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:
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.
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:
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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