Broken Toys

@geldonyetich
Well, the chatlog is eloquent in one way. He was fed up with BoB, that much is known. But if he has any brains, he knew that he would never be trusted by the Goons. First, he’s not part of the SA community, that much would disqualify him with them. Second, since he is spilling the beans on BoB, they’re expecting him to do the same to them if he ever had the chance, so they’ll probably end up ousting him. I think he realized that what he was doing was suicidal. Maybe he will just hop on another alt and start from scratch; maybe he’ll just quit the game. Impossible to know.

@Queso
Nothing wrong with some metagaming. It begins to be a problem when either most of the game is expected to take place there (as it seems to be with EVE), or that the developers are burying their head in the sand when it comes to the impact it has. As an example of the latter, I remember reading a discussion a few months ago in which some people made the case for or against a global chat channel in Darkfall. The Against camp made the argument that the channel would be used to disclose the position of ambushers/PK’s, this sort of thing. The problem is, guilds aren’t going to be affected, because not only would there be a global guild channel, but even if there weren’t, the guilds would just hit Vent, entirely bypassing the communication limitations introduced by the game. I for one would love to see a game where you’re forced to develop your strategy based on incomplete and sometimes inaccurate information, instead of being updated live by your guildies doing their stuff at the other end of the map.

I can take metagaming in small doses, but not when it starts to drive a game all by itself, or that it destroys other aspects of it.

EpicSquirt :
@Vetarnias
Good point Vetarnias.
Imagine Dark Age of Camelot without chat and without guard spam: You would actually have to roam to defend your keeps, you would have to post scouts who would have to use some kind of information-system to forward an inbound attack.

Or you’d have what actually happened which is an out of game arrangement between the players to allow all realms to be able to port to the same zone because having to look for enemies is hard work.

Don’t underestimate the power of the route of least resistance.

Rapewaffle :
>However, outside of being able to read minds and know this guy was about to turn, there’s nothing BoB could have done to prevent this.
This is false and you know it.

I do? Sure, there was infighting going on within BoB, but the entire leadership was doing it. From the entire pack of complainers with the right permissions, how do you pick out the one who was about to defect?

So, as far as risk vs reward is concerned, I’m not satisfied.

I suppose we could say that the Goons were rewarded for not dropping the ball on this – if someone with a big mouth started blabbing, the whole deal would have fallen through. Aside form that, as the Mittani himself says at the end of the youtube video, they “were completely helpless.”

@IainC
“Don’t underestimate the power of the route of least resistance.”

I was always against the iRvR as it was called. If taking keeps would be easier, due to a communicaton breakdown (missing chat etc.), then maybe players wouldn’t be that interested in iRvR?

@IainC

Pardon my ignorance but what does iRvR stand for? I get the Realm vs Realm part, just not sure what the i means.

@Viz
Well, you should see the movie Idiocracy then.
Joke aside, I never understood somethingawful or found it particularly funny. It always seemed to stay around the level of most moronic reality shows and work on the most basic human instincts (oh look, an accident and some blood, let’s spend 2 hours watching, maybe someone died!).
That said, it works. A lot of awful TV shows work and it probably takes only a couple of power-hungry fellas to control all that mass of people. Works for religion and politics, why not games

@Kemor
I’ve tried to understand the SA phenomenon a few times. In a nutshell, it was founded on a business pattern that would be a complete flop in 2009, but the idea of subscribing to a forum for posting privileges, even though it’s a one-time fee, gives an impression of being an exclusive club among those who did pay. Add to this a certain approach to life and the Internet (“makes you stupid”) that I could best describe as snarky, self-deprecating (perhaps for having paid to subscribe in the first place) and nihilistic, and you get the Goons of today.

Reading their forums is free, so I know that in my case I wouldn’t fit there if I bothered to pay the fee. It’s just too caustic to my liking, and furthermore, there’s something essentially American about it — more so than any other general-interest forum I’ve seen — that, as a Canuck, a lot of what is discussed there would just be way above my head (like Broken Toys’ political posts).

And?

geldonyetich :
So, as far as risk vs reward is concerned, I’m not satisfied.
I suppose we could say that the Goons were rewarded for not dropping the ball on this – if someone with a big mouth started blabbing, the whole deal would have fallen through. Aside form that, as the Mittani himself says at the end of the youtube video, they “were completely helpless.”

There is a lot missing here. Two things happened when the director defected: (1) BoB lost sovereignty in all their space (2) One of BoB’s corps lost a small dreadnought fleet and some fuel caches. The corp theft, while not insignificant, is not terribly uncommon in the world of EVE (one of GoonSwarm’s FCs just made off with a newly built Titan a couple of weeks ago).

The loss of sovereignty is really just a leveling of the playing field (GoonSwarm and our allies are also working without sovereignty benefits). It has been frequently argued that the combination of Titan DDs (2 will destroy all sub-capital ships on the battlefield), Cynojammers and Jump Bridges make space ridiculously easy to defend. GoonSwarm itself has recently been under attack by numerous alliances while our allies were busy elsewhere and had little problem defending most of our space (space geography made some spots difficult) — even when our participation was kind of ‘meh’. Overall this led to a sense of stagnation in the game.

As for risk/reward, I dunno man, the amount of isk generated by Delve is absolutely incredible and that generates accompanying risk. From a GoonSwarm perspective, we’ve abandoned all of our conquerable space and, if the invasion of Delve fails, will be homeless. Additionally, -A- forces have been pouring into our old space, complicating evacuation of assets. Assets are being lost to various camps by goons either too rushed or too dumb to take proper precautions. Even more assets will be locked away in stations until such time as they have been reconquered by a friendly alliance (which may be never).