Metagaming in EVE - Page 18

On March 17 2009 17:05 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
So the Goons are using bugs in order to gain the upper hand how have GM's not taken action or anything?

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Ironically this means that even though they don't have Cyno-Jammers yet, the Goons have less to fear from Dreadnoughts trying to retake their systems until the bug is fixed.


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Man, sounds like the Goons are getting a massive upper hand from this bug. First a director level defector, then several slip ups on BoB/AAA's part, now this bug. It's as if the stars are aligning just right to ensure this takeover successful.


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Can't wait to see when/if H_B comes back to tell us about how exBoB claims the bug is a deliberate sign of CCP Goon collusion or something.


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Probably not. They are benefiting too much from the other bug that showed up with the patch, which is exacerbated system lag under high load. KenZoku/AAA's current strategy in 49-U6U appears to go something like this:

1. Get up earlier than the Coalition.

2. Stuff as many people as possible into 49-U6U so that it is near but not at the lag-threshold.

3. When Coalition ships try to enter the system, shoot them as they appear in ones and twos, unable to activate any modules, fire any weapons, or move.

On March 17 2009 23:38 Khaymus wrote:
I am currently playing this game and have been for a couple years off and on. If you are interested in playing just let me know! I can help you get started and even get you set up and on your way. It really helps to have a "mentor" so to say when starting this game. Let me know if you are interested!!!

The bad crazy goes beyond dropping 100 large on internet spaceships, though. About two years ago, Goonswarm was aiding our allies, Red Alliance (RA, the aforementioned 'rats' with whom SirLordex is cross) in the invasion of the Scalding Pass region against Lotka Volterra and their coalition. Lotka Volterra had unveiled one of the first Titans against us to catastrophic consequences, and at the time these profoundly silly ships were nearly impossible to kill through legitimate in-game means; they were essentially invulnerable, with the only Titans destroyed through catching the ship while the pilot was disconnected from the game. It was determined that 'The Enslaver' and his Avatar-class Titan had to go. I was approached by one of the leaders of Red Alliance to help make this happen, but almost immediately we were down the rabbit hole. Much to my surprise, the RA director didn't want in-game information from me; he wanted us to use the forensic resources of our intelligence agency to trace down The Enslaver's home address. At a coordinated time, armed with this information, a RA member would apparently cut the power to The Enslaver's house in the real world, and in EVE a RA capital fleet would assault the abruptly pilotless Titan. Yikes.

Standard practice is to fit a Tower with batteries of massive guns. You can't bring anything smaller than a Battleship and Battleships & larger need remote-repair (healing) from everyone else in the fleet to survive in proximity. They're referred to as "Deathstars".

The Goons have rigged their Towers with lots and lots of HP & damage-resistance along with ECM that causes attackers to lose lock-on so you can't use AFK tactics against them. They idea is to make them as time-consuming, boring, and irritating to destroy as possible. They call them "Dickstars".

On March 19 2009 17:31 HeadBangaa wrote:

lol

Oh and I've enjoyed reading this the past few days, thanks for posting CDRDude <3

On March 20 2009 11:03 GoodWill wrote:
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/65112

OK, so according to this post by goonswarm director of intelligence, Kenzoku was trapped in a star system for over a month and that was basically what decided the outcome of the war (and they are still trapped there).

On March 20 2009 11:06 Conquest101 wrote:


You're a little behind. They broke out already.

Well, I would call this a good day for the good guys, and a downright horrible one for the Mercenary Coalition.

It started off shakily: as mentioned we had a tower coming out at 20:00, right in Euro and Russian primes, and there was very little we could do to save it short of a Horn Of Goondor, which was not called. That tower was, therefore, lost, and we were staring at sov going neutral for a few days, so close is the system.

The reason that we didn't call an all-out op was that DaBigRedBoat, our FC and the best of all red boats, had kited a hostile tower through the day before, and it was due to come out in US time. If we could kill that then we would keep sov.

The situation was made yet more complex by the fact that McAAA/SE/ROL/Kenny/Barbie had spent endless hours and summoned everyone they could in order to kite a few more of our towers. Unfortunately for them, their tedious hours of work gave them a bunch of timers in late US time that same night. All that time, black ops were sitting in Catch ganking their reinforcements.

The short version of what happened is this: the 20:00 tower died. We then killed the Kenny tower that came out at 0200 to regain the advantage. This left the hostiles with a few of our towers coming out in very late US/early Russian/very early euro which they had to kill in order to save something from their massive efforts, and they therefore called an alarm-clock op. This would be a big test of their commitment.

Sadly for them, however, what actually happened was that we camped them into their bubbled, incapped POSes while we repped our towers, and killed the time by using the passwords to their towers (we had them for every hostile alliance except perhaps one... the Mittanni sends his regards) to bump out their ships and steal their unanchored pos mods.

Now, all of this completely wasted effort would make this a pretty bad day for the Mercenary Coalition in any case, but there was one final detail that made it just perfect. While this was going on, AAA had sent their pets, AAA Citizens, to siege a goonfleet tower in 46-DP, back in our old territory that we left out east.

Imagine their surprise when their little dread fleet gets hot-dropped by the Good Russians of Legion of xXDEATHXx, who then join forces with Red Alliance to reinforce every AAA tower in the system. This leaves Evil Thug with some... ahem... interesting choices to make.

On March 16 2009 04:51 CDRdude wrote:
I haven't read all of this, but a GoonSwarm member posted a really long story on the eve forums. It's quite good so far

http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1023429

There hasn't unfortunately been a lot of big battles to report, so I'll summarize the last few days in this post.

Wednesday was another typical day in the current POS war in 49. The A/SE/ROL/COVEN/SYSK took control of early euro prime firmly from pre-DT to all the way to 21:00 with no contest from coalition forces.

We attempted to make previous days 3-l logoff force pay for having to jump back in, but just didn't have enough numbers to stop the 4-0 reinforcements from breaking in with the fleet that was already in system. As such the gate changes hands pretty peacefully and the 4-0 reinforcements warped to the 5v gate to cover the previous days op entering into the system, again -- uncontested. We did have 7 titans logged on in system, but the hostile forces played it pretty safe and we deemed DDs mostly not worth the risk with the amount of dreads that are now logged off in the system.

As such, daily pos repping by A/SE/ROL/COVEN/SYSK got underway uninterupted and swapped hands to Kenny reppers around 17:00 onwards with A taking a small break. Some drive-bys were done, but that's about it while A/SE/ROL/COVEN/SYSK and some Kenny forces reinforced a tower or two.

As we have come accustomed to now, the 49- system changed hands peacefully around 21:30 and from 500 hostile system -- within 30minutes it was 300 friendly system with dreads coming in to shoot the same towers that had just been repped back into reinforced Very Happy.

We set to kite a pos and reinforced some more, finally getting a decent timer for 2am on Friday morning from a long kited Kenny pos. This tower also served as a fighting point for US TZ as 30-40 Kenny BS warped to it at one point of the evening proceeding to shoot it. They were quickly bubbled with considerable losses for GKC forces and retreated inside the shields shortly afterwards.

For lulz, we did warp 2 titans to the pos inside the force field @ 0 on each other to bump some people off -- which worked ok but we couldn't activate DDs due to desync Sad. Ah well.

Thursday was a big day for A/SE/ROL/COVEN/SYSK and Kenny forces -- an untimed GF pos was comign out @ 20:00 EVE which is well inside the A/SE/ROL controlled timezone. As expected, local was dominated from 9am onwards, thou suprisingly no towers were shot until the late afternoon hours.

Local approached 1100, with perhaps 600 hostiles including a counted 300 BS -- shortly bolstered by approximately 60 Kenny capitals jumping in to reinforce towers. I believe they got through 2-3 (lol resistars) before the 20:00 timer approached.

PL lit a bait cyno at our POS just before and drew the whole hostile force into our manned tower with our fleet of 80 sitting outisde shields trying to pop the first landers before running back in. We bridged in some people on the first cyno, and I believe we lost 2 BS in the heavy loading lag while killing a nice amount of HACs + few stragle BS when hostiles warped off field. We proceeded to repeat this 4 more times, thou last 2 netted no more kills Sad.

The GF tower died without resistance and was replaced by Kenny tower taking the tower count in system now to 22 GF to 17 Kenny. Importantly however, this tower which died was an old enough tower to affect the pre-dt counter for last weeks pre/post DT kenny tower spam.

As such, we believe that 49- sov will go neutral for a day (unless more towers are destroyed) on Saturday, thus at least resetting the counter. While capitals have not played a part in 49- so far, it does prevent a direct jump bridge network link into 49. Not that a JB stands much of a chance against 300 BS anyway Very Happy.

Timezone changed again close to 22:00 and local went quickly down to 400, mainly friendly. And as such, towers were knocked back into reinforced and 3 titans warped to a Kenny tower bouncing off 13 BS + support which quickly were dispatched by 3 DDs.

As night draws -- there is 1 Kenny tower coming out to destroy and a whole string of GF towers to save. Rumour is -A- will alarm clock the 4am towers, thus choosing to contest 4 GF towers coming out after 4am EVE with the possibility to flip sov to Kenny by downtime. More on this tomorrow morning.

Another night of tower repping, mixed in with an important tower kill.

The 2am Kenny tower came out of reinforced and was greeted with 350 Goons in local, pretty much alone, and quickly fell to it's demise.

Interestingly -- this tower was traced by DED mails to be part of the pre-DT spam batch, and as such... the 11-11 tower counter (takes 7 days for tower to start claiming sov) for DT on Saturday/Sunday was reverted back to 11-10, with total tower count back to 23 GF to 16 Kenny. That is.. unless someone unticks sov on a tower, which we all know... well... happens Laughing.

The rumoured 4am -A- regroup was therefore an important one to counter, and as clockwork -- number of pilots started to logon to system on the clock. At this stage however, the -A- formup POS together with the GKC formup pos had been reinforced and fully stripped of modules with large bubbles placed around it in hopes of delaying any formup that might take place.

It didn't really delay much, out of 480 local... only 100 or so were hostile with coalition having 6 Titans in system and numerous capital ships. This was understandable considering it was well in reach of the GoonPrime. As such, local fell as quickly as it had risen and we got to our usual entertainment of chilling inside the hostile POSes with Titans and support.

Another day, another pos rep. The tower wars continue.

Currently there are 13 hostiles towers in reinforced to 1 goonfleet tower, but this is because the GF towers were short stronted yesterday to come out the same night. Weekend will see a traditional surge in both hostile numbers as well as the timezone they are able to control. They will undoubtedly use this wisely to get good tower timers, so the current balance is by no means uncontested.

The chance of fights still seems distant with the new capital bump mechanics and system load from bridging in, but we can all hope for the best.

I think tonight's events are pretty well reported here already, but I'll summarise it anyway -- forgive me.

Coalition continued on from the previous battlereport this afternoon slooowly building up forces throughout the evening. A/SE/ROL/COVEN/SYS-K had a sizable fleet in system, along with GKC fleet perhaps totalling close to 300-400 hostiles at one point. Interestingly -- Kenny had about 19 dreads along with multiple carriers in POSes, and as such our :tinfoil: meter went red with cap fight bait as -A- suddenly decided to leave 49- system.

We tracked them moving towards some formup system, before getting scout reports from RA/Death that they had gone to 46d to save towers Death had put in reinforced yesterday(?).

As such, we quickly called all hands on deck to attempt to break into 49 and secure system control as there were 5 towers coming out of reinforced while -A- was on a roadtrip. Our numbers slowly build up, but we still did not have comfortable numbers incase this turned into a capital slugfest and thus let one POS go and be repped.

Second one however we had reached our goal of 80 caps and quickly bumrushed them to local while support went for few carriers outside of the POS which had come out of reinforced moments earlier in order to try to force them inside.

As the support landed however -- everything in the system warped in to sniper ranges and our support quickly found themselves bubbled and retreating off field as we were outnumbered on support department pretty heavily. We killed some BS, lose some and lost looooots of t1 frigs :goons: while all capitals aligned towards the hostile tower.

Given we had within 5min grown to close to 100 capitals, Kenny warped everyone out of the tower retreating to their formup POS while capitals entered field and got settled (warping 100 caps with the current "mechanics" is ... interesting). As dreads entered siege -- tower was quickly destroyed...

However, just as tower entered structure a COVEN BS heavy fleet warped below the dreads to a sniper spot starting to take pot shots. It didn't take long for our support to probe and get a warpin on top of them -- and shortly everyone rushed to 0 on the fleet.

Crazy Frenchies were in system with 30-40 suicide Smartbomb BS and warped on top of the hostiles also. I'm not sure if they fried anything other than friendly t1 frigates -- but much lols were had and I'm sure TCF fleet truly enjoyed that one. Luckily for us -- they were mainly primaried leaving our actual sniper fleet largely unharmed for few minutes before they all died to their own smartbomb + concentrated fire and went to swap to Fleet BS.

Kenny had at this point warped on field at opposite side of the capitals (above), which interestingly was also our DD spot. So 2 titans were sent in with heavy lag (I warped 3 times on my screen for 20AU) and by the time they actually entered grid and loaded... pretty much all Kenny had warped off leaving Viper to fry one Tempest basically along with TheAdj's rapier (which arguably was the true price of the DD).

This provided some welcomed releif however to our support fleet who once again was about even numbered killing stuff and once destroyed -- quickly went to get a new ship and took a bridge in again. As capitals exited siege -- they also warped on top of SE/COVEN fleet putting points on BSes and starting to quickly rip them apart.

At this stage, Kenny came back in and we started work on a new DD spot which would catch them, but leave our own support intact. However lag was making this close to impossible and we never warped our titans back on the POS grid leaving caps get their fun along with support fleet.

Losses were heavy (all TCF smartbomb BS dies for example) on both sides, and grid was epic afterwars. Through wear and tear however, capitals prevailed and with SOT now coming in to bubble and kill with their HAC fleet -- Kenny bailed last from the grid.

Tower work got under way and further 2 Kenny and 1 ROL pos were destroyed and replaced with friendly towers.

As I mentioned earlier -- the 1 Kenny tower destroyed yesterday maintained SOV counter for Goons (thou it's not really an issue) and these 4 moons guaranteed 51% moon coverage for GF and healthy backup of allied holders.

We'll see what the weekend has in store for us, but it sure got underway with a BLAST!