From the Warwick champion rework page:
“Approachability is great, but you shouldn’t be able to totally master a champ in a few games.”
A few games, a few dozen, maybe a few hundred after no-life playing for a thousand+ hours in a few months, what’s the difference. Everyone learns at their own pace within their sometimes extremely limited abilities, and (maybe?) leaves the starter leagues (Silver) eventually.
Unless that dastardly Falcon sends another note perhaps? Stay tuned everyone, the comedy continues, and the final laugh is almost here!
Hardcore Casual 
When I started playing WoW in August of 2009, I rolled a Priest. I healed because that’s what Priest do. Around level 75 or so near the end of the year, because back then leveling was hard work, I read an article on how Shadowpriests were going to be good. So I thought I would try it. It was the first time playing the game that I fully grasped all of the intricacies, and I got it. Was I great? No, but I fully understood the concept and what you had to do to be good. Never found any other class that I could run with or was able to pick up as quickly as I did.
Given your dislike for both Gevlon and Tobold, I wonder whether you simply don’t care for scientists.
You yourself seem more entrepreneurial, if anything: a tribal-minded, loyalty-prioritising guy who invests himself personally in the ideas he holds. I can see how people like those two could strike you as insolent and dumb (because they keep iterating on the basics and questioning assumptions commonly held by ‘successful people’) and fickle and incoherent (because they subscribe to a changing patchwork of ideas based on available data).
From a reader’s perspective, it works out fine – hard numbers with the slim but real possibility of revealing something fascinating there, cheeky triumphalism here – but it’s a pity that Mummy and Daddy have to fight.
Tobold and Gevlon have almost nothing in common IMO. Tobold and I poke at each other (or did when we both blogged more) generally on the basis that one of us enjoys PvP and the other really doesn’t. Often we take the extreme stance of both sides, likely more for entertainment than actual belief. I respect Tobold, as both a blogger and the person behind it, even if I don’t often agree with either.
Gevlon on the other hand is a batshit insane soft-skinned closet social. He is literally a living meme, which is why so many in EVE ‘enjoy his content’. He lacks any real ability or talent (4 years of hardcore playing EVE with zero major accomplishments despite many attempts, close to a thousand LoL games with zero progress), but in his mind has both in spades. In his mind he was a “prominent” EVE player, and he is dead-serious in that believe, just like he actually believes CCP cares about him beyond joining in on the laughs once. I bet if you asked him today, he would tell you that lots of people think he mattered in EVE (outside of famous meme-status). That’s not a difference of opinion, that’s one person convincing themselves that water isn’t wet, and everyone else looking to see what the crazy person is going to do next.
The closet social thing is really interesting though. He keeps claiming he dislikes socials, like that one clearly gay friend who gay-bashes and hasn’t come out yet. He is a blogger who constantly talks about his blog reader numbers, or how important his website was as a community site, or, just lately, how his method is clearly working because he is back in S2. He needs those “great work” comments (to the point I’m almost positive he posts as anon himself on his site), and its why he will delete comments and edit blogs when he digs a hole even he can’t get himself out of. Its also why he sticks mostly to just his blog, because outside of it he can’t control things via deleting, and his thin-skin gets hurt on sites like Reddit or other blogs.
He moves goalposts (get to top 10%, oops that’s too hard even with the ability to play ultra hardcore hours), because a social can’t stand failing in the eyes of those he needs the approval of. Remember how mad and jealous he got when Lenny accomplished what Gevlon tried so hard to do but failed? Who but a social would rage like that over something that happening in a game they supposedly quit?
He’s entertaining, but only in a way he doesn’t intend to be. Luckily no matter how many times he fails, he just keeps doing the same thing over and over, so the entertainment isn’t going to stop short of him rage-quitting his blog.
Savage
Tobold is a research scientist, and Gevlon’s occupation has something to do with industrial or water chemistry, if I recall. They are very different people – Tobold is considerably more urbane and less eccentric – but I think they both bring a certain empirical mindset to their blogging. In fact, if you’ll recall, back in 2009, Tobold pretended quasi-successfully to be Gevlon for at least a day. ( http://tobolds.blogspot.ca/2009/08/my-secret-evil-twin-identity.html ) That’s got to count for something!
While I am doing the memory lane thing, I remember that post just shy of a decade ago where Tobold welcomed you to the blogging game. I suppose things have become a little less cordial by the time of the 2015 Game of the Year awards.
Your reply illustrates my point about data-driven thinking very well. We both agree that Gevlon is space-famous, you just think that he’s famous as a giant joke rather than a legitimate content creator. Which is exactly the opposite of a ‘water is wet’ situation, because it is impossible to prove or disprove. Can’t grip it with numbers. Almost everything anyone’s ever said about EVE may have been said tongue in cheek. Meanwhile, despite the fact that I know literally nothing about LoL, I suspect I will be able to follow, accept or reject whatever theory he spins about it in his upcoming post, on its own statistical terms. It’s a sports analysis show versus Mythbusters.
The rest of it, we’ve been over before. I consider his overall wealth acquisition quite impressive, particularly as it did not come with a external gambling/RMT asterisk. You do not. I consider his killboard analyses innovative and useful. You do not. Most importantly, in the end, his idea of an individual with a big enough wallet taking down (or seriously weakening) the alliance that once threatened to monopolise New Eden did prevail. Granted, he ended up a Wallace to Lenny/Eep’s Darwin, and his reaction to it was not his finest hour, but the core idea was vindicated. Oh, and didn’t he get some structure named after him out somewhere in Pure Blind? Seems a good run of EVE to me. Clearly, it does not to you. I concede that you simply have higher standards.
On asociality/rationality, I see him as something of a whisky priest. Profoundly fallible personally, but his preaching is sound. Or would be, if it weren’t so steeped in misanthropy.
Lastly, fake supportive anons are an interesting notion. Gevlon would find them tricky to pull off on account of his imperfect English and grammatical tells, but I agree that any blogger who resorted to something that pathetic would be sorely in need of ego-surgery.
How is Gevlon being a joke impossible to prove when basically all of Reddit laughs at him, Test scammed him when he joined because they didn’t want to deal with him despite him literally paying them to keep him, Goons (the largest group in EVE and mostly off Reddit) laugh at him, and even CCP has joined in on the laughter? At what point do we go from “a few people think he is a joke” to “basically everyone is in agreement”? Again, because a few people on his blog side with his nonsense, many of them often anons? Hell, even MoA got the last laugh on him when they named that station via a Fight Club joke at his expense, one that of course went right over Gevlon’s head.
Plus the ‘why’ people laugh is also solid. Tackle titans, hauling badgers, skill book trading, etc etc. Gevlon has a very long list of very dumb suggestions/ideas, that he then defended when more knowledgeable players corrected him (this is repeating in exactly the same manner in LoL right now). Combine that with his rage-quit over CCP Falcon making a simple and common joke (tinfoil crazy Gevlon is crazy), and again, the joke is well-established and grounded in facts rather than just opinions.
His wealth acquisition would be impressive if it came from something more than playing 24/7 for 4 years doing what is usually done by a bot (updating station orders, hauling in high-sec), or if he had actually achieved a notable level of wealth. He never had more than 2t ISK, when Lenny spent 1t a week in WWB for months (to give some context of what real wealth is in EVE). As for the RMT thing with Lenny, what he and others were doing was legal prior to CCP changing the rules about gambling sites, and if Lenny was converting ISK to real money (I don’t believe he personally was), that only further shows just how much he and others were making compared to what Gevlon was grinding out, as the RMT would mean he had less in-game money, not more.
That a trillion ISK is a lot to the average player doesn’t really matter, because the average player doesn’t play hardcore hours for 4 years focusing exclusively on nothing but grinding out ISK, regardless of how repetitive and boring the activity is. That is perhaps Gevlon’s one true ‘talent’, he seems to be immune to tedium, be it updating station orders or sitting in a LoL queue/champ selection rather than actually doing something that most consider fun. That ‘talent’ combined with being able to play highschool kid hours on a game got him where he was in EVE (and amusingly, even that isn’t getting him anywhere in LoL, as he is back in S3 despite using his unrevealed ‘brilliant plan’).
And Lenny succeeded where Gevlon failed not only because he had real wealth in EVE, but because he was also able to use diplomacy with major factions like PL, rather than having only a pack of flies (MoA) take his money. Plus that’s nothing new, as the history of EVE is full of such examples, so even if by some miracle Gevlon had been successful, he certainly wouldn’t have been doing anything new, just like what Lenny did wasn’t impressive because it was the first of its kind (not that Lenny made that claim, like Gevlon has tried).
Gevlon’s approach is anything but scientific.He starts with the assumption that his conclusion is axiomatically true and cherrypicks data to fit it. Then, when the numbers still don’t add up, he makes up unverifiable explanations for it, blames external conspiracies and deletes or ignores any attempts to peer-review his ‘work’.