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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Why shall we gank?

Yesterday we saw how ganking can net kills to a single player at the magnitude of the largest and strongest corporations. OK, point proven, post written, “badass PvPers” are butthurt, tear comments harvested, can we move on to the next project?

No we can’t. I keep on ganking and I keep on recruiting gankers, now reinforced by the PR value of the 123B massacre. This will be my project in EVE and currently I can’t give a termination date. Why? I wrote that only the information we create and spread will survive us. If I’d quit EVE now, in a few months the only memory of this extraordinary feat would be “some guy got some tears from miners and dunked on Miniluv”. It’s not enough.

Morons and slackers are fine with their “fun”. They can’t care less if their activity is next to useless, but they still expect positive results. Their response to arguments is “tldr idc lol”. You can’t teach them anything. Their safety comes from the social people who carry them on their back. There will always be a group that take them (because they are adorable newbies with 50M SP) and feed them. But they aren’t invincible. If you can break the shield of socials you can force them to face their insufficient performance. Also, such action will show the socials how much they carry them. The socials don’t recognize their exploitation, they believe that the morons and slackers were just unlucky.

MMOs are played by the same people you see in the World, but without a boss telling them what to do. Being terribly ignorant in the game is common. But EVE Online is the worst among them all. Since it has no official leaderboard or goal, you can’t really fail at EVE. When you do, you can just move the goalpost yelling “sandbox”. While claiming “we didn’t want that bosskill anyway” in WoW would be ridiculous, nullsec alliances that failed to keep Sov for themselves or for rent, seriously brand themselves “nomadic elite PvP”. Those who fail in even that, still have a positive message: “we just wanted to have fun roaming with friends and explode, op success” after their fleet was destroyed.

And these are those who got to the endgame. Can you imagine the quality of miners, who do the most basic activity? Well, let’s say they can’t be distinguished from bots. This shall not stand! Something must happen to these morons and slackers, because they can’t stay in this lowly state. Since they listen to no positive interaction, only one method left: blow their ships up. When they find their barge and pod destroyed, they must react somehow. Some just vent on local and try again. He’ll blow up again.

But others do what they probably didn’t do before: read up a guide. For the first time he can’t say “tldr lol”, because he blows up again if he doesn’t learn. By forcing him to read a guide we make the biggest progress in his gaming. He no longer does whatever he pleases like a little baby but tries to get information before making a decision. While it’s hard to see, the morons and slackers aren’t born different from us. They aren’t lesser beings. They just never had to use their brain and make an effort. Now they have to. More than 6000 people already read the guide, despite it never was on the front page of the blog, one could only get there by actively clicking a link.

Socials of course respond to the “act of evil”. Ganking the miners has a very positive effect on them. First they turn into “white knights”, protecting the “weak” from “evil”. Then they fail to. They have to fail in order to improve themselves. They have to face that even if they seriously outnumbering the ganker, they can’t win. This is the anti-thesis of the social thinking: “the group is strong”. Yet, here they are, camping the station and the belts in large numbers and that single ganking “bully” still does whatever he wants. After a day or two they give up. While I can’t be sure how much they get from this experience, they surely has to learn that the “group of friends” isn’t all powerful. A single guy can be more powerful than them. Maybe some of them will say “I want to be powerful too, I want to be more than the guys around me”.

Finally there are the competitive people. The ones who are proud of their stats. Well, I gave them some stats yesterday and they weren’t happy. Why? Because they wanted to compete inside the box, using their skill. They wanted to do what the others, just better. Me on the other hand didn’t go out on a nullsec roam and bested them with ship piloting but did something very different and got much better stats. These people have to learn that the real success isn’t being a few % better than your neighbor but in doing something new. A new way can get much better results than perfecting the old way.

Ganking morons and slackers changes people. Changes the miners themselves, changes the white knights and changes the competitive guys. Come and join, make a difference!

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The anti-tear of the day by Kata Komba:

The moron of the day was piloting a hulk. A dumb fitted hulk. In this pod. Because you need +6% tracking to catch those pesky asteroids!

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1 player, 1 month, 1000+ kills, 123B damage

I had a ganking campaign in February with the nice 52B worth of kills a month. Since I’ve realized that “big and powerful guys do whatever they want” is a lie and they are just padding their killboard and their ego with easy kills, I went on a quest to teach miners to tank their ships.

For most time, my corp only had one player in it, myself, the first and second non-me members joined days ago. I subtracted their kills from the corp result, leaving this one-man corp with 123.2B worth of kills in September. More than a thousand kills. I have a giant secure container with 749 corpses and the loot from the miners paid for all the ganks and some bonus.
123B is enough to buy PLEX to play for free for 19 years. It’s the price of a titan and a supercarrier. But it’s better to compare apples to apples. Let’s see how other corporations performed in the same month:

• Goonwaffe (GSF): 354.3B
• D00M. (NC.): 122.9B
• Sniggerdly (PL): 445.0B
• Dreddit (TEST): 113.7B
• Red Federation (RvB): 176.2B

Save for Red, these are huge corporations within their alliances which means that they get on kills that they didn’t kill alone (a lone Goon pilot in a mixed CFC fleet get the kill booked for Goonwaffe). Yet, they only managed to get kills in the same magnitude as a single player. Some a bit more, some a bit less but the same amount of digits. Let me add that me outperforming Dreddit is a nice goodbye gift from Bob the God of EVE to that unmatched failure BoodaBooda.

But the best isn’t outperforming Dreddit. GSF (the alliance) had an official highsec ganking campaign, the Caldari Ice Interdiction. The result couldn't be masked as a victory even on the Goon Fox News, they had to admit "Unfortunately, without sustained pressure to back up the talk, their victims quickly lose their fear and the game returns to normal." Why? Because the corp Bat Country, the main corp behind Miniluv, the Goon ganking organization booked 142B kills this month and most of them are nullsec kills (read: abandoned Querious, Delve, PB structures, TESTies in Curse and fellow Goons during their stupid thunderdome event). The Miniluv page (which can be incomplete) books 30 Exhumers and 94 Barges for September. We Gank Because We Care had 281 and 311. This is really apples to apples: the mighty griefers of EVE, in their annual tear campaign were significantly outdone in their declared goal by a single player. A “highsec publord” I might add. If I were The Mittani, Miniluv would be dissolved and Warr Akini summarily podded back to Empire to mine Veldspar. By the way, the New Order Logistics, the ganking corp of James 315 booked only 55 and 149 ships, 58B.

How could this happen? About a year ago the mining barges were rebalanced because previously they were killable by a 3 days old throwaway alt in a T1 ship. That part was necessary. But CCP didn’t give tools to miners to defend themselves, like enough PG and CPU to fit proper tank, but they were given raw EHP. A 390DPS is needed to kill a naked Retriever in 0.5, it’s not something that a throwaway alt can provide. This killed “for fun” ganking. A bored nullsec player can no longer start a recruit-a-friend 51-days free account and massacre miners for lulz. Barge deaths went nosedive and miners got used to be safe without lifting a finger.

But 390DPS isn’t much for someone who cares to get it. My T2 fit Cata has 740 and I can dualbox gankers, being able to destroy anything below Procurers and 2-lowslots-tanked Mackinaws. Unlike the other ganking groups that tried to solve the problem by throwing numbers on it, I put my trust in the solo player. A solo player doesn’t have to wait for others or suffer the incompetence of others. A ganking fleet spends more time lolling on childish jokes than actually flying out to gank and fail half of ganks because someone didn’t have ammo, had safety on, undocked in a pod or shot the wrong target. The results of the solo player depend on his actions. He ganks, when he wants, where he wants, without having to discuss with others or depending on their resources. The very anti-thesis of the slogan “the best EVE ship is friendship”.

What I did is clearly not something that you couldn’t do. No “l33t skillz” are needed to gank miners. That’s the point. Then why does your corp with hundreds or even thousands of members have similar amount of kills as a single guy? Because you are held back by the incompetent fools around you. The funds of your organization goes to handouts to the morons and slackers and in doctrines you have to limit yourself to the lowest common denominator (the bombless bomber). If you want to achieve something above the average, you can’t do it in a group whose membership is - by definition - average. It doesn’t matter what you aim for, the best approach is starting on your own.

Of course you can join forces for bigger tasks now and then, that’s why I formed a corp and recruit. But your main focus should be solo acting. If the everyday tasks are too big for you alone, you don’t need friends, you need to improve. Fleeting up to kill Orcas or deadspace fitted 50K EHP Mackinaws is normal. Needing a fleet to kill an untanked Mack is being a failure.

My stats matching thousand-men groups are the ultimate proof of selfishness, individualism and the rejection of “helping friends”. EVE and the rest of the MMOs are purely meritocratic: every single avatar started on an equal footing. If someone needs help, he isn’t unlucky or cute but lazy or dumb who needs a link to a guide and a kick in the butt and not handouts of resources or carrying him in groups to get on kills.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about “why” and the future plans regarding ganking.


PS: I really hope this was RMT. I mean no one can be this stupid.

While I use to post anti-tears, this piece of tear is so perfect that I must share with you:

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