The sad fate of vulture-heroes

The New Order calls those who attack the Knights "vultures". This came from what they are doing: whoring on Catalyst kill reports and stealing from wrecks. They don't really look like someone who means to stop the New Order, but someone who wants to leech some ISK, kills and fun on the side.

Since I moved away from the main New Order fleet to fight AFK-leeching alone, I learned much about these "vultures". Obviously no one would try to leech on a single player. Sitting in an ice belt with whoring guns where 10+ Knights operate can net you lot of kills. Camping a single one? Not really. Yet I have lot of personal "vultures". They are busy camping the station I'm in. They try to camp my scout, figuring out where the gank will take place. They organize in local and above all, they don't stop despite their poor results. They are really motivated, ready to camp for hours.

It took some time to realize that they aren't vultures. They can't care less about the loot or that few kills, hell many of them don't even upload kills. They want to stop me from doing "evil" and want to protect the "innocent". Just like in WoW, the morons and slackers are supported by a group of socials who believe in friendship, niceness and helping the weak. They are random people in the system who are upset that someone "griefs" the "little guys" so they go and grab whatever combat-looking things they have in the hangar and go to fight. They are so unsuccessful that they were misidentified for killpad whores and thieves. They aren't even recognized as a threat. Why?

The key to their failure - as always - has nothing to do with gaming skill, though the lack of it plays a part for making them a comedy. But even if the best PvP-ers would come to highsec to save the AFK-miners they wouldn't fare better. The reason is simple: to win, they must defeat me. I don't have to defeat them. I just have to defeat an AFK mining barge to win. This theme appears many ways:

• They have to find me. They have to scout multiple systems and stations. For my scout they have to scour the belts and even finding him can be a decoy, maybe the target is already bookmarked in another belt. On the other hand all I have to find an AFK mining barge. That goes as "warp to random belt, hit dscan for nearby belts, bingo".
• They have to catch me. I have instas, I have safes, I have an Orca so I can rebase without taking gates in Catalysts. They have to be quick, they have to set up traps, they have to have the right ships and they must avoid being spotted. Compare it with the task of "catching" a barge that is standing still for half an hour or more.
• I have full control over the time. As AFK barges always present themselves, I can undock for a gank any time I wish. They obviously can only catch me when I undock. If a situation is too risky, I don't take it, there will be another target for me in a minute or two. I often "AFK-cloak" them, by keeping the ganker+scout logged in while I'm working, sleeping or doing household chores. They can't know if I'm going to undock in the next minute, so they must keep camping. In the morning I look at the local chat and giggle on them writing "I think he is AFK" 3 hours after I went to bed.
• They take risks, I don't. Due to the rules of suicide gank, my ship is lost in the second I take GCC. Since I'm going to take GCC, I undock with being sure that my ship will not return. The question is only if the target dies or not? I obviously undock something I don't mind to lose, so losing my ship to them can be annoying, but definitely not a loss I'm unprepared for. However if they make some mistake, they can easily end up with serious losses like this one who lost his ship and his 1.2B pod.
• My victory is sweeter than theirs. If they win, all they have to show off is a 6-12M Catalyst kill. Very rarely a 40M podkill. If I win, I have a 50-250M ship kill and very often a pod around 50M.

Because of these, they have so small chances that they became a comedy on the minerbumping channel. They can't hinder our operations and only frustrate themselves. Does it mean that the miners are without hope? Absolutely not. Everything that I wrote in vulture-ganker relation is true in the ganker-miner relation. It's equally hard to find a particular miner, he can avoid the warpin by simple orbiting, he can control when he is vulnerable, the ganker risks a very embarrassing loss report to a barge and he can tank his ship making the gankers losses higher than his. The ganker is equally hopeless against a miner as the vulture is against the ganker. The only reason why ganking is alive is that the gank victims are morons and as slackers as one can theoretically be in a computer game: AFK.

The vultures should stop trying to protect AFK-ers who are unworthy of support. Since EVE doesn't have welfare like WoW, they will learn it the hard way: they will fail and their efforts won't even be thanked by the miners, since it's hard to thank anything while AFK.

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Happy birthday to me

1 year ago I started playing EVE Online.
As in EVE you gain skillpoints by real time, character age is an important factor in power. Therefore in EVE a few months old player is considered a newbie while an average game takes less time than this to complete and forget. In EVE you can't farm skillpoints by active play, you can only increase the acquisition rate by clever remaps and implants. You can also have more than one accounts specialized in different tasks. Luckily the official RMT of EVE is trading game time for game currency. If you are good in the game, you can get your play funded by less successful players. Thanks to this, I pay-by-PLEX for 12 accounts.

5 of them are supercarrier pilots in training, I intend to sell them as a passive income. Trading characters are legal in EVE, as long as it's done for game currency. One account is played by my girlfriend who is mainly playing WoW but spends some time in EVE and I hope she eventually switches to EVE. Now let's see my own 6 accounts:

1. • Gevlon Goblin, my "main". This pilot earns the most money and does what I - as a player - identify with: trading. Like most newbies, I managed to spend both bonus remaps, but luckily they weren't that bad. The reason why Gevlon has so many skillpoints in Spaceship Command is that I learned all of them in a P/W remap and I don't see learning any more. You can see lack of gunnery, missiles, drones, because Gevlon doesn't fly combat ships, but freighter, Orca, transport Tengu. I will never leave the best corporation of EVE: the NPC corp. Besides trading and hauling I can research blueprints and now learning for manufacturig/refining. 15.0M SP, +5 implants, 8 Int, 6 M, remap up in 2 weeks
     
   • Hek trader: she got much less attention than Gevlon, she just traded in Hek and lacks the ability to undock practically anything. Now that the important skills on this account are completed, she'll learn to fly a covops frig and train the needed skills for researching blueprints.
     2.9M SP, +3 implants, 10 Int, 8 M, 1 bonus remap
   • Cindy Sasen: scout and covops pilot, one of those who took part in my nullsec adventure. Now mostly out of work, so got skillpoints for blueprint research and spends her time in a lowsec research station.
     3.9M SP, +4 implants, 10 Int, 8 M, 1 bonus remap
2. There are 3 pilots on this account, who are more or less clones: Amarr, Dodixie and Rens trader. They all have trading skills and good standings with their home stations. 2 already can, 1 will be able to research blueprints. 1 can, 2 will be able to fly cloaked. 1 can, 2 will have manufacturing ability. None of them can, but all of them will be able to fly freighter and Orca. On this front the latest devblog made some mess. Learning an Orca will be much easier after the summer expansion while learning a freighter will be harder, as it replaces the useful Racial industrial 5 (covops hauler) with the useless Advanced spaceship command 5 skills. So I have to turn their plans upside down, learn freighters now, wait with Orca. They will all have transport Tengus too, so there is filler for waiting. Their future is clear: they will live in their hubs, trade, research, maybe manufacture. One of them has near-perfect planet skills to practice PI.5.9M, 4.6M, 8.4M SP, +4 implants all
   
3. This account is the home of Titania Goblin, the other char involved in my nullsec visit. She flied logi during the capture of three regions, took part in the largest supercapital battle of 2012 and trains for carriers. Which will have to wait of course since the new skill system will make that easier. Her future is currently blurry as I don't know when will I return to null. I learned that as long as it's a money sink and people are there altruistically, "for fun", I have no place there. So she'll only fly again if nullsec industry will be fixed and there will be economic incentive to live in null. 16.4M SP, +5 implants, 10 Perc, 4 Will, 1 bonus remap
   While she's waiting, a new character took residence in this account: Botslayer Goblin, the busy Knight of the New Order. There are way too many morons and slackers polluting highsec in their untanked mining barges. They refuse to put on tank or use Skiff because of their yield. This is exactly as smart as ratting with a supercarrier: sure, it's the best ISK/hour way of ratting, but it won't last long. The skill queue now includes various gunnery 5s to increase the current 620 DPS a bit. After their completion I will learn Destroyers and battlecruiser 5 with cruiser 3 for all races to get the free skillpoints. I will fly a Talos soon to handle the harder nuts that a Catalyst can't break. 2.7M SP, +3 implants, 10 Perc, 4 Will, 1 bonus remap
   
4. Rorka Goblin, my original nullsec industrialist, who is now the trader and scout for the New Order. Rorka is in Cha/Will remap, learning mining boosting and trading skills. He is mostly flying an Orca that I learned in this remap because needed it now: it carries the gank equipment needed, so Botslayer doesn't have to take gates. Rorka also flies a Procurer to scout. My dreams of nullsec industry aren't dead, but they are indeed foggy. 15.2M SP, +5 implants, 10 Cha, 4 Will, 1 bonus remap
   
5. Ragnarok pilot. The weirdest of my characters and the one I refused to change after my nullsec journey ended. He keeps learning and will have a gunless Ragnarok titan some day. Currently in Cha/Will remap, maxing out all the fleet booster skills except mining. The Int part is over, including JDC5. While it is maybe foolish to stick to this plan, I can afford it. And I can definitely not buy such pilot on the bazaar if the tide turns. 15.2M SP, +5 implants, 10 Cha, 4 Will, 1 bonus remap
   
6. The first pilot on this account was learning for a Moros dreadnought and progressed pretty well, was the first to complete his training. 13.5M SP, +5 implants, 10 Perc, 4 Will, 1 bonus remap
   However as my focus changed, a newcomer arrived to this account: Botmuncher Goblin, a secondary ganker. No, I'm not planning to do dualbox-gank, I just want to skip waiting for GCC. He will only learn Catalyst skills, no point or need to climb higher.

What did I do during this year? Mostly this: (the measured quantity is billion ISK gained due trading. It would be my asset if I wouldn't spend on various non-trading projects)

How did I celebrate this event? By destroying AFK-ers and bots! I created a new warehouse in Mesybier and devastated the surroundings.

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The "little guy" bullshit

The EVE blogosphere has a new, extremely annoying theme: "the little guy can't compete". Two probable CSM candidates, Mynnna and Jester are already on the bandwagon.

The story goes as "the space (sov-null, C5-6s) is already taken by large players and newcomers can't compete". Of course like every bullshit debate, it has two equally wrong sides, one claims that CCP should make the mechanics supporting coexistence of alliances of various sizes while the other claims that newcomers should take space by fire, the same way Goons took from BoB and TEST did from SoCo.

The debate is even more wrong than the non-consensual PvP one. The reason for it is that neither the large power actors, nor the small, weak alliances are guys. The pilots are players. The corporations and alliances are not.

Now, if players who started after 2008 would all be in highsec as all nullsec alliances would be veteran-only who don't take them, we'd have a problem to debate. But as long as a few weeks old players can join practically every color existing on the map, there is no problem. Due to the purposefully messed up economy of EVE nullsec, the only resource on this theater is players. Nullsec is a place where you spend the money you PLEX-ed or earned on your highsec alts. The more land you have, the more you have to spend. For this reason, an upcoming alliance with more players can always take land from an existing one with less.

The reason why no upcoming alliances break into the map is simply that they suck and players choose not to join them. When you say "X corp is struggling against Y", it doesn't mean that players in X are in trouble and need help from CCP. It means that the leadership of X is crap and the members are better off without them. Demanding CCP to help "small alliances" is actually demanding help for a handful of bossy nerds to become more pixel-important, to force players to be their minions.

SoCo - once home to 20K+ players - crumbled and disappeared without a trace. Does it mean 20K+ players lost the game and forced to quit or reroll as newbies? Of course not. Most of them are living in the same stations, just under different colors. Hell, Makalu himself, the de facto leader of SoCo found a new home in Pandemic Legion and soon will happily hotdrop the same ratters as before and can yell "you don't talk back to PL" to the same blues. Of course some corp and alliance leaders lost their power. But who cares about failed bossy nerds?

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Business Thursday: Skillbooks

The skillbook market is probably the one that most trader started their career. The reason for that is skillbooks are widely needed and not replaceable. Practically every pilot will buy the Gunnery skillbook.

If everyone does it, isn't it full? No, because we move on. Skillbooks don't provide stellar profit and pretty laborious. I'd rather consider it hauling than real trading, but exactly because of that, very young newbies can start it. All you need is a frigate with inertia stabilizers and 20-30M capital. Based on availability, there are several kinds of skillbooks:

• Unlimited: these ones are the worst, every school station has hundreds of it. While you can haul them to a hub, usually the margin is pitiful. It's a business for large capital, low time traders who get thousands of it at once and sell them for below 1% profit.
• Limited stock: my dear Logistics skillbook, the one that I collected in my youth. These books are sold by a small number and if you buy them out, the next batch will be expensive. So you can't buy a billion worth of it, you have to hop around in stations and buy a few at once. Sometimes you have to go to other regions for it. It's practically running courier missions, except for the much higher profit.
• Region specific: Amarr Dreadnought skillbook can only be purchased in Amarr space. There are lot of others like that too. So you stock up and go to the hub of the other races and sell.
• LP store/drop: Nanite Control and co. You need to set up both buy and sell orders for them, station trading them normally.
• Newbie: these are given out as mission rewards in the newbie systems. These aren't expensive but you can have large profit % on them, duplicating your little capital fast. Of course this market is limited by the number of newbies. You set up buy orders in school systems and haul them to hubs.

Skillbooks don't seem much, but they are a good entry to anyone starting his trading career. Don't ignore them!

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The false debate on non-consensual PvP

This isn't a large post, yet a very important one which hopefully ends the "is non-consensual PvP is good for a game or not" dabate? No it's not a decisive argument in either way. It's decisive in a sense that the question itself is wrong and shouldn't be asked.

In a game, always a pixel avatar does things against your pixel avatar. In EVE a spaceship comes to blow up your spaceship. Or your spaceship goes to blow up that spaceship. During combat various modules are activated and at the end usually one spaceship blows ups. Does it make any difference if that other spaceship is player controlled or not?

Actually, if the game companies wouldn't make special tools to identify player characters, we couldn't even know. Imagine that there would be no local channel and the name of the pilot wouldn't show up on the overview. You would only see a Merlin or a Retriever or an Erebus. Without these artificial tools you could only say "I destroyed/was destroyed by a Merlin". Would the game be any different? People die to rats all the time. Do you think this player is happier that his 7B Machariel was lost to Blood Raiders instead of xxPizza?

The question that you should be asking is "should people be defeated in the game or should they always win?"

The answer of WoW is "they should only win". The worst thing that can happen to you in WoW is simply not advancing. And no, PvP doesn't change that, if you enter a battleground and you capture zero objectives, score no kills and totally graveyard camped, you will lose nothing and earn honor points. Blizzard could advertise their game with "everyone is a winner here", they don't do it because it would scare away non-players and decrease the self-esteem of the bad players who are very sure that their progression has anything to do with their skill or effort instead of welfare given out by the developers.

PvP being consensual or not is a completely irrelevant point. You can easily design a game with consensual PvP only (or no PvP at all) and yet with losses: Diablo hardcore mode is a good example. Similarly the non-consensual PvP in WoW PvP servers (bored top levels oneshot leveling newbies) doesn't change WoW as the victim lost nothing but a few seconds. While evaluating the game, ignore PvP status and seek if the player has a chance to lose or he can only win regardless of which buttons he pressed.

When players and developers focus on the PvP status instead of loss status, we get the chimera of EVE highsec. It is practically safe PvE-wise, NPCs don't gank you at the gates, belt rats can be handled by T1 drones of mining barge, mission rats rarely if ever kill missioners. On the other hand PvP-ers can kill ships at will. The two must be matched. If highsec is meant to be a safe place where people can lol around, than PvP losses has no place either. If highsec is meant to be a risky place where you get some backup from the Empire NPCs, then the pirate NPCs should be much more aggressive. The problem of the newbie is that he can lol around at will, everything is nice and shiny and then bang, suicide ganked and podded with all his assets going down. If he'd be losing frigs left and right to scramming mission NPCs in the end missions of the career agents, then he'd both be expecting losses and also learn to tank his ship at the cost of cheap frigs instead of battlecruisers. If belt rats in 1.0-0.8 would be serious risk to his Venture, he wouldn't be losing untanked Retrievers in 0.5 to Catalysts. If Guristas would suicide gank his Badger I on a gate during a L2 hauling mission, he wouldn't lose a Badger II with 300M cargo.

The infamous learning curve comes from the game being incoherent: laughable NPCs + vicious players. Either tame the players by taking away their ability to hurt other players or buff up the NPCs so the newbie can practice on his own speed.


PS: You laughed on 300M Drakes or 100M T1 cruisers? Then you'll love this!

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Miner survival guide

CCP gave lot of tools for miners who were dying left and right. After the largest buff any ship class received in the history of EVE... miners are dying left and right and demand more buffs. With this post I want to tell how easily one can defend himself against suicide gankers.

Let's see the first and most important mechanic: security status. As its name clearly tells, it's about the security of the star system. "The higher, the better" should be obvious even to 1 hour newbies. Numerically it defines the response time of CONCORD, the invincible cops of EVE highsec. According to my own combat logs, in 0.5 you can gank for 25 seconds, in 0.6 20, in 0.7 16. Of course it can be affected by lag and rounding errors but you clearly get the tendency. In 0.8-1.0 you can practically only alpha-gank, meaning firing one salvo from a long-reload gun. Typically Tornado battlecruisers are used for it and they cost 100M. In 0.7-0.5 you can use sustained DPS ships, like the 11M Catalyst. You probably see the difference between these options. Considering that there are lot of belts in 0.8-1.0, there is absolutely no reason for risk-averse miners to move to 0.5-0.7. Yet they do.

The second concept that constantly evades dead miners is "tanking". Ships have shield, armor and hull. Each have HPs. To kill a ship, all three must be reduced to zero. You can increase the value of all three and also their resistances. A shield with 50% resistance to a damage type is just as strong as a twice bigger shield with no resistance. This mechanic coined the term "effective HP": the HP of the ship with zero resistances that lives as long as the current ship. Let's see a max-yield Retriever in EFT (third party EVE ship modeling program): You can see that it has 2-3000 HP in shield, armor and hull, all with low resistances. The hull resistances are zero. This provides 9614 EHP.

Now let's put on an Adaptive invulnerability field that increases shield resistances, and replace one Mining laser upgrades with a Damage control module that gives a small increase to shield and armor and big to hull. Since they need CPU, we'll need one processor overclocking rig. To the other two rig slots the optimal choice is a medium core defense field extender, but that's expensive, so let's just go with rigs that increase your weakest resistances: armor kinetic and armor thermic. While the armor explosive and shield EM were smaller, gankers prefers doing kinetic and thermal damage. Of course if you put on only resistors for these, they will adapt, hence we stick to the adaptive invulnerability field. Let's see the ship now: Look, the EHP almost doubled for less than 9% yield decrease! Is there any reason to not fit your Retriever this way? Then tell me, why do we gank untanked barges all the time? Can there be any other reason for those ganks than miners being stupid?

Finally let's compare all the Barges and Exhumers with max-yield vs reasonable tank:

Name	Naked, yield	Naked, EHP	Tanked, yield	Tanked, EHP
Retriever	1.28	9.6	1.17	17.1
Covetor	1.40	7.2	1.29	13.3
Procurer	1.17	29.1	1.07	67.9
Mackinaw	1.34	14.5	1.23	31.3
Hulk	1.44	10.9	1.32	24.0
Skiff	1.23	36.3	1.13	109.5

Can you see the extreme differences between the various ships and fits? Then why are the 0.5-0.6 belts are full of naked Retrievers?! The only possible answer is stupidity and laziness. It is practically impossible to gank miners who choose ships and system security properly and fit their ships well. Yet the only thing slowing miner ganking is waiting out GCC.

Finally, something trivial: AFK-ing. How can you seriously think of going AFK in a game and win? How could going AFK in a dangerous place mean anything else than sure defeat?

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There can't be competition without performance measurement

My solo kills post made lot of PvP-ers mad. You can see them raging on EN24, I cleared them up from here. They claim that mining barge kills don't count. The problem isn't their definition of "real" PvP. It's the lack of it.

One thing is sure, PvP is competitive play. But to have a competition, we must be able to compare performances. There are lot of measurement attempts on EVE PvP: number of kills, kill-death ratio, ISK destroyed, ISK ratio. Zkillboard has some "points" and several alliances evaluate their members based on some form of PvP performance. We can argue for and against all of them, but each of them gives a numerical performance review on everyone.

Those who babble about "thrill of the hunt" and "worthy opponent" and such, can't give such exact number. So if we follow their opinion, we simply will be unable to compare two players. Of course they are ready for the answer: let these two do a 1v1 and we'll know who is better. It's not a bad answer, but to make it work, we need official tournaments. Without clear rules and an external power to enforce them we get what every fool got who accepted an 1v1 challenge: being cheated and ganked.

Imagine an ideal world where people in 1v1 aren't using booster alts, scanners on the gate to know the enemy fitting to fit hard counter and turning it 1v10 if still not winning. Would these matches help? Not really, because they only measure the limited number of participants. While in these ideal matches the winner is better than the loser, we can't place them on a global ranking. This is a common problem in WoW, where the best guy of a casual guild applies to a HC guild and they find him totally useless and beyond help. In EVE - exactly because of lack of official performance measurement - this can go unnoticed for long. However reality at the end hits, the most remarkable event was the "so elite" NC. wardeccing RvB to smash them for insulting one of their directors with the horrible word "mate". You probably know how it went.

I'm not saying that every performance measurement is good or even useful. For example the "total kills" and "ISK destroyed" fields of zkillboard are next to useless since they aren't zero-sum. If 1001 smartbombing Rifters, each with 1M price tag gather and fire their smartbombs, every participant will get 1000 kills and 1B damage done. I'm sure that every ship destruction must create exactly one kill and not more (of course it can be in a form of 1/n kills to everyone). Similarly ISK destroyed must be split between the killers instead of everyone getting the full sum.

However the "true PvP-ers" who don't have a globally usable performance measurement aren't wrong in their position. They simply have no position to argue with. What they have is the feeling "I'm having fun blowing up frigs" and they try to rationalize it to be meaningful, great and competitive. If only they'd say "I'm having fun blowing up frigs like others having fun collecting minipets in WoW" we wouldn't have an argument. But for some reason they insist that blowing up frigs in lowsec is somehow more elite than trying to tame a squirrel in Elvyn Forest. From the fact that they blow up frigs and T1 cruisers they come to the conclusion that they are "badass PvP-ers" who have every right to look down on "highsec carebears". I'm not saying that they are wrong. I'm merely saying that to claim that, they have to come up with numbers. And if someone get higher numbers than them, they have accept that guy being better than them instead of coming up with excuses why his kills don't count.

Finally some numbers about PvP, our organization, the New Order has a killboard, let's see our performance in the last 3 months. Since some agents are living in nullsec and just podjump to us, their nullsec kills mess up with the ISK calculation as the killboards give them full value if they do 0.001% on a titan. So let's just stick to barges and exhumers:

Month	Barge	Exhumer
November	13	10
December	301	632
January	377	924

Since we aren't cooperating with any other entity, all these kills are 100% New Order kills. Unfortunately we don't have numbers for players because if we add the kills of the members up, we get something like 5000 kills. Someone could really write a program that gets the kills from Zkillboard API and distribute them among the killers. I mean if 3 pilots kill 1, doing 50-25-25% damages, they should get 0.5, 0.25, 0.25 kills. Factoring the ISK destroyed (not the looted, that allows inflating numbers) with the same ratios, we would get individual kills and individual ISK destroyed. I think these numbers would be the best to compare PvP-ers.

To help us gather data if you are in the New Order movement, please submit your kill-log API to both Zkillboard.com and neworder.mindflood.org.

Finally some fun: "true PvP-ers" claim my kills don't count because the enemy had no guns. This one had guns. A disgruntled miner coming for revenge... with this pod.

PS: for the first time since my removal, I wish I could be on TEST forums again to see how they welcome their newest bro.

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