The influx of competitive players

There is a common fear that removing the ability to farm huge amount of ISK without risk or skill would remove large amount of subscribers. I've already mentioned that the highsec-only players don't pay for the game anyway and the others could move to farm in competitive areas. But it's indeed true that the game needs players to feel like a World and also there is a chance that the solo player will turn a content creator or a paying customer some day. So it's without doubt that losing players is a bad thing for an MMO.

However let's look at the other side: while any change alienate some, it is beneficial for others and these others can find the game worthy of playing. What kind of player could be lured to EVE if ISK could only be gained in competitive zones? Captain Obvious says: competitive players.

Let's face it, EVE isn't a competitive game. You can amass wealth and top the killboards without facing anyone who could fight back. EVE has a dark marketing that can lure competitive players who had enough of the WoW-clones where even AFK-autofollowing "players" are entitled to every reward and content is nerfed to the level of the braindead. I remember when I was hesitating about trying EVE out. I was afraid that maybe I'm not hardcore or have good enough reaction time to survive in this "cut-throat world". Then I gave a try and in half year I could afford a titan. In the first month I started shooting other players I got more kills than hundreds of "nullsec PvPers". I was disappointed and stayed only in lack of options. However those who don't just look for MMOs have options! There are several competitive e-sport-like games where they could - and probably did - move.

Now imagine if EVE would be just like it is marketed: a dark, unforgiving world where players fight for resources and power in an anything goes setting instead of "go to belt, target asteroid, go AFK, receive reward". EVE could be the competitive MMO where the players who want to test their skills against opponents could play.

EVE is in a perilous position: its marketing keeps the true "carebears" away, while those who are lured to try it leave disappointed. Practically the only way to get more players is word-of-mouth, the real life friends of current players can join. But seriously: how many real life friends does an average EVE player have?

EVE could have a unique selling point: the competitive MMO, where the skilled wins and the weak fails. Many-many players seek that game. Less than WoW sure, but more than the current EVE playerbase (which is likely around 150K humans). Instead of trying to keep those who'd fit WoW better anyway, let's keep those who fit nowhere else. I'm sure that making EVE competitive would increase subscriber count.

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An example of players who is not competitive and the EVE community is probably better off replacing him with someone who is:

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Business Thursday: no competition!

The dream of every trader is having no competition. Surprisingly it's not a rare thing (unless you are trading veldspar in Jita). If you work in nullsec, it's rather the norm than an exception. But even in highsec hubs you can check the market and find it empty: And at this point most traders do a serious mistake, letting this opportunity pass by: they price their wares too high thinking that buyers will have no choice but to buy it. It is wrong for two reasons: at first no one has to buy anything ever. They could live without it till now, they can keep living without it. They can also take some jumps and get it. Secondly your monopoly will end sooner or later. If you don't sell by then, your window closes.

So how to price an item in such cases? At first check the history: This case the sales happened in the 130-140 range. You shouldn't go too far from it.

Secondly, just type in your first guess into the sell price field and watch the % next to it: 145M is almost 10% over the regional average. The buyer will see the same number, except in ugly red. He is informed that this is expensive, he could be getting the same item cheaper by waiting or going another region. I'd strongly suggest not to try selling over +20% and preferably over 10%. Of course if the number is 1212156%, you can ignore it.

That's it. Don't get too greedy and don't for a second think that you control the market or anything. You are just a seller trying to get some profit. Be humble with your demands and you'll sell well.

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Non-paying players must create content

There is a common misconception among those who pay their account via buying PLEX in Jita for ISK. It's best summarized by Jester. The idea is mostly "I'm a useful customer of CCP because someone else bought the PLEX for $15". It's completely wrong.

At first let's step aside from pixels and look at the real world. In the real world you are a player who plays a game provided by the developer. You should be paying for this service some way, it's obvious. You either do so by subscribing the game, paying the developer directly. The other is helping him creating content for other, paying players, increasing their likelihood of remaining subscribers. If you do neither, you are leeching and are a useless waste of server capacity for the developer.

CCP made a mistake, no doubt. They designed the game with the same assumption as the developers of World of Tanks: if you are a free player, you are cannonfodder for the paying players. In World of Tanks if you don't pay for the game, your tank upgrades very slowly, making you easy target. In EVE you must rat/mine/mission in a ship that is totally unfit for combat to get resources. If you don't pay for the game, you must rat/mine/mission about 10 hours/month extra to generate the ISK needed for your PLEX. During this 10 hours you are easy target for roaming gangs. If you die to them you have to re-farm your lost ship, providing them further hours of fun. In the original design "playing free = time spent as target".

The design failed when they made highsec way too profitable. The highsec player is neither playing in group, providing content to his groupmates, nor he is a target for anyone (assuming he is not an idiot and fly something that can be reasonably ganked). He is playing alone for free, wasting server capacity. Have you seen the TiDi and the "can't jump in because of traffic jam" in Jita? I'd guess 50% of the players who caused this annoyance haven't paid a single $ for CCP or provided any content for anyone. Due to imbalanced highsec "playing free = time spent playing alone".

OK, OK, but he still generates ISK, LP and minerals that paying players are ready to buy for $ via PLEX. Isn't it makes him useful to CCP? No, because CCP can generate ISK, LP and minerals from thin air. If a highsec miner would be replaced by an NPC who sells the same amount of minerals in Jita and buys PLEX from the ISK, no one would notice or care. Since the paying player would get the same thing for the same $, he would have no reason to stop paying.

The bottom line is that CCP could replace non-paying highsec PvE players by an item shop with no effect on anyone else besides less lag and keep the same $ for less server and tech support costs.

I'm not saying that highsec PvE players must be purged. I'm saying they must pay for the game they play with $ as they provide no content to anyone. Technically this can be implemented by stopping them being able to farm the cost of PLEX with normal play. Highsec income must be nerfed to the range of 5M/hour. Out with L4s, incursions and all ores besides veldspar!

Update: just found out the most trivial way to explain it: every in-game item is worthy only in comparison to the amount in the hands of other people. If you double the ISK in the hand of everyone, you just caused inflation. If highsec farmers would disappear, there would be less tritanium for sure, so less ships. But the amount of ships vs the amount of ships in the hand of your enemy won't change. Similarly if you pay $15 to buy a PLEX, from this PLEX you can buy less ships, that's true. But the amount of benefit you gain from the PLEX (compared to your enemy or the average gamer) will be the same, so you become no weaker nor stronger by the increase of ship prices.

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Buffing low/null won't be enough

"Money is in highsec" is widely accepted in EVE, practically every null/low player has highsec alt(s) to make ISK. My recent results proved that even the "get fights" value of null/low is way below highsec leaving it no selling point. Those who are there are either mistaken or just want to fool around.

Still many resist the necessity of serious nerfing of highsec income, based on the idea of "buff null/low" instead, providing rewards to players for moving instead of punishing staying. This won't work. It's not an opinion, as it was tested recently and failed.

8 months ago CCP made a serious design error and provided insane income for FW lowsec in the form of LP print in complexes that could be completed in a one week old frigate while AFK. The LP could be cashed out at insane rates during level 5 zone control. Players participating in it got over hundred billion ISK a month running several of the AFK orbiting frigates. Even a single account could reach 2-300M/hour which was way out of reach for any other PvE activities. The result was devastating inflation, increasing the price of PLEX (practically the amount of ISK in the hands of players) by 20% over 3 months (185%/year inflation). The price of titan BPCs and slave implants doubled. Lot of people got very rich until CCP finally fixed it.

So CCP created the ultimate lowsec income buff. Yet only a few adventurous players responded. Most of the highsec dwellers remained in highsec. Missioning/AFK-mining alts were not replaced by FW orbiter alts in significant numbers, despite the huge income imbalance. Why?

Because highsec income is enough. If you do PvE in highsec, you gain enough money to PLEX your account and pay for your PvP costs. You don't need more income. Sure you could waste billions on never-logged-in titans and solo roaming Machariels and other forms of luxury but you don't need this money. So most people couldn't be bothered to learn how to operate in FW lowsec.

If the totally unbalanced FW rewards couldn't lure people out of their comfort zone, how could any form of balanced null/low income buff have any effect?

To have an effect, highsec PVE income must be nerfed to the point where no form of low/null life can be financed from it, nor PLEXing an account. The second is imperative: since the highsec PvE player provide no content for anyone, there is absolutely no reason for him to play for free. If he quits because he can't PLEX an account, CCP loses nothing. He didn't pay and he kept no one else playing. If his ore or LP is missing from the economy, NPCs selling them could replace it. No, they don't provide content for suicide gankers, since only small portion of highsec PvE players are gankable: the morons. However the first part is also necessary: no null PvP-er should be able to finance himself from highsec PvE, he must PvE in low/null or PLEX.

The above nerf could be done by removing L4s, incursions, complexes over L3 difficulty/reward and every ore but veldspar from highsec. While most fear a highsec exodus, it is neither relevant (they didn't pay for their account anyway) nor likely. Don't forget that highsec play will still remain an ever-increasing wealth. Even if slower, every highsec player would keep on eternally progressing. The fact that they will be blitzing L3s for 10M/hour instead of L4s for 100M/hour is completely irrelevant. And don't forget that a fixed competitive nullsec would gain new players.

The crucial point here is that a fixed nullsec is very newbie friendly while current highsec is not. Why? Because in nullsec blob warfare every pilot is valuable. The current newbie-unfriendliness comes from "we didn't want that space anyway". Many alliances prefer losing their space than giving up their "elite" status, because they really don't need that space as they make money in highsec by AFK retrievers and Vargur bots. If losing their space would mean losing income, they wouldn't treat new pilots like crap.

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12B/week solo

No, it's not another business report, my income is 1.2B/day (8B/week) and no one cares about that. It's a report on solo ganking. On Jan 27, 4 weeks ago I started solo ganking Code-violating, AFK-ing, untanked mining barges. I've been busy since then, and in the last 4 weeks I did not fleet up with anyone, so all my kills are solo. Look at the butchers bill:

• Jan 27: 20 kills, 4890M
• Jan 28: 11 kills, 1137M
• Jan 29: 22 kills, 1457M
• Feb 1: 9 kills, 352M
• Feb 2: 19 kills, 738M
• Feb 3: 24 kills, 2268M
• Feb 5: 14 kills, 2907M
• Feb 6: 16 kills, 1706M
• Feb 7: 26 kills, 1692M
• Feb 8: 7 kills, 477M
• Feb 9: 42 kills, 2770M
• Feb 10: 27 kills, 1415M
• Feb 11: 15 kills, 1288M
• Feb 12: 18 kills, 960M
• Feb 13: 36 kills, 3960M
• Feb 14: 26 kills, 1538M
• Feb 15: 19 kills, 1720M
• Feb 16: 29 kills, 1926M
• Feb 17: 54 kills, 3755M
• Feb 18: 23 kills, 2254M
• Feb 19: 34 kills, 1944M
• Feb 20: 25 kills, 1803M
• Feb 21: 15 kills, 759M
• Feb 22: 37 kills, 2706M
• Feb 23: 39 kills, 1663M

Since weekends provide more kills, it's best to evaluate the results on a weekly basis:

1. 81 kills, 8.57B
2. 129 kills, 11.82B
3. 170 kills, 12.81B
4. 227 kills, 14.88B

As you can see it's increasing week by week as I'm improving. Calculating from the first four weeks, my weekly average is 152 solo kills and 12B ISK damage. (659 and 52.2B/month)

It's not easy to put this number into context because everyone and his mother has 1000+/month kills, 50B+ ISK damage done and 99.99% efficiency due to the way the killboard calculates these: you get full value for every kill you took part in. If you were in a noobship in Asakai you could easily get 700B kills. However this error is smaller for corporations and even smaller (though non-zero) for alliances. If 10 corpies kill a ship, each of them get the full value, but the corp gets only one value, not 10x. Of course if members of two corps kill something, both corps get the kill, so even corp kills are overestimated. However as we move to larger and larger entities, the error decreases. So let's compare this 12B/week solo kills to the largest sov-holder alliance: TEST. Their killboard has weekly results:

• Week 7: 3334 Ships killed (242.18B ISK)
• Week 6: 3543 Ships killed (229.4B ISK)
• Week 5: 3628 Ships killed (283.49B ISK)
• Week 4: 3968 Ships killed (647.6B ISK) Asakai week
• Week 3: 3360 Ships killed (316.44B ISK)
• Week 2: 3780 Ships killed (220.96B ISK)
• Week 1: 3434 Ships killed (278.94B ISK)
• Week 52: 3157 Ships killed (176.82B ISK) 2012 week 52 of course
• Week 51: 2604 Ships killed (180.56B ISK)
• Week 50: 3041 Ships killed (233.7B ISK)
• Week 49: 2274 Ships killed (240.64B ISK)
• Week 48: 1468 Ships killed (101.94B ISK)
• Week 47: 1673 Ships killed (123.79B ISK)
• Week 46: 2558 Ships killed (137.34B ISK)
• Week 45: 2751 Ships killed (187.82B ISK)

The last 15 weeks of TEST had lulls and deployments, Christmas and Asakai. The average is: 2972 kills and 240B ISK damage done. I'd remind you that this data is still not perfect as many of these kills had participating people from out of TEST (like every living body on those Asakai titans) but let's be generous and accept all of these as TEST kills and with that we get the result: I killed 1/20 as many ships and 1/20 as much ISK as the 13000 member TEST alliance. Does this "1/20 of TEST" gives anyone deja vu? If you care to divide 13000 by 20, you get that I destroyed 650x more ISK than an average TEST member. Ouch!

OK, TEST is known to be bad at EVE, let's look at the oh-so-elite NCdot:

• Feb (on 20th): 3928 Ships killed (535.02B ISK)
• Jan: 9004 Ships killed (1444.49B ISK)
• Dec: 6326 Ships killed (544.55B ISK)
• Nov: 5059 Ships killed (676.51B ISK)

This covers 111 days, so on an average week they kill 1533 ships and 202B ISK, 10x more ships and 17x more ISK than me. Considering they have 1650 members, I outperformed the average NC. pilot 163x in kills and 98x in value. Oh, so elite, I wish I could be there.

The Pandemic Legion killboard is weird enough to stop me from getting ISK destroyed data, but their stats show about 1.5x more kills for the various corps than EVE-Kill.net (some kills are not uploaded to the public board). So I went to EVE-Kill and found:

• Feb (on 20th): 4310 Ships killed (476.13B ISK)
• Jan: 8446 Ships killed (1697.61B ISK)
• Dec: 5186 Ships killed (800.19B ISK)
• Nov: 2891 Ships killed (454.22B ISK)

Multiplying by 1.5 we get 1971 kills and 324B ISK for a week. With 1736 members, it's 134x more kills and 64x more ISK destroyed for me than the average PL member. I tried to write something witty here, but failed.

Let's look at small-gang elite alliances, like Rote Kapelle (where Jester plays):

• Week 7: 227 Ships killed (12.44B ISK)
• Week 6: 275 Ships killed (18.83B ISK)
• Week 5: 180 Ships killed (19.27B ISK)
• Week 4: 318 Ships killed (22.41B ISK)
• Week 3: 222 Ships killed (33.34B ISK)
• Week 2: 208 Ships killed (9.23B ISK)
• Week 1: 452 Ships killed (22.06B ISK)
• Week 52: 196 Ships killed (14.96B ISK)
• Week 51: 320 Ships killed (35.8B ISK)
• Week 50: 309 Ships killed (37.08B ISK)
• Week 49: 405 Ships killed (50.48B ISK)
• Week 48: 243 Ships killed (20.5B ISK)
• Week 47: 188 Ships killed (22.47B ISK)
• Week 46: 198 Ships killed (16.43B ISK)
• Week 45: 189 Ships killed (21.5B ISK)

The average is 262 kills, 23.8B ISK, so I alone did half as much ISK damage as the whole Rote Kapelle, 122x more than an average member. I earned money with ganking, more than my catalysts cost. An average ret gank provides 5-6M net income, despite I didn't pick them after fitting, but rather pilot age.

No, the purpose of these hilarious numbers are not to make these alliances look like clowns. I made it to expose the huge inbalance between highsec and nullsec. A small corp of me and 19 of my clones could outperform the largest sov-holder alliance both in ISK generation and kills. How? Because I'm in highsec, where the money is. Money means "farms and fields": the "peasants" who generate the income to nullsec are not in nullsec but in highsec. Nullsec alliance members can't compete with me because the farmers of their enemies are not in nullsec. A TEST roam can't kill FA miners, highsec gankers can. Since the miners, ratters and missioners are barely present in nullsec, null is nearly empty, PvP-ers find no one one to kill.

On the top of the huge income potential, highsec also provides anonymity. Some people might be tempted to say "the members of these alliances with joke stats could defeat me 1v1 and could end my highsec massacre with a few seboed Tornados", but they are wrong. They could only camp Botslayer Goblin, my 2 months old pilot into a station while I can easily continue somewhere else on an unnamed alt. You can't do the same in nullsec because your friends would shoot your unnamed alt, not knowing it's you. Losing ships to friends is bad enough, but imagine the consequences if you shoot a wrong neutral Falcon!

Without huge nerfs to highsec income to force at least the nullsec people to live in nullsec instead of farming in AFK Retrievers on the other screen, nullsec remains the wasteland it is today, lacking both decent income and targets to kill. If you want something bigger in nullsec than idiotic frig/T1 cruiser roams, vote for highsec nerfing candidates for the next CSM. Until CCP fixes this, leave that empty wasteland and come where the money and the targets are: highsec. There are enough untanked barges and 10+B, zero buffer missioning battleships for everyone!

Beside voting, the nulseccers could do more: hold a "strike" when they refuse to kill each other in nullsec, instead they come and gank in highsec. Not in the wasteful "Burn Jita" style, but smartly, with solo-duo catalysts farming miners in 0.5-0.7 and dropping Taloses on scanned down missioners. This can be done profitably and can be upheld eternally, until CCP finally fixes the nullsec economy and makes it profitable to live there. Alternatively they could hold a capital mining op where the capitals and supers of various alliances are peacefully mining as a protest against the messed up EVE economy. The end goal is to have significantly higher ISK/hour in nullsec, therefore creating targets there. As long as a highsec ganker has higher ISK destroyed than an average Pandemic Legion member, the high-null balancing is not acceptable.

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Moron of the week: he mad

AFK Miners react differently if their 220M untanked Hulk and 150M pod are suicide ganked. Most of them just fill one or more fields of the miner bingo.

But not Ray Rayary. He responded as a true warrior, fighting fire with fire. You might know that I use a Procurer alt to scout targets. So came Ray and attempted to suicide gank it. His choice of ship was maybe not optimal and also he attacked in a belt where Concord was already present, but my 8% lost shields remind me never to mess with Ray again:

Defeat could not take the fighting spirit of Ray. Neither GCC. He valiantly undocked again:

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What's wrong with RMT?

Important message: Don't miss the post on Monday! Just don't! Here is a preview:

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Tobold pointed out that developers have lame excuses against real money trading (RMT) of in-game items. Spamming, account theft and credit card issues are all linked to third party RMT that can be easily removed by sanctioned RMT. The game developer has so much control over the game and has so much more credibility than third party sites that it could take decent cut from RMT between players, just like Blizzard does with Diablo III.

Their claims don't answer the fundamental question: what's wrong with RMT?

I can pretty easily answer it, because I'm one of those who would benefit greatly from legal RMT. Both in WoW and EVE I could make significant real life sum selling in-game currency. In EVE, even with calculating with the current PLEX prices ($30/B) and my current income 40B/month, I could earn more money than the median income of my country. What would I do if RMT would be legalized in EVE? Quit my real time job and do EVE-trading instead. My income is limited by my trading time. Even with a very modest 330B/hour income approximation, I could make $10/hour in a country where the minimal hourly wage is $2. So hell with me trading in Jita, I'd hire some unemployed nerds to do the trading for me, according to my instructions and under supervision of course, pay them $6/hour and keep the other $4. With 10 employees working 8 hours per day, 20 days per month, I'd earn $77K/year without actually doing anything but check on my employees.

What effect would it have on the game? Every market fully covered, leaving no trading income to casual/newbie players, only similar professional traders could compete. The simpler income sources, like doing PvE would be covered by real world corporations using minimal wage labor (after all, ratting can be done by half-illiterates), leaving absolutely no in-game income source to the real players. The only way for real players to earn in-game currency would be RMT itself. However if the player can only obtain items by buying from someone, why should the developer give a share to me? They are better off removing farming completely and sell the items in the item shop, keeping the whole money.

The above happened exactly in Diablo III. The real players obtain 99.9% of their gear from the AH and don't farm themselves. It's not a tragedy in a one-time play box-sold game, but obviously a death sentence to any MMO.

To let real players progress, professionals cannot exist, so RMT cannot exist. Of course where is demand, there is supply, so if there is no official RMT, third party RMT emerges. To handle this, EVE is using a pretty good middle way: a limited official RMT. I can and do sell in-game currency for real money in EVE by buying PLEX and consuming it to fund my play. As I wrote on my birthday post, I fund 5 accounts for myself, 3 of it are training capital/supercapital pilots who may never be used. Add one more account for my girlfriend and that's it (supercapital pilots training for the Bazaar don't count, they are income source). 6 accounts, 3B/month ISK RMT-ed. I could sell much more ISK, but I'm limited by the utility of PLEX. What could I do with more PLEX? More accounts that I won't use?

Since I can't use more PLEX, I can't use more ISK, so I cut back on my trading, giving more space to other players to play in Jita. On the other hand that 3B/month I RMT away keeps several players in cheap ships for their $15, therefore stopping them being so broke that they'd turn to illicit RMT sellers.

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Business Thursday: Ratting miners

Highsec suicide ganking is considered "griefing", an activity where the ganker spends time and ISK to receive nothing but "tears". While ganking, I was always doing so with a goblinish eye and realized that it's not true. You can gank pretty profitably.

What does a ship kill provides ISK wise: module drops, cargo drops and salvage. If these are larger than the cost of your own hull loss and module loss (your module drops are reused), you are making profit. Most highsec mining is done in Retrievers. A ret has two high slots, each equipped with a mining laser. It's 2x1.5M if T1 is used, 2x5 if T2. They also have 3 mining laser upgrades, T1 doesn't worth much but T2 worth a million. Their ore hold has mined ore, about 5M worth. So a T1 fitted Ret drops 4-5M a T2 drops around 10M. Then comes drones. The drones of the destroyed ship are abandoned and you can scoop them to your cargohold. A flight of Hobgoblin II costs 3M. Add salvage of your own ship and the miner plus an occasional random stuff (unassembled mining crystals) in the cargohold of the ret and you are looking at 5-20M loot from a gank. By choosing targets according to fit and drones, you can be on the high end, gaining around 15M for a gank. A good ganker can do 3.5 ganks/hour, netting over 50M/hour income. Yes, ganking highsec miners beats battlecruiser ratting in nullsec.

The costs? In 0.6 security a meta 3 neutron fitted Catalyst can kill a Retreiver. In 0.5 it can even pod it. The ship costs around 5M and 2M can be regained as loot. So even if you are not in the New Order where gank catas are reimbursed, you are still over 40M/hour.

To effectively rat AFK miners you need 3 characters on two accounts. One is - obviously - the ganker. After two weeks the pilot will have enough skillpoints to rat in 0.5, after a month in 0.6. James 315 has a great guide how to skill a ganker.

The second character is the scout. I advise a Procurer as scout since it's very well tanked and does not rise suspicion in a belt. As a bonus it has its own mining ability and get you minerals on the side. Its ore hold will also be in use. The advised fitting is:
[Procurer, scout]
Damage Control II
Reactor Control Unit II

Passive Targeter II
Ship Scanner II
Experimental 10MN Afterburner I
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II

Strip Miner I

Medium Polycarbon Engine Housing I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I

If you can't fit Reactor Control II (needs energy grid upgrades 5), you can fit faction or replace one of the shield rigs to Ancillary current router. Have an overview tab with nothing but mining barges, exhumers and belts. Using this tab, a quick dscan tells which belts have Covetors, Hulks and rets. Warp there, passive target the miner, approach with AB, scan his ship and if it's untanked, continue to approach. Find a nearby asteroid and start mining. It's best to doubleclick in space next to the target so you don't bump it if you stop too late. When you are near the target, switch to another overview tab with ships except exhumers and barges to see if there are any vultures around. Ship scan any suspicious ship on grid, seboed high DPS ones, Ewar ships and neuters are big no. Most vultures can be ignored, they can't (and often don't even want to) stop you, just want to leech on the Concord mail (hence the name).

If the belt is clear, warp your ganker to the scout and gank the target. After the Catalyst is destroyed by Concord, warp your pod to a celestial and your scout shall loot the Catalyst wreck and scoop the drones. Warp the pod to the station and dock. Have instadock and insta-undock bookmark of course to prevent station campers from interfering.

After your ganker is safe, relog to the looter. He can fly a venture or a frig with 2 warpstabs. Have some tank, align fast, have salvagers, afterburner and off you warp to the scout. Salvage the wrecks and while doing so, jettison some random crap. Open the jetcan and the miner wreck and move the loot to the can. The loot will not fit into the frig of course, that's why you use a jetcan. Doing so is stealing, placing a suspect timer on you. Warp to station or to a safe in a stationless system. You can use the safe logout feature under criminal timer.

The loot is now in the can and the scout as a fleetmate can safely take from it. Loot the modules, put the ore to your ore hold and dock with the loot. Don't forget to repair the modules before repackaging. Sometimes you need to take multiple turns, especially if the target was jetcan mining. This case the looter pilot should move all the ore from the cans to your cans first. Never go suspect on a Procurer. After you deposited the fruits of your honest day's work, undock and find another "rat".

Let me add an advanced tip to people with good multiboxing ability: during the gank, your scout should engage the ganker with a drone to get on his kill report. This way you can get your own bounty that the nice miners placed on you.

Finally: you don't have to be a ganker to do this, you can be a looter/salvager for gankers, just offer % to known gankers and follow them around for mutual profit.

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Solo is alone

I've written about it multiple times: EVE Online is very solo friendly MMO and does not support group play outside of nullsec Sov war (where it support huge fleets). Now I can talk about another aspect of it: suicide ganking.

I started it in the New Order fleets. I couldn't gank anything alone due to low skillpoints and no clue how to do it. I flew dozens of fleets as scout, ganker and even as FC. I learned it inside out and also gained skillpoints to T2 guns. From there I was able to hit Retrievers and Covetors with pods in 0.5-0.6, Hulks with pods in 0.5, without in 0.6 and Mackinaws in 0.5. Solo I wasn't bound to other people, I could act completely according to my own schedule. It was much more efficient, even if I was bound to 0.5-0.6 and had to pass on juicy but somewhat tanked targets. Since its easier to find targets where dozens of other people don't gank, so I moved away from the main New Order fleet and started to solo gank, never looked back.

Why is it a problem? Because it's another example of the "better alone" design of EVE. No matter what aspect of the game you look at, the skilled player has no reason to team up with others, as he can get the highest efficiency by playing alone. The best gankers of the New Order are playing (mostly) solo, therefore the fleets, where the newbie members could learn, are suffering. Of course we could play in fleets, but it would be an altruist move, sacrificing our own efficiency to help others. I saw the same with missioning, mining, trading and now with ganking.

On the one hand it's great as it allows the player to rely on no one else, therefore his results coming only from his own performance. On the other hand it's expelling social players, since it limits "team" aspect to "chatting while playing solo". I am on the minerbumping channel but my participation is limited to sharing kills and answering technical questions. We no longer play together, despite we keep on fighting the same campaign.

I'm not sure if it's a problem at all. After all I always supported a-social approach to problems. I enjoy playing this way and clearly others too, or EVE wouldn't exist. It's a weird way of "EVE is real", being much more life-like than other games where certain activities (raiding, battlegrounds) demand players to team up. In EVE not only you can do everything alone but you are better off. Sov is the only exception but Sov is itself an altruistic activity, its income is way below what you can gain in highsec.

No wisdom here, no solution. This post is just what it looks: even ganking is a lonely activity.

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Outrunning the bear

Most bears (Grizzly, Polar, European Brown) run faster than a man. So if you are in the range of a hungry bear, you are out of luck. This is the fatalist approach of the miners who are aware of the existence of Damage Control II module but refuse to use it. "If someone wants to gank me, he will succeed."

Both statements are equally true. However we know the saying "you don't need to outrun the bear, only the slowest man around". The bear doesn't want to eat you, it just wants to eat. It won't make the extra effort to catch you if there is an easier prey or closer threat.

There are lot of situations where the above is naturally applied. Does seatbelt protects from all accidents? No, but it saves from many, so it's better to use it. Does washing your hands before eating stops every bacteria from entering your body? No, but it stops a lot. Someone claiming "I don't wash my hands because bacteria can get in anyway" would be laughed.

However social people see a huge difference where there is none: between the human opponent and the bear or bacteria. They implicitly assume that the human opponent is after them. As an active ganker and member of the New Order, I can guarantee that we can't care less about your name - unless you walked an extra mile to make us care, like Moonsong Miner. We are ganking barges, not people. If it is not on the list on the permit holder (set to blue) the scout approaches. If it doesn't warp off (hard when the player is AFK), it will be ganked.

How does tank comes to the picture? Simple: if you have a tanked Retriever, solo gankers can't gank you. Can they form a fleet and gank you? Can they upgrade to a Vexor? Yes they can. Will they when the next belt has an untanked Hulk, two Retrievers and an 3 bot Covetors filling and Orca? Kidding?

Gank fleets can indeed destroy targets at will. But will a 5-man fleet bother with a T1 barge when it can hit T2 exhumers? The chance of your Retriever be hit by a fleet is the same as PL hotdroping supers on your frigate roam. Finally, Procurer/skiff is out of range even for fleets. While I can imagine some extremely obnoxious New Order hater be ganked in a Skiff, I've yet to see a single Skiff kill.

I see that I avoid most traps simply by not being social. For me a ganking catalyst is no different from an equal DPS belt rat. If I can tank it, I do, if I can't, I don't go there.

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"Bad people" - social response to threat

When I'm ganking barges and exhumers, I scan the ships first looking for tanking modules. I'd say less than 10% of the barges has any form of tanking (even dumb ones like armor plates) and less then 20% of the exhumers, and even these are mostly some random tanking module thrown to the empty med slots. I've yet to see a single Orca with shield or armor gang link and saw only one with shield transporter.

It's surprising if we consider the ego of EVE players who are sooooo much better than WoW players. Well, the infamous cloth gear warriors are rare examples in the magnitude of 0.1-1% while in EVE the majority of the miners are complete failures. But it's not about re-iterating my opinion of the average IQ of EVE players (which I believe to be lower than of WoW players). It's about the miracle that they are still living/playing. I mean with their complete ignorance of ship fitting they should die more often than they could mine enough to replace their ships. Yet they are living and progressing enough to enjoy the game and keep playing.

The cheap answer would be "dumb people can progress in EVE because their competitors are equally dumb, an untanked mining barge is safe from equally badly fitted gankers". But I've seen a weird, greatly sub-optimal, yet fun functioning response to threat. While they don't even try to address the problem (their barge can be ganked by a single 10M destroyer) but they put great effort into resisting me, the player behind the destroyer.

I've yet to see a single advice (beside my own) in local to fit tank. But if I enter a system I've done some ganking before, I quickly see "beware, ganker in local, dock up". Some of them even camp the station or the belts with (usually horribly fitted) combat ships to stop me. Others try to locate my scout and convo the targeted miners. It doesn't really help, because they can't respond to warnings when they are AFK. However they are clearly trying to save themselves and their fellow miners from danger.

This behavior is too persistent and repeated by too many people to be random acts. This comes from the core of the social thinking: "people matter" as opposed to "things matter". They believe that the key to safety isn't being able to defeat a Catalyst destroyer but to defeat a "bad person". If people wouldn't be evil, there wouldn't be bad things! Their refusal to fit tank comes not from ignorance of EVE ship fitting, but refusal to accept the existence of the ganker. Fitting tank means "ganking happens, I'm prepared". They don't want it to happen, since it's evil. So they focus not on saving themselves but to stop "bad people".

This is another ape-subroutine, mental scheme from ancient times when prehistoric men lived in small communities. There every single troublemaker could be identified and handled. A closed village could be kept clean from norm-breakers. This is much harder in large cities and completely impossible on the internet. Their coping attempt with ganking in EVE is totally futile since there are many gankers and alts. It was funny when I ganked the loudest anti-gank activist simply by using a different alt for scouting. He ignored the ship right top of his barge because it wasn't named "Goblin" so it wasn't identified as a "bad guy".

So ganking them is a more worthy activity than I initially thought. It has the prospective to save these people from this thinking. One who stops watching local for known gankers and fits tank did not change his gameplay, but his real life thinking. He stopped trying to be safe from bad people and started to defend himself from bad things. So, save a social from his ape-subroutines, gank an AFK-er!

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Enabler burnout

After I wrote about people who are not enablers, let's talk about those who are. Enablers are people who are part of a team and their actions allow others to do the front line work. Tower managers, HQ-seeders, scouts, cyno operators and so on. They are usually the bottleneck of group operations as it's pretty easy to find people to "shoot stuff".

The main danger for them is "burnout". Somehow they lose their "spirit" and stop "having fun". This is as useless description as it can be. As a busy enabler myself, I can exactly tell what kills the "spirit" of enablers: lack of control and lack of rewards.

When I was in TEST, I was a pain in the ass for the enablers because I kept posting ideas how could things be done better. Why didn't I do it myself instead of giving "orders"? Because I was not allowed to. I had no access to anything, I had no rights to towers or such. Hell, when I figured out a completely business-based, tower-free system, how could simple line members earn lot of money by setting up a PI market, a director stepped in, took initiative and transformed it into a very complicated and bureaucratic system. I was upset despite I didn't lose anything, just my plans. Now imagine the frustration of those who worked hours on something and then overruled or simply kept in the dark: "go to X, do Y, don't ask questions".

Enablers need control over their actions. They must have a dedicated field where they operate at their own will. Like "this moon shall provide X units of materials a month, get it done as you can" instead of micro-managing him like some bot.

Secondly, I've yet to see a single communication between line members and enablers which is not whining, demanding or bitching. These "shoot stuff" people have no clue how hard it is to get the things done, so they come with the attitude "X isn't working FFS". I also got my share of "catalyst fittings are too expensive, sell us at Jita price as a bro would" in the New Order. I sent such guys to Hell. Of course to do it - again - you need control over your actions, to be sure that some director don't step in and say "hey, our bros need X, do better" or "don't tell our bros to go to hell when they have problems, try to help them instead".

However the ability to send bitching lolkids to Hell is necessary for ones well-being but insufficient. You also need rewards, and you surely won't get a "thank you" from those you enable. That leaves material rewards: enabling must be profitable. Enablers should be encouraged to take profit from their work, even by setting floor prices like: "you must ask for 200ISK/m³ if you jump freight their stuff from Jita" or "10% of the income of the moon you manage is yours". Obviously the best would be a free market system where the enablers are stepping in not because of altruism but profit. Moons could be auctioned, the winner pays X ISK/month for moon ownership and do whatever he wants with the moon.

Asking someone to work for free is exploiting. People sooner or later get enough of being exploited, especially in a video game. Even self-exploited "helpful guys" do. Enabler burnout is them getting enough of being exploited. Maybe stop exploiting them?

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Business Thursday: 0.01

The Goons, who fancy themselves as being newbie friendly released their guide. Besides telling poor newbies to rat, they also told "When selling, don’t just accept a Buy Order - you’ll probably lose a fortune for the convenience of a quick sell. Look at all the Sell Orders in the region, ordered by price. Then right click the item again to sell it, and under Advanced put up your own sell order, undercutting the previous lowest sell order by .01 ISK. Remember to check on your orders in your Wallet, to make sure somebody else hasn’t undercut you."

I've been preaching against 0.01-ing since I started to make a billion a day. I wrote that it's cartel, babbled about price elasticity, shown my own results and this horrible thing is still here. I now try to explain its stupidity as simple as possible.

It is obvious that the cheaper something is, the more people will buy it. If you look at the buy orders, you see exactly that: people who are ready to buy for that price instantly. Of course there are buyers for more money too, but less. If you look at the current sell orders, you don't see the current market price. You see items that no one bought because they are too expensive. Of course someone might buy them later, but at the moment no one bought them.

Let's use numbers: there are 5 buy orders of item X are for 1000000, 1000000.01, 1000000.02, 1000000.03 and 1000000.04 and 5 sell orders are 9000000, 8999999.99, 8999999.98, 8999999.97 and 8999999.96. No, it's not exaggeration, I see such imbalances all the time. In nullsec, for a less common item, it can be much worse. What do these numbers tell you? There are 5 people who want to sell for 9M but can't, and 5 others who want to buy for 1M but can't. Do you really think that it's a good idea to be the sixth guy who tries to sell at 9M?

OK, you open price history and see that once a week one sells for 9M. 9M is good money. You can be the guy who sells for 9M, right? Yes, you can, if you are the lowest seller in the moment when an impatient fool enters. How can you be the lowest seller? By being 0.01 lower than the previous one. This is what they all think. So they update their orders often. If everyone updates with the same frequency, you'll have 1/6 chance to be the lucky seller. You can increase your chances by updating more often. But they can defend themselves by updating even more often. At the end you'll be sitting by the market window all day, updating that damn order. I'm still not exaggerating, people (and bots) are doing exactly that.

What can you do? You can set up your sell order for 8.5M instead. Tomorrow you will find that they undercut you by 0.01. Then you update to 8M and you'll see that some of your competitors disappeared: they sold their items. This is the point! By undercutting deeply, you drive the price to the point where all of you sell. For example you drive it down to 5M and you see that there are 6 sells/week. Congratulation, you reached market equilibrium.

Let me show a real example, when I broke down the price of an implant used in armor battleships in K-6K16, the capital of TEST alliance:The busy people were undercutting by 0.01 at 37-38M but of course no one bought their stuff. I cut to 25M first, then 23, 22 and look how many sold! I got them in Jita for 14M by the way.

The same applies to buy orders. If you want to buy something, don't join those morons who update their orders all day by 0.01 at 1M, set your order to 1.5M and. They will "overcut" you. So cut again the next day, until you finally buy. You will see that for example for 4M they bought too, there are 6 buys this week, everybody made a buy. This is the definition of market equilibrium: everyone buys/sells who wants for that price.

OK, so everybody can sell for 5M and buy for 4M? How? Because people are impatient. They are ready to pay some premium to buy now (for 5M) and sell now (for 4M). If you are thinking that you could buy it for 4M and resell it for 5M... well, you are on the way to never-ever rat, mine, mission or pay real money for the game. Being able to afford a titan before you could fly it is just a bonus.

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Highsec miners, missioners and traders aren't enablers

Jester in his newfound support for gank victims wrote "I think there's room in EVE for all types of EVE play. Even people who insist on being high-sec lurker enablers. You know them as solo high-sec miners and missioners." I don't argue with the "they have room" part. I argue with the "enabler" part. Enablers are people who do background work that make other people able to do their thing. For example the guy who fuels the jump bridge allows the alliance fleet to respond quickly. Or the JF pilot who hauls for contract from Jita to the nullsec HQ.

People tend to look miners, missioners this way. I add traders too, exactly to include myself into this bunch. They see themselves enablers too, "without miners you'd have no ships" is a field in the miner bingo, the collection of the standard replies of ganked/bumped miners.

The error comes from a wrong real life analogy. If you give something useful to everyone, you are great, as you increased the well-being of every people. If you give something useful to everyone in a game, you just nerfed the game and no one is better off. In-game items are worthless pixels. They gain only value by comparison to other players. It is very easy to see in MMOs where itemlevel is elevated every patch. The sword of uberness which makes the wielder envied will be random crap next patch when the first murlock gives better. Also game developers are capable of giving everyone everything, but I don't think that anyone (except morons and slackers) would be happier if everyone would get 1T ISK, a billion units of every minerals and 10 titans after next downtime in EVE.

The highsec missioner, miner and trader indeed participates in the game economy, supplying various things. But if they would be replaced by an NPC, no one would notice, exactly because their minerals, LP items and smaller Jita margins are available to everyone. It gives exactly as much help to a Nulli guy as the Solar guy gets from them.

The real enablers aren't neutral. They enable one group against the other. The Solar tower-fueling guy makes Solar stronger relative to Nulli. You can't replace him with an NPC since the developers can't take sides. By running warehouses I'm an enabler for the New Order. The Red Frog guy who hauls the Catalysts to the warehouse on the other hand is not an enabler for us, as he transports Skiffs to miners just as happily. From the point of view of AFK miners vs New Order, the Red Frog guy acts as a hauling nerf. Neither of us need to haul, we just have to pay a small sum and in a day or two our items arrive to their destination. A CCP given "magic transport" tool would be just as good.

Of course this "enabler" nonsense came from the very entitled position of the average EVE player. Jester - similarly to the "without us you'd have no ships" miner - tries to convince the PvP-ers that "carebears" have a purpose in the game. This entitlement is crystal clear in Corelin: "I am perfectly OK with people playing in highsec. What I really want them doing is creating content for ME. A highsec player who does nothing but accumulate isk running missions, mining, doing whatever, doesn’t really add value to MY experience. A griefer potentially does. Alts have mains, who potentially do. A carebear? Meh. His replacement is a dime a dozen. The ore he mines will rapidly be acquired by someone else and my prices will stabilize The isk injected by that mission runner who got horribly ganked will be replaced by another mission runner and the prices will stabilize. Again I don’t care what you do much, or where you do it. I care that you bring something to the table, that you contribute to this game, to this community, to me. If you can do it by moving, great, if you can do it by blogging, great. If you can do it by doing what you are doing, fantastic, but if you aren’t doing anything for me, why should I give a rats ass about you?"

Jester tries to make understanding between the ones who feel entitled to others providing content to them and those who feel entitled to be left alone in an MMO. There cannot be such understanding. These groups can't coexist. The MMO side could go on with miners being NPCs, and the PvE could go on if PvP-ers would be replaced by NPC buy orders. The developers must make their decision how much they cater to these groups.

Please note that I didn't say that either group is worthless. I said that they are worthless in the eyes of the other group and there cannot be peace and understanding between them.

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The sad fate of vulture-heroes

The New Order calls those who attack the Knights "vultures". This came from what they are doing: whoring on Catalyst kill reports and stealing from wrecks. They don't really look like someone who means to stop the New Order, but someone who wants to leech some ISK, kills and fun on the side.

Since I moved away from the main New Order fleet to fight AFK-leeching alone, I learned much about these "vultures". Obviously no one would try to leech on a single player. Sitting in an ice belt with whoring guns where 10+ Knights operate can net you lot of kills. Camping a single one? Not really. Yet I have lot of personal "vultures". They are busy camping the station I'm in. They try to camp my scout, figuring out where the gank will take place. They organize in local and above all, they don't stop despite their poor results. They are really motivated, ready to camp for hours.

It took some time to realize that they aren't vultures. They can't care less about the loot or that few kills, hell many of them don't even upload kills. They want to stop me from doing "evil" and want to protect the "innocent". Just like in WoW, the morons and slackers are supported by a group of socials who believe in friendship, niceness and helping the weak. They are random people in the system who are upset that someone "griefs" the "little guys" so they go and grab whatever combat-looking things they have in the hangar and go to fight. They are so unsuccessful that they were misidentified for killpad whores and thieves. They aren't even recognized as a threat. Why?

The key to their failure - as always - has nothing to do with gaming skill, though the lack of it plays a part for making them a comedy. But even if the best PvP-ers would come to highsec to save the AFK-miners they wouldn't fare better. The reason is simple: to win, they must defeat me. I don't have to defeat them. I just have to defeat an AFK mining barge to win. This theme appears many ways:

• They have to find me. They have to scout multiple systems and stations. For my scout they have to scour the belts and even finding him can be a decoy, maybe the target is already bookmarked in another belt. On the other hand all I have to find an AFK mining barge. That goes as "warp to random belt, hit dscan for nearby belts, bingo".
• They have to catch me. I have instas, I have safes, I have an Orca so I can rebase without taking gates in Catalysts. They have to be quick, they have to set up traps, they have to have the right ships and they must avoid being spotted. Compare it with the task of "catching" a barge that is standing still for half an hour or more.
• I have full control over the time. As AFK barges always present themselves, I can undock for a gank any time I wish. They obviously can only catch me when I undock. If a situation is too risky, I don't take it, there will be another target for me in a minute or two. I often "AFK-cloak" them, by keeping the ganker+scout logged in while I'm working, sleeping or doing household chores. They can't know if I'm going to undock in the next minute, so they must keep camping. In the morning I look at the local chat and giggle on them writing "I think he is AFK" 3 hours after I went to bed.
• They take risks, I don't. Due to the rules of suicide gank, my ship is lost in the second I take GCC. Since I'm going to take GCC, I undock with being sure that my ship will not return. The question is only if the target dies or not? I obviously undock something I don't mind to lose, so losing my ship to them can be annoying, but definitely not a loss I'm unprepared for. However if they make some mistake, they can easily end up with serious losses like this one who lost his ship and his 1.2B pod.
• My victory is sweeter than theirs. If they win, all they have to show off is a 6-12M Catalyst kill. Very rarely a 40M podkill. If I win, I have a 50-250M ship kill and very often a pod around 50M.

Because of these, they have so small chances that they became a comedy on the minerbumping channel. They can't hinder our operations and only frustrate themselves. Does it mean that the miners are without hope? Absolutely not. Everything that I wrote in vulture-ganker relation is true in the ganker-miner relation. It's equally hard to find a particular miner, he can avoid the warpin by simple orbiting, he can control when he is vulnerable, the ganker risks a very embarrassing loss report to a barge and he can tank his ship making the gankers losses higher than his. The ganker is equally hopeless against a miner as the vulture is against the ganker. The only reason why ganking is alive is that the gank victims are morons and as slackers as one can theoretically be in a computer game: AFK.

The vultures should stop trying to protect AFK-ers who are unworthy of support. Since EVE doesn't have welfare like WoW, they will learn it the hard way: they will fail and their efforts won't even be thanked by the miners, since it's hard to thank anything while AFK.

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Happy birthday to me

1 year ago I started playing EVE Online.
As in EVE you gain skillpoints by real time, character age is an important factor in power. Therefore in EVE a few months old player is considered a newbie while an average game takes less time than this to complete and forget. In EVE you can't farm skillpoints by active play, you can only increase the acquisition rate by clever remaps and implants. You can also have more than one accounts specialized in different tasks. Luckily the official RMT of EVE is trading game time for game currency. If you are good in the game, you can get your play funded by less successful players. Thanks to this, I pay-by-PLEX for 12 accounts.

5 of them are supercarrier pilots in training, I intend to sell them as a passive income. Trading characters are legal in EVE, as long as it's done for game currency. One account is played by my girlfriend who is mainly playing WoW but spends some time in EVE and I hope she eventually switches to EVE. Now let's see my own 6 accounts:

1. • Gevlon Goblin, my "main". This pilot earns the most money and does what I - as a player - identify with: trading. Like most newbies, I managed to spend both bonus remaps, but luckily they weren't that bad. The reason why Gevlon has so many skillpoints in Spaceship Command is that I learned all of them in a P/W remap and I don't see learning any more. You can see lack of gunnery, missiles, drones, because Gevlon doesn't fly combat ships, but freighter, Orca, transport Tengu. I will never leave the best corporation of EVE: the NPC corp. Besides trading and hauling I can research blueprints and now learning for manufacturig/refining. 15.0M SP, +5 implants, 8 Int, 6 M, remap up in 2 weeks
     
   • Hek trader: she got much less attention than Gevlon, she just traded in Hek and lacks the ability to undock practically anything. Now that the important skills on this account are completed, she'll learn to fly a covops frig and train the needed skills for researching blueprints.
     2.9M SP, +3 implants, 10 Int, 8 M, 1 bonus remap
   • Cindy Sasen: scout and covops pilot, one of those who took part in my nullsec adventure. Now mostly out of work, so got skillpoints for blueprint research and spends her time in a lowsec research station.
     3.9M SP, +4 implants, 10 Int, 8 M, 1 bonus remap
2. There are 3 pilots on this account, who are more or less clones: Amarr, Dodixie and Rens trader. They all have trading skills and good standings with their home stations. 2 already can, 1 will be able to research blueprints. 1 can, 2 will be able to fly cloaked. 1 can, 2 will have manufacturing ability. None of them can, but all of them will be able to fly freighter and Orca. On this front the latest devblog made some mess. Learning an Orca will be much easier after the summer expansion while learning a freighter will be harder, as it replaces the useful Racial industrial 5 (covops hauler) with the useless Advanced spaceship command 5 skills. So I have to turn their plans upside down, learn freighters now, wait with Orca. They will all have transport Tengus too, so there is filler for waiting. Their future is clear: they will live in their hubs, trade, research, maybe manufacture. One of them has near-perfect planet skills to practice PI.5.9M, 4.6M, 8.4M SP, +4 implants all
   
3. This account is the home of Titania Goblin, the other char involved in my nullsec visit. She flied logi during the capture of three regions, took part in the largest supercapital battle of 2012 and trains for carriers. Which will have to wait of course since the new skill system will make that easier. Her future is currently blurry as I don't know when will I return to null. I learned that as long as it's a money sink and people are there altruistically, "for fun", I have no place there. So she'll only fly again if nullsec industry will be fixed and there will be economic incentive to live in null. 16.4M SP, +5 implants, 10 Perc, 4 Will, 1 bonus remap
   While she's waiting, a new character took residence in this account: Botslayer Goblin, the busy Knight of the New Order. There are way too many morons and slackers polluting highsec in their untanked mining barges. They refuse to put on tank or use Skiff because of their yield. This is exactly as smart as ratting with a supercarrier: sure, it's the best ISK/hour way of ratting, but it won't last long. The skill queue now includes various gunnery 5s to increase the current 620 DPS a bit. After their completion I will learn Destroyers and battlecruiser 5 with cruiser 3 for all races to get the free skillpoints. I will fly a Talos soon to handle the harder nuts that a Catalyst can't break. 2.7M SP, +3 implants, 10 Perc, 4 Will, 1 bonus remap
   
4. Rorka Goblin, my original nullsec industrialist, who is now the trader and scout for the New Order. Rorka is in Cha/Will remap, learning mining boosting and trading skills. He is mostly flying an Orca that I learned in this remap because needed it now: it carries the gank equipment needed, so Botslayer doesn't have to take gates. Rorka also flies a Procurer to scout. My dreams of nullsec industry aren't dead, but they are indeed foggy. 15.2M SP, +5 implants, 10 Cha, 4 Will, 1 bonus remap
   
5. Ragnarok pilot. The weirdest of my characters and the one I refused to change after my nullsec journey ended. He keeps learning and will have a gunless Ragnarok titan some day. Currently in Cha/Will remap, maxing out all the fleet booster skills except mining. The Int part is over, including JDC5. While it is maybe foolish to stick to this plan, I can afford it. And I can definitely not buy such pilot on the bazaar if the tide turns. 15.2M SP, +5 implants, 10 Cha, 4 Will, 1 bonus remap
   
6. The first pilot on this account was learning for a Moros dreadnought and progressed pretty well, was the first to complete his training. 13.5M SP, +5 implants, 10 Perc, 4 Will, 1 bonus remap
   However as my focus changed, a newcomer arrived to this account: Botmuncher Goblin, a secondary ganker. No, I'm not planning to do dualbox-gank, I just want to skip waiting for GCC. He will only learn Catalyst skills, no point or need to climb higher.

What did I do during this year? Mostly this: (the measured quantity is billion ISK gained due trading. It would be my asset if I wouldn't spend on various non-trading projects)

How did I celebrate this event? By destroying AFK-ers and bots! I created a new warehouse in Mesybier and devastated the surroundings.

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The "little guy" bullshit

The EVE blogosphere has a new, extremely annoying theme: "the little guy can't compete". Two probable CSM candidates, Mynnna and Jester are already on the bandwagon.

The story goes as "the space (sov-null, C5-6s) is already taken by large players and newcomers can't compete". Of course like every bullshit debate, it has two equally wrong sides, one claims that CCP should make the mechanics supporting coexistence of alliances of various sizes while the other claims that newcomers should take space by fire, the same way Goons took from BoB and TEST did from SoCo.

The debate is even more wrong than the non-consensual PvP one. The reason for it is that neither the large power actors, nor the small, weak alliances are guys. The pilots are players. The corporations and alliances are not.

Now, if players who started after 2008 would all be in highsec as all nullsec alliances would be veteran-only who don't take them, we'd have a problem to debate. But as long as a few weeks old players can join practically every color existing on the map, there is no problem. Due to the purposefully messed up economy of EVE nullsec, the only resource on this theater is players. Nullsec is a place where you spend the money you PLEX-ed or earned on your highsec alts. The more land you have, the more you have to spend. For this reason, an upcoming alliance with more players can always take land from an existing one with less.

The reason why no upcoming alliances break into the map is simply that they suck and players choose not to join them. When you say "X corp is struggling against Y", it doesn't mean that players in X are in trouble and need help from CCP. It means that the leadership of X is crap and the members are better off without them. Demanding CCP to help "small alliances" is actually demanding help for a handful of bossy nerds to become more pixel-important, to force players to be their minions.

SoCo - once home to 20K+ players - crumbled and disappeared without a trace. Does it mean 20K+ players lost the game and forced to quit or reroll as newbies? Of course not. Most of them are living in the same stations, just under different colors. Hell, Makalu himself, the de facto leader of SoCo found a new home in Pandemic Legion and soon will happily hotdrop the same ratters as before and can yell "you don't talk back to PL" to the same blues. Of course some corp and alliance leaders lost their power. But who cares about failed bossy nerds?

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Business Thursday: Skillbooks

The skillbook market is probably the one that most trader started their career. The reason for that is skillbooks are widely needed and not replaceable. Practically every pilot will buy the Gunnery skillbook.

If everyone does it, isn't it full? No, because we move on. Skillbooks don't provide stellar profit and pretty laborious. I'd rather consider it hauling than real trading, but exactly because of that, very young newbies can start it. All you need is a frigate with inertia stabilizers and 20-30M capital. Based on availability, there are several kinds of skillbooks:

• Unlimited: these ones are the worst, every school station has hundreds of it. While you can haul them to a hub, usually the margin is pitiful. It's a business for large capital, low time traders who get thousands of it at once and sell them for below 1% profit.
• Limited stock: my dear Logistics skillbook, the one that I collected in my youth. These books are sold by a small number and if you buy them out, the next batch will be expensive. So you can't buy a billion worth of it, you have to hop around in stations and buy a few at once. Sometimes you have to go to other regions for it. It's practically running courier missions, except for the much higher profit.
• Region specific: Amarr Dreadnought skillbook can only be purchased in Amarr space. There are lot of others like that too. So you stock up and go to the hub of the other races and sell.
• LP store/drop: Nanite Control and co. You need to set up both buy and sell orders for them, station trading them normally.
• Newbie: these are given out as mission rewards in the newbie systems. These aren't expensive but you can have large profit % on them, duplicating your little capital fast. Of course this market is limited by the number of newbies. You set up buy orders in school systems and haul them to hubs.

Skillbooks don't seem much, but they are a good entry to anyone starting his trading career. Don't ignore them!

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The false debate on non-consensual PvP

This isn't a large post, yet a very important one which hopefully ends the "is non-consensual PvP is good for a game or not" dabate? No it's not a decisive argument in either way. It's decisive in a sense that the question itself is wrong and shouldn't be asked.

In a game, always a pixel avatar does things against your pixel avatar. In EVE a spaceship comes to blow up your spaceship. Or your spaceship goes to blow up that spaceship. During combat various modules are activated and at the end usually one spaceship blows ups. Does it make any difference if that other spaceship is player controlled or not?

Actually, if the game companies wouldn't make special tools to identify player characters, we couldn't even know. Imagine that there would be no local channel and the name of the pilot wouldn't show up on the overview. You would only see a Merlin or a Retriever or an Erebus. Without these artificial tools you could only say "I destroyed/was destroyed by a Merlin". Would the game be any different? People die to rats all the time. Do you think this player is happier that his 7B Machariel was lost to Blood Raiders instead of xxPizza?

The question that you should be asking is "should people be defeated in the game or should they always win?"

The answer of WoW is "they should only win". The worst thing that can happen to you in WoW is simply not advancing. And no, PvP doesn't change that, if you enter a battleground and you capture zero objectives, score no kills and totally graveyard camped, you will lose nothing and earn honor points. Blizzard could advertise their game with "everyone is a winner here", they don't do it because it would scare away non-players and decrease the self-esteem of the bad players who are very sure that their progression has anything to do with their skill or effort instead of welfare given out by the developers.

PvP being consensual or not is a completely irrelevant point. You can easily design a game with consensual PvP only (or no PvP at all) and yet with losses: Diablo hardcore mode is a good example. Similarly the non-consensual PvP in WoW PvP servers (bored top levels oneshot leveling newbies) doesn't change WoW as the victim lost nothing but a few seconds. While evaluating the game, ignore PvP status and seek if the player has a chance to lose or he can only win regardless of which buttons he pressed.

When players and developers focus on the PvP status instead of loss status, we get the chimera of EVE highsec. It is practically safe PvE-wise, NPCs don't gank you at the gates, belt rats can be handled by T1 drones of mining barge, mission rats rarely if ever kill missioners. On the other hand PvP-ers can kill ships at will. The two must be matched. If highsec is meant to be a safe place where people can lol around, than PvP losses has no place either. If highsec is meant to be a risky place where you get some backup from the Empire NPCs, then the pirate NPCs should be much more aggressive. The problem of the newbie is that he can lol around at will, everything is nice and shiny and then bang, suicide ganked and podded with all his assets going down. If he'd be losing frigs left and right to scramming mission NPCs in the end missions of the career agents, then he'd both be expecting losses and also learn to tank his ship at the cost of cheap frigs instead of battlecruisers. If belt rats in 1.0-0.8 would be serious risk to his Venture, he wouldn't be losing untanked Retrievers in 0.5 to Catalysts. If Guristas would suicide gank his Badger I on a gate during a L2 hauling mission, he wouldn't lose a Badger II with 300M cargo.

The infamous learning curve comes from the game being incoherent: laughable NPCs + vicious players. Either tame the players by taking away their ability to hurt other players or buff up the NPCs so the newbie can practice on his own speed.


PS: You laughed on 300M Drakes or 100M T1 cruisers? Then you'll love this!

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Miner survival guide

CCP gave lot of tools for miners who were dying left and right. After the largest buff any ship class received in the history of EVE... miners are dying left and right and demand more buffs. With this post I want to tell how easily one can defend himself against suicide gankers.

Let's see the first and most important mechanic: security status. As its name clearly tells, it's about the security of the star system. "The higher, the better" should be obvious even to 1 hour newbies. Numerically it defines the response time of CONCORD, the invincible cops of EVE highsec. According to my own combat logs, in 0.5 you can gank for 25 seconds, in 0.6 20, in 0.7 16. Of course it can be affected by lag and rounding errors but you clearly get the tendency. In 0.8-1.0 you can practically only alpha-gank, meaning firing one salvo from a long-reload gun. Typically Tornado battlecruisers are used for it and they cost 100M. In 0.7-0.5 you can use sustained DPS ships, like the 11M Catalyst. You probably see the difference between these options. Considering that there are lot of belts in 0.8-1.0, there is absolutely no reason for risk-averse miners to move to 0.5-0.7. Yet they do.

The second concept that constantly evades dead miners is "tanking". Ships have shield, armor and hull. Each have HPs. To kill a ship, all three must be reduced to zero. You can increase the value of all three and also their resistances. A shield with 50% resistance to a damage type is just as strong as a twice bigger shield with no resistance. This mechanic coined the term "effective HP": the HP of the ship with zero resistances that lives as long as the current ship. Let's see a max-yield Retriever in EFT (third party EVE ship modeling program): You can see that it has 2-3000 HP in shield, armor and hull, all with low resistances. The hull resistances are zero. This provides 9614 EHP.

Now let's put on an Adaptive invulnerability field that increases shield resistances, and replace one Mining laser upgrades with a Damage control module that gives a small increase to shield and armor and big to hull. Since they need CPU, we'll need one processor overclocking rig. To the other two rig slots the optimal choice is a medium core defense field extender, but that's expensive, so let's just go with rigs that increase your weakest resistances: armor kinetic and armor thermic. While the armor explosive and shield EM were smaller, gankers prefers doing kinetic and thermal damage. Of course if you put on only resistors for these, they will adapt, hence we stick to the adaptive invulnerability field. Let's see the ship now: Look, the EHP almost doubled for less than 9% yield decrease! Is there any reason to not fit your Retriever this way? Then tell me, why do we gank untanked barges all the time? Can there be any other reason for those ganks than miners being stupid?

Finally let's compare all the Barges and Exhumers with max-yield vs reasonable tank:

Name	Naked, yield	Naked, EHP	Tanked, yield	Tanked, EHP
Retriever	1.28	9.6	1.17	17.1
Covetor	1.40	7.2	1.29	13.3
Procurer	1.17	29.1	1.07	67.9
Mackinaw	1.34	14.5	1.23	31.3
Hulk	1.44	10.9	1.32	24.0
Skiff	1.23	36.3	1.13	109.5

Can you see the extreme differences between the various ships and fits? Then why are the 0.5-0.6 belts are full of naked Retrievers?! The only possible answer is stupidity and laziness. It is practically impossible to gank miners who choose ships and system security properly and fit their ships well. Yet the only thing slowing miner ganking is waiting out GCC.

Finally, something trivial: AFK-ing. How can you seriously think of going AFK in a game and win? How could going AFK in a dangerous place mean anything else than sure defeat?

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There can't be competition without performance measurement

My solo kills post made lot of PvP-ers mad. You can see them raging on EN24, I cleared them up from here. They claim that mining barge kills don't count. The problem isn't their definition of "real" PvP. It's the lack of it.

One thing is sure, PvP is competitive play. But to have a competition, we must be able to compare performances. There are lot of measurement attempts on EVE PvP: number of kills, kill-death ratio, ISK destroyed, ISK ratio. Zkillboard has some "points" and several alliances evaluate their members based on some form of PvP performance. We can argue for and against all of them, but each of them gives a numerical performance review on everyone.

Those who babble about "thrill of the hunt" and "worthy opponent" and such, can't give such exact number. So if we follow their opinion, we simply will be unable to compare two players. Of course they are ready for the answer: let these two do a 1v1 and we'll know who is better. It's not a bad answer, but to make it work, we need official tournaments. Without clear rules and an external power to enforce them we get what every fool got who accepted an 1v1 challenge: being cheated and ganked.

Imagine an ideal world where people in 1v1 aren't using booster alts, scanners on the gate to know the enemy fitting to fit hard counter and turning it 1v10 if still not winning. Would these matches help? Not really, because they only measure the limited number of participants. While in these ideal matches the winner is better than the loser, we can't place them on a global ranking. This is a common problem in WoW, where the best guy of a casual guild applies to a HC guild and they find him totally useless and beyond help. In EVE - exactly because of lack of official performance measurement - this can go unnoticed for long. However reality at the end hits, the most remarkable event was the "so elite" NC. wardeccing RvB to smash them for insulting one of their directors with the horrible word "mate". You probably know how it went.

I'm not saying that every performance measurement is good or even useful. For example the "total kills" and "ISK destroyed" fields of zkillboard are next to useless since they aren't zero-sum. If 1001 smartbombing Rifters, each with 1M price tag gather and fire their smartbombs, every participant will get 1000 kills and 1B damage done. I'm sure that every ship destruction must create exactly one kill and not more (of course it can be in a form of 1/n kills to everyone). Similarly ISK destroyed must be split between the killers instead of everyone getting the full sum.

However the "true PvP-ers" who don't have a globally usable performance measurement aren't wrong in their position. They simply have no position to argue with. What they have is the feeling "I'm having fun blowing up frigs" and they try to rationalize it to be meaningful, great and competitive. If only they'd say "I'm having fun blowing up frigs like others having fun collecting minipets in WoW" we wouldn't have an argument. But for some reason they insist that blowing up frigs in lowsec is somehow more elite than trying to tame a squirrel in Elvyn Forest. From the fact that they blow up frigs and T1 cruisers they come to the conclusion that they are "badass PvP-ers" who have every right to look down on "highsec carebears". I'm not saying that they are wrong. I'm merely saying that to claim that, they have to come up with numbers. And if someone get higher numbers than them, they have accept that guy being better than them instead of coming up with excuses why his kills don't count.

Finally some numbers about PvP, our organization, the New Order has a killboard, let's see our performance in the last 3 months. Since some agents are living in nullsec and just podjump to us, their nullsec kills mess up with the ISK calculation as the killboards give them full value if they do 0.001% on a titan. So let's just stick to barges and exhumers:

Month	Barge	Exhumer
November	13	10
December	301	632
January	377	924

Since we aren't cooperating with any other entity, all these kills are 100% New Order kills. Unfortunately we don't have numbers for players because if we add the kills of the members up, we get something like 5000 kills. Someone could really write a program that gets the kills from Zkillboard API and distribute them among the killers. I mean if 3 pilots kill 1, doing 50-25-25% damages, they should get 0.5, 0.25, 0.25 kills. Factoring the ISK destroyed (not the looted, that allows inflating numbers) with the same ratios, we would get individual kills and individual ISK destroyed. I think these numbers would be the best to compare PvP-ers.

To help us gather data if you are in the New Order movement, please submit your kill-log API to both Zkillboard.com and neworder.mindflood.org.

Finally some fun: "true PvP-ers" claim my kills don't count because the enemy had no guns. This one had guns. A disgruntled miner coming for revenge... with this pod.

PS: for the first time since my removal, I wish I could be on TEST forums again to see how they welcome their newest bro.

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