The lossmail-M&S

The pathologic fear from loss reports couldn't stop puzzling me. I'm fully aware that kill and loss reports are like scoreboards in PvP and competitive people measure their skill according to them. It's fine. I wrote that I understand that people can't be rationals before they experienced their personal skill affecting their surroundings. A mindless robot can't turn a thinker overnight, he first have to learn to act independently. All actions need a measurement system that shows ones progress compared to the other people. Scoreboards in PvP games are fine and a good PvP-er has every reason to take pride from his good kill:death ratio. He can also expect that other PvP-ers value him after his results and he gain acceptance to more elite PvP-gangs.

However the above applies to ones own kill and death reports. The "lossmail-paranoia" has the strange characteristics: it focuses on the losses of other people. If one is competitive, he cares about his own scores. Actually if people around him are worse, he just feels better. Remember that the focus of the competitive people is local: the guy compares his car to his neighbors and not to the guy 3 cities away. I've seen this in WoW many times in form of "damage meter competitions" where one was proud of being high in his raid, even if his performance to global standards was poor. If he was way above the others, he started considering leaving his "scrub" guild and moving to a "more elite" one.

However in EVE this works backwards: many people want their group to have no loss reports, even to the sick point of self-destructing completely functional ships or losing a pilot with all his ships by kicking him rather than maybe losing one ship due to him undocking when neutrals are in local. This isn't competitive (or even sane) behavior at all.

To make it more weird, they often live in nullsec sov-holding alliances where personal kill and death reports are more or less meaningless. I mean in a small-gang engagement your personal skills make serious difference. In large fleet if you are targeted by 100 Maelstroms, you'll die in any subcap and your damage on any target is in the 1-2% range due to shooting the same targets as everyone else. The large-fleet engagement can only be evaluated at fleet level and not personal level. A alliance won, B lost. The number of kills and deaths say nearly nothing (besides atrocious fails) about the skill of an individual pilot.

Competitive people care about their own performance. Socials care about doing the "right" thing. Rationals care about the big picture. The ones crying about the loss reports of others are M&S. They do it because morons and slackers want to harvest "cool" status from the kill:death ratio of others. They don't think they should do anything to "be cool" and expect to get it by sitting under a corp/alliance logo, letting other people make this logo respected by having a good kill:death ratio. The loss of some other guy make them upset because other M&S will troll them because of it. Badmouthing is practically the only activity the M&S happily take part of. When other people kill some enemy, he goes to a chat and announce that "we pwn lol".

The easiest way to find useless idiots in your corp is asking "What would you feel and do if a corpmate would lose an expensive ship?". If the answer is...

• "Troll the n00b!", "Post his loss on the corp forum for a good laugh!" you have a competitive PvP-er.
• "I would be sad and try to comfort him and help replace his losses", you have a social, who slaves to fill the corp wallet and presses F1 when told
• "I would link him some pages about proper fitting" or "Educate him", you have a rational who tries to solve the problem, make the group stronger
• "I wud be upset cuz he make us look loosers": Kick the M&S back to highsec before he does more damage!

This leads us to the next point: "corp morale". Lot of people are scared of loss reports because they would decrease the "corp morale" and people would stop logging in. From the above we can see who would disappear: the M&S. You should lose them as they are useless. They might help you when you don't need help as you are winning on your own, but when things get rough, they will disappear! With proper marketing you can fool them for some time believing that things are fine and shiny, but sooner or later some troll will inform them that they are not. The idea that you can keep them motivated during some seriously hard period (or the idea that you won't have seriously hard periods) is ridiculous. An alliance filled with them can look bigger than it is, but think about -A-. A month ago everyone called them the cornerstone of a powerblock, equal to CFC-HB. They had the numbers. But at the moment some guys started kicking the wall because of boredom, to the surprise of all, the "fort" crumbled and the truth revealed: -A- doesn't have power to even put up some semi-decent resemblance of a fight. And in EVE kicking the wall for fun is a common activity. You can't reasonably hope that your fleet will never be tested in fire and the M&S-inflated numbers keep the enemies away. It's much better to have a smaller but useful fleet which allows you to find reasonable political measures: alliances, treaties, orderly evacuations. The sad fact is that the numbers fooled -A- leadership too, so they boldly entered the Nulli-TEST "goodfights" instead of telling Nulli to simply wait them out.

There is a direct damage caused by the "lossmail-M&S". They make uninformed, new, but not idiot players stay uninformed. The "don't lose ships" protocols (docking when neut comes, flying only crap, flying only in blop) make the player unable to learn anything or even recognize that he must learn. One must experiment and practice to be better. The pilot who lost 10 ships and learned from them will be much more valuable in a war than the one who docked every time he saw a neut.


Please don't mix "morale" with "motivation" which comes from one having a goal, a reason to fight. Sometimes one has to be reminded why he is there. Sometimes the goal is lost, rightfully making one unwilling to fight. However these are conscious thoughts. One then says "I no longer want to fight as the war is lost, let's evac and start over in FW", or even "I don't see this group winning. It's better to disband and the good ones move to a new home". However M&S says or does nothing like that. He just says "itz no fun" and doesn't log. The translation to human language is "its no longer providing me the positive feeling of being superior just because I sit below that logo".

One more thing: no wonder that the alliance that gained the most Sov in the recent war is the one that is happily fielding retreivers, laser rokhs and such things and openly states that "we don't care!". Having low M&S ratio does wonders.


Saturday morning report: 111.8B (2B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on Logi/Carrier, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 1.0 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 1.3 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
Sunday morning report: 112.1B (2+0.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3+0.5 spent on Logi/Carrier, 1.0+0.5 on Ragnarok, 1.0 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 1.3 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
Monday morning report: 115.4B God bless the FW-bears! (2+0.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3+0.5 spent on Logi/Carrier, 1.0+0.5 on Ragnarok, 1.0 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 1.3 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
Liquidation report: I got rid of serious part of my item list, decreasing my trading hours below 2/day. This means both that I got above 800M/hour and that I now have 40B cash, tomorrow you'll see it will be put to good use.