Psychotic Tendencies [TISHU], an alliance based in Placid, has once again reformed. As a newer player, with only around 7 months of experience, I had no idea who TISHU were, and what they represented in the complex political scene of EVE Online. Over the weekend I sat down with Lex Arson, CEO of Adversity and Executor of Psychotic Tendencies, to find out exactly who they were, and what they aimed to achieve in Placid, which is full of activity at the moment, as Snuffed Out and Shadow Cartel continue to battle over assets in what has become known as ‘The Placid Wars’.
Dracos Rhaghar Lex, You are Executor of Psychotic Tendencies and CEO of Adversity, would you mind telling me about about yourself, and how your EVE career has led you to where you are now?
Lex Arson Yeah, Sure. I used to play Battlefield 2132 back in the day, with a group of people known as Angels of Death. Some of the guys I was rolling with had an EVE corp, and I started playing with the guys in late 2009. I played the game for a month, and got bored, because I wasn’t progressing fast enough. My skillpoints weren’t improving as fast as I wanted them to, and I got tired of Level 1 missioning. So I ended up quitting for about a year. When I came back, I was still a High-Sec carebear. When I came back, one of my goals was to be a PVP pilot, I wanted to get involved in the null-sec big battles, even though I have mostly never left NPC Null in my EVE career.
So I was running NPC missions out of the Jita area. I was part of a high-sec corp in a low-sec alliance, and we’d occasionally get war-decced. When this happened, they would shuffle is into low-sec, and tell us not to undock when until the war was over. The first corp I was in really was a cancerous, horrible corp. But they had a sister corp that was PVP based. You had to go through the high-sec corp for a while and take the old Agony PVP Basics class, and you could eventually join the low-sec pirate corp. They lived in Aridia in 2010, when people lived in Aridia. The PVP corp was terrible to, but we did some roams and stuff. But I fumbled along, losing drakes and stuff. I almost quit the game again,. but eventually got talked out of it.
The Alliance eventually split, and I was part of the defectors, which made for a great civil war narrative. A corp that joined our new split-off alliance was a corp called Idiots in Spaceships. I instantly made a personal connection with the corp and ended up joining them. After a few months, they realized that the alliance was terrible, and left them. We moved unto a small pocket in Syndicate, and reformed Psychotic Tendencies.
Dracos Rhaghar Playing EVE for 7 months, I don’t really know who Psychotic Tendencies are, so who are you, and what do you stand for?
Lex Arson A lot of what I do is post on Reddit, and forums, and a lot of people look at me as the PR face of Psychotic Tendencies, and I don’t mind shit posting on Reddit, or other forums, so I never have a shortage of people coming to fight me because they feel insulted. But Psychotic Tendencies, a lot of people compare us to triumvirate and Triple A, which is sad, but they see us like old alliances that have disbanded and reformed over and over again, which we have. This is the 6th reboot of Psychotic Tendencies, I joined for the second reboot, wasn’t here for the 3rd, and ran the rest of the reboots. This alliance is home to me.
What do we stand for? I guess fighting people. We don’t limit ourselves, I will take TISHU, and push the envelope to getting bigger and better fights. Adversity have gone from destroyer fleets to fighting with faction battleships with triage and dread support. This time around, I have been cutting down the amount of battleship doctrines, but that is what we have always flown. We fight over money moons, its a reliable way to get big battleship fights, and motivating people to fight. Its hard to find content in EVE right now. If you go out roaming you wont find content, there is no consistency in anything bigger that t1 cruisers. You might get a fight, but you’ll get blobbed, or hard-countered. A lot of people here are enthusiastic about small-gang and solo PVP, but t1 cruiser roams don’t make us log in, we like big fights with high stakes, and pushing ourselves to the edge. A lot of people hate timers, but they are a way of scheduling fights, its an alarm both sides know is coming, and I hate that CCP are moving away from that style of game-play.
Dracos Rhaghar Would you mind walking me through the history of the Psychotic Tendencies reformations, from the original TISHU to TISHU V6.0
Lex Arson Psychotic Tendencies was formed in 2008, before I even entered the game. It was formed by Aridia pirates, and they fought against rooks and kings, and fight over towers in Aridia.
I don’t know much about the original TISHU, but Mark 2 happened when I joined Idiots in Spaceships. Everyone had got rich of high-sec incursions, and they decided to fly battleships other heavy ships. We tried to copy R’n’K as much as we could. Rooks and Kings were an early inspiration for TISHU, looking back, we didn’t have anything close to a fleet comp, it was a kitchen sink battleship with a triage carrier, but we’d go through and steamroll everybody, maybe get dropped by pl occasionally, but TISHU Mark 2 came to a close when EarlJ, the executor, had a large disagreement with the CEO of Trigun, after which he stepped down and retired from his position. It was at this point I left and formed Adversity. Psychotic Tendencies survived for a month before shutting their doors.
In the interval, Adversity did a tour of the universe doing small gang fleet. It was at this point Triple6 decided he wanted to reform Psychotic Tendencies as Mark 3, but they didn’t have any FC’s, and recruited a bunch of French corps, they used t3 battle-cruisers, small gang stuff, but it wasn’t TISHU, and Triple realized that one day when he logged in and said “This is a sham.” He kicked all of the corps, and closed the doors again.
At this point he decided to join Adversity, we were in Rote Kapelle, another Syndicate alliance, but I had a different vision that Rote leadership, so we parted ways peacefully, and moved out. The same day Triple offered me the keys to TISHU. I paid him 4 Billion ISK in borrowed money, and he transferred Psychotic Tendencies to my alt. TISHU Mark 4 is when we started to get on the low-sec radars, we had Adversity, and Tempest Legion, who had R34, a great FC, every time we come back we get bigger and better, but nothing really stood out. In Mark 4, we took over all the moons we wanted, and then it was quiet, but there was drama between corps, and they started leaving. I personally was working night shifts 7 days a week, outside of the alliances timezone, so I couldn’t do much. I couldn’t effectively run the alliance, and Psychotic Tendencies shut down. I joined Pandemic Legion, Tempest Legion joined Black Legion, and some of the Adversity guys joined NCDot. 3 or 4 months later, at the end of the summer, R34 came back, and wanted to get the band back together. Everyone left the alliances they were in, and we all got back together in TISHU. It was here we started to get the workings of a Super fleet, because a lot of the guys came out of the Legions with Supers they didn’t have 3 months before, we lost a few learning to use them, but TISHU Mark 5 ended when R34 left for personal reasons.
It left us in shaky ground without our main FC. We’d finished a campaign, and slugged through a few months without him. I whelped a few cap fleets. We started working with Overload Everything, with DoomChinchilla. We wanted fights, so we started hitting moons again, we launched a huge campaign against Nocturnal Romance and Space Violence. It went on for months. There was one fight where we killed 3 supers. The whole Syndicate campaign ended as European Goonion came in and took the valuable moons. They pacified Syndicate, and dampened the fighting. At this point we needed a change of scenery, and wanted to go south to fight Easily Excited in Genesis. Overload Everything moved to Ostingele, and we supported each other once or twice, but went our separate ways.
Genesis was horrible, Easily Excited us only fuught us once, and it was a trap, we dropped 7 dupers and a Titan, and an NCDot super fleet dropped us and killed a titan and a Nyx, we did alright considering it was a set-up. From there on, we ground moons with no good fights. Out numbers faded, but moon money doesn’t satisfy anyone, not without good fights. We had bad turnouts, so I had to do something. We decided to deploy to Curse, test doctrines, and fight TEST and Phoebe Freeport Republic, and a big blue doughnut. I tried to get people to move, but the move-op was even doomed to fail, we had a spy, or someone hadn’t changed their API. A newer FC sent out a mail about the move op, and I told him to wait until I got home from work, because I wanted to be there for it.
I said “Don’t leave til I get home.” I sit down to being told they got dropped by Black Legion 1 jump out. The convoy only lost two Archons, but when we got to Curse, we couldn’t even get critical mass. NCDot moved nearby, and they sounded like they had fun plans, so I asked people what they thought about joining NCDot, and there was a unanimous decision to join them. So we packed our bags again, and moved. TISHU Mark 5 ended here.Dracos Rhaghar So TISHU Mark 6 has been formed. After the previous failures, what was the real cause behind them?
Lex Arson I feel that our narrative fell apart. Anyone who says they play EVE for the good fights is lying, they play because of the social aspect, and the narrative. The PVP mechanics in this game are terrible. People log in for wars, for a story and narrative. When we moved to Genesis, our narrative fell through. We lost vision and direction without fights, without our war. TISHU has always been a small alliance with a high saturation of capital pilots. AT that time everyone could fly an Archon, and half the pilots were Super pilots, but they were only 35 pilots, but we had no sub-cap support fleet. We opt away with it before because we were fighting lower skill alliances, but at that time the people we could face were either bigger than us, and we were too small to fight the bigger alliances, and the little guys wouldn’t fight us, we were caught in a paradox of our own making. I feel that lack of direction caused the decline.
Dracos Rhaghar Based out of Placid, In Vestouve, you are fighting Shadow Cartel, what is your narrative this time. The Placid War has been raging for a while, where’s your place in the politics of Placid, and what is your end goal?
Lex Arson That’s a great question. We are here for fights and narrative. The Placid War gives us both of those. We rarely switch allegiances, and so we are fighting Shadow Cartel again. They are tough opponents, The OSS are the alliance that Black Omega Security formed into. They are friendly with the same old people, Nocturnal Romance, Shadow Cartel etc. but now everyone has more Supers and Dreadnoughts. Phoebe has made Low-Sec go the way of Null-Sec. Alliances escalate their cap fleets unhindered by the threat of Pandemic Legion and other huge fleets. People don’t want to fight over command Nodes. The majority of people aren’t enjoying Aegis Sov. Placid is one of the last Bastions in EVE where people have grudge matches still. All the factions involved in the Placid War have grudges. Its one of the few areas where moons and strategic objectives change hands regularly. People have a reason to log in. With Cloud Ring’s semi-invasion of Cloud Ring, you have all these timers in Cloud Ring that provide content. We have been going there, but the content in Placid is another level though. If the Imperium wanted Cloud Ring, they would steamroll it. It’s like war games.
Dracos Rhaghar I honestly believe that was the Imperium’s goal, to set Cloud Ring up as a content generator, to allow people to come in and fight over it, so they could just 3rd party, and have content.
Lex Arson If they did, its brilliant. I mean, even so, it is lacking a strategic objective. There’s not the same narrative as taking an R64. The war is finely balanced, and the politics are so complicated. It seems like noone has the edge, because assets change so quickly. Placid has a great thing going on. People in Null-Sec are complaining because they have no idea what is going on in Placid.
Dracos Rhaghar You guys have waded in on Snuffed’s Side right?
Lex Arson Yes, I have always had respect for Donnie as an FC and Leader. All these alliances are teamed up against Snuffed, so we decided to help them. We as an alliance aren’t huge on blue lists, we have friends and frenemies, but we usually only have one blue, and we have narrative again. I think what has made Placid such a content spot is that its all the same groups, with different names, its the same people fighting under different names.
Dracos Rhaghar So you lost an Erebus over a week ago, what happened there, and what led up too it?
Lex Arson This is extremely embarrassing, and Ill tell you why. Since Adversity came back, we’ve always been active with our Supers. As a US timezone alliance, TISHU have the supremacy in that timezone. A lot of the former Black Legion corps joined us after the alliances demise.DIX moved their supers, everyone did, but The Suicide Kings joined us that Friday, and Capri was asking us when the could move their Supers. He asked for a cover fleet, but Ive never had a cover fleet to jump Supers into our home system. We thought we were immune. I didn’t see anything on my watch list to alert me, and told them to light the Cyno on the edge of a TISHU POS and warp to their POS. He lit his cyno, and jumped a Titan, and as the titian lands on grid, a Purifier uncloaks. I went to log in my Aeon client, and it never reached the character screen. We pinged, got as many online as possible. My mains client crashed, and when I logged in, he was already dead. We were logging in Supers, but they were inside the POS and had to slow-boat to the edge of the POS. I was trying to get Triage to the Titan, for a second, I thought about off-lining the POS, but he was in structure when I finally logged in. We chose to let the Erebus die, if it had been the Supers tackled too, it would have been a different story.
Dracos Rhaghar So you thought you’d been DDOS’d, or it was posted on Reddit, is that true?
Lex Arson There’s speculation about that, but my connection was perfect until the Titan landed on grid. I got a socket close, I crashed off Mumble, I honestly don’t know if it was a DDOS, and I wont point fingers, but we can’t prove who did it, but I will say I experienced very convenient connection problems the minute the cyno went up. Its not hte first time it happened fighting those groups that were present. There is circumstantial evidence, but nothing is provable, but crying on Reddit bring nothing good to the table.
With Psychotic Tendencies losing an Erebus a week ago, and Snuffed Out losing an Erebus last night, one can only wonder if the Placid War is swinging in the direction of Shadow Cartel. One thing is for sure, there is no lack of content in Placid right now. We can only guess what the next few months hold for the region.
