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By the time Haargoth showed up, Bob were already running out of steam. They were being solidly stonewalled after losing a few dozen caps to a sniper dread hotdrop in Detorid, followed by a nasty POS grind in the DG- constellation where we often outnumbered them with the help of PL and old-NC titans. We had retaken everything they had POS-spammed but hadn't yet been able to evict them from their NPC staging system.

The far south was another matter however. At the time we owned a pretty huge swathe of the map from Scalding Pass around to Paragon Soul. While we focused on stopping Bob in Detorid, our far south was under constant pressure from Russians including Stain Empire, -A- and ROL. Once a director spy dropped our sov in R2TJ we lost a vital jumpbridge link and couldn't properly defend the moon-rich Esoteria area. That space was gradually being eroded by downtime sieging, kiting and POS spam.

If the war had continued on that course, the most likely scenario I see would have been GoonSwarm surviving with a much smaller domain. We would have ceded any territory west of Tenerifis/Omist to the Russians and continued making life miserable for BoB until they gave up and returned to Delve. As for how history would have progressed from there... I guess we'll never know.

As much as I'd like to vote on some stories, 76 pages of crap is way too much to read through. Surely someone could provide a search feature of some sort?

CCP should have hand-picked the results themselves. It's no surprise the Goonswarm's own Mittani is/going to get the win. All they have to do is tell every alliance mate to vote for his story regardless of how good it is. Mittani writes a ton of buzzwords and everyone starts drooling. Ridiculous is the word that springs into my mind.

I wont say "cheating", thats an ugly word. The correct word is nepotism.

By the way a good story doesnt needs to be about "epic" events. Normally is not only what you tell, but how you tell it. Having a gaming website has nothing to do with story telling and to be honest a story where metagaming is involved destroys the immersion of the tale.

I agree. But in fairness, Mittani's is by no means the only story whose narrative style is non-immersive. A majority of the submissions are written in a way that emphasizes the "I'm telling you about my experiences sitting at a computer playing a game". aspect versus a "real experience filtered through the eyes of a New Eden capsuleer".

Although doubtless Alliance bloc voting etc. was a factor, this may simply be that such an immersive style is too "RP'ish" for a playerbase notoriously allergic to roleplaying (which I often attribute to the high number of engineer types that play EVE). Likewise, it may be the assumption that an epic/large event tale even if written like an AAR has potential that can be realized in adaptation -- seeing as even the best written entry will likely never make it into media with its original prose. Ironically, it will be the ultimate RP rewrite.

I say this as an entrant who believes his slice of life pieces aren't epic ( but which I confess I think are well written) and believes smaller stories well told have a place, and has voted for others' stories some of whom are beautifully told. Yet I don't beieve that a the success of the winning stories is just about vote rigging. That's sour grapes.

That said, I do feel determining "artistic merit" soley via vote, particularly in the political bloc and power center heavy world of EVE is a bit odd. I'm hoping if not prizes, some of CCP's creative teams and artistic collaborators will themselves look through the stories to mine them for source material as well.

Houm, i may be doing something wrong... browsed the 4 first pages and didn't find any story that caught my eye to read nor had a high rating. Are they sorted randomly, maybe? Where are the best ones?

Kudos! No surprise the usual suspects are getting all votes, but i've found some interesting stuff on top of that.

~~justice won~~

"At the end of the day, this isn’t about the trip to Iceland, or the decade of PLEX, or marveling at the stunning Icelandic nature." ... this is about giving 240 plexes and 2 trips to Iceland to a powerful alliance just because they have good numbers.

The stories do not matter and every sensible person knows that.
Mittani could have submitted a story with five words in it "I own you CCP lol", he would still have won.

You makes yourself appear stupid with this one, CCP.

~we'll never know cause we won with great stories fair and square~