The one rule to keep to be absolutely safe in EVE

Jester wrote how complicated EVE is and how easy you can have losses on mechanics you didn't understand and had little chance to learn it due to no documentation. He is wrong. You can avoid all hurting losses by keeping one simple rule: "don't mess with anything that you'd hate to lose". This is a slight rephrasing of "don't fly anything you can't afford to lose", a rule told to every newbie many times.

Yesterday I misclicked and instead of "create contract", I clicked "plug in", so my station trader alt has now 5% more firepower with large hybrid turrets and 5% more armor HP. Bye-bye 0.28B. Was it a honest mistake? Yes it was. Was it due to some obscure mechanic? Yes, since I couldn't plug in these implants earlier, their requirements were stealth-nerfed to cybernetics 4 from 5. Did I immediately filled the implant slots of all my alts with random 1% implants? Of course I did.

But did it hurt? No. I have more than 100B in implants that aren't even listed on the market. The loss can't even make a visible bump on my chart. If it was on my first week, I'd lost everything I had. But in my first week I did not run around with 100+M implants. I was selling skillbooks I bought from newbies in Uitra and Akianavas.

The point is that you shouldn't mess with things that consist large amount of your assets. One day or the other you'll lose it. This is why people should have insurance on their homes, despite on the long run they lose money on it: to not suffer a crippling loss. Having a supercarrier with 200M in the wallet is a disaster waiting to happen. If your total assets are 30B, then even dreadnoughts are risky for you, stick to T2 fit, full insured carriers, that's only 600M to lose, you'll manage.

People push things too hard and suffer for it. They shouldn't live on the edge. People keeping the one rule can safely learn on their own experience. This is why I didn't buy a titan pilot, despite people told me. I could afford a titan when I was 5 months old. But I think I'd lost that titan already, and losing 90B when all you have is 150 is dumb. In other words, I could afford to have a titan when I was 5 months old, but I couldn't afford to lose it. So I would have been like the ordinary titan pilots who never log in or even quit the game. I'm sure that I will lose my first titan in a few months due to my own mistake, and I wanted to wait to the point when I can honestly say that "this was dumb, now let's do it again without the stupid part" instead of shouting obscenities to my keyboard.

Now I have a humble suggestion to CCP that would greatly increase its customer retention: since most losses are connected to ships blowing up, the hurting losses could be removed from the game by demanding players to have 2x more liquid cash than their ship's worth (hull+fit+cargo). If you have a 100M ship, you must have 200M cash in your wallet to undock. If you are already outside but don't have the money, you can't use offensive modules on it, so you can move it, but can't use it.

With this, CCP could enforce people to keep the only one rule needed to have a pleasant gaming experience instead of a ragequit over losing everything to a misclick: don't mess with things you'd hate to lose.

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Dirty way to cleanse EVE from dirt

Ali Aras wrote how she rejects porn links in EVE, because it shows people like here objectified. I flew a lot with TEST (being the workaholic I am, I barely missed a stratop) and I can tell she got it easy. In TEST battlecruiser fleet chat was full of pictures with two or more people like me and no people like her. Luckily the Foxcat fleets were leagues better.

Ali Aras also wrote her solution: petition these people (even blues) to CCP who then receive their well-deserved bans. This happened in TEST fleet often, Beffah (military director who is also female) often pinged "please don't report blues".

These gave me an idea. EVE is a dark place, full of spies, convospammers, corp thieves and such. Instead of writing long posts how racist or misogynist speak is wrong, you can be an anti-dirt spy. That's simple: you join an alliance under the guise of an "adorable newbro", fly in fleets, don't sabotate anything except you file petitions against people who violate the EULA. There are hatespeakers, botters, porn-link spammers, ISK sellers and all kind of filthy people out there. With a nice little petition you can suspend or even ban their account.

This can be elevated to the next level: warring empires can activate their spies to deliver a killing blow to the enemy by getting their members banned.

Is it mean? Does it kill the "fun"? Is it unfair? Is it a jerk move?
Welcome to EVE Online!

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0.5T

I haven't post a business report for a long time. The reason is simple: I'm still trading the same implants as almost a year ago, there isn't much competition. What's the reason for this post then?
This is the amount of money I made with trading. I don't have this sum, I have some invested, a lot in implants to sell and spent some on various projects. Yet, this is what I made in the one year and four months of playing EVE. With the 16B gained by the mistype of a buyer, I passed half trillion ISK this week. That's about 1.2B/day, approximately 0.5-0.8B/hour actively played.

This result in itself a proof that the money is in trading, in moving goods from impatient sellers to impatient buyers. I'm not having any "skillz", I do nothing that anyone couldn't repeat. The way to earn a supercarrier a month is open for everyone.

What will I do with it? I don't have explicit plans. I have to stay in highsec for a week or two more to finish a project (which will change highsec L4 security mission running) but then, I probably start looking around in nullsec. I'm sure there is a need for some cash.

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Wrong ragequit over a right reason + the importance of the dot

Sugar pointed us toward the direction of an epic fail: guy lost a 2B collateral, 1.2B value cargo in a tanked Mammoth industrial to a suicide ganker. In the forum topic he announces his quitting from the game and also his opinion about the game being horribly unbalanced, if a 140M fitted Tornado can finish his 1.2B thing in highsec.

He is an idiot, no doubt. But his idiocy lies only in not recognizing the horrible unbalance before he suffered it. While having a big hole on the street is the fail of the road maintenance corporation, you are still stupid to jump into it.

The game is not unbalanced in the sense that the 140M Tornado could oneshot the 3M hull with 3M fittings. The design problem is that industrials naturally has a high pricetag due to their cargo. If you put 400M fittings on a 40M drake hull, you are an idiot and can avoid it by fitting T2 modules instead of faction and deadspace to Drake. Putting cargo into a ship is equal to putting on fittings loss and gank-loot wise. However the only alternative of putting 1.2B on a 3M Mammoth is not flying the Mammoth.

And here we arrive to the fundamental T1 hauler problem: their pricetag and defense is way too low for the cargo they are meant to haul by any veteran player. Of course there should be a cheap and weak hauler for newbies, but anyone over 1 month old will haul at least 100M, and for them all T1 haulers are useless. The ragequitter is right that the T1 haulers are broken, his fail was still flying one. I haven't flown one since my first month. When I started my ISK empire by hauling skillbooks, I realized that even a nano-fitted Condor is better for the job. Later when I had skillpoints I moved to a 300K EHP Orca and a 600K EHP cloaky Tengu.

A hauler that can be ganked economically with 1B cargo is by definition a noobship only for newbies. CCP Rise must design haulers for veteran players too. Alternatively it can be declared that blockade runners, freighters, Jump-freighters and Orcas are the options for veterans, but then the whole T1 hauler bunch should be replaced by a single Ore hauler, and the skillpoints put into racial industrial skills should be refund and its description should contain "IT IS TOO WEAK TO DEFEND any cargo over 100 million ISK, consider using transport ships, Orca or a freighter instead".

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You might noticed that the dot is an important thing in EVE Online. Not only because it's a running joke to put it to your corp and alliance names, but because if you delete it while you set up a buy order, you end up like this: Yes, he paid 16B for a 0.16B implant, thank you Ingeborg Tim very much. I told many times not to disable the warning box if the price is out of normal range. I tell it again, maybe it holds.

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Why there are no NPC teammates?

Have you ever wondered why there are no NPCs to hire to do group content? Blizzard just introduced flexible raids to deal with the "group not full" problem, when the solution is so trivial: introduce an NPC that does acceptable DPS and can be hired for raiding. It wouldn't be any good, but better than an empty spot.

In EVE Online it's even more problematic. You see, EVE is a game of alts, I know exactly one player who doesn't have alts in the game (my girlfirend, and she is too casual to matter). CCP games said that the average account/player is above 2, yet there is no officially supported method to multibox. To make it less understandable, setting up a "follower" AI would be like 30 minutes work for a programmer: warping needs no programming as squadwarp is already available, the only coding needed is when the boss jumps or activates warp gate or jump bridge or titan, the follower does the same, upon landing activate tank and propulsion start orbiting its master, lock it up, activate helping modules on it, then attack whatever the master attacks with all offensive modules. Such ship would be much worse than a player as it needs to be capstable with all modules perma-running, couldn't overheat and couldn't attack anything else than the primary of the master. Yet it would be a welcome addition.

The reason of the missing NPC teammates isn't programming, it's a fundamental game-design thing: an NPC teammate would set a barrier of skill for players. I mean a player who is worse than the NPC is rejected from every team, including teams of equally useless players. If a drooling moron starts a team, he will also include NPCs in the hope that they can carry him than taking other drooling morons. Such feature would remove a significant playerbase from the game as they would be outcast and ridiculed as "worse than a dumb NPC". Actually that NPC is just as good for a doctrine fleet than a player, or even better as it's never late, it doesn't spam the chat, won't go AFK, doesn't DC, doesn't mind if asked to stay docked and doesn't jump the gate on arrival when it was explicitly told not to.

While I wrote it would be worse than a player I meant it would be worse than someone who can overheat, warp off when needed, switch targets without orders, keep its position on its own, keep up Ewar on others than primary. Sure, there are such players, but not many, otherwise no one would field F1-bashing fleets that are prone to bombing runs. The pure fact that both sides of the "great 2013 Summer war" use "anchor up, permarun MWD, click broadcast, press F1" fleets prove that the average player isn't far from that very primitive bot. And I'm sure they wouldn't like to find this out the hard way, being devastated by a 50-man corp with each member running 20 accounts, fielding 1000-"men" fleets.

The game companies need human players, so even PvP games go great length to prevent players figure out that they are horrible. World of Warcraft still don't have a built-in damage meter. In EVE there is no way to set up a fair fight, while it's told to be because of the "dark universe", it's actually because it keeps the loser in the game as he can always blame link alts, faction modules or blobbing. In League of Legends the rating system was hidden behind this "bronze-silver-gold..." nonsense, to make sure that the 600 rated moron never finds out that he is indeed a 600 rated moron. I needed to dig to find some source to figure which tier and subtier belongs to which ELO rating and how it translates to ones position in the playerbase (and its numbers don't add up). Even if I failed to search well, the point is that I need to do even more effort to find out how am I performing.


PS: if you know a reliable source that translate League of Legends subtiers to player positions as "silver 4 = top 12%-top 8%", please link.

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Why the bind-on-pickup and mudflation?

Tobold wrote how trading kills MMO games. He is indeed right in that both the "item collection" and the crafting part of the game is only there for the bleeding edge players, everyone else is better off for buying their junk. Diablo III became infamous in being an item collection game with no one collecting items. Same for crafting: what you craft is only useful if you are on the first day of the expansion.

He also mentions mudflation as a necessity. This is the current inflation of item level. First as your character levels you gain better and better items for doing the same things (killing 10 boars), then on top level every patch gives new level of gear. This is a necessity as otherwise the "complete" character can't do anything.

He concluded that the best is having no trading between players, therefore making everyone grind out his gear, to prevent them just pick them all up from the AH.

In EVE everything is traded. And real money trading is sanctioned. On your first day in the game you can legally buy a titan pilot with a titan. How come that anyone still playing this game? Because there is item destruction. Even if the case you are a very focused player and want to play only one kind of spaceships like logistics, your item collection doesn't end with having all 4 logistics cruisers in your hangar, because you need replacements. A lot. In a nullsec war you can easily lose them by dozens. On the other hand in Diablo III only newbies on lvl 15 need lvl 15 weapons. Even if there is a constant influx of new characters forever (there is not), the amount of lvl 15 characters is constant and the amount of lvl 15 weapons increase day by day.

World of Warcraft deals with it two ways: one is bind on pickup which is indeed removal of trading, if you equipped it, you can't sell it. The other is mudflation where every item are made obsolete and everyone are motivated to grind new out and destroy the old. Tobold is right that banning trading works.

But banning trading essentially makes the game single-player. If I can't give my teammate items, we aren't a team at all. We just do the same single player game and chat while in it.

The real solution would be item destruction. Then the game could have trading and need no mudflation or even inflation of levels. New encounters could be on the same item level, just new dance and lore. Item destruction doesn't have to mean item loss. Many players don't play games where they can have losses (I resist the urge to comment on them). Item destruction can happen as an inevitable wear. Durability decrease over time and the item becomes junk, needing replacement. This way there will always be someone buying new daggers.

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The horrible industrial rebalance

CCP Rise published his ideas about industrial rebalancing. I seriously doubt he ever flown one (except as a bait). He creates two industrials for each race: a tanky and a large-hold one. The remaining Iterons will be foster children.

His ideas don't address the fundamental industrial problem: they are all stepping stones. The Caracal isn't just a stepping stone of the Raven and the Tengu. It needs the same skills and runs well on lower level, so someone who learns for a Raven or Tengu usually plays with a Caracal until he gets there. But the point is that after he can fly a Tengu or Raven and even have these ships, he still has reasons to fly a Caracal. CFC often sends fleets of them to Fountain. The Caracal is a ship on its own right, not just a stepping stone flied only by newbies. On the other hand the industrials, even with the rebalance are worse than the Orca in every aspect. Even the new "tanky" hauler has less EHP than an Orca and even if you take the paper-thin T1, fill it with cargo expanders and rigs, it'll have less cargo space than a max tanked Orca.

I think the reason why CCP Rise doesn't see the problem is the fundamental difference between industrial ships an combat ships. A combat ship can accomplish its mission despite dead. If you are defending your system with Caracals, dying and reshipping 10 times but saving the timer, you won. If you shot just one Tengu while losing 10 Caracals, you even won the ISK war. Also if you just want fun, roaming in a band of Caracals will do: you'll have fun despite you'll return as a new clone. This creates a position for cheap ships for veteran players.

On the other hand if an industrial dies, it failed its mission in every aspect. It lost the cargo and made its owner sad. No industrial pilot who did industry (and not comedy fleet or baiting) was ever having fun in a fight. Even if you survive a gank attempt it's not "yeah I won, I'm the man" but "Thank you Jesus!". The purpose of an industrial pilot is to transport valuable cargo, so making the ship cheap doesn't help with the loss. If you don't care about your cargo, you don't transport it, but reprocess and sell it to a buy order. An industrial pilot will pick the safest ship that can do the job. In highsec it's the Orca or a Freighter, in other spaces it's the Covops hauler or the Jump Freighter. After they can fly these, they will fly only these. If the situation is too hot for even these ships, he doesn't fly anything and saves his cargo until it's safer. T1 industrials and even the "deep space transport" are obsolete ships flied only by newbies who can't fly or can't afford the "proper" ship.

To give a reason of existence to T1 industrials, you must give them a role where they beat the Orca, Freigher, JF or Covops. Let me offer some ideas:

• Sigil, Badger, Wreathe, Iteron: they are designated noobships, they all cost about 0.5M, on a resaonable fit, they can carry about 4000m³ and tank about 10K.
• Bestover: tanky highsec hauler. 4000m³ cargohold without expanders but no one would put expanders on it but armor tank. Fully tanked it has 300K EHP.
• Hoarder: wormhole hauler. 200m/s while flying under T2 cloak (can't warp cloaked). Bonused for scanners.
• Mammoth: combat hauler. Bonus to salvage cycle speed (not strength), can fit both armor and shield tanks (enough slots and powergrid), but cannot fit cargohold expanders. 100K tank with good fittings, 3000m³ cargohold, with proper fittings 1000m/s, 5 secs align. Its purpose is to fly with fleets, loot and salvage.
• Badger II: relic/data site hauler: automatically collects the loot from the loot-explosion.
• Iteron 2,3,4: specialized haulers: they can carry about 50k m³ of various kind of items: ore, PI, fuel.
• Iteron 5: like today, the baby-freighter, the last stepping stone before the big ones.
• The 4 currently useless "deep space transports" would become useful again if they got interdiction nullifying bonus and some more warp stab bonuses as +2 won't save you in the world of +2 long points. I'd take the the +2 strength and give +100% effect from warp core stabilizers, allowing them to have 10 warp strength if filled with 5 warpstabs.

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Business Thursday: lazy man's PI

What is this? You surely didn't see it in any PI guide. The reason for that is that it's highly suboptimal in terms of ISK/pilot. I created it for one purpose: lazy ISK for as little effort as possible.

In the middle, you can see a storage facility. The extractor is routed to it and pour aqueous liquids into it. No one serious extracts aqueous liquids, because they are dirt cheap. You can run such facility on any Terran, Storm or Ocean planet. Next to the storage, in the vertical column there are 4 primary processors, processing it to water and filling it back to the storage facility. The storage is there so you don't have to worry about extraction fluctuations. I restart the extractor every second day and replace it if the production goes below 20000/hour. Which is low. But I don't care, moving it more often wouldn't worth the effort.

You can see two launchpads. Both of them are filled with electrolytes I buy. Each feeds two advanced processors, both creating Coolants from the electrolytes and the water. There are two launchpads because I don't want to visit them more often than once a week.

The profit? 5 coolants/hour/facility, 9000 ISK price, 8x450 ISK for the electrolytes, 10% tax, 60M/month/planet. With 6 planets, this is 2/3 PLEX and takes minimal effort to babysit if you have an Orca. Enjoy!

Note: As water sells for 200 ISK, you should run a 16 processors facility if you don't mind the daily hauling. That's about 130M/month/planet, but again, the price is daily hauling. Here you not only don't haul water, but also don't pay for it, increasing the profit/unit, at the cost of having 1/4 as many units created. As a hauling round is about 15 minutes, doing it daily would be +4 hours/month that doesn't worth me +120M.


PS: I just can't resist commenting on this: This is the GSF alliance update. There are no units on the graph, but it can't be trillions or CFC would field supercarrier fleets and not Caracals. They are billions. The war is for 200 billion ISK/month. Hell, it can be for 200B/week or even day! 20000 pilots fight for it. So the average CFC pilot (not person) will see 10M/month-or-week-or-day spoils. Compare it with the "do eight jumps a week Highsec PI" above with nearly 360M/month/pilot (80/week, 11/day). I mean spending countless of hours grinding structures, running into R&K pipebombs, running from PL supers, being trolled by TEST badposters and paying ransom for your slowcat fleet definitely worth it. Whoever wins this great war will be totally the richest in the galaxy. I envy them so much.

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What makes an MMO different from WoW?

MMOs with lot of money backing them are developed by major studios. One by one they are announced as the "next big thing" only to fall by the sword of World of Warcraft. Only EVE Online could maintain its existence and profitability on the long run. I believe the reason for it is that EVE is different from WoW, therefore address another playerbase. The fallen MMOs were not different, therefore players have little reason to switch.

What makes an MMO different from WoW? No, not the graphics or the story. Having Caldari instead of Alliance and Guristas instead of Gnolls does not make EVE different. Using blasters instead of swords neither. Having 12km optimal range instead of 40 yards spell range ditto. These are "lore" changes, the gameplay is the same: you approach mob or enemy player, use ability, one of you dies. An FPS where you have to manually aim is different gameplay.

Where is EVE different from WoW:

• Item loss on death: if you die in WoW you just lose play time. So worst case (permanently graveyard-camped) is equal to not playing. In EVE you can lose a $3000 titan by clicking "jump" instead of "bridge".
• Transportation: all WoW items fit into your backpack or placed into the conveniently available bank. If you send an item via mail, it is accessible everywhere in the World. In EVE items are on their location and has to be moved by player action. This can take hours and demand planning of your logistics.
• Zone ownership: in EVE players can take formal control of gaming zones where enemy cannot use NPC features. In WoW every player can access everything, they can't change the behavior of the World
• Single shard: in EVE every player plays the same game. In WoW you are separated by servers and within the servers the raids, dungeons, battlegrounds are locked from third party invasion. You don't really have to care about others on the server.
• Item creation from industry and not combat: in EVE items are gained via industry and destroyed in combat. In WoW you gain items by combat: bosses drop them or give Valor points to buy, players give Conquest and Honor points to buy PvP gear.

There are other differences but I find these the major. These changes define the gameplay, while the textures, lore and technical mechanics are only small variations. If we'd implement the "small" change in WoW that you can loot killed players from their gear, the game would change totally and players would think that the Star Wars Old Republic, Lord of Rings Online, Rift or Wildstar are more similar to the old WoW than this "new WoW".

To create a new game that can live next to WoW, it has to be different. It doesn't mean "be like EVE" as those games would be killed by EVE, like Darkfall. They have to be different from all of them. Here is an example of the game that is different from all:

• Mobs only guard resources but don't drop them besides meat and skin. [similar to EVE, very different from WoW]
• All items are created from resources via industry. Quests only give currency. Currency is not used for anything else than player trading, there aren't any currency sinks, inflation is constant. [dissimilar from both games]
• Gear is never lost in combat. [similar to WoW, very different from EVE]
• No PvP. [similar to WoW, very different from EVE]
• Gear is decaying over time and has to be replaced after X hours of being online. [dissimilar from both games]
• Characters are toplisted according to their raid progress. [similar to WoW, very different from EVE]
• Raids give nothing besides fame. [similar to EVE, very different from WoW]

This game - assuming it is properly written and coded - could attract lot of builders and achievers and would have a different playerbase than EVE and WoW, being able to coexist. A game which is similar in all main gameplay features to WoW, cannot.

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The dumbest game company ever

Every decision has costs. Sometimes you don't make the right one. Such is life, no one can see the future. But some choices just can't work and it was clear from the start. Someone making them is - by definition - dumb. 1B in a T1 hauler? Cloth geared warrior? Autopiloting in lowsec? People doing it are target of ridicule.

Game companies often make choices the players disagree. Sometimes they leave bugs in the game too. But this beats all idiocy I see in the gaming industry: 10160 Hungarian Forint is about 39 Euros. As you need 3600 Riot points for a 30 days IP boost which can be considered as "subscription" for League of legends, you have to pay 75 Euros/month for it, making it 5x higher than WoW or EVE. That price for a truly free to play game is a bad joke. I mean it's an IP boost, you can play without it, granted, slower.

However it can a design decision, it can work, maybe there are whales ready to pay such sums. What makes it idiotic? This:The cost is actually 20 Euros, in line with the rest of the games. The first price is there if you pay by your mobile phone, where the phone company takes most of the money. I wonder why would anyone pay with his mobile phone, but there are stupid people out there, why not milking them? However the Riot dev who put the most expensive form of paying the default is an epic idiot. I assume thousands of prospective customers pushed the "buy riot points" button, saw the atrocious price popping up and close it before thinking about switching the payment method to Visa. The "mobile payment" option should have been at the very bottom, maybe in a submenu under "not preferred methods". Darwin prize to Riot Games!

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Why there are oppressive governments everywhere?

Have you ever asked the above question? I'd be surprised if you didn't. In every generation young people rally for freedom. Be it Woodstock or Occupy Wall Street, it's all about the same: freedom. To let no one tell me how do I live. Of course (most of) them are not idiots and aware of the fact that your freedom will always be limited by the freedom of other people. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. Most of them accept this and demands only governmental oppression to end. I mean they accept that they can't just walk to other person's property but they don't accept that some clerk telling them they can't drink, can't smoke weed, can't drive fast, can't sing on the street, can't do this, can't do that, despite no one would get hurt.

The libertarian, objectivist and somewhat the Tea Party and right-wing organizations are demanding the same on a more coherent level. But there is no result. There isn't a country where "clerks" don't tell you when to walk, when to stop, what to wear, who to marry, what to smoke, when to drink and other countless things. The contrary: even countries that were more free are tightening governmental control. They peek into your mail, they strip-search you on the airport, they might even drop a drone on you and kill you with your family if they guess you are up to trouble. And the people in general agree with this.

There were political movements for more freedom but they all failed. Controlled systems simply outcompeted free ones, contrary to objectivist beliefs freedom did not liberated the power of men to create a better world for their self-interest.

I was objectivist longer than average people, way beyond my youth. Most people trade freedom for welfare or nationalism, I'm free of both. I don't think that "unlucky" people deserve help nor I think my countrymen are more my "brothers" than any random human. I've been preaching for self-interest, caring for ourselves, not taking responsibility for anyone else but taking responsibility for ourselves. I simply realized that my self interest demands to allow a "clerk" to decide when can I walk, when can I drink, what speed can I drive, what can I wear and so on.

The reason for this change is playing EVE Online. In this game the freedom one can dream of is available. The GMs don't tell you what to do, there isn't "governmental" punishment for any in-game action. The trailers are true that here only your abilities limit how far you reach: you can be filthy rich, you can be powerful, you can be revered hero.

Socialists believe selfishness is evil. They believe that the "bad" people are those who engage in zero-sum games. I take your money in a scheme, I have money, you don't. They believe that capitalism is a set of zero-sum games and only the good government could protect us from the "greedy capitalist" who doesn't care if he hurt us while he takes what he wants. Capitalist believe that selfish actions are productive to the World, as it's always easier to make a bigger pie and cooperate than take from others, especially as the weak is by definition poor, so you can't really take anything from them.

EVE proves the capitalist dream. The group aren't the pirates or a world conquering army, they are industrialists and traders who create value and serve other people. Our billions come from transportation, price stabilization and the service of providing instant buys and sells. If you look at the ISK-billionaires you can see how wrong the socialists are. I truly believe that any socialist can be converted by making them play EVE.

But I saw something I didn't expect. Something that the objectivist and even the socialist books don't write about. Something that gives a new meaning to the word "evil". It's not the people who ignore suffering. It's the people who want it. Many-many EVE players set out not to gain money or power or fame but to "harvest tears". Other people suffering isn't just something they can live with. It's something they can't live without. Their games aren't zero-sum but negative. They destroy things for no self-interest or even interest in destruction itself. They don't care about the ship they destroy, they do it to make another person sad. Their prize is not ISK or sovereignty but chatlogs proving that someone is angry or sad.

These people cannot be set free. There must always be a clerk who tells them where to go, what to do, what to smoke, what to tell because in the minute they do what they want, they go and hurt people for no reason. Most players gladly trade their freedom, their ability to own stars for the control of CONCORD, because it's easier to live by the rules than constantly fighting griefers who has no other reason to attack than their assumption that I will cry or rage if they succeed.

Of course they are not spawns of the devil, they are simply people on the third level of their development. They realized that the "help the weak" is simply a scheme exploiting them and they want to regain control. Dominating someone gives them the feeling of this control. They aren't evil to be exterminated, they are able to do great things, but to do so they must be kept in check. As long as vast majority of the people are not rational, there must always be a government oppressing these people from doing what they really want: harvest tears.

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The uniqueness of EVE skill system

Every MMO has some form of levels or skills. Players gain them as time progresses. This usually means time spent in the game. EVE is called to be unique because skills are gained in real time. While it's indeed peculiar, it's not important as MMO players spend time in their game anyway and usually play for months to years. World of Warcraft could be changed to "levels gained in real time" without seriously impacting the game. Actually it's already "levels gained in real time" as item level is an integral part of a WoW character. You can't lose your gear, they aren't actually items but character attributes. Item level jumps happen when a new patch elevates valor gear level, so if we'd plot the ilvl of various players vs time, we'd see them close to each other, jumping together after a patch.

The uniqueness of EVE isn't from the fact that it has no levels. Would WoW be any different if players could start on lvl 90? Actually players demand it since ages and Blizzard gives in by constantly speeding up the leveling process.

The real difference between EVE and all the other MMOs out there can be shown by this:380 DPS and 200 HPS tank isn't stellar from a Rokh. The story behind it is when I started playing EVE I lured my girlfriend with me. She didn't really like the game and remained very casual. A mission here, another there. She was like a week old when she undocked her Moa next to a magnificent thing. "I want that" - she said and in another week, with all support and gunnery skills at 3 she was driving the Rokh of the picture. With 4 Hobgoblin I it was a menace to level 2 mission rats.

Fast forward a year and she still plays, but still just a 1-2 hours a week (though it might change now as I conjured up an interesting project for her). Times and priorities change, she spent this year with +4 implants and perfect remaps, very focused, and finally she got the ship of her dreams: Yeah, it's the same Rokh. She is stubborn. Now what's interesting is the very little increase of power due skilling (T2 modules are considered baseline and skill-limited). She had like 4% of her current skillpoints. Yet the ship had 60% of its active tank, 75% of its passive, 60% of its DPS and 80% of its tracking/range. When you have 4% of your WoW level or ilvl, your power is like 0.01% of the maximum. 2 of the noobRokhs would defeat one of the top Rokhs. Not even a thousand of ilevel 52 WoW characters could kill a single top character.

In EVE the skilling is just a marginal thing, something that was probably added as a necessity to make their game qualify as an MMO. With focused training, very soon you get power matching your competitors. You won't get significantly stronger just by having more skillpoints. In EVE you get stronger by learning and thinking. In other MMOs, you get stronger by spending time. A lolkid who never set foot in a raid and all his "heroic" efforts are being AFK in dungeons and questing for the farmer faction has a stronger character than a top raider had 2 patches ago.

In other MMOs you gain power as a handout, without doing anything but being around. In EVE, you gain it by being skillful. I'm not sure if EVE needs a skillpoint system at all and anything would be lost if there wouldn't be skills at all. In other MMOs, there wouldn't be a game at all without constant grinding for ever-increasing numbers.

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Business thursday: Traffic jam at Jita

Since EVE become more and more popular, more and more people are getting into Jita to shop. This makes Jita a busy place. It is usually full so you can't jump in. As the load comes from people in the space and the act of logging in being docking, simply removing chatbots doesn't help. Somehow motivating players to shop or PvP elsewhere would defeat the point of the existence of Jita. The shoppers want to come because this is where the stuff is, the traders want to come because this is where the buyers are, the gankers want to come because this is where the targets are. They could ban duels though, as that's consensual PvP and the parties could really jump one system away. Some other random stuff like manufacturing line and corporate offices could be removed too like they removed agents and belts. But the real solution is buying stronger hardware or optimizing the code.

However until some solution is implemented, businessmen face a nasty problem. So, you are busy hauling 25B cargo on average, all small items like officer and deadspace modules, skillbooks, implants. You have a transport Tengu which has 500K EHP with your non-perfect skills and lack of escorting fleet booster. It's cloaky, aligns under 4 seconds, never caused any problems. And now it sits on the Perimiter gate, unable to cloak or move, while you are spamming the jump button watching the midslot heat climbing up. Not a pleasing situation.

There isn't much you can do to prevent it, besides jumping to Maurasi to sit on the less camped Maurasi-Jita gate. It seems your fate is in the hand of luck, which isn't a good thing. Sooner or later someone will crack your Tengu open. Of course you could just split up the cargo, but that would mean more jumps in a gate what can hold you for 5-10 minutes. Or you can reschedule your real life to transport near downtime. Or set up 25 different Red Frog contracts and wait a day. Neither one is acceptable.

Now, your situation isn't that bad. You surely have a supercapital pilot in training with near-perfect armor tanking skills. You probably also have an Orca pilot. With these, in a month of training you can conjure up an armor-boosting Orca and the ship that will get you trough the traffic jam without ganks: You have 8 minutes to jump in before the hardeners burn out. Armor hardeners have 20s cycle, so it is much harder to suicide-neut it than a shield-tanked Tengu. Finally, it has 147m signature, so the 400m resolution Tornado guns will do half damage on it. So its anti-tornado EHP is close to a capital ship. Anyone wants to suicide gank a carrier in a 0.9 system? Well, mine is there a few times a week, come and take it!

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The money is in the Goon schemes!

Every now and then someone comments on my ISK-making posts that "Goons make 1000x more with one speculation". No, I'm not going to cite my personal income, because even I don't make a trillion in a few months, the average length of a patch-speculation. I won't even talk about the failed speculation, like the one on Tritanium when the drone alloys were removed, as most of them don't fail. The truth is that the Goon stock-shark brigade makes more and has more money than I'll ever do.

But it's not a problem, as goon speculations are Goon speculations and not "Mynnna speculations" for a reason. While some players are more important in it then others, it's clearly true that even Mynnna couldn't pull them off alone. If he could, he would. To pull them off, the wast human resources of GSF is needed. They can only pull them off together. If there was a smaller subset of Goons that could operate these schemes, this subset would just cut the fat and keep the all money to themselves. Why would they give share of the loot to other people? The only reason is that one way or another the "average Goon" is needed for the speculation to work.

If we look GSF up on Dotlan, we see 8200 members. If that translates only to 3000 actual people, a trillion ISK income turns into 333M/person. And trillion-income speculations aren't happening every day. Same for the old "oh-my-God-so-big" Technetium moon income. Huge money in one pile but if we distribute among the members, we get sums that would make a Veldspar miner say "meh".

Comparing a yourself to an alliance can be disheartening (or hilarious). The solution is to stop it. Whenever you hear "Goons did this, Goons did that", divide that number by 3000 and you'll see that you aren't doing bad.

The infamous Goon recruitment scams are based on the fact that people want in the GSF badly since "that's where the money and power is". GSF has money and power, it is true. But a random Goon has just a little portion of it. You should always measure yourself to the "random Goon" and not GSF.

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How can TEST win this?

Since TEST quit the HBC, its situation became grim. It has practically one ally left, Tribal Band, which isn't really a powerhouse. Surprisingly N3 and PL backed it in the last battle but there is no official pact, it's more likely that they find the Goons larger trouble now and they can return shooting TEST any time. CFC is attacking Fountain, all out. Fountain is where both TEST members rat and where its renter alliance NOFKS lives. There are also moons there to harvest. Lose Fountain and TEST loses most of its income.

Now I think The Mittani made a fatal mistake declaring this war as "Nice region, we'll take it". It will cost a lot on line member enthusiasm. But it doesn't make it less true. EVE is about money, no matter how much the grunts believe it's about good fights and morale. Morale can't keep you in ships. The spirit of good fights won't help you against a supercapital fleet. CFC (and HBC) were built on Tech moons, their income allowed the leaders to keep the grunts in ships. The Mittani is right to only care about money. He is fatally wrong admitting it to his grunts, because if they start caring about the money, they soon recognize that their time spent in fleets bashing structures while running from bombers could earn them more money if they'd mine Veldspar in a Venture.

TEST is more relaxed about money. It has two squads directly related to ISK-making (the industrialist Antitrust and the ratter Admiral) and generally there is no shame in making ISK in TEST. But that is member income. The alliance income is based on renters and moons. It means that once Fountain is taken, TEST as an alliance will bankrupt, unable to keep the grunts in ships, therefore loses its power to fight on the large scale. While it doesn't mean the end and failcascade of TEST, as they can just move to FW or another, less worthy nullsec region, it will be the end of their importance on the Sov map.

This is a Blitzkrieg from the point of CFC: they have to make TEST bankrupt before their members get bored on grinding structures of people they don't hate at all, for ISK they won't see much of. Can it work? Yes it can.

What TEST needs to do is not only making the CFC plan "not work" but make it theoretically impossible. I mean if they could conjure up a financial method that guarantee their income even if they lose Fountain, they became undestroyable. Currently the war cry of BoodaBodda "we fight till the last ship and last timer and even come back after that" is just as empty as "God forgives, -A- doesn't". If TEST ship replacement program would not depend on Fountain, it would become unquestionable truth. From that point, the Fountain campaign would become a forever-war for CFC which cannot be won, even if they finally take it. The region would be useless as thousands of bloodthirsty trolls would be living next to it, sitting in an endless stream of ships. CFC would then have to ask for peace as the war could make them no good.

Actually there is more than that here. Since TEST is already swarming with pilots and have a culture where PvP losses aren't reason to be ashamed, they can only be defeated financially. Take that away and TEST become an unbeatable monster, something that can only be contained by extreme costs but can never be forced to leave. The CFC war is a breaking point for TEST: they either fix the financial Achilles heel and become the monster of EVE or they don't and they can go FW.

How to gain financial stability which is not based on moons or renters? Well, there is only one source left: members. TEST has 12000 characters in it, and from the fact that they field 1500 men fleets, we can assume 5000 active, playing people in the alliance. Back in the day, my 20B/month donation was 5% of the budget and they've grown, so let's assume 500B/month. That's mere 0.1B/member/month. If TEST could make an average member pay 100M a month to the alliance, they are safe. I mean from everything. No one can take away the members, so no one can take away the income.

Of course it doesn't mean that every member must pay 100M. If they could, there would be no need for ship replacement program at the first place. Many members are dirt-poor and doesn't bother. They PvP for fun if they have ships and play League of Legends if not. So an overall "pay 100M/month" order would be a disaster. Taxes wouldn't work either, as high tax demotivate work. They'll simply stop ratting.

The only way to get money from the members is asking for it, and making it a badge of honor. I wrote about a year ago of the War Bonds idea, to create a toplist for members based on the number of war bonds purchased. This way the large amount of ratters and industrialists could directly help their alliance while gaining personal glory, the same way as PvP-ers.

When I pushed it a year ago, it was in the wrong time. TEST was near its peak of power. They needed nothing, so they didn't care about it. Now the situation has changed. They are fighting for survival.

Finally: why TEST? Why am I so obsessed with the alliance that kicked me for posting on their forums? Because everyone else is so permeated with the "ima l33t pvpr" culture that they would rather go extinct than carebear. TEST is practically the only alliance with official industrialist and ratter squads. While others do PvE too, obviously as their ships must be paid, they do it secretly on alts while shouting "ima no fucks given badass pvpr" to the face of everyone. If there is an alliance that can make it, it's TEST. I really hope they make it.


PS: I know that Li3 is collecting money member-based. But it's from corporations and not players. The money comes from ratting taxes and moon money. It doesn't change the source of the money, just the collection level: alliance and not corp.

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League of Legends: easy as newbie

The game League of Legends is all over the EVE-player community. It seems EVE players play it a lot, probably while waiting for a fleet to happen or the ore hold to fill. I looked it up long ago and found it a pretty childish twitch game where your progress is defined by your reaction time and memorizing which champion counters what and so on. No thinking or strategy, the job is well known, the winner is the one who executes it better. Clearly not for me who left World of Warcraft raiding for becoming "dancy".

Recently TMC published an article, how horribly hard this game is for newbies, because they are faced with veterans on their second-third account. If you can't make yourself read that steaming piece of crap, I summarize for you: as a newbie you'll be totally farmed by veteran opponents, giving them gold and XP, making them stronger, therefore losing the game to your team more than you'd do by being AFK. For this and other reasons, your team will hate and mock you and you can't even quit since that's bannable offense. This will go on for 100-300 games, each 30-50 minutes long.

What made me download this game and play it about a week is the extremely annoying "EVE-ego": the article literally claims that learning the Oh-my-God so hard EVE Online and simply being here for longer than 3 months is a huge badge of commitment and valor. Yeah, because alt-tabbing every half-an-hour to empty your ore hold is soooooo hard that being able to do it places you to the gaming elite. The frigate-lolling impoverished punks being smug simply for having an EVE subscription annoys me. So off I went to disprove this punk.

So here I am, complete newbie, having slow reaction time, no intention to learn even the names of the champions (units in League of Legends), not to mention their abilities, neither the item builds, practically no experience in playing RTS games, I'm not even liking the damn game, so please guess what my kill:death ratio is.

According to the article, a dedicated but new player is chainfarmed, finishing as "1-12-3" (kill-death-assist). I must be worse than that. And in a sense I am. If I'd be pitted in an empty arena 1v1 by random League of Legends players, I'd be in the bottom 5%. So if you'd guess 1:10 to 1:20, you'd be forgiven.

After a few days of complete sucking, I figured out how to play. Since then, my kill-death is the best in the team in 90% of the games. Only absolute veterans who carry the team all alone can get higher winrate. In the last 6 games it was 3:1. Want that? Want to be the one who call the others "dumb feederx"? Want to be the one who tell the years old veterans to just stay in the base or be reported for intentional feeding? Want to harvest "teamwork" and "honorable opponent" instead? Here it is how it's done:

1. You play a jungler. The game site tells you the names of the champions if you type "jungler" to that empty field. Warwick and Nunu are very cheap.
2. Your masteries are all in the defense field, except 2 in offense, the NPC killing one. All your runes are "magic resist at lvl 18", "defense at lvl 18" and "health at lvl 18"
3. Your spells are smite and teleport
4. At the start buy "Hunter's machete" and a bunch of health potions. Ask your teammates to help killing the blue monster, it's a big golem giving mana regen buff. Use your smite ability to deliver the killing blow when it's below 500 HP.
5. From there you just patrol your jungle (and after some experience, the enemy jungle) and killing the 5 monster spawns.
6. From time to time return to the base for item upgrades: upgrade the machete into a "spirit stone", get a pair of boots and start building "Sunfire Cape".
7. If you find a monster camp missing, having only one small monster in it, the enemy is intruding your territory. Buy Sight Wards and place them at the blue and red monster. When he comes again, he'll be ganked.
8. Your teammates sometime spam "jungler why no gank ffs", just ignore them. When your ulti is up and you are near a lane, visit it and use it on some enemy to harass them, but don't go out of your way for a gank. Sitting in a bush for 30 seconds cost you more than the time spent dead for the enemy.
9. By the time you get Sunfire Cape, your teammates reach the end of their attention span and start leaving their lanes to "gank" (running around pointlessly and getting killed). When you see an empty lane, go there and with the Sunfire Cape, AoE the minions down. Lot of XP and gold. Don't get far from your tower, if the enemy minions are pushed back by your efforts, get back to the jungle.
10. At lvl 10-11 you can solo the Dragon for gold to the whole team. Get the more expensive Vision Ward and place it front of the dragon lair. It will show the enemy wards, destroy those if there is any and run away, come back for the dragon later.
11. Keep ignoring the "ffs jungler why no help i report u" and "ffs come teamfight" requests. You can not be banned for playing as you want unless it's feeding. And you aren't feeding, you don't even have a single death.
12. Watch for besieged turrets! If the enemy minions and especially champions fight near your turret, go there (use the teleport spell if far) and kill them. Enemies can't kill you near towers because the tower kills them first. Here is where you get your hilarious kills, because they "haz skills" meaning they memorized how many hits they need to kill you before the tower kills them. Except your masteries and runes are defensive so they die with a "wut" on their face.
13. From time to time return to the base and get item upgrades, all defensive, except the last one. Spirit Visage, Runic Bulwark, Frozen Heart are my favorites. Put Sight wards to the last slot and keep busy placing them.
14. When your are 2-3 level and 1-2 items above everyone on the field, you can go bold and join the teamfights, with hilarious effects. While your damage is crap, they can't kill you, but they focus on you since they got used to your champion being offensive. Remember, it's not platinum league, it's just a bunch of mentally 12 years old trolls, they won't look up your items and think.
15. At lvl 18 and having your items, you can attack towers head on and tank their damage while your teammates kill it. You can do the same with the Baron monster.
16. Get home, sell the wards and the Sunfire cape, get a Wit's End and a Bloodthirster, and march into their base, if they haven't surrendered yet!

Look at this 4v5 victory (the last guy went AFK after being farmed): While Tristana and Master Yi were classes above me, I wasn't useless feeder, but a defender of towers and tank in the teamfights.

Of course you won't always win. The normal games have a ranking machmaking trying to keep you around 50% wins, so you'll lose. You can tell you lost if you have AFK-ers, childish arguing over who goes mid solo, general bitching. As a general rule, always vote yes for surrender, because if you decline, the one who started it will purposefully lose anyway. Start surrender vote yourself if the game isn't going well. But even a 3v5 is no excuse for bad kill:death: Jungling also let you abandon a failed game without abandoning: being AFK is bannable, leaving is bannable, feeding is bannable but jungling in a quiet corner is not.

The picture below is very important, as it's the obvious proof that "teamfights" are pointless until you are powerful enough to win decisively. The upper half shows mid-game, you can see that both Draven and Fizz have awful lot of kills and good kill:death ratio. Still, they have less levels and cheaper items than me. Enemy kills are simply not cost-effective compared to minion farming because you die and lose time. On the bottom you can see the end result and the reason why people insist on killing enemies: if you don't die, it's great. Draven finished with 1.5x more gold than me, because after I started tanking, he had just one death but 5 kills. But to do so, I needed gear I couldn't get if I get into fights and farmed as the rest of the newbies:

Another 4v5 victory and you can see how: since the enemy was busy trying to get kills while we were busy farming, we simply outgrew them: The last picture is the damage recap. You can see how little I did to enemies, but was instrumental to the victory, exactly because of that: I farmed in early game and tanked in late.

This is the mentioned last 6 games, with 3.8-1.2-8.3 average performance, proving that the above results aren't cherry-picked battles, with my strategy you can consistently have good results:
The solution for a smooth and rewarding newbie experience in League of Legends is exactly the same as in EVE: stay in highsec, earn money, ignore PvP and go for objectives! Remember, League of Legends games are won by destroying the Nexus, not by killing players. You can theoretically win a game without any kills on your team.

PS: I'm not sure if I continue playing as the game is clearly not my genre and my point is proven!

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The first and last mistake of The Mittani

I'm not used to make two posts a day. It's an exception, replying to a recent event. The regular article of today is here.

The Mittani is known as "the King of Space", he is the leader of CFC coalition, he won CSM7 by large and would win CSM8 if he'd care to run. He gained his power via manipulation, lies and diplomacy.

He now made a mistake. His first one within EVE (suicidegate was outside EVE). And probably his last one too. I believe this mistake will be his undoing. No, I'm not talking about an invasion against TEST. I'm talking about his recent State of the Alliance message.

This message has two elements that would alone be enough to undo him, but together they are sure death sentence. The first is openly claiming that he wants Fountain for its moons and literally nothing else: "he hard fact is that we would not be going to war against TEST if they were living in Providence." Why is it a problem? Because "pubbie carebears" want moons. "Big, manly PvP-ers" just want good fights and tears and "give no fucks". CFC routinely invade highsec and kill residents for no other reason than "being carebears". SMA just had to kick half its membership for being carebears on the order of The Mittani. And now, he announce a "carebear-war", one motivated by nothing else than getting ISK. The Mittani doesn't even notice, but he declared himself the biggest carebear in EVE by that SotA.

It isn't a surprise. "good fights" are a bullshit fed to the grunts who waste their time in fleets which get spoils for their masters. If the grunts needed to be paid with even L4 hourly income for opportunity cost, a 500-man, 3 hours long fleet action would cost 60B just in salaries. The Mittani doesn't have that money, nor anyone else. So they created the narrative of the "gives no fucks PvP-er", a badge of honor that can be gained by giving your time at their service for free. This narrative is only viable if the opposite, "the carebear" is despicable.

The other mistake is declaring that other wars were started by propaganda, "a declaration of grievance, followed by a quest for justice. The enemy did a bad thing to us, and now we must go after them to redress the balance; they are bad people and need to be punished." He then continue and say that he doesn't even bother to do this again. This makes him a liar retroactively. He didn't even bother to make an exception "we always fought for justice/tears/revenge/gudfites, but now we are financially troubled so must make a one-time exception of a carebear-war". He confesses that he was always after the money and lied to his grunts. He finishes with "This is a CFC invasion, which means that we will be judging participation as a basis for spoils and moons will be distributed accordingly... There will be no Q&A session."

So the translation of the recent SotA:

1. I want moons, not good fights, not glory, nor tears, not revenge. Moons. ISK. Like the highsec miners.
2. I always wanted moons. CFC was never about glory, tears or revenge. It was about ISK.
3. I used to lie to you that we are fighting for glory, tears and revenge, because it made you feel good so you kept serving me for free.
4. I can't even bother keeping up the narrative that we are PvP-ers who are more valuable than highsec miners.
5. Just shut up and get my iskies or you'll be whipped!

I think CFC grunts will be a bit less motivated to show up than TESTies who now literally fight for survival. By dropping HBC, BoodaBooda clearly proved that he is truly not after ISK or power but good fights and making a mess. I expect 150 vs 1500 battles.

The Mittani is history. I doubt if the new war slogan "Nice region, we'll take it" will be accepted by Goons.

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Pixel war on sexism, racism and other bad -isms?

It would be an understatement to call the video gamer community sexist, racist and various other -ist. Even on heavily moderated games the voice chat is less than welcoming to anyone who isn't a white, male, heterosexual, young adult. In less moderated games like EVE, hearing things like "we raped the nigger faggot cunts" is more or less normal.

Well, it shouldn't be, and from time to time someone go to the forum or a blogpost and say it's not. And then nothing happens, everything goes on as it always was: the worst example of a gym locker room culture.

Currently there isn't a single authority figure or opinion leader who would openly support sexism, racism and the rest of the isms. You can tell to the camera that "there is no proof for global warming" but you can't tell "women aren't smart enough to get a high-level job". There isn't a sexist literature to read, there aren't sexist parties to join or clubs to attend. The ism-s live not as an ideology, just as a self-entitlement: "I'm worthy because I'm a male" for example. People of low performance love ideas that value people according to other things than their merit. Hell, they even created a class "PvP-er" which gives them self-esteem, despite the bar of joining is trivial (lose frigates).

I believe the easiest way of defeating them is to objectively prove that they are less successful than the groups they despise. I can't imagine better humiliation for a sexist than being beaten by a girl in something he fancies himself great. So theoretically it's easy to cleanse EVE Online or any other game which has competition included: beat them soundly in the game. Just imagine the tears of the "big strong guys with the big balls" after they are "raped" by "cunts", "niggers" and "faggots" (as "obviously" anyone who has a problem with hate speech must be a woman, black, jew or homosexual, he can't be a majority member who is just disgusted by hate speech).

How to implement it: simple! Create a corporation where supporters of the cause place PvP alts, funded by out-of-corp PvE mains who act as "free mercenary" in wars on the side which is less disgusting. If your region is under attack, just ban hate-speech from your forums and your coms and we bring hundreds of pilots to your aid, for free.

Except there is no "we". The above scheme is completely altruistic. The selfish protection from disgusting people is avoiding them. I did not meet a single racist or sexist slur in EVE in the last month because I don't chat with anyone who is doing such. You are only exposed to their disgusting behavior if you choose to. Also, your progression in the game does not depend on joining any group, so you can avoid talking to anyone with no in-game consequences.

This is the reason why disgusting stereotypes are alive in the primitive circles: fighting them isn't self-rewarding. Of course women fought for their right to vote. Or their right to contraceptives. Or blacks to be able to sit on a bus. But why would anyone bother to fight to moderate strangers behave badly to each other somewhere else?

This is a standard ghetto-problem. If you have a pre-existing professional/financial status, you don't need to care. I mean the "you don't need to talk anyone in EVE to progress" is true if you know basic economy, have the skills of looking up theorycrafting on external sites, aware of how game economies work in general. I could earn L4-equal income on my first days in EVE by hauling on my Badger II. But if someone "born into" the getto, he is locked into this mud. I mean if you don't know these, the only way to survive in EVE is joining players who help you get the knowledge. There you have to suffer not only the abusive behavior of the dwellers, but soon you'll be identified with them by those who aren't living inside.

So while the idea of the "Anti-Filthspeak Legion" is terrific, it's also pretty unlikely to rise as it would demand people who are otherwise fine and successful to spend their own resources protecting other people. The only reward for this activity would be the tears of the defeated filth-speakers and that would fade pretty quickly. So if you are looking at someone to organize the Anti-Filthspeak Legion, I'm not your guy. I'm way too selfish for that. Though I'd consider joining.

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There is no such thing as "free beer"

Look at the pictures below, both from intro movies of two games: It's not a question which game has more sexist clichés. In World of Warcraft every races have large sexual dimorphism where the females are considerably smaller, much-much thinner and have human-like shape and generally look "chicks". The same clothing somehow shows much more skin on a female avatar. In EVE Online, the worst that players can create is a twisted camera angle that looks down on the cleavage of the avatar. The clothing is absolutely functional an non-sexy. The woman on the picture above - despite barely wearing clothes - radiates power and competence instead of sexiness.

Now guess which game has larger female percentage in the audience! Well, bad news feminists, the one with the sexy elf chicks have one of the largest in the gaming industry while the one with the powerful and competent pilot has one of the smallest. It's not just a video game issue, the party that endorse(d) Rush Limbaugh, who coined the term Feminazi has much-much more female voters than any feminist organization ever had.

Why? In short: because in World of Warcraft you can get anything by doing trivial jobs, while in EVE you actually have to take some risk and effort (not much, but still more than press a random key). Being content with freebies, refusing to do anything isn't restricted to men.

There is an extremely sexist custom, something that constitute outright discrimination: men have to pay entrance fee to clubs, women not. I've yet to see a feminist marching against it. I guess they also like free beer. Obviously, there is no such thing as free entrance or free drinks. The club lives from income coming from paying customers: men. Women has to somehow compensate them. And they indeed do. Can you really blame the men if they consider women's body an object if it can be bought with an entry ticket and some booze? The sad fact is that sexism is very comfortable for lazy women. They can get awful lot of things from guys by offering sex, sexiness or housework. I don't mean that it's comfortable for women in general, a competent woman surely suffer a lot from sexist "jokes", unwanted dating attempts, having to prove her competence in situations where male peers don't. But for lazy women, it's paradise. A useless, dumb, lazy man can only expect help from his family (the basement dweller cliché), while women can expect it from large amount of sexist men.

There is no such thing as sexist political party. There is no such thing as sexist movement. There isn't a man with any office who'd say a sexist statement in public (and could hope to keep that office). There is no such ideology as sexism. There are just a bunch of lazy, dumb, unsuccessful guys who feel entitled for respect just because they are men. And there are a bunch of lazy, dumb, unsuccessful women who feel entitled for freebies just because they are women.

I'm obviously not blaming the women for the survival of sexism. Accepting free beer is smaller act than offering it. I merely state that they have more to lose, so they should work harder to stop it. If I live near a river, I have more reason to pack sandbags during flooding than the guy living on the hill.

The first thing women could easily do is stop tolerating obvious sex-toy-elves, countless Damsel in Distress quests, systematic mass-murder campaigns against sentinent races and generally a World where you can only advance by performing violence and there is no way to advance by building, creating or caring. Of course the rest of the games are harder, so abandoning WoW would mean abandoning easy game victories too. Well, one should have priorities. The same goes obviously with free drink offers.

Now, can someone create an easy, entitling game with no sexism in it? Unlikely. Ask a bunch of people to draw a picture of two people, one cutting lumber, the other caring for a child! They will draw a stereotypical male lumberjack and a female mother or baby-sitter. Despite the description is totally gender-neutral, the outcome will be not and this is "normal" in our culture, people just fill the holes with their (indoctrinated, sexist) preconceptions. The opposite (female lumberjack, male baby-sitter) would be a comedy/parody. The same thing happens when a game developer is tasked to create a heroic player and some weak non-player characters who are at his mercy. Despite the task is again gender-neutral, he will "naturally" make the hero masculine, while the positive NPCs are made to be women, elderly, children, disabled or members of a lesser race or class. The audience will also "naturally" accept this, and would reject the opposite as a comedy. The solution is not creating a situation which trigger strong cultural resonance in both your developers and players. Since easy games are all placing the player to the position of power and domination over other characters, they will all be sexist or comedy beyond help, save for a few totally human-absent games (like Tetris).

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Damsel in distress

From time to time feminists appear on some gaming issue. They are usually right and completely useless in the same time. This time it's about the cliché "Damsel in distress" by Anita Sarkeesian, where the (male) lead character is motivated to save a woman, who is helpless and lost without the strong, powerful man. Is it sexist? Yes it is. Is it disgusting, demeaning and outright wrong towards women? Yes it is. Are the feminists right that it's overused and need to stop? Yes they are. Do feminists make any sense? Never.

I coined the "The Devil is sexist" term when I heard some feminist being outraged that in Africa various militias mass-rape women. What the good feminist forgot that the same militias also killed the women. And the men. And the children. And burned the villages. "The Devil is sexist" term refers to feminists focusing on the sexism of something that is overall terrible and sexism is its smallest issue. Fixing its sexism wouldn't make it much better (would the African women be better off if they wouldn't be raped before slaughtered by machetes?). However focusing on its sexism separates men and women on an issue where they have no conflicting interest.

The "Damsel in distress" cliché in video games is a typical "The Devil is sexist" issue: in contemporary gaming everything is just a tool to advance the story of the player. There is no world in the games (except EVE Online) where players must adapt to and live in. The mock world is forged in a way to adapt to the player. In World of Warcraft, despite it's a multiplayer game, by phasing they made it possible that I am the hero who single handedly stopped multiple horrible evils by my outstanding ability to press any key.

When Blizzard developers quickly needed some new foe, they turned the long-term allies of the players, the Zandalari trolls into a world-conquering evil, so they could reuse the Zul Gurub and Zul Aman instances. Isn't it funny that feminists whine that a female character is abused as story object when whole civilizations are abused? In Mogushan Vaults the poor Zandalari appear again for no other reason than the scriptwriters ran out of ideas. They are introduced as "old allies of the Mogu", so now even their past is twisted, retroactively. We were always at war with Eurasia the Zandalar Tribe.

The sexism of the video games is just a symptom of what's rotten in video games. Other games (like table-top games, sports, puzzles) are designed to have a fixed rule set that the gamers must obey and present a challenge they need to overcome to win. In a usual contemporary video game, the rules are constantly changed in order to make sure that the player - regardless of his merits - always wins and gets what he wants. Could you imagine a "nerf" to the games soccer, American football or basketball where the goal zone (the gate, touchdown zone or basket) is greatly enlarged to make sure that "more casual" players can score?

If a game is designed as "press any key and receive reward", can it not fulfill the immature sexist wishes of boys for a sexy and attractive woman being at their mercy? Can the kidnapped woman escape on her own, practically saying "I'm fine, I don't need you"? No, because like everything in the game her only purpose is to serve the desire of the player to be rewarded for his inadequate and mediocre performance.

However it is still just a consequence. The games aren't made this way by some evil mastermind trying to corrupt the good and healthy youth into a bunch of entitled, leeching punks. They are just following the demand. EVE Online, where the game world doesn't bend to your will and you won't be made the greatest man ever lived for killing 10 rats, have like 100K players (not accounts), World of Warcraft where you literally are, have 100x more (though declining, so probably more nerfs incoming). The sad fact is that the people are indeed a bunch of leeching, non-performing punks who feel entitled to everything including a blowjob from a supermodel. So yes, they are sexist, just like the Devil.

What can the feminists do, besides whining and demanding developers fix it against their financial interests? (It's funny that Sarkeesian doesn't notice that by asking the developers/Holywood to get rid of the sexism she is declaring herself and women in general damsels in distress who can only be saved by the powerful men at the helm of media companies.) There is a famous statement that I might don't remember absolutely correctly:

First they came for the raid difficulty,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a raider.
Then they came for game economy,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't an AH-wizzard.
Then they came for the Zandalari,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a lore nerd.
Then they came for the me, turning me into an E-cup blondie in a cell or a fridge,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

Say no for games that provide rewards for nothing, that bend the game world for the enjoyment of the players, where players are automatically placed into a position of power and entitlement! Just stop giving the makers of these games money!

Give it instead to games where players progress according to their merits. In EVE Online there is absolutely no sexism or even male-normality programmed in. Sure there are horribly sexists morons among the players, since the playerbase is largely the same as of the other games (even if they think otherwise). But you can blow them up. Or rob their group from their goods. I haven't seen horrible behavior on e-sport tournaments, just on the "for fun" games, where you can't really stand out with your performance.


PS to feminists: I don't support your cause not because I consider your views incorrect or your goal a bad one, but because I think sexism isn't an idea at all. It doesn't have theoretical points, scholars or literature. Sexism is the product of "reward/respect me without merit or effort". The typical sexist is also racist, nationalist and hates other religions, simply because he means "I'm in the top 1% of the mankind just because I'm male, white, Christian and member of my nation". The cure is the idea that one can only be rewarded/respected for his actions and in the case of gaming the implementation isn't giving another speech on gender equality but simply pwning his ass in the game. However that's impossible in games where everyone is a winner, and the game company goes an extra mile to reassure him of his awesomeness. So fighting sexism is just as stupid as trying to protect the walls getting black from smoke. I'd rather fight the fire instead.

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The true purpose of highsec

Why is highsec safe and profitable? Why does it exist in EVE Online? What is its purpose? I mean if EVE is a PvP game, we would be better off without it. There is no highsec in World of Tanks. If CCP can't get rid of it since most of the players prefer to live there, the logical move would be to remove the rest of it and turn the game into a huge space-WoW. If most customers are so fond of the safety of highsec, why doesn't CCP get rid of PvP completely and enlarge its playerbase? After all, there aren't many MMOs where players are not represented by a human avatar shooting bullets/spells but as a various of devices (spaceships in EVE), the "be a spaceship instead of a mage" could provide it a niche!

But no, CCP seems to accept something that looks like an unstable situation, like a coin standing on its edge. Yet the coin did not fall to either of its faces over a decade: most players didn't "grew a ball" (how I hate this sexist term) and moved to null where the "big players" are, nor a living highsec community formed. CSM has only one member who somewhat represents highsec, despite the majority lives there.

The answer was provided by a late news piece: Spacemonkey's Alliance, one that is known to have a strong industrialist arm was ordered by The Mittani to cut this arm down and keep only PvP-ers, or be kicked from CFC, therefore its space. This is just one of the countless series of the events when a nullsec entity "cut down the fat" and removed "carebears" from its ranks. But this time it hit an alliance that was famous for calling itself industrialist. They did not look at PvE players as fat and they functioned. Now they got the order: you go full-PvP or go to Hell!

The question is simple: how will the surviving "full-PvP" players pay for their ships? How did the "full-PvP" alliances were to paying for their ships? "Moon money" is bad answer. Tech was used in T2 production and highsec does not consume T2 materials. An item in EVE is consumed when it disappears, either as a used ammunition or as a destroyed ship. While a highsec player might purchase a T2 module, he will sell it back when he upgrades to faction. While he might buys a T2 ship, he will replace it to a T3 or faction one. Besides the Hulks ganked, not much Tech was consumed in highsec. Most of the Tech sold by Goons were blown up the hands of other nullsec, lowsec and WH residents. While Tech might took a trip to Jita, it eventually died outside of Highsec. If it's used outside of highsec, the money for it also came from out of highsec, so the question remains: how can a PvP-er pay for his PvP?

Remember the production-consumption graphs: The point is not that the value (any item, LP, ISK) is made in highsec, the point is that it's destroyed in nullsec. What is created by "highsec carebears" remains in highsec, either without being destroyed, or ganked in highsec. How do majority of the value go to low/null for destruction? There is only one explanation: alts. The value is created by a highsec "carebear" alt and then gifted to the "PvP-er" main for consumption.

The purpose of highsec is to allow PvP-ers upkeep their PvP-er image. He gives the "fuck carebears, give no shit about ISK, let's just go have some fun pewing" attitude while he runs 3 retrievers and an Orca on the other screen. The selling point of EVE is similar to WoW. While in WoW the skill-less, dumb faceroller is a "hero" who killed all the dragons and has the most epic sword (of the patch), in EVE, the same failplayer is a "no fucks given" badass PvP-er. Everyone can be a badass PvP-er, since he has no reason to give a damn about his ship, it is already replaced by his AFK Retrievers. Take away this secret farm, force them to compete for their resources and they would fail.

What would happen if highsec would be removed from the game? The very opposite of what PvP-ers claim: not the carebears would disappear but the PvP-ers. Sure, in the first week the real carebears would be in trouble adapting. Some would quit. But most would quickly adapt, like those who already did and moved to WH space or doing lowsec exploration. On the first week the PvP-ers would have their feast they've been dreaming of. But after they got popped by other PvP-ers, they couldn't log to their 3 Rets+Orca setup! They would have to do PvE in their space! They would either become carebears themselves, like the WH players, or stop playing. In an EVE with no highsec no one could be pure PvP-er. And without that image, the game couldn't be a massive success. Sure, a small hard core could enjoy the game. But the masses who parade around with their highsec-paid badass life would quit.

Don't believe it? Just suggest on the forum that the welfare system of "insurance" should be removed and watch them scream. Some "no fucks given" dudes!

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Why?

The question always appears among comments. Being irrational saves others from answering it. "for fun lol" and "whatever feels good" is their answer. They PvP in frigates because it's fun. They roam and kill frigates because it's fun. They fight on Arathi Basin bridge because it's fun.

On the other hand why do I earn money, raided in blues or without fixed group in WoW? What is the point?

We are mortal. We will die. Every single one of us. Despite various priests earn good money making you believe that you'll be living on a cloud with 77 virgins next to a beer river, you'll just cease to exist. In a game it's even faster: stop playing and you cease to exist for the rest of the players. Sure, if you made some impression, people will remember you after your departure. But they are mortal too and sooner or later you'll be forgotten. Everything you were will disappear without a trace.

The ancient Greek scientists like Archimedes perished more than two thousand years ago, yet not forgotten. Why? Not simply because they made an impression with their personal skills (anyone knows who won the ancient Olympic games?) but because their methods were adopted by many people generations after generations. When you use a fan too cool your room, you use an optimized version of the screw of Archimedes, designed to move fluids. The area of a triangle is still calculated by the method set by Pythagoras. The people didn't learn them because of respect or because they were forced to, but because these methods made their life easier. The name of the one who first grabbed a lightning-struck branch and carried to the camp of his tribe could not be remembered due to lack of literacy. But the fire he brought home shaped the life of everyone in that camp and their children and their children's children up to the current generation.

I wish to create replicating and spreading methods of doing things that survive me both in my profession and my hobby: internet gaming. Those who stopped boosting morons and slackers in WoW guilds after reading my blog, play differently due to my effort. They will also drag others to do so and by abandoning the M&S force them to find a new host or stop leeching. I realized and published that the EVE money is in highsec and nullsec is just a ghetto where impoverished youth brawling for street fame. From the fact I have so much haters (instead of just being ignored) it seems many victims stopped serving various manipulators and started to earn ISK and may also think about the social structure of the game itself (will no longer see nullsec fighters as badass kings of space but as brawling punks in a rust-zone block). Those tens of thousands who already read the World of Tanks cheat articles will no longer support a cheater organization and will look more critically to other cheating ones too.

In a month or two, no one will remember that you killed a T3 with a frig. In a year or two, no one will remember that you manipulated a bunch of people into a space empire (how many current EVE players know what "BoB" means, besides "some bad pubbie shit we hate"?) Similarly they will not remember that I killed 52B worth of ships all alone in a month. But they will know that you can get under the guns of a larger ship, leadership is about manipulation and the best way of getting a good killboard is ganking miners. People will be forgotten, but methods will live because they are useful.

What will be left of you after the last man who known you died?
Or less dramatically: what will be left of you in a game when your last buddy stopped playing?

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