To BoW, and DAWN, and 300, and CHAOS, and all the rest:

[MrGarnet]

Contrary to popular belief, a lot of us in the top guilds don't like the current state of the server any more than players in BoW/DAWN/300/CHAOS/lower-tier guilds. At some level, I hope all of you have realized that, because it's fairly intuitive: it'd be pretty easy for RD or LOVE (and, to a lesser extent, H-IV) to take down any guild outside of the top three, and it wouldn't take very long at all. It's well within the capability of any one of our guilds to drop a billion fleet into one of your clusters for a month while the other 2 billion (or 4 billion, or 500 mill or whatever H-IV would have left) set recall traps for running fleets, and there's not really anything you guys could do to stop it. I know it sucks to hear that, but it sucks just as much to say it, and it's the pragmatic truth of the current situation.

But AE is a team game, just like baseball or football, and we all play it to have fun with our buddies. In the case of AE, this means derbing people. If I take a billion RD fleet into the 40s, and 300 runs, all I'm doing is simming in a different spot, and the scenery in H24 is much prettier than the scenery in H41--there's not nearly as much smog in the air or used needles on the ground, and sometimes I wonder why I keep a vacation home up there. Beating you guys by sheer weight of numbers just isn't any fun, for you or us. It's like the Yankees playing against a beer-league softball team: it's just boring for both sides. The true fun is in playing against an even match, or a better opponent, and beating them. You might not beat them the first time, but that just makes it that much sweeter when you do beat them. From the conversations I've had, regardless of whether it's a LOVE/RD member, or a member of a second-tier guild, or a player that's just turned level 30 in some five-person RL friends guild, everybody tends to agree with that sentiment. And admit it, if one of you guys crashed a LOVE or RD mini-blob and won, you'd be trumpeting that victory across every forum here, from Alpha Tavern to Forum Requests. Likewise, we've always been willing to show respect to players and guilds that play with skill, even if we lose; one needs to look only at the RD/H-IV->WHY crash thread from a few months ago to see that we were among the first to give credit and respect to the WHY/H-N/AVA players that stood and fought (to contrast, the WHY player that ran from the crash and later returned to suicide for terrible ratios no longer has his account; we don't have much respect for players like that).

At the same time, we can't sit back and sim to let you grow until you could challenge us head to head. First off, that's just as boring for us as the current situation; we do like derbing people. Second of all, the best way to develop skills are to keep testing them, and if we sit back and let you sim to our fleet levels, we'd just end up destroying those, too, and afterwards the server would be in an even worse state. Each of the second-tier guilds, and a lot of the lower-tier guilds, have shown at least the start of the skills necessary to compete with us in one way or another:

BoW has done a great job of doing more than surviving in the upper 20s, RD's backyard, despite semi-regular trips by RD and LOVE up there. Despite getting their biggest fleets roughed up recently, they're sticking around and still going. Top respect to BoW for that particular accomplishment.

CHAOS has done the same kind of thing in the 50s, although to a lesser extent than BoW. There are a few players in there that have made themselves quite the pain in the side of RD/LOVE, though, and they know who they are.

300's used a combination of military strength, diplomatic relations, and all-around good leadership planning (with one exception) to lock down most of the 40s. As an RD op planner, I personally think that that makes the 40s the toughest non-pacted cluster to run an op in without taking way more fleet than you need, regardless of whether or not 300 is the target. Managing to do that despite the vendetta LOVE has against 300 leadership is a testament to their skills, and it's an interesting thought problem to see where they'd be if that leadership hadn't pissed off LOVE.

DAWN, like 300, hasn't had to share a cluster with a major guild until very recently, but has likewise done a pretty good job of building their strength--the fact that they'd be #4 in fleet count if there weren't LOVE folks in SR right now shows that, since their member count isn't wildly out of line with similar guilds (although their averages do suck because of that). They've generally done a pretty good job of not letting their mobiles get caught, so they can keep growing to try to catch up.

***

However, those skills haven't been enough to "balance the server," for lack of a better phrase. It'd be easy to point to the fleet count differences for that, but I think that's naive. Neither RD nor LOVE nor H-IV tends to bring their whole fleet to bear against a particular guild without a good reason; it's hard to get 3 billion fleet and a hundred players to move in sync, and there usually isn't much profit in it--taking more fleet than you need to safely derb the available targets is just a waste, so taking the extra stacks just causes the planners more work and stress. Nowadays, you'll generally see RD or LOVE bring their entire fleet against one guild only if that guild manages to royally piss off RD or LOVE leadership.

At the same time, we've been telling you general platitudes, like "be more active" and "work as a team" and "cut deadweight and players that don't learn" and "scout more," under the idea that, if we tell you to do that and keep farming you guys, you'll eventually learn. Quite a few of you have, but it's becoming obvious that you're not learning fast enough: the server is still stagnating. RD and LOVE run this server right now, but it's fun for us if you guys can make it hard for us.

I can tell you right now, we're not going to stop running the farming ops, and LOVE and RD aren't going to de-pact any time soon. However, I can tell you that, as far as RD is concerned, we're not going to mobilize 3.5B fleet against your guild without a damn good reason, as I said above, because it's a lot of work and it's just not fun enough to justify that work. Hopefully, that applies to LOVE as well, but don't pretend that I speak for them. So, don't make a habit of stealing RD occs or trying to perma RD bases "just because," or you actually will get bunches of fleet showing up. But any RD member will tell you that I've been harping on them to run smaller ops, relying more on skill and the old RD ninja playstyle and less on overwhelming force (honestly, they probably ignore my WoTs at this point ). The RD members that have tried those smaller ops have generally found that I'm right, that they have more fun when they're winning with skill instead of fleet count, and that more of those types of op are coming.

Running smaller ops is just one part of making this fun for us again; the other part is giving you guys more than just platitudes. Think of it as Playing AE: 200 level; you've proven you're not freshmen anymore, and it's time to get a little more into the meat of tactics and strategy. I'm not going to give you specific pointers for hitting a target or entering a galaxy, especially an RD or LOVE one, but anyone who wants some more tips on what to look for is welcome to PM me in game, and I'm sure some other members of RD or LOVE will volunteer in this thread too.

Most of those pointers, though, can be summed up in the idea that efficiency is the most important thing, right now. Efficiency in tech, in fleet composition, in base construction, in hits, in scouting. Our position at the top lets us be inefficient and make mistakes without losing much power, relatively; exploit that, if you can. Push back against us, don't be afraid to fight instead of running, and make us *have* to be better. Right now, RD and LOVE are proving that we don't have to play perfectly to beat you guys. Play perfectly yourselves, please, and stop letting us do that.

[MrGarnet]

1) Stop turtling, since any respectable-size fleet has stopped worrying about rings and in some cases even CCs; as an HC stack, I can tell you I've eaten 800k fleets sitting on 35 or 40 rings for decent-but-not-great profit (50% or more before pillage). At this stage of the server, putting all those rings up on every base is just wasting pop/area/energy and, more importantly, is wasting construction time that could be used to boost your production, and the faster your prod rises, the easier a time you'll have. Make one base to be a stronghold, heavily fortify it, and keep your fleet there or on your blob, nowhere else. Don't overdefend the rest of your bases. That stronghold base should be in a safe galaxy, not some random spot a cluster and a half away from most of your guild. Really, you should never leave your mobile in a place where you don't have backup, especially overnight.

2) To go along with that, scouting really is one of the most important things. Don't consider any galaxy safe unless your guild watches the galaxies around it. Check wormholes at least every 12 hours. Check X0 and X9 galaxies at least every two days to look for slowboats trying to sneak in. If you're launching to an astro you don't have eyes on, send a scout or corvette a couple minutes ahead of it, so you don't get surprised. Don't consider a mobile or a blob safe, regardless of size or defenses, if the time it takes the nearest enemy fleet or blob to get to it is less than the period between checks on that enemy fleet or your own; if an enemy fleet can get to your mobile in half an hour, make sure either your mobile or the enemy fleet is checked every twenty or twenty-five minutes.

3) DO NOT LAND YOUR MOBILE OFFLINE. Anywhere. If you have to land at 4AM, set an alarm for five minutes beforehand, wake up to check your LZ, recall or launch to another spot, and go back to sleep. Again, never go anywhere alone--always have a buddy who can give you a call or text if something goes wrong. And yes, keep a guild database of people's contact info so you can get in touch with offline people.

4) If your mobile gets recall trapped, don't disband it in flight, ever. Yes, it denies the trapper the derbs, but it also gives you absolutely nothing. Always land, and you can try to run, or disband on the astro to get at least part of the value back. Even if you are derbed on landing, it gives your guildmates a chance to win back the pile and gives you experience to dump into production commanders to rebuild faster.

5) Keep your fleet together and safe, instead of distributing it among 18 heavily-defended bases. This plays into "stop turtling" above; any fleet can be hit for profit, and rings aren't a deterrent when you've got more than 500k or so fleet on the base. A fleet is only safe if you know it can't be hit before the enemy is seen and you're able to move it.

5) Stop rainbowing, and start specializing your fleet. The most profitable/efficient type of hit (shieldraping aside) is one where you one-shot a fleet that your spec matches up well against, like frigs against HCs or HCs against caps. Rainbowing hurts that: your finisher is smaller, so it can't be used to one-shot as many fleets as a specialized stack could be. An HC stacker that mixes in some HBs might be able to clear some CRs from a target, but at a cost of his finisher: every 500 HBs he builds is 30 HCs he didn't, which limits the number of FT swarms or dread stacks he can eat. Likewise, a frig stacker that mixes in some ion frigs or battleships to ward off capital stacks limits the number of HC/CR stacks he can one-shot: building 1k battleships means 25k fewer frigs in his stack, and he has to research ion and missile instead of just missile to boot. Ideally, if there's a fleet on the server big enough to one-shot you, you should be building only your finisher, recs, just enough fighters to give you meat and do small drops, and enough hangar units to carry those fighters. Since they may have move fighters to shieldrape, HC specs and larger should have enough CA or FC to carry all their fighters; frig and CR specs should only have enough CA or FC to carry the fighters that their frigs or CRs can't.

6) Instead of rainbowing, work with your teammates to make hits; ideally, no hit should be made unless it involves at least two people or is a shieldrape. This serves two purposes: first, it lets people specialize their mobiles, with all the benefits above. Second, it's more production efficient from the guild perspective, even if splitting the hit just means using a dropper. For example, a single HC/FT fleet makes a hit, dropping 200k fighters (1M losses) and losing another 100k fighters and 1k HCs on the finisher (1M losses), making 4M total derbs on the hit for a nice 100% profit. If that player has 12k prod and that doesn't grow, it takes him 167 hours to rebuild the fleet lost and another 167 hours to spend all his profits on building more fleet, so the profits are realized after 334 hours. If instead someone else drops for him, both he and the dropper would pick up 2M derbs for 1M losses. However, if the dropper also has 12k prod, they each rebuild their losses in 83 hours and spend another 83 hours building new fleet from the profits. The guild's overall fleet count goes up by 2M either way, but in much less time.

7) That leads into the final point: AE is not a game where one person can realistically survive on their own. Soloing is a recipe for disaster; a group of people working as a team will always be able to outplay them. The only way for this server to keep going is for guilds to make sure that every member puts the guild first, in everything they do in AE. Scout for each other, and make sure each other's mobiles stay safe, with cellphone contact to make sure offline folks don't get surprised. Specialize fleets to maximize not just profits, but production efficiency. If one player can run cons/tech on econ and is about to make a hit when his prod queues are already full for the next 600 hours, get a guildmate with empty prod queues to help with the hit and get those queues going again. Once a guild can do things like that, when they know they can work reliably as a team, they can start expanding on what they do. They can try to catch RD or LOVE op groups unawares, can try to pick off stragglers or early landers, can reclaim piles instead of just sniping recs. The server will be more challenging, and more fun, for all of us.

[AJam]

*sigh* I have to read all that now -.-

[MrGarnet]

*sigh* I have to read all that now -.-

You're not the one that spent almost three hours writing it up I'm sure as heck not gonna spend all that time writing it instead of doing paying work just to see it get deleted/locked for violating forum rules :p

[AJam]

Yea I figured It's very well done Though from experience I would set 2 alarms I tend to turn the first off and fall asleep and need a 2nd

[MrGarnet]

As a follow-up, the link to this got forwarded to leadership of most of the second- and third-tier guilds. I made a point to Kattu in PMs about this that I should've included as part of the main WoT:

But really, the thing I want GMs to get from it is the need for selectivity in their membership, whether the guild is RD or 4Hire. The second post, with the tips, are policies that guilds like DAWN should take on. Ideally, your membership already practices those, but as is becoming more and more clear as time goes on, most people don't. New players are new players, and their noobness shouldn't be punished, but a refusal to learn better play should be. I'm not going to tell you what the standard is, how to tell when someone's just a noob that doesn't know better and when someone won't improve their play, but I think we can agree that someone who insists on not playing better is only a liability to their guild.

Ideally, guilds like DAWN will take on policies like the ones I gave, add in some other stuff they come up with to suit the guild's playstyle and the GM's management style, and start evaluating their own members. Players that can learn, will, and players that can't will get weeded out. Guilds like RD have been doing it for you by hitting folks like that, but the server keeps stagnating, and a guild's leadership is in a better position than we are to educate new players and weed out the ones who can't. Hopefully, that leads to a bunch of farms without a guild and a bunch of smaller guilds (or op groups from larger guilds) competing with each other for those farms, and using more skill to play than sheer numbers.

I want the lower guilds to do more in terms of weeding out the inexperienced from the just dumb, and I think they need some guidelines in what to look for. I started playing AE on March 15, 2010 (according to Faboo), less than eighteen months ago. Not "started playing Helion," "started playing AE." I was in 7sins for a while as my first guild, and joined RD not long after the H24 crash. Now I'm an op planner for one of the top guilds in all of AE, proof that an inexperienced person willing to learn can go far. The inexperienced should be educated, like I was, and they should be educated in more than "here's how to use a battle calculator, here's how to click attack." On Helion, either RD/LOVE can set up AE training camps, which I doubt would go well, or we can show the GMs of the lesser guilds the best practices for play and let them do it. I'm lazy, WoTs notwithstanding, so I like the second idea more.

[Lyra]

Well, I will delegate any WoTting in reply to those who are probably even now hunched over a hot keyboard and decorating them with colour and pictures.
I do just want to say one important thing which is that LOVE leadership (and to the best of m knowledge LOVE membership) doesn't hate 300 - I have no idea where that idea came from.
As soon as you let the game become personal, you have lost something - not least your sense of perspective. So as the name implies - We LOVE you all - even if sometimes our embrace is a little muscular. After all, without you, there is no game.

[MrGarnet]

I do just want to say one important thing which is that LOVE leadership (and to the best of m knowledge LOVE membership) doesn't hate 300 - I have no idea where that idea came from.

This might be my mistake, then; I was under the impression that LOVE was sore over something WHY did a while back (I want to say the H24 run-up, but I'm not sure).

[Purge]

I do just want to say one important thing which is that LOVE leadership (and to the best of m knowledge LOVE membership) doesn't hate 300 - I have no idea where that idea came from.

This might be my mistake, then; I was under the impression that LOVE was sore over something WHY did a while back (I want to say the H24 run-up, but I'm not sure).

They broke their word to us and revealed some of our plans to DREAD. In return, we promised to come by and thoroughly rape them into the ground at some later date. We've already fulfilled that promise. Everything post that is just lulz, profits and tasty e-tears from DD.

Though it should be mentioned that if you go around trying to perma members bases and I'm making a choice about who we are going to farm next, that tends to put your name at the top of the list. Be it DAWN, 300 or CHAOS. All of whom seem to like to do that.

[MrGarnet]

Well that'll teach me to speculate about the diplomatic relations of other guilds

[Lyra]

Well now we've cleared that up, press on to paragraph 7 ...

[JGM2]

At the same time, we've been telling you general platitudes, like "be more active" and "work as a team" and "cut deadweight and players that don't learn" and "scout more," under the idea that, if we tell you to do that and keep farming you guys, you'll eventually learn. Quite a few of you have, but it's becoming obvious that you're not learning fast enough: the server is still stagnating. RD and LOVE run this server right now, but it's fun for us if you guys can make it hard for us.

your so full of it. If your not having fun then go fix the real problem. As for the rest of us, some continue to play because they are to stubborn to quite, so have paid for upgrades and are just waiting for them to run out, some are oblivious and have not a clue what is happening. You shall be soon left with the first and last groups, enjoy your server you earned it

[MrGarnet]

your so full of it. If your not having fun then go fix the real problem.

(sic)

I am, hence all the words up there. LOVE, RD, and H-IV each have an enormous fleet advantage over the rest of the server, there's no denying that. But we have no interest in watching the server slowly die as people give up hope of overcoming that advantage. Winning through sheer attrition isn't something we want to do, because it's not fun, it's just waiting for a clock to run down.

So, players outside of the top three need to be able to compete with us on, if not equal footing, then at least more equal footing than there is currently. Under the game mechanics, there are only a few ways to do that:

We can sit and sim, waiting for the rest of the server to catch up to us in fleet averages. This will take months of sitting around doing nothing, and the rest of the server still won't be as skilled at using that fleet as we are, so they'll probably get derbed relatively quickly. The server ends up more unbalanced, people leave even more quickly because their hopes have been dashed, and we're here at this time next year trying to figure out a new solution.

RD, LOVE, and H-IV could de-pact in one form or another, giving the server the fight it always wanted since a year ago when we last fought. The idea of being able to do something other than farm the second-tier guilds into the ground stirs interest, the three of us fight for a while with more interested player bases, and then the fighting dies down as either people get drained from all the work and metagaming that entails or the balance of power between those three shifts. Once the fighting dies down again, the guilds go back to farming the second-tier guilds. The people getting farmed again start saying that RD, LOVE, and H-IV need to fight each other to preserve server balance.

Or, we could limit our farming operations to ops that don't involve taking twice as many stacks as there are targets. Rely on farming through ninja-style play, like we used to, where a skilled and creative target had a chance to do something other than run when we're still two days from landing in the cluster. Use our skills, not our fleet counts, to farm; or have you forgotten the days when RD wasn't #1 in fleet average and #2 in fleet count for perpetuity and still went farming, not always successfully? We could supplement that by showing the second-tier guilds what they're doing wrong, in a general sense, and rely on the GMs of those guilds to whip their players into shape. Keep the competition going, by giving them a chance to develop the same skills we have on a relatively even footing. One guild against an RD op group, not all of RD, trying to exploit our mistakes while we try not to make them.

Doing it this way, by giving second-tier GMs hints as to what they're doing wrong and what players in their guilds are a liability, lets the lower guilds improve on the skills they've already shown without unnecessarily hampering us; it maximizes their chances of an even fight without making the server boring for us. Any GM with fight left in them, able to inspire their members, is paying attention to this and keeping going; I've already gotten PMs from a number of them, both second-tier and lower. The problem with Helion was people were giving up hope of ever being anything other than a snack for an RD or LOVE fleet; this shows them that it's still possible for them to have a chance without taking away our own fun. Everybody wins except the people who would rather give up than take a chance at preserving their account, and good riddance to them anyway.

[sillyboy]

lol- what a bloated bunch of B.S... RD/Love never bring their full fleet to bear against a Guild? you guys want to go back to ninja style attacks? Really??

When you are attacking these smaller Guilds of which I am one, I certainly don't see fair fights. If a Guild only has 400-500 million fleet total and one RD/Love fleet shows up with 40-50 million fleet that's not exactly fair. The smaller Guilds would lose probably 20%- 30% of their overall fleet total and you guys lose one fleet and on top of that we wouldn't be able to keep the derbs.

You want to boast about how "skilled" you guys are then show up with 10-20 million fleet and see what happens. You know what does happen, your fleets get derbed.

If you think you and your guys are so good and skilled and better then everyone else, prove it- pick a galaxy and bring 5-10 million fleet each and let's see what happens- we'll call it the Helion Olympics ...

to be the best, you have to beat the best- still talking about something that happened in H24 months ago is pretty sad and boring... if you are happy simming and derbing Guilds that have no chance against you then all the best to you as you "earned it" (insert sarcasm) but I have never read such a pompous, condescending piece of garbage in my life than your post.

[JGM2]

amen sillyboy.