Greedy Goblin

Monday, March 10, 2014

Goons didn't want highsec POCOs anyway

Trolls have been busy commenting "you didn't take a single POCO", ignoring that in the first phase of Sov wars there isn't significant Sov movement. In the Fountain war CFC were actually losing the Sov they got from metagaming Sort Dragon. Then the resistance breaks over losses, the pilots on one side no longer fleet up or an ally figures out that Alliance Tournament is more interesting and the Sov is mopped up fast.

This screenshot shows all POCO losses of Sobaseki. As you can see Goons took the NPC customs when it became possible and no one could touch them for months. Then Darwins Lemmings took one from GSF. We took it last Sunday and it's still not under GSF colors. Actually the corp holding it isn't even wardecced by Goons, despite open trolling:

This was a testing POCO, this is why I didn't brag about it earlier. It came with our new POCO war doctrine replacing the large reinforcing fleets. We used to reinforce dozens of POCOs. Then Goons formed up along with their RvB pets and saved them. They had the numbers. Our new doctrine is to reinforce 1-2 POCOs a day, not more. That can literally be done by a few guys while AFK. Now Goons and pets have two options:
  1. They get an FC, ping a fleet, clonejump to highsec, lose a bunch of stragglers to camps, get their butt to the POCO before timer is up, sit on the POCO in DPS ships while the few logi reps it and then go home. About an hour of total boredom for one damn POCO.
  2. Send a few unsupported logies since "pubbies are cowards and don't fight". And then bang, 20+ fleet. Remember that Lemmings live in highsec, mostly in Jita, literally 1-2 jumps from the POCOs, so forming a fleet and getting to the target takes like 5 minutes.
For days after days they went with #1. Formup, blueball, 1 hour wasted. Then they just couldn't do it anymore. Despite I openly taunted them, RvB left the war. Without them, Goons simply couldn't muster the numbers needed for an engagement. Their own propaganda turned on them as "Marmite is coward and will run" guarantees no fight to their members. So Goons had no option left than hoping that "RvB will be here by Wednesday", but I doubt they will. After the legions of data I gathered about RvB being pets, combined with their huge losses, they simply couldn't press the war without devastating member losses. I think the Goon leadership realized that a dead pet is a useless pet, let RvB go to recover and wrote off the highsec POCOs.

I don't say that the remaining POCOs will be mopped up in a week. After all, we only killed just another one since then. I think junior Goon FCs will ping and some Goons will join a few times just to give me a finger (see tomorrow's comedy WH post). But day after day there will be a handful of POCOs coming out of RF that can only be saved by a 40+ gang which will never get a fight. Remember, you can't cyno or bubble in highsec and it's easy to place NPC corp scouts to every system in 3 jump range, so when an overwhelming Goon gang is approaching, the Lemming fleet can scatter. No, it doesn't stand down, going home like a null gang would. We live here, so the fleet just breaks into small roams, gatecamps, going back to the ordinary stuff. Every day less and less line Goons fleet up and less and less FCs will ping. A one hour op without fight or even an important structure is the least fun fleet I can imagine.

As I said, it's not the mopping up phase yet, but we reached the turning point. It's like in Fountain when the Sov was still all TEST, but PL already left and Rokh fleets had more Rifters than battleships. Yes, the mopping up is still ahead of us. And yes, they will have their 6VDT-like last stand in Perimiter. The highsec POCO war isn't over and won't be over for months. We won't be winning "fast enough". But we will win. We already did. That 1-week old POCO, without any retake attempt is the proof that Goons don't want to fight anymore.

Think about that! A 400-men ragtag crew of "anyone invited", along with hired mercenaries, all paid by a single trader has broken the will of the largest coalition and their specifically trained highsec pet to fight. If you want to take part in beating them out of highsec, then going after them in nullsec, join! Both individual PvP-ers and PvP corps are welcomed. If you don't like PvP, you can take part in our victory by donating!

If you still have hopes that Lemmings will get bored too and stop reinforcing POCOs or be online for the reinforcement timer, I have to shatter it. Thanks to our donators, I could allocate some money to make sure that 1-2 POCOs will be reinforced and a small fleet will be ready to take it if Goons fail to form a large gang every single day:

PS: hint about an upcoming post:


GWI said...

What are your costs? Just the war, or Srp also now?

Arrendis said...

Good work, Gevlon. You're finally making some progress. Now hold onto them. As you say: the significant movement isn't in the first phase, it's in the last.

Arrendis said...

Oh, just one other thought on the text of this post:


Not even close. The least fun fleet is the one where you get a fight, but nothing - I mean nothing goes right. The interceptors don't think to burn perches, the dictors bubble your own fleet. The FC's getting frustrated and short-tempered, and every turn you make to try to keep the logi in position goes wrong as the fleet aligns the opposite way just in time for an enemy sabre to warp in and put a bubble right in that one spot.

You know the spot. It's the spot where, with the fleet aligned, the FC warps them off as soon as the sabre lands... and the logi gets hooked by half the bubble's diameter. A quarter of your guys get out - including one (Count 'em! ONE!) guardian, so he's feeling useless now, and the best you can manage to do is get your pod back with the fleet and try to get the logi organized around someone who survived. Only none of the survivors have any experience, and even less comfort about taking over. Everyone's sniping at one another because 'you left us to die!' or 'you all were in the wrong spot' or...

... yeah.

And hour of sitting around, laughing and talking with people, with no stress and no angst?

Fucking heaven, some days, man.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations - your first actual strategic victory. It took you long enough. Yes you are right, wars are about ebb and flow. You take some steps forward, then some steps back - and it is those who can maintain the grid the longest who will ultimately win as most wars in eve are wars of attrition and this is no different.

However, I would have expected you take some POCOs before now. It has taken a very long time to get your first "ebb" in this war. How quickly goons strike back will be telling. If they can undo what amounts to months worth of work in a matter of days then you may have a crisis of morale to deal with.

If however you can hold your assets and deny goons those assets for a prolonged period of time, until goons decide to no longer contest them, then "Didn't want those POCOs anyway" is valid.

Good luck

Anonymous said...

I was on the OP for the poco that died. We were about 30 seconds late with our fleet.

I was on a poco rep just last night. Took us about ten minutes, most of which we spent having a good time bullshitting in mumble and giving each other hell for not being able to form a proper conga line (we got it to work eventually.) Then I parked my ship in our highsec office and podjumped back to Dek for a night of chasing Harry Forever's stealth bomber around.

Its good fun to Harass Harry's quest to slay newbie cyno ships on the VFK undock, but one can only do that so many times before the excitement dulls. I've been looking for some better way to pass the time, something more amusing, with victims that will scream louder -


a few guys while afk

And oh golly, Jita's right next door and podjumping down there is piss-easy. Thanks, Gevlon!

maxim said...

... but late you were :D

Though one has to wonder what happens once you turn a sizeable amount of POCOs. At that junction, goons might just fleet up and take em all back.

Bobbins said...

'I was on the OP for the poco that died. We were about 30 seconds late with our fleet'

So it was you fault the embarassment was caused to the cfc?
And btw when making excuses do not put 'most of which we spent having a good time bullshitting in mumble and giving each other hell for not being able to form a proper conga line (we got it to work eventually.)'. It just makes you look really stupid, not cool just stupid.

Anonymous said...

if at all possible make the POCOs you take as many jumps apart as possible.

then when the day comes that the goons form a fleet to "take them all back" they have many jumps through highsec to trudge through. hopefully with campers on every gate.

Gevlon said...

@GWI: I pay wardec and management costs. SRP is paid by donators found by General Lemming on the forum.

@Arrendis: so being AFK is better than playing. Why do you play then?

@Anonymous: podjumping to Jita is easy. And the POCOs are just 1 jump from Jita. In February 53B worth of Goons and pets didn't make it trough that one jump.

However the thing isn't that we took that POCO. Mistakes can happen, a single failure don't make Goons a failure. However not contesting for a week is different. It's not even trying to fight.

Anonymous said...


When we say that EVE is a bad game we aren't joking. Goons are socials first and foremost.

It is no secret that EVE rewards afk-like play (mining, ishtar ratting, 10% tidi lagfests, structure grinds in bombers, ...).

Other games like Dota, Diablo 3, War Thunder, ... are much better and more fun than EVE but they only allow a small group of players to hang out together at a time.
EVE gives us a reason to hang out with 50-500 like-minded friends in the evening and bitch about the game, CCP and the world at large.
People don't go to church because they are religious and goons don't log into EVE because they enjoy the game.

Anonymous said...

Addendum to my 08:21 post:

I think you haven't realized yet that with goons everything is as it seems.
Where you are seeing misdrection, propaganda or at least massive hypocrisy there is none.

When we ridicule ~elite pvp~ then we aren't engaging in some long-term propaganda campaign, we just do exactly the same thing socials do in every single game.
When we make fun of you because you think isk is important and will get you anywhere then we do exactly what the have-nots do towards the haves in every single game.

The alliance is rich, the alliance is well-coordinated, the alliance has some driven leaders who might play to win, ...
But 99% of the 12,000 goons are just your average social gamer who will flame you if he loses yet will never seriously try to win.

EVE is special in the sense that a very small (non-social, rational) elite happens to be leading the socials towards actual victory. But the socials still are the same socials with the same mindsets as in WoW, LoL, ...

Remove the 15 players at the head of the org chart and we will be lolling through low-sec just like BNI or post-Fountain TEST.

Anonymous said...

oh my, you are comparing highsec wars to sov wars in 0.0?

I suppose it does fit your propaganda goal in this post so its not pure stupidity.

Why did Goons not declare war on your poco holding corp? Because it would mean you can invite everyone and their mother as allies in a war against goons, saving you atleast 1.5bil (marmite, lemmings, noir.). If you want to demonstrate that goons can't take the pocos because they dont have the power to do so, transfer it into Lemmings (haha fat chance of that happening).

In contrast to a 0.0 sov war, this mechanic means that the penduluum will swing back once you take enough pocos to justify the cost.

Anonymous said...

@ Gevlon: So being afk is not fun but may I quote from your post "That can literally be done by a few guys while AFK"

It looks like you are planning to have guys be afk too? I'm confused at this point.

Additionally, wouldn't it be a better use of your guys time to just farm L4 and use that money somehow againt goons, what are the opportunity costs of ref'ing 2 pocos every day?

Gevlon said...

Reinforcing the POCO isn't fun either. But we need 3-4 guys to do that, Goons need 40 to save it. The difference is because Goons don't know when we reinforce, so they can't form up. We'll know when the POCO leaves reinforced, so we might form up, so Goons must bring a fleet that can fight that.

Anonymous said...

So how come, for goons to form up, supposedly they need to want to, but for lemmings, they just need your isk? Read you post. Goons your are saying will get bored of waiting (even though they have shown for years that they don't) while lemmings are immune to boredom because you have a slightly fatter wallet that a handful of people. It makes no sense. If it's just because you "live in highsec" so do miniluv, and so do RvB, so that can't be it.

Arrendis said...


Who said being AFK is better than playing? When I'm being social for an hour in fleet, you bet your ass I'm at the keyboard, even if nothing's going on. Just because nothing is actively happening right now doesn't mean it won't be happening in another minute.

Please, don't put words in my mouth. What I said wasn't that 'AFK is better than playing', it was that your idea of 'the least fun fleet I can imagine' doesn't even come close to how bad things can be.

Note: can be. I don't know how it was for you when you were in TEST, but those days? They're rare as hell. Most fleets - even losing fights - are generally enjoyable experiences, with a good amount of joking around and socializing.

Why do I play? Because other than those fleets when everything goes horribly wrong, I enjoy large-scale fleet operations. I like weaving around fleet formations, especially when there's multiple enemy fleets to keep track of. I like the challenge of making sure that my guys are right where they should be, even on a fluid battlefield.

I cannot wait to get back to gunships. Not having to sit on sentry drones means the fleet will always be in motion, always be positioning relative to everything else. The battleships won't have to spread out so much to avoid bombers - anchoring will keep them in a tighter formation, which means my leash is a little longer on where I can keep the logi. I'll have more options and more latitude. I'll have more to do.

And that's what I play the game for, Gevlon: to do that. To keep pushing myself to get better, to improve on all the little mistakes and momentary 'crap, I should've done X instead'.

You don't do that when you're AFK.

Gevlon said...

@Anonymous: Lemmings don't have to be bored (besides the few guys who RF). There are no boring waiting ops for Lemmings. Goons have to guard the reppers, Lemmings don't have the same job.

@Arrendis: I always forget that socializing is considered fun. I think listening random guys telling the same jokes for an hour is much worse than just sitting there and watching the HP of a POCO going up/down.

Provi Miner said...

I know this is going to sound silly but honestly if my ship is undocked there is zero chance I am afk. Maybe I value my space time differently I don't know. As for the worst thing, where nothing goes right, I disagree I spent a tense hour and half getting my pod out of red space once. The pod was a blank clone would have only cost me isk to get podded and back to my homestation. But where is the "fun" in that instead I bounced and dodged bubbles, camps and random reds but I brought the pod back. So yeah losing sucked but it was not boring and that is the worst thing to happen in eve, log on and be bored. I too can only hear the same jokes, and listent to the same smack talk for so long till I just log and go to bed.

Anonymous said...

I Wouldn't normally post here, sure I read cue I'm a glutton for drama, but this is about the truest statement ever, I've been an FC in that fleet a logi and just a rank file dps and I'd have taken an hour of shit talk over 15 mins of frantic fuck ups

Arrendis said...


Random guys telling the same jokes for an hour is boring as hell. Reagalan trolling his entire fleet into a political argument is just funny. And I guess that's part of the point: it's not random guys, it's people I've known for a decent amount of time now - and it's not the same jokes (though when Othal does Arnie, it's kinda hit-or-miss w/me), it's usually just joking around about the general conversation, world events, etc. Maybe that's an outgrowth of SA's 'shut the hell up about your internet meme and actually discuss shit' culture, I don't know.


See, but not everything went wrong there. :) I've had those days, too. Back before the old SoCo went down, I was in a WH corp, and managed to get my Tempest stuck on the wrong side of a hole we were collapsing (we never did figure out how we'd screwed the math there). I had a probe launcher and a cloak on it, and some small (yes, small - frigate/dictor killers) guns on it, and scanned my way out. I figured I'd head to high-sec and wait for the guys to get me a route in, and so I did.

Unfortunately, my route took me through a system I'd never heard of at the time, HED-GP. Turns out, I was deep in nullsec, and if I'd been more aware of the null political situation, I'd have made damned sure to route through Providence instead of 'shortest way to high-sec'.

A system out, I hit my first drag bubble. MWD away from it at an angle, hit the cloak, and pretty much 10 seconds later, I see a sabre land about 3500m away from me. He turns and burns straight toward the gate, hoping to decloak me, only obviously enough, I'm not there.

After about 20m of him warping back and forth between gates and scanning points (I think), I'm in position to warp safely to the gate, and zoom, out I go...

... into HED. At the time, I'd never seen a gate bubbled so securely. And that was the nullsec end. Angle, cloak, crawl, and I spent the next hour slowly moving off so I could start trying to bounce from planet to planet and dodge the locals.

And then, I notice there's a station in system. I'm safe! WOO-HOO!

Yeah. I'd never dealt w/sov-null.

It won't let me dock. I'm a little panicked. Someone lands on the station grid, I warp STRAIGHT to the highsec gate... and get caught in an array of bubbles that makes the in-gate look like nothing. Regional gate, fully rapecaged. It was very impressive. I start trying to burn to the gate, and a group of destroyers warp in. I think I got one of them (go small gun tracking!), but alas, neither the 'pest nor the pod survived.

That was fun. That's what I meant when I said there's a difference between losing a fight and 'that day'. Sometimes, you just get beat. That happens. It's not always bad. But when you feel like you beat yourself? 'That day' absolutely sucks.

Anonymous said...

hi, gevlon.

My english ist not the best. Do you have a wing witch speaks german? Can you form it? It´s the only hurdle.

Gevlon said...

I don't know if there are any German players in the Lemmings. Go to the public chat and ask around!

Dvorak said...

Hansens Rauhreiter is a german corp in DL.

NoizyGamer said...

Am I going to have to start watching POCOs on top of all the RMT stuff I monitor? A lot of the comments here remind me of what I read on the botting forums after CCP Peligro bans another set of bots :)

This is getting interesting, with GSF making the mistake of giving Gevlon a small victory that should keep his Lemmings' morale up. It's also funny reading the CFC comments about the ineffectiveness of blue-balling and other tricks Gevlon writes about. Perhaps they need to read Sins of a Solar Spymaster #57. It looks like Gevlon did.

Also, I think Gevlon is missing the political perspective in RvB dropping out of the war. There are 2 RvB candidates running for CSM and they like to claim they are just a fun-loving high sec based group. One of those candidates is in a bit of trouble because the reason he decided to run was to win a $50 bet. If RvB is tied to Goons, that could lose them even more support.

Anonymous said...

We all know blueballing can be effective, but it takes it's toll on both sides. Gevlon simply dismisses that as not the case. He just assumes that all lemmings will keep turning up forever. Goons have a lot more experience on both sides and enough numbers to ensure it's not the same people taking the hit every time.

Powers said...

Sieging and Punting will always be a thing. If we triage timers and choose to save a more valuable poco, we can siege and take the ones we've lost back, with little to no cost or effort. Punting is the act if handwaving a timer with the intention of circling back to take it later.

I have yet to not form up for a poco defense. You have to look at the big picture, which you clearly don't.