Mabrick: What the hell happened to Goonswarm?

By Mabrick | Jan 25th 2013 6:45PM
64 Comments

mabrick

It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything about Goonswarm Federation and their leader The Mittani. It’s not that I haven’t noticed what’s going on outside wormhole space. I frankly didn’t care. If it wasn’t a K162 leading into my space, it was effectively off d-scan for me.

But now I’m taking some R&R in high-sec, and I did post awhile back about a friend’s take on TEST threatening Fatal Ascension, so I suppose I’ve already dipped my toes into this one. Since then there has been an escalation, a deescalation and tens of thousands of blog words spilled over the incident – and absolutely no POD goo.

This has left one indelible question mark inside my brain. What the hell happened to Goonswarm? This is not the alliance I’ve come to know and love. They NEGOTIATED a deescalation of tensions. There wasn’t even a single large fleet engagement. It was at best a proxy war and a disappointing one at that. Is this appropriate behavior for vaunted Goonswarm? I think not. It certainly doesn’t match their swagger and strut image. They took a smack talk torpedo from “crazy” Montolio amidships and turned the other cheek.

I once posted something about the Mittani, an obscure and unremembered bronze age empire, and compared them to The Mittani of Goonswarm. The analogy I made was the Mittani faded from memory and so will The Mittani. What I did not discuss is why the people known as the Mittani were not remembered.

It was because their existence was simply not memorable. They built no monuments. They did not conquer any worthy adversaries for the half millennium of their existence beyond their initial conquest of the Hurrians. They left no written histories for others to ponder. They kept to themselves, took no chances and faded into oblivion. In all, they did nothing of note and people don’t bother to remember nothings.

This latest crisis is exactly that – nothing to remember. It’s about as memorable as a boil: exciting when it erupts but once lanced completely forgettable.

Why did this outcome happen? It seems it was because Goonswarm and TEST don’t want to risk what they have. That’s a carebear attitude. “Dude, why’d you attack me? It took a year of campaigning and endless CTAs to obtain sovereignty over this many systems!” How is this any different than the high-sec miner who doesn’t want his expensive mining barge blown up? Just because Goonswarm’s mining barge is comprised of dozens (hundreds?) of Technetium moons doesn’t change the attitude equation. Not taking risks so you can protect what you’ve invested your hard work to obtain IS a carebear attitude. I ought to know. That’s what I am at heart.

But that’s not what I have to be. That’s what I choose to be – usually. Sometimes Mabrick does DIAF. And Goonswarm makes excuses not to fight. Damn, hell has frozen over ladies and gentlemen.

Here’s some free advice from a capsuleer who’s been a carebear longer than you Goonswarm. Ships are safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are built for. If you really are the combat pilots you claim to be, the self-proclaimed masters of emergent game play, then start acting like it. Dare to be great even if it risks everything. And in this instance…

- Mabrick

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Tags
  • Yuma

    TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM,
    TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM,
    TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM,
    TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM,
    TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM,
    TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM, TECHNITUM,

  • Yuma

    *TECHNITIUM :P

    • recollector1973

      Dude…TECHNETIUM…

  • Flying Spaceships

    "What the hell happened to Goonswarm? This is not the alliance I’ve come to know and love. They NEGOTIATED a deescalation of tensions"

    I think you will find it was Shadoo got Montolio to sit back in his corner.

    • mmhmm

      Oh please, it was Shadoo on behalf of the entire OTEC. They are all equally to blame for getting him to "sit back in his corner". Trying to blame just the messenger and not the entire group he represents is idiocy.

  • Yuma

    it sucks your brain dry and makes you a pacifist

  • Endie

    You see Eve is a lot like bronze-age north-Syriac Fertile Crescent politics…

    • M1k3y

      …what?

  • Goons = Pussies

    Goons are massive pussies who call in PETS like FA, TNT and Fidelas Constans hot dropping on a WH in VFK like 5/1 against a WH T3 fleet… lolz at the massive blob….. Goon = pussies

    • Goons = pussies

      Why isn't EVENEWS or themittani.com reporting on that fight?

    • ohgodwhy

      its okay though. they filled up 6 to 7 pages on our killboard =)

  • Point of View

    CCP needs to take NOTE, Technetium needs CHANGED! ASAP….. Moon Mining, Passive Income, Desperately Needs a Revamp.

    • zer

      I thought EvE was a Sand Box ? Now you want CCP to intervene in players affairs ?

      Tech is not the problem, the players are.

      • Meaple of Syndicate

        Obviously there is not a clear distinction of when CCP should let the sandbox do it's thing and when an intervention is needed. In this case, the players are the problem because the system is a problem.

        • SHADOORP

          the system has bounds, but the players utilizing that system in in the ways that they have has resulted in the circumstance we find ourselves in.

          Big ups to syndicate. a few of you guys dropped an archon on my loki while i was flying solo. First time I ever laughed while getting popped. I think I gave the guy the pod kill for making me smile.

      • SOLAR

        Tech should run out and be respawned at random in other space or something more dynamic.

        • taina

          Or buff alchemy…

          • Boner

            Or just dont fly t2 ships, that should decrease the price also.

          • recollector1973

            Or leave game in mass…there won't be buyers.

      • Highsec Perspective

        You realize what you're saying is that Sandbox-type games (your "understanding" of it) require absolutely no development (CCP intervention in "player affairs," which is a category so wide that it spans nearly every aspect of the game except the technical maintenance of the server…) of the game post-launch, therefore, every single expansion since 2003 has continually diminished the "sandbox" aspect of EVE and should not have been developed (apart from technical-side issues).

        Hell, CCP should just abandon the game to us to make do with it what we will right (except for them to keep running the server)? No need to fix any game-breaking imbalances or other issues that make the game overall not balanced, not interesting. A balanced game is a dynamic game and successful game (a BIG sandbox), an imbalanced game (no developer involvement, no people recommending changes to make the game more balanced because some whining bitches like yourself complain that it's ruining their imbalanced sandbox, whaa…) is a dead game with a small sandbox full of shit. With your approach, EVE would've died 2-3 years after release if that.

        Look, a sandbox game is not where you do whatever you want and when somebody wants to change something in the game, you are protected from those changes because you complain about "them changing/making the game into something THEY want to play." The problem with this is that it creates disconnections between players AND features in that game to the point where the game is incoherent–>everyone is playing the game in their own, tiny, little protected worlds with little that connects it all together into a coherent game-world.

        TL;DR But if you're still too stupid to understand what this means, here's an analogy you might understand. Do you remember when you were a kid how all sandboxes had walls, guess what walls represent: limitations, boundaries, direction. A sandbox is not some chaotic, libertararian eutopia of disparate, autonomous individual actions, it has structure and form, it has direction, something that it pursues and aspires to (certain features should be certain ways etc.). Guess what happens when you remove the walls that hold the sand in (and connects everything together)…the sand disperses and eventually disappears into the dirt. There goes your sandbox.

        • offtopic

          Was it really necessary to put parenthesis in 3 out of the 4 paragraphs you wrote?

        • mmhmm

          Actually, that is one of the most useful and effective TL:DRs that I've seen. The first three paragraphs literally contained nothing that wasn't in your TL:DR.

      • Smellypirate

        Goons have always as you say interveined with the game for there own benifit, numerous examples can be given in regards to that, just one is them crying to nerf titans so they could win the war against RDN. They influenced CCP to nerf titans to make there life easier so they could beat RDN. Goons have only ever won wars or gained space by nerfs focused on taking there hostiles counter to there mass numerical blob, or blobbed a group a fraction of its size or lastly given space (tcf) without being a le to influence CCP for there own benifit or out blob there hostiles 5:1 and more they would not stand a chance. They may not even be here right now if they had not been given tcf space with shit loads of tech moons in the first place!

        • TRONGLE

          Actually titans where nerfed because they represented the most not-fun development in MMO sandbox history. Literally a button where you automatically win and there is no counter except to probe out agressed logouts. It was fucking stupid and ALL the 0.0 alliances pretty much agreed nobody was having fun except a handful of titan pilots.

          THATS why it was nerfed, because it was fundamentally broken. And trust me, Bob blobbed as bad as the goons.

    • dani lizardov

      LoL I think I have seen that statement before …
      Ah YES! its every fu*&ing time, when someone seeks a war against the current tech holder…
      As of there is no other way to win ???

    • Alwayslaughaha

      You do have to admit the otec commercials were pretty funny.

  • Gam_Samgee

    As much as everyone is disappointing with the lack of huge, bloc shattering war, this shit needs to stop. Goons had good reasons not to go to war, Technetium, not really hating TEST, sov grinds, the possibility of actually losing etc. If you really think this move was wholly out of line with the core of Goonswarm you haven't been paying attention for the last few years, where they've been fairly successfully utilizing diplomacy to just as great effect as the war machine.

    • Mike

      So basically tech, which is suppose to be a conflict driver, is now stopping wars….. your awesome CCP.

      • Anona-mouse

        *you're

    • SHADOORP

      you can't say, "it needs to stop." people are unsubbing over lack of content.

      • Not a Pet

        There is content if people look for it. With the NIP gone, HBC reset, and the SOLAR war, there is content.
        What is not there, is the endless hours of grinding, damn timers that forces you to get up in the middle of the night, logistical problems to bring shit in Null due to jumpbridges being taken out.. etc etc

        Those who want sov war on such a scale either :

        1- Are bitter because they got rolfstomped by CFC or HBC and want space back
        2- Have never fought one and have a romanticized vision of it
        3- Want tobsee goonswarm destroyed due to something a goon did to them.

        Guys, take this period to amass wealth. Fleet up and hwve fun fights due to the reset. Invent and test new doctrines made available thanks to the latest patch.

        Prepare for war because one of these days it will happen.

  • The_Oracle86

    theres really only one thing left to do…… and thats for the blobs to go to war.

  • http://poeticstanziel.blogspot.com/ Poetic Stanziel

    Band of Bees ( BoB )

  • Scar

    Making the same mistake as the NC . . . sitting still . . . avoiding real conflict on a coalition level will lead to the same destination. Massive internal rot.

    Good FCs, true pvpers . . . everything that makes a good coalition able to function and defend itself will eventually leak into pvp orientated alliances or stop playing the game. Eve is a game. Collecting items, ships, and isk grows boring over time and unless you can provide true excitement (not scheduled battles and sissy pvp) your core will rot and you'll wake up to a massive invasion one day and wonder why your 70k man coalition has 150 in fleet while 50k stream into lowsec in Vargurs, Hulks and Charons.

    • nerds unite

      True but NC downfall was catalysed by being attacked by the people they'd being supplying supers to.Also, the null situation was far more polarised. In this case the null situation is a circle jerk and will only be broken by 2 things,1) subjugation of either HBC or CFC military leaderships to polarise membership for war.y2) decisive action ftom PLbefore these were relatively simple to achieve. Eg give PL a shit load of Isk. This is not possible while OTEC. exists.

  • M1k3y

    Because of Tech

  • Someotherdude

    Maybe Monty was right and wasn't the mad-ranting child Mittens propaganda made him out to be? Eve really is about risking it all and failing hard or winning big. What Goons and PL showed was they don't want to go balls deep any more. That has "lame" and "weak" stink all over it.

  • justanotherscrub

    the goons and pl have shown their true colors, montolio praise to you for attempting to start one the biggest wars in eve and sorry shadoo was such a fag about it

    • Bored at Work

      Right, Goons have officially hopped on the short bus at this point. :/ Nullsec just got a lot more boring…

  • truth

    its now really the few major alliance leaders against all the grunts in the respective alliances, thier RMT/TECH against our fun. time to stand up and get them voted out or fight against the ones we cant

  • Mittens accountant

    Mittens hasen't taken any pvp risks ever. Why do you think a guy who has all of Eve's wealth hasnt taken any in game risks ever? Do you think he spends every last isk on supers that will never see battle? Or do you think he also buys hundreds of plexes and sells them to friends at discounted prices? Do you think that mittens makes a dollar here and there or do you think that he makes tens of thousands? Do you think mittens has a real job other than eve? Does it now make sense to you why mittens will never fight and has probably set up the goons management structure so that no one can ever change that?

    • Lumifragger

      Its true, eve is alex's job. hes not going to get entangled in a war he's not sure he can win. If goonswarm loses, he loses his job and income.

      • Anona-mouse

        Sounds like we really need to make him unemployed then.

    • TRONGLE

      1) GF takes plenty of risks
      2) GFs finances are actually independently audited (I'm serious) and the results distributed to all members. If he was running off with plex, dude we'd know about it. This is a paranoid conspiracy theory
      3) He works as a Lawyer, he makes more money doing that then he ever could hocking off internet space money.

      Nothing about your absurd theory makes sense.

  • Eirene

    Goonswarm has never seen an threat on equal level. That's why the deescalate. They are an one trick pony.
    They know that a fight with an similiar strenght is an uncalculating risk for them.

    Remember how small dotbrothers were in comparision. Even if they were double the people, they would have been outnumbered. But that would have been maybe enough to threathen the clumsy Swarm.

  • Get it trending GM

    every single pilot of new eden should just swarm every goon system know to the eve map. cloaky camp and kill kill kill, if Shadoo and every other game ruining RMTing faggot wants to cearbear and protect thier precious tech let them at the mercy of new eden! lol fuck hulkageddon, GOONAGEDDON!!!

  • ???

    "If you really are the combat pilots you claim to be, the self-proclaimed masters of emergent game play, then start acting like it."

    Since when are goons anything they claim to be?

    • hmmm

      bingo. + moon goo needs to be changed.

  • Ex imp

    Fuck you shadoo you lazy bitch

  • Charles Darwin

    Is EN24 going to cover this from any angle other than the "omfg why are CFC and HBC not destroying each other?!?!" one? No mention anywhere how divided TEST were on it at all (less than half wanted war), instead en24 has focused solely on deriding shadoo and mittens for avoiding a costly war when they could be exterminating pubbies.

    • asdf

      Of course less than half of TEST wanted war, it would interfere with the mining/ratting of the rest of the pubbies. They want a big blue donut so they can continue mining/ratting in peace.

    • Pussy Legion

      The whole idea of naming the coalition "Honey Badgers" was that they "give no fucks", but it seems Monty is the only one who remembered this. Now that he's gone they need to think up a new name for the coalition, one that matches their current status as underling, risk averse carebears, any suggestions?

  • init. Grunt

    Every other Game-Developer 'emergency-Patch' something when its broken in a couple of hours/days. The whole Technetium mechanic is broken but CCP do nothing. It's not about Goons, its about a broken Game mechanic imho.

  • droljica

    Every company, house, guild or corp that has intoxicated peopel on top, are doomed.

  • Technerfium

    The playing field would certainly be much more interesting with a better distribution of wealth throughout nullsec. Just saying.

    Is it possible that the (almost war) and all this smack talk between TEST & CFC is a ploy to push tech prices higher? Will they have a resurgence of diplo lvl smack to spike tech whenever thy feel like it. This is what goons are best at Imo. Not tactics, not strategy, not warfare or politix. But manipulation. They have become exceedingly good at this over the years.

  • FA grunt

    This proxy war was awsome there is no confusing nip now 6vdt is practically permanent bubbled and everyone is killing eachother. But I do agree test bitched out and CFC/hbc wanted to hold each others dicks and not go to war…..fuck you CFC leadership,,,,,,only big claim to not go to war is the sov grind/we don't want anymore space…fucking give it to someone who is more deserving and can fight back with dick holding…..while the CFC fights the hbc. Dust might have saved eve for being a new distraction of the game I hope it doesn't become the focus

  • Random Goon

    The best reason to avoid this war is because of how much it pisses off everyone else. Mabrick, your tears are delicious

  • Naj

    Goons are just that goons. Spineless and chicken shit

  • Guest

    Actually I think that Goonswarm is NOT the bloodthirsty types that people make them out to be. Yes they fight, and yes they gank, and yes they control a lot of SOV in 0.0. But they have negotiated settlements more than once. It also apears that they have an idea concerning Balance of Power in EVE. I think this goes towards continuing existence of the corp/alliance/coalition as opposed to being eliminated and becoming history. I also think that GSF realized that Mitrolio was the real issue here, not the rank and file of TEST, and made a smart play to defuse a bad situation.

    Remember the Cold War? Mabrick, I know you do – you grew up with it, like I did. Was it ever really in the interests of either side to totally destroy the other one? Remember the power vacuum that occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union? And all the Chaos and uncertainty in Eastern Europe and the middle east since then that can be attributed to that? In many ways, the Middle East was a fishbowl and when the Soviets on one side and us on the other told the allies there it was time to stop to prevent escalation, they did. Since then, well, it's not as easy. I think that 0.0 works very similarly. The Demise of the HBC or the CFC would leave a massive power vacuum. And it is obvious that as a coalition takes more space, it becomes more difficult to protect it all. There is nothing wrong with good fights, and they an be a lot of fun, but actual SOV take-over and holding is a different story. I'm not sure Goons wants the HBC to collapse. I don't think the HBC wants the CFC to collapse either. That could destabilize things too far for everyone.

    • Get Out

      Cuz Cold War and video game about blowing ships up is the same thing, amirite? ;)

    • EVE_Dude

      Cold war? Seriously?

      Goons are acting like carebears, because they have always been carebears, who have blobbed and diplomatiqued their way to where they are.