You're actually paraphrasing Gordon Gekko to support your argument? Don't get me wrong, I'm a capitalist pigdog, but really? I'm not sure I understood that part of your comment either. You seem to be saying 'don't be communists it will make you too strong, everyone will team up on you and you'll get bored of winning'? Gharl, are you a communist in disguise?:/

It's all material benefit, and material benefit can be turned into NIC. I mean, that's what NIC is. A stick used to measure the value of goods and services. The stick differs in length according to how much NIC is in the game, but it's still the same thing.

Most of those things amount to a monopoly on certain production and better time efficiency, both of which are directly equivalent to currency.

Out of all the items in the list, the only non 'NIC' benefit to living in 0.0 rather than travelling to 0.0 is that it's inconvenient to move back and forth. If people want to PvP, they need to be on beta, so perhaps that's a good option. I don't think it is, but the rest amount to giving a handout to the most powerful corps in the game, which does little to increase competition over these islands.

Smash them with magnedart and run like hell while your team finishes them? Then you get the best of both worlds, massive unnerfed magnedart damage, and zero explosion damage.

1. Free anything is pretty good value for money, complaining that it is not good enough is extremely childish. Children get stuff for free, the rest of us have to work and pay our way.

2. 10 bucks for the full version is also pretty good value for money. I know a guy earning good money who would literally prefer to dumpster dive than pay for a meal, but you guys are taking tight to a whole new level.

3. Everytime I see this complaint I automatically categorise the complainer as someone looking to expand their RMT business.

Actually, yes they do have all those advantages at once. That was just the most blatant example. I've got plenty more that aren't as bad but are still a long way from close. Every time I try a fit, I check how it would look if a guy with 3x the EP was running it, and then put it on the shelf to 'come back to in 6 months'. You don't need points all over the place, just a few key extensions a few points higher than the other guy.

EP is an equipment advantage too. Limited CPU/Reactor/Slots ensures that. It's also likely to go hand in hand with an experience advantage, but that's the one I'm happy to take on. I'll lose to inexperience, and I won't care, because I'll be gaining experience. I'll lose to poor equipment, because the other guy is risking more than me to gain that advantage. I won't lose to insufficient EP, because it's irrational to try until the relative gap is smaller in a few months.

If everyone had started last month, I'd be out there now. Anyone who feels the risk is too high for their superman toons should consider if they really belong there.

The more I mess around with potential pvp fits, the more I change my mind and begin to agree with the people saying EP scales characters too fast. I'm not motivated to head out there when a guy using the same fit but with 25-30 more ranks in key extensions has literally 90x my survivability vs sustained damage, 4x my survivability vs alpha, and twice my dps. It's going to be 6 months before I have half the EP early access people have, at which point the gap may be narrow enough that it won't feel like outright suicide to engage. Scratch that, to be seen. Asking to increase the rewards for those who can operate out there with a much lower level of risk than the rest of us is fairly rich tbh. Just talking about beta risk from the perspective of someone with 8x the EP of many players is bad enough.

I'd be careful with the histrionics. If you don't keep it sensible and logical, they may just decide the appropriate solution is to nerf tyrannos recharge.

Obviously they do. Otherwise they wouldn't be looking for people to exploit them, they'd exploit the lot themselves. And nowhere has 'I can shoot you in the face through my foot' ever been a form of power except in the minds of easily destroyed alliances. It sounds especially so in EvE. You shot him in the face, but you shot yourself in the foot to do so. Now you still have a ton of guys who need shooting in the face, but you can't walk. And they're coming for you.

'I can shoot you in the face, period' is the situation you need to create before you start beating your chest and lording around, and that is not a situation you will ever find yourself in with allies, because it would no longer be in your interest to be allied to them.

If you can't leverage (example from soss) 8% of the value of a titan *  the number of people paying you rent/tribute per month into a strategic advantage, you have no business calling yourself an effective military force. If you think you don't need a strategic advantage, same again. Ergo, you need people to exploit that space in order to be an effective military force. People might pretend they don't, but it's obviously costing them. Acting superior to people you need doesn't sound all that bright to me. To each his own though.

The whole thing sounds like a massive logistics fail to me anyway. You should be exploiting that space yourself, and if you don't have the wherewithal, you're overextended. Every post seems to emphasise leadership failure as the root cause more and more.

I would be far more inclined to laugh at the all conquering chest beating heroes who took something they couldn't use and need to prance around flexing their e-muscles to the guys they 'gave' that space to than I would at the guys who saw and took an opportunity to make a buck, increase their capability, and develop some experience, all at levels beyond what it seems like they should be able to.

This is where our communication is failing. You see corps with lesser military might as intrinsically inferior. We're back to 'smaller corp allying with bigger corp is bad, because'.

Punishments for killing people in certain areas of the game sound pretty weak to me. Nullsec sounds fun, but simply having highsec in the game kind of removes the opportunity to call it harsh. There are plenty of really harsh games out there. Haven & Hearth for example is too harsh for me, I make a new guy there every world and quit as soon as he dies, which typically doesn't take longer than a couple months. Last time it was because I made the foolish, and fatal, error of trying to swim across a river, since I heard swimming had been made easier. It had too, I nearly made it.

Warning : Long post ahead.

Sorry I wasn't particularly clear on what I was referring to. I actually was talking about this particular section:

None of that should need leadership intervention. If it gets to the point where you are actually facing any of that, you've already made several mistakes, the first of which is developing, through either error or inaction, a culture that encourages such behaviour.

Things like discontent about how a fleet commander handled a fight should be squashed by members of the corporation who understand that 100% perfection is almost impossible to achieve, they shouldn't need direct intervention from the leader of the entire alliance. They shouldn't even need intervention from anyone in a leadership role, and in fact, having leadership intervene in disputes between members should be a last resort, for when the community simply cannot resolve the situation themselves. If the organisation is structured such that fleet commanders are seen as closer to members of the leadership than the regular guys, that goes double.

You should have far more people who recognise that organisational cohesion is more important than any one battle than you do people who will whine about things not going their way and looking to cast the blame. If you don't, you simply can't afford to externalise that onto the whiners and make it all their fault. You obviously have to look at how you got yourself into such a situation.

This is what I mean when I say 'more of it to handle, more people to handle it'. If you try to centralise such things, the workload of your leadership is going to spiral out of control. They need to be diffused through the entire organisation, such that they never cross your desk, so to speak. The means for doing so are fairly clear, and not remarkably difficult. You look at root causes of behaviour. If you've created an organisation where people who want an FC position think that the easiest way to get there is to point out that they could have handled an engagement better than the FC who did handle it, guess what they'll do? Whose fault is that?

How does the quote go? Something like 'Give the people what they want, but make sure they want what you do'?

Dissenting opinions can be encouraged without damaging morale if there is a culture that recognises the organisation is more important and valuable than the situation under discussion. I can *** about my taxes, but I'm not going to move to west africa because they pay less tax.

These are social dynamics that you can observe every day simply by reading a newspaper. These are the kind of social structures that people have been building for thousands of years, why not stand on the shoulders of giants?

It just sounds like a lot of guys want to play autocrat, and due to that mindset, are devaluing the people who actually get things done in favour of the people who tell them what needs doing. The kind of mind that reads The Prince and decides they know all about governing, or has experience leading an organisation with massive inertia working for them and thinks that qualifies them to participate in the catherding exercise that is virtual leadership.

I've been a member of several guilds that were composed largely of military and ex military guys, and the leadership tend to try to stamp the leadership techniques that work in the military onto the guild. It works too, provided the guild is almost entirely composed of military personnel. The most successful leader I have seen of a guild that was closer to 50/50 military and civilians was actually a schoolteacher who had served for a few years.

Real world techniques tend to assume that people are already heavily invested into the organisation. Someone else has done the propaganda, job hopping looks bad, they're signed up for several years, for whatever reason, they have little desire to make trouble. You need to draw on the reasons that real world techniques work, not draw on the techniques. You don't have that inertia supporting you, especially not if you're building an organisation from scratch.

So anyway, back to the point a little, this is why I say that the 'pet' term only has impact if leadership hasn't done their job right. From reading the soss regarding pets, it becomes obvious that such is the case. Alliances are explicitly looking for pets. If it were me, I would be looking for 'business partners to engage in a renewable contract for rights to exploit sectors of space that we can defend but lack the manpower/infrastructure/capital to exploit for ourselves'. There's no gain except a little epeen stroking to be made by referring to people as inferiors when recruiting them. They have the role of exploiting those minerals, you have the role of defending them and exploiting the sectors you can. What makes yours more important? Both are needed.

Gradually you can pass more responsibility for defense onto them, but there should never a need to dictate to them what they must do. If they are regarded as equals whose contributions are important and valued, they don't need orders, they're already motivated to do what needs to be done. They're also willing to hand the responsibility for control of fleet movements over to you as more experienced in that area, provided they are recognised for excellence when it is demonstrated and thus given more responsibility next time.

So I guess if people find the term pets insulting rather than laughable, it's because they really are being seen and treated as pets by their allies. Seems like some (maybe even most) alliances in eve are doing just that. In that context, throwing it around does seem to make sense.

These sound like things you do from within engagement range.

While this just sounds like you are attempting to counter the example without understanding what it means. I shouldn't have deleted the last line I wrote there sorry, I have a tendency to think that I am expressing myself more clearly than I am.

The point is this : the faster bots are, the closer they are to safety at any time. Top speed 60, outpost 4ks away, you're 4 minutes from safety. Top speed 90, outpost 4ks away, you're 2 minutes and 40 seconds from safety.

It also changes accum from 'very important' to 'the only stat that matters'. Look at LWF. Now ask yourself how many people would slot every accum booster they could and run only autocannons in order to maximise their speed. Ask yourself whether changing green bots from 'very close to slowest' to 'blindingly fast' overnight is a good change.