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.