A Christmas Gift in Minecraft

I have to admit that I have a serious blind spot when it comes to redstone automation in Minecraft.  It isn’t that I try it and fail or can’t figure it out, but that it never even occurs to me to bring that sort of thing into my projects.

Of course, that may be related to the type of projects I choose to take on in our world.

I am always the guy building roads and paths and laying mine cart track, all stuff that keeps you in motion.  When my last base gets inconveniently far from the current location of the work I just make a new one.  The old gets left in my wake, a rest stop for other travelers and maybe an attraction for tourist, but generally a place that doesn’t see much more practical use.  The inevitable building, mine, lava fueled auto-furnace, farm, and corral will mostly sit idle once I am out of range.

So redstone likely doesn’t occur to me in part because it isn’t mobile.  I would leave behind anything I built and just have to remake it at the next base if it were useful.  And since I tend not to use it, I don’t even think about building redstone devices.

And doubly so when it comes to my current road building project, which will be about 18km as the crow flies, but more like 40km when one takes into account the twists and turns I make to find a path across the world without having to build multi-kilometer bridges across oceans.  I’m now just 2.5km from the Mansion starting place but have built at least 4km of road that has snaked around mountains and seas alike.  This is going to be a long project.

And my plan for the road to have a continuous strip of cobblestone the whole way (interrupted only by lighting) so you’ll never lose it and will be able to find it by crossing over it (and maybe some day that will be a rail line) slows me down as I need to quarry stone along the way.  Sometimes I get it as part of digging out the path forward, but sometimes I just have to tear into the nearest hill to get some.

But the day after Christmas I logged in and went to my forward base along the road to find a gift.  Skronk had been asking how to get to the road and while I was away, had walked out and set something up for me; a redstone cobblestone generating machine.  He had dug out a big more of the small base to set it up and put up signs to guide me.

Machine this way

It uses a piston driven by a redstone clock mechanism to push cobblestone created by the interaction of lava and water out with a furnace at the end to stop the cobblestone from going too far in the limited space.

That seemed to turn out cobblestone at a respectable rate.  The problem was that I was about ready to give up on that base as I moved forward.  It was already quite a ways from the end of the road.  But Skronk had foreseen that.  The machine is fairly simple and so as part of his gift he put together a set of parts to build another one.

DIY Kit

It looked much better at Christmas when all chests were wrapped up like presents. (See here.)

So as I moved further down the line I eventually copied most of his design and setup my own cobblestone generation station at the next big encampment, which also happened to be an NPC village on the coast where I was going to have to build my first long water spanning bridge.

Cobble creation inside

I setup and harvested some there, then had a thought.  The building was still a walk from the bridge site, maybe I should get it even closer… like right there at the bridge.  I was also curious too see just how far a piston would push the cobblestone.  So with visions of automated bridge building in my head, I setup another generator.

Right at the bridge

I quickly learned that a piston will only push 12 blocks, so I wasn’t going to be able to sit back and watch it cross the sea without me.  But having it right there was still very convenient.  I could harvest a couple of stacks and run out and build some more of the bridge surface, then come back and harvest some more.   So Skronk has given me a new option for resources.

The only real issue is the speed of harvesting.  With a diamond pick and a huge seam of stone, I can harvest cobblestone much faster than the machine can generate it.  And while the machine is right there so I don’t have to haul the cobblestone very far, it can seem a bit slow.  I have been tinkering with the timing on the clock to see just how fast I can get it to run.  There is clearly a threshold where the piston moves too quickly and does not give the cobblestone time to form.

Meanwhile, the road work goes on, though I have to take a break and run back for supplies.  My bow broke, my last flint got used up, I’ve run out of iron, and while standing at the end of the bridge I accidentally threw my diamond sword into the deep sea and wasn’t able to find it again.  The hazards of construction work.

 

CCP and the Elephant in the Room

I’m feeling a bit wrung out on the video game front this week, and it is only Thursday.  We had Daybreak slip in a great subscription deal I had to seriously consider.  There has been the World of Warcraft Legion expansion launch and all the attendant excitement and new things.  And then there has been CCP, which has seemed determined this week to occupy every last free neuron in my brain with its announcements.

First CCP hit us with the dev blog about how fleet boost would be changing with the coming November release.  The boring, old “park your boosting alt in a safe” method is being replaced with an area effect method that will put boosters on grid and in harms way.  This made a lot of people very angry, and you could certainly tell who was invested in the status quo.

Then, yesterday, CCP announced that EVE Online was going free to play.  Sort of.  Certainly, free to play made the headlines, though the plan itself is a lot closer to WoW’s unlimited trial than, say, Rift’s up-until-now, you’re not in Azeroth, everything is free method.  (Trion decided they needed to charge for expansions, which sounds fine for me.)

The free accounts announcement, the Alpha and Omega clone system, seemed to get a favorable response.  The implications of this proposal on the game are huge, and most people seemed to accept that CCP’s first problem was going to be containing the current player base to keep it from abusing the system for their own ends without locking Alpha clones down so much that nobody would want to play them.  It is going to be a balancing act, and only the naive think it will be easy.

This Alpha clone plan will have two big bonuses right away.  First, it will attract lapsed players back to the game, and lapsed players with friends and such in game are likely to resubscribe from time to time if they are allowed constant access.  Second, unless PCU remains stagnent or drops even further, it will have been effectively removed as the favored “EVE is dying” metric… for a while at least.  I expect that the PCU will go up significantly for months after Alpha clones become a thing.

But the real goal of the plan has to be to bring new players, fresh blood and/or meat, to New Eden.  And, on the surface, this seems very likely.  Free is the best price point at which to get people to try your product, and we have seen spikes in the PCU when CCP has free weekends on Steam. (See the weekends of May 6 and August 19 on the EVE Offline new character creation chart.)

Unfortunately, here is what you do not see after those free weekends: Any significant change in the PCU.

This is the elephant in the room,  the long time problem for the game, the failure to convert trial players into paying customers.   Some of you likely remember this chart from the New Player Experience panel at Fanfest 2014. (video here, chart comes up at about the 16 minute mark.)

New Player Trajectory

That chart is actually more grim than it seems.  Half of the players who get through the new player experience and subscribe, cancel and leave the game before their first subscription cycle is up.  40% solo mission for a bit, then leave.  And maybe 10%… that seemed to be the optimum number… found some experience they really liked in the game and stuck around to become a bitter vet.

The thing is, that chart, as noted in the presentation, only talks about people who made it through the trial and the new player experience and decided to subscribe.  I would have to imagine that, were the chart to run from the start of a trial account, the percentages at the end would dwindle to insignificance.

During the previous Steam free weekend, approximately 20,000 new characters were created in the game.  Did the PCU shift by much?  The next weekend was a little better.  It broke the 30K mark, which is back to being the benchmark for a “good” day, literally the same situation the game was in back when I started in 2006.  But there wasn’t anything dramatic after the free weekend, neither in August nor in May.

So it would be tough to call that free weekend a rousing success, at least when looking at the longer term.  CCP threw 20,000 new characters onto the ramparts of the current new player experience in August (and 26,000 back in May), and the NPE held them off.  Solid is the bulwark of the NPE, and it will deflect all but the most determined capsuleer.

Basically, on top of the learning cliff that is EVE Online… or maybe it is at the base of the cliff… damn metaphors… there is a new player experience which is indifferent at best.  As I wrote in the past, it is a toss up as to which kills the game harder for new players.  I lean towards the NPE being more critical.  If you could get people engaged and enthusiastic, they might ask in the help channel or go out of game to figure out the more obscure bits.

I am sympathetic to CCP on the NPE front.  It is easy to sit and yell at them that they need a better one.  But actually creating one, a fun and engaging experience that will draw players into the game, but which isn’t too rigid, and which moves at just the right pace… the right pace for everybody… is a very tall order indeed.

And it isn’t as though CCP hasn’t tried.  The NPE has changed drastically a couple of times since I started the game.  My first experience was guided but flawed back in 2006.  That was replaced by a much more closely guided and mission orientated experience.  And lately, we have the much more free form opportunities, which I watched my daughter struggle through, and during which she asked me the magic question, “How do I warp to something?”  NPE fail.

CCP has even tried to hold classes to educate users directly.

As I said, they have been trying.  We’re just not there yet.

However, at Fanfest earlier this year, as part of the keynote, there was a passionate talk by a new member of the team, CCP Ghost, who gave us a vision of a better NPE. (Video here, CCP Seagull introduces him at about the 52 minute mark.)

My hope is that we are not done with announcements about the it-so-needs-a-good-name November release.  My hope is that CCP has at least one more thing to share with us, something about a vision for an engaging NPE that will retain new players better than the attempts that have gone before.

Because without that, I don’t think the Alpha clone idea will make a big enough of a difference.

I know I will be logging in any unsubscribed accounts I have laying around to start training up alts to their five million skill point cap come the November release.  What would be the downside of that?  I fully expect the Imperium to have an Alpha clone doctrine.  I expect that a lot of current players will take advantage of the Alpha clone idea and that, far from any sort of “filthy casual” response to 5 million SP pilots, they will quickly be accepted as part of the ecosystem and the game will adapt to them.

But unless Alpha clones attract new players, players who become invested in the game and end up subscribing, there won’t be a whole lot of upside for CCP as a business.  And to get there, I think we need the NPE vision that CCP Ghost was trying to describe to us.

The Pokemon GO Phenomenon

Dad, there is a Zubat on you!

-My daughter, in the middle of the SF MOMA

Pokemon are literally everywhere these days.  Pokemon GO was everywhere this weekend.

I must admit I am a bit jealous of those who have smart phones for one.  The lure of Pokemon made me consider ditching my ridiculously cheap pre-paid burner phone… that is pretty much just a phone… in order to be able to join in on the fun.

It is one thing for my Twitter feed to be all abuzz about some new game, but it is quite a new thing to be able to actually see people engaged with a game out in the world.  On Saturday I drove my daughter up to the store to get a new inner tube for her bike.

In the car she was telling me all the Pokemon she could see.  Meanwhile, just looking out the window I could clearly see people hunting for Pokemon.  You see three guys with their smart phones out in their hands, one wearing a Pikachu shirt, and there is little question as to what they are pointing at.

My daughter wanted to get her bike going, which she has ignored for a few years, in order to ride around with a friend in search of Pokemon.  The park in our neighborhood, which has a Pokestop , has people walking all over with their phones out.  My daughter says that there is a group that camps the park and has a lure… a cash shop item that attracts more Pokemon to a location… running all the time.

Nintendo has been big on getting its users to get up an exercise from time to time, there being the Wii Fit, or the Pokewalker that came with Pokemon HeartGold & SoulSilver, to the built-in pedometer in the 3DS, to the simple reminders that come up during some games to encourage players to take a break, stretch, and maybe get some exercise.

But if Nintedo’s plan was to get its fans up and out of the house, it has succeeded. In my daughter’s case, my wife has gone from, “You need to leave the house” during the day to “You need to be home by…” pretty quickly.

Meanwhile, people I know who pay no real attention to video games know what Pokemon GO is suddenly.  Without any big marketing campaign, it made it to the top of the download list on the iTunes store and, more importantly, to the top of the highest grossing app list as well.

Not there haven’t been problems.  A couple of times my wife handed me her iPhone 6 so I could try the game out, only to be thwarted because the servers were down due to the overwhelming load.  And then there is the battery drain.  The app uses GPS, data, and your phone’s camera, which conspire to kill battery life at a prodigious rate, though a fix to help that is reported to be on the way. (Some battery tricks are available.)

Then there have been the real life issues.  Along with the usual tales of people driving or riding bikes while playing, or restaurants dealing with the whole thing, a news story surfaced about somebody finding a dead body while out looking for Pokemon near a river, while a group was using Pokemon lures to attract players to a remote location in order to rob them.  And then there was just some bad taste moments, like a Koffing, a Pokemon that emits noxious gas, being found at the United States Holocaust Museum.

Koffing found at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. #Pokemon #Pokémon #PokemonGo 😅✡😈💀👾⚰🎮🕍⚱📸☠ http://pic.twitter.com/I4SdxhM2NO

— EncyclopæDramatica (@EDdotSE) July 10, 2016

But otherwise the whole thing seems to have been a rousing success, where the biggest problem is simply too many people wanting to play the game.  They have held off rolling it out in other countries until they get a handle on the server issue.  Nintendo’s stock is up and I expect that we will be hearing a lot more about Pokemon GO over the next couple of weeks.  Cue segments on the news, late night talk shows, and Ellen this week for sure.  There is a Blastoise in the fountain at the White House and people are going to talk about it.

Even today’s XKCD features the game.

This could be a moment of change for Nintendo.  After the tepid response to the Wii U, largely due to self-inflicted issues, Nintendo seemed to be grudgingly heading towards the mobile market to appease shareholders.

The culture of the company has always seemed to me to be that of a hardware maker, for whom software sells the hardware. (I’ve worked for companies like that before.)  They make new versions of Super Mario Bros. in order to sell more consoles in to the family room and new versions of Pokemon in order to sell more handheld units.  And that has been a viable plan for the most part.  Certainly the GameBoy, DS, and 3DS lines have been sustained by Pokemon.  I own a 3DS solely to play Pokemon, and I doubt I am alone in that.  But while they like software sales, they measure their success as a company in hardware units sold.

And, suddenly, they have a runaway success on somebody else’s platform, a runaway success where they are only the software vendor in an environment where they do not control everything.

Pokemon GO will have more daily active users than Twitter by Tuesday http://pic.twitter.com/O7mgW5FrhJ

— Tero Kuittinen (@teroterotero) July 10, 2016

This has to be an eye opening moment for Nintendo which has, in the past, disparaged the idea of things like 99 cent apps, stating that their games have more value than that.  And now they are making bank on an app they are giving away for free vie the age old scheme of giving the razor away and making money selling the blades.

I don’t think Nintendo is suddenly going to give up on hardware.  That is too ingrained in their culture.  It is too much a part of Nintendo’s identity.  But I imagine they will be even more serious about this sort of “software only” thing in the future.

In the mean time I am waiting for people to draw the wrong conclusions from this sudden success.  You know that, right now, somebody out there is going, “Hah, I can make a GPS AR app better than that!” while forgetting that the immediate success of Pokemon GO is in large part because Pokemon is a 20 year old franchise for Nintendo that has enjoyed immense popularity.  Pokemon is second only to Mario at Nintendo, and the plumber showed up nearly a decade and a half earlier.  Ars Technica has a post up on some of the realities.

It will be interesting to see how this changes things, if it changes things at all.

Back in our little corner of the world, my daughter caught several Pokemon at the SF MOMA.  While the place seemed to be mostly populated by Zubats, she did get a Growlithe, which made her happy.  She was a bit upset that we wouldn’t let her run out of the MOMA when there was a Bulbasaur across the street by the Metreon.  When we finally did walk over there it was gone, but there was a Jynx nearby.  We went over to grab that.  As my daughter was trying to catch it, I saw somebody else walk up who was clearly there to catch it as well.  Pokemon are contested and whoever catches it first gets it.  My daughter managed to grab it, but there were not hard feelings, just a nod to a fellow fan who moved off in search of further catches.

So it sounds like Pokemon GO will be a thing for a while, the app of the summer.

Friday Bullet Points from Beyond the Blog

Or just some tidbits I want to bring up but which don’t quite justify a full post.

Nintendo and More Nostalgia Validation

As part of the 20th anniversary of Pokemon, Nintendo released Virtual Console version of the original Pokemon Red, Blue, & Yellow on February 27th of this year.

Old games come to the Virtual Console

They just reported some sales numbers, which included more 1.5 million copies of those three titles.  Not bad for 20 year old games.  Of course, as I noted, vanilla Pokemon, if you will, plays pretty well.

EverQuest II hits Game Update 100

I can’t recall if EQII has gone through every number, 1-99, with updates, but still, hitting 100 is something of note.  And this update has a bit of a nostalgia twist to it.  While I’m not exactly thrilled about the owl mounts, the re-use of Zek, the orcish wastes zone for additional content has me happy.  It has always been one of my favorites among the original zones, probably for its consistent/coherent “orcs, orcs, orcs” theme.

I won’t be playing it however.  For openers, I think my highest level characters are still in Kunark… which is late 2007 content.  And then there is the fact that I am still pottering around on the Stormhold nostalgia server, where I am level 22.

Nostalgia on Wayne!  Often the theme of this blog.

However, Stormhold still seems to be lively enough.  There aren’t five versions of The Commonlands running any more, but Freeport always has a couple versions running due to population.  Still, it is nostalgia one way or the other.  That seems to be a theme of late.

Blizzard Might Give You a Free Copy of Warlords of Draenor

Way back after Blizz announced the Warlords of Draenor expansion, I had a post about phishing attempt offering a free version of the expansion.  One of the key tells was Blizz giving you a free copy of… well… anything.

Of course, things change.  As Keen reports, Blizz now has an offer out to long lapsed subscribers offering them some free game time as well as a FREE copy of Warlords of Draenor.

Nostalgic old WoW logo, image swiped from Keen and cropped

Blizz must be staring at the reality of a long spring/summer until WoW Legion hits.  They stopped announcing subscription numbers last year, but it would be hard to imagine they have gone up from 5.5 million in the last six months.

Of course, this offer has only gone out to people who didn’t purchase Warlords of Draenor, which is making me think about my pre-order of WoW Legion.  Given that my post-Cataclysm experiences in WoW have generally been best when I am late to the expansion party… being a year late to Mists of Panderia was excellent timing… I am tempt to just cancel my pre-order and wait a year or so until Blizz is ready to give me a free copy of WoW Legion.  Or until they open a retro server.  One or the other.

DC Universe Online and on XBox One

Well, the first title for the company formerly known as SOE has made it to the XBox.  As promised earlier this year, the five year old DC Universe Online has gone live on the Microsoft console platform.

XBox One! Would you like to know more?

Back during the Daybreak transition, this was one of Smed’s selling points, the ability to get titles on to XBox.  We shall see if it was worth the effort.  But at least they made their “Spring 2016” target.  Making dates is generally a good sign.

Diablo III Season 6 Starts Tonight

Just a passing note on this.  I had a lot of fun with Diablo III and Season 5… right up until the moment I got that last achievement and stopped logging in.  Goal driven much?  Still, the Season thing seems to work well, especially for those of us who are goal drive.  And here comes Season 6.

It has a 6 on a leaf, because leaves are seasons or something

However I am not sure at this point if Season 6 is in the cards for me.  I might need to skip a season to keep it fresh.  I would want to play a fresh character again, but not another crusader, so I would have to figure that out.  And I would have to see if the rewards appeal to me at all.

EVE Vegas is Coming

One of the final announcement at EVE Fanfest this past weekend was the date for EVE Vegas this year, which has sort of become the US EVE Fanfest.   The official EVE Vegas site has all the details.

The would be Halloween weekend

Tickets went on sale while players were still in Iceland and the early bird discount tickets were gone in a flash.  I am tempted to go.  I had a good time last year.  However, Halloween weekend seems like an awkward time to plan such an event.  It will definitely not be an “off” weekend for the strip, which means prices for everything will be up and venues will be crowded.  Not a problem for the party animals I am sure, but for a grumpy old guy who prefers discussion groups with maybe four or five people, this might not be the ideal date.  Anyway, tickets are going fast so my decision to go or not might be made for me.

Anyway, those are all the items that I had on my list of notes.  Tomorrow there will be an end of month post and then we will be in May.

Black Thursday, The State of the Goonion, VFK, and Circle of Traitors

Just some catch up on things from The Casino War this week, most of which I missed.

Black Thursday in UMI-KK

The Moneybadgers invested a good deal of time and effort after the betrayal at M-OEE8 reinforcing systems in Fade and Pure Blind which all came out in a great mass during Euro time on Thursday.

The foe prosecuted those timers in force and, as has become the norm in the last week, The Imperium was heavily out numbered.  In the face of that, the closer an objective was to our staging system, the more likely it was to get a fleet out to help it.

Unfortunately for TNT, systems in Tribute were also under attack including our capital system of UMI-KK.  We were easily the furthest from Saranen.  Still, our allies managed to scrape together an interceptor fleet to help us fend off the assault, leaving us only out numbered on the field by about 10 to 1.

While the hostiles didn’t get everything they came for, they killed the ihub in UMI-KK and freeported the station.  In addition we lost three TCUs, which is what changes the ownership on the map, and had a station freeported in Pure Blind.

CCP, getting in on the war to promote the game, included the battle in an episode of The Scope.

We were given notice by TNT leadership to pull non-essential items out if we could, but to otherwise have alliance specific doctrines and entosis ships ready to go in the region.  I had the foresight to jump my carrier out just the night before, since it was in a front-line system.  Meanwhile the enemy camp of UMI-KK has been sporadic at best so I was able to fly out four ships to our back up staging station and three more all the way back to Saranen.

The next timer for UMI-KK comes up later today.  We shall see what becomes of our capital.

State of the Goonion and VFK-IV by Next Week Maybe?

Yesterday was April Fools, and I couldn’t tell if it was an auspicious time for a State of the Goonion.  As noted in the episode of The Scope above, people were waiting to hear what The Mittani had to say. (Also, they included a nice little “more info” button on the video.)

Join The Imperium and save the Galaxy. Service guarantees citizenship. Would you like to know more?

The Mittani’s speech… and I like to picture him in my mind just as The Scope illustrated him using his in-game avatar… was short, coming in at under eight minutes.  War is no time for bloviation. (I’m sure it is up on SoundCloud somewhere by now. I watched the replay on their Twitch channel, where the speech doesn’t actually start until 8 minutes into the recording.)

Most of what he said was unsurprising.  A change of tactics to deal with the unfavorable odds we face in nearly every fight.  A return to the Megathrons of Baltec Fleet.  Siege bombers to attack enemy infrastructure.  Clouds of interceptors to harass when we are out numbered.  A couple new allies to help us out.

And then something of a bomb shell.

The Imperium would not be defending VFK-IV.  We haven’t staged out of VFK for ages, nobody lives there (so the ADM isn’t great), and so we wouldn’t be expending effort to salvage a system that is little more than a symbol.

VFK has been a rallying cry since the anti-Goon headshot attempt back in 2011 and reached meme status when “VFK by February!” became the shorthand slogan for the White Noise pronouncement that they would clear Deklein of Goons.  And the allure of the system is such that I wasn’t sure we could make that message stick.  Talvorian Dex wrote a long piece on his blog about the importance of VFK as a symbol, likening it to Stalingrad in the comments. (The station there used to be named “Mittanengrad” until it was renamed to honor Sean Smith/Vile Rat.)

Instead of VFK, The Imperium would be headed to UQ9-3C in Branch to defend the staging system of our allies in the north.  Oh, and we are already on the way there.

That turned into a huge brawl, but only after the ihub had been saved.  The enemy had to slog all the way up there, then fight through tidi to come to grips with us.  They managed to freeport the station, which was a blow, but we still have access to everything of ours in it and they have to come back again if they want to finish the job.

And, while our foes were locked in that tidi morass, VFK-IV came out of its reinforced state and was saved in what was essentially a non-event.  If the Jabber info was correct… I was at work when this happened… only MOA showed up in any force to assail the system, and they were chased off almost immediately.  As I noted yesterday, MOA can take systems… so long as they have a thousand allies flying cover in the area.  Alone, not so much.

So maybe next time.

Circle of Traitors

Yesterday saw the release in the Goonfleet forums of a 99 page document consisting of diplomatic chat logs between GSF/Imperium diplomats and Circle of Two and some annotation by Sion Kumitomo, chief of the diplomatic service of The Imperium.  It covers the arc of the relationship from CO2 coming to the CFC, hat in hand, looking for a home for its 300 pilots, grateful for any help, through much incompetence (one of their officers was systematically robbing them blind), to a feeling that the alliance deserved more than they were getting and demanding that be changed.

In what must be no surprise to anybody at this point, the document is already up on Reddit.  The reaction there is predictable.  Sion, already hated, is accused, by turns, of making it all up, of selectively editing, and of being a horrible obsessive for even keeping chat logs of diplomatic interactions with other alliances.  The whole document is too long and I doubt most of the comment authors read more than a paragraph.  The whole thing will be denounced and dismissed.

Which is fine.  This document wasn’t for them.  It was for us.

If you have no context, you can spin it however you want.  If you lived in the coalition for the last few years, much of what is in that document will link up to events that happened at the time and the behavior of CO2.  Things like bad participation in coalition wars, provoking our neighbors in contravention of agreements made, complaining when others do exactly what they did (like recruiting ITAI from another alliance), and generally being dicks to my alliance, TNT, demanding our space from the coalition.

Goons, despite their espousal of a Realpolitik philosophy at times, have their own sense of honor.  They can look past enemies of the moment and work with them when the situation is right.  They keep their agreements.  And they remember when people betray them.

Goons have a frenemy relationship with Pandemic Legion.  Despite him being a long time foe, they can work with Elo Knight.  Despite some of the acrimony of the Fountain War, they didn’t go hunt TEST to extinction, or even go out of their way to attack them afterwards, save for a couple of Reavers deployments for good fights.  Despite the rhetoric at times, it generally doesn’t get personal… unless you betray them.

This document was to lay down the reasons why the war against CO2 is now a forever war, how CO2 were helped, given chance after chance, with bad behavior overlooked, and, while the alliance was spending enormous amounts of time and ISK to defend them they chose to betray the coalition.  The only question is really why we didn’t kick them a year ago.

It doesn’t matter what happens in the broader war at this point.  If the Imperium is swept from its null sec holdings and has to evac to low sec, if the super capital fleet is lost, if other allies defect and we have to all hide in a system in the far end of Feythabolis under Russian protection, Goons will still take time to go out of their way to hit CO2 no matter where they live.

The document ends with the the following:

Best possible friends. Worst possible enemies.

And they mean it.