R&K are locals pretty much if that's who you're referring to. They've been in and around Syndi for a long time.
The Colorblind Angel of Kugutsumen - Turning Bad Country into Mad Country one post a time
I wasn't, though they did kill caps as well. I had merged the RK incident and the NC./BL incident
I've noticed that there's a pretty big disconnect between the general consensus of kugu and what's actually happening. It seems enough people have said it in this thread that people are taking it as fact.
Can't really blame them for dying to R&K. But it's one of those cases I'd blame them for even trying, hiding would be the only sound tactic. You gotta know your limits.
~~~~GIMMIE +REP+ GIMMIE~~~~
The facts have a strong anti-A- bias.
I agree that they have much to learn. (Personally, I hope they come back to Syndicate to learn some more -- our KB could use the fluffing) My point is, as long as the moonjewgold keeps flowing from the CFC teat, there's no learning going on.
Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.
Zagdul said as much himself in forums -- FA literally could not give a shit if they lost 250B. That's a drop in the bucket when you've been given a region and a half to jew in, especially when that half-region is Pure Blind. (It's second only to Tribute for number of tech moons in Eve.) Also, FA is not some fresh new alliance; it's been around since 2009. Most of their current crew, including Zagdul, has been in it since early 2010 when they were still CVA pets. They've been part of CFC, and living in Pure Blind, for nearly two years now. If you've been around that long, with that kind of cash flow, and still haven't figured things out? Then, I suspect that you probably won't ever learn.
Even with the current nosedive in Tech price, a tech moon still brings in 12B in revenue every 30 days at current Jita prices. (Used to be quite a bit more.) Takes about 500M/mo in fuel to run a large Gallente tower, and assume the guy who runs it skims a bit, so imagine that you get 10B in realized profit per month from a single tech moon today.
Despite the spy, I don't know exactly how many tech moons FA has -- their accounting isn't as good as, say, TEST. It's safe to say that they have at least fifteen, given their location and their relationship with CFC. (More to the point, it's well known that FA owns more tech than TEST.)
Let's lowball it at fifteen tech moons. That's 150B of profit coming in with very little effort. They can reimburse half of their alliance losses (their killboard shows that they lose about 200B in ships per month) every month, and still have 50B left over -- bizzam, the 250B is replaced in full by end of year. If they have more than 15 tech moons or if you mix in mining of other R32s/R64s in their space or if they have a non-zero tax rate (hint: all but one of their main corps is 10%) or tech goes up over 100K isk/u again? TBH they could probably have that shit replaced in 2-3 months.
250B is, very much indeed, a drop in the bucket to the average CFC member. And that's one reason, among many, why I'm a bittervet and spend a lot of time infiltrating instead of undocking :P
A drop in the bucket means that you lost so little, that you have a thousand like that left.
So can we say a chunk of the yearly profit?
In b4 "didn't really want that 250b anyway"
Oh shit I missed it.
If you want to be pedantic, then sure: it's a large impact, but that impact is softened significantly due to the massive amount of revenue coming in.
The situation is such that, if nobody had bragged about the theft, then a rank and file member of FA would notice nothing amiss. FA's warchest has been temporarily impacted, but day-to-day operations continue as normal. 250B is far from a life-threatening loss; it's not painful, it's not a learning experience, it's barely even remarkable. The only damage dealt has been to one or two people's ego.
That's something worth being a little bittervet about, IMO. If not on principle, then think on:
* How would an up-and-coming alliance reach the same kind of financial stability today? Is there any room for newcomers in the 0.0 sov game?
* Is there any way to effectively dislodge an alliance powered by tech moons, the way that OWN was dislodged by Dreddit?
(note: tech could be replaced by any other massive amount of passive income -- it's jut the most common and effective one.)
* And, if you want to be a morality/philosophy faggot: What pressures exist to encourage a tech-holding alliance to improve themselves?
The CFC didn't seem to have too much trouble dislodging White Noise and Raiden.
See above. If your alliance isn't improving itself, growing its base of pilots with both new blood, and keeping the old guard interested with fights and activity, you are getting worse. If you're getting worse, then sooner or later somebody will come and they will take your space. Sometimes you can get really rotten before anyone notices and then collapse under the first real pressure (old NC). Sometimes it's fast decay and public infighting that draws the sharks (White Noise). Sometimes unlikely shit happens because you have a giant achillies' heel (PL getting beaten by IT Alliance). Sink or swim motherfuckers.* And, if you want to be a morality/philosophy faggot: What pressures exist to encourage a tech-holding alliance to improve themselves?
Up and coming alliances have to deal with and plan around their limitations, financial and otherwise. You don't need tech moons to achieve financial stability, you just need to be smart.* How would an up-and-coming alliance reach the same kind of financial stability today? Is there any room for newcomers in the 0.0 sov game?
It's interesting, the idea of "newcomers". It's long been observed than most "new" alliances are just the same old people with a new name. And that most corps and individuals who really are new to 0.0 join established alliances. The exceptions have been goons and TEST, who were both able to make new alliances with new people, because they had numbers and a pre-existing structure.
Is there room for some newcomers in 0.0? Sure. There's a space in the drones being fought over by scrappy little alliances right now. Big swaths of the south are owned by stale alliances. As for where newcomers might come from? Not empire -- between CVA, IRC, and the return on ED they're cleaned out. Maybe another big internet site will do a dreddit with the out-of-nowhere 2000 newbies thing. There's a japanese client, we could get a new ethnic alliance. I'm surprised that one of the wormhole alliances hasn't done a vanity 0.0 grab to get their name on the map, they're rich and not adverse to pvp, but I know nothing about them. Maybe they look down on anyone in 0.0 the same way we look down on empire.
Getting betrayed by people you trust is a long tradition in nullsec. Goons (twice), PL, BoB, etc.
My grasp on eve history before Jan. '11 is pretty goon centric but I'm sure everybody has their favorite examples.
In null, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
edit: Wait shit the apt simile is clearly Rocky III
So explain to me exactly what you feel I should learn from this?
I mean, by your standards, I should fuel pos's, manage the wallets, the handing out of jump fuel for all the caps, and anchor/online every tower.
Because, if I can't pass out a role once and a while to assist managing much of the stuff that goes on requires us to grant roles and access to shit once and a while. It's how the game works.
I stand by giving Fencejumper the roles he had. He was a trusted person in our organization and amongst the coalition. Nobody expected him to pull it off, but that's the nature of the game. He had been skimming assets for about a month which included a ton of moon goo, 40b in pos fuel and a bunch of personal assets from the members of my corp which he had access to.
Trufax: We went to syndicate with deliberate intent as we knew that Delve would kick off. We had other options on the table for deployments like going to hang out with FCON over in Russian space and rekindling old friendships. Instead of having a big, fat, lazy alliance pull it's load all the way across the galaxy, we decided to go to Syndicate which within good staging range of Delve and allowed our pilots to piggy back off coalition fleets to get down to Delve.
FA has never been and we have never made claims that we are some bad ass null sec alliance. We always have and always will remain a soldiering force. What we're good at is supporting allies and we're the best in EVE at it. Nobody in EVE brings the numbers per capita across any timezone to fleets like we do. Nobody.
When our shit is hit, we do well by defending it and yes, we ask allies for support sometimes just as in every campaign, they've asked for ours.
Yes, we lost ships.
Yes, we're pretty fucking bad at EVE.
Much of what you say is very true. Our issues aren't what we need to learn, rather what we should even attempt to learn. We're a soldiering force and always have been. Our pride comes with supporting allies and its always where it has stemmed from. By going to Syndicate we did learn. We learned how fleets can escellate against us and how to properly manage one of our own. We learned that e-leet pvp'ers don't give a shit about their moons and that they'll run and hide to avoid K/D ratios. They did it twice against our fleets. Next time, we'll keep this in mind as a goal to focus on because we don't give a shit about k/d ratios. We went down there for a quick moon grab and ~something~ to do while we waited for the Delve war to kick off.
Not to mention, the beatings we took weren't against Syndicate residents, it was against NC. and Black Legion and Rooks and Kings. To be quite honest, I'm not ashamed or embarrassed to say I got my ass handed to me by any of those names.
A lot of people in this thread are making claims that we need to learn something from this 250b heist. We don't and stand by the dude who had the roles was, when he was on his game, correct for his position and in that regard, we have nothing to learn other than that EVE is a cold, harsh, universe.
We were well prepared for this to happen to us and we'll recover just fine. Much of the assets were returned by Fencejumper as he did feel guilty about it. He was convinced by SETC who was a corp that didn't like some ~behind the scenes~ discussions of how we were/will be implementing some alliance level standards on recruitment. So, they convinced him that these standards were against the nature of how we do things in FA, he agreed and went rogue.
Shit happens. It's pixels.
If anything we as an alliance needed this. We needed something to band behind as things have been pretty stale lately. The day Riverini posted this to his site, there were literally hundreds of X's from our proud Fatal Ascension Grunts throwing support behind the Alliance in it's time of need.
The next day, ice mining ops went up and we literally mined most of what was lost back.
Most of the assets are replaced except the ihubs, ihub upgrades, pos modules and a bunch of purchased ships that were to go up into alliance contracts so dudes have ships to get into.
EDIT: In reality what they took was shit sitting in 'trusted' areas of hangars.
What hurt: The ~40b in pos fuel we had to re-import so we could build fuel blocks then re-distribute to towers. Logistics sucks dude, especially when moving ice products.
The ~300k tech + 5m fullerides they skimmed out of us out of this months SRF income.
The rest, didn't matter. It's all shit that we were actually pretty smart about and set isk aside in the event this did ever happen. As soon as we worked out all that was lost, we went and bought back what wouldn't crash the market in Jita and went about normal day to day business.
I'm not pretending that it wasn't a large amount they got from us. However, we are already 'recovered' and back to saving mode for our war chest/oh-shit wallet. They punched us in the dick where our logistics guys are concerned. They didn't really hurt our income or our alliance wallets (which were absolutely in tact).
Considering how ~trusted~ the members of that corp was, we got off easy. They could have done FAR more damage to us.
Haha holy shit Fatal Ascension essay contest
You got owned in the lower regions by a decent logistics uprising.
You admitted it and have demonstrated that you had systems in place to take care of such an emergency.
People still really hate FA, honestly not sure why, seems like a pretty chill place to just x up in fleets and actually enjoy EVE. (Do you not share you Halloween candy Zagdul?)
/thread vOv
Fake Edit: Oh yea and Riverini is still allowed to post here evidently.
Spaceship friends don't let other spaceship friends madpost.
I can come off pretty harsh to some people at times. It's part of the title when I accepted the job. Most leaders in EVE aren't liked. Matter of fact, I know very few alliance leaders who are in any form of a spotlight who are liked by all.
As I grow, I have learned that it's pretty fucking hard to make everyone happy but pissing everyone off is a piece of cake. Sometimes, the pissing off aspect leads to dudes pulling shit and it's not the first time it's happened to us nor will it be the last. I sat with the other 'directors' of the alliance who actually have the ability to push the button and we all agreed on some further measures to mitigate this much of a hit in the future.
FYI, I was never approached.
You made that claim on your site. If you're going to make shit up, at least do it with some sense of credibility to at least give your site a little bit of respect dude. I wasn't hiding anything. When the heist happened, I told the world about it because I'm not embarrassed by it. It's part of the game and sometimes you lose, sometimes you win. On this occasion, we lost.
They hate us for our freedom.
What I don't understand is the thought from others that we've always had this awesome alliance income just because we've held a varying number of systems in PB for two years. As far as I remember, we only had two or three tech for a 2000+ man alliance up until the collapse of the NC, and in our early pet-of-a-pet days we had to go ask Mostly Harmless for shit moons in our own space that we held and paid the bill for. Hell, we didn't even have a proper SRF before we got space in CR, and that was paid out of the corps and members' pockets.
In that context, losing 250b that we can make back in a reasonably short time isn't all that big a deal, as many of us still remember our long era as poor bads.
FA you just need to do what TEST did and go on a long deployment completely on your own (or maybe with 1-2 friends, GENTS maybe?) and hammer out a war command structure and improve your FCs/discover new FCs. Your line pilots are no worse than any other alliance.
Also you should work on creating a better culture of loyalty to the alliance, rather than a corp. A corp-centric alliance is in a very dangerous position. in FA this is especially dangerous because you're built from a very large number of "independent" corps that jump from alliance to alliance. Find the cliques, break that shit up, even at the risk of losing a corp or two over it. In TEST wherever we've discovered people putting a corp's gain above the alliance, they have been ruthlessly weeded out by mass trolling / mocking on the forums.
From what I understand you gave a lot of logistics duties to a single corp / member. That's just asking to get robbed. Were you checking on them at all? Montolio is constantly poking around the various branches of TEST, asking questions about how things are going, and if he isn't happy with your answers he'll fire you and get someone else.
In before someone walks off with 300 billion from TEST and makes me look like a moron.
They've pretty much had a target painted on their back since someone held them up as the shining example of how much better Goonswarm helped smaller alliances develop than the old NC did. Worse, their tendency to have something spectacularly stupid happen to them (like this basically) every few months makes them an easy target.
For once, I wish I wasn't right. You haven't learned anything -- you fully intend to repeat what you've done in the past, and we'll all be here to laugh at you again when you get fucked by your members again. Actually, when it happens again, I'll probably laugh at CFC leadership too for giving a space cadet so much space.
I'll give you a goddamned freebie on this one, and this is something even the most moronic poorfag Syndicate alliance gets: Share the load.
Have more than one person doing transport / SRP / moongoo. Have them check each other's logs and keep each other in line. Check in on them yourself regularly. Think in terms of "move this chunk of stuff that a director contracted to you", not "we trust you, here's hangar access, move it." The best way to mitigate the inevitable hit is to have more than one person involved, keep them happy, and make sure they don't burn out on the thankless job that is 0.0 logistics. Their happiness is more important than the rank and file. Build a support network, build in positive reinforcement from other people, so that they actually feel loyalty to the alliance rather than to their corp or themselves.
If this sounds like a lot of work -- it is. Welcome to the big boy chair.
oh god, you pulled 'we needed this' and 'lol its only pixels' in one post. good fucking job.
You say that living in syndicate. What exactly do you know about running a big alliance with tons of sov and hundreds of pos's?
The logistic load in FA is probably distributed over a couple guys but there is only so many people that you trust with tens of billions. One of the dudes he trusted ran of with some isk and a lot of stuff from hangers. The more people that have access to these hangers the more chance it will happen again. You either do everything yourself or you accept the risk that this stuff happens, even with guys you trust.
BTW where is setc going?
Is that the best you've got?
Hint: Just because I live in Syndicate now doesn't mean I've always lived there.
Ironically, giving more people access to hangars reduces the chance of thefts from happening, simply because you're not putting a ton of responsibility on 1-2 people and letting them burn out. This is unintuitive to some, but it's the truth -- Dreddit pulls this off somewhat well with their non-critical hangars. Alternately, you can eschew hangar rights entirely and manage logistics via contracts if you're going for super-paranoia. (However, especially when it comes to POS fuel, doing an excessively controlled system based on paranoia can bite you in the ass. Ask goons about sov payments.)
Very true.
TEST has a lot of people with access, but it's split up.
We have Montolio and 1-2 other people with the main wallet, then isk for reimbursements gets dumped into another wallet for a group of people to actually pay out. They don't actually look at the mails and approve/deny requests though, we have a small army of volunteers to do that.
Or say the dread cache, there's maybe 6-8 people who can hand out dreads and have access to the main fuel caches. They don't fuel ships though, they just dump fuel out of locked cans into the fuel hanger which a whole bunch of people can access to hand out fuel.
Same thing with the newbie free ship program. The main stocks of hulls and parts are locked away, but there's several people who just dump a stack of hulls and parts into the training hanger where 20-30 people can just grab hulls and fit them up and hand them out. Since there's a ton of people doing this it doesn't matter if a few people get sick of eve for a week or two.
I like how everyone thinks fencejumper was our only pos guy
I've noticed that there's a pretty big disconnect between the general consensus of kugu and what's actually happening. It seems enough people have said it in this thread that people are taking it as fact.
So why did he rageleave?
Good question
I've noticed that there's a pretty big disconnect between the general consensus of kugu and what's actually happening. It seems enough people have said it in this thread that people are taking it as fact.
you wouldn't leave test if you could take 250bil?
Ron Mexxico - Broski North
Helios Black > not mad ron
Because we had a leadership thread up discussion opinions on a potential alliance wide recruitment policy. He didn't like that we may potentially put recruitment standards on his corp so he got ~mad~. We also were discussing cutting super capital subsidy (his 'position' in FA) and assumed that due to the tech nerf, we'd be pocketing any additional isk.
This is very similar to how we do it.
The issue is that Fence was one of the 'few'.
@the lol zag said pixels.
realtalk: I know you'd rather me come here, crying my eyes out or letting the world know that we're literally crippled over this. 200b is quite a bit of assets to get from someone. I'm playing a video game, those dudes used the mechanics of the game to their advantage. The fact is, we're pretty responsible with what we have and always keep a 'war chest' to the side which is why we can shrug it off. We prepared for the worse. Not only that but, much of it was returned to us to the tune of roughly 60-80b making their total haul 120-140b.
That's a serious amount of assets ripped off. I'm not going to pretend that it didn't have an effect on us, but the facts are, I personally have no emotional attachment to the shit that was stolen. I'm more concerned for the dudes who put in the leg work to keep us running than I am for ~lol pixels~. It hit our logistics dudes square in the nuts because they work very hard at making sure this alliance is prepared for things like this. The fact that Fence was in on that preparation, he was able to hit one of our more vital hangars where fuel stocks are stored. This is just another bump in the road for us, everyone has them. Asset wise, this alliance is worth FAR more than the 200b they nabbed. We invest isk in assets, have stock piles of fuel and do well by not having everything liquid. I don't pretend that it was nothing to the people who invested the effort to help us be prepared. Needless to say, we've tightened up the reigns a bit more and have made further divisions in how our assets are stored and managed. If a theft were to happen again, we shouldn't get hit this hard going forward.
Putting his corp ahead of the alliance? Should have been a screaming red flag.Because we had a leadership thread up discussion opinions on a potential alliance wide recruitment policy. He didn't like that we may potentially put recruitment standards on his corp so he got ~mad~. We also were discussing cutting super capital subsidy (his 'position' in FA) and assumed that due to the tech nerf, we'd be pocketing any additional isk.
Live and learn I guess.
There is only two alliances that i know to be completely alliance centred: Goons and Test. Every other alliance is a collection of corps with a collective goal or gameplay style(and fail alliances of course). A corp CEO defends his corp's interests in alliance decisions which does not mean they will never suck it up if they don't like something. Goons and test on the other hand are lead by the leader of condi and dreddit and other the corps just accept the leadership wich does not mean they can't get people in higher positions. This makes them very stable alliances that bounce back easily and have less power struggle issues because they are usually contained to one corp.
FA is made up out of a lot of equivalent corps with a common gameplay style Zag described as soldiering. They like joining fleets and a lot of corps force every member to pvp. They lack top tier fc's but all in all they are quite an impressive force in about every time zone. A long term solo deployement to develop their military structure combined with a transition to the goon/test squad system might make them more powerfull and stable but corps hold a lot of power at the moment.
Have't corps realized that a solo corp is more or less useless in nullsec? Why do they keep thinking they should be individual troublemakers? We had those types in TEST, OMFG, E115, etc. It causes nothing but problems. I cannot understand how people have not figured this out yet.
Mostly yes, but there are exceptions to this rule. For example, the old Foundati0n alliance had ~1200 members in between 50-100 corps (it varied and I forget how many) and they were managed well, so they kicked RA's ass and controlled the entire region for a long time. That was back in what, 08?
The Colorblind Angel of Kugutsumen - Turning Bad Country into Mad Country one post a time
Wait how is that an exception?
Or am I being retarded an need to put my reading glasses on?
Spaceship friends don't let other spaceship friends madpost.
By 'solo corp' I assumed he was talking about a corporation that thinks about itself first. I'm no expert, but I'd assume if you had dozens of tiny corporations in an alliance, each corp would mostly look out for itself first. It's possible I was misunderstanding/am wrong, of course.
The Colorblind Angel of Kugutsumen - Turning Bad Country into Mad Country one post a time
The Colorblind Angel of Kugutsumen - Turning Bad Country into Mad Country one post a time
Shut the fuck up Securitas.
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