A good example for traders

Sugar Kyle who runs her own blog has a shop in Bosena, Molden Heath lowsec. Her little business is pretty successful, despite obvious mistakes (get a JF already!)

Is it some miracle? No. The lack of formal economics knowledge is irrelevant compared to the proper attitude. She has it, so her fate is to become damn rich. Her example is important exactly to show that being successful in business is not about using the proper tools, having proper item selection, time efficiency or other know-how (though they clearly affect the magnitude of success), but having the proper mindset:

1. Wants to serve her customers: This is a make it or break it issue. If you are in to rob everyone and run away with huge spoils, you have like 5% chance to make a great heist and 95% chance to leave busted. If you are interested in mutually profitable cooperation, you have 100% chance to make some profit.
2. Does what she wants: everyone, including corpmates, commenters and JF-obsessed goblins tell her what to do. She ignores them and does what she plans. If these people had a good idea how to run a lowsec hub, they'd done it themselves. So she is completely right to listen to the one who has the most experience in running a lowsec hub in Molden Heath: herself. Listening to people's opinion is a social mistake, most people have great difficulty learning to ignore them.
3. Doesn't want to market-PvP: people tend to spend great resources to defeat this or that competitor. They usually succeed, at the cost of losing much more money than it would cost to just coexist.
4. Doesn't want to get rich: another crucial thing, such ambitions just lead to overwork (which leads to exhaustion and multi-billion mistypes) and also leads to risky investments (that end up as a disaster). Working on your own schedule, working for the thing itself is the best way to have a steady income.
5. Focused on graphs, trends instead of direct income (or opinions): Rome wasn't built in a day. If you can't find joy in the decreasing price of Light Neutron Blasters II, you won't last long here.

So the business tip for today: subscribe her blog and try to absorb the above.

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The rise of the non-aligned voter (and fail of the null leaders)

Thursday is generally for business posts, and there was one for today. But it will be shifted to Friday to give space to this recent development.

The CSM election ballots are finally published and you can download it too. Many people did to calculate ordered lists, but I was interested in something else: the power of the blocks. Mynnna wrote: "Null bloc votes, as identified by Two Step: 9823+10957+5999 = 26799, 53.9% of the votes. Null bloc candidates: Five (Myself, Kesper, Sort, Sala and Progodlegend), which is about 35% of the council. I suppose you could count Malcanis as well, as the HBC ballot was instrumental in electing him and he is technically part of the bloc, but even that's only 42%. Basically, I'm saying that I think the people who were claiming that STV is all about rigging it for nullsec (ya'll know who you are) can put down their tinfoil hats. If anything we're under represented. "

Mynnna is wrong. He is wrong because Two Step was wrong identifying the voter blocks. Part of it was that he only looked for a few patterns, and looked for it everywhere in the ballot, while only the first spots had serious effect on the outcome. Below you can see a spreadsheet. Its fields show how many ballots have a certain candidate or pair of candidates in the top 7 places. I choose 7 because according to CCP that had 98.26% of the power of the ballots and because former CSMs had 7 Icelandic positions, so many people considered this an important number. The green background ones belong to one character, you can see that 12672 ballots had Mynnna on one of their top 7 positions. Next to it you can see "925", saying 925 people had both Mynnna and Ripard Teg on their top 7 spots.

Can you see the shocking result? Or just a bunch of numbers? Let me clear it up for you. At first I divided each line with the self-vote result, so every number of the first line was divided by 12672. From there the first line shows how big percentage of the Mynnna voters voted also for the other winner candidates. Then color-coded the fields, with the average value being white, below-average is red, above average is green. Finally I rearranged the candidates according to their cross-votes:
Now it's clearer, right? It shows that Mynnna, Kesper, Sort and Sala voters placed the other 3 to their ballots with high chance, though far from 100%. Only 75% of the Mynnna voters voted for Kesper, not really a good thing for CFC leadership. The cross-CFC-HBC votes were even smaller, though still high. What is more important here is that the rest of their lines and columns are red, meaning that those who voted for the CFC-HBC block ballot were unlikely to vote for other winning candidates (likely voted for non-winning block ones) and also that the voters of other winning candidates were unlikely to vote for them.

Following them comes the WH-pair. Their columns are red, so the non-WH voters were unlikely to vote for them, but their out-of-block lines are not red meaning that the WH voters were likely to support Mangala, Ripard, Trebor, instead of the WH 5 as instructed. Since the WH5 was a 5-long ballot, all of them fit into the top 7. According to the instructions, all WH pilots should have placed the 5 WH candidates to the top 5 positions in some order. Let's check it out:Ouch! If everyone would follow the instructions, we should have seen 100% everywhere! The chance that a voter of a WH candidate also supported another WH candidates was around 50%! It seems the cooperation of the candidates is not enough to make their voters cooperate! Did it matter? To see that, you should know that STV runs in rounds, every round eliminating one candidiate. The ballots that had this candidate at the top position move to the next one on the list, so the rest of the candidate gain votes. Let's see how did it happen with the Wormhole 5: The first eliminations gained 27 votes to the wormholers from voters who placed someone else first and wormholers behind. Then Cipreh got eliminated. At this move the WH top votes decreased by 155, which means that out of the 590 Cipreh voters 155 did not place another WH-er behind Cipreh. They gained 48 more voters with further eliminations and spillovers until Ayerson got eliminated, draining 310 out of 737, 42% of the Ayerson voters from the WH pool. Looking at the end of the run, it's likely that even that wouldn't get a third WH-er in, but still you can see the point. Same for the HBC-CFC block vote: when Kaleb Rysode was eliminated, 17% of his votes went to people who are not on the block list, half of it directly to the unaligned ones. When Banlish was eliminated, 41% of his votes leaked away from the null block.

After the two WH winners, there is a huge green field: the unaligned ones. See how these voters supported all candidates. They also got support from WH and Progodlegend voters, but gave no support to out-of-block candidates. It shows a huge number of votes supporting all of these candidates. Please note that the HBC member Malcanis belongs here. Despite what Mynnna wrote, the HBC votes were not getting him the seat. The Sort Dragon voters barely gave him more votes than they gave to Progodlegend and this was mutual. Those people supported Malcanis who supported the other unaligned ones. The null block was simply outnumbered by the unaligned ones. They were not simply voting randomly, they seem to like all these CSMs.

At the bottom corner sits Progodlegend all alone. His column is red, showing that no other winner had significant amount of voters who also supported him.


Hubris made nullsec leaders tell that they could place a basketball to their ballot and win. It seems their line members were not really motivated to support a basketball and many did not vote, or did not follow the official ballot! I was in TEST for months but never heard of Banlish, and probably other TEST voters neither. At least Sort and Sala often bridged me. For CSM9 the null leaders should take their own members seriously. Maybe they should run pre-eliminaries, finding candidates that have the real support of their members. Same goes to the Wormhole people. If those WH people who had no affiliation to any candidate had the same 50% "cross-support" as the affiliated ones, many WH votes were cast on non-WH candidates, mostly on the unaligned block. With 3 widely accepted candidates, they could get them all in.

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Living in interesting times

TEST leaving the HBC is an unprecedented move in EVE. Of course groups left bigger groups before but only when they were forced. N2S jumping out of SoCo was such. Corps leaving -A- for PL too. Jumping the sinking ship isn't heroic, but a good practice. TEST left HBC on its peak of power. It has never lost a war before. They gave up their position of the unstoppable war machine. Now they sit on two wanted regions with no means to defend them.

People tend to describe TEST as a bunch of trolls who do crazy stunts for no reason. But being crazy doesn't ensure survival. Actually, it often causes the opposite. It is likely that TEST just opted for losing its Sov.

The times aren't interesting for being the first when someone made a call that leads to its "doom". These times are interesting because I don't think TEST is heading for its doom. I think they are heading for FW-lowsec and into growth. You know, many TEST members already abandoned Sov-null and joined FW, "for fun". However "fun" doesn't keep you in ships, ISK does. According the canon, TEST should go bankrupt. Actually the alliance update says "We will defend our home with ... every last god damned ISK in our wallets."

The big thing is that I don't think it would come to this. I think they will never run out of ISK and they can continue to grow. Such growth of TEST would be the ultimate proof that nullsec is broken, you don't need Sov: the largest and strongest sov-holder willingly losing it and gaining more players on this transition. I think it would force CCP to redesign nullsec economy more than anything else, before others would follow TEST, leaving only botters in sov-null.

An even more interesting outcome would be if TEST would not lose its regions. Currently only large block members can hold land in the Sov map. Most of them would obviously not be able to hold it on its own and just gained it via block membership. I remember when Montolio was dumpster diving to find various obscure things to live in the regions we conquered. They weren't pets in the sense of following our command, they were rather maintenance guys hired as janitors of those constellations. Obviously without the might of the HBC they couldn't own a C1 wormhole on their own.

Now, since TEST thrown away the HBC shelter, it should lose its land. If it doesn't, it means that the large players have recognized that land doesn't worth having in excess. It would herald a new age where practically anyone can claim Sov in regions where no one else wants to. I mean if TEST can do it, you can too!

Welcome to the interesting times in EVE Online!

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Ownership vs leadership (aka the Sort Dragon fail)

Sort Dragon was the leader of the strongest EVE coalition for about a month. He managed to destroy it without any hostile pressure, financial crisis or cultural clash to solve. Without his utter incompetence, the last month would be a boring one for them where nothing happened, despite TEST changes leadership faster than an African military dictatorship.

Where did he fail horribly? He did not understand the huge difference between ownership and leadership. Ownership of an item is obvious: you control it. Ownership of people is much less obvious since every person has free will (even if most of them only goes so far to will for drink, sex and a warm place to rest). Ownership of people is the most misunderstood concept. Majority of people - who, not by surprise doesn't even owns himself - believe that it comes from the ability of punishment: "who can destroy the thing, controls the thing". Wrong!

The ability to punish someone doesn't give you control as he can hide from punishment. You need to actively hunt him down to deliver punishment which you can or cannot do. From even the most secured locations there were escapes. People escaped the Gulag or Auschwitz. No tyranny ever lasted too long because the cost of punishing the people climbed higher and higher.

Ownership of people is ownership of the things they need. The medieval kings owned their people not because they could hang those they could catch. They owned them because they owned the land needed for growing food. One could easily escape the gallows by hiding in swamps and forests. But what do you eat in the swamp? Frogs? Living in a swamp is - while possible - a punishment in itself. It's also a perfect punishment as you can't dodge it while living in a swamp and it costs nothing to the king as the swamp is there for free. The foundation of the medieval system was the fact that without the easily controllable land, you couldn't maintain a humane life.

The medieval system fell when the industrial revolution changed the method of income: from farming to industry. You can rise a factory everywhere, so the refugees could earn their food by working in a new factory somewhere else.

Sort Dragon assumed he can control various HBC alliances by the fact that he can evict them if they disobey. He was wrong for issuing commands to TEST not because he can't evict them. He can. TEST probably couldn't field a single serious doctrine fleet due to lack of discipline, lack of proper FCs and lack of supercapital superiority. You can't fight battleships or T3s with some random mixture of frigates, battlecruisers and cruisers. If some serious alliance wants to live in Delve and Fountain (someone in N3, PL to rent it out or CFC), TEST will be out of these in a month or two.

Sort Dragon was terminally wrong for assuming that TEST members will give a damn (they would use other term) for being evicted. Sov-null is just a money-sink for a line member, unless he is a botter and TEST probably has the lowest botter pilot ratio in nullsec. I didn't say they have no botters, I've said they have awful lot of real players. For real players the money is in highsec missions, mission mining, highsec AFK mining. No real player needs sov. They might want it, to have a place to call home, a flag on the map and an excuse to get fights. But the members wouldn't lose their income by losing sov.

Please note that this isn't a coalition level problem. Not even an alliance level problem. It's an ownership problem on the lowest possible management level: in EVE no player can be owned as the methods of ones income cannot be owned. It's not that TEST alliance rebelled against Sort Dragon. It's that if the TEST leadership would obey, they would have lost their members.

Without ownership, you can still lead people, simply because they give you leadership in turn of your services. The average TEST member couldn't care less who he shoots as long as he was shooting at someone, so Montolio could lead them against enemies of his choices. Montolio could build his space empire because his choices never conflicted with the choices of his line members. His power came from his understanding of his line members, knowing the fields where he was given control. But even he reached the point where his aims conflicted with the will of his line members. He wanted to attack CFC to further increase HBC power, but the line members would not follow him against the endless no-fun invasion against people who they actually liked. He recognized this and did the only reasonable thing: left his position. He could formally press on the war, but it would be lost anyway as the line members wouldn't log in.

As long as living in nullsec as a non-botting line member is not the best income source by large, the nullsec powers cannot control the income of players, so they can't control the players themselves. Top leadership positions goes to politicians who serve their people while serving their own agendas in the same time.

Update: I've just read the TEST alliance update literally saying: "we are an alliance with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO LOSE. Everything up to and including getting brutally murdered would be a great opportunity to do something new." I'm happy to see that their move wasn't a random act of trolling but came from the understanding of the same thing I've talked above. Damn, the first time I miss not being there.

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Blues and morality

Sugar wrote how she disagrees that lowsec pirates who shoot anything that moves are "evil" and deserve punishment in the form of poverty. However I never mixed moral into my statements that pirates eat what they cooked. There is nothing immoral in wearing a T-shirt and a short. But if you do it in winter, you'll end up in the hospital. I believe that non-FW lowsec is necessarily poor and any design change that tries to give income to lowsec pirates will either fail or some block shows up and dominate the zone, destroying its "pirate" nature.

The main "immorality" of lowsec is people hurting each other without reason. Every single society bans that. In EVE alliances killing blues (outside of organized thunderdomes) is a good way to get to the NPC corp. However this rule applies only to society members. Killing outsiders is a common activity both in real life and in games. You can get various medals if you do the bad things to "the enemy". The lowsec pirates actually not immoral, since they aren't blue to their victim, and everyone shoot non-blue "outsiders" in EVE, except the roleplayers in Providence.

Why do others consider lowsec pirates "bad" then? Because they don't "rightfully own" their land, like WH and sov-null alliances. But they are wrong, since the WH and null alliances gained their land via violence, so their ownership isn't more moral than the "gate ownership" of the gatecamper pirates.

What is the action that has poverty as consequence in lowsec? Being small-gang. Everyone else is surrounded by blues. If you are in a WH, most people in your WH are your friendlies (except when an invasion is in progress). If you are in null, blues own every system in several regions. Even the FW-lowsec residents are surrounded by friendly militia members. A blue means someone who doesn't shoot you and even better, someone who shoots the one who'd shoot you (or at least a decoy to be shot instead of you). The more blues are around you, the less likely you are shot at, therefore can farm in peace.

Since lowsec pirates have very few blues and the presence of hostiles in "their" systems is the norm, they can never farm in peace. Since they can't farm, it doesn't matter how profitable it would be to farm, so buffing income sources wouldn't help. Of course there can be a point where it's so profitable that a nullsec block moves in, fill it with blues, exterminate the pirates and start farming.

There cannot be profit without relative peace. There cannot be peace without some form of law, that is usually internalized by the social people as moral, "the right thing. A land where piracy is the norm is an impoverished land. Think of Somalia!

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Farms and fields will never happen

"Farms and fields" is a long-lasting plan in EVE, shared by both (certain) players and developers. In short, it means that nullsec empires live on PvE done by the members (the peasants on the farms) and roaming marauder gangs plunder them for fun and profit. The only problem is that it doesn't seem to work. Yet another idea was published, but I'm sure it won't work either.

This post isn't the 1589th idea how to implement farms and fields. It's about why the idea can't be implemented and must be abandoned. The short version is: no PvE player will ever fight a roaming gang, because there is no profit in it, there is no chance to win such fight and he can't fight at the first place.

Let's start with "no profit" and compare it with the nullsec blob fights that actually happen. Why there is a profit in engaging a huge enemy fleet and no profit in engaging a small gang? The answer is that for the individual pilot there is no profit in huge fleet battles either, but the pilots are fighting not for profit, but for their "friends". Most social people don't want to be the one who abandoned their friends in the hours of need, even if they rationally know that fighting is a bad idea. On the other hand there is no such social pressure on fighting against a roaming gang. The decision to fight or not is made purely on financial basis and the answer is always "dock up, log highsec alt".

Secondly, you can win a blob fight. Structures are often saved, objectives denided from the attackers. Also the reimbursement of losses can overwhelm the enemy alliance wallet. Forming up and getting hammered can make line members not log in, slowly eating the enemy away. On the other hand, no one ever in the history of EVE defeated a roaming gang as their goal is "shoot stuff, explode and chat with bros". That goal cannot be defeated. Their ships have little value, they don't expect to keep them and they have nothing better to do with their time. You can destroy their fleet hundred times and they will still come back.

Finally a blob fight needs one to anchor up and press F1. It can be done by a miner. Engaging in small-gang PvP needs both skillpoints and game knowledge that the average "farms and fields peasant" do not have. So he cannot engage in combat even if he wants to.

No game mechanics change can force nullsec PvE players to defend their income from roaming gangs. If the changes allow roamers to make serious damage, it can make the PvE to stop and move to highsec, but nothing ever will make a miner or ratter undock a combat ship into a small-gang PvP situation.

Please note that I did not say that there can't be meaningful PvE in nullsec or an alliance can't base itself on farming members (or renters). I'm just saying that they will not provide any fights, they will either handle the PvP-er problem by using disposable ships (Retreivers, Ventures) or by docking up when any threat is present. This behavior makes roaming boring enough that only very bored people do it, therefore their threat is minimal.

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Business Thursday: mission mining at large

Last week I revealed an unused feature, highsec lvl 4 mining missions that provide good income for newbies and OK income while AFK to veterans. The new Odessey changes just make it more important, as ice mining will become competitive and highsec rock mining will be crushed by the low level mineral boom of nullsec. If you want to mine in relative peace for OK-ish income, mining missions are the place for you.

But there is more in mining missions than you've seen: Yes, you see it right, that mission provides 15M income with 1000ISK/LP and 30M income with 2500ISK/LP. Who provides that high ISK/LP? Pirate factions! The following factions have nullsec mining agents:

• Angel Cartel
• Caldari State
• Gallente Federation
• ORE
• Shansa's nation
• Serpentis
• Thukker Tribe

Of course there are agents in lowsec too, for the following factions. Their income is about 10-12M for a mission:

• Amarr Empire
• Ammatar Mandate
• Caldari State
• Gallente Federation
• Minmatar Republic
• Thukker Tribe

How hard are they?This is me, with horrible skills, AFK-orbiting in nullsec in a Venture. While I was at the keyboard, I did not need to press a single key during the mission. Of course AFK-ing in lowsec and nullsec is not the safest thing, but hey, losing a Venture or Retreiver with an empty beta clone won't kill you. It's like the AFK-orbiting of FW-lowsec. Some frigates were killed, but most were not, simply because no one cared to kill them. This is something a few days old newbie can do in lowsec or NPC null: mission-mine. In sov-null the new ores probably provide better income, but those need refining and hauling capacity as the ore needs to be sold.

How to go large? Place a tower, put a Rorqual below the shield and run multiple miners, eating missions at the rate of 3/hour, providing 30-35M/hour/account in lowsec and 80-90M/hour/account in certain pirate-populated nullsec regions, with very small risk (a Retreiver pays for itself in 15 minutes if mining for pirate factions).

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