedish neo-nazi (pardon me, he just posts on Flashback relentlessly and has been banned for Nazi ‘humor’ as well as RMT, how dare we call him a neo-Nazi), DurrHurrDurr (champion of the right to say ‘kill yourself’ on r/eve while still somehow trying to wag his finger about wizard hats), and that guy leading Specter Fleets against us while wearing a bow tie.
Note that CCP has now added an ingame background for ‘World War Bee’ which has, for the Imperium, bees on it – not the Black Eagle, and nothing relevant to our allies. This war is not about Goonswarm, it is about our coalition and the attempts of the enemy to destroy it, yet there is a ‘coalition background’ using the name of choice of the Band of Backstabbers (“Moneybadgers”) and for the Imperium there’s some Goonswarm-ish specific shit with bees on it. Not subtle, but after we called CCP on the carpet for their laughable No Sions Rule, perhaps we should have anticipated this level of unprofessionalism.
Bullshit CCP PR aside, the playbook here is simple, taken from Herman and Chomsky’s ‘Manufacturing Consent‘: Flak, and lots of it. The platform CCP and our enemies worship is r/eve, and at every turn we will simply rubbish both that platform and scorn their attempts to control us. Their hope is to serve Goonswarm up on a platter to drive subscriptions up in the name of content, and while we have been happy to play the heel in for the good of the game itself in the past, we will not relent, despite the passive-aggressive backtracking and squid ink we’ve witnessed over ‘World War Bee’. The enemy is already enraged by our audacity to not buy into their bullshit, which is ever more proof of the hostility of that name.
We will relentlessly attack their platform’s legitimacy instead of validating the frame they attempt to put us in; this is precisely why we have our own propaganda section, our own media outlets, our own fireside chats and twitch streams, and why we do not bother with ‘counter propaganda’ on the enemy’s platform. We are fighting the War of Sovless Aggression against the Band of Backstabbers, and they choke on it.
If you’d like to help out with the media war, you can join the Ministry of Truth here, as well as the Most Evil Gaming Media Organization That Has Ever Existed, aka TheMittani.com.
SUFFER NOT THE UNCLEAN TO LIVE
“Only the insane have strength enough to prosper. Only those who prosper may truly judge that which is sane.”
A Hellwar is a solemn promise of vengeance, a grim vendetta that only stops with the destruction or abject submission of those who have betrayed us. C02 will be the first; after that, every single alliance now arrayed against us – even those summer children seeking only “good fights” who are “just here for content” will suffer. Each system of sov lost and each CSAA destroyed by the Band of Backstabbers and their minions and bootlickers will be repaid in raw suffering.
Our crusade begins.
(Editor’s Note: Alliance Updates are aimed at internal audiences and usually are considered the gospel truth by their membership but vile propaganda by everybody else. You should definitely know this by now. This is a GSF CEO Update from The Mittani.)
