And yet even ANOTHER.. #facepalm
OK, I finally have found some more time to answer your message in detail as well.Please note that I'll just give a short comment to parts of which I think that I already explained them in my first answer - and I'll try to ignore all the anger and threats from your side, since these were - as far as I can see - based on a big misunderstanding and, as I wrote before, some cultural differences when it comes to "how can I get into contact with somebody when the game itself doesn't give that option and third party websites are not reliable?". Just to add to this part: I myself have been contacted in exactly that way so often that I honestly cannot even give you an estimate how often it happened over the years (and yes, as I wrote in the first answer, that includes emails to me, Jabber, ICQ, Facebook and other social media I was/am active on. As I wrote: this was - and still is - more or less the standard in Europe's online gamer subculture. Obviously it's different in the US, which I guess I have to keep in mind for the future - and this makes things a little bit more complicated for sure. And I thought we German's were the ones who like their privacy most, just think about all the laws we have in place against Google, Facebook, and other companies who try to make money with our personal data. ;-) ).
Here we go:
Firstly, and foremost
As I already explained in my first answer, our reason to contact your "subordinate" was that we weren't sure about the intentions (if it was something he did by himself, or because he was following "orders". Had he answered accordingly, everything would have been much easier. And I explained the "threatening" part as well already.
Secondly:
As I already explained, contacting a player over Facebook, Jabber, Skype, or "whatever" is nothing special in Europe and as such I (and the other members - most of them form the UK) don't see this as "stalking" (it doesn't come even close to that definition, sorry). Especially since I didn't utter any personal threads or anything even remotely like that (quite the opposite of what "Doc Cummings" actually did). But since obviously there is a big cultural difference regarding this topic, I'll make sure to keep this in mind in the future. PS: It's nice that some of you are vets - I've been in the German Bundeswehr myself and know a thing or two about being in the army - so what exactly did you want to tell me with that last sentence? That soldiers aren't bound by law and that you threatened to take the law into your own hands to get back at me? Really? But lets just drop this topic, because a) it's not needed and b) it wouldn't have worked anyways, since I am not that easy to scare (and would have had the - German - law on my side).
Thirdly:
Thanks for the detailed explanation what happened - as you know, I immediately saw our error of thought after reading the two paragraphs "As to the first fold" and "As to the second fold" and apologized to Chris for bothering him - and wrote that long first answer which explain how we ended up with that train of thought (which - at that time - looked perfectly reasonable for us - if you were really going to attack us, that is). I guess the biggest problem in game is the lack of any in-game communication between player groups - which would have cleared up the whole thing in no time without anybody being felt "stalked" (your guys) or "attacked/threatened" (first our guys, then - because of our reaction - your guys, too :-( ). No idea what happened in Alignak - obviously this was another unlucky coincidence caused by some random passing through player(s) which made the whole thing look even more like we were under attack for us.
I find that your approach and your claims are incredibly insulting, threatening, and (quite frankly) unacceptable. No one in the Fireflies is seeking to war with ANY player faction, especially with our neighbors. However, your faction holdings surround us on 360 degrees and inadvertently the BGS/RNG expands at ITS OWN description - not ours. Instead of levying threats of annihilation, you could have noticed our positive effort and offered us a "Welcome to the neighborhood/game" and we then may have worked out a subsequent plan of co-existence - instead of threats to destroy us, as you have done.
You are mostly right with this one - hadn't we had the feeling that we were under attack by The Fireflies, we probably would simply have waited for somebody from your group to make the first contact (since you were the newcomers and we were first in the area), as we did for some time already - and a lot of things would have run quite differently (read: a lot better for both of us)... *sigh*
ETA currently has 23 systems to our 3. We do not want YOUR systems - we only want to expand on our own. However, you have expanded from Draconis towards US, not the other way around. You have many more options to expand in directions that do not create conflict with our gameplay - we do not.
Well, to that I have to answer what you did before - the BGS decides were to expand (yes, there are some ways which help to point it into a certain direction, but from personal experience (after all, we expanded over 25 times already ;-) ) I can tell you that the BGS quite often makes some very strange decisions (at one point in time, it expanded into a system 32 ly away from the originating system - even though there were at least [b]five/b] closer systems which still had "space" to expand into (and which even had the same type of economy as that system).
If you think we will accept the ridiculous terms you laid out in your threat - you are sadly mistaken. We could care less if you decimate us out of Cao Yans or Spocs 719 - as they are both crappy systems, to begin with. However, be aware of this: we have alliances & friends too (not that we need them to do our dirty work). If you can't figure out a way to live neighborly and permit us to expand away from your holdings, and, if you attempt to levy your vengeance against us simply because we are trying to play our game & expand innocently - you can be certain that WE WILL WILLINGLY SACRIFICE EVERYTHING and spend every waking moment in this game committed to destroying every single planet you have presence on until such time that your holdings are nill [which I estimate would take just a couple of weeks to complete (at most)].
As you may have already seen - 20 mins of "incidental" effort by ONE of my officers can be very impactful, just imagine what 24/7/365 of intensive focused effort from our ENTIRE FACTION (& additional CMDRs) would be like. We (effectively) have nothing to lose, while you will lose an immense amount of real estate & effort, and most certainly be set back to square 1 in your own BGS game. Is that really what YOU want??..
I'll just kind of "ignore" these parts, because your reaction was based on our first message - and we Tigers already agreed that we were a little bit "premature" (and as such wrong) in our reasoning to write it like that in the first place. Mea culpa.
Unfortunately, we are both on different platforms and, as such, WE are just as vulnerable to you - as YOU are to us. So, we can either waste our time & effort battling each other, totally destroying each of our efforts entirely - or, we can acknowledge each of our rights to co-exist and enjoy each of our own expansion rewards.
Agreed. As I already wrote in the very first message, we are a PvE group playing the BGS and as such don't like conflicts with other player groups, and - besides one specific player group - we haven't had any issues with the other groups in the area up to now. (In case you wonder, that group is ESS, which we chose to ignore if possible and of which we hope that they never expand into our core area, because they are lying bastards and do exactly what you wrote just two paragraphs above! :-O Oh, and you can ask some of the other player groups in the area about them, they will all tell you the same I just did - in fact, the other groups warned us about them when we first encountered them, and they were right)
However, as I stated previously, your faction controls much of the space that entirely surrounds us. If an agreement is to be accomplished, you will have to accept the fact that we will eventually (& inadvertently) expand into one of your many systems in the due course of our own current (& minuscule) expression & expansion efforts.
That's understood. In general, we wouldn't have any problems to have another player group as minor faction in one of the systems we either already control (or are in the process to take over control), but the problem is that other players often "meddle" with influences (we have exactly that problem in Colonia as "GVC Flying Tigers" all the time, since the BGS is much more volatile over there and not every player there is part of one of the player groups - if you think this is a difficult diplomatic situation, feel free to try having your own group in Colonia for a week or two! :-( ), that's why we prefer if the other group tries to get out of that system ASAP (and as I already wrote, if such an expansion happens to us, we try to do the same). If you have a better idea how to handle this, we (and I surmise some of the other groups around us) are all ears! ;-)
I will not suggest to my wing that we retreat from systems just because you are there (& everywhere) already. Even if we retreated, when we re-triggered the next expansion, it would just put us right back there again. Nor will I suggest to my wing, that we grind & re-grind *in perpetuity* just because you own everything around us. You will either have to share the galaxy with us and permit us the normal due course of our tiny expansion (ie: regular gameplay) which, I might add, was afforded to your faction in earlier times, or - we can just spend the next few years destroying each other's gameplay. I would suggest that you think that through [thoroughly] before making your decision.
As I wrote before, we have retreated from a few systems over time ourselves - and up to now never ended in one of those systems again, even when the expansion started from the same system it did before. The BGS doesn't work like that, it takes a lot of things into account when selecting the system for expansion (at to our knowledge).
We could maybe come to terms that your group can stay in our systems if they expand into them - as long as you don't try to take it over and actually put some effort in to make sure that no takeover is triggered because of other CMDRs in the area (and vice-versa. And yes, it's not always possible to do this, we know - but at least one needs to try). This is basically the situation we have in Colonia, and as I wrote before, it sadly doesn't work very well because of a lot of non-group players (There is actually a group in our home system there which got up to over 65% influence - and they had only one player in Colonia at the time, who was doing only missions in their own system, so they weren't responsible for it - and not able to counter it, either. We only had two players in Colonia at that time, and weren't able to counter it ourselves, but luckily some of the other groups helped out).
It might just work over here since we are quite at the border of the bubble and as such not as many other players are around - but the number of players in the area has definitely gone up quite a bit over the last year or so (which we know because we have to work a lot harder to keep the status quo in our systems, and as you know, only players influence the BGS).
Perhaps, instead of threatening one of my officers, you came to me and suggested a reasonable (& friendly) due course of action, whereas, you could alternatively focus on one of your many other expandable vectors and [perhaps] welcome us to "the neighborhood", maybe we could then reciprocate with a coalition to be your "eyes & ears" (& force) on the Xbox platform while you could do the same for us on the PC side.
Since we (hopefully) have cleared up the misunderstanding leading to this mess, I think we should start again with a clean slate and forget the whole clusterfuck we got us into because of some very unlucky coincidences and "logical reasoning based on wrong 'facts' and some bad experiences we had over time" (read: ESS - we actually were friendly to them and had a non-aggression pact, and they thanked us by taking over some systems we were already working on for months to take over. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say).
As a side question:
Since you claim to have so much "power" in this game - why haven't you done anything to reverse your lockdown state??.. It's quite simple [as you should know]..
Well, we did. It only caught us at a bad time, because some members were busy in Colonia, I myself was busy way out of the bubble, and we don't cry for help by our allies if we think it's not really needed (if we called them for every little bit of a problem, we wouldn't have those allies for long, you know?) ;-)
Additionally, someone UA bombed Bell Orbital when we were trying to trigger an expansion to Coa Yans - but we didn't send threatening letters to you, did we??.. We suspected it was you (and/or one of your wing) but we did not act on it in the way that you just did. We also have UA capability too [BTW] but chose not to use it merely "just because we could". Instead, we continued on our with our own efforts and "minded our own business".
Somebody UA bombed your station? :-O That's not good at all - we are way on the other side of the Thargoid sites, so somebody must have had a real issue with you being there - but it fop sure wasn't us, since most of our members haven't even seen a single Thargoid yet, because we are way to busy to "play the BGS". I think only a handful of us have ever been down to there yet (one of them being me - and I don't have access to Palin yet, so bringing enough of those things up to your place would be close to impossible for me in the first place). Some of our bigger allies would have that capability, too, but I guess if we would ask them to do something like that, they would simply refuse (and rightly so). We didn't even think about using that against ESS, for example (and they really suck - if you excuse my French).
Perhaps you should reconsider your intentions and their subsequent results before acting on your greed & anger to possess everything and share nothing while trying to intimidate, dominate, & stalk other players - which might just backfire in your face as a result of your bad attitude. [just a thought]
I think I already wrote enough about that topic. One thing so: Greed? If we would have gotten that treaty, we wouldn't have had more systems than before (actually, we would have ended up with two less very soon, and we cannot expand FASTER than you could, since it's the same BGS... and as somebody from the military, you should know that a too fast expansion is actually bad for you... just ask Napoleon Bonaparte ;-) ), so where came the thought that we were greedy from?!? [just something to think about as well]
Let me be perfectly clear -
You have 8 - we have 29 (and more awaiting approval, post confirmation of their skill set). We are ALL well-seasoned PP/PvE/Thargoid combat pilots, competent BGS manipulators, and very VERY diligent grinders. Do not under-estimate for ONE MOMENT that you will do more damage to us, than we will most certainly do back to you, - especially if we no longer have anything else to do...
Well, the first sentence shows that at least one assumption of us was correct - that you would think we only have 8 members, because only those are on Inara (we are a Facebook group with about 80 members, even though the bigger part of them are not playing most of the time, or at least aren't present in the Eta Draconis area very often - but I think most of them will come if EDGVC is in trouble. We are what we like to call a "non-commitment" group: if you are around, you help playing the BGS, if you instead want to circle the galaxy for half a year, or to spend a few months grinding ranks for the Fed or Imps: have fun, you'll be greeted friendly once you are back). And because of that "non-commitment" part, most of our members aren't even using Inara... And nope, we don't think of ourselves as a big group because of that.
I would direct you to refer to the "Boston Tea Party" result [metaphorically] before you consider your next step. I would also like to inform you that we are indeed coming to the PC side forthwith and several have already begun grinding up PS alternate CMDRS as well, so very soon, "platform invisibility" will no longer be an issue between us (or anyone else for that matter) and we can settle "our differences" any which way you desire.
Good for you! We tried to add a XBOX section, but failed miserably after a few months, basically because none of the "more committed" guys actually owned one (and as such we knew basically nothing about the scene there), and we didn't find anybody to basically put down the seed and cared to nourish it on the Xbox side. I think we had at one point in time three people on Xbox - and that was over 1.5 years ago. That's the disadvantage of being a non-commitment group. :-/
Nobody likes a greedy bully!!
Yep, that was our thought exactly... :-O
So how do we continue now? Start afresh and see where we end up? What would your solution for the "multiple player groups in one system" be? Who decides who "gets" (controls) a system (even though we want to reduce our number of systems, there are still a very few closer ones which we tried to get into for years already - for which we would probably have to give up some of the more remote ones)?
Cheers and o7,
CMDR Igor Rock [not a faction leader as such, just one of the group admins - and contact for Frontier - who still wonders how the others got him to take over those posts two years ago in the first place, since he is already busy with a ton of other stuff IRL ;-) ]
EDC Flying Tiger Squadron, Eta Draconis
GVC Flying Tigers, Colonia