What went wrong with my ganking project? In one word: altruism.
It did not offer anything to the gankers in it. It did not give anything to me either as a ganker. It was started as an ambitious goal to change highsec. Had it succeeded it would still not give anything to the participants. The winners would have been those players who had learn the basics of ship fitting and the philosophy behind ganks (padding killboard), removing tears and easy targets from highsec.
Every action has opportunity cost. An hour spent ganking is an hour not spent trading. Since I've completely closed down my highsec trading for this project, it cost me more than 100B in opportunity cost. Other gankers also sacrificed some of their income for it. We got nothing for this money, just the thought that we might make something lasting in EVE, which is marketed exactly as the game where you can make difference. It was enough for me. Wasn't enough for them.
Am I somehow special to have more plans than simply fill my coffers and pad my killboard? Note: the best way to have a good personal killboard is not ganking, but whoring on blob kills. Those N3/PL pilots who were on the BL supercapital trap all got 7-800B kills in October. Practically if you were in NC. and you cared to log in, you got it, while NC. itself just had 1.45T in October. Are other people are OK with only personal goals? While most people are not on this level, claiming to be alone would be ridiculous when anyone can list names like Sindel Pellion, Chribba, there are people who spend lot of time teaching in E-UNI, those who caught SOMER doing RMT and so on. The problem is that these people obviously have different vision about what's right and what difference should be made. I never joined any of the mentioned guys for their goals, why should anyone join my goal?
Compare this with the blog which just passed 6 million visitors, individual pageviews focused on trading advices, the Undergeared project (back in WoW, WotLK I proved that the game went way too easy by doing endgame raiding in beginner gear) and the evidences that World of Tanks rigs the battles. Why does my blogging works if my ganking did not? Because it is a solo project. The blog needs no one but me. I can keep going if not a single man on the planet supports me. The ganking project needed other people to both agree with me and to be ready to do volunteer work for the idea. Now this intersection of groups proved to be too small.
There are two ways out of it: one is moving to ideas that are more mainstream. The Angel Project is a good example, it collects donations for newbies. Most people consider it a noble act. Anyone who had altruism in himself could easily find the project supportable. The other option is to make the next project non-altruist. If the participants are paid, everyone who can agree with the project can join without losing something. Hell, people who don't agree first can join for the money. This is what many commenters suggested with the ganking project too: pay the gankers in form of ships, transportation or whatever. Now, in an hour an average guy can earn about 30M ISK. A mediocre ganker can take out about 150M. So for every ISK ganked, I have to pay 0.2ISK "salary" (in some form). So to reach 2T ganks, I need to pay 400B ISK a month. I don't have that ISK. The only way if the project itself pays. If I could figure out a way to get the money as loot from the ganked miners, I would have an army under me already. But there is none, by design.
The limitation of altruism is the amount of people who both agree with a goal and willing to donate resources. A business-based idea on the other hand is self-paying. Whatever I do next, it must pay for itself.
It did not offer anything to the gankers in it. It did not give anything to me either as a ganker. It was started as an ambitious goal to change highsec. Had it succeeded it would still not give anything to the participants. The winners would have been those players who had learn the basics of ship fitting and the philosophy behind ganks (padding killboard), removing tears and easy targets from highsec.
Every action has opportunity cost. An hour spent ganking is an hour not spent trading. Since I've completely closed down my highsec trading for this project, it cost me more than 100B in opportunity cost. Other gankers also sacrificed some of their income for it. We got nothing for this money, just the thought that we might make something lasting in EVE, which is marketed exactly as the game where you can make difference. It was enough for me. Wasn't enough for them.
Am I somehow special to have more plans than simply fill my coffers and pad my killboard? Note: the best way to have a good personal killboard is not ganking, but whoring on blob kills. Those N3/PL pilots who were on the BL supercapital trap all got 7-800B kills in October. Practically if you were in NC. and you cared to log in, you got it, while NC. itself just had 1.45T in October. Are other people are OK with only personal goals? While most people are not on this level, claiming to be alone would be ridiculous when anyone can list names like Sindel Pellion, Chribba, there are people who spend lot of time teaching in E-UNI, those who caught SOMER doing RMT and so on. The problem is that these people obviously have different vision about what's right and what difference should be made. I never joined any of the mentioned guys for their goals, why should anyone join my goal?
Compare this with the blog which just passed 6 million visitors, individual pageviews focused on trading advices, the Undergeared project (back in WoW, WotLK I proved that the game went way too easy by doing endgame raiding in beginner gear) and the evidences that World of Tanks rigs the battles. Why does my blogging works if my ganking did not? Because it is a solo project. The blog needs no one but me. I can keep going if not a single man on the planet supports me. The ganking project needed other people to both agree with me and to be ready to do volunteer work for the idea. Now this intersection of groups proved to be too small.
There are two ways out of it: one is moving to ideas that are more mainstream. The Angel Project is a good example, it collects donations for newbies. Most people consider it a noble act. Anyone who had altruism in himself could easily find the project supportable. The other option is to make the next project non-altruist. If the participants are paid, everyone who can agree with the project can join without losing something. Hell, people who don't agree first can join for the money. This is what many commenters suggested with the ganking project too: pay the gankers in form of ships, transportation or whatever. Now, in an hour an average guy can earn about 30M ISK. A mediocre ganker can take out about 150M. So for every ISK ganked, I have to pay 0.2ISK "salary" (in some form). So to reach 2T ganks, I need to pay 400B ISK a month. I don't have that ISK. The only way if the project itself pays. If I could figure out a way to get the money as loot from the ganked miners, I would have an army under me already. But there is none, by design.
The limitation of altruism is the amount of people who both agree with a goal and willing to donate resources. A business-based idea on the other hand is self-paying. Whatever I do next, it must pay for itself.
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