Reply to Risen

A lot of people have played the "yeah, but everyone hates Fury!" card in this thread and asked, “don’t you realize no one likes you?” It’s a point which I want to reply to, and since concision has never been my strong point, I think I’ll make a longer post than is really warranted. Bear with me.

We do realize we aren’t popular; it’s a little hard to miss. It is a little bothersome? Absolutely. No one really enjoys being disliked or being deemed "uncool," ourselves included.  However, it's hard to actually be surprised or concerned about it because people often base their dislike of us on their misconceptions about us which they mistakenly believe are the factual truth.

I'll use Risen an illustration of this, not to pick on him, but because he’s an easy example. Risen thinks, apparently, that Fury has a doctrine of refusing to do anything unless we have simmed and calculated overwhelming odds of success and are certain we will win. He thinks, rightfully, that such an approach would be bad for the game. I agree; it probably would be – IF THAT WERE ACTUALLY WHAT WE WERE DOING.

The facts are, you can look back through AP and find a bunch of threads in which Fury has tried to jump someone and gotten completely shredded. (Typically, these are started by someone who doesn’t like us and they are gloating about how much we suck.)  You can look through AP and find other threads in which Fury has gotten jumped and owned because we raided with weak or minimal cover. You can look at the conversation Mak posted earlier in this thread and see we were certainly not convinced we’d win on Sunday, and would go regardless of turnout. Where is this supposed philosophy of avoiding conflict unless the odds of victory are overwhelming there?

You can also find plenty of threads where Fury won a fight, and if you examined the numbers and ships, would find that we often did not have overwhelming advantages or were certain of victory. In addition, the majority of engagements Fury gets into are not posted on AP in the first place, and that the majority of them, both wins and losses, are done without the massive advantages and calculations we supposedly rely on.

The facts are, Risen is not a Fury member, and he probably never will be, and thus he lacks the inside perspective that would allow him to actually make an educated comment about our approach or actions.  He has no concept of how we plan. He is CERTAINLY not aware of every battle Fury has been involved in, or every plan to jump we’ve had against an equal or superior opponent which has never happened because they stopped raiding. He feels justified in saying that we never come out without three weeks of planning and enough cover to make us impossible to jump, yet he’s naturally unaware of all the ops we’ve run extremely short on cover, or planet raids thrown together an hour before they happen and run without a single escort, where we’ve gotten away with them.

The facts are, for EVERY SINGLE RAID OP that doesn't get jumped in this game, there are a dozen alliances which aren't jumping them, not only Fury. Maybe you're thinking. "That's not a fair point! They don't have the shipped warbirds with turns online to make a reasonable attempt!" That's absolutely a valid reason, yet people seem to believe that this can’t apply to Fury. KAOS not jumping anything? Oh, they're inactive, don't blame them. Fury not jumping anything? "LOLOL THEY'RE SCARED THEY NEED 99% ODDS AND DON'T MOVE UNLESS THEY CAN WIN, LOLOL!"

I could go on, but I think the point is clear. Really, when people use something as absurd as showing up in ships that didn't suck to a public fight, which was posted a week in advance and in which all alliances was urged to come and participate as an excuse for disliking us, there's really nothing we can do about it. Did we? Yep. Is this unexpected or abnormal? Not in the TDZK I’ve played for 3 years. It’s hard for me to believe that utilizing SHIP DESIGN, which is pretty much the most fundamental and basic factor in TDZK combat, is actually being attacked as “too much planning.”

It is also hard to be convinced or alarmed by the trend of people disliking us when historically, the anti-Fury section of this community have been laughably wrong in so much of they've said about us. For example, I think back to a round ago to the middle of 2.6, in which it seemed like barely a day could pass without some accusation about about tester abuse or alliance caps. People were [i]utterly, completely convinced[/i] that the reason they had been removed was because the highly corrupt, scheming Fury testers, looking to rig the game mechanics in favor of Fury, had used their influence to get the admins (who were obviously in our lap) to give Fury an advantage that would make the game easier for us and that other alliances would not be able to exploit. People passionately and repeatedly attacked us in lengthly threads in I&S, AP and GD, totally convinced they were exposing a clear example of “Fury corruption” at the highest level.

Naturally, we tried to defend ourselves, bringing up the many reasons that we felt that alliance caps were unhelpful, clumsy, and unneeded. This was immediately pounced on with, “wow, look how defensive they’re getting about this! We must be onto something! This proves it’s true!” Yet, a round later, which alliance caps back in, it’s now quite clear that having caps back in actually makes no difference at all, except for being vastly less convenient for everyone and muddying the rankings. Turns out, removing them wasn’t such a bad idea after all! And the foremost arguer in favor of the Fury-corrupt-tester-conspiracy, who held the strongest convictions that he was in the right and was the most venemous and passionate in his attacks on us, came out publically and quietly said, “oops, I guess I was wrong about alliance caps.”

I bring this up not because alliance caps really matter in a discussion about alliance reptuation, but because it perfectly illustrates the point I’m trying to make: people may dislike us, but their reasons for doing so are often wrong. The people who were making these attacks weren’t always doing so merely to be nasty. Often, there were making them because they genuinely believed that what they were saying was true. People actually thought this conspiracy theory about the corrupt Fury testers pushing through Fury favoring changes was real, and yes, they hated us for it.

Alliance caps are hardly the only example of this. People have come up with a wonderfully inventive list of reasons to dislike us over the rounds. People have convinced themselves that the admins secretly help us and that this is a valid reason to discredit our accomplishements.  People argued with utter conviction that 8002 was untakeable and that we were thus breaking the game by giving ourselves an “invincible” docking place (where, I wonder, was their outrage against deploy blobs in 2.7?) People accused us of “ruining the game” in 2.6 when we were actively raiding, jumping and hunting, then turned about and scorned us for “not participating” when we've struggled to muster any activity at all this round.

This is why the "everyone hates you" argument fails to sway me. It’s naïve to think that, if you make up things about us, convince yourselves and others that they’re true, and attack them, we’re going to be impressed or influenced by, “but look, people are saying bad things about you!” comments. Of course they’re saying bad things about us; it’s not hard to attack a caricature you’ve created.

Of course, we have our egos and braggers -- just like every other alliance in the game. We also have, as a whole, a lot of friendly, intelligent, funny people that are a pleasure to fly with. We have never been involved with a cheating scandal or had any members disabled for it. (unless you ask AtM; he’ll provide you several for which he has “conclusive proof”). We avoid internal drama.  We do not believe that ‘playing to win’ leads to an uncompetitive or unenjoyable game. (Quite to the contrary, and almost without exception, the most fiercely competitive and interesting games of every type are the ones in which everyone is trying to win. We do not consider planning or organization, or any other form of foresight, to be against the spirit of the game.  We do not believe that playing intelligently is a crime or means you can't have fun.  If these are traits which are no longer respected by the TDZK community, then that's a sad day for the hope of future, genuinely competitive rounds, and we will simply have to get by without the respect of the TDZK community.