Greedy Goblin

Friday, July 12, 2013

You didn't see this coming! (me neither)

Well, sometimes life have strange twists. Being one of the richest players in EVE and making 100x more kills than "nullsec PvP-ers" are nice achievements, but I'm surely very-very sad as no one likes me (yes, I have to admit, I cried all the way to the bank).

Now look at that:

This is my scout pilot, on the same account as my main, Gevlon Goblin. What the hell she's been doing in Dreddit, TEST alliance? Well, several players from TEST sent me messages that things have changed a lot in TEST and my haters turned out to be ... haters and left or removed for various jerk moves and I can apply back. I dismissed them as trolls. But one of them was hard to dismiss. Kaito Momaki sent me quotes from the forum where a topic was created about my 0.5T and also informed me about the changing general attitude. I did not believe it for a second. Finally, he got the financial director, Packetninja to EVE-mail me that my re-application would be accepted. So now I'm once again docked in K-6 (I know it's not the deployment base, but that's lowsec, anyone can dock there)


It would be great to say "it was my master plan all along", but the truth is that until I saw Cindy with the Dreddit tag I was just as sure as you, that my days in TEST (and likely in sov-null in general) are over. I mean everyone was sure that TEST would rather cooperate with Pizza than get me back ... oh wait!

What happened? Well, read the new alliance update. It says "Financially we're finally to the point where I need to ask people to contribute. We’ve been welping things pretty much since I took over, and the wallets are finally worn out." Well, it's good that it's written. Goons still try to lie themselves that they are rich while they are fielding stealthless-bombless stealth bombers. First step of solving a problem is admitting that it's a problem. That "fun" doesn't keep you in ships.

What will I do in TEST? My best to help with their pretty bad financial situation. Without testing, my ideas are just ideas without proof. I need to win this war as much as they need it. So I accepted the offer without hesitation.

The best comment about this rather surprising situation?
PS: My other pilots will lag a bit because I have an ongoing project in highsec that I'll finish this week and post the results next Monday.

25 comments:

Anonymous said...

You seem as a rational person, so why are you boasting achievements that make you look stupid? Isn't that the opposite of what you are trying to convey to your readers? That entry alone makes a very bad first impression and diminishes the value of the rest of the post.

Anonymous said...

Good. Now beat GSF for me and you will have finally won EVE! I'm serious, please help beat Goons - no-one likes Goons.

Anonymous said...

Looking forward to your take on the Fountain War now that you're neck-deep in it!

Anonymous said...

you must have no self-respect going back to an alliance that treated you that way.

Gevlon said...

@Last anonymous: you didn't read any of my a-sociality posts, right? In short "self-respect" is an ape-subroutine, a prehistoric bot-code that makes you no good.

Also, "the alliance" can't threat anyone anyway. People can. The "kill yourself IRL shitlord" spammers are now kicked and the leader who actually kicked me is no longer leading.

Tim said...

Well first let me say I'm not convinced on the 0.5T side. Noone has seen any proof that this is true. All we have to go on is some pretty unrealistic looking graphs and your word that you are rich.

Secondly, assuming you have 0.5T, while you are rich, you wouldn't make the forbes 40 of EVE.

Thirdly your PVP is you shooting afk miners, which means absolutely nothing. your method of determining alliance members kills is also "alliance total / total alliance members" which is reidiculous, cos many of those are alts. How about you do yours in the same way, so you divide your kills by the number of total characters across all your accounts? No?

It's easy to be a winner when you set both the metrics and the targets eh?
I actually measure wealth in units of EMP S, so I'm much much richer than you.

All that said. Even if you have 0.5T (about 2 battles worth of cash in this war) and even if you are the best PVPer in the game, TEST still don't stand a chance of surviving this war.

Oska Rus said...

I wonder how long this might last. TEST will try to make goblin help their finances.
Goblin either gets bored of this impossible and personaly meaningles task and leaves or test drones will be forced to pay for their loses and leave.

tim said...

"You seem as a rational person, so why are you boasting achievements that make you look stupid? Isn't that the opposite of what you are trying to convey to your readers? That entry alone makes a very bad first impression and diminishes the value of the rest of the post."

Basically Gevlon like to put forward the idea that he doesn't care what anyone thinks, and he likes to rank people into 4 tiers (of which he is in the highest, shocking...) but even someone with half an ounce of education can see that everything he writes is designed to stroke his ego. He loves watching people get worked up about what he says, and loves to feel like his accomplishments are greater than all of ours. That's why every post he writes has a subtext of "I'm better than all of you". He'll of course deny this and argue his point, and I'll be ranked into his M&S or Social rank undoubtedly, but luckily I don't feel the need to turn to the internet for validation.

I have to say though, the amount of absolute tripe that people commenting here just gobble up, is amazing. He needs to provide no proof to you about his accomplishments and his methods of measurement are highly dubious, yet it's just assumed that he is some king of trade and some master of eve finances. I find the fact that the only source of that information is straight from Gevlon's mouth himself to be a little too convenient. In a game where it is so easy to use an API key on a trusted site to display your characters true worth, the fact that no such link has ever been provided makes me question the truth of the matter.

I've actually posed this question before, several times but every time the post has been "moderated" away. The same is likely to happen to this post. I'm starting to ask the same question on sites not under Gevlon's control though, so perhaps the question will start to be asked by the masses. Can Gevlon's word about his accomplishments really be trusted?

TLDR: Gevlon loves to stroke his ego while portraying the idea he is above anyone else, even though he has no proof to back up any of his claims. His methods of data collection, measurement and interpretation are highly dubious.

Unknown said...

Gevlon says it was unintentional, but the whole TEST story is still pretty much a textbook example on how to deal with idiots running a specific organisation that you want to be a part of, but can't as long as those idiots are around.

Get in, make a good enough of impression on organisation's saner people, antagonise the idiots and be thrown out, wait for idiots to run themselves into the ground, come back to organisation, enjoying solid political standing.

The only way this could have went better if there was a severance pay involved the first time Gevlon got kicked out :D

Anonymous said...

Good to have another brain-user in TEST! After reading about your "alliances should finance themselves from the wealth of their members, because that is where the real wealth and major income lies", I had thought about suggesting to my alliance leader to consider your counsel. Good to see TEST is apparently listening. :) I am glad. This is good news.

Duke of O said...

I was thinking just prior to this post that given your liking for EVE that it would have been a pity for you to sit out this war. I'm not an EVE player and I disagree with many things that you say but I am totally enraptured by the EVE meta-game and the player driven narratives coming out of this MMO. It's really fascinating reading accounts written by the various factions, and trying to winnow the truth from the propaganda. I'm glad that TEST invited you back - it was a astute political move for them given their increasingly parlous finances. This move by TEST incorporates one of the more polarizing character/personalities of EVE into the big fight and I am really looking forward to keeping up with developments as they unfold. In my opinion this is where is at - who cares about billions of virtual currency if you can't parley that wealth into participating in the historical narrative sweeping over EVE at the moment. Regardless of how it turns out I envy your participation in such a huge player driven event - good luck!

Lucas Kell said...

@Duke of O
It really won't have that much of an effect. While Gevlon explains here that he can make a huge amount of money, he's also explained why his grown is flat rather than exponential. The methods he uses has a relatively low cap which prevents you from being able to make vast amounts of money quickly. 0.5T can be gone in a single battle in a war of this size. It will be near impossible for the financial situation of TEST to change that drastically in the short time it is required.

His idea of using the population of the alliance to generate income also sounds good on paper but in reality is not a viable option. You have to think that these are people being called into battle multiple times per day. The reaction of then saying "on top of this, we want you to do solid PVE/mining and give us a %" is way too damaging to morale. And again on top of that, you have logistics. Money from PVE bounties is only part of it. There is then loot from PVE and minerals from mining, PI resources, etc. That all needs to be shifted to high sec for sale to make the cash. Logistics are already stretched to be pulling fuel, mods, ships, ammo, and sov structures from high sec.

I think there's just too many obstacles for someone like Gevlon to be able to overcome. He is a direct action->reward kind of player and that just doesn't work in finances of this scale.

That said, best of luck in the role.

Munchkin said...

Great to have you back in TEST. I think by the response from your recent forum posts shows that its good for you to be back in the alliance!

NetherLands said...

Certainly an entertaining turn of events!

All the best of luck and try not to gloat too much ;)

Anonymous said...

Well, looks like you now can start planning to recruit from within test and outside for a marketplayer group.

You wrote earlier that corporations in hi-sec are worthless and a liability, and you're right, but in nullsec, it's different.





Von Keigai said...

I doubt Goblin will be given any substantial authority. At best, maybe some of the people in Test with such authority will consult him. Perhaps he can give them useful ideas.

However it is an interesting question. If you were given authority in an alliance in a hot war as Test is, what would you have the alliance do to raise money for the war?

Von Keigai said...

Lucas, it is true that there are many things Gevlon does that do not scale well. I.e., the high-end implant trade is quite finite. One person can make a lot of money on it if nobody else is in it. Ten people would not. On the other hand, Gevlon also does things that would scale. I.e., everyone can do PI. And while not everyone can make top money trading high-end implants, many could make medium money trading medium grade implants.

Gevlon's limiting factor is his time: he only has 24 man-hours per day to try to earn money. And really more like 3 or 4. Whereas Test has thousands of man hours each day.

Lucas Kell said...

@Von Keigai Those man hours aren't dedicated to the alliance, and that's my point. If money is made from PI, most of it will be for personal gain, not alliance gain. Few are going to attend non stop CTAs which disrupt their normal gameplay, then spend the rest of the time working on making money for the alliance. That's the biggest hurdle. Convincing everyone to give up their time.

Then again I commented on the other part: even if everyone does do PI for the alliance, logistics for shipping it is not good. Someone has to collect it from all the different stations, then ship it to high sec. Millions of m3. Then once it's in high sec, it needs to be sold in parts, which means you will build up a stockpile. It only takes about 100,000 units of a P2 product to crash the Jita market. Offloading the amount of units it would take to maintain financial integrity for a 12000 man alliance would completely crash the PI market.

That's what I mean by being fine on paper, bad in practice. If you add the numbers up, sure if you add more man hours to it, you can make more isk, makes sense - on paper. In reality there's so many caveats to it, that it becomes impossible to work.

Lucas Kell said...

@Von Keigai "If you were given authority in an alliance in a hot war as Test is, what would you have the alliance do to raise money for the war?"
This is the way I see it.
Not much can be done to bring in huge amounts of cash. There are some avenues they can work, but not many. The way I would run this whole thing would be:
1. Shut down expenses that are not required. That is thing like POSes, unused pocos, etc. At the moment fountain is being hit hard. Any POS that isn't making money is a cost. Work out which of those can be removed and remove them. This should be done across all space to remove overall costs.

2. In line with the above, give over expenses to alliance members. Start giving lower end moons to corporations to make cash on and tax that income. Again this should be done all over.

3. Industrial sub corporations. Create more opportunities for lower end members to create industrial enterprises by creating smaller corporations with increased rights with their own manufacturing POSes. Give the corporations specific wartime production to produce and pay them a profitable amount but lower than you'd pay and ship for. Having sub corporations removes the risks of giving people additional roles.

The basic idea behind all of this is not about getting more income, its about reducing expense and lowering the cost of wartime replacements. If they are too low on cash, then they need to cycle doctrines. This slows the rate of price increase and you are not creating a massively inflated demand but is a really tough choice as you need to make sure you are keeping the number of pilots that can fly the doctrines high.

Anonymous said...

4. Leverage the thousands of people in high sec that hate Goonswarm.

Lucas Kell said...

There's been way to many scam share schemes for anything like that to be even remotely successful.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I figured it was a long shot. It's really too bad that there isn't an enforcement mechanism to make something like this a possibility. As the game is structured now there is much less in the way of benefits to being 'good' than in real life and much less in the way of downsides to being 'bad' than real life and so it tends to bring out the worst in people and make large scale cooperation harder than it has to be.

Kind of disappointed that Gevlon left my e-mail address in there. Was rushed for time and didn't see that he had an e-mail link in there so was hoping he'd just not let the comment through moderation.

Gevlon said...

Comment with E-mail deleted, sorry. I just did not see it there.

Anonymous said...

Graphs are nice, huh.

http://imgur.com/o51gMLl

Lucas Kell said...

So what's this a graph of?