What the Freight Club killboard tells us

A piece of breaking news before the post: It seems the end has reached the RMT site Somer Blink. After receiving a 10 days closure deadline, SOMER Blink is clearing its stash while they can, offering one Billion ISK RMT-ed money for a single GTC:
I'm not sure if I dare to suggest you to take it, as you might end up negwalleted, but I surely suggest that if you have any Blink Credit, bet on anything while you can and take ships and ISK, because after the deadline Somer will probably go offline and your remaining credits will be lost. They probably sell their remaining ISK to black hat RMT sites.

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Doing morons of the week articles, I noticed that most of the jump freighters that died without suicide gank died to the same corp, Freight Club. So I collected some info about them and found things you need to see.

Freight Club is a small corp. Currently 13 members and Dotlan corp stats say they were in this magnitude for years. Yet their results in terms of billion ISK destroyed are stunning: 3.24T destroyed in the pictured one year period. As comparison, Goonwaffe had 11.5T destroyed in the same period, 3.5x more. With 230x more members and by getting on kills that aren’t exclusively theirs, but made by the 30K members CFC. Stunning difference.

Out of the 50 last Anshar Jump Freighter kills 23 was their doing. From the last 50 Rheas, 29. From Arks: 20. Nomads, 16. So they are responsible for a bit less than half of the JF kills in New Eden. In other words, the rest of EVE kills barely more JFs than these handful of guys/ Their in-game page shows 61 active and one pending wars, all started by them. They are practically in war with all nullsec entities, so all they need is to wait until some idiot drives a wardecced JF into one of their scouts. Then they black-ops jump to the nearest lowsec gate and catch it, while the scout suicide tackles it.

What’s we can learn here is that a small, but competent group can get results in the magnitude of much-much larger entities. This is something everyone must consider when he tries to evaluate the landscape of EVE. The nullsec “powerhouses” are extremely inefficient both ISK and kill-wise and they are so because they can be. There isn’t real competition that could force them to step up their game.

While CCP should really address the underlying issue: you can’t start a competitor because no one will believe you aren’t a Goon/PL/whatever spy. However we, the players should not wait for Santa Claus to save us. The results of Freight Club shows that it is possible to form effective organizations despite the horrible lack of implemented security. We can do better than simply pick one of the lousy organizations, led by a Falcon-drama-queen, join and press F1 when told.


On Monday I'll post the October ganking report of my corp. While our numbers aren't as great as of Freight Club, you'll see that we have nothing to be ashamed of either. Till then, here are more anti-tears:

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Those smoke filled rooms

There is a commonly cited problem with EVE: that all decisions are made in “smoke-filled rooms” between the same 10-15 people and no new players can enter into that arena. Have you ever considered why?

Before we’d continue, I’d like to point out that the above isn’t true. Every single player has chance to get into practically every alliance/coalition if he is persistent enough and by being there, increasing the options of the alliance leadership. If suddenly 10000 people would recognize that his true home is SOLAR fleet or Spacemonkeys Alliance, the map would change radically.

But there is a layer of truth in it. You won’t be the next The Mittani, Montolio, Vince Draken, Elo Knight or Shadoo, no matter how hard you try or how skilled you are. If we consider the infamous fails of some of them, it is surprising. I recognized the problem when I’ve read about the alt-gate. The answer “why can’t you get into the smoke filled room” is the same as “why can’t you be the next Chribba”.

I’ve been playing EVE for almost two years. I’ve never ever scammed anyone. I am pretty upfront in what I believe, no matter what others think. Yet I couldn’t start a supercap escrow service, even if I’d have much lower rates than Chribba.

The answer is “trust”. It’s not mathematically quantifiable. My scam rate is the same 0% as it’s for Chribba. Yet no one would believe me. Or more correctly no one would give me a chance. Why? Because Chribba is already there and he has proven himself. He took the position of “trustable guy” and until he leaves it, there is no other spot. It’s similar to being married. As long as you are OK in your marriage, you don’t even consider if others would be better and your wife could be replaced with gain. It only happens if your marriage is awful.

It doesn’t matter how hard Vince failed with the Falcon and how hard Elo failed when a total stranger sent him a screenshot of a PL titan with “PL Spy” literally written on it. It doesn’t matter that in these situations a 4x Civilian shield booster fit Mackinaw miner would have made a better choice. Unless they do something that makes them totally inacceptable, they stay, because they have already proven their loyalty to their group. They will not awox or steal. They earned the trust and no one gets a chance until they remove themselves from their position.

It’s not the same in the real world business. You don’t stick to the same shop until it closes or starting to sell absolutely inacceptable products. You try out other shops when they are nearby or if they have a sale. You try out new video games even when you are satisfied with your current one.

The reason is that the society enforces a level of trustworthiness on everyone. The other shop I try might have rude employees and low quality wares. But it is surely not like the shop in the Pulp Fiction where people are kidnapped into Zed’s torture chamber. They also won’t rob me and even if they sell me faulty products, I will be able to get a refund from them, because the law says so. The other video game might be lame, but surely doesn’t contain spyware. A level of decency is guaranteed, therefore I can safely try out others.

In EVE, it’s not true. Sure, X might show better judgment than Vince in the Falcon issue. But X might also be a Goon spy and Vince is surely not. X might lead our whole super fleet purposefully into a trap, while Elo only does it when he fails. X might rob anything and everything I had in the game, publish my chat logs, mails, lingerie pictures I carelessly sent him and my IP address and e-mail from the mumble server allowing people to find me in real life. There is no limit how much damage X can do to me in the game and the only thing I can do to prevent it is not trusting anyone who isn’t totally trustable, no matter how incompetent and annoying he is. Vince, Elo, Mittani and co have proven themselves in this aspect towards their group and no one in his right mind would risk a change.

Your options in EVE – unless you joined with an out of game group – are

• Playing alone
• Be the F1-monkey of people you know to be incompetent and asshole, but at least not spies
• Limiting yourself to frigs and bombless bombers, so you cannot lose anything you’d care for

If you want EVE to be somewhat social game, you need to establish some basic level of trustworthiness. I do not want (and due to alts cannot) remove spying. But the list of things needed to prevent a single guy destroying everything that thousands have built are bare minimum to make EVE grow.

Until it is implemented, the only real option besides the three above is what I’m building now: a loose cooperation of solo players who share a common goal, share information but don’t share their assets and don’t follow orders.

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The anti-tears of today:

As a blogger, it's always a heartwarming thing to meet a reader:

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Providence

People complained that I demanded an Orca alt for members of the ganker corp. Well, I’ve outgrown the Orca. Of course I still use it for its 1 MWD cycle align, 250K EHP, 2.7AU/sec warp speed. It’s great to carry around fittings and loot. But not to move hulls. An Orca can carry around 23 Catalysts if it’s not carrying anything else (please don’t say to put cargo expanders on it, only suicidal morons do that). With dual-ganking, that’s used up in a few hours.

I used to Red Frog a freighter worth of hulls to some nearby system and go with the Orca to pick 23 up. But I also noticed that covering large distances during ganking increases kill count greatly. No point finding that last Retriever in this constellation if there are Mackinaws 5 jumps away! This way I could get several jumps away from my storage, making the Orca trip 15-20 mins long. That’s a gank lost.

Not anymore. I grabbed a Providence freighter and will move hulls for myself! How? Just as currently, I Red Frog a freighterload of hulls to my current base. Then I gank from there until I move. When I move, I move with my Orca filling it with fittings, loot and as many Catas I can. I move and gank. When I run off, I just jump into a shuttle, ride back to the storage, grab the Providence and move it with the hulls to my current base. If I’m 8 jumps away from my old base, I have to take 8 jumps with the Providence. With the Orca, I had to do 16 for every batch and there can be 7 batches in a freighter.

So an own Orca alt is not a convenience but a must for a ganker. Without it, you can’t move at all. The convenience is having a freighter next to it.


PS: of course it’s insured and a full load of destroyer hulls cost 180M so don’t get any ideas! The fittings are travelling in the Orca.

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Some anti-tears:

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Morons of the week

As promised, I’m back with the morons of the last week (Oct 21-27), in three groups.

Suicide ganked morons simply can’t learn that the buffer tank of the ship must be in line to its value:

• 5B freighter
• 5B, zero buffer missioning Tengu
• 9B freighter with 7B drop
• 5B freighter
• 7B freighter
• 8B missioner
• 6B missioner
• 6B incursion runner
• 8B missioner
• 5B incursion runner
• 7B freighter
• 6B freighter

Wardecced ones ignored the most obvious EVE advice: if it’s expensive, don’t fly it without Concord protection (or supercap blob):

• 6B JF
• 12B JF extra dumb, as an empty JF has a reason to take gates, but a full one could instantly jump from the undock into low/nullsec
• 6B JF
• This 5B thing fit best to this group, as it was in nullsec where everyone is “wardecced” and the top damage dealers were rats, so it was probably ratting. In a very-very strange and expensive fit.
• 8B JF
• 6B JF
• 8B JF
• 5B nullsec ratter
• 8B JF
• 6B JF
• JF is for sissies, let’s take gates in nullsec in a 5B freighter
• 6B JF
• 6B JF

This week we have one super-idiot who considered it a good idea to put a scram on a mission-fit, 8B Tengu and go to nullsec to PvP.

We also have special guest morons: "a total stranger told me it will get me a titan killmail"

Finally let me share a moron I found myself: an Orca was peacefully sitting in the ice field, surrounded by its alts, rets and a Mackinaw. Maybe I shouldn’t have podded it, because the Orca pilot got mad, ejected a Caldari Navy Hookbill and started to camp my station in it. Killed my noobship! Then he went back to protect the ice field. He forgot that Caldari Navy Hookbills aren’t invincible. He also forgot to warp out his pod. The Orca which he ejected from, was now floating in the ice field all alone, so I jumped into it and drove it home:

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The daily anti-tear:
Finally an anti-tear combined with an arch-moron. Bar0n Greenback lost his third mining barge and pod to me, cried more on local, but the others informed him of proper attitude:

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Evidence that SOMER Blink is involved in botting and RMT

SOMER Blink seems like a gambling site, and as all such is making money from the fools. It’s fine. How much money? They claim to give out 1250T winnings. On their site it seems that the price of all the tickets is about 30% higher than the prize. So for every 70 ISK payout they make 30M profit. That’s 535T profit.

Let’s put that money into perspective: the recent event that turned BL into bl had ISK lost about 0.15% of SOMER’s money. If you buy out all the PLEX in Jita, that money allows you to do it for almost a year. If you buy out all the tritanium, you can keep doing it for 20 years.

Where the hell is this money? I mean SOMER neither uses it to make something happen in EVE, nor it was ever stolen. No SOMER theft was ever happened. In EVE people betray their long friends for pity sums of 0.01-0.05T. A 0.1-0.5T theft gets to the top pages. Here lies 535T in the hands of an organization of dozens of people (30 got Scorpions, there must be more), and none of them ever touched it.

From 535T you can rise a 5000 strong titan fleet. SOMER could just stand behind Goons, TEST or Brave Newbies and put every member into titans. Yet no such action happened. SOMER didn’t do any significant EVE event with their money.

Where is the money? They RMT-ed it all. When you get 200M “SOMER Credit” for your GTC purchase, with the 70% payout, you win 140M ISK on average. If you buy out all the blinks of an item, you can surely cash out your 200M credits into 140M ISK. Every time you do it, SOMER must get 140M ISK to cover it. SOMER doesn’t have 535T. Whatever ISK came in was given out to those who lotteried with Blink Credits. For every GTC they sold, they had to spend 140M ISK.

How much money they made from RMT? If they get $1 for a GTC and it cost them 140M ISK, about 3.8 million dollars. This is why there are no thefts: no one steals pixel money when he can get real money. The RMT scheme is simple: if you buy PLEX from CCP and sell it, you get 600M ISK at the moment. If you buy GTC from SOMER, turn it into PLEX and sell it, you get 600+140M ISK. So they are practically selling ISK for 600/740 = 81% of the official CCP-PLEX price.

I believe SOMER Blink should be immediately banned from the game with all accounts involved as “employee”. But so far I’m just repeating Nosy Gamer (and practically every blogger and forum poster). What is the new evidence?

The interesting part isn’t how SOMER used the 535T. We believe they spent it on RMT. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they spent it on charity or still have it in the wallet of the Somerset Mahm. It doesn’t matter. What matters is they could only gain 535T if others lost 535T. These can only be players who gambled with ISK (GTC buyers don’t put ISK into SOMER, they take out).

EVE has like 200K players. It means that the average player lost 2.7B ISK to SOMER, the price of a dreadnought. Most players can’t afford a carrier, not to gamble a dread away! Or you’d rather believe that there are whales who gambled away trillions to make up for those who never seen a billion in one place? Sure, people who can make trillions can’t figure out that the bank always wins on the lottery!

Who the hell lost 535T ISK on SOMER? Do you actually know anyone who gambled with multiple billions of ISK (instead of blink credits)? I believe that those who “lost” this ISK to SOMER are botters who were paid with real money to do so. SOMER didn’t even have to manipulate anything, if you buy 1T worth of tickets, you win 700B worth of prize, giving 300B to SOMER. Of course there are legitimate idiots who lost a couple million ISK, but they are insignificant in the books.

If you claim that SOMER is legit and not buying ISK from botters, you have to somehow prove that the average player, including yourself, your corpmates, the fools who mine veldspar to PLEX their accounts, the FW frig complex fighters, the TESTies who had more Rifters in battleship fleets than battleships, the Goons who grind structures in bombers have all lost a dreadnought to SOMER. Good luck!

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The anti-tear of today:
The good news of today, another ice field cleansed:
Astesia is a busy white knight, protecting miners. He isn't a failure like Hitamino and the no-scram-Drake campers, he has a killboard full of gankers. Yet, I could pop Macks in his presence, so he choose to upship a bit when the ice field appeared:It seems it wasn't the brightest idea.

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Breaking news: The battle in Hadji

Hadji system in Genesis lights up on Dotlan because a glorious battle was fought between the forces of light and the evil multibox-farming menace. Brave heroes of Nulli, Snigwaffe and the Sepultura corp warped a smartbombing battleship gang to the middle of the multibox-mining blob of The Wis. The battle report shows 39 badly tanked Mackinaws and their pods destroyed at the cost of 9 battleships and 3 pods. The losses of the dark side are 13-14B ISK at the cost of about 1B.

To make it better, the brave warriors who faced the overwhelming numbers posted their video of the fight. Watch this beautiful gem of small-gang PvP!

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While far from being that glorious, I also found a moron who helped me contribute to the good cause with my humble means. Remember Bar0n Greenback who lost his 1B hulk+pod and then camped me for hours with no results?

He was out mining again and he got new implants!

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Punish the rats!

Imagine that in the next EVE patch, new belt rats are introduced. They spawn rarely, but when they do, they can scram and kill weaker mining barges. What would the miners do? Some would whine and cry on the forums, but most would either adjust their fits to resists the new rats or decrease its value to limit the losses if caught. But no one would go and camp the spawn point of the rat to get revenge. That would be quite stupid act considering their low bounty and loot compared to the time needed to catch one.

Highsec gankers are exactly like the mentioned rats: they arrive to a system and gank poorly fit miners, missioners, haulers. I do it for two months now. But many people do exactly what they’d never do if I was just an NPC: camp the station I’m in, follow me around trying to destroy my ships. Some even admittedly settle with slowing me down and being a minor nuisance.

Social people threat other people very differently than equally acting objects. They try to handle challenges from objects by manipulating other objects, responding to the physical threat. But when the challenging actor is a person, they get emotional and try to change its behavior instead of just responding to its physical manifestation. From begging to punishing they try to communicate with the acting person and make him stop what he is doing.

Camping my station or various belts isn’t stupid because it doesn’t even slow me down. It is stupid because it wouldn’t help them if they’d succeed! They wanted to mine. Yet they aren’t mining but camping. When they get on the Concord kill or even destroy the noobship I’m using to pull Concord, they are proudly linking “their” kills on local and cheering to each other. They feel victorious despite they didn’t mine a single piece of ore, the goal they had before I arrived.

Of course their constant failure is closely connected to the futility of their actions. I’m sure that someone who knows that a torpedo battleship or an active tanked Drake isn’t the best tool against ganking Catalysts could cause me some trouble. But someone who is smart enough to do that is smart enough to don’t waste his time for a few 5-10M Catalyst kills and maybe some fitting drops. They rather bait supercarriers instead. So competent PvP-ers ignored me and I had to settle with idiots who trade kill rights, do wardecs against -10 pilots and call it tears when informed about the futility of the above actions.

However the lack of results doesn’t deter the socials from their futile actions. They – like bots – trying to do what’s “right” and “punishing evil” is right. They also self-rewarding themselves with imaginary-emotional gains, talking about that I’m currently raging because they “locked me down”. It’s both funny and sad that I find local chat comments where they celebrate that I didn’t dare to undock all night after I left the computer running while asleep.

This is probably the most obvious symptom of being social: he acts differently if the same action is done by a person and not an inanimate object. Being rational is the opposite. I don’t care if my home is ravaged by hooligans or wild boars, I build a fence and get a gun to keep them out. Fireproof materials and sprinklers protect my home both from arsonists and electrical fire. I don’t care if my EVE ship is ganked by gatecamping players or gatecamping incursion rats, I scout for it to avoid being caught. I respond to the action, not to the actor, therefore I don’t waste my time with “revenge” that gives me noting. This is why I can make 50B income or 100B kills a month while others struggle to get their account Plexed and only have frig kills.

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In the anti-tear of today, Skiff miners are celebrating the massacre of ice bots (check the kills, they are identically fit with identical implants, yet they did not warp after their alts died one by one):
The first moron of today challenged the gankers:
The second moron is a permanent one, Hitamino, who follows me around with zero results. But he is a goddamn hero!

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How to make EVE a bit safer but much more popular?

There are awful lot of zero-sum PvP games where the loser loses ranking, kill:death ratio and other stats. Yet these games are popular. The PvP games where you can farm XP and credits, therefore “progress” like in World of Tanks or League of Legends are even more popular, despite you still have losses in the individual game. I don’t think that the losses make EVE a small niche game.

It’s not even “unfair”, ganking PvP. You have little effect on the outcome of a World of Tanks game or a World of Warcraft battlegrounds. You are just one soldier in the battle. Sometimes the game is lost on loading screen due to matchmaking unbalance, teammate AFK or something like that. Still these games are popular.

The thing that all PvP games have but EVE doesn’t is the ability to trust in your teammates. In these games you fight side by side with other players. They might suck or even go AFK. But griefing is rare, banned and its effect limited to one short battle. Also, by handpicking your team, you can be 100% free of AFK-ers, noobs and griefers.

Not in EVE. In EVE a single hostile getting into your team can destroy a supercapital fleet, drop Sov, steal everything or simply go on an unstoppable awox spree. This is a bad design, not because these actions are “bad”, but because the individual player is completely powerless to do something about it. Only the leadership of his corporation/alliance can keep spies out. The little guy can only hope that they succeed.

You might say “but EVE supposed to be real”, but such spying power is not real. The president of a country cannot disable all infrastructure, grab everything in the treasury and jump it in a minute to a hostile country all by himself. Such act would need a huge conspiracy to bypass the checks and balances.

I do not suggest to ban spying or GMs reverse awoxes. I want built-in tools to limit the effect a spy can do. My suggestions:

• Remove highsec awoxing. Simply make shooting corpmates a suicide gank. Since there are duels, there is no legitimate need of shooting a corpmate.
• Make set standings take precedence over corp/alliance membership. If you set a corpmate -10, he still shows up as green and not red. Fix it, so a low/null awoxer can be marked after his first awox and also locked out of services. (I understand that instant-kicking is not possible due to abusing it to avoid war targets in highsec)
• Create a time lock for every possibly harmful activity. It can be activated selectively and makes actions like offlining a tower, SBU, TCU, cancelling a job, removing stront from the tower, disbanding the alliance, kicking corps or even members impossible. To perform the action, first you have to switch off time lock, wait 24 hours and then perform it. This way the members have 24 hours to respond before the bad thing happens.
• Daily withdraw limits to hangars and wallets. You can only remove this amount a single day. The limit itself can be time-locked, so the rogue director can’t just remove it.
• “Equal share” setting. By switching it on, the shares of the corporation are equally distributed between members all the time, allowing them to vote out the CEO. Protectable by time lock too.
• Automatic reimbursement feature. The replacement of lost combat ships are the largest ISK sinks of an alliance, so automatizing it would remove lot of ISK from the hands of people who could steal it. You just put the ISK to the reimbursement wallet and automatic algorithms send it to players who lost their ship in an eligible way. It would also remove huge administrative workload.

With such improvements, the players could more easily trust in their blues/greens, allowing much more players to participate in group content. And we know that group integration is the best predictor of remaining in the game.

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The moron of the day is Bar0n Greenback. After losing his hulk alt with his 720M pod, he swore revenge: He spent the rest of the day trashing up local and camping my stations in a ship that was specially tailored to catch Catalysts: If you don't see any kills under his name, it's not a bug. But he surely had lot of fun doing it, because he was around all evenings.

The anti-tear of today:

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EVE Downtime: why 11:00?

Ever wondered why the EVE downtime is when it is? You probably thought that this is because of the lowest connection count: this is when the smallest amount of players are annoyed by being kicked off the server.

But it's not true, as you can see from the chart on Chribba's site:
You can see that the minimum user count is around 6 AM EVE time and from there it's growing until the downtime hits at 11.

Of course the downtime can't be at 6 AM since EVE time is the time zone of the Iceland, where headquarters of the developers is. During downtime they do maintenance on the server, which goes better if they are in the office. However I don't see why can't it be pulled back 2 hours, to 9:00 EVE time.

I know it's not much of a post, just a weird observation, but I'm still puzzled why the downtime is not closer to the minimum user load.

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The moron of the day figured out a ingenious way to hide his covetors:
The anti-tear of the day is a miner who learned a lesson:
Finally, another ice belt saved:

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Morons of the week

I neglected the killboard outside of my own. This was a mistake. Idiotism should not be ignored. Watch, how our fellow human beings, who managed to collect billions of ISK displayed zero understanding of the game.

This report covers the October 14 – 20 week and I hopefully don’t forget to do it again next week. I created 3 groups for them. The first is suicide ganked morons. They simply put way too much value into their ship for its tank and got ganked. No, a freighter isn’t too tanked and not able to protect more than a billion. No, shield booster is not considered tank. Neither shield boost amplifier.

• 6B, missioning Nightmare.
• T1 industrial, 6B cargo, killed by one Tornado. In Jita.
• 4.5B cargo in a freighter.
• 6.5B cargo in a freighter.
• 17B cargo in a freighter. Loot fairy gave the gankers the finger.
• 7B missioner.
• 6B in a freighter.
• 4B cargo in a freighter.
• 5B missioner. His fit is stupid even if we ignore the lack of buffer, which a bunch of tornadoes didn’t.
• 7B missioner.
• 4.5B cargo in a freighter.
• 11B in a freighter.
• 5B thing. I can’t figure out what he wanted.
• 6.5B Missioner
• 7B cargo freighter.
• 4.5B cargo freighter.
• 6B cargo freighter.
• 4B cargo freighter.
• 9B cargo freighter with a nice loot.
• 4B cargo freighter.
• 8B cargo freighter.
• 6.5B cargo freighter.
• 7B cargo freighter.
• 5.5B cargo freighter.
• 10.5B T1 industrial

The second group is even dumber. They flown something expensive in highsec under wardec. Usually a jump freighter. So their death didn’t need an organized gank group, just a few pilots. Because if you own a 6B ship, you can’t afford a second pilot who is in the NPC corp and takes over the JF in a lowsec mindpoint.

• Empty JF. Since the hull is 6B, “empty” is a relative term.
• Another empty one.
• 4.5B cargo + the JF.
• Almost empty JF.
• 1.3B Paladinwith a 6.5B pod.
• Empty JF.
• 5B transport Tengu. At least it was cap stable.
• 5.5B in a freighter. Under wardec.
• One more empty JF.

All together 246B. In a week. Approximately 1T/month. That’s a high price for being a moron in EVE Online. Counting with $13/PLEX and 600M/Plex, it’s $22000/month. It would have paid for basic education. Please also note that the gank losses of overpriced morons are already in the magnitude of the kills of the largest nullsec alliances.

The last group is stupid beyond imagination. I mean the previous ones are bad enough, but they could at least get lucky and pass unnoticed. However these idiots put a few PvP modules, typically a point or scram to their otherwise completely badly fit and stupidly expensive ships. So it’s likely that they were actively looking for being killed. In which they succeeded. Oh wait, they might just wanted to impress Ripard Teg.

• 14B something. I failed to figure out what he wanted, but surely not showing up here.
• 12B something. It’s like the previous one, except having gateguns on the kill and being in lowsec.
• 5B Loki in Uedama. It had a long point, which complements the autocannons, and webs well. Oh wait, it doesn’t.

Finally, let me share a personally found idiot(s). This one has a story, unlike just a kill report and a one-line summary. So, I was ganking ice Macks. Found one with interesting fit: 3 empty midslots and a 400M faction invulnerability field. Ganked him. Got the pod too, 2.2B. OK, losing an expensive but dumbly fit ship and a stupidly expensive pod is bad enough, but the story is far from being finished. After docking up the flashy red pods, I went to loot the faction invulnerability field which dropped. Except it wasn't there. Easy come, easy go, I guess. So I found another Mack and ganked it. Another 600M kill. How? It wasn't expensively fit! Then I checked the cargo: he took the invulnerability of the wreck of his corpmate, and kept mining. His pod was 2.3B. Since the loot fairy loves those who cleanse New Eden from idiots, the faction invulnerability field dropped again and this time I looted it.


PS: a piece of great news by Sugar from EVE Vegas: “Are they done with mining changes? No. They want to do another pass of the barges. The Procurer and Skiff are not as useful as they want. The Retriever and the Mackinaw are too strong with being good in two out of three areas.” The three areas are tank, yield and ore hold. Since Rets and Macks are meant to have the best ore hold, it means that they will either get a tank nerf or a yield nerf, both are welcome changes.

No day shall pass without an anti-tear:

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World of Warcraft: the working class dreamworld

World of Warcraft is a strange "game". Actually it's not even a game as you can't win or lose it. You can't even win or lose aspects of it like an EVE battle. You always get rewards, your character always progresses. Yet it's the most popular MMO. Why?

Surely not because its fantasy world. People just ignore it. They talk about mobs, abilities, ilvl, chat about real life things while playing and so on. If the orcs would be replaced by humans in the next expansion, no one would care, just like there was no comment on the new races in the various expansions.

Playing World of Warcraft is an escapism into an ideal world. But what way it is ideal? It is the working class dreamworld:

• There is no unemployment: there are quests, mobs and instances whenever you want to access them
• Work is needed, not performance: you were in a battleground and lost horribly? Here are some honor points as payment. Damaged less than the disc priest in the looking for raid? Here is your well earned valor point and loot. In WoW your performance isn't judged. If you show up and make some effort, you get rewarded, regardless of the worth of your activity.
• Low income inequities: are you below average in performance? Are you putting in much less effort than most? Nevermind, your rewards are just a bit lower than what the best of the best gets. The ilvl difference between a total slacker and the world first is less than 25%
• Constant progression: you can replace your car... I mean your mount and gear every month, no matter how bad you are

You know, the socialists didn't demand freebies. That's the morons and slackers. The socialist, Marxists always demanded work. These people want to contribute and want to be proud of their work. They however worship working itself, and not its product. If you spend digging holes and refilling them, you are entitled to salary - they believe.

But the World doesn't work this way. You can't get decent salary for flipping burgers or can't even get any job in lack of qualifications. To make it worse, not even games work this way: Basketball, Chess or an FPS game gives you nothing just a "you have lost" for your efforts. To win, you have to be better than the other player/team. So they flock to "games" where you don't have to be better than any standard.

It's sad to recognize, but the dream World of socials is a place where everyone can flip burgers and get paid for it well.

I don't find this world a dream, rather a nightmare. I rather play games where your actions shape your future and you become different in results than the other guys. For example now I have 100B+/month solo and dualbox kills in EVE, something that very few players can achieve. Why? Because I don't just log in and do as told, but think, analyze and act much more efficiently than them.

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Ganking goes on, providing more anti-tears:

Of course you also find morons. Luckly loot fairy hates morons and loves those who destroy them. Also, there are still good pods in bad ships.

The Catalyst ganking guide is updated with this graph:

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Ganking in 0.7

For long I only ganked in 0.5 and 0.6 security. I’m not the only one as you could see from the Mackinaw death chart

The reason of ignoring 0.7 is that Concord responds in 16 seconds, making a T2 fit Catalyst unable to kill anything but bad fit Covetors. Even two T2 fit Catalyst can’t kill a Mackinaw that has tanking modules in the slots which are not needed for yield. So theoretically you can’t gank here.

Practically the amount of absolutely horribly fit ships is stunning. Most Mackinaws have their mid slots empty or filled with an ore scanner and maybe civilian shield boosters. Hulks are widespread. But the best thing is that – unlike 0.5-0.6 miners, the 0.7 miners probably never seen a ganker in their life. The warnings in local channel, docking up when someone arrives to their belt, paying attention to anything are absent from 0.7. You can gank, pull Concord and gank again in the same belt, as the miners in the belt can’t care less until they get the Void S.

The amount of mining in 0.7 is shocking. Much more barges and especially T2 exhumers are chewing the belts than in lower security. You can set up shop and gank all evening in a system and its neighbors. Butthurt miners might camp the station in missioning ships without sebo, point, ecm, web or anything PvP-like, but “real” white knights are missing. Probably even they don’t consider the 0.7 miners worthy of saving.

The problem with 0.7 ganking is the limited time. You can’t solo gank, so this is just annoying instead of "rampage time", like it would be in 0.6: Even dual gankers are limited to 23K kin-therm damage, which isn’t much. And that’s with perfect skills. A pair of 500 DPS Catalysts have trouble killing a naked Mack and most have a passive thermic resistor. So to start 0.7 ganking you need two 700+ DPS T2 Catalysts which is a serious limiting factor for most gankers.

However WGBWC is emphasizing competent, self-reliant solo gankers exactly for this reason: to be able to gank in ways which aren’t accessible to casual gankers. While 0.7 ganking is harder skillpoint- and fitting-wise, it’s much easier piloting-wise. If you are taking ganking seriously and don’t want to be locked into the newbie-friendly 0.5 systems, having a second ganker trained is the way.

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The anti-tear of today is beautiful. We warp into belts again and again grinding barges and exhumers in the hope of teaching people. When they learn, it's the biggest reward:
The moron of today considered using 1B worth of faction mining drones. After he died, I just scooped them in:

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Lilypad on the island

My girlfriend didn’t follow me to EVE and play very little with it, merely skill updates. She still plays WoW. She started a paladin tank alt recently, Lilypad.

The current patch non-raiding content is on some new island. There you must kill elite creatures for quests and for rep. Obviously, such activity is best done in group, probably that was the purpose of the developers. Yet I saw poor Lilypad slowly killing them alone. So I suggested her to form a group from the people present on the island. She did but it didn’t go well at all. To be exact, she got nothing but repair bill and to finish the quest, she had to quit the group and return solo questing.

What? The content that seems to encourage grouping is best done solo? No, when she had guildmates and people she knew online, they could farm them very fast. The problem is that the random guy is simply worse than nothing. We are beyond the “poor player needs help” doctrine. The constant nerfs and catering to the lowest common denominator in WoW decreased the mentioned lowest common denominator to the point where they have negative value, you are faster alone than with them. These idiots run around like chickens, pull everything that moves and wipe the group. First I thought they are griefers, but they continued to do it when kicked from group and couldn’t grief anyone but themselves.

They are simply very bad players who are nothing but burden to any team they join. The game developer keep them progressing via freebies and handouts. However even I don’t think that anyone can be this bad. I mean they are, but surely not because they couldn’t be better. Even a mildly mentally retarded patient can learn to “not click on anything which has no skull icon on it”. These players simply never had to learn anything.

Blizzard nerfed the once great WoW because they wanted it to be a “social game”, where people can play with their friends regardless of their abilities. Instead they got the most anti-social game where people solo or join automated queues and play together without saying a word or even caring for the name of each other. “tank pls pull fstr” is the most human interaction you can get. The only place where people actually talk is the raiding guild where players do the only remaining hard content.

Let this be a reminder to all game developers who think it’s a good idea to dumb down their game to allow lazy and dumb people win.

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The moron of the day was watching dscan to prevent anyone being ganked around him: Watching Directional Scan indeed alert you of incoming hostiles. However it doesn't help if you just chat but don't warp off, as he recognized it himself with his third line.

The daily anti-tears are small gestures of gratitude for my relentless work to teach the miners how to fit their ships:

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What impresses Ripard Teg?

Ripard Teg is impressed by something that I could only call retarded. The impressive guy didn’t make it as moron as the day, because he was already all over the EVE sites. Yes, it’s the one who managed to lose an officer fit tournament ship, the Chremoas, creating a 110B loss report.

This post isn’t about that capital moron, it is about Ripard Teg, the model “PvP-er”: he flies in AT, he flies small gang, has no Sov and permanently whines about being broke. His opinion of the loss: “Full credit to Tropic9 of HYDRA RELOADED for taking a Chremoas out and doing what it was made to do: pick and choose fights to get into, and kill things... lots and lots of things!  Over a two month period, he racked up a really impressive 168 kills -- most of them solo -- before finally being taken down by Mav'Lite in a Dramiel.  That's impressive by any metric I can think of.”

What impressed the good CSM member? 168 kills in the Sept 21 – Oct 12 period, that’s 229 kills/month. The value of his kills is 2.25B (3.06/month). He lost 110B, ending this period with 2% ISK efficiency. Yes, that’s impressive by any metric I can think of. I mean even Hulk miners have better efficiency as their drones get the Catalyst Concord kill report. For comparison, here are the results of my main ganker pilot, Botslayer Goblin for September: 724 kills, 101.7B ISK destroyed, 96% efficiency, all solo and duoed with my alt. And I used a cheap ship, often facing literally a dozen of hostiles instead of a monster-frig in a frig-only complex with perfect links, popping lost newbies in armor tanked Merlins, meta-fit Rifters and assorted comedy. I guess most of his victims thought that “Chemoras” is the new name of Iteron II.

Again, the point is not that Tropic9 is exactly 11x dumber than the one who put 10B into an untanked T1 industrial and 9 times dumber than the one who lost a 13B Falcon to POS guns. The point is that Ripard Teg considers this drooling imbecile impressive, something that worth respect, an example what an EVE player should be. Why?

The best I can think of is conspicuous waste: by purposefully wasting 110B, he displayed that he has 110B to throw away. I got lot of attention when I was throwing similar amount on TEST alliance. Actually got the attention of Ripard too. He wasn’t impressed though, probably because my donation drive wasn’t meant to be lost, unlike the Chremoas. What he did was like buying a titan, self-destructing it and get on the kill with a noobship. Dumb, but unquestionably shows that the owner can afford such nonsense.

Don’t forget that Ripard Teg got lot of votes on CSM8 without being in a block. Lot of people consider him a leader. This post is a window into the mind of the kings of the ghetto block: get into fights, be loud, pay drinks to everyone when you have money, plan nothing, save nothing, regret nothing, live fast, die young. Note: I don’t think that Ripard is a ghetto fighter in real life, but he sure roleplays one in EVE.

The “impressive” loss of the Chremoas should be a wake-up call to everyone. This isn’t a good life, this isn’t where we want to be, not even in a video game. While it doesn’t impress Ripard and the likes, I’d suggest to play smart, don’t waste your money, be goal-oriented, ignore what “l33t dudes” tell, get lot of ISK and lot of kills.

PS: of course, Ripard is wrong about the purpose of the Chremoas. It was a tournament ship and should have given the edge on the next tournament against a worthy enemy, instead of dumbly lost while farming frigs that I wouldn’t bother to shoot even if they’d sit on the station undock flashy yellow.

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Since there are never enough morons, here are some more: white knights protecting … the empty ice field (the ships without brackets are Caldari Police): And as always, an anti-tear, miners celebrating the fall of their dumb comrade. More ice to the tanked miners!

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New rule for WGBWC: we are fat, unemployed virgins in the basement

It's no point denying when every single miner (who happens to be at the keyboard) knows and yells it in local anyway: we are losers. We have no job, we never met a woman who didn't laugh or scream and ran when we asked for a date, we are fat from the crappy food we eat front of the computer where we live 24/7. The only reason we gank them is to have a little escapism from our crappy life and feel stronger than those lucky and successful people who have everything we just dream of. After all, mining AFK is the best form of entertainment for a rich family man, because such man would never simply PLEX for some ISK but farm it with 10M/hour.

So the new WGBWC rule is that you must accept the above as truth when the miner accuses you. Why? Because his out-of-game insults are actually meant as conversion stoppers. They don't want to discuss how their incompetence lead to the loss of their ship so they want to talk about something that has no point. Neither he, nor me can prove what is my age, connection status, income, housing and so on. Arguing over it is stupid and that's exactly what he wants: to stop talking. Because talking about the game would be bad for him, because he was just defeated.

The solution is sweeping their nonsense out of the way by accepting it. They aren't prepared for this. They expect a pointless argument and get acceptance. And after it was established that we are total losers in life, we can discuss how he ended up defeated by a fat, basement-dwelling virgin. It also gets some attention on local channel which is great because more people will learn about the importance of fitting their ships.

This is also a lesson for them about meritocracy. In achieveing something it does not matter if you really are a fat virgin. Only you knowledge and effort about the task at hand matters. A fat virgin can be a brilliant scientist, programmer or workingsman. Judging people of their non-related qualities are sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia and various other isms that I forgot. They are all dumb. One can learn an important real life thing in the games: a fat, virgin, lesbian, black, jewis woman can beat you in the game if she is better in the game. If he learns that, then he'll be more successful in his professional life, since in your job your skill in the job matters and not your color, sexual preference, religion or look.

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Another day, another anti-tear, an evidence that an ignorant player was saved from his ignorance:

Of course there are still morons:

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“Skill” PvP is consensual!

Who is entitled to decide what is real “skill” PvP and what is just a gank? It seems everyone (including me) considers himself a judge. While the definition of “skill” is trivial, the ability to win a fight, the definition of the “fight” is absolutely not. Is a Catalyst vs Covetor engagement a fight? Is a remote seboed Tornado at 50 from a gate vs frig just jumped in is a fight? Is a super hotdrop vs lone carrier a fight? Is a frig piloted by a lost newbie vs an equally fit frig piloted by a seasoned lowsec dweller a fight?

Who are you do decide? And who am I to decide? We need someone with authority to decide it once and for all. And I know who have all the knowledge to make the decision: the participants. Actually this is what everyone tells me: “go and try some lowsec PvP and see yourself”. The participants know their ship and their own abilities, therefore can completely assess if they have a chance to win or not.

However the winner will surely claim it was a fight. If you just ask me if a miner gank is a “skill PvP” action, I can easily answer “yes, sure, it needs lot of planning and practice”. The miner would disagree. Which is the crucial point. He, knowing his own abilities and ship doesn’t see our fight winnable. He sees himself not as a defeated participant but a victim of a gank.

The proper definition of the gank is a PvP engagement where one side doesn’t see hope to win, therefore wouldn’t engage if he had a choice. This is equally true to the Covetor miner, the guy who jumps into a gatecamp, the hotdropped ratting carrier and the newbie who somehow jumped to lowsec without having a clue about his modules. If you claim to be ganked, you are. If your opponent claims that you ganked him, you ganked him, period, your opinion doesn’t count here. If you disagree, then you have to accept me as real PvP-er, since all miners have the chance to fit tank to their barges, watch dscan, overheat hardeners or send out ECM drones. They didn’t because they couldn’t. They lack the game knowledge or they weren’t even at the keyboard.

The above has an important consequence: to have a real, “skill” PvP fight, both participants must agree that they have a chance and willingly engage. Which means consensual PvP. Non-consensual PvP is necessarily a gank, where one side is forced to take a fight where he sees no chance of victory. If he’d seen chance, he wouldn’t need to be forced, he’d willingly engage.

There are consensual fights in EVE. Alliance Tournament for example. Or timer fights in nullsec where both sides have time to prepare and spies to estimate their chances. Fights in PvP complexes of Faction Warfare. Red vs Blue. Duels. But most fights are not consensual. The very niche of EVE is not consensual PvP, aka gank. If you want “skill” fights and not ganks, why are you playing this game then? There are countless games where the opponent willingly engages and by doing so accepts you as an equal opponent. Oh, you'd say "by undocking, he consented to PvP?" So did the miner!

My point is, and my last word in the “skill PvP” debate: if you are playing EVE Online, you are a ganker, who willingly moved away from “skill PvP” and went to the game of ganks.

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The moron of the day is this Mackinaw miner. Not for his 560M pod. Not for the deadspace tank that tanked nothing against Catalysts. Not even for the faction cap recharger when he was already cap stable. The real reason is the 3 high-meta ore mining upgrades on the ice Mack.

Look how beautiful this ice belt is! Soon all of them will be cleansed from untanked ships:
Join our holy quest against dumbness, help the cleansing of highsec from untanked ships!

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Final Fantasy XIV ARR Account Hacked

Just over a month ago I went out and purchased Final Fantasy XIV - A Realm Reborn. I encountered some very concerning security issues and poor customer service along the way and recommend you think twice before playing this game.  

Let me fill you in on my unfortunate journey with Final Fantasy and their creators, Square Enix.

To start with, there were major issues with servers overloaded for the first week after game launch, resulting in the inability to log into the game. Square Enix obviously had very poor capacity planning and in hindsight, the warning bells should have been ringing for me at this stage.

In any case, after about a week the server overload problem subsided.  I proceeded to play the game for almost two weeks and the stopped playing since it was not the game for me.

About 1 week later, I received a curious, automated email from them:

We are writing to inform you that we have suspended the FINAL FANTASY XIV service account registered to this e-mail because on 9/24/2013 you breached the FINAL FANTASY XIV User Agreement.  

They went on to say that that I had violated two clauses of their agreement - 1. that I was not truthful with my registration information and 2. that I had participated in real money trading, farming or power-leveling.

Being the security guy and strongly expecting this to be a bogus phishing email, I decided not to click on any links in this email.  I went to my game login and tried to login.  To my surprise, my account had indeed been disabled.

So how did I breach their user agreement? I did not play on 9/24/2013 (or any day either side of this), nor was I in anyway dishonest with my registration info.

I could only conclude that my account had been compromised.

To have had my account compromised, the attacker would have had to either got hold of my login and then done a dictionary attack on the password or they would have needed to compromise the Square Enix user database.  You might be surprised to know that MMO's allow multiple password attempts so that you can't purposely deny another player access by locking out their account with failed password attempts. Consequently, a dictionary attack on the password is quite feasible.

If someone had compromised the Square Enix user database then it is very difficult to confirm this unless the company discloses it.

If their systems have a problem then it is likely that more people would have been affected. A google search for "Final Fantasy XIV ARR account suspension" came up with a lot hits.  One great example quotes "it looks like there have been waves of people getting hacked since launch":

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=7892;forum=1;msg=152733

So it appeared that I was not the only one suffering here.

I then discovered a recent news post from Square Enix warning users that they are seeing accounts compromised:

Currently, we have confirmed that a third party is using account names and passwords, thought to be obtained from security breaches of other companys' online services, in attempts to gain unauthorized access to Square Enix accounts.

If you are using the same account name or password as your Square Enix account on other online services, there is a much greater chance that a security breach at any of the other online services could potentially lead to your Square Enix account being compromised. source

I decided to try and follow the instructions in my breach notification email in the hope that their tech support team may see the error in their ways and provide great customer service and sort this out painlessly for me. How wrong I was.

I started by resetting my Square Enix account password - this was a fairly seamless process.  I then raised a support case.  I received any automated reply to my support case.

Seven days later, I finally received a response from a support person offering to open an investigation for me if I were to send them my date of birth, my email address and a copy of my passport or driver's license. I asked them to re-instate my account without me having to send private information to them just so they can investigate.  I was not comfortable sending my passport info to a company that clearly had issues with their security systems.

I get a reply another four days later saying they cannot help unless I identify myself. Meanwhile my one month of included subscription time has just expired and I was definitely not prepared to invest any more time and money with this organization.  While I understand their need to identify legitimate users, they clearly need to get their support and security systems sorted first.

For the record, my biggest issue here is with the slowness of their customer service team.  My second biggest issue is the fact that I paid money, had my account compromised and then had to wait long periods of time to get any help at all.  MMO accounts get compromised, especially those without a security token - but all I wanted to do was play the game for my first month to decide if I would continue with it - at which point I would have certainly attached a token to it.

I highly recommend you re-consider participating in any online products from Square Enix until they can prove that they have the skills to run a MMO.  Their lack of capacity planning, poor customer service and apparent security issues are the reasons I won't be going back to them in a hurry.  If you must play their games, be sure to add a security token to your account!

PS - Square Enix have been invited to comment

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The problem with Concord

I wrote that in highsec you must tank to enjoy the protection of Concord. Today we’ll see why it is a bad design.

EVE is (supposed to be) a PvP game. Yet, in highsec where the new players without outside connection start their life is punishing PvP. No, I don’t mean you’ll be Concorded for ganking. I mean that you are punished for trying to defend yourself. Every damage, damage projection or EWAR (except ECM) mod you put on your ship decreases your chance to win an encounter. If you did 99% damage to the enemy and Concord did just 1%, you did nothing, as Concord would have killed it in the exact same moment anyway. Your combat mods just wasted slots, PG and CPU for more useful modules, namely tanking. The optimal way of winning against a ganker is having just a whoring mod and max tank. This teaches new players against proper PvP fitting. In other words, Highsec is fundamentally different from all other zones and mastering Highsec mechanics gives you no help in other zones. It’s a common problem in MMOs: the leveling game is very different from the endgame.

The necessity of some Highsec anti-aggression mechanic is obvious: a new player (without external help) would be completely devastated without it. However this mechanic should help him defend himself instead of simply doing it for him, without his contribution. Teach them to fish instead of giving them fish! Also, the rigid barrier between lowsec and highsec should be changed. A 0.5 system is more similar to a 1.0 than to a 0.4 and this shouldn’t stay.

To fix it, let me suggest a much better Concord mechanic that applies to all of empire (1.0-0.1):

• If you attack someone without kill right, wardec, awox or him being criminal/suspect, you get GCC (currently in lowsec you only get suspect) the length of GCC varies with sec status, 2.5 mins for every 0.1 (so 2:30 in 0.1, 5 mins in 0.2 … 25 in 1.0).
• During GCC, unless you are in a pod, you are afflicted by “Concord beam”. This is the only NPC effect, there are no Concord or Faction Police ships (Faction Navy that responds to low faction standings stays)
• The Concord beam makes you unable to warp, dock, take a gate or jump
• The Concord beam places a beacon on you that anyone can warp to. The name of the beacon contains the name of the hull you are flying, for example “Criminal Catalyst”. There is a new interface element that informs you about crimes in the region you are in, so anti-criminals can quickly take gates to arrive to a crime location.
• Similarly to the incursion effect, the Concord beam decreases the damage of the afflicted player and his shield armor and hull resists. The decrease effect is 9% for every 0.1 sec status (so in 1.0 the ganker does 1/10 of his normal damage)
• Gate and station guns are not changed, which means greatly increased incoming DPS due to decreased player resists
• The only difference between highsec and lowsec is that you can’t cyno in 0.5 and above.

This new Concord mechanic wouldn’t kill an unlawful attacker but would make him significantly weaker, allowing the attacked party and whoever in system to fight against him when normally wouldn’t have a chance. This new mechanic would encourage players to defend themselves and each other. Having a group would be beneficial instead of just increased risk due to corp thefts, awoxes and wardecs. PvE ops would require support combat ships. This way a new player would learn to fight for himself and would be able to move lower and lower security systems as his abilities grow.

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A player can dream:

• Cruisers have “rapid” anti-frigate missiles
• In Rubicon battleships will get “rapid” anti-cruiser missiles
• Can Phoenix dreads get “rapid” anti-battleship missiles?

The moron of the day is without doubt Hitamino. He is a kind of white knight. I wrote "kind of" because he is way worse than ordinary white knights and his activity is mostly restricted to trolling. In this picture you can see him celebrating that the WGBWC member "ragelogged". 15 mins later, when GCC was up, his rage must have subsided because he relogged and finished the gank.

Let me share a miner story:

1. 3 Mackinaws, an Orca and an Obelisk are mining in a belt.
2. Bad gankers come, a Mack dies. Pod lives because mistakes were made.
3. 2 Mackinaws, a pod, an Orca and an Obelisk are mining in a belt.
4. Bad ganker comes, 1B pod dies.
5. 2 Mackinaws, an Orca and an Obelisk are mining in a belt.
6. Bad gankers come, a Mack and a 1B pod dies.
7. A Mackinaw, an Orca and an Obelisk are mining in a belt.
8. Bad gankers come, a Mack and a 2.3B pod dies.
9. An Orca and an Obelisk are still mining in a belt unless Team Security had time to process my report.

A beautiful anti-tear:
Wait, there are more anti-tears, this time in pastebin, local chat.

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The myth of the skilled, goodfight-seeking PvP-er

While no sane man would claim that pilot skill decides large engagement instead of strategic decisions, there is a claim that there are skilled, goodfight-seeking PvP-ers somewhere who fight in small gangs against worthy enemies and win via skill.

However when I posted that Mining barges are massacred in highsec, commenters were quick to remind that mining in the various zones is very different. 80-85% of mining happens in highsec, the rest in nullsec while WH and lowsec mining contribute by 1-2%. I guess the new interceptor changes will decrease nullsec mining significantly. Compared to the amount of mining, lot of ganks happen in lowsec and WH.

Killing a defenseless mining barge is ganking by definition and „no skill”. Besides the facts that I’m a 12 years old, fat, beaten, gay, virgin boy with no friends, the mining community informed me that I have no skill and the only reason I’m in highsec is that I don’t have what it takes to fight in low/null/WH. But if the failures like myself are all in highsec, who ganked the miners into extinction in lowsec? I mean, a skilled PvP-er looking for goodfights would surely not waste his time or sink so low to pad his killboard with a barge gank!

Ganking in highsec is harder than anywhere else, as Concord will arrive to blow you up and faction police chases you. You have to get a good warpin and kill the target in a small timeframe. In other zones you can just roam the belts in a 100 DPS Rifter and kill even a Skiff all by yourself.

The point is that the other zones are full of gankers who can gank easier. They hunted lowsec and WH miners into extinction and hit the null miners hard. While they fancy themselves to be “skilled PvP-ers”, they do exactly what I do: gank. If you have mining barges, haulers and other unarmed ships on your killboard, you are just as much a ganker as I am. Except I destroy 10-100x more ISK than you in a month, due to less competition. After all a catalyst dual gank needs much more skill than just roaming the belts in a Rifter.

Of course I cannot claim that everyone outside of highsec is such. There can be “real PvP-ers” who ignore barges, exhumers, haulers, cyno frigs, shuttles, travel-fit capitals and only engage in “good fights”. Maybe you are one of them. However we can be sure that these “real PvP-ers” are a tiny minority: if they were a significant group, they would exterminate the lowly, skill-less, pathetic gankers who sink to my level and attack mining barges.

So next time before you’d comment about “real PvP”, look at your own killboard. If there are unarmed ships on it, you aren’t less of a ganker than me. You are probably less successful ganker though! You have two options:

• Start a new life and from now on don’t gank and only engage in good fights, earning the status of “real PvP-er” that you now talk about without merit
• Come out of the closet and embrace what you are: a ganker who kills weak and defenseless ships. If you want to do it well, destroying dozens of billions of ISK, my corp is waiting for you

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The anti-tear of today is this beautiful sight:

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Do you want to make history or do you want to mess with people?

"Goal oriented vs competitive", "rational vs social", "morons and slackers". Terms I tried to introduce, explain, defend in numerous posts. Definitions, theories, walls of text. What I really missed is a simple, obvious classification that doesn't need reading my whole blog. While re-reading an old saved TEST forum, a commenter gave it to me:

Do you want to make history or do you want to mess with people?
That's it. Not perfect, not accurate, not scientific. But trivial and everyone can answer it. What do you want? Make something to change or make someone mad. That's the question that everyone in your alliance must answer the same way for it to function. There is no "wrong" answer, but everyone must answer the same.

No, you can't have both. To make someone mad, you have to do something that he didn't expect. Like guy peacefully mines and then bang, Catalysts. To make something to change, you have to do the very opposite: make him understand that things can't go on the same way. Make him expect that doing the old thing won't end well. If a reinforced TCU dies when the timer is up, no one gets mad, because that's the normal way of things. If the TCU dies out of the blue, because a rogue director dropped sov, people get mad. But it won't last, as we saw in the N3 sov drop.

You want a ratter to get mad? Gank him! You want him to go away? Put an AFK-cloaker in his system!
Want an alliance mad? Camp their undock with Tornadoes! Want them go away? Grind down their Sov!
Want a trader get mad? Sell his stuff for a day at loss, he'll be scared that the price crashes for a long time. Want him to stop making profits? Sell the stuff for long time at little profit!
Want to make a solo PvP-er rage? Set up a trap with a pointing-webbing-cyno Mackinaw. Want him to disappear? Dock up every time he enters the system!
Want to laugh on freighter gankers? Get an armor booster fleetmate and Full Slaves for your Obelisk and haul 10B once. Don't want to be ganked? Never haul more than 1B!

Things change when people are no longer mad, but accepted the new status quo. The two goals need totally opposite approach and mindset. Trying both will make you fail badly. Make up your mind!

I guess this is why highsec gankers during almost a decade of ganking couldn't change the behavior of miners: they hit out of the blue, laughed and went on their merry way. Via announcing kills on local and sending explanatory mails I want the opposite: to make miners get used to gankers and don't try to just outlast them but adopt.

Finally a clarification on "making history": you made history if you changed the way people play and not if you climbed to the top in an existing structure. You and your team winning the next alliance tournament would not change anything, we already known that the best team will win it. If it's you, congratulations, your mum will be proud! Examples of history-making changes:

• The emerge of the blob: individually "bad at EVE" players outnumbering and swarming down "elite"
• Hulkageddon and Burn Jita: bringing violence where was none before into the lives of those who believed to be out of its reach.
• The recent fall of moon-based economics and rise of renter-based ones

The change I want to make is the end of the "best EVE ship is friendship" doctrine. People desperately want to be in corps because they assume to be lost and hopeless without them. Hence the existence of completely dysfunctional highsec corps and the famous Goon recruitment scams. I want the people to live by the doctrine: "I can get ISK or kills easily on my own, corps are only social clubs on the way and not something I desperately need". If you want to be part of this fundamental change, join!

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Let me introduce the moron of the day, he made a long series of mistakes to gain this noble position:

• He was mining with a Mackinaw-Orca combo. This is dumb as the Mackinaw is known for its large ore hold. If you stand next to your Orca, use a Hulk for yield or Skiff against ganks!
• His Mack wasn't even tanked against 2 Catas.
• He was mining in the system where I had already slain several Rets.
• He went suspect with the Orca to remote shield boost the Mack. Since he started it instantly, I did not commit the second Cata, warped it home.
• He did not warp out with the Orca, but continued mining with a flashy yellow Orca. Of course he was safe from my ganker as the faction police would kill me if I stay long enough to kill an Orca. My scout and looter can't shoot. But my main Gevlon Goblin had some level 2-3 missile skills which he used on the Sister Epic Arc. So I logged in, purchased a combat like fit to my transport Tengu and took 5 gates from Jita to the yellow Orca.
• While I was shooting the Orca, he undocked a Drake and suicide ganked my Tengu. Shields down to 98%, Drake died of course.
• The Orca died. I warped in a ganker at the end to grab the pod, but he instawarped. That's the only thing he did well today.
• After all these, he got a new Orca, and went back in the same system to keep on mining. With the same 2-Cata gankable Mack.
• Since he didn't want to go suspect this time, he saw no reason to be at the keyboard. Bye pod!

Finally let's see an illustration of the power of AFK-cloaking white knights:

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Dangerous lands for Mackinaws

Yesterday I started discussing how the safety of highsec works: via tanking the ganker damage long enough till Concord arrive. The conclusion was that those who don't tank are better off outside of higsec since they will die anyway if someone sneezes on them, doesn't matter where they are. Many commenters claimed that highsec is still safer for miners. Instead of speculations I looked up the Mackinaw losses on the killboard. I checked a full week between September 30 and October 6. 357 Mackinaws died in this week, about 70B worth of loss. Where did they die?

Oops! It seems 0.5-0.7 systems are the worst place to be for Mackinaws while 0.8+ systems are pretty safe. While this data is old, the trends are probably the same: "@CCP_Diagoras 10 May 12: Mining numbers! Average mined per day for the 7 days before escalation: High (2.7bn m3), Low (9.3m m3), Null (696m m3), WH (97.7m m3)." This means that there must be 300x more mining barges in highsec than in low and 6x more than in null. Compared to this, they die a lot. Tomorrow we see what that means.

However there is little explanation (besides stupidity) that miners insist to put their Macks to 0.5-0.6 where they are massacred.

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The moron of the day had a covetor. No, he isn't moron for his pod. Nor there is a funny story how he died. He just mined in a covetor and died. That's all.

Random local chat anti-tears and miner-related fun:

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If you don't tank in highsec, you are wrong!

I often get the comment that tanking your mining (hauling, missioning) ship isn’t the only option. They claim there are two other options:

• good piloting: aligning out, watching Dscan and local, marking known gankers and so on
• replacement: simply earn enough income to be able to write down gank losses as operational costs

They are wrong. Not because their options couldn’t result higher income/hour than tanking. They are wrong because tanking is the only option that benefits from the existence of Concord. Concord responds to aggression and destroys the attackers. You need to be tanked enough to live until this happens. If you choose not to be tanked, you forfeit the assistance of Concord.

However if you do so, why are you in highsec? The ore, the mission rewards, the drops and the bounties are the worst in highsec. You can get more of all of these in lowsec, nullsec or WH space. How do you protect yourself from being destroyed in these Concord-less zones? By good piloting or replacement!

If you believe in good piloting or accepting and replacing your losses, you are wrong to be in highsec! Leave it and get much better results without doing anything differently! The only valid reason to be in highsec is enjoying Concord protection! However to do so, you must be tanked.

So anyone who did not tank his ship in highsec is wrong. Tomorrow we explore this from another angle.

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Speaking of Concord, a moron of the weekend contender met them. He was baiting aggression by being suspect on the ice belt. Which was a mess itself with various parties ganking. Probably he also lost counting who he can shoot and who he can't. This is why you shouldn't set your safety red, unless you explicitly go for suicide ganking. Who got the ice then? The Skiffs and Procurers of course:
The weekend was nice and provided several morons, it was hard to pick. The above GCC 1.5B Tengu was a strong contender, but what Inquisitor Reyalstob found is unbeatable: a covops frig. Decloaked. AFK. On the Sun. With this pod.

The anti-tear of today:

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The myth of "skill"

PvP-ers agree that there is no “skill” in ganking miners. However there is a problem: there is no skill in other forms of EVE PvP either (except for Alliance Tournaments). No, it’s not my opinion. It’s the opinion of everyone. I mean, there wasn’t a single PvP engagement in the ten years of EVE Online where the defeated side said “you were better, congratulations!” They always say “blobbing”, “outshipping”, “baiting”, “awox” or other form of unfair fight. There isn’t anyone in EVE who ever acknowledged the skill of the one who defeated him (again, outside of AT).

Seriously, is there anyone who says that CFC won 6VDT because the individual pilots were more skilled? Not even CFC does that. Or the PL supers with the Revenant were massacred because the BL pilots were outclassing them in piloting their dreads? No, even BL accepts that it was due to the awox of the PL FC. Is there any skill in assigning drones and going AFK?

PvP games, both on the computer (like League of Legends) and offline (like boxing) have a very strict ruleset that always determine the equal number of opponents, equal resources and playfield. They all limit the weapons/moves available (if you kick, or even if the weight of your gloves is a few grams off, you can’t box). Deviation from these rules leads to immediate bans/disqualifications. Only by these very strict rules can you guarantee that the outcome depends only on player skill.

Because of lack of these rules, the engagements in EVE are always ganks. An all-seeing GM can perfectly tell who will win the engagement before it happens. What you do in the engagement might affect the exact kill:death ratio, but victory or defeat is decided before the first shot. On the other hand no one can tell who will win the next AT, exactly because the conditions are equal and the player skill will decide the outcome.

The “PvP-ers” who look down on the “gankers” are self-deceiving liars. Their slogan “try shooting something that can shoot back” is a joke, since the PL supers with the Revenant are something that usually preys on capitals. But on that engagement they were baited at a hostile POS with their hard counter under the command of an awoxer. The TEST fleet in 6VDT was probably one of the strongest fleets EVE has ever seen. Yet they had zero chance to win because all POS-es were in CFC hands and CFC was on grid first. While both examples were considered very strong in general, in those circumstances they didn’t have more chance to win than a mining barge.

Of course setting up the trap for PL or the moon control for 6VDT weren’t random acts. They were planned by someone and this someone displayed skill. However this guy is an FC/mildir guy and not a pilot. He probably wasn’t even on grid. Claiming that there is no skill in EVE would be a joke. But this is a skill of generals, planners, politicians. But how is a gank-planner different from them? He found a weaker enemy, designed a hard-counter doctrine and trained pilots to do the footwork.

In EVE there is no such thing as “PvP skill”. No one acknowledges your skill (besides your blues) and it’s easy to prove that any engagements were decided by other factors (numbers, ship types, trap). The point isn’t that a “real PvP” pilot isn’t more skilled than me. The point is that he isn’t more skilled than the miner I gank. Or the rats the miner shoots. After all the “lock up hostile, activate guns” is exactly what the belt rat, the BL dread pilot or the CFC mega pilot does.

Of course people say that there is skill in hidden places like certain wormholes and lowsec parts where "good fights" can be found. The problem with this is indeed its hidden nature. If I'd go down to lowsec and kill ships, would that mean I found these hidden good fights and won, proving my skill? Or would it just mean that I was lucky and caught some noobs who were farming sec status tags? In lack of tournament or even a commonly accepted place for these "skill fights", no one can verify or falsify the claim that by winning a certain PvP engagement one displayed this mythical skill.

The other common claim is "awesome PvP videos". The problem with them is repeatability. There are several videos where some newbie golf player hit the ball into the hole from the first hit. Does it mean that they are awesome golf players? No, it was pure luck. If you sit a monkey down before EVE and wait enough time, he will make you an awesome PvP video. Of course in 99.99% of the time it loses. But what do we know about the win-loss-retreat ratio of Rooks and Kings or Rote Kapelle? Nothing. We only see the engagements when they made something awesome.

In absence of strict PvP rules, EVE isn’t a skill game. EVE is a strategy game. Anyone claiming to have “skill” demonstrates that he has no skill in the strategy part that matters.

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The anti tear of today was provided by the audience in the local channel:

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