Well of course you wouldn’t resub for 235mill per account. You’d make way more buying plex - if you wanted the isk. Apologies I did not realise you had gone Alpha.
I’m much more interested in why someone who is still Omega would not log in a collect these rewards. Which is what Arrendis was suggesting.
You know, I keep hearing this from a small number of people, and I get why it might be appealing to think of it that way, but really? This makes no sense.
If this was a fake war, why would the invaders have been putting down structures like they did? We killed over 6 trillion in their assets just retaking out space over the last 3 weeks. And that’s just the alliances and corps. Think about the impact on individual players.
Months of sitting there, making no progress, definitely took its toll on activity. People just walked away and stopped caring. Members of the former-PAPI alliances lost everything getting caught moving their suitcase capitals, either by us, or by lowsec guys, or others using bait beacons along their route. 3 weeks into their evac, TEST is still trying to get to their destination. Do you think all of that cumulative frustration and anger would be worth it for a ‘fake’ war?
I mean, I get that Vily, PGL, Gobbins, etc all screwed the pooch badly, but as alliance leaders, do you think that’s a move they make as a sham? What’s the payoff here? What’s in it for them? The former Legacy alliances either crashed and burned, or left their coalition in disgust, or are having corps poached by PanFam now. Do you think any of them except maybe Dunk could get elected to anything at this point? Do you think anyone trusts their vision, leadership, and guidance?
What’s in it for them? What makes all of this pointless kabuki worth undertaking? Having their reputations ruined? Being shown up as incompetent? If you can’t win a war with three times the defenders’ numbers, and after sitting there not even trying for months on end, you’re forced to blame the game for your failure… nobody’s going to believe that.
So what’s their incentive here to fake it?
Invite me to your discord and I would be glad to share my line of thinking with you. The ISD like to delete my post and ban me so its not safe to post here without them deleting what I say before you see it.
I don’t have a discord server. INN’s discord server is public, though, and I can be reached there.
Not the game per-se just poor mechnics and design over the last 6 years or so.
Mechanics they were well aware of, having taken part in the large fights over those six years. If they failed to consider those mechanics before crafting a strategy for their campaign, that is not a failure of the game, design or the mechanics.
It’s like if I know there’s traffic on the beltway around Washington DC, and I fail to account for that when planning a trip that has me driving through DC on a strict timetable, it’s not a failure of the District’s transit system.
if Mechanics make it so that the server cannot handle the only means to overcome the mechanics, then the game and mechanics are to blame for this failure of a war end. CCP knows that full well but they keep ignoring all the issues with their retarded mechanics that the server cannot handle and only keep making them worse and worse.
Moronic behavior and decisions by players also play a role (because why would you crumble just because you lose 3 months of SRP when there are risk free, low effort means exist to farm ISK). However, if it comes down to who can stuff the most people in a system to accomplish anything while the server cannot handle even one side doing that, it’s not just the players’ fault that this war turned into this kind of farce.
Except they don’t. Nothing about the actual game mechanics or server performance prevented them from winning. The only thing that kept them from winning was their unwillingness to take significant losses.
When you assault a fortified position, it’s going to be bloody. That’s true in RL, in EVE, and in literally every game that simulates war. If you’re going to try to get through a gate guarded by a few hundred supercarriers, it’s going to take a lot more than some frigates to pull it off.
Take EVE out of the equation for a moment. Let’s put this in terms of say, World of Tanks. There’s a narrow choke point that you’re trying to funnel your forces through, and the defenders already have a dozen heavy tanks guarding it, and artillery sighted in. Trying to push in with a couple of scouts is not going to do it. Getting through that choke point is going to be bloody. It’s going to inflict a lot of losses. In that situation, any smart group is going to look for another way in.
And there were other ways in. Every day, we had to run around like madmen closing every wormhole we found—if we could. Frigate holes, for example, couldn’t be closed. You know, the things you can sneak a covert ops frigate in with? It wasn’t at all impossible, and they did get covert cynos in. That’s how they got their tengus in for that last fight.
Here’s the nightmare scenario:
PAPI sneaks a few covert cynos in by various means, back in January while we’re hyperfocused on M2. Every week, they blops a dozen bombers in, along with the occassional fuel truck to keep the cynos fueled. From what we see, their numbers look like they’re starting to weaken. Fewer people show up to timers each week.
Then, around mid-May, they make a serious push on the 3-D gate. We have to defend both 3-D/E-V and 1DQ/T5Z to make sure this isn’t a feint to draw us off (which we had to do every time). Once our capital and subcapital forces are committed and stuck in tidi, 1 covert T3C decloaks in each of the other systems in the constellation, refits off a depot in a safe spot, and begins entosising.
At the same time, small groups of long-range torpedo bombers start hitting the jammers in each of those systems.
When we scramble a response fleet made up of whoever’s not already stuck in tidi and run over to one of the threatened ihubs… it gets bombed out of existence. If the fleet goes to the jammers instead, the bombers cloak up, so the only option the defense fleet has is going to the ihub. If they try to guard the jammers, the ihub gets reinforced, which is bad for us. If the fleet splits up to try to defend all the jammers… it’ll just get bombed out of existence, piecemeal.
And as soon as one of those systems isn’t jammed, they can move capitals in. A couple of entosis faxes and a few hundred dreads. They’ve got 150,000 characters, remember. They’ve got the numbers to keep 400 of them logged off for a few months in preparation… if they have the will and the leadership to do it.
And that’s just one quick-and-dirty way to completely circumvent ‘the mechanics’ they spent seven months whining about without actually trying a real attack.
In fact, it did not come down to that. Not at all. When we RF’d everything in T5Z a few weeks before their last push, we put more people through the gate than they did in that final attack. And they still had more in the system, they just wouldn’t undock2. When their final push did come, the servers were fine. If that push had started with a hundred smartbombing titans, our defenses on the gate would have been severely degraded before we could kill even a third of them. And once those bubbles went down, nothing would’ve kept the rest of their capitals and supers from just gating in and getting the hell off the gate.
In the first M2 fight, the server worked fine, too, even if things were slow. But that’s tidi. It’s supposed to do that. In the second M2 fight, their big failure wasn’t ‘you jumped in’, it was ‘you waited until the last minute and then jumped in on top of the fighter-bombers’1. They had a fortizar in system. They had other citadels in system. They even had at least one on the keepstar grid. If they’d gotten into system earlier, they could have positioned however they liked, using cloaky scouts to set up perches, just like we do all the damn time on every other fleet.
But no. They jumped in literally on top of the fighter-bombers. Their cyno warped in uncloaked, and then didn’t move once he cloaked up. And we went and sent the bombers to right where he was, because they were already pretty much there. It was a painfully obvious position to come into: directly above the target structure. Move it off to one side even a hundred kilometers, and they’re fine. They’re not jumping into a lawnmower. They’ll have time to load.
And, again, the fact that you appear in space before your client fully loads the new system? Not new. Not something their leaders were unaware of.
It was not game mechanics that dictated how their offensive ended. It was poor judgment, and an unwillingness to do the painful things that could have secured victory.
And look, I get why they were unwilling to pay that kind of price. I do. If the Imperium sends a supercapital fleet into a woodchipper because it’s necessary, it’s an Imperium supercapital fleet. We don’t care who’s in Goons vs LAWN or TNT or Bastion or whichever alliance. It’s a unified command and control that has been unified for years. We will make those pilots whole, if they lose a titan doing what an Imperium FC told them to do.
PAPI? PAPI always had to have an eye on the next war. Let’s say they won, and drove us out of the game somehow. Who are they fighting next? Well, obviously, each other. So which one of their alliances wants to be the one to take heavy losses now, so they can be at a disadvantage later? None of them. Obviously. They had no reason to trust one another, no reason to expect long-term cooperation… no reason to be willing to be the ones to make the sacrifice. So they didn’t.
And that is what cost them the war. A huge mob that’s really just a collection of fractious mutual enemies failed to act as a cohesive whole and trust one another when assaulting a fortified position manned by a unified group that they had hardened into a fairly disciplined defense3.
In doing so, the mob insisted on only ever attempting a frontal assault, and only ever doing it in ways that did not put them at any risk.
THAT APPROACH WILL ALWAYS FAIL. Always.
1. And let’s be clear here: the fact that the servers got overwhelmed because of where they jumped in, on an already packed grid with thousands of f/bs on top of them? That saved dozens of their ships. A number of titans that generated killmails in M2 respawned in T5Z, docked. If the servers had been flawless, those ships die and stay dead.
2. For clarification, I shouldn’t just say ‘wouldn’t undock’. They had undocked. And we beat their fleets with our fleets. They had supercarrier fighters that they moved over to the gate, just like we did, and they still failed to hold it, because we didn’t waste time trying to engage the fighters, we just got the hell off the (relatively bubble-free) gate and went to a more distant structure. And, in fact, that’s exactly what PAPI was doing in 3-D when they were still trying to anchor structures. So they knew it could be done. They’d done it. They just hadn’t succeeded in actually getting any structures online.
Let me emphasize that: PAPI KNEW THEY COULD GET IN AND GET OFF THE GATE BECAUSE THEY’D DONE IT, OVER AND OVER AGAIN. THEY JUST STOPPED TRYING.
3. We know that PAPI’s external pressure is what prompted Imperium pilots to actually be competent and disciplined during the defense, too. We know it because literally as soon as they collapsed and we started doing offensive fleets to purge Delve… that discipline evaporated. We started losing supers stupidly. We started not paying a damned bit of attention to FC orders. I can’t count the number of times we bridged in and someone started shooting the structure we were on, even though it was ours.
Everything you describe has one or more parts of the mechanics working against smooth and acceptable gameplay performance in it. Fighters, single-point-engagement structures, bubbled gates, tons of players. You can’t take a cyno jammer down with bombers if you can’t keep all the enemies on another system which you cannot do because you cannot go through the gates to get into these systems. What you put in so many words comes back to mechanics working against good gameplay. Always. All the possible tactics that you eloquently described fall apart when they meet the server because the server cannot handle them in a way that makes them work as intended.
And yet, every one of those mechanical issues existed, AND WAS KNOWN ABOUT BY THE LEADERS OF PAPI, before they decided to being their offensive.
In effect, you are saying ‘look, it wasn’t Napoleon’s fault his attempt to invade Russia failed, it’s because winter happened.’ Yes, winter happened. Shockingly, Napoleon knew there would be a winter that year.
And no, all of the tactics I described do not fall apart when they meet the server. Logging things off in advance does not get broken by tidi elsewhere in the constellation. Bombing does not get broken by tidi. We used bombing to great effect in some of the largest fights.
As for this bit of nonsense:
Did you read? Yes, they could keep all their enemies on the gates in 3-D and 1DQ, just by using their massive advantage in numbers to ensure that if we left those positions, they’d just come through the gates. We had to stay on the gates. Which meant we didn’t have a lot of options for dealing with large-scale attacks behind the lines—which were absolutely possible, as we ourselves demonstrated by sending out bomber groups every day.
What’s more, by using a fight on the gates as cover for their bombers’ attacks on the jammer, the tidi would mean we’d take hours just to get off the gates if we tried. And you know what doesn’t get tidi’d?
Entosis. The thing they needed to do. First cycle is subject to tidi because the module has to cycle once. But there’s no warning alert until that finishes, and once it finishes, it is all pure time.
But you cannot just come through the gates. That is the neat thing about the server and the mechanics: they simply don’t allow that to happen because of endless jump tunnel, tidi, lag, disconnects and so on. And even then you still have more than enough people to send a few dozen Harpies over to the cyno jammer that is being attacked by bombers. They make short work of bombers.
They did. They just didn’t do it with supercapitals. They came through the gates daily. Their fleets loaded without a problem. Tidi did not prevent a damned thing. What kept them from getting off the gates wasn’t server issues, it was bubbles, and their own decision to try to kill the fighters.
No, they don’t. Because when local spikes, the bombers cloak. And either the Harpies are stuck there, and so ignoring other jammers being attacked, or they leave, and the bombers start back up again. And if the Harpies spread out to cover all the jammers, then you bomb them. Multiple bombing runs, 20s apart, means the ADCs are down for the second one.
Which, again, is something their FCs know.
And nothing of that works well in tidi, especially if tidi is not limited to just one system but spreads to the entire constellation or the entire region even, as it has during your attempt to attack Ihubs. With your jump bridges inside the 1DQ1 constellation, the harpies won’t be stuck anywhere.
Which is pointless to do as they would not have managed to get in with all their ships but only a few at a time, which is just a meaningless meatgrinder that accomplishes nothing. Simply because the server does not allow that kind of tactic to work.
Really?
REALLY?
You think they lost 2700 ships loading ‘a few at a time’? Dude, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Yes, SUBCAPS. Try that again with supers and their fighters. Besides, what are the supers supposed to do on a bubbled gate? With thousands of fighters on it? Your supers were out of range for engagement. I know what I am talking about, especially when it comes to this atrocious server.
I tried last night to get on the INN"S server but I could not find it. Whats INN anyways and I think we can chat without joining a server.
Because I’m not giving my personal discord info out on the damned EVE-O forums. Holy carp.
Well, since they wouldn’t have the fighters out coming through the gate, that’s not even an issue, now is it? But what were they supposed to do? As I already noted: you make the first wave a bunch of smartbombing titans, and suddenly they’re not on a bubbled gate.
But more importantly: they wouldn’t need to have used supers to hold us on the gate. If they’d done exactly the same thing, but with 400 bombers seeded in the constellation instead of dropping a quarter-fleet of T3Cs that all had to refit before they could fight… and if they’d done it 3 months earlier, before their numbers atrophied and ours climbed as much as they did…
Yeah, it’s a very different situation.
Obviously not.
And this is surely not going to create any tidi or any lag, when the smartbombs hit the bubbles and fighters. And the titans are definitely going to kill these bubbles in due time before your titans volley them off the field because you can’t bring in support or else that will be in big trouble due to the 8 titan smartbombs as well.
So much for that.
Yes, it’s going to create tidi. So what? Tidi isn’t the servers breaking. Tidi doesn’t prevent things from working. When the servers have trouble, they’re almost always on an unreinforced node, btw, and 1DQ was reinforced for months. Time Dilation is not that. We’ve had thousands of fights in heavy tidi all the way through this, where everything worked fine.
And no, our titans obviously aren’t going to volley them off the field, because our titans weren’t even undocked. To DD anything on the gate, our titans would have needed to be well off tether, which means they’d have been vulnerable to them bringing dreads in through the gate, just like our dreads died to the subcaps they brought in.
I’ve been part of the command team for every major supercapital fight in the last six years that involved Imperium supers. I’ve run fleets in those fights from my Hel. I know it’s hard to admit you don’t know as much as you think you do, but really… you don’t.
That is a stupid argument. The gate is bubbled. If Papi’s titans were just killing the bubbles, you have ample time to get your titans in position to kill Papi’s titans. If they brought in dreads later, they could not go to your titans because they would be still in bubbles, especially since you’d be warping in dictors as well. Your titans are not at risk at all unless your cyno jammer in 1DQ breaks because even if the bubbles were gone and the dreads could warp, your titans are still 300km away from the gate, aligned to the KS and it takes ages for a dread to align in the smartbomb created tidilag. Not to mention the dictor bubbles.
So much for that.