Greedy Goblin

Thursday, June 23, 2016

... War Kickstarter reloaded

I'm speechless. When I read the comment of Wilhelm "My understanding is that the article will form the basis of a novelization of the war, to be funded via a Kickstarter, just to completely close the circle on events." I believed it to be meant figuratively. I took it as "they want to be remembered as". And then this happened (screenshotted if it'd disappear like MOA and me from the war against Goons):
Oh my! He literally wants to create an "accurate an account of the war". He is repeating everything The Mittani did just want to do better. He distributed a big bunch of money to various opinion leaders to all sing his praise. The reason is obvious: their real money printing site "I want ISK", which is definitely RMTing (source CCP Bugartist) and probably violates several anti-gamble laws and likely never paid a dime of tax can only operate if they are "important content creators". They can count on Falcon, protecting criminals from the community is his thing.

I just have one question left to all who orbited structures, hellcamped "Fabian Defending" Goons in Saranen, hunted the elusive interceptors of Boat for countless hours: is this what you were fighting for?! Did you do all this to replace The Mittani with one who does all he did and RMTs? EN24 and Zebra are already more an "IWI propaganda site" than TMC ever was for The Mittani. I mean Matterall at least didn't personally intervene to save Mittens or the vandals from their well deserved bans.

I didn't smile this wide since Sion gave me his precious tears about the lost Kickstarter. Convincing Reddit that my well documented project never existed is one thing. Creating an official, CCP approved media piece about it when I was a source to gaming media about the Goon war a year before anyone even known Lenny existed will be a very different stunt. I mean we are talking about people outside of EVE's groupthink. People who won't be convinced just because Grath "backs the Fountain war" Telkin and Elsie "Just read @siggonK's piece about the Fountain War Kickstarter" Randolph testifies for Lenny. Everything I did was properly documented in hundreds of blogposts and Google caches and Reddit links. MoA August conquests are also documented and still visible on Dotlan. Erasing us front of the gaming media and canonizing "Goons were docked in Saranen" into "a great war" will be quite an uphill battle.

Since I'm no longer playing EVE and have absolutely no sympathy for CCP since they let Falcon run his little bully campaign (1, 2, 3) against me to save Goons from losing the same war in August, I have nothing to lose and no reason to hold back. This will be a battle I'll treasure just as much as I treasured fighting The Mittani. And this time I won't even have to haul implants or skill injectors, just send mails to editors with a big bunch of archive links and point out that Google finds nothing about Lenny from before March 2016.


Or, maybe I should take the high road and help creating this "accurate an account of the war". Let me write a chapter about a pivotal battle that changed the galaxy forever. Let its title be "Piercing the Veil". Any similarities to the works of other authors are mere coincidences:

The Imperium fleet commander dropped out of warp, 60 warships coming behind him. From the pilot capsule on the bridge of his Raptor class Interceptor, the defending Fleet Commander, Dabigredboat, watched his head-up display populate. Dozens of red-coded ship symbols appeared in rapid succession as the Raptors’s computers sorted out the hostiles. The friendlies were still in warp, according to the readout at the upper left of Boat’s tactical overlay, their ships would remain there for another eight seconds. Plenty of time for him to scope out the strength and displacement of the enemy’s forces. The star was deep into MBC space, more than 15 light years from the Pure Blind region where the major battles were being fought. A safe place to hide a string of Forsaken Hubs. Maybe crank out a few ticks, or a couple of X-types. Or so those idiots thought.

Boat felt himself grin, always a strange sensation in the gel-filled womb of the capsule. Goonswarm was about to unleash a little bit of hell, right here in the MBC's back yard. Predictably, the defending force was camping the gate—the bulk of the enemy ships within a hundred kilometers of the exit—positioned to intercept anything trying to warp to them. It was a good tactic. Against a different commander or another fleet it might have worked. But not against this fleet, and definitely not against Boat. The Raptors’s computers had finished racking and stacking the hostiles. In terms of simple numbers, the two forces were closely matched, but one look at the Imperium fleet composition turned Boat’s grin to something harder and more feral. The stupid bastards had only fielded 8 Interceptors. The rest of the enemy formation was limited to less agile combatants: Chimera class entosis ships and above. Boat had nearly 6x that many Interceptors under his command, and three times the number of fancy hats. The defending fleet must have been scraped together at the last minute, from whatever TEST could find. They couldn’t seriously expect to stop him with such an underpowered formation. His fleet could hit harder, fight longer, and repair itself more quickly. This was going to be a slaughter! He’d hammer the fuck out of TEST’s front line, then break off a formation to jam out some entosis ships that weren't immune. When that little detail was out of the way, he could bring in the real killers. Fourteen FCON carriers were staged at a midpoint cyno, waiting for downtime to jump into Deklein and run away.

Boat took another quick glance at the time readout. His fleet would be coming out of warp in about three seconds. Time to get this party started. He keyed the comm channel and spoke to his other pilots—the words coming not from his mouth, but from the neural link to the speech centers of his brain’s left frontal lobe. “All ships: orbit me and activate modules. Primary target is Crow class interceptor, hostile track alpha-zero-seven. Secondary target is the Slasher, hostile track alpha-one-nine. Engage!”

Before the last word was out, the battle was on. More than 41 GSF, 3 SMA, 10 TNT, 8 FCON, 1 LAWN and 3 Init ships popping up suddenly on his HUD (no RAZOR), appearing just as suddenly on the tactical displays of the enemy. The blood sang in Boat’s ears, his Raptor surging forward into combat; the ship’s sensors, engines, and weapons responding instantaneously to the thought-quick commands of his cerebral cortex. The space around the gate swarmed with waves of launching Imperium drones, angry metallic wasps with death-dealing stings. But then more hostiles landed! And more! Warp out! - he shouted. We're pointed! ... I'm pointed - he continued. Realizing that he'll soon be in his clone station, he uttered his epic words that were retold countless times in the centuries to come, remembering the moment when everything changed forever.

26 comments:

Wilhelm Arcturus said...

Can confirm, I made that comment merely because the idea of it amused me.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps you should consider playing EVE again, and start financing the Goons, in order to indefinitely prolong the war, as an ISK drain on the MBC's IWI backers?

Gevlon said...

@Wilhelm: You didn't expect it to be the literal truth, right?

@Anon: I wish I could. I left EVE not because I wanted to leave, but because my "relationship" with Falcon became openly hostile. The fact that CCP let him continue his bully campaign shows that "anything goes" there. While New Jita wasn't built (mostly because of the long range buy order from disposable citadels), I still can't believe that CCP isn't actively helping groups against other groups. Bugartist being overruled on banning the RMTing "bankers" is another evidence.

When I left, I burnt every bridge with the http://greedygoblin.blogspot.hu/p/dont-play-eve-online.html Do you think I could just walk back like nothing happened even if I wanted to?

The core issue here (what the desperately bargaining Lenny can't understand) isn't just that I have nothing left to lose. It's that I have nothing left to win either. Even if he'd offer a trillion ISK compensation and a celebration post on EN24, I couldn't use them as I couldn't log in to claim it or start a project with my newfound space-importance.

I left and meant to stay left. Then the IWI group - may or may not personally Lenny - decided to kick after me, erase everything they did and literally take the place of The Mittani, repeating his worst offenses on top of RMTing.

Creating a portfolio of links to prove that they are liars and RMTers takes a few hours and mostly done. Sending it to various media is a few minutes for finding each. Seriously harming them costs me next to nothing as building the posts is already sunk cost. If I knew about Falcon, I never came to EVE the first place, but I can't do anything about it.

So tell me, why I shouldn't spend a few hours to harm them?

Anonymous said...

"When I left, I burnt every bridge with the http://greedygoblin.blogspot.hu/p/dont-play-eve-online.html Do you think I could just walk back like nothing happened even if I wanted to?"

Unless you are banned, then yes, it is only your ego stopping you

Anonymous said...

"What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master, and you will get one." - Jacques Lacan.

Anonymous said...

1) You can't ever go too wrong with applying Hanlon's Razor to CCP (Heinlein wrote, "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity".)

2) I am so utterly irrelevant in EVE, but yeah I signed up for this. I watched the Mittani do the drunken suicide speech. I am pleased he is on the decline, at least for the moment. I am not a huge fan of IWI but based upon WWB, but I certainly have a positive impression of them. My risk intolerance is that were I to RMT, it would be legal PLEXes from authorized dealers. But I can't see that much moral outrage to their RMT when CCP allows and profits from people turning RL$ into in-game power. Equal power regardless of spending was prevented by CCP even if RMTers did not exist. And wow did Skill Injectors exacerbate that.

3) As to "why I shouldn't spend a few hours to harm them?" - well if you want to, go for it. But I think a lot of people on the periphery will just see a "he said, she said" and not give it a rigorous analysis and thus not be persuaded. There is even a chance the incremental publicity will help them more than convincing the few people who did not know it but did read your analysis.

Gevlon said...

@First anon: if you just look at the technical sense (being able to log into the client), you are right. But don't you think that Falcon would do everything in his power to sabotage me. It's not just his original reasons (that was probably business with The Mittani, nothing personal). In the last half year I didn't exactly looked for a win-win solution with him. He new has a reason to hate me personally, just as much as I hate him. If his bosses flat out stop him from banning me, he'll ban the people around me (remember Stunt Flores!). He can use his dev powers to create a full API of my characters and give to my enemies. Or give me a random DC right in the middle of their gatecamp. Devs are gods in a game, his options are limitless.

@Next anon: indeed. And now I do a little "Mockingjay ending" moment.

@Last anon:
- How can you attribute the Falcon bully to stupidity?
- I hated all game monetizers, but RMTers are flat out the worst.
- I know that most will say "he said, she said". But I have nothing to lose. If anything sticks, I win.

Anonymous said...

If you honestly think a community manager has the type of knowledge and access to all necessary servers to pull this off without leaving any kind of logs behind (and you would ask for audits immediatly) you are far more delusional than falcon ever claimed.

Or all of CCP is against you.

Anonymous said...

I am with anon on this. I too think Falcon is a good guy, just really dumb and inconsiderate.
Still, it would be CCPs responsibility to remove and find a better job for unqualified personnel.

Gevlon said...

Asking for audit for a random DC? I got lots of random DCs, most of them for my own ISP. I probably wouldn't even know what happened and would just damn the luck. If he'd give my API to my enemies - unless they are flat out retards - I'd have no way to find anything of evidence. I would only see that they are always lucky.

Finally, while I don't think that "all of CCP is against me", I do think that they stick together and protect their own, even if they disagree with him. Ergo, if Falcon does some really shitty move (oh hey, he did several), they might tell him in person that "this was pretty low, shame on you", but for the outside they will tell "nothing happened, Falcon did absolutely nothing wrong". He survived that Sion outed him protecting criminals and lied to the media. Sion didn't survive it (not like I cry for him). T20 also wasn't punished until there was an all-out protest against him, something that will never happen for me. I mean even if there was evidence that Falcon gave my API to my enemies, Reddit would say "ur gay pwned" and everyone would laugh on my misfortune.

Finally, I'm far from a "passive victim" in this story one can have mercy for. I fought back from the first minute and some of my blows to Falcon were below the belt. People in CCP can easily see that "while Falcon isn't without blame, Gevlon is the one who is more responsible for the sour situation and deserve whatever he gets". Maybe a flat out "playing the victim" was a better strategy against Falcon (instead of finding damning evidence, just cry how much I'm hurt by his bully). But it's too late now.

The bridges are burnt, there is no way back. I wanted to leave it all behind but Lenny had to kick after me (that Seraph shit was totally uncalled for). Also, while I no longer wish EVE well, I still despise RMT-ers, and IWI is the main RMT source of EVE. So have at thee boy!

Anonymous said...

"I mean even if there was evidence that Falcon gave my API to my enemies, Reddit would say "ur gay pwned" and everyone would laugh on my misfortune"

No, they would not if you had irrefutable proof that a CCP employee tampered with the gameplay experience of others.

Frankly this persecution complex of yours is getting old. Not everyone is out to get you.

Gevlon said...

Reddit is not everyone. Most players are not members of "the community" by the famous 50% leave, 40% solo, 10% group-diverse chart. Of course most players would think negatively of devs messing with the game to harm players. But they are not asked and they can only vote with their feet - which they do.

The opinion leaders "in the community" - most of them who are monetizing on the game in one form or another on the other hand are out to get not just me, but everyone they can. Remember the cheering for the famous Mittani The Wis speech. Or the cheering for the Falcon bully campaign. Or when Falcon burned The Mittani (which was also uncalled for). Or when Sion was fired from the CSM with no real reason given.

But this is theoretical: I have no access to the servers. The IWI RMT scandal shown that Bugartist has no word what will happen and it would be his job to investigate. So even if he would find that Falcon messed with the server, he would be overruled and "logs show nothing". Without evidence, I would have nothing to show to the already hostile "community".

Game over. There is no scenario where I can win. There are however scenarios when I can make my enemies lose. Lose-lose is better than They win, I lose. Burning IWI is such: not only I hit RMT-ers which I despise, I get revenge for my eradication from history AND also further erode the PR of EVE Online itself AND for trivial costs.

Anonymous said...

Even assuming that there is an admin tool having the option to disconnect players or read out your apis (or even generate unlisted apis, just in case you only use temp apis to counter them), which given the questionable necessity of those features is not something that i would be assume blindly, even assuming that falcon has access to those options, even assuming that those uses are not diligently monitored - as soon as you would percieve an anomaly, noise or actual manipulation, you would blog about it and/or create unassociated accounts trying to proof statistical significance and detail the process - or at least that would be the baseline assumption given your character profile.
If you get caught using administrative tools or even worse directly manipulating the live database (him having access to it is unreasonable to assume and would be a red flag to any dba) and trying to hide this with further manipulation will be ground for immediate release from your position and possibly further legal steps depending on the process, your contract and your jurisidiction.
Now obviously i can not proof that he does not have a way to do you harm without an unreasonable risk or that his hatred is not making him blind. Going one step back i can not even proof that the required amount of maliciousness can not be infered from his posts. But i can also not proof that there is no celesatial tea pot.

Anonymous said...

So you admit you cannot "win" and rather than let it be and contribute positively to something else (like BDO), you would instead try to damage Eve online and try to ruin the fun and enjoyment that others still get out of the game?

That's a rather dark path to walk. I don't see how this is any different than the RMT'er impacting the game negatively, or even Goons ruining other people's fun for that matter.

Gevlon said...

@Anonymous: you are right, if you assume CCP operates like a normal company. But considering that Falcon flat out said "do you want us to be engaged or go corporate", this is not the case. They are PROUD to not follow corporate standards. Hint: in normal corporations using you corporate account to publicly harass a customer without any provocation (I swear I didn't even know who Falcon was before his posts about me), you'll likely get fired without letter of recommendation.

What I assume is that Falcon can do anything with my account AND casually talk about it next to the watercooler with his boss, the boss of his boss and the guy whose job is to stop such actions and they'd have a good laugh. And no, I don't mean "all CCP hates me", I mean if he'd do it with a randomly selected account against office boredom, the result would be the same. Remember when CCP reps had a highsec event when they lead fleets of carebears right into a 300+ nullsec gatecamp. http://greedygoblin.blogspot.hu/2013/11/the-largest-awox-in-history-of-eve.html

The only risk for him is public outrage which has zero chance because:
- these things can only be suspected but never proven from the outside (I mean if I lose 3 80B Tengus in a row at various gates to DC that's suspicious, but CAN be bad luck and many people lost supers to DCs and I believe most of those were really just DCs)
- most of the "community" would upvote him if he'd stand out and say "yes, that's what I did and it felt good"

@Last anon: you are right. And I will contribute to BDO. It's just that I'm more human than I wish and want revenge on those who hit me for absolutely no reason. I never wronged Lenny, yet he couldn't even put a "Gevlon's data and MoAs August push shown how weak the Imperium is and encouraged me that now is the right time" in a 2 pages article. Instead, he sent his dog Seraph to do a totally uncalled smear post despite I was no threat at all. Falcon - and CCP who tolerate his behavior - bullied me and destroyed the August push by breaking MoA morale. I never wronged him or any dev before, instead I got 200+ players who tried out EVE with my referral link and created lot of content for EVE. This isn't what I deserved from CCP.

I AM pissed. I do NOT believe anything good will come out of this. I am NOT proud of myself now. But I'm going to hurt those who hurt me it will feel good.

Anonymous said...

CCP Falcon is a community manager. He has nothing to do with development. To claim he has access to the required workstation/dev tools/know-how in order to arrange for 'accidents', account or API manipulation is completely baseless. Is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? No.

Any of us posting on the official forums have probably pissed off a CCP employee at some point. Do we cower in fear for their retribution? Will they disconnect us during a critical moment of gameplay? Of course not. It would be found out and CCP would have a player revolt on their hands.

And I remember that awox event all too well, but as someone else has already stated: don't attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to stupidity. CCP has never been the clever sort. They are very naive and often think they know better while the playerbase can provide proof that they are wrong. Just look at these half-finished Citadels that are supposed to be a worthy replacement for POS's.

Gevlon said...

@Anon: can a dev be pissed over a non-offensive post (which simply criticizes his work). Yes. But most devs aren't pissed enough to post smear about you repeatedly. Or are you claiming that Falcon is/was NOT after me?

Hanlon's razor is a dangerous thing: exactly because everyone assumes *CCP*, they are free to do malice and people will just shrug "stupid again". Ergo, if I'd find undisputed evidence that I was disconnected in the middle of the gatecamp from server side, they can simply claim "we are investigating a problem in the *legacy code* that can result players disconnect on grids with lots of ships operating Sensor Boosters, if you died in a Tornado camp, please contact customer support for reimbursement". Everyone would believe in them and there would be no customer problems as there is reimbursement. Of course if I can't find evidence, there will be no issue and no reimbursement.

maxim said...

Gotta love the way Lenny just handed Goblin his new project :D

Other than that, their quarrel seems to come down to the notion of what is more real - ISK and activity dynamics within Goons or people's perceptions of Goons as rich and active. If perception is more real than ISK than spending 18 trill. ISK to fix perceptions is a worthwhile thing to do.

I'm personally of the opinion that ISK are more real.

Anonymous said...

" Or are you claiming that Falcon is/was NOT after me?"

I would claim that you overreacted to falcons post and decided there was a witchhunt against you, which played nicely into your "CCP support Goons" views. You then went on several rants calling for him to be fired, which, to be honest, veers way more into vendetta territory than anything you claim he did to you.

You missed out the parts in your posts where he says he enjoys your blog and reads its, and thinks you are a contributor to the community, because that does not play into the narrative you wanted.

Anonymous said...

I agree that Falcon went too far in letting his personal opinion surface more than it should have. I don't think anyone can dispute that. However, I'm definitely not convinced that Falcon *hates* you and wants to ruin you.

But let's assume for a second that Falcon really is the evil sort and harbors a grudge towards you, then this smear campaign was pretty much the extent of the damage he can do (and you kept going anyway, didn't you?). As I said before, it's extremely unlikely he knows anything about the game code or is allowed anywhere near it.

And look at it this way, if you come back to EVE and if he keeps picking on you then you can simply say you were right all along and it will prove beyond a doubt that he's not fit for the role of a CM. I really would not let the Falcon incident get in the way of a potential return to Eve.

Gevlon said...

@Anon, the post tomorrow will be the answer, it's too long for a comment.

Anonymous said...

PR/CM/whatever 'people person' has absolutly no idea nor the passwords nor the access level. Falcon is not a DEV he is a shittalking PR comunity idiot who got lucky on a CM job. stop making shit up. Yes he is good friends with someone of the devops team (the people running the service! having the power for what you describe ... but I argue that they don't hack some rouge software just to troll some accounts.).
Besides that. Even the shitttiest webdesign startup doesn't have this kind of access for their PR idiots. and if they do they don't stay long in buis.

Anonymous said...

", just send mails to editors with a big bunch of archive links and point out that Google finds nothing about Lenny from before March 2016."


I think perhaps you use a different google than I do. http://eve-search.com/search/author/Lenny+Kravitz2 Might help you perhaps? Showed up on the 2nd page (there is more than one page on Google)

Samus said...

I would love to see a comparison of the total damage done by groups you funded since the beginning of the project, versus the total damage done by groups funded by Lenny. This would go a long way to objectively showing whether this was a legendary enemy defeated in epic battle, or an already defeated enemy being swept away easily.

Gevlon said...

@Samus: the Lenny team don't question that Marmite+MoA+OOS destroyed more CFC since 2014 than they did. What they claim is that this damage was manageable and maybe even "content", while their small, but concentrated damage was devastating. Their claim isn't complete nonsense (you donating 20l blood over 20 years won't kill you, losing 2l at once does) but mine neither (a cut every day won't kill you but clearly make you weaker)

Provi Miner said...

Here is the thing, and this is important. Goons in fleet are shit use shit ships and generally don't give a rats ask if they die as long as they get that pap. Goons losing ratters and ticks now that's a real problem. However we live in a melodramatic romantic place were there are white nights and black hearted skullduggery. My point is the PR effect of winning a battle is far more valuable then killing three ratters worth 8x the loss's in the battle. Everyone "meh's" the rat loss while they in turn oooh and ahhh the battle. The bottom line is goblin not only laid out a blue print but put the concept in practice what he lacked was the dog pile that suddenly showed up with MBC.