The long march to Deklein: the birth of numbers

I asked in the starting piece why neither their enemies, nor themselves noticed how weak Goons were in reality. The answer is the lack of stats. While it's obvious that in any other game or any field of real life people and organizations are measured by various benchmarks, in EVE there were only a very rudimentary system used: PAPlinks, that measured mere activity. To make it worse, in the final years not even this was used as Goons got overconfident and considered themselves (and were considered by everyone else) unbeatable. If we'd want a date when Goonswarm faced the "adapt or die" challenge, it was Feb 3, 2014, when I posted my first de-inflated killboard analysis. Of course it was in EXCEL and it was lightyears away from the five thousand lines software monstrosity I'm using today for proper killboard analysises, it had the crucial part, the de-inflation.

For some reason, the game itself doesn't give out "points" for PvP performance like every other game. There is an API process to verify the kill itself and its participants, but that's all. From this came the "killboards", player written software to record these kills. For some reason or other, the writers of these killboards added the full value of the kill to every pilot on the kill. 100 players killed a ship? They got the same value like they were individually killing 1-1 ships each! This rendered the killboards totally useless: the average pilot had 14x more kills than losses, despite the average pilot must have 1:1 ratio. My method ended this nonsense and made the PvP performance measurable. It didn't fly well with those who were judged average or below-average and even today you can easily find a someone babbling about how he has "skill", despite no killboard results to prove it. That's normal, you can find such morons and slackers in every game.

What wasn't normal is that decision makers and opinion leaders didn't start to use my method (or developed something like that earlier). The second can be explained by the very closed thinking of EVE population, mostly because the leading communication platform, the subreddit r/eve punishes dissenting voices harshly. For leaders, I simply couldn't imagine that those intelligent people who lead empires don't use such methods silently. But cognitive dissonance is a nasty thing: it's hard to maintain a rational decision making when you are expected to give speeches about friendship, fun and good fights. Also, as long as the cart ran, there was no pressing reason to make changes. So they didn't make them. Not the Goons, not their enemies.

In the following two years I improved my data analysis methods and also increased the scope of the data I analyzed. The true PvP power of various groups were revealed in my posts but most people choose to ignore it as "tinfoil". They kept babbling their old mantras while the data clearly showed that

• The monthly average PvP kill and loss of an Imperium pilot is a trivial sum, about 100M/month/pilot, so they must have very few PvP-ers
• Most PvP losses of the Imperium are suffered to small gangs or solo pilots
• The groups that consider themselves as "elite" are pretty mediocre
• Some "no-name" groups are extremely effective in killing Goons

Without accepting and using measurable benchmarks, the normal competition for "being the best" turned into a bizarre popularity contest. Whoever could make the best propaganda, the best posts, the "coolest" videos, became "great", without any merit. In this bizarre Kardashian-dystopia simply no one saw the truth: the Imperium is weak and their enemies are strong. It's not that someone outgrew the Imperium in the last two years. It's not that someone weakened the Goons in the last two years, least of all, me. The Moneybadgers could crush the Imperium two years ago, just as easily as they are doing it today. But the Moneybadgers didn't exist, both because the members were sure that Goons are invincible and because many of them didn't have grudge against Goons. The second part was fixed by Goons themselves, who - in their blindness to their weakness - attacked them for no good reason.

Finally, my peace terms, my demands to Goons weren't really demands, they were good advises how to fix their empire. I - naively - thought that in their secret channels they are rationally thinking, see the same data, come to the same conclusions and implement them. Then I can act like they did it because I forced them. It was like "I command you to breath!". To my honest surprise, they didn't. Which lead us to the next part of the story.