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Join Date: Dec 2004
Posts: 7
+0 Internets | The Goons are still not dead yet? Quote:
This forum thread deserves my applause. I haven't read so much of a corporations forum thread so thoroughly in what seems like an eternity - and its a great reminder that I still care about EVE.
To answer the question "where did the Goons go wrong?" by itself is impossible. Go wrong at what? To people like Jasmine/JF, they failed to bring a new angle of thinking to what they deem as an old and jaded community. They are upset the opportunity to do something entirely new was squandered. Instead they fell into the same habits that I see a thousand other corporations making. I'm sure some Goons will disagree, but the simple fact that you are new to EVE and everything is new to YOU does not mean we haven't seen it all before.
Your tactics, your leadership, your structure, your loyalty, your approach. None of it is unique, despite believing the contrary, and I think if there was ever an expert on radical thought it would be Jasmine.
So the first failure of expectation is innovation. I say expectation, because that is what some people wanted to see. It doesn't mean that GoonSwarm was trying to innovate in the first place or that they should innovate, because after all, the standard and established norms which JF find stagnant are generally the ones that have mass appeal. They simply wanted to provide a stable and friendly environment for newbies to flourish in, and you can't do that with wild ideas which are harder to grasp than the game itself - unless your leader is more charismatic than Jesus and has the intellect of Einstein and the cunning of Sun Tzu. To see 2000+ people running around with radical political viewpoints and unorthodox (non-metagaming) strategies would be quite the sight. In fact, I'd real money to see that just because it would turn EVE on its freaking head. And I'm sure that making public my own personal dissapointment, and having my ideaologies associated with JF will cause me violent fits of vomiting for many nights to come. Sorry Jasmine
The second reason why people's expectations were let down with GoonSwarm was their inability to capitalize on the tiny foothold they were given into 0.0 politics/warfare (through sheer luck, might I add) in any sort of long term capacity. They sorta had it, and then they didn't. For this, I squarely blame the current leadership - Remedial. He may have the ability to stir up the hive, but you can't expect to have any long term success without the planning, logistics and sheer political cunning to go along with it. The internal drama which was posted on E-O boards between Remedial and his directors perfectly exemplifies his inability to accept that HE ALONE IS NOT GOONSWARM. He may have created it, he may have the powers to destroy it. All corporations go through creation and destruction (eventually) and what matters is what you do in between. Remedial simply doesn't have the patience/stamina for it. The cold hard truth is that he likely created GoonFleet as his own personal shortcut to the success/fame he's been unable to grasp in the last three years on his own.
So did GoonSwarm prove the point that even low skilled characters can wrestle with serious alliances in 0.0? If they wish to believe they did, simply by contesting XZH for two weeks, fine. But I don't believe they did. To prove a point they would have to been able to not only contest but hold that space. To prove that newbie ambition is more powerful than all the isk reserves of D2. To show that skillpoints and dreadnaughts don't matter when you have organization.
In the end they lost the space. They didn't have the proper attitude going in, because a lot of it was "its okay if we lose it, we're still new!". If you go into any war with the option of defeat being "acceptable" by a large majority of your membership, that is the only outcome you'll recieve when there is any pressure put upon you. A mistake you are making now with the BoB war. And initially you had the right idea of hiring mercs to do the dreadnaught work, because really.. thats the only recourse you have when you can't fly a dread. But in the end you simply hold onto that concept.
So what are we at now? Lack of innovation, and lack of organization. You've dissapointed quite a lot of people right there, but they were unfair expectations to begin with. It would be nice to see an entity come in and blitz the entire cluster in their first couple months, but the sad reality is that you can't do that. EVE has a steep as hell learning curve and the only way you'll be anything more than "NewbFleet" is with time. We all did it, so will you. But I think the even sadder reality is that many people (especially new ones) will misunderstand this and see it as "I can't compete unless I have skillpoints and isk" which is entirely untrue. My largest pet peeve about this community is the overestablished relevance of skillpoints and isk - and I was hoping a non-EVE based community would come in to clearly and definitively prove otherwise.
Of course, to blame GoonSwarm of these two "failures" would be pretty silly. 99% of EVE's corporations can be blamed of being newbs when they were newbs, and lacking innovation. No, thats not a worthy topic of discussion.
The real question should be "what have the Goons done to deserve being held back / hated / oppressed / insertsomething ?"
And boy, am I going to love answering this question.
I will say now that any Goon who seriously believes it was done to curb them from being a future threat is simply put: a moron. There IS a certain expectation from BoB when it comes to how other entities treat us. It doesn't require asskissing, or fear, or even general basic compliance to anything we say or do ingame. I'd be lying if I said those weren't nice when they do happen. But I'd also be lying if I said that is exactly what we/I want. No, I want people to think they can beat me. I want them to try, hard. I want them to go to great lengths at showing EVE just exactly how much "BoB sucks". Why? Because its fun fighting people who try. I'm not saying anybody who doesn't try to Jihad us is bending/rolling over, they could simply have similar political and strategic viewpoints (FIX is a good example).
Getting that out of the way lets me focus on the core problem. We all know the reprocussions of them. GoonSwarm in its current state will never be allowed to exist in EVE, ever. If you take that as the threat of BoB hounding you ingame for all eternity, good. If I said this extends to the entire EVE community and end up sounding arrogant in your eyes, thats fine too. I do not represent the "EVE community", but BoB is part of it, and I know the people who I personally associate with and the community which we as a group associate with - and it we would simply not be a part of this mythological "EVE community" if it blindly accepted the cancerous filth that resides within GoonSwarm.
If you've read this far and feel insulted at my last statement, don't. You're probably not part of it. I tread lightly for this next part, because I know blanket statements are stupid. But the public perception of the SomethingAwful community (from an outside perspective) is basically this:
Its a community that I believe started with an honestly witty and comedic premise, then mutated into something totally different. When you get such a large community based around "comedy", people will naturally get a bit competitive and try to become the funniest one of them all. They then start believing 'any response is a good response' and slowly the truly hilarious stuff got buried under mountains of what I deem trolling. There are hundreds maybe thousands of people in SA who believe comedy lies in insulting or "poking fun at" anything and everything. This gets a response, which may not always be positive. In defense people start saying "its only the Internet man, dont be so serious", which slowly begins to mutate into "nothing should ever be taken seriously on the Internet, because its not real".
This one phrase is the catalyst for everything that is wrong with the SA community, and the Internet at large. Its used as a carte blanche to act like a retard towards other individuals across the Internet. This has continued for long enough to become the prevailing image of SA, which has then resulted in further multiplication of members like that. Now they have majority rule. To feel insulted by "internet jokes" is against the status quo, and the very borders of the SA community itself. Anyone who steps outside of it will be ridiculed into submission of one form or another. Going against it at this point is pretty much impossible. There are no reprocussions of behaving this way because the community pretty much encourages it, and being a jackass doesn't break any known Internet law.. so within the safety net of privately hosted forums, and carte blanche statements, something awful truly exists.
Even if lowtax wanted to change the community, which I don't think he would given his fame and phat $, the only way to do it would be by destroying it and removing the communal meeting place of Internet delinquency.
Whoa there Digi, thems some mighty fine rhetorics! But what does this gots ta do with EVE?????
To put it bluntly, if people wanted to pay real money to be unfunny internet clowns towards each other, they'd be giving it to lowtax and not CCP. People come to EVE because they want to play an internet space game, not troll some forums. Ok?
The LARGE majority of GoonSwarm has done this quite well. To argue this would be silly. The EVE community is tight, and thus passionate about making this the best MMO in existance. Some have been around for nearly five years, which is about four years of when it wasn't even a thoroughly "playable" game. We aren't attacking you because we despite newbies, or your internet spaceships might kill our internet spaceships in the far future. The tasteless remarks made about Smoske's tragic death was done by a small group of people within your ranks who are still playing the game as a forum, and not any forum, but your SA forum. They did it to get a reaction and achieved quite well in doing so, as a result they thought they were being the funniest cretins alive.
Where things went really wrong..
..was when the rest of the Goons defended these people out of some misguided attempt to preserve freedom of speech, and to a larger extent.. out of sheer habit and fear of prosecution (defining borders of your community = dont take it seriously man! its just a game!).
That is the exact moment in time where you failed; failed to respect our community, failed to realize there may be consequences for doing so, failed to police yourselves.
So now what?
Now you're being prosecuted for the actions of a very few people, who unfortunately for GoonSwarm, have a commanding position within the corporation. For it to end, you'll have to learn this isn't SA Clone #2657 the hard way. We will keep teaching you the meaning of consequence for as long as you give us a reason. And you will learn, my God you will learn - either by disassociating yourselves from the trash that started this (which you've begun already) or finding your own path in EVE outside of GS.
You can think of BoB as parents, scolding children for unruly behaviour. You can think of the community as Borg, forcing assimilation upon you under penalty of death. Pick and choose they are free metaphors, I really don't care. But what you're fighting against is nothing short of omnipotence itself. Only a cause delivered by the Divine can motivate the most bored and jaded vets of EVE to camp your stupid shuttles 24/7.
And thats what this war is, a Holy War. We put a Jihad on you, and you'll find that even the thickest roleplay variations of this war (which I may be spewing now actually!) are quite hurty. You're going to go through days, weeks, and most likely months of ingame pressure and constraint. Until one day, you finally realize its not a place to pew pew and irritate the crap out of everyone who doesn't suckle on lowtax's teats and condemn anyone who even thinks of pulling another stupidly unfunny stunt. Then, and only then will the cancer be gone.
/runs off to buy a stock of Uranium and Plutonium charges
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05-13-2007, 08:27 PM
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