Thoughts On A Scandal

It’s always been said that dominance in the FW war zone ebbs and flows.

Anyone who has been in the militia for over a year will agree to that. It’s a number’s game, really. If one side has too many, they blob the other. (and this isn’t a post about blobing, there’s nothing anyone can do to limit the amount of pilots on the field at one time) And nine times out of ten, those with the most numbers win.

Math, really.

In the past, FW pilots have been known to switch sides merely because their side was ‘winning’ and they wanted more people to shoot at. That’s how casual FW used to be.

Throughout the history of FW, that’s all that really mattered. Shooting people. There was no gain really other than whatever loot was dropped and the smug satisfaction of blowing someone up.

We were always broke as a joke, PVP was King, and it didn’t matter what ‘side’ you were on, not really. We undocked, we shot at each other, we docked back up and called it a night.

We left the plexing of systems to those who cared, which equaled very few. To the majority, it never mattered who owned the system and if by chance some hard core pvp’er happened to wander into a plex, you knew it was on the odds that they were chasing someone who was already in there or waiting on the warp in for someone to come in.

Occupancy just didn’t matter to 90% of FW.

And then, suddenly Inferno.

Now plexing is everything. The entire strategy of FW has changed with one expansion.

We knew it was coming. Since Fanfest, we had an inkling, that was later confirmed. We knew it, but at the same time, the Minmatar was winning the numbers game, so there was little we could do about it.

They simply had more people. Everywhere you went there was a gang of orange stars buzzing around laying claim to space.

Remember, in those days you could flip a system in six hours. All it took was the efforts of one time zone and you could have it all. You did not have to coordinate with your counterparts. It was a bit frustrating to do anything plex/system wise and have it undone by the next time you logged on. In the time of sleeping and working, a star-system could change occupancy twice.

Those were the days.

So with superior numbers, somewhat better organization, and their secret weapon, the Minmatar managed to have most of our FW space claimed by Inferno.

The Amarr were nearly defeated but still we held on. We rallied to fight back,despite their ever-growing numbers, despite the station lock outs, and despite the horrible LP ratios.

All the while we never had an inkling that someone else was pulling the FW strings, making marionettes of us all.

As you have all read, the Goons manipulated Inferno, using the Minmatar as a cash cow machine.

What they took from us was the chance that the Amarr could ever possibly turn the tides again. It would be nearly impossible to plex enough for it to matter. The ‘cabal’ would merely lend its LP to grant tier 5 again. It turned the Minmatar into formidable foes with endless amounts of LP and ISK.

The Amarr have become the victims of the biggest scam ever run on EVE.

No matter what CCP does in regards to fixing the market, fixing the exploits, or even banning those involved in the exploit, they can never undo the trickle down effect that this had on all of militia.

And don’t think I say this just for the sake of Amarr. The Minmatar were affected by this as well, probably more so than we were because now, now history has been rewritten, and victory has been stolen from the Minmatar. They will never be able to truly claim that they won on their own merit; there will always be someone there to say if it weren’t for the Goons the war might have been vastly different.

But that’s just my opinion, what do you guys think?