Attack Piece Disguised as Opinionated News

Over at TheMittani.Com there is an article that the editors of that site should have rejected and asked for a re-write. Titled "The Sunt Flores Ban" it is an obvious attack piece that I would expect from a bombastic blogger and not a site that was founded on trying to improve games journalism.

For example, take the very first two sentences:

"Adapt or wait for the fixes."
These six words got a prominent Eve Online player banned.

Well that was inflammatory. And completely wrong. Those six words falsely attributed to a CCP dev are what allegedly got the player banned.

The article goes on to explain what happened, or rather what allegedly happened as we know CCP does not comment on bans and the reasons thereof.

Further on we see this line:

In short, players are mad. They are furious. Frustrated. Fed up. 

There is no supporting information to go along with that line. That is pure writer opinion, very subjective and very unrealistic. Most players never even heard of Stunt Flores or his ban.

The player in question obviously did not intend to impersonate a developer.

Again, more evidence this is an attack piece. Often when we see some claim innocence in a ban most players look askew at him and ask "Really? You did nothing wrong? Are you sure? wink wink nudge nudge". Every convict in jail is innocent, am I right? This writer has made a decision from only a part of the whole truth and decided to unload both barrels because of it.

At the bottom of the article we see:

Editor's Note: As an opinion article, the opinions expressed above are those of the writer and do not reflect TMC as a whole.

*Throws hands up* That makes it ok I guess, right? Seriously, if you want to be better than other gaming news sites, you need to remove garbage like this. I'm not saying that CCP is in the right here or that Stunt Flores deserved his ban, but theMittani.com can't claim the high road in game reporting and allow attack pieces to be hosted on their site as "opinion pieces" without some semblance of trying to get to the bottom of the actual facts at the same time.

 

CCP: Its Almost Too Late

I read this excellent article by The Mittani on TheMittani.com about super capitals:

You ever wonder why you don't hear stories about scrappy groups from NPC 0.0 trying to take sov space and getting smacked down by the blocs who attempt to defend their territory? In theory this should happen all the time. In practice, it almost never does.

There's a 'You must be this high to ride' bar in front of sov null. Unless you are a bloc or are backed explicitly or implicitly by a bloc you're not going to get to get a slice of sov - and supercapitals are entirely to blame.

Whoever has the biggest supercapital group near a quadrant can ensure that an organization trying to gain entrance into sov null or build up any real capital fleet in NPC 0.0 gets utterly splattered. You want to try to build up a capital group in lowsec? Good luck deploying against a tower without someone in a bloc finding out and dropping a pile of bored supercarrier pilots on you. You want to build up or buy enough supers that you can take down sov structures without seriously questioning your life choices? You need to have more than a bloc can destroy to prevent them dropping on you - which means you essentially must be a bloc already.

I agree with everything written in there because I've been saying the same things here for nearly four fucking years (post Capitals Online, Oct 2010):

4) There is no effective counter-measure to supercaps other than other supercaps. While it is possible to destroy a Titan or supercarrier with only sub-cap ships, you need effectively a perfect storm of conditions to do so: a tackled ship, a few hundred of your allies, hope your opponent does have a hundred or so of their sub-cap ships, and enough DPS to kill the ship in 15 minutes if he logs off. On the other hand, a small handful of supercaps can hotdrop a tackled titan and kill it in a few minutes.
But beyond that, a fleet of enemy supercaps can't be stopped by anything outside of a fleet of your own supercaps. Or a hell of a lot of regular capitals or metric shitton of well coordinated sub-caps, neither option which is very feasible for your average every day operation. Thus "supercap blobs" are well nigh un-counterable, and POS defenses are inadequate to deter these fleets.
Fundamentally, you need supercaps to deal with enemy supercaps.

The stagnation in null sec is killing the game CCP, and its really starting to show. You're running out of time.