Warehouse system for the New Order

The power of the New Order grows fast, we are able to cleanse a constellation from rebels in a week or two. Miners who refuse all the light of The Code have no place in highsec! We moved to North Everyshore just two weeks ago, and we are already moving south again as the targets ran thin. This is great news for us, but also lot of trouble for me, who is engaged in supplying the New Order with catalysts and fittings. Currently we are using 2-3 HQs to cover a zone (which is usually a constellation or two) and the Knights ride out from these, taking 1-2 gates to hit the followers of The Machine.

There is a tactical and a logistics problem with this: the catalysts aren't aligning fast, so they are easy targets of vultures. A single long-point ship can take down a cata by scramming it until the faction police arrives and kills it. Taking gates is problematic already and as the amount of rage among the bot-aspirants grow, it will eventually become impossible. The logistics problem is that it's impossible to keep so many HQs seeded. Seeding needs capital, market orders and market update time. As we are operating in larger and larger land, the number of HQs to seed are increasing.

As first countermeasure I checked my transaction log and deleted 1/3 of the items, the ones that didn't sell well. The following items remained on the list:

• Anode Light Ion Particle Cannon I
• Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I
• Catalyst
• Federation Navy Antimatter Charge S
• Gallente Shuttle
• Gauss Field Balancer I
• Initiated Harmonic Warp Scrambler I
• Insulated Stabilizer Array I
• Light Ion Blaster II
• Light Neutron Blaster II
• Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
• Magnetic Vortex Stabilizer I
• Prototype Sensor Booster
• Regulated Light Neutron Phase Cannon I
• Scan Resolution Script
• Small Hybrid Burst Aerator I
• Small Hybrid Collision Accelerator I
• Void S
• Zainou 'Deadeye' Small Hybrid Turret SH-603

Out of these 19 items 14 are looted from destroyed catalysts so I need to set buy orders too to let looters quickly return them to me and to Knights to get rid of their excess. However since most items are reused by the team, I set buy orders only in Brapelille. Also about 5-6B capital locked down in escrow and items. Obviously the amount of HQs I can handle is limited even with the decreased item list.

To solve this problem, I designed the warehouse system: one warehouse within 4 jumps of any target system. I try to match them with tactical HQs, but they aren't the same, there will be more HQs than warehouses. The purpose of the warehouse is to allow Knights to shop nearby. The shopping should be done by a normal sec status character who buys for his main or for his fleet. The destroyer fittings are small, so a battleship or Procurer/Skiff with cargo extenders can transport for a whole fleet. Using T1 industrials is obviously not advised. I will build up warehouses as the New Order moves. Warehouse stations should have repair facility (because the looted guns are damaged from overheat) and preferably factory slots to manufacture catalysts.

OK, the Knights (or second level traders) can shop in the warehouses. But what about Catalyst hulls? They'd need T2 industrials, Orcas or freighters to move more than one at a time. To solve this problem, here is an ambitious plan: Hulls seeded to every relevant system. So the Knight docks, buys hull, his alt or fleetmate gets fittings from the nearby warehouse and he can do his holy duty without taking gates. I will list the Catalyst hulls purposefully high, like 30% above Jita to discourage hostiles from buying it out and to encourage people to import/manufacture hulls. I'd be happy if I wouldn't sell a single hull because that would mean others took this not really profitable - yet essential - duty from me. I'll simply serve as an emergency hull provider, if all else fails, you can still buy from me, without insane cost (currently 1.9M).

The first Warehouse will cover our recently abandoned operations: North Everyshore. The warehouse will be Carirgnottin IX - Moon 5 - Impro Factory. Below you can see the map of the covered zone without lowsec and 0.8+ security systems unless they are bridging to targets: Yes, I'm not happy about those 4-5-6 numbers, but Deninard is surrounded by lowsec in every other direction so can only be supplied from this side and alone doesn't deserve a warehouse. The neighborhood of Bereye has no ice belts and is close to the next warehouse, which is Jaschercis III - Moon 1 - Federal Freight Storage: The third warehouse, Brapelille IV - Moon 2 - Federal Freight Storage: This is a relatively small, but busy zone, full of rebel miners.

The fourth warehouse is fully my design, I moved in here first and found so many rebels that I choose to build a warehouse to support fighting them. The HQ is Mesybier II - TransStellar Shipping Storage, 5 jumps from Dodixie:

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Business Thursday: station trading metas

"Metas" are named variations of T1 modules. For example the Light Ion Blaster I has the following metas:

• Anode Light Ion Particle Cannon I
• Limited Light Ion Blaster I
• Modal Light Ion Particle Accelerator I
• Regulated Light Ion Phase Cannon I

They are all better than T1 and worse than T2. They are dropped by NPC pirates killed in complexes, mission sites and belts and acquired by those who looted them. They are used by people who can't fit T2 yet and people doing T2 production.

There are awful lot of metas in the game. Practically every T1 have some. This market is extremely abandoned, practically no one tends it. The Jita sell orders are often 10x higher than buy orders. You can make nice profit by setting buy and sell orders for them in Jita, where the volume is the highest. Most metas are cheap, in the region of 10K-2M, so the profit on one isn't great. But you can sell dozens to hundreds every day which isn't bad money. Also, meta-trading is very good start for a new trader due to the low investment cost. You can start trading with a few million ISK capital and bad skills, since the margin is 20-30% instead of 2-3.

How to start? Pick one item class, like small lasers and check their price history. If the volume is relevant and the maximum and minimum are far from each other, you can set up your shop. Don't try to 0.01, decrease the margin aggressively to 10-30%. Keep even low margin for a week or two, the 0.01 punks usually have little tolerance for that.

After you stabilized the price of your selection of metas in Jita, you can extend to other hubs, moving your wares with courier contracts. At the end you can try regional buy orders and get items collected for you by couriers.

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Highsec EVE: the most anti-social game ever

When even Jester speaks out against ganking in EVE, we are probably facing a problem. When everyone tells EVE is too harsh on a new player, something is wrong. Not necessarily the way they think, but it's surely wrong some way.

I started exactly like the the newbie mentioned in the horror stories: no knowledge of the game and no friends, and pretty late, less than a year ago. Others known the game inside-out years before my character was created. They owned titans before I owned by first destroyer. According to the myth, I was set up for failure and only a miracle could save me. Instead of failure, I gained titanic wealth, I was not ganked once after the initial noob mistake of driving a Badger II to lowsec, I was not scammed and I experienced nullsec on my terms. And on top of that I got these so easily that I spent several blogposts whining how easy EVE is and how disappointed I am because of that.

Let me recite my motto: I do not believe in personal awesomeness. I'm a solid believer is that whatever I do can be repeated by an average person. Every time we see someone doing something unbelievable, we don't face an extraordinary man, we face an average guy using some knowledge we do not own yet. When we face a large group of people failing in something where we don't, we see equal people who are poisoned by some bad belief.

Since I never had to make serious effort for my achievements, I never felt in a cut-throat competition with equals and gaining my wealth rather looked like a 5-800M/hour grind than awesome winning, it's rather the second case. It's not that I know something right, it's something that the average EVE player does wrong. I've read another article of Jester several times because I felt it's important but didn't know how. The mistake of the average EVE new player was right there, explicitly stated:

CCP Solomon: The strong prey on the weak, but the weak aren't responding, and nobody's getting particularly fun or nourishing game play out of this. Is that a failure?
Seleene: Well then maybe they need to get more friends and they need to learn to defend themselves better in a PvP game.
Seleene, CSM head tells exactly what every successful and powerful player would suggest a newbie: get more friends and learn PvP. This answer is fundamentally and completely wrong and any new player following it is set up for failure, poverty and ragequit.

They don't give this advice because they are evil, but because their highsec newbie memories have long faded. Or they never was a highsec newbie, they are probably "community born" who podjumped to their out-of-game friends to nullsec on day 1. Nullsec mechanics favor blobbing. A fleet of 200 defeats the fleet of 100 unless extreme difference on their skill and/or ISK. Also, the fleet of 200 can force the fleet of 100 to fight by taking their space assets: moons, stations, systems.

Highsec (and somewhat lowsec) is completely different from nullsec and not because of bubbles, cynos and doomsdays:

• Everyone can dock everywhere.
• No one has significant space assets that he'd care to lose.
• Neutrals are everywhere.
• Shooting neutrals is expensive due to Concord and faction police in case of low sec status.
• NPC corps can't be wardecced, player corps can.
• PvP between NPC corpmates is equal to shooting neutrals, PvP between player corpmates is allowed.

Between these mechanics a blob helps you little to win. If the enemy sees it, can dock up anywhere. If you are neutral to someone (and no kill rights or suspect or whatever), you need to sacrifice overwhelming resources to kill him assuming the target isn't stupid or AFK. No one ever had a positive ISK ratio in a suicide gank against a non-moronic target. If there are 1000 people wanting to kill me but has no right to, I'm not forced to dock, I can easily wage a 90-95% ISK ratio war on them by undocking gunless, max-insured, max-tanked battleships into their blob or easily find a straggler, scan him with a neutral alt and drop a hard counter on him.

Highsec, where the most new players start their EVE life is the most anti-social game ever: the mechanics actively penalize having friends. The more friends you have, the weaker you are. Every new corpie increases the chance of you being awoxed, scammed, robbed or wardecced. If you have zero friends and you are not oblivious to the basic game mechanics, you are practically invincible.

The newbies are devastated not because the game is harsh or unbalanced, they are devastated because they come with a strong, wrong belief that is reinforced by the veterans: "the strongest EVE ship is friendship". No. If you are in highsec, it's equal to self-destruct. CCP knows this, this is why wardec costs scale with target size, to somewhat protect the people with lot of friends from being obliterated. Remember the one time when Goons ran to CCP to save them: when Jade Constantine caught them in a highsec forever-war against practically every highsec PvP-ers. You can't blame Goons for having no friends or being shy of PvP, still they couldn't handle it.

I didn't progress despite of having no friends but because of it. I naturally played solo so did not even encounter the limitless amount of traps the average newbie falls. I couldn't be wardecced, I couldn't be awoxed, no spy could get into my trust and no bad player leeched on me. Joining a highsec corp is like taking from the "Gift for newbies" container.

Let me make a simple suggestion that makes EVE much more newbie-friendly: ban player corporations from highsec. Something like "the Empires has fed up with the destruction caused by capsuleers, so they decided that every capsuleer who do not pledge their allegiance to them are no longer protected by them", making every player corp member perma-suspect. Of course give a huge "if you get into this corp, everyone can freely shoot you in highsec" warning for the application interface. This would mean exactly what is already true for members of larger nullsec alliances: you are safer in your own sov-null than in highsec. Hell, player corp members would be safer in lowsec too. This way social players would go to low/null, while newbies who did not learn the game yet would be safe in Highsec from the largest danger: the siren song of noobcorps. Make every corp post a warning like this: and let only those corps to survive that can do so in low, null or WH. They can be good homes of newbies, unlike these horrible idiocy-hives in highsec.

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Best place for solo kills

Better late then never, I dipped my feet into solo PvP. You know, like the other people, in a small ship, blowing up mostly, killing some frigs, having fun...


Did you believe that in a second? Me wasting time in frig nonsense? Don't you remember when you were telling that I have to start from below, learning "the art of pew" and I replied with screenshots flying logi in fleets taking 3 regions and winning the largest supercap battle of 2012?

This is me (related shipkill) doing solo PvP literally the first time of my EVE life:
Here is the butcher's bill from my first day (Jan 27) spent solo PvP-ing:

• 12 ships and 8 pods killed
• 12 ships and 0 pod lost
• 4890M (2 more B over that pod) destroyed, 132M lost, 97.4% efficiency.
• 168M looted, 21M peacefully acquired on the side

Before you'd think I just hit the one-in-a-million Jackpot, here is one from Monday. If it's not luck, I must be a natural-born PvP God, right? Of course not. You could have learned that I don't attribute anything to personal "skillz", but to knowledge that anyone can gain. It's always the method that is awesome, not the guy following it. These numbers are stellar for a solo PvP-er, because he is hunting for fellow pirates, lost newbies and cyno noobships in lowsec. I went where the money is: highsec. When I finally could fit T2 small blasters to my Catalyst, off I went to solo-gank Retreivers, covetors and Hulks.

Ganking these is much easier than ganking exhumers. They have little natural tank and they rarely fit with Damage Control or adaptive invulnerability field (and even more rare to have them switched on). The barge itself is 4x more expensive than the Catalyst killing it, so 80% efficiency is guaranteed even if you take no pods. Unless you made some newbie mistake, the kill is guaranteed, since they are AFK/bot.

Barge pods are suprisingly expensive. I mean the New Order found all the expensive pods in barges, not exhumers. The reason for that is exhumer pilots are dedicated miners, who have a set of +5s at best. On the other hand barge pilots are either newbie miners (their age tells) or part-time miners. You know, fearless missioner at night, AFK-miner at day. Or nullsec PvP-er when he can play, mining all day when he can't play.

What you need to solo-gank barges? Two accounts: one is the scout/looter, the other is the ganker. The scout should drive a Procurer of Skiff to prevent rage-ganking. Don't forget to fit strip miners or ice harvesters depending on what belt you are after. Fit tank, afterburner, passive targeter and ship scanner to the scout, go to the belts, scan down Retreivers, Covetors, Hulks and if they are not tanked, go near them and start mining. You warp your ganking Catalyst to the target and collect pod. Don't forget to pull concord first in all systems you want to hunt by shooting customs office in the first, docking with your pod in the second, undock in noobship, dock in the third and so on. If there is a stationless system in the hunt area, start there shooting the customs. In a 0.6 system you can hit up to 10K EHP with chance to catch the pod and 12K without it. After Concord destroyed your ship, warp your pod away and the scout should loot your wreck. If there is no one else around, you can also loot the target, which makes you suspect so you have to dock up. If 10-20M dropped, it worth waiting a few mins. Don't forget to dock up even if you are not suspect and unload your small cargo hold and ore hold. You can get significant amount of minerals while ganking.

The main benefits of solo ganking is independence. If you can supply yourself (can be done with an Orca or even with Red Frog contracts), you can set up shop anywhere in the Highsec, you aren't bound to any group. Solo you probably won't gather vultures who camp gates or belts in order to pad their killboard with destroyer kills. Vultures are collecting concorded Catalyst wrecks (they are available to everyone) and try to pad their killboard with Catalyst mails.

The main downside of solo ganking is newbie-unfriendliness. It needs you to know what you are doing and also good skills in driving Catalyst. If you are new to barge ganking, I recommend joining the New Order and taking your first steps in a fleet. Don't forget to add your limited API with kill-log only to neworder.mindflood.org

Remember: every barge you kill increases mineral prices, bringing consequences back to the game.

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Game harshness, death penalty, miners

"EVE is a harsh, dark universe" is all over the marketing. Why? Because here unconsensual PvP happens. "By undocking, you consent to PvP" they say.

My old WoW character reached 50000 kills in July 2011 and ended his career with 96000 kills, despite I shifted to EVE around 2012 spring. So in my last year I had around 4000 kills/month. Very few EVE players have so many kills. In WoW I was very far from being top PvP-er. So the "sweet fluffy WoW" is much more PvP-ish than EVE. Let's look at League of Legends and World of Tanks. These games are pure PvP, you can't advance your character without PvP. Every match is direct PvP. Yet these games are rather considered casual fun games than harsh and unforgiving. On the other hand the original X-com had no PvP but the mind-controlling aliens still haunt me. How?

The solution is that PvP itself don't make a game harsh. If you die in WoW, you resurrect in a few seconds without losses. Even if you are corpse-camped, you can talk to the spirit healer, take a 10 minutes debuff and pay a pitiful repair sum and you are out of PvP. WoW has very low death penalty.

Harshness = death_chance * death_penalty
PvP indeed increases death chance since you can always choose safe, overgeared PvE, but PvP finds you. However if death is meaningless, it doesn't matter. What is the death penalty in EVE? You lose your ship, maybe your pod too and also your cargo. Is that a high death penalty?

It depends on the cost of the ship and cargo. And this is where EVE is constantly nerfed. While PvP-ers are always worried about EVE is made "space WoW" by making PvP harder, and cry loud on every mechanics change that makes it harder to trick someone into PvP, they are fundamentally wrong as WoW already has more PvP than EVE. What they mean is making EVE just as loss-free as WoW, but they are ignoring the second part of the equation. Even worse, many prominent PvP-ers and even the self-defined griefer Goons are premiere supporters of nerfing losses.

The supercapital nerfs (and the ongoing cries of "supers are still too powerful") make the game fluffier than closing any loophole that allowed newbies to be tricked into PvP. The T1 cruiser rebalance removed more harshness from EVE than the imaginary "completely safe highsec" could ever do. Why? Because they allow players to be useful in ships they don't mind to lose. With the original doomsday you had to put your capitals to the line to stop an invasion as subcaps would be eliminated by a pair of titans. That was risky for both sides. Lolling around in Drakes (the epic ship of Goons) is safe. The nullseccers are just as risk-averse as the "carebear pubbies" they hate. They just recognized long ago that the key of safety isn't decreasing the chance of losing your ship, but decreasing the cost of the loss.

Since Retribution even the Drakes are history of the once harsh game, as battlecruisers are now considered expensive, "serious fleet" ships, the "fun PvP" is done in T1 cruisers that are pocket change even for a few weeks old newbie. Next patch will update T1 battlecruisers to further cheapen fleet battles. Flying anything that has a relevant price tag will be the territory of highsec missioners and Pandemic Legion.

The infamous exhumer rebalance was indeed a nerf to the harshness of EVE, but not because they got some extra HP. The real nerf is the increased ore hold that makes AFK mining easy. The easier mining is, the more mining will happen. The more mining, the cheaper minerals. Cheap minerals are cheap ships, less death penalty. CCP - just like every MMO developer - nerfs the game to cater the "casual" (read: bad) players. While the PvP-ers guard the "EVE-spirit" vehemently, protecting it from any limitations towards PvP, the nerfs of death cost is unnoticed or even celebrated. Cheap ships are good for all, right?

EVE will never be nerfed into a place where you can't kill another player. CCP is constantly nerfing it into the place where that other player won't care about the loss.

Against this nerf there is little player resistance. I've yet to see a single CSM opposing a change that makes a cheap ship stronger or ships generally cheaper. Practically only the New Order fights against diminishing death costs by destroying the farming machines (AFK-ers and bots).

So if you want EVE to be a harsh place (instead of Space WoW with dark marketing), you must:

• Demand expensive ships to be strong and cheap ones to be weak, to force people risk expensive ships if they want to win in PvP.
• Demand the removal of "insurance", giving welfare to those who lost their ships.
• Resist every change that makes it easier to obtain materials needed for building ships.

Of course you can take matters to your own hand and blow up AFK miners. There is no point trying to blow up active ones, you'll either fail or only win using extreme amount of resources. AFK-ers on the other hand are both very easy target and may give up on their activities. They are AFK because they want ISK without effort. Defending their ship needs effort, it's easier for them to simply not mine when they don't play.

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Catalysts, fittings, seedings

This post is probably only useful to Knights of the New Order, but maybe other market seeders (low-nullsec traders) can benefit from it too. For everyone else, let me post the question of a ganked miner: (No, he wasn't taunting or crying, he honestly didn't know that you can lose your ship in highsec)


At first let's talk about ganking catalysts. They are simple to fit: magstabs to lows, blasters to highs. To mids you have to choose between one or two sensor boosters, afterburner or warp scrambler. Use small hybrid burst areator and small hybrid collision accelerator rigs. However there are several versions of each item. No sane man would fit faction or deadspace items on a suicide ganking ship, so we just focus on T1, T2 and meta items. On the left of the table you an see the overheated DPS of the various guns with a perfectly skilled pilot using rigs and T2 magstabs. You are not a perfectly skilled pilot, but the ratios are the same for everyone. As a general rule, every meta level gives 5% DPS, T2 is much better than even meta 4 and and moving up in the electron - ion - neutron way gives another 6%. So as first idea, don't use electrons. Ever. Ions are different because of their much easier fitting. A T2 neutron catalyst has little CPU and powergrid left for medslot items. Also, ions are significantly cheaper than neutrons.

On the right side you can see the magnetic field stabilizers. Moving up the meta level you gain about 2.5% DPS, with Magnetic Vortex stabilizer being almost as good as T2, but with significantly worse fitting demands. I also seeded all 5.

Now let's look at the prices (K ISK). They are current average of sell and buy, but that's not surely the best data, see below:

Version	Small ion gun	Small neutron	Magstab
T1	29	60	80
Meta 1	15	110	90
Meta 2	45	220	130
Meta 3	155	500	265
Meta 4	350	1150	555
T2	1150	1300	1000

As usual you have to pay larger and larger amounts for small upgrades. However don't forget to compare the costs to the cost of the whole gank, including your opportunity cost. If the total cost of the gank is 15M then 1% DPS upgrade for 150K isn't a bad deal, even if the individual item is 100% more expensive than the previous version. The T2 gain is 46% over T1, so its price is well justified. 2 T2 Catas are equal to 3 T1. The metas are harder issue due to their lower gains. However the Meta 1 and Meta 2 are so cheap that you really shouldn't use T1.

Now let's look at the price changes of Anode light ion particle accelerator:The rest of the guns are the same. This is a problem. The T1 and T2 items are manufactured by players and their price more or less linked to their material costs. However metas are NPC drops so the supply can't really increase. We use these things up pretty fast. I don't know where the price will stop. Maybe there is a serious hidden supply of them, metas being reprocessed. This case the higher prices will increase supply. If there is not, the prices can run up to the point where the demand stops. This can mean that sooner or later those who can't use T2 will have to use T1. Let's hope for the first option. The magstab prices are more stable since magstabs are used by every gallente and non-missile caldari pilots, not just by newbies like the small meta guns.

The meta and T2 ions, neutrons, magstabs, along with catalyst hulls, Experimental 1MN afterburners, prototype sensor boosters, rigs and Initiated harmonic warp scramblers are available in all 3 HQs. The expensive ones are about 10% above Jita sell price, the cheap ones have higher margin simply because their transportation and handling cost more than the item. The hulls have a higher margin too because they are large and takes lot of time to transport them. The price difference is needed to prevent hostile buyouts.

In the Tolle base I also set up buy orders for these items, so you can dump your excess or loot from destroyed ships. I simply don't have order slots left to set buy orders in the other two HQs.

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Business Thursday: how to control the market

Before the post, a quick tip: Audit log containers have a great functionality, they can't be repackaged until the last log entry is 3 weeks old. This is there to protect the log. However we can use it against accidental repackaging. Have you ever repackaged a container, mixing the carefully selected items with others? I did, since then I'm using audit log containers.


Now about the market control. Controlling the market is exactly what you think it is. You decide the running prices, you decide how much profit you want. If you reach market control, you can extort any prices from the hapless people. How can you do it?

You can't.

Whoever you heard of bragging that he controls the market here and there, is either

• a liar
• someone who operates in the middle of nowhere and could "extort" a lost newbie or moron once a year
• who controls production like the Tech cartel did with Tech
• who controls consumption, for example an alliance leader buying out all the Lokis, relisting 2x higher and then declare that the new doctrine is Lokis and everyone must buy one by tomorrow or kicked
• a market swing happened on its own and someone claims he did it

The market cannot be controlled. It will always return to equilibrium and those who try to mess with it don't fare well. The reason is simple: price elasticity. No one is forced to buy anything from you now. There are alternative sources, there are alternative items, he can go out to farm himself or simply wait a few more days. There is nothing in the World that forces him to buy your overpriced product. You on the other hand have to constantly buy out undercutting offers, constantly increasing your stock, usually gained on above-normal price. You could still make profit on these if you could sell it at extortionist prices, but you can't.

Traders are slaves of the invisible hand. It is a very generous master who showers the obedient ones with riches. However it slaps the rebellious into poverty. I've yet to see a single successful guy who intentionally messed with the prices (without having control over production or consumption). The "successful" market controllers are usually liars, sometimes just dumb who don't count their own time and celebrate that they could sell a 3x priced stuff after two days of 0.01-ing without sleep.

So, don't try to be smart, don't try to make it to the front page of the EVE news sites, don't try to do anything worth bragging. Just set up decent buy orders, resell the items with a reasonable margin, transport to other hubs if they are under-supplied and money will just pour into your wallet.

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Passive income, active income

Jester wrote a good post about passive vs active income. In short: you receive passive income without active effort, for some effort you invested once. For example if you learned the skills and got the standings to start research with an R&D agent, the agent will generate datacores for you as long as you have your account running.

On the other hand to get active income you have to perform an activity now and be rewarded for it, for example running a mission.

Every game economy must be balanced to prevent inflation or "everyone has everything, nothing matters". Passive income sources are usually low in comparison to active, for example my highsec planets earn me about 0.3B/month. I've yet to see someone getting rich over them, they are rather little rewards for long-term continued playing.

Active income seems not really balanced. Highsec missioning can earn 30-40M/hour, so you can earn 21-28B/month by running missions. The reason why there is no runaway inflation in EVE is that the active income sources are limited by the time spent playing. To earn 21-28B/month via highsec missioning, you have run missions 24/7. While there are some "no-lifers", the vast majority of players don't overuse these sources simply because their gaming time is limited, and also within their gaming time they want to do other things besides grinding missions. In the theoretical case where everyone is a "no-lifer" the active income based economy cannot be sustained and must be changed to a scarce resource based one, where you can't just spawn rats by talking to an agent. For example in WoW you can run the same raid once a week, the normal quests once in the lifetime of the character and the daily quests once a day.

Enters the botter and the AFK-farmer and the practical limit of "no lifer farming" disappears. With a bot you can run missions 24/7 with several characters. AFK-ing a Dominix in a newbie complex or a Mackinaw by a chunk of ice let you farm 8-12 hours a day without effort, practically turning the active income source into passive. Just as your planets collect resources while you are away, you bot/AFK ship collects bounties/ore. Except 100x more in ISK.

Theoretically CCP can stop botting by catching botters and banning them. Practically they can't but let's be nice here. However AFK-leeching isn't against the EULA, so the resource acquisition must be redesigned to prevent AFK leeching.

I already mentioned the artificial limits of WoW: you can run the same daily quest once a day, and even if you do them all, you are done in 2 hours and you can't farm more. Similar arbitrary limits could be introduced, like "you can run 5 missions a day" or "you can rat for only 2 hours a day, after that no more loot or bounty" or "maximum 2 hours of mining". They are both immersion-breaking, anti-sandboxy and outright harmful to players in need: imagine that you lost your ships in the first timer of your station and you have 2 days to get back. You are motivated and ready put some extra time in, but the mission and ratting limit practically says "150M/day max no matter how hard you try" and two days later you're facing the most important battle of your EVE carrier without a replacement ship. This would be bad.

I would rather use a more subtle limiting that also rewards good playing, therefore might even promote group-PVE: while in space and not logged off, your ship constantly degrades due to usage and from time to time needs repairs. (For ISK in a station or nanite paste in the space.) The repair costs would be around 10M/hour for a battleship, strat cruiser or mining barge, obviously less for cruisers and frigates, more for capitals. This cost would disproportionately hit those who have low income. If you made 100M/hour, your income decreased by 10%. If you made 20M/hour, the costs halved it. If you leave your Mack by the ice when you go to work, you can easily end up with negative income. This way active playing isn't penalized (if everyone is penalized, then no one is, or the yield/bounty can be rebalanced to give 10M/hour more for active play), but AFK-leeching and horrible performance take a hit.

Until something like that is implemented, there is one solution for AFK-leeching that threatens to remove consequences from the game: gank them!

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Bad, bad Mr Metis

My biggest contribution to the New Order isn't ganking and scouting myself, on this front I'm just one of many. It's seeding the New Order HQs. You see, the New Order operates far from Jita and needs lot of supplies: catalyst destroyers and fittings are used in large quantities. If you check small meta ion and neutron cannons, you can see the price increase. That's us. So every now and then I send a batch of items to the HQs to restock.

On Sunday morning my HQ trader had this transaction log: Mr Metis, a 1 day old character bought out all my meta guns in both HQs and relisted for 2x-3x higher than Jita price, clearly to "force" the gankers to buy from him. This is a targeted market PvP attempt against the New Order, since no one else buys these stuff in the middle of nowhere. Some ganked botter is upset, right?

Well, I already had bunch of supplies in Jita due to buy orders and bought some lower listed sell orders too and soon I could send my Orca to a merry 15 jumps with 1B worth of meta guns in the hold that should supply the Knights for a day or two until I get more. Just when I arrived, Mr Metis canceled his lists and disappeared. No, he didn't start to 0.01 me, just disappeared. Where did he go? We don't know. But we know this for sure: As I mentioned I have large volume buy orders for these meta guns in Jita. This Wescro guy sold me a lot. Surprisingly similar quantities that Mr Metis bought in the HQs. Of course Mr Metis paid a 0.2B more for them than me, as I sell over Jita of course. To make it more suspicious, just an hour before these sales, I bumped into Wescro's Orca at the undock of our HQ. Literally. I even suggested him to use an insta-undock bookmark on the New Order channel. Yes, on our channel, as Wescro isn't a disgruntled miner. He is the hero-awoxer of the New Order, the guy every newbie Agent wants to be. Well, well, he should have put Mr Metis in a shuttle and autopilot him to Jita. If Mr Metis sold me the guns, we would forever believe that it was a miner who tried to rob the Knights of the New Order with overpriced guns, not one of our own most respected members. Buying and selling in highsec isn't a crime, so formally he did nothing wrong. However I doubt if he'll ever be called anything else than "Mr Metis" by the members of the New Order. From hero to laughing stock over a day. Good job!

Why? Why does someone do something like that? The answer tells why competitive anti-socials can't take over the World and social organizations still linger: because they just can't be loyal to each other. A group of competitive anti-socials usually turn on each other. I'm probably the only one who doesn't. Do I have ethics? No. I just know that if I'd try it, I'd fail. You can devastate the morons and slackers, but not your equals. The problem with competitive people is that their constant victories make them believe that they are above the people and the law. That they are special, godlike.

We are not. We are just guys. It is true that our powers are godlike compared to the morons and slackers but it doesn't make us gods. It just makes the morons and slackers ... well morons and slackers. We aren't above the people and the law. The morons and slackers are below it. We are not special, they are especially stupid. Yes, Wescro could awox billions from these drooling subhumans, well done. But it's not because Wescro was skilled, it's because they were idiots. Similarly I made the price of three titans before my first birthday, but it doesn't make me awesome. Hey, I'm just flipping implants, there is nothing awesome about that. I'm just filthy rich because most people can't even do that, or too lazy to set something up when they have money so they are forced to grind for 40-50 M/hour when they run out of it.

So dear Wescro and others, please be nice with fellow competitive anti-socials for your own good. Keep farming the morons and slackers as you wish, but don't think for a second that you can pull something like that on us. If you realize that it's a fight you cannot win, we will have a nice little community that brings havoc and destruction to the morons and slackers. We'll be wolves among the sheep. But if wolf is not good enough for you, if you need to be the alpha wolf... well, I'll always have blog space for new laughing stocks!


PS: on Thursday I make a post how can one properly control the market instead of failing like Mr Metis.

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The fundamental highsec corp problem

I wrote that I think the greatest design problem is making highsec PvE players having to choose between the safety of the NPC or 1-man corp and the social interactions of a real player corp. Several CSM members seem to already agree, considering Empire wardecs nothing but tools for griefing. James considers limiting highsec wars is just WoW-ifying EVE (more). While I formulated an answer for it, I realized that I only addressed a symptom and not the problem.

My main character is in the starter NPC corp and will forever be there. Most of my pilots detto. I never even considered joining a player corp. Only a few alts participated in TEST. Now my botganker alt is the New Order Logistics corp, but that's rather an identification badge, as the New Order activity is organized on a channel and fleets ignore corps.

I barely played together with my own girlfriend since we quickly realized that it's not effective. Which is the fundamental problem: in EVE PvE you don't benefit from playing with other people. Even if you benefit from having another pilot around, it's easier to make him your own alt. Incursions are the only PvE content in EVE where you actually have to be with players. PvP is different as a fleet of individually acting players is more effective than multiboxing clone-ships. For this reason PvP usually involves multiple players playing together.

Since you don't need other players for PvE, it's pointless to participate in PvE corps. Since the PvE corps have no point, they only exist as a form of socialization. This is why a highsec PvE player hates wardecs more than suicide ganking. A suicide ganker attacked him because of his (lack of) tank. He can avoid it by fitting a tank. The wardeccer or awoxer attacked him because he has friends in the game. He can avoid it by not socializing with other players. Telling someone to fit tank is an in-game thing. Telling someone to sever connection with his "friends" is a personal thing, obviously making him more mad. For this reason highsec war declaration is a griefing tool, since its only counter is anti-social which griefs social people by definition.

CCP thinks about wardecs because they see that there is barely any combat in most, one side just docks up. The primitive solution is to remove this griefing tool. However the correct solution is to give players a reason to have something together worth fighting for. If being in a PvE player corp would have a point, good players would join these corps and would defend them. Just look at nullsec/WH! Those players need each other to defend their land from invaders. Alone none of them would have a chance to hold it.

Without such need, good highsec PvE players are currently alone in the NPC corp or in an altcorp leaving only newbies and morons in player corps. The solution for the highsec wardec problems is making cooperative PvE play profitable. So my 11 CSM votes goes to the guy who has any idea how to make cooperative PvE play profitable (read: more profitable than solo or alt-play).

I have an idea for that: sovereignty light. Accepting L4 missions or activating strip miner/ice harvester/gas harvester in a system needs a permit. System permits can be purchased by corporations, individual players can't buy permits. L4 or mining without permit makes one a suspect. So players would have to gather into corps to have permit. Of course then they could be wardecced for their land. This would be a middle ground between the current "farm top PvE in safety" and the "move L4 and medium level ore to lowsec". They could be attacked by war targets only and not by everyone like in lowsec. Of course L1-3 missions and mining ore with a non-strip miner is allowed without permit, so newbies are not penalized.


PS: I support Sugar's suggestion about highsec entrance gatecamps.

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The future of the New Order

Naysayers claim that the New Order will fail to have impact on the game economy and will remain a funny, roleplaying nonsense in highsec without any other effect than making some AFK-ers mad.

There are two challenges the New Order must - and clearly cannot - complete to reach its goals. At first, whole highsec must be covered. 2000+ systems. If we assume a Knight squad in every constellation, we will need more people online and in fleets than HBC had on the last timer of 49U. Clearly impossible.

Well, we are growing very fast, new Knights are arriving left and right so let's imagine we can continue to grow to the point of 2000 men standing army. Then what? The permanent botters and notorious AFK-leeches were smashed long ago, all that's left to gank is a few newbie Retreivers who failed to read the forums or talk with anyone in the belt who could have informed them. Maybe sometimes a permit holder thinks that 10M bought him AFK-ing rights and doesn't respond in local for longer time. But at this stage there will be 1-2 violating miners every day per constellation. A huge standing fleet is impossible on its own, now we are talking about a huge, standing patrolling but not fighting fleet. Let's be honest after a week of patrol most people will move to do something more fun, like grinding structures in stealth bombers.

We have to face it, the goals of the New Order are completely out of reach.

However the New Order is for the miners, and wish to facilitate the arrival of the active miner. It's not a mythical creature. New players mine actively since they are interested in the game. Casual miners detto. Multiboxers without bot also need to be around to manage their fleet. There are already active miners and with even a slight increase of mineral prices their numbers will grow.

Contrary to naysayers, the active miner isn't just looking at the cycle. He is watching local, communicating with other miners, watching directional scan for random griefers and so on. And above all, he spends his time in the belt (for obvious reasons). He knows that his worst enemy is the AFK-leech who devalues his products. So when he warps in the belt he checks on the fellow miners, both to join/form Orca-boosted fleet and to find AFK-ers. If he finds one and communication attempts fail for a longer period, he alerts the rest of the miners in the constellation, they relog to ganker alts and dispose the imposter. He won't get too many kills, but he won't mind as he is a miner. The kills are rather a little spice to his mining day. It will also serve as an introduction to PvP for the mainly PvE-er miners. His main activity will be - surprise - mining and socializing. Yes, I promote socializing as it is one level above leeching.

What about the Knights? Well, there will always be need for Knights but not in the number of thousands or even hundreds. A dozen Knights at a time online can keep the whole highsec clear. How? Because they don't have to bother about lone AFK-ing Macks, the miners handle those. The Knights are only called when the bad guys are really bad: bot-fleets, tanked Skiff AFK-er, combat ship protected bait Macks and so on. By the time we get to this phase, the Knighs will improve a lot. Those Knights won't resemble to the rag-tag militia of today. Orca alts will be all around highsec of the various knights, so one Orca can move to position in a few jumps. The Knights podjump to a close station, move to the Orca which deploys a few T2 Catalysts that the Knights mount and dispose the infidel. If the baddie is really-really bad, like a 20+ member botfleet, one of them follow it in covops, a proper fleet is planned for the next evening and the field cleaned up completely.

So yes, the low-meta Cata riding few days old alts of casual gankers have no future. But the active miners combined with a small elite force has. You probably guessed it, the crucial question is "will there be enough PvE players who switch to mining from missioning/ratting"? Only time will tell.

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Business Thursday: Shuttle+ and Hek standings

Two simple business tips for today. The first is a replacement for shuttle. Shuttles are good for one thing: autopiloting yourself from one place to another. Since you have no cargo, no one has a reason to shoot you in highsec.

Well, no reason doesn't mean they don't do it. Yesterday I was suicide ganked while I was providing warpin on an AFK mining barge for suicide gankers. EVE needs to be safer I tell you! So, let me introduce the "business class shuttle", that let you autopilot in highsec without being ganked by bored randoms. Please note that it cannot protect you from non-randoms, if you expect targeted attacks, don't autopilot and travel in a 600K EHP Tengu. I calculated with Shield upgrades 4 (with 5 you can fit 2x T2 extenders) and Shield compensation 4s (200 more EHP if 5). I assumed Caldari frigate 5 as you probably have it anyway for a Buzzard (700 less EHP on 4). It's almost as fast as a shuttle.

The second tip is for traders in Hek, a simple and effortless way to increase standings: learn the skills necessary to start working with an R&D agent. Science 5, Mechanics 5, Mechanical engineering 1 is enough. Then start working with the L2 agent in the station. Every day she'll give you a trivial mission (1-2 jump courier with a shuttle or to give her a trivial amount of trit). They give 0.08 and 0.32% standings alternating and after every 16 mission you get an L2 storyline for 1-2% faction standing. It's very low, but it's practically free. Since Boundless Creations has no highsec storyline agent, this is as good as you can get to increase standings.

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What the hell am I doing in the New Order?

The New Order is pretty much an altruistic roleplaying PvP organization. Definitely not the kind of place where a selfish industrialist would place himself. Even if it succeeds it provides no profit for the participants, the only beneficiaries are the active miners. A selfish, objectivist individual would only care for his own good and the New Order provides me nothing. Yet I see it a crucial part of "winning EVE" and I suggest every business- and winning-oriented players to join. Why?

Theoretically EVE is not a WoW clone. In WoW if you play totally incompetently, do whatever you desire in the moment, ignore planning and thinking, you still get every possible in-game rewards. "Failure" is not defined in WoW, even a literally AFK/autofollow player can complete raids and you can gain every item for justice/honor points next patch. WoW is the ideal socialism where the "government" (The Horde and Alliance NPCs) shower everyone with everything regardless effort or merit. In such environment making effort or gaining skill is wasting time. I left it for EVE in hope for a competitive environment.

Theoretically failure in EVE has consequences: you lose your ship and maybe even impants (skillpoint gain). In this environment only the strong survives. This idea fuels the ego of the EVE players who consider themselves soooo much better than WoW players. However what I found is lolling, random Arathi-basin bridge like PvP, horribly incompetent players (I'm sure you can find less spirit geared warriors in WoW than ships with unbonused guns in EVE). I gained the price of a titan as a few months old newbie. I had 10% of the income of 10000 men alliances. I was in WoW again, with racism and porn in the chat. Wonderful.

The only real resource in a video game is time. If you lose a ship, you must spend time re-grind it. To manufacture a Rokh, you need about 15M units of minerals. That's about 500K m³ ore. An OK exhumer takes about 1700³/minute. So if you lose your Rokh, you have to watch mining cycles and move ore from your hold to the Orca or Jetcan for 5 hours. Add fittings and you are close to 7-8 hours of farming to get that lost Rokh back. That's pretty harsh, right? Losing a cruiser means an hour of boring farming. EVE is harsh, forcing players to do boring grind as punishment for a single mistake that lead to the loss of the ship. Obviously you don't have to build the ship yourself, there is a market, but you have to provide some service to the ones who build it. Assuming everyone farms with the same ISK/hour (which is true by definition for the average player), you must farm an hour for your cruiser and 7-8 for a battleship. Soon the bad players will be out of ships, right?

Wrong, because you don't have to spend time farming. Your computer has to, while you are AFK. The minerals and ice products are practically free of time investment as they are gathered without player interaction, either via a bot or simply by AFK farming. Mining ores is 2-2.5x more profitable than mining ice. Still people mine ice, because that is easier AFK.

The problem:

1. AFKers and bots generate lot of minerals/ice
2. Minerals and ice products are cheap
3. As they are the basic level of manufacturing, everything is cheap
4. So it's cheap to replace losses
5. So losses don't hurt
6. So playing bad and generally being dumb, drunk or irrational has no more consequences than in WoW: frustrating other people who wanted to win

The AFK/bot mining nerfed EVE to the level of WoW: no loss penalty. Pull out the first point and the whole thing will fall apart. Remove AFK mining and ships will have value in terms of grinding time. Then losing will mean forced to do boring grind, so there will be difference between winning and losing. Only then we can start to play for win and talk about optimal strategies.

So, despite I'm fully aware of its weirdness, I joined and fully support a funny roleplay-religious altruist group and I suggest you do the same unless you want to watch the same guys who fought in the Arathi Bridge lol around in spaceships forever. Every AFK/bot you take out is a bunch of ore that a lolkid will have to farm himself.

So you were right, I joined the New Order to grief. But not the mining bots (can you grief a bot?), nor the AFK miners (who can avoid being griefed by not being AFK) but the mineral users. I want to drive up mineral/ice prices so losing a ship would mean "omg I now have to farm hours" instead of "gf lol". I want their tears!


PS: to put some numbers behind these: an average, casual highsec missioner in an OK-ish mission boat can take 40M/hour. If mining is forced to be active, it will reach the same ISK/hour. A similarly casual miner (T2 crystal, T2 strip miner Mackinaw, redocking, no other boost than himself having a Mining Foreman 4 skill) can earn 1300m³/minute veldspar. With spending 4 minutes/hour redocking, and +5% from "elite" veldspar, it's 76400m³/hour. 1m³ veldspar yields 30 units of tritanium. So 2.29M trit should be 40M IS, so one trit should be 17.4 IS. 3x higher than today. If we clear out AFK mining from highsec, all ship costs can be increased 3x higher. That would be impact!

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The Scripture of the New Order

At first there was the Miner.

As the Creator wished, he was in a cheerful team. He rode a mining frigate, then barge, then Exhumer eating asteroids after asteroids. He had Orca boost, a dedicated refiner, hauler, trader. He was happy.
But the mining beams found other than veldspar in the eons old asteroids. The Machine was awakened. Some believe it was the same entity that spawned the Rogue Drones. This timeless evil spirit started to whisper to their ears during the long strip miner cycles. It started to corrupt the miners to its own ways. The lone, dumb, endlessly repeating way of the machines. One by one they fell. They stopped mining in gangs despite its efficiency and turned to AFK mining. They countered the lost efficiency with increased time. They started to mine all day. "hey, it's AFK, it's not like I'm a no-lifer for mining 10 hours a day" they told themselves.

The belts became void of human presence, despite the number of barges increased. No one talked, no one hauled, no one boosted, there was nothing but the barges filling their hold, docking up to unload and return. Again and again, in endless repetition. New capsuleers who tried mining were both turned down by its machine-likeness and by the low prices caused by the endless stream of unpiloted barges. Mining got a bad name.

But then - like usually in times of need - a Savior arrived!
James 315, the Savior of Highsec proclaimed The Code to reclaim the belts for humanity from the minions of The Machine. They - like machines do - ignored it and kept on with their endless mine-redock cycles. But then James bumped them out of mining range with his Stabber. He started to write about his adventures and humans with compassion to the miners joined him. They became the Agents. They - as James taught them - bumped the corrupted miners out of range.

When they returned from AFK they found their hold empty. They knew that by failing to complete the cycle, they failed to operate within parameters, therefore they failed The Machine. They then experienced something that machines don't, only humans: rage. In their rage they spilled insults on their saviors. To help Agents properly examine this phenomena, James created the Miner Bingo:
It's important that the New Order has no anger towards these misguided people. We know that their nonsense is only coming from the corruption. The poor souls just reiterate the lies of The Machine, like "the fleet" that will come from some dark corner and gank the agents, or the powerful "lowsec friends" who will take revenge on those who violate the followers of The Machine. They also file countless petitions to the Creator, as The Machine misguided them into believing that they are invincible in Highsec as long as they are away from keyboard.

While lot of miners still suffer from these delusions, some found a way back to their former human selves. These gallant miners pledged their allegiance to the New Order in their Bio and paid the 10M support to the movement. Many of them - still remembering the darkness that held them until recently - became Agents themselves to save their still enslaved brethren. The Agents cleansed whole belts from the mindless zombies that were once our brothers.

But it was early to celebrate. While dozens were saved by the New Order, in others the corruption of The Machine ran deeper. They completed the Dark Ascension and turned into a Bot. The Bot has no humanity left in it at all. It is equal to the rats it shares the belt with. It never rages when bumped. It just reappears the asteroid and continues mining. It is a machine. And like all machines it is mass produced. Look at this, fellow humans and despair at the soulless legion that fell on the asteroid belts:

But even against this army of machines, the mankind of New Eden is not lost. The Knights of the New Order, riding on shiny Catalysts exorcise these abominations with Holy Antimatter:
Watch how the Knights strike down the slave army of The Machine! These ... drones - unlike the bumped miners - rarely rage. Do they just walk from the clone station with a blank stare on their face to their next barge and warp to the belt to continue? Or do they wake up, not remembering anything and live as cleansed humans? We can only hope.

The story of the New Order doesn't end here. You can be part of it too, cleansing the belts from this menace. Time is short. In every hour a human being turns into a Bot, losing everything that was good in him. Can you just walk over this tragedy? You can become an Agent or a Knight. The story will end as it began:

"there was the Miner. As the Creator wished, he was in a cheerful team. He rode a mining frigate, then barge, then Exhumer eating asteroids after asteroids. He had Orca boost, a dedicated refiner, hauler, trader. He was happy."

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11 CSM votes for sale

Update: the idea has been refined, see here.

I control 11 accounts. I used to publish character reports, the last one was in November, then I realized that probably no one cares so stopped. There you can see 7 accounts. Since then I started 4 more, all for training supercarrier pilots for sale on the bazaar. That's 11 votes on next CSM. These votes are for sale. They will go to the CSM candidate who endorse the following change and places into her program. There are many things wrong in EVE, just like in every game, but this one is seriously wrong and I find it the No1 reason for bad new player experience.

You can be killed 6 ways in highsec, where new players start their EVE life:

1. You are outlaw (-5 sec status), anyone can shoot you
2. You are a suspect, anyone can shoot you
3. You have a kill right on you, the owner and those who buy it can shoot you (limited engagement is a version of this)
4. You are in a corporation that is under wardec, your war enemies can shoot you
5. Your corpmates can shoot you
6. You can be suicide ganked

The first 3 are self-inflicted, you must shoot someone or steal first to be outlaw, suspect or kill right target. Suicide gank can happen to everyone equally but it's not so common and can be defended by not hauling billions and tanking your ship and by not AFK mining.

However the 4. and 5. ways to die can only happen to you if you are in a player corp. You can completely avoid these by remaining in the NPC corp or by creating a one-man corp (and close it if wardecced, starting a new). NPC corp has some drawbacks (mission tax, ratting tax), one-man corp has a one time creation cost but both are tiny compared to a ship loss or even being forced to stay docked.

Let me rephrase: playing together with other players increases the risk of being killed in highsec. People are in highsec because they prefer not to be killed. If your goal is safety then not playing alone is making a mistake. I can't tell how much it is a bad design. It makes miners, manufacturers, missioners having to choose between playing alone and taking extra risks. New players are looked with suspicion as they can easily be freshly created awoxer alts. Also, they can't join serious PvE corporations as there are no such: serious PvE players play alone. I want this to change.

This can be fixed several ways and you can get my vote in either way. Even the "everyone after 1 week must be in a player corp" is better than this, though it wouldn't make much sense as it would just make people move to 1-man corps. The point is to remove the "it's better to be alone" design. I repeat: I don't want to make highsec safer, you can currently avoid wardecs and awoxes. What I want to change is that this safety is connected to lone playing.

I would suggest two changes to fix this problem:
- At first a player corporation can be PvP and PvE. It's decided on creation and can be changed for a fee, but to avoid abuse not more frequently than once a month and you can't change to PvE while at war. PvE corporations have the same limitations as NPC corporations: no shooting corpmates, no towers and 11% ratting/missioning tax paid to Concord. Actually more restrains can be applied to avoid this mechanic be abused in PvP, for example being in a PvE (or NPC) corp fixes your safety on green. In turn no one can declare war on PvE corps and they are safe from awoxers (as you can't shoot corpmates).
- Secondly a flat, non-punishing but non-zero corporation upkeep cost, applying both PvP and PvE corps. I'd guess 100M/month. It's nothing for any real player corps, a few million per member, however it would be significant enough to close down one-man corps. It's paid from corp wallet, if there isn't enough in the wallet, it goes negative at first, upon reaching -200M the corp is dissolved, the members are moved to NPC corp and the corp hangar contents given to the CEO. I'd also implement a significant corporation creation fee, like 500M to avoid reckless creation of corps.

I repeat again, it's just my idea to fix it, you don't need to follow it to get my votes. You just have to offer a solution to the "safer alone" problem.

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The Lottery failure

I announced the New Eden bot lottery to celebrate and reward the ice bot gankings.

To my utter surprise, only 5 mails arrived, despite we destroyed awful lot of exhumers. Just the small corp I'm in killed 60 this week and most Knights are not even in a corp since there is no real point to (besides centralized killboard, the reason I've joined).

It seems most Knights have enough money and couldn't care less about winning more. I'm surprised, but life is full of surprises anyway. So despite I distribute winnings today, the lottery is discontinued.

The list of participants:I used Chribba's dice to determine a winner, as you can see I only used the dice once and the winner is #2, a wonderful 4x civilian shield booster Mackinaw. Prizes are:

• John E Normus: 165M
• Fawn Tailor: 150M
• Lin Suizei: 122M + 200M submitter
• Raqn Paudeen: 112M
• George Theodore Barrack: 104M
• Aleksa Mayhap: 97M
• NoseCandy: 50M

Winnings are being sent now.

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Dead morons of the week

Before the random idiots, let me tell my own story about someone who has way too little brain to survive in EVE. So I was out in the belt scouting after we killed like 5 exhumers (2 kills for myself, other 3 as scout). So I happily noticed that the pair of Hulks have Permit and wanted to leave when suddenly 2 Mackinaws warped in. I scanned them to see tank. Scanned again. Scanned again. Then I wrote a not too modest yet appropriate line to the channel: "All hands on deck, get into fleet, supers log in". That last part was stolen from the PL FCs I flied with and I guess this exhumer and pod deserved it. There was another equal Mack but we couldn't kill that since we have lot of newbies still (the top 1/3 pilots did equal damage as the other 2/3 on the kill).

After that our mega-fleet killed another random AFK Mack, then we hit on a triple-hulk setup. All 3 died, the combined value is in the calculator:

Now the idiots from the killboard busy in competition for Darwin prize:

• Wardecced jump freighter is dead jump freighter. A Goon is always wardecced.
• Same is true for MateDot.
• Or Nulli Secunda.
• Or Pandemic Legion.
• More Pandemic Legion.
• Or RA Citizens.
• Or Ethereal Dawn.
• Or Solar Citizens.
• One more Solar Citizens, this one with 11B cargo, so the only thing saved it from suicide gank is the wardec-gank.
• Yet another Solar Citizens.
• One more Solar Citizens.
• I've never heard of them but they also shouldn't haul under wardec
• Jump freighters can jump. Normal freighters can't. In nullsec if you are big and can't jump, you die
• 6B normal hauler (not covops) in lowsec with max-cargo fit. Wonderful
• Supercarriers can die without anyone is moron (hint: if you have no damage control, you are one). However having 8B cargo in it is just dumb. Use a JF.
• Another hauler Nyx, this one with 10B
• Purple ratting Nyx yay!
• Ratting Nyx full of the fruits of a long day of farming (probably botting) without tank with a 4B pod.
• 8B normal freighter in lowsec.
• Capacitor Power Relay "Increases capacitor recharge rate at the expense of shield boosting. Keep that in mind when you fit an overpimped shield Moros
• 6B ratting Machariel
• 8B cargo in a non-cloaky Tengu
• 5B shield Moros, and didn't even got all mids for shield. Or rigs. So rather tankless Moros. We an also talk about stacking penalty on tracking moduls. Or pointless pimping.
• Northen Coalition. (MateDot) lost a region due to a Falcon. Compared to that, a 17B Falcon isn't that bad.
• And the winner, the uncontested idiot of idiots, the suspect Noobship with 10 billion cargo!

So people, please, don't fly wardecced freighters and jump freighters, don't put billions into an Ibis, Falcon or normal hauler, don't haul or bot in supercarriers and you won't lose a fortune.

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Why fight against the AFK-ers?

I already wrote why it is important "morally" to fight the AFK-leeching. Now I want to explain why is it important from the selfish perspective.

The income/hour of the AFK-leech is infinite by definition. Practically it is a large number as setting up the character takes some time (queuing into a WoW battleground, warping to the ice field in EVE). Even this small time can be saved and the infinite income/hour can be reached by utilizing a bot.

Compared to the income/effort of the AFK-leech, even my trading income is laughable. Any active player is a loser compared to the AFK-leech. So yet again we reached the point that the best way to win a video game is not playing it but let a bot do it for us. However we want to play video games and don't want to be losers in the same time.

The only way out if we can make the AFK-leeches go away. In WoW it was theoretically impossible. Since you have no losses in WoW you can only slow down their progression but it's irrelevant as half of the infinite is still infinite. Also, Blizzard actively protected them, because an AFK-leech/bot is indistinguishable from a bad player. Does he do below-tank DPS because he is a bot or because he is bad? Does he stands in the middle of the nothing in a BG because he is AFK or because he is clueless? Blizzard wants "casual friendly" which by definition friendly to AFK-leeches and bots.

In EVE the active players can actually win against AFK-leeches/bots because there are losses. I can't just decrease the mining income of the bot but can make his income negative by blowing up his ship. "EVE is real" and "EVE is harsh" is all over the marketing, but still the game is littered by AFK-leeches proving that it's not true. In a really harsh game AFK-leeching would be impossible. I've never heard of someone winning in chess or football by not being there.

While "the economy is important" is all over EVE, practically people ignore it. Theoretically you have losses, your destroyed ship doesn't respawn like your killed avatar in WoW. The consequence of a loss is having to spend time mining, missioning or ratting. The enemy can be defeated by simply destroying more ships than they can replace or want to grind for. The problem is that with AFK-leeching getting a ship isn't harder than waiting for the resurrection timer. Sure you must wait more, but it's only a problem if you "have no life". If you play just X hours a day (and X isn't a large number), you have 24-X hours left to get ISK while asleep, watching TV, playing some other game or going to school/work. You really can't care less about your lost ship if its price will be there when you wake up thanks to your mission bot or AFK-ing Mackinaw.

So both to not be a sorry impoverished loser and to make ISK important, the AFK leeching must go. It won't go away by writing posts how unethical it is. We can also wait forever until CCP can catch all the bots. EVE is a sandbox where players can make impact. It's time to make some: the AFK-leeches will be purged by holy antimatter!

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Business Thursday: seeding headquarters

This isn't just a "how to make ISK" post, despite you make ISK with it. It is a post about how to participate in a group operation as a trader (as opposed to as a normal fleet member using your traded ISK). Every group operation in EVE needs resources: ships, ammo, modules and many other things. This is usually done utilizing corp hangars full of donated items. Such communistic approach is sub-optimal due to need of slave-work which leads to burnout and extreme vulnerability to spies/awoxers. Also, it is only applicable if the group is indeed a corporation and harder to use with alliances and formally non-organized groups.

The alternative is simple market seeding as it happens in Jita normally: people who want to sell put their wares to the market and people who want to buy buy them or place buy orders. This does not happen automatically as it needs capital: to put out 10 ships you need to own 10 ships. In Jita it happens due to the large number of sellers, each putting out a few. In a headquarters only a few people have excess items, most just want to buy. This is where you enter: provide the needed wares from your own money and sell them for profit. Currently I'm doing it for the New Order HQ and since I'm doing it the ganking goes much more smoothly. Let me outline the basic rules of doing it:

• Standardization: working with the ops leadership figure out what are the few items that will be needed. For example there are more than 20 kind of small blasters that the Catalysts ships use. I seed only 4 kind of them after careful selection. Please note that unlike the corp hangar method you can make your own calls without risks as you are not forcing anyone anything. It's not like I say "you must use one these blasters", it's that I provide them but anyone is free to use different and also to provide different in the market.
• Advertising: the people should know what you sell or they don't even look for it. Post on the group forum for example. In the New Order I use the simple trick of putting the item list to my Bio.
• Hauling: while you should use contracted haulers (members of the organization and others) they aren't always available. As a fallback you shall be able to haul yourself. If you operate in highsec, have Orca and Freighter. In low/null/WH have a Jump Freighter. Below I show my new highsec hauling Orca. It is a compromise between tank and align time, faster than a max-tank, stronger than an Afterburner-accelerated one. The T2 large rigs are surprisingly cheap and you can put in a shield and armor link to further increase EHP:
• Pricing: despite you are selling for your own people, you shouldn't sell at Jita prices for two reasons. One is the eternal "you shall not be a slave". If they find your prices high, suggest them to haul themselves and undercut you. Some may do, increasing the supply of the HQ. For this reason you shall never 0.01. If another guy undercuts you, be generous and let him sell if the price is OK. If it's too high, cut deeply. The other reason is protection from hostile buyouts. If you price over Jita and haul costs, the hostile buyer suffer losses.
• Skills: you'll probably have to supply multiple smaller bases, not just one HQ. So you need lot of orders, time to learn Tychoon. Don't be scared by having 300 orders, they don't need the same babysitting as the Jita orders. Look at them once a week or so. Remote order management skills are helpful too. Having a fast aligning but not easily suicide ganked frigate (Merlin is great) in highsec or a covops frigate in low/null/wh also helps a lot. If you base on NPC stations, have your standings up. No need to max them, especially as it decreases your standings with other factions. Having your broker fee below 0.5% is acceptable, no need to go for 0.3-0.2 like in a dedicated hub trader. Accounting and Broker Relations 5 are no-brainers.
• Buy orders: important! Whatever you sell, you should also buy in the same stations. I told that you'll need Tychoon. Buy orders are needed to let group members easily recycle their excess items (instead of hauling them back to Jita for sale and letting them rot in the hangar). Buy orders also allow independent haulers to supply you. Finally buy orders help silence "omg ripoff" idiots: they will more easily accept the Jita +30% price in deep nullsec if you also have a Jita +15% buy order. Even with their limited economy knowledge they can understand that you don't want to rip off yourself.
• Manufacturing: ships are large, therefore their transportation is hard. Having manufacturing skills and proper blueprints let you haul (compressed) minerals and build the ships yourself.
• Hub trader: the trade hub where you get your supplies, must have a standard, high-standings station trader alt and you must station trade the items in that hub. Why? Because this cannot be tolerated:This item is one of the implants I provide to the New Order. You can see the huge margin between buy and sell orders, right? This cannot stay for several reasons. At first the 900K sell orders might make hostiles believe that they can profitably buy out your wares at the HQ and haul to Jita. Secondly it makes you unable to define "the price" of the item. The hub buy and sell orders must be within 10%, keep station trading the the item until you reach it (and get nice profit). Thirdly in case of surge demand you might have to buy out sell orders in the hub and this case you don't want these sell orders to be 50% over the market price.

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Come fight M&S in the ice fields!

People are making the mistake of considering the New Order, the project I'm on, jet another griefing campaign. It's pretty easy to disprove: a miner can remove himself from the target list by stopping botting and AFK-leeching (hardly an evil demand), paying a pitiful sum of 10M and declare his support to the movement. Compare it to Burn Jita! You couldn't get immunity from Goon gank squads and trying to join them leads only to the infamous Goon recruitment scams. The New Order on the other hand welcomes miners to join, become agents and create Knight alts.

For long I've ignored the original purpose of my blog: fighting Morons and Slackers. I was too busy proving that EVE can be won that I forgot that winning it would change little in real life. "You won a video game with 40K other people, good show champ" - right? On the other hand look at the permanent page that I wrote as a personal goal. It's time to make it happen! My purpose with this project is to find these morons and slackers and force them to change into socials while collecting socials and upgrading them to competitive people (called anti-social by socials).

Let's see the morons and slackers. Obviously mining ice in EVE won't make you one. However "ice miner" and "miner" in general gained a bad name for a reason in EVE. Botting and AFK-leeching is the norm. They expect ISK without any thinking or making effort. The stereotypical ice miner just park a Mackinaw in the ice field and goes AFK, returning just to handle the full Mack. As dumb and lazy activity as it can be. Their tank is "fukk u nolifer". Also, currently the New Order is small and can cover only a few systems. It wouldn't be hard to move a bit further where we don't operate. But that would be too much thinking/effort for the M&S.

This is about to end. When they return from AFK they'll find their Mackinaw empty, bumped out of range or even worse: themselves in the clone station. They will be forced to be upgraded to norm-following socials: they will change their Bio, they will pay a fee and they will mine active. I will provide Orca boosts for free as soon as my former nullsec industrialist pilot can fly an Orca. I will also encourage them to form groups with each other, find business partners, get their own Orcas and play in groups. I want them to experience that "being with people" can be profitable and not just wasting time with idle chit-chat. They will be talking with fellow miners in the belt in local and not with distant "friends". They'll have to be on local or they risk losing their permit as the Code says: "No AFK mining allowed. All miners are expected to remain at their keyboards at all times, and are required to prove their presence by responding in local when requested by the Supreme Protector or one of his Agents."

Secondly there are the socials, full of flowers and love in their heart. No wonder they earned the title "carebear". They do what is "ethical". They are so upset by our "griefing" that they go out and try to protect the targets, people who they don't know. Also a miner who is lazy but not a moron would simply change his Bio and pay the 10M. However socials refuse to give in to "14 years old griefers". They rather try to counter-bump or counter-gank. They will fail. They will not fail because they are worse players than us, I mean lower skill point or inability to fit a ship. They will fail because they stand up for "ethics" and "moral" instead of something real. The "anti-gank movement" is not real, they have no member list, channel, ships, nothing. They are just a loose collection of whiners. They want to rally the "oppressed ones" just to find that they are AFK. They have to face that their beliefs help them nothing. They have to experience that losing ships protecting the "oppressed ones" is a waste of time because they don't even say "thank you" as they are AFK. The M&S is unworthy of saving. They will learn it the hard way. Their resistance will be broken. On the other hand they will not be broken. Every time they lose, they get the chance to join us. One day they will have enough of the futile attempt of protecting the unworthy M&S.

Finally, I'm not naive. Lot of the "Knights" can't care less about the Code or the vision of a bot/AFK-free mining. They are just here for the tears. They are competitive ones, enjoying their superiority over peers. I hope that they will see that by their actions the whole EVE changes. By this there is a chance to outgrow their state and start to aspire for more than e-peen.

- If you never tried EVE and still "enjoying" being damage #1 as tank (or healer, happened with me on battleground) in WoW, try it. You can be an effective ganker in a week. It's like WoW, except the defeated M&S won't say "lol idc" but rage over his lost pixels. If you have a trader alt, you'll never have problems affording gank ships. If you don't want to do any other activity, an extra PLEX ($15) can cover your costs for a month. Just roll a Gallente pilot, do the newbie missions to familiarize yourself with EVE and come to Chelien, our current base.
- If you tried EVE and found only "permanent Arathi basin" and left, come back and join!
- If you are in EVE looking for a change, come and make a change.

The New Order is a non-bureaucratic, casual (no time sheets) organization smashing the M&S. Ships will be destroyed! Socials will cry, break and reborn as higher beings.


PS: my "try out EVE Online" page has been changed to reflect this.

Also, the gank need a scout who scans the miner, reports tank and provides warpin. Obvious scout is obvious. However the "friendly heplfull ppl" who risk their ship defending stranger M&S gave me an idea about making a scout ship that rises cheer instead of suspicion:

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The economy of the suicide ganks

Update: the New Eden Ice Bot lottery has been updated to decrease the work with submitting a kill, comment on that post please.

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The Knights of New Order use Catalysts for suicide ganking non-compliant miners. Various freighter-ganking groups use Taloses and Vexors. James 315 wrote a post calling these "terror weapons", things that aren't economical but good to have to strike down some hard target in a show of force.

I have to disagree. The cheaper ships are more expensive. The problem is that you need more cheaper ships as they are weaker so you need more people. Man-hours aren't free. The fact that "ganking is fun" doesn't change that, with optimized costs you can get more ganks.

Let's compare various ships on a gank that needs 3000DPS. Please note that you need an extra guy as scout. How much time a gank is? There is 15 minutes GCC, undock, warp, I doubt if you can go below 20 mins. But there is a problem: the more people, the more waiting for others. One is AFK, the other is fitting ships and also we must simply sit and wait till the group fills up. While a clockwork team might be able to gank in every 20 minutes, I seen such times only on 2-man Retreiver ganks. In my experience every man after 2+1 costs another 5 mins. With this data let's compare the various ships. Please note that half of the fittings drop and can be scooped by the scout, so the "total cost" is lower than their sum:
Now let's see the cost of a gank depending on the ISK/hour of the participants: As you can see even in very low incomes it's better to use T2 catalyst than meta and better to use meta than T1. Even really poor newbies who joined EVE exactly for ganking are better off in the better ship. Since 15M/hour is really attainable for everyone (hint: mine ice if you don't have better ideas), we should upgrade to Vexors as soon as possible.

Now let's see the multiboxing situation, when you can actually keep the 20mins/gank schedule: Even in this ideal case the T2 Cata is better than meta and that is better than T1 at low income. The Vexor limit elevates but for a multiboxer 40M/hour isn't that hard. The point is that even if you hope that the group improves and gets to 20mins/gank, the economically optimal move is fit your Cata as good as you can (up to T2 of course, faction fitting would be stupid).

PS: Magnetic Vortex Stabilizer I is almost as good as Magnetic Field Stabilizer II (684 vs 686 DPS on a perfect, overheating T2 Cata), so it can be fitted as T2. Please note that it has higher CPU requirement though and Neutron Blasters eat CPU fast.

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New Eden ice bot lottery!

Update: the lottery is cancelled due to lack of interest

I want to give more support to the New Order than ganking bots and AFK-leeches myself (flashy red when less than a week old) and seeding the market of the HQs. I've already donated ISK and could more, but you might noticed that I'm rather fan of business solutions than bureaucratic.

So I hereby announce the New Eden ice bot lottery! Every Sunday one billion ISK will be randomly distributed. To enter the lottery for the one billion prize you have to do the following:

Gank a Code violating (bot or AFK leech) miner in the ice belt. To verify that he was in the ice belt, he must have ice in the cargohold on the kill report. We don't have the numbers to cover every belt and grav site, we must focus our efforts to one zone and now that's ice. Also, Ice mining has the most bots. If he just started mining and is empty, you are out of luck. T1 barges are ineligible, an Orca or Ice-hauling freighter worth 3 tickets (if they have ice in them).

Find the kill on zkillboard.com. If it's not there, then no one loaded it up. Go and bug the guy with the killing blow to add his limited API to zkillboard.com. If it's done, the kill will be uploaded.

Copy and paste the following to an eve-mail:

Dear former owner of the following items,
[shipkill zkillboard link], [podkill zkillboard link if any]

You were terminated because you violated the New Halaima Code of Conduct http://www.minerbumping.com/p/the-code.html

The New Order is fighting against botting and AFK leeching and NOT to grief people. We are for the betterment of miners. Less bots/leeches: higher prices for active players! http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-was-i-ganked-while-mining.html

Also please look up your kill reports on the zkillboard link and see how many other Code violators were slain by us. We are mighty and will continue pursue inappropriate behavior. Please read the linked posts and think about your mining future!

Send this EVE-mail to the target and Botslayer Goblin. This is needed to verify that the letter actually reached the target.

I will collect these mails and do a Sunday extra post of the ganks of the week. People don't really read my blog on weekends so it's a good place for the kills. After that I'll make a random roll and select the winner. I'll figure out how to use the dice of Chribba.

To encourage people do the smart thing and fit for T2 or high meta (see tomorrows post), the distribution of the 1B: everyone on the kill report receives the money directly from me, 8M for every % damage they caused. The better you are, the more money. The remaining 200M is given to the guy who first sent me the kill. 100M for his extra efforts of submitting the mail and 100M with the instruction to forward it to the scout of the gank! If I'm on the kill, still do the same, I won't process it automatically. If the winner kill includes me, I won't get a share.

PS: Sugar wrote a great post how a mining op should look like. Hint: not with AFK-leeching Macks. Feel free to recommend it to miners.

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