The ISK war is irrelevant you dumb sheep (The Fountain War)

There have been frequent posts/discussions in recent days about the war in Fountain, attempting to quantify who is "winning" in terms of ISK, majorly in ISK kills vs losses and the apparent impact this has had on TEST's SRP funds, and how all this means the CFC is winning and TEST will soon collapse.

I'd like to point out now, in my own colourful way, that even if TEST was broke as fuck, they would not stop fighting for Fountain.

You can have that for your Tl;dr if you like.


In a deeper fashion, using killboard stats to point out "oh TEST has lost x amount of ships and CFC is ISK positive" or "oh the CFC lost this battle really heavily, look at the TFI welp" is inherently flawed. Due to the way killboards are generated, even losing a battle can leave your killboards green. I won't go into this beyond saying that, since people have been beating this argument to death recently. Suffice to say, comparing ISK as a metric for victory is utterly pointless. Imagine TEST push CFC out of Fountain while suffering losses of say, three hundred billion while the CFC only lose a hundred billion. TEST still won, even though they heavily lost the ISK war. Sure it was expensive, but they achieved their objectives.

Furthermore, there is a frequent example of TEST being "broke" that's used at almost every opportunity; their late payments of SRP, or even anonymous claims that SRP is being turned down. I'm going to call this bullshit and/or irrelevant. My alliance, Nulli Secunda, estimates SRP to take between 3 days to one week. We're a much smaller alliance than TEST. Imagine the difficulty SRP officers have sorting through hundreds of killmails, checking for duplicates, sending payouts etc etc. Waiting a week or more for repayments does not make an alliance broke, it means the people running SRP actually have a life. And if TESTies really were being refused repayments on ships by their leadership, you can be damn sure they'd be kicking off about it. That's just how they are. And yet every TEST member I've spoken to has confirmed their SRP requests have been payed. Yes it took a week or so, but they got their money. So if we could kindly stop trotting out this tired argument that "TEST can't afford SRP, war is almost over" that would be great.

And another thing. Let's pretend TEST, as an alliance, is broke as shit, and barely covering alliance "costs" month to month (like bills for tower fuel and all that crap). So what? It's not like her members are suddenly broke as shit too. SRP is a nice bonus many alliances offer, it does not make or break their PvP campaigns. Pilots are wealthy enough to fund their own ships. I for one, can cover the cost of losing ships through market trading, it's just nice that Nulli cover my losses on official fleets. So the pilots can still afford to replace ships even if the alliance as a whole, can't. When was the last time you heard about an alliance losing a war because it was broke?

And speaking of Nulli, I'd like to point out that it's not just TEST vs CFC here. It's TEST, Tribe, Nulli Secunda, NC., Nexus and a multitude of others vs CFC. One alliance running out of ISK (even if it was true) does not affect the others in the slightest. N3 will still run fleets even if TEST goes broke. Sure we might have a few less TEST pilots in our fleets, but it's not going to affect the course of the war as a whole. I've even heard discussions on comms that N3 would likely "bail out" TEST if their wealth suddenly plummeted.

And one last thing. Fighting against an invading force with your friends (though I use that word in the broadest terms) with you does wonderful things for fleet participation. You can be damn sure if Immensea was invaded, every Nulli Secunda pilot would fight to the last Rifter. I've only been with Nulli for a couple of weeks now, and I'd happily lose every ship I own in the defense of my home alongside my corp and alliance. That's how much loyalty a good alliance can create among its members.

Fountain is no different for TEST. Defending your home is a massive advantage when it comes to morale, and the CFC need to remember this.

TEST is not broke. The war is far from over.

And win or lose, we're going to kick the CFC in the face hard enough to leave scars.


Good luck out there guys