Few days ago a member of our corp invited me into a fleet to kill a really tanked, blinged miner. Taking 8 jumps when you are -10 and your fittings are in an Orca isn’t instant. Waiting for another guy took more time. “Oh I have no insta on this station”, “Who can fly a Thrasher” and so on and so on. More time. Needless to say, the miner docked up after trolling in local.
This is the very reason why I built the whole campaign on the concept of the solo ganker. Catching that miner would have been nice. But for that chance we wasted the certain kills of several simpler ones.
You know your own limitations and can count on them. You won’t travel several jumps just to realize that you can’t fly a Thrasher. You won’t accidently notice that your fitting isn’t available. And if you do, you only held up your own dumb self, and not other people. I’ve seen enough wasted time and stupid fails in the New Order, I don’t want to recreate them.
But again, the main problem isn’t that cooperating needs time to learn. The problem is that even if the kill is successful, it cost too much in opportunity costs. Killing an Orca with the cooperation of 3 people running 5 pilots using an hour looks awesome. A 800M kill + a 500M pod yay! Except, if the same pilots would use this time to gank alone, and find nothing but average, lame Retrievers with totally average pods, they would have 5*2*(35+83) = 1.2B kills. Yes, the most basic ganking activity, killing noob retrievers provides almost as good results as an “Oh my God, Orca”.
People often ignore opportunity costs. The comment “Goons can gank in T1 catas or grind regions in Bombers because they have the menpower” is plaguing my blog. An activity always have an opportunity costs, even if you don’t care about ISK. OK, 15 mins you spend on GCC doesn’t cost 10M ISK because you wouldn’t be ratting anyway. But you could gank another target, so the cost of 10 Goons ganking the same Mack in 0.7 costs the not ganking of 5 Macks they could gank in pairs if they had a T2 Cata, skills to fly it and knowledge to pull the gank. The opportunity cost of a fleet Orca kill is a bunch of not killed solo Rets.
The key of my mindblowing 130B/month solo-dualbox kills isn’t doing something mindblowing. It’s the very opposite, doing as simple as easy form of ganking as possible: killing readily available mining barges en masse. Sometimes the best solution is the most lame and obvious. You can literally get more kill value grinding noobs in Rets than hunting down a Titan. Fun fact: if the 258 “bl” (Black Legion, but without capitals) pilots who were involved in the fight trying to kill Makalu’s titan and spent 4 hours there had went ganking Rets instead, with lame 2 ganks/hour ratio, they’d have 250B kills. And they’d still have their supercarriers.
Oh, and the miner who got away? The next day I found the fool mining in the same system in a blinged Hulk. It seems he only used that tanked Mack when gankers were about, otherwise he went for yield. I didn’t even need a Talos, a pair of T2 Catas finished him and his 2.2B pod.
The morons of the day aren't just doing something completely useless: camping the wreck of the miner in the empty ore belt, but they are doing so in a pretty numerous fleet to maximize the wasted time.
This is the very reason why I built the whole campaign on the concept of the solo ganker. Catching that miner would have been nice. But for that chance we wasted the certain kills of several simpler ones.
You know your own limitations and can count on them. You won’t travel several jumps just to realize that you can’t fly a Thrasher. You won’t accidently notice that your fitting isn’t available. And if you do, you only held up your own dumb self, and not other people. I’ve seen enough wasted time and stupid fails in the New Order, I don’t want to recreate them.
But again, the main problem isn’t that cooperating needs time to learn. The problem is that even if the kill is successful, it cost too much in opportunity costs. Killing an Orca with the cooperation of 3 people running 5 pilots using an hour looks awesome. A 800M kill + a 500M pod yay! Except, if the same pilots would use this time to gank alone, and find nothing but average, lame Retrievers with totally average pods, they would have 5*2*(35+83) = 1.2B kills. Yes, the most basic ganking activity, killing noob retrievers provides almost as good results as an “Oh my God, Orca”.
People often ignore opportunity costs. The comment “Goons can gank in T1 catas or grind regions in Bombers because they have the menpower” is plaguing my blog. An activity always have an opportunity costs, even if you don’t care about ISK. OK, 15 mins you spend on GCC doesn’t cost 10M ISK because you wouldn’t be ratting anyway. But you could gank another target, so the cost of 10 Goons ganking the same Mack in 0.7 costs the not ganking of 5 Macks they could gank in pairs if they had a T2 Cata, skills to fly it and knowledge to pull the gank. The opportunity cost of a fleet Orca kill is a bunch of not killed solo Rets.
The key of my mindblowing 130B/month solo-dualbox kills isn’t doing something mindblowing. It’s the very opposite, doing as simple as easy form of ganking as possible: killing readily available mining barges en masse. Sometimes the best solution is the most lame and obvious. You can literally get more kill value grinding noobs in Rets than hunting down a Titan. Fun fact: if the 258 “bl” (Black Legion, but without capitals) pilots who were involved in the fight trying to kill Makalu’s titan and spent 4 hours there had went ganking Rets instead, with lame 2 ganks/hour ratio, they’d have 250B kills. And they’d still have their supercarriers.
Oh, and the miner who got away? The next day I found the fool mining in the same system in a blinged Hulk. It seems he only used that tanked Mack when gankers were about, otherwise he went for yield. I didn’t even need a Talos, a pair of T2 Catas finished him and his 2.2B pod.
The morons of the day aren't just doing something completely useless: camping the wreck of the miner in the empty ore belt, but they are doing so in a pretty numerous fleet to maximize the wasted time.
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