Reply to AtM
[b]RE: Testers and game shaping[/b]
Having
not been a tester, I can’t comment on test zone politics, except to say
that what you describe is entirely plausible and that as long as it
stays on a “here’s a possible systemic issue with how test zone
operates” level, I have no problems with your reading of it. I’m not
exactly sure what you mean when you talk about a “Fury-centric” view on
the game, but I do know that many core Fury members and ex-testers have
a similar concept about what drives a game like this: primarily, that
genuine competition is the result of worthwhile limited resources and
that conflict and activity is due to alliances having incentive to
fight for that resource, not because they have been arbitrarily
equalized in the attempt to keep small alliances “competitive.” Maybe
this is “Fury-centric” and maybe this isn’t. Either way, it’s an idea
Fury members believe in and argue for because they see it as crucial to
the long term health of the game, and one that, to my knowledge, has
never really been accepted or adopted by the admins. Except for the
dropping of alliance caps in 2.5, which was almost a purely cosmetic
change, the game hasn’t been shaped in a direction remotely resembling
anything that we favor, which is why the allegation that TDZK has
somehow become our custom ideal play ground is so absurd to me.
As
you point out, there is a huge difference between what you discussed
and a organized conspiracy to ruin the game and give Fury whatever
advantages possible. And aside from you briefly in recent times on a
couple of occasions, and then in more detail in your message here, the
huge majority of accusations that get tossed around out there fall
heavily on the latter side of the spectrum. That’s what frustrates me.
I have read an endless amount of raving, moronic “Fury leaders are
using test zone to test their designs and trick the admins into making
the game into raid only Fury TDZK because the admins only listen to
them!” posts, and they bother the hell out of me, because if anything,
the opposite is true. We are EXTREMELY careful to avoid anything that
might possibly be construed as test zone abuse because we know how
badly that would bite us. Test zone has never been anything but a
hindrance to me; being unable to ask my better members about, say, what
they think about, say, NPC bashing because they worked with NPCs in
test zone is very aggravating.
If it were up to me, I’d just as soon have had no testers at all.
[b]RE: Recruiting testers[/b]
Regarding
intentional recruitment of testers, I am glad that you realize that
these kind of allegations are silly, but there’s more to it than just
the general absurdity of a conspiracy theory. The fact is that, as a
matter of policy, we don't proactively recruit ANY veterans, not just
testers. This is due to two things. One is ethical; veterans are
usually tagged and I have always considered it to be extremely bad form
to make any attempt to recruit tagged players. The second is more
philosophical. Beyond the basic attributes of teamwork, intelligence,
likeability etc., by far the primary thing I'm looking for in recruits
is that they're seriously interested in making Fury a permanent home,
and that they are the right 'fit' for the alliance.
As such, I
consider it entirely useless to have a player be here if he doesn't
want to be here, regardless of how much I may like him or want him
here. One of the primary ways we screen for this is by forcing veterans
to come to us if they want to join, avoiding putting any pressure on
them to make a decision that might not work out in the long run. This
way, I can be assured that people are joining Fury for the right
reasons, not because we guided them into it.
There are obviously
a few exceptions to this, such as the occasional suggestion a player
talk to us in a AR thread, or harassing old members to rejoin, but it
does account for the huge majority of veteran players that join here,
especially the standouts that weren’t originally Fury members. For
example, I had my eye on Iccyh since 2.1, when he immediately stood out
as one of the brightest and most talented new players I'd seen.
However, we made absolutely no attempt to lure him into the alliance,
and when he joined in 2.3, it was entirely of his own initiative. The
same was true for Alucard; when he showed up in 2.5 or whenever, he
immediately stood out as a rare player who I thought would be perfect
in Fury. But again, we made no attempt to recruit him or suggest he
should think about joining Fury, and when he did, it was with the group
of ex-ES that applied here. Identical case for ZmZ; Iccyh in particular
would have killed to have him in Fury, but when he finally decided to
come here, it was entirely by his own decision. There are many other
examples of good players we've secretly wanted here who all joined Fury
without any prompting or suggestion; Mak, Greg, JPR, Harbinger, Mardak,
and so on.
I have faith that the quality of the alliance
ultimately speaks for itself and will attract the kind of players we
want here, and it works; we have an excellent retention rate with
people we like, and we generally do end up getting the sort of people
we actually want here applying here. Thus, while it's entirely true
that there might have been testers who were familiar to us, stood out
to us, and who we longed to have in the alliance, we actively avoided
making any effort whatsoever to bring them here.
[b]RE: Planet Builders[/b]
I’m
guessing from your numbers that you are basing your calcs on what was
needed to build 8002. It’s true: it would have been no trouble to use
the turns of our existing members to build up the planet, and in fact,
that’s exactly what we did when we rebuilt the rock near the end of
2.6. No planet builders were used for that.
What you are not
factoring in is that our plan for 2.6 was a lot more ambitious than
just 8002. We were also actively working on rebuilding all the other
minor planets we raided in order to make them profitable and do
something other than look pretty. For every rock, this meant a lengthy
process of demolishing and restructuring the defenses, then a huge
number of production buildings and good extractors to make them self
sufficient and anywhere near profitable. The number of turns needed for
this was huge; production oriented planets like those required WAY more
buildings than fortresses.
To give you an idea, I believe we
owned around 13-16 planets at our peak, and in the three months until
8002 happened, using not only a highly organized system of planet
builders, but also plenty of turns by the “real members,” we were only
able to build a little less than half of them. You may rightfully
question the role that planet builders should have in TDZK, but they
were absolutely necessary for us to even think about carrying out our
plan and not at all superfluous or brought in for a “small bit of
efficiency.”
[b]RE: Jump on AD/JT in 2.7[/b]
I’m assuming
you’re referring to our jump on your raid on our planet in 13181, early
morning on June 16. Looking over my logs, our jump on your raid was
scheduled, not spontaneous. It was obvious you had been turn saving for
the week and would be hitting on that weekend, so we had posted up
threads asking people to be around early on those mornings. The reason
why we were able to jump you so quickly and why we were able to get so
many ships online at that god awful time was because we had prepared
for you.
[b]RE: Professionalism in general[/b]
I will address
this point from a different perspective than I have on the forums,
because, while I can entirely accept that we can be a conservative
alliance, the topic of our supposed “calcing” everything, supposed lack
of risk taking, and supposed refusal not to fight without sure odds of
winning has been so frequently and tiringly debated that I really have
no patience for discussing it further. Suffice to say, we play with a
mixture of common sense (ex. “15 KAOS on and we only have 5 cover. Time
to reschedule our raid“), calculated moves, (ex. The 2.6 game plan) and
spontaneity (ex. Countless unplanned jumps with absolutely no guarantee
of victory). I think that this kind of balance isn’t at all abnormal or
unhealthy, and that it should be perfectly easy to see all three
elements of our style for anyone who wants to look as us with an open
mind.
Having said that, Fury was from the very beginning
designed to be a competitive alliance, and I wouldn‘t have it any other
way. We’ve always played to win, and by that, I mean that we’ve always
played to be successful in this game. When I say successful, I am
talking about success in the terms of more traditional measures of
power, ability, unique achievements, victories, etc. and not a
feel-good “if you have fun you’re successful!” way.
I make no
apologies about that because I think the game is at its best when there
are alliances like us around. For example, I think 2.1 was easily one
of the best rounds TDZK ever had. Sure, it had some balance issues, but
it also had a huge number of alliances -- “large,” “organized”
alliances of 60+ members, all of whom arguably “played to win.” Off the
top of my head, KAOS, SH, ASx, Imperials, GC, HH, IR, STS, LoF, HOLY,
TPx, Rens/EV, SG, and Fury all were around or over 60 members. All of
these alliances had raid teams capable of hitting high level ports,
territorial and political ambitions, and goals that were more far
reaching than, “let’s chill out and hunt and do whatever”
In
2.1, the game was vibrant. There were wars, activity, complex politics,
and real competition -- everything that has been increasingly lacking
as TDZK ages. People tend to look at the trends of the game and see
that the decline of the kind of competition that early 2.x and 1.0 had
in droves correlates with the rise of Fury to dominance and draw their
conclusion from that: Fury must be killing the game. And then the
“analysis” begins. Fury is too professional! Fury is too organized!
Fury is too large and is recruiting all the good players! Fury raids
too much! Fury does too much planning!
My take on it is that
we’ve been running this alliance in pretty much the same way since 2.1
and, I would argue, have not significantly deviated from the way the
majority alliances of played when TDZK was at its peak -- a way that
was common, expected, and accepted for any alliance wanting to make an
impact on the game.
You have had experience leading a good sized
and significant alliance, Andrew, and therefore have a good idea of
what sort of organization it takes to run an alliance like that. At the
start of the round, you make sure you have a raid team you can count
on. You recruit and try to train the newbies you get. You make sure you
have a leadership structure that allows the day to day functioning of
the alliance to run smoothly. You make a general effort to keep
improving the quality of the roster, keep people active, pruning
inactives, trying to pick up good players. When you get in a war, you
make a global to being careful about drones and emphasize safe docking
and the importance of showing up for ops and being active so you can
win the war. When it’s time to raid, you try to protect your raiders
and you do what you can to not to get jumped so that your op doesn’t
get shut down. You make sure people aren’t flying completely idiotic
designs and wasting AA money, and you try to keep the AA balanced and
healthy. Longer term, you identify planets you would like to take or
alliances you would like to beat down and make plans to do that. You
post up op times in the forum with enough advance warning that people
will be able to show up. You number-crunch and design your raiders so
that you are fairly sure they won’t die -- because, let’s face it,
losing raiders really sucks.
Those are all organizational
characteristics of the big alliances that were so common back in 2.1,
and none of them are at all unreasonable or, I think, indicative of any
sort of rigid professionalism towards the game. These were simply
things that you did if you wanted to have a good alliance, and everyone
did them with varying degrees of success.
The fact is, the
list I gave above almost *exactly* describes the way Fury is run. Much
as it pains me to say so, it is nothing special. I think I am a good
leader, and that Iccyh has a brilliant mind for the game, but I am
under no illusions that we have some kind of ultra-refined or
ultra-effective approach to running a TDZK alliance that is radically
different than what came before. We organize the alliance and make the
sort of moves as leadership that competitive alliances have been making
since the start of the game. We just do them quite well, because we
have leaders that care, members that are active, and a generally high
level of competence and intelligence throughout the alliance.
Now,
I’m sure you can find plenty of examples that seem to show a level of
organization beyond what the standard big alliance would use. There are
four main ones that I think stick out: our usage of planet builders,
the development of a ship database, the large scale alliance level
trading sprees at the end of 2.6 and the start of 2.7, and of course,
the detailed and ambitious round plan for 2.6. Those are all things I
am freely willing to admit represent a level of organization unique to
us.
Planet builders I discussed before and were mainly a function of our 2.6 plan, which I’ll cover below.
The
ship database was a sophisticated way of organizing all the random
scans, ship stats and locations that would otherwise be scattered in
random threads throughout the forum. It was extremely useful and
functional, but the truth is that after the initial novelty of having
it, it was hard to get people to consistently use it, and the main
thing we ended up using it was for displaying the scout data we’d
collect the hour before an op so we could plan out our target list --
basically, the exact same thing that you’d put in the forums before an
op. For all the fuss about “stat gathering” and “number crunching” from
the community once the secret was out, the ship database was for most
of its existence just a way of displaying op scout data in a nice list
with pretty colors.
I am proud of our trading sprees and the
fact that I have an alliance with the dedication to make a lot of money
when we need it. We did this twice. The first was to raise the money to
rebuild 8002. This was not an option I favored at first, but it became
quickly clear that this was our single option to have a chance of
wining the war. In the weeks after 8002, KAOS, SD/XF/GoD and Ronin all
actively raided us out. We lost all of our planets. We lost all of our
raiders. Frankly, even without 8002 none of those alliances would have
stood any chance whatsoever alone against us, but taken together they
totally removed our ability to fight back effectively. Rebuilding the
planet that would allow us to have a raid team that could survive for
more than a few days was the only option, and especially after 8002, we
were in it for revenge.
The second time we had a large scale
trading spree was in 2.7. This was before the horrible balance and
general stupidity of the retro round became obvious, and when we
naively believed the hype that this would be an ultra active round and
all the old TDZK veterans would come flooding back to relive the glory
days of 1.0. Looking at the numbers and equations that were released,
two things were obvious: planets were genuinely useless, and max level
ports were completely flimsy and easily raidable within a minute or
two. Thus, we were expecting a round with high activity, tons of
raiding, and safe docking being non existent. Because of this, we
expected to be taking a huge number of pods from incidental raidouts
and decided that it was important that we build up a large AA early,
before the mass raiding started, so that we could constantly replace
our losses with interest. Of course, 2.7 ended up being a flop with
practically no activity and only a handful of raiding alliances, and we
ended up being totally wrong and having way more money than we needed,
but that was the rationale behind that.
Finally, the 2.6 round
plan was, indeed, exhaustively planned out and we made huge efforts to
organize the alliance properly so that it could work. We did this for a
number of reasons. The first was to prove to a doubting community that
Fury was fully capable of standing on our own and not merely the
inferior half of IGFury people liked to think of us as. The second was
more idealistic. In a time in which morale about the game was dropping,
everyone was complaining that planets were useless, and there was
generally a large amount of whining that the game was boring, wars were
unwinnable and alliances couldn’t do anything, we were hoping to prove
that with a bit of organization and effort, alliances still had the
power to make great and interesting things happen in the game. We
wanted to show that if Fury could be successful through hard work and
good activity, so could anyone else, and that no one needed to wait for
the admins to fix things for the game to have big wars, big battles,
and lots of activity.
Obviously, that was a complete and utter
disaster and that easily stands as the most depressing thing I have
ever seen happen in the game. Instead of the community reacting
positively and realizing that, even if the game itself wasn’t ideal, we
as a player base were not dependant on the admins and that alliances
still held the power to make the game competitive, active and dramatic,
the community turned on us, accused of us cheating in every way
imaginable, and attacked every single characteristic that had allowed
us to be successful. They denounced any form of organization and
planning as being no fun and ruining the game, and the hatred of “big
alliances” got taken to its highest extreme. It was, by far, the most
disappointing reaction Iccyh and I could have ever conceived of.
Finally,
the third reason for the 2.6 gameplan was that we were planning on
disbanding the alliance after 2.6 (back when we thought 2.6 was the end
of the 2.x series and before 8002 happened) and wanted to go out with a
bang.
All that all said, the extreme level of planning that
people think is so pervasive in all aspects of Fury has been
unbelievably overstated and exaggerated. We’ve had so many players hear
all the stories about how tightly we’re organized and then join and go,
“wait, what? Aren’t you supposed to be organized? Where‘s the
structure?” Particularly older players who join us are completely under
whelmed by our forums and organization because they have been exposed
to so much hype about our extreme organization and formality. The jump
over 13181 at the end of 2.7 that the Rens group continues to bitch
about was literally a post on the forums saying “Hey, there’s going to
be an organized fight on this date. Show up with you can,” and a 2
minute “hmm, let’s use droneships” discussion. My main use for
lemmy-sim was simming L10,000 ships against squads of five small ships
out of general curiosity. We post up our ops in the forums and say,
“hey, we’re raiding on this day, please show up” and they are notorious
within the alliance for being disorganized and never starting on time.
My
point with talking about all of this is that the level of
“professionalism” and organization commonly assumed to be so sinister
and well developed in Fury is nothing atypical for an alliance with the
traditional values of wanting to be successful and influential in the
game. Organizationally, we approach the game in a way very similar to
the way all alliances that did anything did back in the better days of
the game. We DO have a much higher emphasis on teamwork than most other
alliances, because that’s the kind of alliance I want lead, and for me,
teamwork is the entire reason to have an alliance. But teamwork is not
professionalism, at least not in the negative sense that we are labeled
with.
If you look at the forum community today, you’ll see that
words like “big alliances,” “planning,” and “organization” have become
almost dirty words, used derogatively. Even something as basic as good
ship design, which is as fundamental to TDZK combat as you get can, has
turned from something that alliances emphasized and were proud of
into an almost negative quality.
This is sad to me, because
planning, organization and sufficient numbers have been essential
requirements of alliance-level TDZK success since the start of the
game, and planning and organization have been behind ever famous raid,
notable achievement, and great alliance in the game. As I talked about
above, planning and organization are inherently necessary just for any
ambitious alliance to run, and when alliances are have the ability and
numbers necessary to actually affect the people around them, the game
is competitive and healthy. It is commonly said that if all alliances
played like Fury no one would play TDZK, and I think the opposite is
true. There was a time when lots of alliances played like Fury and
wanted to be successful, and that was when the game was at its best.
[b]RE: Public Attitude and Perceptions[/b]
If
my own posts seem aggressive, confrontational and hostile, it‘s because
they are. I have nothing but loathing for most of the web board
community these days, after having seen for years how poorly it’s
treated my alliance. I have absolutely no desire anymore to pretend to
like people who have been so vicious towards us.
Without meaning
to condescend, I think it’s impossible for you to appreciate the amount
of abuse this community has heaped upon Fury without having been in the
alliance. We have been accused of everything under the sun: admin
favorites, multis, talent-less drones, systematic gang bangers,
malicious game shapers, ass kissers, test zone abusers, game ruiners,
fun-destroyers, exploit abusers, elitists, etc… it just goes on and on.
Every single thing we’ve ever worked hard to achieve has been attacked,
mocked and trivialized. It happens on IRC, it happens on the web
boards, it happens regardless of what we do or how we play. It has
become so pervasive that there have been instances where we’ve messaged
complete newbies for recruitment and gotten replies like “no, I heard
about Fury and I only want to join an alliance that plays with honor.”
How, by any stretch of the imagination, is such an engrained anti-Fury
sentiment good for the game?
What made it worse for me was that
so much of this was obviously unfair, but no one in the community was
or is willing to really stand up for us. For example, ZZ is a great
guy. While all this was happening, he knew -- and said as much in
private at the time -- that this kind of crap was unfair and
unwarranted. But in public, he encouraged it and actively worked to
turn public opinion against us. As he pointed out recently, we were
just an easy target, and as a KAOS member, that was of course what he‘d
do. A person like Drunkenduo, who I talked to frequently and who was
well aware of how ugly people were being towards us, had no small
amount of respect from the community and could have acted as a neutral
voice and headed off some of these accusations before they really took
off, but he never did. There are countless others who could have
said something but preferred to keep silent and watch what happened. I
don’t hold this against any of them, but it was frustrating.
Maybe
the most depressing element to it all is seeing the hatred and
harassment directed at anyone just for being a Fury member. Take
someone like Makaveli. He joins Fury, sees how things really are and
how we really operate, and starts pointing out, “hey guys, what you’re
saying isn’t actually true.” And what happens? His supposed friends
turn on him. He gets told that he’s some kind of traitor, a liar, Fury
scum, just another brown-noser sucking off Solace and so forth. I’ve
seen this happen far more than I’d like and I’ve seen how these
“friends” drove him near the edge of quitting in disgust multiple times.
I
have also seen how constant harassment has alienated and jaded Iccyh,
who is one of the most honest, bright, optimistic, and genuinely *good*
people I have ever known. Nowadays nearly anything he says about
the game is attacked as being part of some kind of subversive plan to
give Fury an advantage. I’ve seen how this, among other things, turned
zer0das, who started off as one of the most perceptive and optimistic
players in the alliance, into one of the most cynical (and rightfully
so) people in the game. I’ve seen my own attitude towards the community
turn from goodwill and optimism to incredulity, resentment, disgust and
finally apathy.
Now, I can entirely understand why people might
not like us. We don’t do a lot to make ourselves popular and we beat
down a lot of people. We have traditionally been a mainly self
contained alliance that doesn’t interact a lot with the rest of the
community. And yes, we do have people who can often make asses of
themselves on the web boards. VT and hybridxaos both wear their hearts
on their sleeves and some of their posts make me cringe. The more
frustrated Iccyh gets, the harder he can be to follow, and Minion was
just an idiot and very abbrasive. When I post, it is more often than
not on a heated topic and in defense of Fury. The joke thread with
Makaveli was the result of random messing around in #fury that later
got out of hand and turned into something far uglier than we intended.
We did not come off very well in it, and I appreciate why that offended
some people.
But while some general dislike is perfectly
understandable, that in NO WAY justifies the level of and type of scorn
and abuse that has been directed as us. The joke thread lasted half a
day, and at the end of it we apologized for it. I have never seen
anyone apologize to Fury for years of harassment. I’ve never seen
anyone that carried out lengthy public campaigns against our integrity
step back, look at the facts objectively and say publicly, “you know, I
was wrong about this, it wasn’t right of me to make these accusations.”
It’s just been more of the same, maybe carried on by new people,
someone diminished in fervor as the community gets more and more dead.
So
in the end, your analysis is pretty much spot on. The more we’re
attacked, the more we’ve withdrawn into ourselves and the less we think
off the community. I won’t say that public opinion doesn’t matter to
us, because it obviously does, but the pervading attitude with many of
us is “fuck the community.” By absolutely no means is Fury perfect, but
we’ve done our best to be an active, contributing, ethical alliance in
the community and have largely gotten nothing but negativity and
slander in return. The anger and frustration you now see so often from
us is the result of that, and that leads to an even greater rift
between us and the community. It’s an unfortunate cycle. Sad?
Absolutely. Understandable? If you’re been in Fury for long enough, you
understand.
--------------------------------
There you
go, AtM. That’s about as complete a perspective on how I see Fury and
the game as I can give you. (And I beat you in length! Hah!)
Solace