The no-lifer issue

Most games have strict time limits. You can’t just show up at 3AM in the basketball stadium and score into the empty basket while the other team is asleep. Nor you can’t go AFK in chess and wait until your opponent has to stop playing and win while he is away. In other games the task is itself trivial (like run 100 yards), but the winner is decided by who performed it fastest.

In MMOs on the other hand it’s completely OK to spend the whole day farming or showing up at 3 AM at some objective or wait until the other guy logs of or gives up in boredom. Strike that, many players consider their willingness to spend extreme amount of time in the game a positive thing, dubbed as “effort”. They spew hate on the natural counter of no-lifership: AFK-cloaking. You can’t play more than an AFK cloaker.

The question is “is it a good game design”? First we must ask if basketball would be a better game if you could win by scoring into the empty basket? I doubt if anyone would say yes. It would remove the athletics element from basketball. The ability to play basketball would be secondary to the ability to camp the stadium 24/7. Even the current basketball stars would have no chance against a no-lifer who scores hundreds while they are asleep. But if so, why do people support the no-lifer approach to MMOs?

I can imagine two ways of handling a time-limit. One could be applied on MMOs with multiple shards like World of Warcraft: the servers are in different timezones but every server is up for only 3 hours a day. You simply can’t log in in the other hours. Of course you can find another server to log in (just like you can play basketball any time if you have team, or just by yourself if you have a basket), but your progress cannot be transferred to the servers of another time zone. This way your progress in a server would only be the function of your performance as you simply can’t play more than your competitors.

For single-sharded MMOs the above cannot be implemented one by one. However it can be on a per player basis. You set up your playing hours, up to 3 hours, it would be 16:00-19:00 EVE time for me. I could log in only in this time. Corporations and alliances would also have to set up such time zone. The time zone cannot be changed for more than once a month. All the corporation structures would be reinforced outside the time zone and freely attackable in the time zone (multi-day reinforcements apply).

Such change would seriously change the MMOs. However I’m sure it would be for the better. Your progress in the game would depend on your actions more than your time commitment to the game. Players with healthy life could be competitive with those who have no job or school, assuming equal abilities. Botting would disappear or at least would be limited to the occasions when the player can’t play in his play hours. If we consider that those with healthy life are much more likely to pay money to the developer instead of RMT-ing or just farming in free-to-play games it’s double gain.

PS: I do not comment yet on the Rubicon changes, both because we know too few details, and the Devil is always in the details.



Another ganker joined the corp and found this beautiful anti-tear:

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Thrashed

The sky is blue, the grass is green and the highsec gankers use Catalysts. No one would question this statement. A max-skilled Cata throws out 683 DPS without implants. No cheap ship can match it. The Catalyst has a weakness though, the blasters it uses are bound to Kinetic-Thermal damage. Fierro Delety knew it too and produced this clever fit:

[Mackinaw, Fierro]
Mining Laser Upgrade II
Mining Laser Upgrade II
Mining Laser Upgrade II

Upgraded Kinetic Deflection Amplifier I
Pithum C-Type Kinetic Deflection Amplifier
Pithum A-Type Thermic Dissipation Amplifier
Survey Scanner II

Modulated Strip Miner II, Veldspar Mining Crystal I
Modulated Strip Miner II, Veldspar Mining Crystal I

Medium Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer I
Medium Processor Overclocking Unit I

Don't let the "Pithum" part make you cry "OMG bling, supers log in", these are pretty cheap modules as the demand for them is low (shield supers fearing of being neuted). While sporting full yield fit, the shield resists of the ship are 81% Thermic, 86% Kinetic, which reduces the DPS of the Catalyst to 112. Ouch.

A dedicated ganker cannot suffer this. Equipped with meta4 "scout" guns, Republic Fleet EMP S and bad skills, I had whopping 370 DPS on the fitting screen. However that nasty-fit Mackinaw had only 25% EM resistance, assuming perfect skills, making my effective DPS 278, which is terrible until you consider that it's 2.5x more than the perfect skilled Catalyst due to the resist hole of the ship. So Fierro Delety died.

How to perform a Thrasher/Cata dual gank? The most important is to keep gap between the ships. It's best done basing one jump away from the target, jumping in. The Thrasher warps to the target instantly, the Catalyst shall hold cloak for 10-15 more seconds before warping after it. Both of them shall have scram. The Thrasher lands, locks, orbits, scrams and shoots. Switch to the Cata. Land, lock, orbit but hold fire until the shields are down or you see the messages "Concord warp scrambles Trasher". No point shooting Void ammo into the shields. After the shield is down or Concord is here for the Trasher, shoot. Do not wait until the Thrasher is destroyed, or the same Concord squad will instapop you. Destroy the armor and the hull and pod the miner who thought he is clever by tanking against Therm/Kin. One more tip: if you get T2 guns, don't use T2 ammo because it is Kinetic/Explosive instead of EM.

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An important step in the life of We Gank Because We Care: the first ganker who is not me reached the acceptance limit and invited to the corp. We are recruiting, of course.

Another day, another anti-tears:

Finally a funny moron:

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Morons of the day

Inquisitor Reyalstob is a busy ganker who will soon have the criteria to join the corp. He found this wonderful specimen:

If you are a brave knight, protecting the innocent miners, what ship you choose for your noble quest?
Hint: not something that has 1/5 as much HP and 5x higher value than the Retriever you camp!

"If you can't stop the gank, you can still stop the looting!" - this could be the slogan of these brave knights:I did not touch the looter pilot for an hour of course while they camped.

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The Veldspar isn't real

There is a common misconception among many players who play an MMO for free: that they are somehow needed for game mechanics to work. Good examples are the miner crying "we are making your ships" to gankers and those who "pay" for their EVE accounts by PLEX bought for ISK claiming that they are subscribers since "someone else paid for it with real money".

Their problem is being unable to distinguish real items and game content. A real item needs work to be created and/or be protected by the law. PLEX itself is a coupon that allows you to play the game EVE Online. You have legal rights concerning your game subscription that is governed by real world contracts between the game company and you, typically done by some EULA/ToS. If you buy subscription and cannot play, you can sue for refund and the jury will force the company to refund, unless they rightfully banned you from the game for breaking the contract you clicked OK on. Also, CCP couldn't just give out PLEX-es for free without going bankrupt. The game needs work to be created and maintained and without payment it cannot exits.

Veldspar on the other hand is game content. You have absolutely no legal right to "your" Veldspar. If you'd have lot of Veldspar in your hangar and CCP would remove it all for no reason, there wouldn't be a court that would care. It wasn't your property. Also, CCP could create Veldspar in endless amounts without effort. The claim that "the EVE economy needs you to mine to keep the ship prices OK" is hilarious. CCP could increase the yield of miners or just sell Veldspar as NPC seeded item. If all the miners would quit EVE today, it wouldn't affect the mineral supply, assuming CCP reacts to the market swing and creates some source. They did just that with Technetium, turning the once money print moons into common ones and the Tech in your hangar worthless.

This is true for any of your game activity that makes other players pay for your account: they are game content and CCP could replace you with an NPC without loss of income. The customer (the guy who pays the real money) would simply sell his PLEX to an NPC or in the item shop instead of to you. He would get the same thing for his money. Your Veldspar isn't better than the Veldspar sold by NPCs.

Of course it doesn't mean that free-playing players are worthless. Game companies are struggling making good content and having volunteers creating it is great. While CCP could provide fleet commanding service via a GM, it would cost much more than just letting Mister Vee, Shadoo or Progodlegend playing for free.

When you think you earned your subscription by playing, you are very likely wrong. The truth is that such content creators as the mentioned FCs earned it and you just sneaked in in their shadow. CCP would probably need too much resources to separate those who create content (therefore make other players pay) from those who just sell Veldspar or update market orders. However this can change at any moment and then you are out of luck. Every day when you play for free without actually creating content is a gift you should be grateful for and not a right you earned. You'd better face the fact that your contribution to the game could be replaced by a bot or NPC, therefore you don't worth more to the game company. Sure, you might cost less than a well-programmed bot. But don't forget these when you'd say against a game change "this would make many people like me quit". Who cares if you aren't a customer?

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Check out this work of art that a soon-to-be corpmember sent to the miners he liberated from their badly fit ships:

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EVE needs players, not accounts

I have 11 EVE accounts. I also “pay” for the account of my girlfriend. I placed apostrophes, because CCP saw $60 from me all together, making EVE my cheapest game. I subscribed for the game with my main account and then used a “pay for 3 months, get 6 months on a second account” feature. After these payments I could earn enough ISK in game to PLEX my accounts. I currently sit on 220B cash and another 100B is invested into capital BPOs (my first batch of Naglfar BPOs sold in a week). 5 of my accounts are also investments: supercapital pilots for sale. As my current activity (ganking) pays for itself, I have no ISK needs, I can run the accounts for 8 years. All 6+1 of them. It seems I’m not the ideal customer for CCP.

Actually – as I pay nothing – I am not a customer at all. “But someone paid for your PLEX-es” – you might say, and you are right. However if someone else pays for my in-game actions, I’m – by definition – a content creator. Let’s not argue over the question if the content I create worth $15*7*12 = $1260/year for other people or not, if they pay that much, it worth that much. Let’s also not argue if CCP could create the same content itself for less than I cost them (not $1260, I don’t get that money, only the traffic cost I generate).

The problem I want to discuss today is having content creators who enhance your game for connection costs is nice, but you need to have customers too. Also, the game must cater to your customers and not to your volunteer content creators. Let’s ignore PvP here, because that doesn’t create ISK that you could use to PLEX your account. Quite the opposite.

While most vocal players claim EVE PvE is horrible, vocal players are just a minority. Ganking miners gave me a great overview on mining and the results are the very opposite of what you’d expect: most miners I see are not in a multiboxing or bot-mining operation. Most miners aren’t even in a solo AFK ship with a 1M SP pilot earning ISK while the player is doing his laundry. Brace yourself: most miners are actively piloting their mining ship. They try to warp out when they are attacked (it doesn’t help as I have scram), many warps out when my scout enters the grid (it doesn’t help as I can scan them while they align out, note their EHP and next time I just enter grid cloaked) and many of them has comments on local or convo to me – hopefully only after they upgraded their clones. These are real players of EVE Online who have to like mining otherwise they wouldn’t do it actively. On the other hand, the Orca + 4 Hulks + Obelisk combos never move and never chat. They either don’t warp out at all and keep mining while one of their members blow up or they warp out exactly in the second my ganker pilots enter local. I also see another minority, the solo Mackinaw with tank modules in lows. He is clearly AFK, left his ship running while he is sleeping or in school.

What is the point? Inefficient, solo PvE players are probably customers who are paying for their account and spend their game time with an activity they find fun: PvE. However fun cannot be multiboxed. If you like warping around and getting rocks, you won’t have more fun because you have another ship doing the same in the background. You have more income though. A solo PvE account can be used for fun, but multiple PvE accounts are good for one thing: earning ISK to PLEX your account or fund your PvP (instead of funding it from PLEX). Having multiple PvE accounts that cannot even pay for themselves is plain stupid: you get no extra fun for your $.

My point is that having multiple PvE accounts is probably the best sign of someone not being a paying customer. So changes that close down PvE alt accounts aren’t cutting into the budget of CCP. Of course closing them down has no point in itself (connection costs are low), however if a change would get more customers, it’s not a problem if it would also mean bittervets close down some accounts.

Could the economy turn upside down if enough multibox or bot accounts would be closed? No. They farmed ISK and then sold the ISK to the real customers. Sure, these customers wanted to pay for the ISK, but the ISK injection could be coming from CCP directly in some form of game mechanic change (like the halved ice harvester cycles) or even an item shop. The buyer doesn’t care who sells him ISK for his PLEX. The sellers do care, but they aren’t customers. Before you’d comment, please think about what is the difference between these scenarios:

• you run a ratter account who gets ISK bounties and uses it to buy a PLEX to fund the account.
• the same amount of ISK is sold for 1 PLEX worth of Aurum in the item shop.

To increase revenues, CCP has to embrace the philosophy “we want more players, not more accounts”. 2 accounts played by two players worth more than 2 accounts played by the same player – because he is less likely to pay a dime to CCP.

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The Goblinganks channel gets more and more lively as the newly started gank accounts reach the point where they can actually gank: (the mentioned kill is here)

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A new approach to fight botting

Botting is a widespread plague of MMOs. A botter can gain insane amount of game resources since it “farms for free”: the time of the bot costs the player nothing. To be competitive with the botter, you must be very effective to offset the fact that your time has its opportunity cost. Assuming the botter is not dumber than you, you cannot win (the botter can actively trade as much as I do while having a bot running in the background getting him “free” income).

MMO developers struggle to fight bots. The reason is that the botting software constantly evolves and avoids detection. Behavioral scanning is problematic, as many commenters pointed out on my bot-finding post: I did not find a bot. I found characters that play extremely inefficiently and repetitively for very long time. While this description fits most bots and few players, claiming that they were bots is just like claiming “all people below 150 cm are children”. People who don’t fit into a description that fits most people are minorities by definition and the current politics are very favoring towards minorities. So while I still believe that CCP (and other game developers) don’t ban bots they knew to be bots, I accept that this isn’t because of the love of bots, but because of the fear of bad press because of maltreating the less then bright players.

To solve the botting problem, we first have to see what the fundamental problem is. It’s not the bots, they are just the consequence. The problem is that a dumb, mechanical but very time-consuming way of playing is rewarded. I mean farming in EVE Online in a way that provides 10M/hour income is very dumb. But if you do it 20 hours a day all month, you get 6B ISK, which is enough to pay for 11 accounts. Similarly, if you lose all your battlegrounds in WoW with very bad kill/death ratio, you still get about 100 honor points/game. If you can play 3 games an hour and play 20 hours a day, you can max out your honor every day. What is the best way of playing 20 hours a day? Botting.

What would be the solution? There are two, a harsh and a more dumb-friendly. The harsh approach is making all gaming activities losable. If you would lose honor points for losing a WoW battleground, no one would bot it. If a mining ship would have about 10M/hour fuel costs while in space, no one would bot or AFK mining. As this would be a game mechanic affecting everyone instead of a Game Master decision like bot banning, failing to be productive would be “losing the game” which cannot create bad press. Chess doesn’t ban dumb players from playing, they just lose all the time and quit. The above approach simply makes the game unplayable to dumb people. If you can’t win X% battlegrounds, you can’t play battlegrounds as you go negative in honor. If you can’t earn fuel cost while farming, you can’t farm, and if you can’t farm you can’t get ISK for anything in EVE.

However dumb people are also possible customers so no point losing them. So here is the dumb-friendly approach: you can use a farming feature X hours a week. I mean you can spend X hours a week in WoW battlegrounds, after that you can’t queue up for more. You can mine X hours a week/account in EVE Online, after that the miner modules fail to activate. You can also be in combat with NPCs (except belt and gate rats) for X hours a week/account, after that the rats give no bounty, mission completion nor leave wreck. You can spend X hours a week/account hauling distribution mission cargo. You can set/update Y market orders a week/account. This way the dumb player can still mine and get ISK from mining. But he can’t get rich. The smart player who can farm for 3x higher ISK/hour would get 3x more ISK and it couldn’t be compensated by botting 24/7. A botter would simply have no way to be competitive with a real player, so botting would be irrelevant.

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A nasty mistake in the ganking guide was fixed: there is no need to continuously run the passive targeter, if you got a lock with it you don't get flashy yellow on his overview.

Jackpod and change in the WGBWC rules I wrote that the average T1 barge pod is about 80M. It’s true. However the pod costs have large spread. It’s not like most pods are in the 60-100 range. Most pods are empty or have a few cheap implants. Then there are a few extremely expensive ones. “Jackpod” - I use to write to the channel, celebrating that extraordinary player stupidity was found and defeated. To have the 80M average, for every 1B pod there must be a dozen empty ones.

When I originally created the WGBWC rules, I was thinking about my own first ganking experiment ending in 52B/month kills using just one ganker. Expecting members to perform 10% of my own isn’t an extraordinary request. Expecting members to perform 6% to be invited is even less.

Now that I gank again, I see that the randomness of the ISK value can be a cause of problems to member aspirants. If you are unlucky and get no Jackpods, the 3/5B needed to join/stay can mean 80-120 solo T1 barge kills (before high skillpoints or dual ganking you have little chance to kill T2 exhumers). On the other hand you can get to the limit with a single Jackpod.

So the rules are changed to the following: To stay in the corp you need to provide either 50 solo ship kills or 10B kills (not just solo). To get into the corp, you need to provide 30/6B. Of course the kills need to be in highsec, as the other rule says.

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EVE Trading focused expansion

I believe EVE needs a trading-focused expansion. Why? Because in EVE, everyone is a trader. Of course most people are “traders” in the same sense as the Covetor-miner is participating in PvP. The previous expansions made several obscure or hard to handle features easier. Just consider the Odessey scanning changes. I did not scan before Odessey, besides the newbie scanning missions. I couldn’t be bothered to manually move the probes every time into the same damn formation. Since Odessey I scan a lot: If I find miners in DScan with several belts, I no longer bother further DScan or jump around to see which belt they are in, just throw a cluster of pinpoint formation probes with 2AU range on the belts and they are found in one cycle. I often scan down miners outside of belts, they typically were in an ice anomaly which is no longer there, but they were too AFK to notice. So the Odessey changes gave me content, I’m one of the EVE players who are satisfied with the expansion.

I think a trading-focused expansion would similarly increase the number of people who engage in EVE trading in a positive, satisfying manner. It would also decrease the now extreme income difference between those who know how to trade and those who don’t. I do not think I “deserved” collecting half trillion ISK by safely sitting in a station and updating orders once-twice a day. My income came from being one of the few who was ready to go upwards in the snow in the very unfriendly trading interface and lack of tools. Most people, having no love for economy didn’t care and by doing so, they locked themselves out from the big money and were condemned to shoot rocks or red crosses for minimal wage. A trading expansion could open an easier way for them, just like Odessey it opened for me in scanning.

The expansion would both contain UI improvements and systemic changes, allowing the trader to focus only on the underlying economy and not on the clicky-clicky. I do not mention the small improvements here, just the features that change the gameplay. Of course for an expansion to be an expansion it needs lot of such small improvements.

The main feature would be the automatically updating order. Currently you set an order and it stays there until you change it or someone accepts it. This leads to 0.01-ing, as without proper knowledge of the item and proper economic knowledge one cannot set a proper price. He either accepts the current buy price (sells to a buy order) or the current sell price (sets his sell 0.01 below current). In the automatically updating order you set two more options: cut size and bottom. Every half an hour if you aren’t the lowest seller, the order is automatically cut under the current lowest by your set value unless you’d go below your bottom. While most people would still set 0.01 as cut, a single reasonable cut would be soon followed, so the price would find equilibrium faster. This way more people would set sell orders instead of accepting a buy order.

The second main feature would be a Jita price follower. Jita is the economic capital of EVE, no point acting like The Forge would be just another region. The change would make the Jita 5-days average price available everywhere where a price is displayed. If you open a market window anywhere, there should be a greyed order with that value. In the price history graph, the Jita 5-days average should be visible anywhere. The value approximation of items should be calculating with this price. When you set an order, there should be a line that compares the price to this value. If you set an order away from this, there should be a warning. No need to always query the Jita market, every item could have its Jita-5 days price cached every 2 hours and that value used.

The third feature would be a reprocess value calculator for both scraps and ores. It would use the mentioned Jita 5-days average to tell how much ISK would you get if you’d reprocess the item and sell the minerals, using your skills and standing with the station. Similarly to the Jita-5 days price, this price could also be cached with perfect refine so the actual calculation would only need to modify it with your skills and standings. The refine value would be available with the price assessment and on the sell window. It would give you a warning if you’d sell below reprocess cost.

The next feature would be a “mass sell/reprocess”. It would be very useful for looters and salvagers who end up with tons of random stuff. The feature would replace “Sell this item” if you have more than one item selected. The input fields are

• “manual price limit”, if an item is more expensive (according to Jita-5 days) than this limit, it won’t be mass sold, you can handle it manually later.
• “Jita lowball”: it’s given in %. If you set it to 90%, and the highest buy order is below 90% of Jita-5 days average, the item won’t be sold.
• “Make sell orders” is a checkbox, selecting it opens the menu selecting the length of the order and another box allowing you to set a Jita %. If you choose this option, the item which wasn’t sold because of the “Jita lowball” will be sold via sell order, setting the percentage of Jita 5-days as price. Another checkbox appears “sell it even if there are lower sell orders”, if you uncheck it, it won’t make sell orders which aren’t the lowest.
• “Reprocess if better” is another checkbox, which automatically reprocesses the item if the reprocess value is higher than the buy order (and the item wasn’t put on sell order by the previous item)

Market order change should be able not just change the price, but also the quantity. If I have a sell order and want to sell more items, instead of creating another sell order, I could just increase the item count of my current order.

The final big change would be using the older order instead of the newer. So if there is a buy order for 1000 ISK and I set a sell order for 100, the immediate sell should happen on 1000ISK and not 100 like now. It would not only protect against mistypes but also would make large quantity buys-sells easier: you just type in the quantity and some high/low price and you get the items for the same price like you’d buy the sell orders or fill the buy orders one by one.

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More mails from saved miners:

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The extraordinary evidence that CCP tolerates botting

Poetic Stanziel wrote that CCP Sreegs, the head of security department left because he wasn't allowed to do his job and ban the bots because bots pay subscription too. This claim wasn't reinforced and was mostly ridiculed by the community. As Jester adequately put: "Let's just say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

I've found it. Meet S (full name sent to CCP as a bot report). S is an ice miner. Similarly to half dozen of his identically fit buddies: pretty tanked Mackinaws. I gank miners recently and he was in a Mackinaw. He wasn't anywhere near ore or ice, neither his buddies. They were flying in the open space, thousands of kilometers from the nearest object. It's not surprising on its own: many players set their Mackinaws on orbit (moving protects from ganking) and when the ice disappears, the Mack flies in straight line. If he goes AFK (which isn't illegal) his ship will fly far from the original ice. Nothing interesting yet, I scanned them down and one by one they exploded. Since they were somewhat tanked, some survived in low hull. Nevermind, they were AFK, I came back 15 minutes later to finish the job. This was the fate of S too, I hit him and left him in hull: However I already noticed something strange: he was 1500km from a station, flying directly away from its undock (you can see the station on the picture, it's the yellow thing between the wrecks). It seems someone undocked and left the computer. Strange. Why does someone leaves a mining barge with invulnerability field running flying away from a station?

Soon after he was left in hull, he warped off. "Damnit, he came back to the computer, I wasted a pair of catas for nothing" - I thought. I opened the scanner to find another target and noticed that the ice is up. I warped there, and look what the wind blew in: Yup! Our buddy S went mining without repairing. While flying in a straight line can be done AFK, opening the scanner, finding the ice belt, warping there, mining, redocking when full cannot. If a player was around he would have noticed the missing armor and hull.

But maybe he was just very drunk and did not noticed. He somehow missed the destruction of 3 of his other Macks. So I continued with M, an identically fit (and later found to be identically implanted) Mackinaw. I stood on his face. I bumped him out of mining range. I warped Catalysts on him. I ganked him to hull. I invited him to duel, which he did not accept or decline. He just couldn't care less: reapproached the ice and continued mining until I put him out of his misery:
Let's continue with yet another member of the family, her name is also S. With her I recognized one more strange thing: she did not use drones. None of them did. Each and every one of them died with 10 light drones in the drone bay. Why did they have drones at all, I wonder. Maybe because the terrible homemade bot couldn't handle them? Well, having no drones is not a problem if you aren't alone in an ice belt which is usually the case. But when a big flashy ganker chased off everyone who are - you know - human players, the lack of drones introduces you to the true power. Literally:
The problem isn't the existence of bots in the game. There isn't a single MMO without bots. The problem is the horribly primitive nature of this bot:

• There were half dozen of them, each behaving identically.
• They were online all day (I did not attack them until I found less tanked targets).
• They were flying into the nothing, doing nothing when there was no ice.
• They instantly responded to the appearance of the ice anomaly.
• They did not respond to convo, bumping, ganking, buddies dying, rats eating them.
• They mined ice like a clockwork. No waiting time on the station, no idling on the ice field with full hold (no lasers), mined, filled, warped, returned.

I understand that it's not easy to catch a complicated bot that mimic human player well. I read the botting news on Nosy Gamer and see how botters cry for being caught despite leaving long pauses, being online only a few hours and so on. Also, the price of illicit RMT ISK isn't much lower than the official prices, so RMT botters, who probably use the best bots available cannot get enough ISK for their business. So CCP clearly can catch very sophisticated bots. How could they miss this obviously homemade, horribly primitive bot?

On purpose. The existence of this bot is the extraordinary evidence that CCP does not allow Team Security to ban bots. They are only allowed to catch RMT-ers, because they cut into the business of CCP. Someone buying ISK from an RMT site is not buying PLEX. But botting for yourself is tolerated, even if you do it in a very obvious and primitive fashion.

Why were the careful botters (who cry on botting forums) caught? Oh the irony: because they were careful. They used virtual machines and proxies to hide the connection between their bots and their main accounts. So Team Security couldn't determine if they are farming ISK for themselves or for sale, so they were banned as RMT suspects. Had they run their bots on their main accounts, they'd still be farming!

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After the bad news that bots are free to devalue your income, let's see some good news, another constellation is cleansed from those pesky Mackinaws, Hulks, Covetors and untanked Rets:

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Why there are no industrial corporations in MMOs?

In all MMOs there are organized player groups, guilds, clans, corporations. However they are all “armies”, groups created to fight together as a unit against a raidboss or other group of players. Of course there are also dysfunctional groups where people just hang out and share porn links or childish jokes without progressing in the game. Despite there is industry (moneymaking) in all MMOs, I’ve yet to see a group that is formed with the goal to make members rich. This is surprising because the real world is full of corporations with this very goal: owners get rich from profit, employees from salary (at least more rich than with other options). Why not in MMOs?

To see this, we first have to see the reason of existence of real-world profit oriented corporations. I mean why does someone join a corporation instead of starting his own small business? The answer is not “specialization” as “miner and hauler join up to get minerals out of the ground and transported to the refinery”. Specialization is handled by the market. The miner could hire the hauler for a fee or the hauler could buy the minerals in the mine and sell for higher in the refinery. That not only doesn’t need them to be in a fixed group but it’s actually counter-productive as one of them is always limited by the other (the miner could mine more but the hauler can’t move more). There is no such limitation if you buy services in the free market.

Corporations have two real purposes. The first is concentration of resources. You can’t just open a mine in the middle of the nowhere if you are a miner with all skills and equipment to mine. There are no roads, electricity and you can’t hire services in the middle of the forest, neither for your business (no truckers or repairman available) nor for your personal existence (no food to buy). A corporation has the size to build the infrastructure, hire services and have enough main-line members (miners in a mining corporation) to share the costs (one miner can’t keep a coffee shop alive, thousands can). In MMOs such concentration is not needed because infrastructure exists everywhere and the world is very small. In most MMOs you can instant-travel, but even in the “realistic” EVE Online you can get to a market hub in an hour with a freighter to get anything you need. The only reason for EVE to stock a market is the warzone where you can’t just move around in a freighter. In highsec no amount of miners could make a shop alive that sells crystals, ships and such. If it’s not profitable as a free business, it’s even less profitable as an in-corp service.

Now we get to the nastier purpose: exploitation. Marx was right, production creates surplus value and it’s distributed between workers and capital owners very unequally. However his followers failed to create a productive alternative, the socialist economy based on common ownership created poverty. How can he be right and yet his solution wrong? Because exploitation isn’t a problem in the system, it’s the purpose. The reason for it is the dumbness and laziness of most people. They fail to properly utilize their assets, so if they are left on their own devices, they make very inefficient production. The perfect example is the guy with the credit card loan. Everyone knows that credit card loans are very expensive and they aren’t big enough to be used on big, productive purchases. Everyone with a credit card loan is making a dumb mistake just because he can’t wait to buy something that he probably doesn’t need anyway until he can afford it.

The purpose of both corporations and government is to protect the morons and slackers from themselves, taking away their freedom and force them to do something productive. Since the worker is perpetually broke and lacks perspective, his best option is to just do as told and settle with a little part of the surplus value. Similarly he is forced to pay tax and various mandatory insurances to protect himself from his inability to save the same money for his elderly age and his medical cost. Of course both kind of management have costs and the managers also take as much as they can, so the worker/taxpayer ends up much worse than he would if he would manage the resources himself, hence the name exploitation.

What Marx and his followers failed to notice is that the exploited workers are unlike to themselves (Marx had university degree unlike the blue collars he fought for) and unable to manage themselves. With as much simplification as possible, capitalism is like a pig farm. The pigs are controlled, locked in and finally slain. Yet the pigs are still much better off than wild boars, have much better health and much less stress and even higher life expectancy despite the “finally slain” part. Would the pigs be liberated from the farm, most of them would starve to death soon since one acre of properly handled farmland creates much more biomass than an acre of grazing land or foraging forest, but the pigs can’t operate a farm and limited to grazing and foraging.

Such exploiting corporations cannot exist in most games as the game developers take on the task and create quest givers as “business owners” . They hire the player and pay him for a simple task. This is done exactly because most of them would fail to act for themselves. Theoretically EVE Online could be a great place for exploitive corporations where the smart businessmen creates hourly paid jobs to dumb players who wouldn’t have to bother about production methods or save money to buy tools, just do as told and get paid.

I see lot of EVE miners working in an obviously suboptimal way (if you have no Orca boost, you are doing it wrong, if you warp to the station with the barge instead of filling an Orca or Freighter, you are doing it wrong…), so they – like the pigs – could benefit from being exploited. Even if 90% of the extra yield coming from the boosts and the no warps would go to the capitalist, they would still be better off. Such systems would be great content creators and places for new players to start and get involved.

Yet in EVE there aren’t any successful highsec business corporations besides Red Frog and clones, but they are much rather Franchise systems than real corps, every pilot does the job alone, just share the marketing. The reason of the lack of industrial corporations is the wardec and awox systems. The costs of protecting your corporation simply cannot be gained from exploiting dumb and lazy players. You are better off mining with your own alts in an NPC corp out of sight than getting employees and exploiting them. The income coming from one extra casual miner working for you is much less than the risk he poses as awoxer and the attention he can get for a wardeccer.

I think neither the ability to shoot corpmates nor the highsec wardecs give nothing to EVE but take a lot away. They take away the creation of corporations where a content creating businessmen keep lot of dumb, average players busy. Now everyone has to create his content, and most are unable to. Why do wardecs and awox give nothing to the game? Exactly because there is no one left to wardec or awox: there are no real corporations to attack, you can only find some idiots who formed a dysfunctional social corp where they do nothing but chat. They will simply stay docked for a week and their impoverished state means that an awoxer or wardeccer will have much less kills than a suicide ganker. Before you’d ask, I point out the fundamental difference between wardec/awox and suicide ganking. The first can be avoided by simply not being in a real player corp, while the second affects everyone regardless of corp status. Removing wardecs/awoxes wouldn’t make EVE safer or “less harsh” as any somewhat competent player is already completely safe from them. They are only affecting newbie players who don’t know that EVE isn’t WoW, where being in a guild have benefits or at worst neutral. I think only corps who own space assets should be open to wardecs so players wouldn’t be worse off just for being in a group. This would allow experienced players to mesh with newbies and dumb players, exploit them financially while teaching them some basic stuff.

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Another soul saved from the tankless gank-food state:

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Alts and the ToS change

The EVE blogs and forums are exploding with the new ToS “not”-change where impersonation of other players and organizations were banned – even if it’s true.

I’ve protected the ToS change and still do. But it needs clarification, explanation and maybe more changes. It clearly needs accepting the fact that changes have been made.

Many people claim that the ToS change is an attempt to decrease scamming. I don’t think it’s the case. The case is about a fundamental MMO-problem: alts. In theory if you do something in game, you suffer the consequences in the game. Practically it can be avoided by alts. You do something with a character, who will suffer the consequences, but you, the player don’t care as you are enjoying the benefits while playing another character. Despite EVE is marketed as a living world, it’s not. Pilots come out of nowhere with money and knowledge no newbie can posses, do things and disappear in the shadows forever. For example, I (the player) gank miners. The game says that such actions are to be penalized by low security status and kill rights on me. However I, the player can safely haul billions around – as another pilot. There is absolutely no way for the ganked miner – or rather the white knight fighting for him – to retaliate. Me, the player could hurt his progress in game, he can’t do the same to me.

Alts are both unavoidable and necessary. CCP income comes from subscriptions, they can’t just ban alts. Even if they did, players would avoid it by proxies and virtual machines – like botters do to protect their main accounts from banning when the bot account is found. Sure, CCP does some alt-hunting in bot ban cases, but they often fail to find them all. If you can’t enforce a rule, you shouldn’t make the rule, or you instantly reward those who can break and get away with it.

I suggest the following set of rules to achieve what CCP tries to achieve:

• an official alt-following page on character sheet. Call it “family” for roleplaying reasons.
• same-account alts are automatically listed. It’s not really a change, as CCP already provides account-wide API keys which every corp recruiter will ask for anyway. Also, this is easy to enforce by CCP.
• accounts can be linked by the player on the management site, upon linking, all characters show up on the “family” page of each other
• you can’t un-alt an alt except for open character bazaar sale, where it’s automatically done
• watchlists, chatroom and personal bans affect all alts
• you are not required to connect all your accounts (CCP couldn’t enforce if they’d require it), but claiming to be an alt of someone without your family page supporting it is bannable. The GM first warns you to fix your page by linking accounts in case the claim was true, if you can’t, you get banned. Temporarily if the lie was casual, permanently if it was used to scam/spy (so “I’m very rich, because I’m actually Chribba” is temp-ban, “trust me with this business, as I’m Chribba” is permaban).
• even claiming to have an unnamed alt is bannable. If you say “I have a highsec missioner alt to get ISK” or “my nullsec main will hunt you down” and someone reports you, the GM will request you to add an alt fitting the description to your family page, and bans you if you fail to.
• These rule applies to in-game chat, forums, and any third party media that you call your own in-game, so I can’t claim on my blog that Botslayer Goblin and Gevlon Goblin are both my pilots without the in-game family page representing it.
• kill rights and security status is shared by all family members
• family members must be in the same corp (NPC corps count as one). This would make a player unable to dodge wardecs by out-of-corp alts, except by leaving the corp for the NPC corp completely. When one family member is accepted to a corp, all of them automatically follow. When one kicked or leaving for NPC, all do.

The above rules wouldn’t outlaw having secret alts (that can’t be enforced), but would ban you from mentioning their existence. You always have to watch your mouth. If you slip just once and reported, the GM will warn you to add the alt to your page and if you are unable to – because you lied – bans you.

Sure, I could roll new ganker pilots to prevent my main getting security status hit and kill rights, but I couldn’t blog about their adventures, couldn’t link their kills to anyone. Or I could roll new secret trading pilots but then I couldn’t blog about trading. One way or another I, the player, would have only one in-game identity: the upstanding trader who generates GDP by mutually beneficial trades and cutting down margins or the ganker who kills anything that isn’t tanked.

This change wouldn’t disallow spying and scamming, there are spies and scammers in real life despite lack of throwaway alts there. You would have to build up an identity from scratch and be very careful not to slip once, mentioning your outside connections. Similarly, if you join a corp, all your listed alts join, becoming wardeccable. You can’t be a “nullsec PvPer who doesn’t give a damn” and run 4 Retrievers on the other screen. The corp recruiter will ask why do 4 non-listed pilots send you ISK. If you answer “they are my alts”, the recruiter can report you if you turn out to be a bad recruit, forcing you to make the Retriever pilots linked, therefore wardeccable if your main is in a player corp. You either have to fully commit yourself to the corp joining with all alts or you have to find a corp which doesn’t care why do 4 non-listed pilots are sending you ISK.

My point is that in EVE you can be an upstanding citizen, a warrior of a cause or a pirate looking for booty, but you should have a singular in-game identity. Your actions (performed trough one pilot) should have consequences on your whole in-game existence and not just on that throwaway pilot.

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Another non-hate mails from miners:

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The third party transaction service nonsense

You might heard that a player has modified the Wiki to appear as the alt of Chribba, a respected third-party escrow service provider and then scammed almost half trillion ISK from players wanting to trade their supercapitals trough him (actually trough Chribba). He was banned of course and his scams reversed. It also made CCP to clarify their rules about impersonation.

However the point of the article isn’t the scam itself, it’s the problematic system of using third-party transaction services. The third party gets both the ship and the money and then give them to the clients. Or not, as the infamous The Mittani supercap escrow service did.

But what else can we do? – you might ask. CCP did not provide a secure interface for trading supercapitals or POS-es, someone has to transfer first. Instead of trusting in a total stranger, I’d rather trust Chribba!

The logic above is wrong because both supercapitals and valuable (typically moon) POS-es are alliance-related assets. I mean you have absolutely no use to a titan or a supercarrier if you aren’t in a serious alliance. Look, even I don’t have a titan, despite clearly could afford several. What the hell would I do with it?

Supers don’t just fall out of the sky, they can only be built in special structures that need Sovereignty in the system and lot of time for building. So they can’t really be ninja-built. Therefore a supercapital both in birth and in usage is bound to an alliance. This allows a very safe way of trading them: trough alliance diplomats. Diplomats don’t scam because such act would make the alliance itself look untrustable, making them unable to make treaties. So the proper way to get a titan is finding one in the alliance first, then on the open market and then make a trade through the diplomats. I’m sure they’d gladly help to get one more titan pilot on the buyer side, and they would love to support alliance production – assuming the alliance get its cut.

How could people without an alliance backing them trying to buy titans? Because they are dumb. They just want a huge status symbol that they won’t really use. They’ll have it logged off, only to log it in when their neut-scout confirms the emptiness of the system to update the skill queue and to make screenshots to show off. While the scammer of the story deserved to be banned for messing with the Wiki, the scammed buyers also deserved to lose their ships because they wanted something that wasn’t only out of their league, but totally not needed in their league. If you don’t have a capital blob to join, you don’t need a super at all.

If you are in an alliance that neither has the capacity to build supers, nor any serious alliance negotiate with them the sell of supers, you are in the same position: you don't need a super. Use a dreadnought to grind down structures, those can dock, can be built in lowsec and when you lose it, it cost 1.5B if insured instead of 25B!

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Every day something good happens with the miners: As you can see, everyone except my scout is in a Procurer.

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Oh noes, CCP makes EVE soft!

Poetic Stanziel announced his quitting from EVE Of course it can be a troll/satire as several of his previous posts like this. His stated reason is interesting however, regardless of his future in the game: “In the last year though, CCP Games has been "trammelizing" EVE. Making it much safer, spending development resources to protect idiots. I want a game where players have to protect themselves. A game that forces players to play smart. A game where players cannot rely on the developer to protect them from their own laziness and ignorance. But CCP has seen fit to create many mechanics that do the job players should be doing for themselves.” Then he mentions the lack of Hulkageddon (clearly attributed to the mining barge changes) and the change of Terms of Service that ban certain way of scamming by misidentifying yourself as someone’s alt.

I’ve ganked 52B in a month long after the mining barge rebalance, so can prove first hand that miner ganking isn’t dead. Hulkageddon is, and for good. Hulkageddon wasn’t what Poetic believes, a piece of emergent gameplay where the strong preyed on the weak. It was about starting a 51 days free account, after 3-4 days of training getting into a T1 fit Catalyst, jumping from belt to belt with the catalyst, approaching and ganking anyone who dares to mine. After the pilot got to -5 sec status, repeat with another pilot in the account. After all 3 got to red, just let the account lapse. Remember, biomassing -5 characters is bannable but letting your account lapse is not.

Before the mining barge rebalance it was practically impossible to tank any mining ship to resist a T1 fit newbie ship with a newbie pilot. The only choice miners had for mining below 0.9 was the Rokh. In that sense the mining barges were clearly unbalanced as they were completely outperformed by another ship class in their main role. Imagine if Rokh would be faster and lock faster than an interceptor. Wouldn’t that warrant an interceptor (or Rokh) rebalance?

Hulkageddon was an event where the dumb and incompetent was preying on everyone due to a broken mechanic. On the side of the ganker there was no risk, effort, skillpoint or player skill requirement. The mining barge rebalance changed ganking into what it should be: an act where the strong preys on the weak. Today the miners have all the tools to defend themselves, yet many fail because they are dumb. However a 3 days old pilot in a T1 catalyst can’t – and shouldn’t - gank even a very dumb miner.

To gank now, I’m running 3 accounts directly involved in ganking (the fourth is a thief which can be omitted if you don’t care about loot). The better skilled ganker has 15M SP, granted only 10M affects the Catalyst, the rest is his training for Talos. The less skilled ganker has 6M. Both of these figures makes throwaway alts unusable, forcing me to deal with negative sec status, using scout and proper warpins. Also allows anyone ready to fight back to shoot me at any time, not just when actively ganking (still, idiots trade kill rights and wardec). If I arrive too far, no gank. If someone catches me on the undock or a gate, no gank, if the miner isn’t flying a tankless barge, no solo gank. If I make a mistake, I’m losing a 10M T2 fit Catalyst, if I make a bigger mistake, I also lose a 60M implants. I still gank miners because they are dumb.

What Poetic and most of the “PvPers” want is not “the strong preys on the weak”, because it can easily show that they are the weak. They want an “I prey on anyone I wish”: a broken game. Of course the game was playable before the barge rebalance because most people choose not to gank – for moral reasons. In this environment if you declared yourself a badass, you became one as the broken mechanic allowed you to kill anyone in sight. Now, after the balance, the chance to gank is still there, but not for everyone, which makes the “for fun people” mad. Yes, you can’t defeat people casually anymore – and you shouldn’t be able to.

Success should depend on effort and knowledge and not wishes. Before the rebalances, EVE was giving out “welfare killmails” for incompetent badass-wannabes. It was changed into what he demands: “A game that forces players to play smart. A game where players cannot rely on the developer to protect them from their own laziness and ignorance.”. Previously he could farm kills despite his laziness and ignorance. Now that this welfare was taken from him, he cries and ragequits.

I’d rather suggest him to learn to play and get the kills even when they aren’t trivial anymore. Hint: join the New Order, they take players new to ganking and train them.

The same is true for the TOS change which simply banned an annoying option of claiming you to be someone else. “Being an alt” is an out-of-game thing, in the game you just interact with pilots without any way to see the player behind it. To verify the identity of another player you need out-of-game methods, which is immersion-breaking, bad game design. Scamming, spying and counter-spying should be performed in-game and not by defacing Wikis or stealing IP addresses from teamspeak servers.

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The anti-tears of today features the bright future of Riavayed and a convo from an educated miner:

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Making mining fun: mining PvP

Mining itself isn’t considered fun by anyone. Doing it AFK is commonplace. Why? Because EVE mining is extremely shallow: you warp to a belt or anomaly, target a rock, activate a mining beam and warp back when the hold is full. The yield cannot be increased by proper ship flying. A missioner can increase his income by pulling the proper groups or flying transversally to be able to fit more damage or projection instead of tank. A miner can’t do either. Of course there are ideas to improve it, but they are fundamentally wrong: they aren’t trying to fix mining, they try to replace it. Better belt rats or ship PvP mean that you aren’t mining but ratting or PvP-ing in a mining ship. If that would be the solution, mining wouldn’t be necessary at the first place, minerals could be security mission rewards (last room rat structure drops it) or could be in a PvP complex where you have to kill competitors and capture the place by orbiting its button.

To have a game, you need opponent. It can be a player or an NPC. Ratting against a good AI rat can be a good game. PvP is considered good game by most. A piece of rock can’t really be a challenging opponent. While some mini-game could be introduced, the hacking minigame wasn’t a huge success. Also, mining has to be time-consuming or the mineral prices would crash and a game where T1 battleships are 10M ISK isn’t interesting in lack of losses. On the other hand forcing players to play some hacking-like minigame for hours would be a good way to lose them.

My idea is a two-level mining PvP system: the first level is completely nonviolent, no ships are destroyed, the competition is for the yield itself. It could be done by redesigning the ORE faction mining modules to have a thieving ability. If you are all alone in a belt, an ORE miner isn’t different from T1 miner, besides its beam color. The interesting thing starts when you mine where someone else does, typically in ice fields or high-level ore anomalies. Shooting the beam into an asteroid which is mined by other miners would allow you to steal their yield: when their cycle completes (including manual switch-off), the ore goes to your hangar instead of theirs.

How can the other miner protect his yield? By switching to another asteroid. Unlike the normal mining beam, the thieving beam couldn’t be switched off, it would run a full circle like the siege module. It would also have a spool-up phase (with distinct beam color) when it wouldn’t be able to steal yet. If you switch off your laser during this time, you can keep your yield and the thief got stuck on a roid for a cycle. So against active miners thieving would be hard, while bots would be in trouble as the only signal of being robbed is the beam color: good luck writing a bot that can detect a beam into his rock but not mis-detect a beam into the next rock.

The miners could also switch to ORE miners too, as these beams are immune to thieving. The second level of PvP would be with real explosions: the ORE miners are null-NPC faction items and their LP/ISK cost could be set in a way that they cost 100M on Jita. I already mentioned that the beam cannot be switched off. Let’s add that it would render the ship immobile, unable to warp or logoff while it’s active. It would also bloom the signature of the ship. This would not only turn the thieving miner to an ideal gank target but also killable by war enemies: they just need a neutral scout and jump in after the miner is confirmed to go “siege”. So thief-beam miners would be preying on normal miners and PvP-ers would be preying on them.

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The daily anti-tears feature crying miners getting no support in local and a ganked miner's rebirth into smart miner:

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Moron of the week

I have a looter pilot, Kelly. Her job is to salvage and loot the destroyed ships, miners and catalysts alike. While this activity can make her go suspect, her security status is not negative and she isn't in a wardeccable corporation. There aren't any kill rights against her, so the only way to kill her is to catch her while being a suspect - or suicide gank.

tk1n, a brave white knight with an insightful name was camping the station trying to catch my ganker pilots undocking. He didn't have any luck, probably never heard of insta undock and insta-dock bookmarks. Meanwhile I've found a target and first undocked Kelly so her fat cruiser get far enough from the station to avoid bumping into it. I was busy fitting my ganker when I heard combat sounds. Switched back to Kelly and found that the brave knight attacked her instead of the gankers. CONCORD handled his ship and I got a kill right:
Dumb! - I thought and carried on with the gank preparation. Undocked and saw his flashy red pod sitting at the undock, 2000 meters from my Catalyst. Locked and popped it, then warped to the insta-undock and killed the miner a minute later. After redocking and looting the miner I checked his pod. 640M.

I don't know which was dumber: going to PvP with that pod? Having safety on red without the clear intention to suicide gank? Not warping out his pod after losing his ship? I leave the decision to the readers, but his moron status cannot be disputed.


My miner guide page was updated with a chart showing how many T2 or lowbie Catalys needed to destroy various mining ships:"Yield" fit means T2 miners in highs, mining upgrades in lows and tanking modules in mids and rigs. "Tanked" means also Damage Control module in one of the lows. "Idiot" means not even tanking modules in mids and rigs.

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The fundamental problem with the AFK cloaker

EVE players hate few things more than AFK cloakers. AFK cloakers do exactly what their name implies: cloak up and go AFK. Doesn’t look too dangerous, right? But still, a single AFK cloaker can shut down PvE in a nullsec system and spawn countless of threads that demands CCP to somehow make AFK cloaking impossible. I never cared for AFK cloaking. Actually I never cared for who is in local channel both in my highsec trading/hauling and my nullsec fleet flying. I might checked if local spiked, but a single hostile was always ignored. Why do other people care about AFK cloakers?

I found the solution when I started AFK cloaking myself to break “white knights” who protect the miners from ganking. Considering that you can’t gank while AFK, I was totally harmless in this state, yet my actions were enough to make the good socials give up on their noble quest of defending the innocent. Later I analyzed that their problem is that they depend on skill instead of proper doctrines.

From these I could figure out what is fundamentally wrong about AFK cloaking: the activities were based on "security trough obscurity" and the AFK cloaker breaks obscurity. Let me explain it with an example: if you announce where and when you will rat in a Nyx, you’ll lose that Nyx in a day or two. The rational conclusion from this fact is that ratting in a Nyx is a bad idea. Still many people rat in Nyxes when no one is in local, because if no one knows that he is doing it, he can get away with it. The AFK cloaker can know therefore his presence denies you the ability to rat in Nyx.

However your problem isn’t the AFK cloaker. Your problem is that you are trying to do something stupid that will end up with a disaster if anyone figures out. But obscurity isn’t the only solution. The other solution is not doing stupid. If you are ratting in an omni-tanked, non-blinged, insured T1 battleship you can ignore the AFK cloaker. It’s very unlikely that someone forms a fleet for killing it. If some random roaming punk comes, you have good chance to kill him or at least get away while ECM drones disable tackle. Using the battleship is a stable solution, therefore it can work when discovered. Using a Nyx is an unstable solution which can only work if no one knows. Similarly, mining in a Procurer or an empty-pod, insured, 18K EHP Retriever are stable solutions, you can ignore your surroundings, your doctrine guarantees that you won’t get into trouble, even if dozens of ganking Goons are in local. Mining in Mackinaws with valuable pods under white knight protection is an unstable solution and only works while the knights are on top of their game, which they can’t be 24/7, hence they rely on knowing the small windows where gankers are hunting. My AFK cloaking broke just that.

I turn the above back: "if you care about AFK cloakers or local channel, you are doing something you shouldn't". For example ratting in a too expensive and PvP unable ship, mining in untanked ships, botting, hauling too expensive cargo, flying what you can’t afford to lose or do some other dumb stunt that you know would fail if anyone would figure it out.

So instead of whining about AFK cloakers or staying docked while hostiles are in local, how about fixing your actions, so they can work in spite of hostiles? I literally hauled several billions trough Narja and Uedama with dozens of Miniluv on local, camping the very gate I jumped trough. I didn’t care because my ship wasn’t a dumb freighter. Of course the fix is maybe not something you like. For example highsec miners should use tanked ships instead of max yield Mackinaws. But they want the yield, so they keep doing it, relying on white knights or setting known gankers to red and watching local (when they aren’t AFK). Smaller alliances that cannot protect their assets should abandon nullsec or join a coalition. But they want the “ima null pvpr lol” badge, that they try get some ISK when no one is looking. Then they go cry on the forum when a 100K SP Rifter pilot with a prototype cloak shuts their op down. Their problem isn’t the AFK cloaker but the fact that they are practically ninja-ratting in their "own" Sov.

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The daily anti-tears:

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Business Thursday: capital BPOs

Researching blueprints is a commonly known ISK making enterprise and I clearly didn't invent hot water here.

4 months ago I started researching 10 Naglfar BPOs. The unresearched BPOs are sold by NPCs for 1.8B. I researched 2 ME, 1 PE and put them on contracts in Jita for 2.8B. 4 already sold in 2 days, so I elevated their price a bit.
Since I did the research in lowsec stations, I had no tower costs, risks or work. Practically I made 9B for a few jumps - and having 18B locked down for 4 months.

The other Dreadnought blueprints are also profitable, though less. You can get 700M for researching Revelation and Moros and 500M for Phoenix. It seems the expensive blueprint research isn't that competitive market so you can join. While the profit in ISK is large, the profit/capital is low, mere 10%/month, while Catalyst blueprints get 100%/month profit, granted only 30M/month net income instead of 250.

So if you have lot of ISK lying around and you want to turn it into more ISK slowly but surely, maybe the research of expensive blueprints is for you.

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Yesterday I did a good deed: after ganking a miner, but failing to kill the pod due to swift Concord intervention, I noticed that the pod is still there. It happens with AFK miners, many of them lost their pods after floating in space for 15 minutes. But this one did not float: after some time he started orbiting the same rock he was orbiting while having his ship. So I reported him as bot. The customer support told that bot reports should be done using an in-game tool: "open the character’s show info window and in the top left corner, right-click to bring up a drop down menu. At the bottom of that menu is the option to report the character as a bot. Simply click that button and once submitted, our team will investigate that character more thoroughly and determine if they are in fact using scripts to play EVE.". If you see a bot, please do the same, we don't need them here.

Significant improvement made on the dual-ganking guide, I designed a new dual (and fleet) ganking method that greatly increases your chances to get the podkill in narrow situations. It also helps you keep your pod and maybe even some ships if you rin into a trap.

The daily anti-tear:

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Bad players have skill, good players have doctrines

The war for Finanar made me look up my PvP kills, aka the ones where the target had guns:

• White knight frig, 3M
• Revenge for my pod, 20M
• Finanar Manticore and its pod, 310M
• Nakugard Tornado 100M
• Finanar Hookbill and its pod, 29M
• Hek Algos, 5M
• Old Trasher, 18M
• Ares with an inappropriate pod, 1290M

All together 1774M.

The killboard recorded 520 ship losses and 3 pod losses, but most of them are just miner drones getting on the Concord mail. I can't tell how many of them are actual kills (when the gank was prevented), let's guess 10%, if you want a more exact figure, go and dig into my killboard and find the losses which aren't paired with ganks. As a Catalysts can be a 3M meta fit or a 10M T2 and fittings are often recovered, let's go with 6M losses. That's 300M from the 50 Catas, + 350M from the three pods (I thought you can't lose pods and went crazy on the second pod, my new pod is much cheaper). This is 73% ISK efficiency.

If I was a hypocrite like most, I could tell that I'm not a ganker, just reinforcing belts to get good fights from the owner. But since I don't give this good fights nonsense, the consensus is I don't know anything about "real PvP". Considering my lack of PvP skills, my solo PvP ISK ratio is pretty high, especially all these kills were against people who willingly engaged me, knowing what I fly and having Concord and faction police on their side. How could I win instead of being massacred by any "real PvP-er" who cared to hunt me? Because they trusted in "skill". Sirlin wrote long ago how scrubs worship the unmeasurable skill: "The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a great deal about skill and how he has skill whereas other players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do not have skill. The confusion here is what skill actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is a sequence of moves that is unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take skill, according to the scrub. The dragon punch or uppercut in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a skill move.".

Actually this magical "skill" is "human effort" or "precision of moves". To catch a Catalyst, you have to camp and then perform the necessary moves fast and accurately. If it's done perfectly, you win. This is how scrubs imagine winning. How play-to-win people do win is simply "getting the results". Once upon a time in EVE there were "elite alliances" which demanded good killboard from their members and were proud of their "skill". They were smashed by F1 pushing self-declared bad players in Drakes.

What did these "bad players" have? A doctrine of ships. "Doctrine" can be explained as non-human power source. A typical doctrine ship needs no more "skill" than anchoring up and pressing F1 on the broadcast target. No human perfection needed, the ship does the job by its superior power/ISK ratio. The suicide gank doctrine ship is a Catalyst. It's perfect for it's job, it's easy to fly and most importantly it's very cheap to lose. If we go back to my PvP stats, I lost approximately 50 ships to my enemies and got only 8 kills. Yet I came on top on the measurable objectives because my ship is so cheap. You might say that my kills were inflated by the too expensive pods of the enemy, but that's the very point: they willingly engaged in their expensive pod because they trusted their "skill". I don't. After I was proven to be not "skilled" enough to keep my pod safe, I changed my doctrine to work with a much cheaper pod. I know that I will lose it again and mitigated the damage. They didn't - because they have skill and don't need such "cheap" moves.

Of course every doctrine has a counter (unless the game is unbalanced). The Catalyst has a very easy counter: the Procurer, the Skiff and the empty-pod 18K+ EHP Retriever. These cannot be profitably defeated by Catalysts, no matter how "skilled" one is. Winners adapt their doctrines when faced with problems. Losers just try harder, believing that with enough practice they can get enough "skill" to overcome. Sure, you can teach your whole fleet how to fly their Rokhs to never be bombed. Or you can just switch to Megas. Guess which option worked on the field.

Many miners rely on "skill" to avoid being ganked. They watch local or even Dscan and flee the belts when gank comes. As this needs human effort, they constantly has to be at the keyboard, which makes using Retrievers and Mackinaws pointless at the first place. Also such "skilled play" can easily be defeated by the "cheap" move of AFK cloaking. If they want to wait until I go offline, they are up to a long wait, like these 8!!! white knights waiting for my looter to go suspect. They are still waiting I guess:


Instead of anti-tears, today I post why I need other people in my corp: because I can't gank it all by myself. And we can agree that this thing (and the 5 similarly fit Macks) must die:I've seen them in Gamis, Delerik if you are interested. While I'm sure this bunch will be slaughtered by someone soon, there must be lot of others! Join and let's kill them all!

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The war for Finanar

Finanar is a 0.5 system in Metropolis with 3 ice anomalies. If you check out my corp killboard you see lot of kills there, about 8B destroyed. But this post isn't a "I went there and ganked lot of dumb miners". This is indeed a war, both on EVE and philosophical scale.

In other systems I ganked miners until they all switched to the ships and fits I suggested or ran away. I left when I ran out of targets. Maybe some "white knights" shown up, but there is a reason why the New Order called them "vultures": they were barely more than nuisance, whoring on Concord mails. They barely ever stopped the gank. The Finanar bunch was different: they averted several ganks, destroyed about a dozen ships and even podded me once, forcing me to downgrade on my pod, accepting it to be expendable. Check out this "ice mining fleet" (barges are not on this overview, there were 6):
Yes, you see it right, almost as many "white knights" as protected ones. Strike that, as half of them were already Skiffs and Procurers, they actually protected 2 Mackinaws and a Retriever. However I left Finanar just like the other systems: nothing mines but Procurers, Skiffs, DCII-Retrievers and those annoying tanked Macks that could be profitably ganked by 3 Catalysts but I don't have 3 Catas and won't triple-box.

How did I break them? By AFK-cloaking. The gankers were in the station, the scout was cloaked in a safe and the computer was left running for all night while I was sleeping and while I was at work. Of course I wasn't AFK all day, every now and then I ganked. When they were very strong, I hit ore belts, nearby systems or just went AFK.

Why did it work? Because white knighting is absolutely not profitable no matter what metric you use. If you consider Procurers 10% less yield than Retrievers (and Skiffs than Mackinaws), you need to 10-box miners to warrant a single white knight. Catalyst kill reports are cheap and you don't even get them if I'm AFK. However they weren't mass-multiboxers or killmail whores: they were simple players who played for fun. In their opinion I'm evil for ganking and they felt good by defending the weak from evil. This is the standard social plague: morons and slackers can't defend themselves (by definition), they are defended by productive altruists, the socials who believe it's the right thing and having fun doing it "doing good feels good". However the "fun" only comes when they stop evil. Without the "evil" present, they were just idling in an ice anomaly with combat ships while nothing happened but they couldn't even do it AFK! This is probably the most boring way to play EVE. But when they lowered their guard, the "evil" hit again, taunting them or even worse, killing them!

Also, they could receive no gratitude from the protected morons and slackers, since they probably didn't even know about the protection they recieved or were too AFK to care. I remember that they stopped a gank with the miner surviving in low hull. How happy they must have been for their "in the last moment" intervention. And how frustrated they must have been when 25 minutes!!! later I returned and finished the gank (my loss with the same knights on it) since the miner couldn't bother to dock up to repair because he was AFK or bot. Imagine how much fun they had in that 25 minutes, trying to convo the miner, knowing that sooner or later I'll check back.

Eventually, as no fun could have been gained, they started infighting and blaming each other for "being a spy". Watch this conversation with one of the knights who convoed my looter pilot, no longer knowing who to trust:
The army of the good social people therefore dissolved and I could finish my work. Please note that it couldn't end any other way: they had noting to win but elusive feelings and "fun" while I had hard results to help me carry on when things didn't go well. After all, I could still gank elsewhere or at least leave my computer when their protection of the ice was unbeatable. If the miners would cooperate, it would have been much easier, but morons and slackers don't cooperate, they just leech. I doubt if the good socials got a single "thank you" from the several miners they saved (or rather, whose fate they delayed by a few days).


The daily anti-tears where miners discuss tanking their barges (instead of crying and wanting CCP to do something) and being positive about my acts:
Finally, learning Small Blaster Specialization 5 totally worth it (and this is with the downgraded pod):

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i haz authority

Imagine that the Alliance Tournament winning PL team would go to a lowsec roam. But instead of killing people they meet, they would just write to local "We are the best PvP team in the game, don't bother fighting, just self destruct, we go AFK".

No doubt that they would go home as new clones, despite they officially are the best PvP team of EVE. Yet, every single victim they meet would try to run or fight back. They would have to claim every kill the hard way, no one would just give them a free pass, no matter how much they earned it.

The problem that was finally solved by the above example was haunting me since some "veterans" were trash-talking on TEST forums. They did not offer any kind of argument, they simply stated that they are right because of their history. TEST (was) being a newbie-friendly alliance, there was always someone who did not know who are the "right people" and replied to them as they were just trolls.

Well, the truth is that they were just trolls. You have to prove your idea every single time it's challenged. Of course you can just link some older post or evidence, but you can't take the position "I have authority, I'm right because I say so", especially if you are right.

People will always need evidence for your claims and will alway challenge you. While this is annoying, it's a good thing, the only way of progress. One day one of them will be right and his different idea will be better than yours. Of course 99% of the challengers are just ignorant. But the "I'm right, period" position either silences this good idea or forces its bearer to become your enemy. It's dumb to make enemies among smart people.

Of course talking from the position of authority is convenient. Most people who disagree with you are spamming the same nonsense you've heard. But if you can't be bothered to teach, why do you say anything? Just mind your own business and leave the dumb ones be!

By the way this is why I finally chose to start my own ganking corp. Previously I just published my results and hoped that things will change after people learn it. They didn't. Many others wrote things too, after all I didn't invent Procurers. Most people still fly untanked, badly chosen ships and ignored whatever was written on this topic. They dismissed all the data as "tldr lol". We have to prove them wrong objectively every single day. It's a hard and long work, but it will make difference.


The first daily anti-tear is a very tanked ret. I start to see these and Macks with no mining upgrades in lows. They mine less than Procurers/Skiffs, but being AFK is very important:
Then we can see how the local chat turns on those who feel entitled to mining in an untanked barge in 0.5:

The moron of the week thought that the best answer of ganking is being a "white knight". He was wrong. Another one figured out a good name to his ship:

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The nasty trick of the killboard

The killboards are logs of who killed what. So far so good. But they are used for something else too: competition. Every game has a leaderboard, if not made by the developers, it's made by players. EVE is no exception, the killboard has a "Ranks - Recent (Past 90 Days) - Killers". It ranks players by kill numbers, "points" and ISK value.

At the point of writing this, the #1 on ISK destroyed is Admiral Thelaro of Black Legion with the mindblowing 1.1T kills. This is something that you or me can never get right? This is something totally out of reach for us. For such numbers you not only have to be the best but part of the best team, right? Let's dig deeper and check the individual kills. Since he destroyed 1333 ships the last 90 days, I just checked a sample: the latest 50 kills at the time of writing, starting with this and ending with this. Below you can see three data for each kill: its total value, the number of killers on the report, and value/killers. Since only one ship died, the value must be divided by the killers.
0,01 1 0,0
0,01 1 0,0
20,2 44 0,5
28,6 86 0,3
1820 113 16,1
298,7 102 2,9
254,9 109 2,3
95,7 29 3,3
128,2 32 4,0
3120 46 67,8
2990 51 58,6
2990 65 46,0
3070 59 52,0
2720 15 181,3
25,5 19 1,3
22,1 11 2,0
10,4 9 1,2
101,4 11 9,2
25,2 29 0,9
164,7 93 1,8
164,7 93 1,8
1484 67 22,1
2402 125 19,2
5059 132 38,3
2300 121 19,0
4171 129 32,3
481 94 5,1
38 1 38,0
32,8 38 0,9
50,5 15 3,4
40,8 78 0,5
214,6 59 3,6
216 67 3,2
213,4 93 2,3
202,5 86 2,4
38,5 21 1,8
166,9 31 5,4
229 81 2,8
216,2 89 2,4
709,1 108 6,6
242,6 34 7,1
35,6 6 5,9
84,8 9 9,4
109 20 5,5
110,4 17 6,5
89,4 22 4,1
86,8 26 3,3
157,7 37 4,3
148,9 36 4,1
116,3 25 4,7

If we summarize the total kills we get 37.5B. This is the ISK destroyed number he earned by these kills. But summarizing the last column we only get 718M. This is what he'd get if the toplist would record partial kills and not full for every killer. The ratio of the two numbers are 52.2. The value of the last 50 kills were overestimated 52.2x!!! If we assume that these kills are a good sample of his performance, his 1.1T kills shrink to actually 21.1B. And that's for 90 days, so his actual monthly kills are around 7B. And he isn't some random nullsec player, he is the #1 on the toplist.

What was my monthly kill? 52B. Did I just outperformed the best of the best by the factor of 7? Oops!

Of course that comparison is unfair to him which is the point of the post (me being the best of the best would interest nobody besides my mum). The point of the post is the killboard itself. It isn't designed this way by mistake. No one forced the killboard developers to add a leaderboard or even a summary field to it. But they did, and it was implemented in a way that extremely inflates numbers for nullsec players who usually fly in large fleets. Of course it wasn't done by some evil conspiracy, simply by market forces. The killboard lives on ad money so wants to serve those who click on it the most and it's obviously not the highsec miners. Out of the multiple options the one was accepted which was most liked by the most frequent viewers. This was done even despite its obvious error of giving everyone 99% efficiency. The laziness of CCP of allowing only one killboard per player via the kill API cache killed alternative killboards, canonizing this ranking.

After the method was canonized, it started to affect the players. The "whore on mails" activity emerged, since it cost nothing to the original killers. Maybe the good Admiral Thelaro killed much more than 7B/month, but he is a nice guy and let unworthy punks whore on his kills which now unfairly affects him in my calculation. I mean if he could kill the same ships with half amount of killers, I'd give him twice as high number. But currently he isn't motivated to lock out anyone from a kill.

The error of the killboard and the fact that everyone (except TEST Alliance) has very high efficiency is well known. No one would stand out and say "look at my killboard and envy me". But subconsciously the people are affected. If they wouldn't care, no one would click on the ranking and aggregate pages of the killboard so they wouldn't exist at the first place. When I tried to mitigate the inflation by simply dividing the alliance kill values by the alliance members, the outrage was epic. Fun fact: the toplist gives 2.73T kills for 90 days for Black Legion and it has 1139 members, so BL has 0.8B kills/month/pilot. If we assume 3 alts, we get 2.4B/player, which is good for an average member, considering the best has 7.

The killboard became another tool of the "nullsec supremacy myth", making nullseccers and "carebears" equally believe that nullsec is an extremely dangerous place, full of multi-billion killing PvP Gods. The reason why so many highsec players never even think of PvP is that they see themselves so far below their peers that they don't even try. The permanent carebear is the product of the myth. He doesn't start because he sees zero chance of winning. To fix that we must get him into PvP and teach him how to win. That part is easy: gank him and teach him how to fit a ship that survives ganking.

But it alone won't be enough. After all he just survived the attacks of some "lowly ganker" who surely ganks because he has no chance in "real PvP". So to give highsec dwellers the proof that they can indeed win against dangerous enemies by fitting their ship right, we have to look dangerous in their eyes. How? By climbing high on the killboard ranking as a corp.

The top ranked nullsec corps: Goonwaffe, Wildly Inappropriate, Dreddit are killing 3.3, 2.5, 2.1T per 90 days. That's around 1T per month. With about 25 members like myself we can get to the top of the toplist. Again: two dozen gankers like myself can beat all the nullsec corps on the killboard. This would give weight to our advices to the targets and give them the sense of success when they are not ganked due to proper fitting and movement.

So here is why I needed a corp for my adventure and a channel with NPC corp gankers isn't enough. This is how we will change the thinking of people towards "griefing": we become the worst monster out there and show them how can they survive against us. Join!

Clarification: I do not think that killboards are important or being top of it would mean something so please don't comment it. The ignorant people (like those who mine in untanked Mackinaws with multiple flashy reds on local) believe these and you can tell them anything, they won't listen. The only way to change their thinking is turning the killboard upside down.

Fun fact: my corp (which is currently just my two gankers) have 17.8B kills in September. After 5 days of September.


Here are the daily anti-tears:
The moron of the day is the player behind these two wonderfully fit Mackinaws. The second died 4 minutes after the first. I had to hurry, since the rats were busy killing the second: Oh almost forgot their 600M pods.

Finally, the smart guy of the day is the owner of this Mack. If you check the fit, it's impossible to kill it with two Catalysts. I didn't know you can fit a Mack that high. Smart! But not smart enough, because I checked not only the EHP field in EFT but also the fitting field. You can't fit this thing even with +5% PG, +5% CPU and Genolution implants. He just put on offlined modules as scarecrows.

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