Applied Knowledge
Most of what I do is rather ... supercilious if you were to look at it from the outside. Do I know a lot about the actual politics of the game, the who's who of EVE, nor a fraction of them even know me? Probably not. Do I have spies everywhere, dozens of alts planted in this or that power structure, intimate knowledge of the comings and goings of everything around me? Not likely. Do I need any of this to know what is going to happen because people are just too easy? I sure don't. How many of these people have an actual linear understanding of human history to know their place in it, to actually understand how it works, even with toy guns? If you ask me, very few. Toy guns or no toy guns, people and their foibles are the same everywhere you go.
What then behooves me to bother making predictions or assume I know anything at all about what will or will not happen in the grand scheme of things out in null sec? Well let us assume for a moment, that there is something interesting about human nature, aye that it is predictable. Applied knowledge, is the knowledge of the why, not of the how, nor where, or even when. What one learns on a small scale elsewhere, applied to a large scale at the present.
Let's face it, a vast majority of people are rather unimaginative, static, and terse when it comes to dynamic thought and experience. Most people are incapable of expressing themselves outwardly in a way that does not predate their current circumstances, i.e. communication and expression are often the most difficult tasks especially when asked to distinguish new and dynamically outward thought and conjecture. Mental projection, empathy, and the ability to resolve oneself from one's own humanity in order to interpolate information without personal investment are not traits commonly shared by most people I have come across in life. Think about it, how many of us are writers, artists, well versed communicators? How many would even try if you honestly asked them to give it their best effort? Most of what you find is loose ideas, rough thoughts, drafts of things that people really may understand underneath the surface, but are incapable of expressing in thoughts on a page or words aloud. That does not mean they are unable to comprehend complex systems, it just means they are unable to reproduce said systems themselves.
Now what is it about null sec that this has anything to do with? Well for instance, how is it that I can predict the rise to power of a single pilot in an entire alliance, twelve months prior? How is it that I can almost pinpoint the exact way that rise to power will occur? In fact, I predicted how it should have occurred, but the final detail was that it would occur privately, a private exchange of power, not public. Instead what we have now is a huge public fiasco that has dragged on for months and months, all because the person in question, has not the capacity to understand nor the actual malice in them to do more wrong in order to do a greater right. But you know, that is the best part of it all, I knew this when I made the predictions, banking on that person fouling it up, so they could then be pinioned to their own failures. Something that will bear fruit in the months to come, as an entire coalition gnaws on them to death all the while smiling with a toothy grin, championing them publicly, hoisting them on their own petard.
Now, we find ourselves at a crossroads, unable to wield any true clout ourselves, but warbling back and forth between impossible choices that leave little room for anything but XOR solutions. This is the crux, the final hubris of human nature, that people do not really understand what happens when you accumulate vast enough amounts of influence over others, that you become your own worst enemy.
What is this game about, as with any game, it is about having fun. Though each person has fun in their own way, that fun forms a collective impetus or will, that revolves around there being actual conflict, struggle, and the means with which to combat forces beyond your own control. What happens when the latter is taken out of the equation? Well the fun goes with it. I am told, nearly ten thousand people are bored to tears, they fight an endless war of attrition with meatshield against meatshield, they have no illusions that this pattern must continue lest they are trampled afoot by a coalition of fairly limitless resources, and they are upset. What has the game become that the only thing left for them is to fight a forever war just to keep space that now holds no actual merit by virtue of the very fact that they are now tethered to it for the conceivable future? Is the only fun truly left to them to threaten a minor power bloc of a couple hundred people with their own of more than ten thousand? What would they find when they spent a week migrating down this way, a couple puffs of smoke in the air from our fleets as they ducked and ran from overwhelming odds? What point then is there, if this is the only fun left to them? Well, there is none. This is the crossroads of your gaming life, where you realize that winning is not nearly as fun as you imagined it would be, and in reality it was inconceivably more fun to get there in the first place, when there were legitimate and yet moderate threats to one's meteoric rise to the top. The view from the top, in a game, is a pretty stark and abysmal place, left with the notion that the only entertainment value remaining is mutually assured destruction against the only ones to share the top rung with you, or an endless stream of meaningless campaigns one after the other against forces that not only cannot even begin to put up a significant resistance to your encroachment on their lands, but cannot even put up enough to entertain your own troops for more than a fleeting moment of hope that there is something left to them, something significant, other than annihilation against the only other opposing force remaining. Winning does not quite look the same from the top as it did from the bottom.
I find myself, unable to form my own thoughts into a proper conceptualization of what I mean by any of this, which may or may not amount to a lot of rambling, and not much else, but I can tell you one thing, I wholly believe that the null game will become a North Versus South campaign before this is all said and done. And I have no illusions that if CCP does not truly hit null sec issues with a huge hammer in the Winter Expansion, that the purpose of being out there will dry up like a grape in the sun, as there will no longer remain any real fun to be had, fighting over space for the sake of space, on behalf of either one side or the other, what then is the point of it all? Pit supercap wall against wall every night for all eternity in an endless grind of needlessness? It would be like a disturbing recreation of No Man's Land, with literally nothing to gain of it.
Hmm, I hope I made at least a little sense, I can tell you one thing though, the writing is on the wall for our friend's in the north, a meatshield will falter and be disbanded, and the refugees of an entire coalition will find themselves on a great migration to the south, then the real interesting part begins, waiting to see if it is too late for CCP to fix what Dominion started.
It comes down to impulse control, give a typical person any kind of influence over other people, and you create a monster overnight, finding new ways to abuse that power and use it near constantly to their own benefit, as not all benefits are material in nature, far from it. All the while that near constant abuse, and the playing of the only hand one has been dealt, is a weakness, and the beginning of the end, a vicious cycle of one failed leader after another, again and again. Give someone like me power, and I will not, will not use it unless forced to. But the last thing you would ever want is for a person like me to feel forced to act, because it is final, without mercy, and permanent. This is oddly much like the DRF, having been forced to action, they are without mercy, without regret, without malice or pause, conquering one region after the next, simply because they were forced to take arms for the first time in a very long time, and to band together for one purpose. This is how it works, those without malice, without mercy, acting only when given no other choice, swift and final are their actions, mercy needless when one only acts on just cause in defense of home and citizen.
For all intents and purposes, I really have little sway over things at all, truly, but what sway I do have is enough for me, enough to tip the iceberg I think.
