an unproductive evening
Apr. 1st, 2008 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat_sochoWell, that's not completely true. I wrote a couple of checks for rent and for phone/interbutts service. Going to wait to cut my hair until I get to Minneapolis, I think, unless I have spare time at Dulles - which is quite possible, since I'm going to be dropping off the Kia around 0800 and the flight doesn't take off until 1110.
Instead I had to log on to Eve and find out if I'd been podded on that ill-fated battleship run up the pipe to 319 this morning, or just lost the Typhoon. (Answer: B.) So, yeah...instead of going back to 1v and getting some more stuff ready to sneak into the front lines, I wound up in 49- with an Ibis, and instead of trying to run the pipe in a worthless n00bship I clone-jumped to 319 and went about my jewing.
That wasn't the thing that ate all my time, though; I wound up getting bogged down on the Goonfleet forums reading a tl;dr thread which started as a examination of why we don't have more fleet commanders and derailed at several points into whining about why our allies aren't here helping us curb-stomp BoB, arguments about fleet battles v. small-gang PVP, etc., etc. The one thing I took away from it is that the metagame of Goonswarm against BoB just isn't a lot of fun for the goons in the fleet, because lately there's been a depressing number of WW1 style charges into BoB's Titan-supported fleets, with WW1 style results. (Poor morale, decreased participation in ops, goons leaving GF for other corps outside the Swarm, goons leaving the game, etc.) I don't think the current leadership knows what to do about this in the short term; in the long term, of course, our superior numbers and economic strength should allow
the Swarm to grind BoB into the ground with superior numbers of Titans, dreadnoughts, and capital ships, but that's the long term and goons are mostly college kids who don't tend to think much about the long term. In the meantime, the sense/fear that the directorate doesn't have a plan rots our morale.
The game has changed. Time was that we could bring a few hundred frigates and cruisers to a battle and drive BoB and their pets from their systems, and that time was as recent as last summer. Now BoB is holed up in Delve, concentrated among the NPC stations and handful of conquerable systems. There's nowhere for them to run, and they can concentrate their massive supercapital and capital fleet at any point in their time zone to get an overwhelming superiority. Our various allies (except for Razor and Pandemic Legion) are off riding bikes, dealing with internal political tensions while smacking down uppity BoB pets/minor allies, or defending their own space from various assholes. Which really as is it should be; RSF was a defensive alliance aimed at keeping the BoB/MC alliance from overrunning all of 0.0 space, and neither the Russians nor the French ever saw this as the crusade of extermination Goons did. So it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the other members of RSF aren't climbing out of the trenches with us in QY6 to get doomsdayed. That goes double for IAC and AAA, who we're friendly to but not formally allied with.
To me this feels a lot like the depressing days last spring leading up to the Memorial Day Threadnaught. Thing is, there's no daring morale-boosting strike we can make against a critical BoB system, because they really don't have one any more. There's also no "Titan Manifesto" in the offing to convince CCP that the supercaps are horribly broken and making it nearly impossible to take a system against a determined defense based on half a dozen Titans. So it'll be interesting to see what our new CEO Darius Johnson and the directorate come up with to get the Swarm's morale back up and get us fighting again. We already know what doesn't work.
So now I'm going to go sort out my stuff for tomorrow, pack stuff in my backpack and suitcase, and get to bed two hours after I originally planned to.
But first, I'm going to turn this laptop off and put it away.
Instead I had to log on to Eve and find out if I'd been podded on that ill-fated battleship run up the pipe to 319 this morning, or just lost the Typhoon. (Answer: B.) So, yeah...instead of going back to 1v and getting some more stuff ready to sneak into the front lines, I wound up in 49- with an Ibis, and instead of trying to run the pipe in a worthless n00bship I clone-jumped to 319 and went about my jewing.
That wasn't the thing that ate all my time, though; I wound up getting bogged down on the Goonfleet forums reading a tl;dr thread which started as a examination of why we don't have more fleet commanders and derailed at several points into whining about why our allies aren't here helping us curb-stomp BoB, arguments about fleet battles v. small-gang PVP, etc., etc. The one thing I took away from it is that the metagame of Goonswarm against BoB just isn't a lot of fun for the goons in the fleet, because lately there's been a depressing number of WW1 style charges into BoB's Titan-supported fleets, with WW1 style results. (Poor morale, decreased participation in ops, goons leaving GF for other corps outside the Swarm, goons leaving the game, etc.) I don't think the current leadership knows what to do about this in the short term; in the long term, of course, our superior numbers and economic strength should allow
the Swarm to grind BoB into the ground with superior numbers of Titans, dreadnoughts, and capital ships, but that's the long term and goons are mostly college kids who don't tend to think much about the long term. In the meantime, the sense/fear that the directorate doesn't have a plan rots our morale.
The game has changed. Time was that we could bring a few hundred frigates and cruisers to a battle and drive BoB and their pets from their systems, and that time was as recent as last summer. Now BoB is holed up in Delve, concentrated among the NPC stations and handful of conquerable systems. There's nowhere for them to run, and they can concentrate their massive supercapital and capital fleet at any point in their time zone to get an overwhelming superiority. Our various allies (except for Razor and Pandemic Legion) are off riding bikes, dealing with internal political tensions while smacking down uppity BoB pets/minor allies, or defending their own space from various assholes. Which really as is it should be; RSF was a defensive alliance aimed at keeping the BoB/MC alliance from overrunning all of 0.0 space, and neither the Russians nor the French ever saw this as the crusade of extermination Goons did. So it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the other members of RSF aren't climbing out of the trenches with us in QY6 to get doomsdayed. That goes double for IAC and AAA, who we're friendly to but not formally allied with.
To me this feels a lot like the depressing days last spring leading up to the Memorial Day Threadnaught. Thing is, there's no daring morale-boosting strike we can make against a critical BoB system, because they really don't have one any more. There's also no "Titan Manifesto" in the offing to convince CCP that the supercaps are horribly broken and making it nearly impossible to take a system against a determined defense based on half a dozen Titans. So it'll be interesting to see what our new CEO Darius Johnson and the directorate come up with to get the Swarm's morale back up and get us fighting again. We already know what doesn't work.
So now I'm going to go sort out my stuff for tomorrow, pack stuff in my backpack and suitcase, and get to bed two hours after I originally planned to.
But first, I'm going to turn this laptop off and put it away.
