Vetarnias :
@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.

The irony of this is that the original purpose of the $10 fee was to stop people from just registering a dozen accounts to spam the boards. I’ve been a member for a couple years and honestly while the signal:noise ratio isn’t ideal sometimes the noise is usually at least somewhat entertaining.

Regarding the article at hand this is just more evidence to my theory that the most fun to be had in EVE online is not playing it.

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).

The argument for GTC sales has always been that it allows lower income players and players in depressed economies to get their game time paid for by more real-world affluent players. Alliance have also been known to use in-game currency to buy time cards for special-purpose accounts that no one really wants to own personally — think buffbot accounts in DAoC.

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).

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

iRvR stands for ‘instant Realm v Realm’. Specifically it refers to a phenomenon in DAoC where the three realms would co-operate to ensure that they had one keep each in a single realm’s beach-head zone. This allowed players of all realms had the ability to teleport directly to the same place thus concentrating all the PvP action in one small area.

Breaking this iRvR state by recapturing the necessary keeps was deeply frowned upon by many players.