Crime & Punishment

There are so many errors and head palming moments in Gevlon's latest post that I'm not entirely sure how to begin. But I'm not just going to call him a moron and walk away. Anyone can claim someone else is stupid, it doesn't make it so. NO I'm afraid I'm going to have to deconstruct this multi-layered lasagna of idiocy and demonstrate just how bad it is.

There is a small chance that some of his followers, or heck, even Gevlon himself, might understand something, after all.

Before I start, I'll point out that a frequent error of Gevlon is that he'll come up with say, six facts, 3 of them true, one quite insightful, and 2 completely wrong. He'll then combine them into an overall conclusion that's completely off the wall, and then wonder why it is that no one thinks his prosciutto and mothball pizza isn't well received.

So let's start!

1: " This is the unique selling point of RvB: constant PvP with very low costs."

This is wrong for 2 main reasons. Firs the *individual* cost of ships is cheap. The *cumulative* cost can be quite expensive. It's not uncommon for RvB to lose hundreds, even thousands of ships. Granted, you can do nothing but frigate with cheap fittings and no rigs if you want, but many players will t2-fit their ships, fly cruisers or assault frigates etc. Not so expensive for a single cruiser, but it adds up. The second thing is that RvB is much more than cheap PvP. The community is very good, newbies are welcomed, veterans are respected, we have fun events etc etc. These are probably things that Gevlon sees as insignificant, but they are not.

2: "It represents losses on Feb 15-16, the weekend when RvB dropped the war. Not only the loss % to external enemies halved, but their ship values decreased too. Why? Because when not facing real enemies, RvB can even more focus on their very cheap frig PvP.`

Here we see where Gevlon takes a few facts that are correct, but then ignorantly jumps to a wrong conclusion. The reason the ship value went down is because we had a weekend-long theme called frigatus. This event was planned long before the war dropped, it was just a coincidence that it did. So of course the the value of the ships dropped, we were fighting mostly in frigates that weekend.

3: "The members are in RvB because they want to do PvP without paying ISK for it. They are playing spaceship WoW battlegrounds."

Rebuffed above. And stop using WoW metaphores will you?

4: "The presence of real enemies forces them to ship up and do exactly what they wanted to get away from: losing expensive ships."

You should see how freaking thrilled some of our members get when we form a purple wartarget hunting fleet. We get to fly flashier ships and explode lemmings and marmites! Sure we lose a few... but this is RvB, ALL OUR SHIPS WILL EXPLODE.

5: "I am certain that we can simply defeat them in spaceship combat."

... based on what exactly?

6: "This is why I wasn't "diplomatic" (read: beg for mercy after they attacked us when we had 50 members)."

This comment I'm highlighting because how illustrative is is of Gevlon's thinking, which is very binary. Things are black or they are white. They are good or they are bad. Diplomacy is "kiss my posterior" or "beg for mercy". A more rational person would have used a more "business" approach to RvB. Something like "Guys, I don't think helping the Goons is a good deal for you, and you're in my way". Gevlon's approach has been very antagonistic, making things personal, and motivating RvB to stay in the war. This appears irrational, but since Gevlon seems to thinking a binary way, it probably makes sense to him since he can't even conceive of a nuanced approach.

7 " After they saw that the 50 turned into 150 during the first 2-weeks period, (allies are auto-dropped after 2 weeks, must rejoin manually) they announced that they'll leave the war that they "only joined for fun". After we reinforced Goon POCOs, they were ordered back to the war by their masters. " (it goes on)

Gevlon's understanding of events is superficially right, but fundamentally wrong. We have a mutual defence pact with the goons. When the war auto-drops, there is no reason for us to automatically rejoin... but when you reinforce the POCOs, there is. The bad diplomacy is certainly increasing the chances we respect the pact.

8: "To give them a way out. I won't."

This is irrational. You've claimed before that we were your primary obstacle to victory.

9: "We will keep reinforcing Goon POCOs. "

You are aware that in less than a week, the Goons will start winding down from their war standing and will be looking for things to do hmmm? They may not need our help at all soon.

10: "If Mynnna becomes soft (or rather recognizes that a dead pet is useless) and allows them to leave, we declare on them and start taking their POCOs. "

Are you saying that you want to take RvB POCOs now? See point 8. Focus on your goal Gevlon.

11: "There is only one way for RvB to leave this war: to accept my terms coming tomorrow. You'll be surprised, my terms are very nice."

Wait, are you leaving us a way out, or not? This is bad writing for the sake of a cliff-hanger. No reason to wait for tomorrow.

12: Why are they not broken yet? Simple: in this February only 17% of their ISK losses came from Lemmings and Marmites.

So instead of losing ships to ourselves, we lost ships to Marmites/lemmings... see point 4: ALL OUR SHIPS WILL EXPLODE. Sheesh.


Tl,dr: Because Gevlon often gets some of his basics facts wrong, his overall conclusions are often wrong.

The willpower needed to deconstruct Gevlon's post is the willpower that allowed us to grab 310 POCOs. LOLfights in frigates is *serious business* ;)

and you have sass, I'll give you that.

Rvb, I said your were going to be slapped in the face with some stats and a chart. Do you feel crushed enough, or do you want goblin to throw a pie chart at you?

Now if only the little green guy actually monetised his blog traffic, he could probably quit his day job. Theres almost a crazy brilliance to it. You think he plans to float it on the stock exchange?

Yup. Not surprising. I could probably write down the list after a glance at dotlan and then a couple of checks. Gevlon could implement a winning strategy, and still fail at tactical, risk management and effort issues (since you guys are so far ahead of him), but right now, not even in the same postcode as a winning strategy.

Since when did RVB members not pay for their ships?

Hey Pete,

I know you and I don't really see eye to eye but would you please provide me with a quote for the statements underlined?
^^ Not trolling, serious question, thanks upfront.

D.



↓↓↓ Thanks guys, I'll see what I can google/search and find on the subject.

I actually am a long time reader of his blog (daily amusement) and this is a notion which constantly pops up either in his posts or comments. It would take some time to dig through all he's written to find specific posts, but I urge you to start going through his pyramid of players and the definition of morons and slackers. If I recall correctly, he once said "I'm not desperate enough to play for fun" when another of his projects failed (it was either his wh experience or ganking corp). You can try to Google it.
For another example, you can read about his miner ganking project. He created a corp with no services, no srp, but required members to be self sufficient and have a minimum value of miner ganks per month. And banned talking in corp chat. No, this is not a joke. Chatting in corp wasn't permitted. That's also when he started claiming to be the best pvper in eve, quite seriously.
For specific quotes you can try to ask Lucas, since he's been active there for a year now, I think. Maybe he has something ready.

Really, Gevlon do you even remotely know what you are talking about?

I'm still searching but the quote you refer to is actually from an online book 'playing to win' written by a random game dev 14 years ago and has to be seen in the broader context of the book/time frame and specifically the chapter about 'the scrub'
My point is: Altough he seems to agree with the content of the book the quote isn't his and it's too small a snippet to judge the thoughts behind it.

I'm neither judging the merit or level of disdain in the book untill I've read all 72 pages of text which could take me a while since I've got plenty more stuff to read since I started my digging

More news at 11

D.

[/quote]

It may be from some book, but that doesn't make it less ******** in the context he uses it. If you read his posts long enough, you'll see he legitimately thinks he is superior to all of us. Everyone who disagrees is labeled a moron. He even said he treats posts which disagree with him as spam, because he cannot see being wrong. If you have some free time and willpower to resist his sociopathic spergings, read his posts and comments. The fun thing is that he treats people who roam in ships as morons, since they could be grinding isk (opportunity costs) and people who fleet up double morons since they waste time to form up and they're being social (social is BAD). Does it make lemmings triple morons by their masters standards?