With Enemies Like This, The Mittani Doesn't Need Friends

"Idiots are idiots. Please stop making everyone who isn't a goon sympathizer look like a complete tard. The sheer volume of these threads are painting the rest of the community in a really crappy light. When will the whining stop?"

Oregin, Red Federation, RvB.

As The Mittani and the Goons create their list of targets for The Ministry of Love one of the criteria, as least for the early victims, is to find unsympathetic people that the player base will applaud to see taken down.  One particularly annoying forum troll, Krixtal Icefluxor/Quartzlight Evenstar Icefluxor, fits the bill nicely.  Apparently Krixtal had made a habit of trolling the Goons, as his signature indicates.

"Ohh poor silly goon chillrens. Nobody in high sec cares about your plans to occupy jita like a bunch of dirty hippies.

"....as if 10,058 Goon voices cried out and were suddenly silenced."

Icefluxor is a very unsympathetic figure with a habit of threatening to unsubscribe from the game.  Icefluxor's ranting against The Mittani's involvement in Hulkageddon V apparently inspired the Goons to attack Icefluxor's research POS.  Alas, my hopes that Icefluxor would leave the game or at least take the opportunity to shut up fell through as The Mittani tweeted about another terrible forum post by Icefluxor, this time comparing Mittens to Hitler.  I could almost hear the laughter emanating from Madison at my desk in Chicago as Icefluxor did exactly what The Mittani wanted him to do; make a complete ass of himself.

How bad was the post?  Here goes, with a little bit of format editing on my part of Icefluxor's post.

"Those who want a 'totally safe high sec': leave the game please. Those who want 'a Goon-type All PvP only': please leave the game as well."

A very tolerant fellow, this Icefluxor.

"The balance worked for nearly a decade.  Unfortunaely, CCP has made a fatal mistake by allowing an EXTREMIST GROUP to take the reigns. Game or not, any form of extremism always, in RL or E-Life, utterly breaks the system."

So the Goons have taken over the game?  So we are back to the tired argument that the Goons performed the greatest metagaming performance in history by getting former Goons CCP Soundwave and CCP Sreegs into positions of power?  I don't think that Senior Producer CCP Unifex, a 5-year veteran of Eve who was not a Goon, would agree.  And if the Goons truly were in charge, wouldn't The Mittani still be on the CSM?

Also, I should point out that a player group trying to take over the game is not only encouraged, but is nothing new.  Does anyone remember when Band of Brothers had a vision of galaxy-wide conquest?  And remember how the dominance of Northern Coalition and then the Drone Russian Forces spelled the end of Eve?  How did that work out?

"And I don't blame any player for not wanting to join in a limp, unwinnable recreation of the Allies vs. Axis here. The Mittani, a genius? BS. He does nothing but take sickening cues out of history books and calls it 'brilliant' because he is doing it 'on the interwebs.'"

I don't know how brilliant The Mittani actually is, although retiring, or at least taking a very long vacation, at the age of 30 probably indicates some smarts.  Inside the game, if Mittens isn't very smart, then that means his opponents are idiots.  Icefluxor, do you really want to antagonize potential allies like that?  And what does this "sickening cues" phrase mean?

"Whether it's Jews or Miners, racism is racism, prejudice towards an 'other' is prejudice."

At this point I was in utter disbelief at what I had read.  First off, Jews are a race of people.  Miners in Eve, on the other hand, are engaged in a voluntary behavior that they can change if they want.  Sure, Jews can convert to Christianity, but what Icefluxor is suggesting with the race comment is something akin to how the Nazis chose who went to the concentration camps.

"Have we really gotten to the point where we will hand over our entertainment money for a simulation of the worst aspects of humanity? Of course we have. Sadly."

Really?  One could rightly say that war represents the worst that humanity has to offer and we've been paying for that when we've purchased novels since the advent of the printing press.  Do I really need to get into games like Grand Theft Auto?  Or the many war games we play today?  And if Icefluxor is referring to racism, The Birth of a Nation was a huge hit back in 1915.

"But one can speak with one's Wallet. The Jews were not so lucky."

The Holocaust?  He really went there. /facepalm.

"EVE requires a lot of time and financial investment to build up, and now one individual thinks others do not deserve any of it." 

I really think Icefluxor does not understand the nature of Eve.  The game is about conflict and some people profit because other people lose.  I think this quote is a direct reference to Icefluxor losing his research POS.  In Eve, you only get to have something really big and nice if you can defend it.  This kind of thing happens every day in New Eden and the Goons sometimes are the losers.

"I take that back. They are incapable of considering it as undeserved. None of it really means a thing at all to them, except the utter elimination of anyone non-Goon."

Gee, in a game about conquest the Goons are bad for wanting to own everything?  I think I addressed this point earlier.

"As EVE has been described as more of a hobby than a game, I guess the equivalent would be building a huge model railroad as one's lifetime hobby, then discovering you made the landscapes for it out of radioactive material."

Actually I think the equivalent is not a railroad but a garden.  The weather may not cooperate, weeding is hard work and the compost doesn't always smell so good, but with some research, a lot of hard work and some reasonable luck somthing beautiful can emerge.  But with a bad attitude things can go terribly wrong.

"The whole thing must be abandoned as is.  EVE? It's a Trap."

Icefluxor keeps promising to leave, but I guess those are just lies.

I'm interested in the success or failure of The Mittani's plan to mold the message from the community to his liking.  Depending on how successful the effort is I might find myself subject to the caring ministrations of The Ministry of Love some day.  Given that cheerful possibility, forgive me if I'm not happy with someone like Icefluxor who seems hell-bent to make the Goons job as easy as possible.  With an enemy like Icefluxor, The Mittani doesn't need friends.