M&S, social, griefer, rational

I promised the "most important post" for Monday, but mostly I delivered some incoherent mess. Also, my nullsec plans aren't really griefing, while the logo image says griefing will make the World a better place. And where are the M&S and the socials, our old friends? Today I clean it up. Read the permanent page. No, it's not a "the really-really-really most important post", I won't post anything new. I'll just make sense now.

My nullsec plans are fully formed and I'll post them on Monday. You'll find griefing in it, on a scale that even the Goons could not dream of. Blogging my profit away post on Tuesday. In the light of the the above, I also recognized the value of Good Fights, you'll see that in Wednesday.

Please comment here about the permanent page and not the moron pictures below.

TrueVox sent a picture of "gwrda" (nice name). Can you figure out which level of development he is on?
Atrea found some who talked about the importance of rules. That should be lvl2. But he also bought out his - already overpriced - stuff for relisting, which clearly place him among the morons:I guess you could figure out what Atera bought from the ISK.


You can join trading discussions on the Goblinworks channel.
Friday morning report: 96.7B (2B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5+0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 1.3 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).

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"The Goons are just another social group"

I wrote that griefing actions are liberating the griefer from social norms and helping him become a more efficient person, citing the Goons as example who are the most obnoxious griefers and also important members of the most successful EVE player group. The most common counter-argument was "they are just members of another social group, following their norms". Of course this can be ignored as merely semantic argument since it doesn't question that anti-social acts make one more effective, it merely claims that the gain appears on the group and not individual level.

However Dark Segura on the goblinworks channel found a much better counter-argument: the Goonswarm is a group existing in the reality and their acceptance/support for griefing is real. On the other hand the "large-society" is not a really existing entity as it does nothing. I mean if you are a Goon griefing someone, other Goons will act positively towards you. If you give donation to a poor player to help him out, "the people" will not do anything for you. "The carebears", "the l33t PvP-ers" are characteristics and not social groups. There are many people with brown eyes, yet they don't know each other, don't support each other, don't do actions together because of this characteristic.

Some of the objects of our World are people or groups of people. If you bump into people on the street with the idea that "I'm asocial, I refuse to care for people", you are an idiot. Just like you avoid collision with street lamps you shall avoid collision with people. Not because they have feelings, but because they have mass and velocity. Being social is trying to get the respect and liking of others. These aren't measurable, "real" things. Seeking them is stupid. However seeking benefits and avoiding harm coming from people is just as rational as doing the same with other objects.

Social people are bots. You should treat like them. Using social skills isn't social. Actually it's part of the defining criteria of psychopathy: superficial charm, lying, cunning, manipulative. If you do X and in turn other people do Y, than you shall consider Y the natural consequence of X, just like you'd do in an inanimate environment. I've never suggested ignoring social skills. They are practically the programming language of the social bots. The problem comes when someone is not programming these bots but being them. When interpersonal actions are not based on goals but "moral", "doing the right thing", "getting karma", "being a nice guy".

If there would be a Highsec Vigilantes alliance who actively hunt known gankers, scammers, trolls then being a "nice carebear" could be a rational action: "I don't want to be ganked by HV so I don't misbehave". There are other rational ways of being "nice": "I want to join a miner corp and they take no one with negative sec status" or "I want incursions but they kick me if I'm in war so I stay away from deccing corps".

The big difference between the Goons and the socials is that the Goons have a real social group, while the random socials do not. The Goons receive rewards for acting the way they do from this group, while random socials receive nothing from their imaginary group. So Goons are not in a social group like the others. They are in a social group unlike the others who has an imaginary group "the people" and hope that if they are nice and friendly with randoms, "the people" will love and respect them.

You can join trading discussions on the Goblinworks channel.
Thursday morning report: 95.3B Ouch, negative daily record! (1.5+0.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 1.3 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).

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The "opportunity cost" fleet

Since I'm sure that griefing is the best way to make the World a better place, by liberating participants from the bonds of outdated (rather ape-age than medieval age) mental schemes, I'm thinking about the way of implementing it. No matter where I will go, I will have to fly with a fleet doing it, so it's time for me to think about fleet doctrines.

ISK efficiency is a goal for all alliances. On the top of that, CCP designed the game as "every ship is playable" which can't be done without diminishing returns. A 2x more expensive ship isn't 2x more effective. This pushes fleets towards cheapness. It's better to field 100 Drakes than 50 Tengus. Hell it's better to field 50 Drakes with 250 spare ships waiting for reshipping than 50 Tengus with no replacements. However more expensive ships are still better (otherwise everyone would just RvB in T1 frigs). They are rarely fielded because they are not ISK effective.

Avoiding polishing the sneaker is a major goal in ship fitting. The hull, fitting and consumable prices should be balanced. You should spend your money on the weakest link of the system. If the hull with T1 projectiles, gyrostabs and the tanking modules give 300DPS for 100M, spending 100M for gun/gyro upgrade that increase DPS by 20% is a waste, as the cost would be +100%. Spending the same 100M on the same modules on a 1B hull+tank ship would increase DPS by 20% for 10% cost lost, clearly a good trade. So overfitting a lame hull or underfitting an expensive one is to be avoided, that's basic knowledge.

However the "I farmed it for free" attitude appears here well, valuing time spent in the battle zero. You know, the veldspar is free too, since you spent no money on it. Just 10 hours of your life. Everyone has an income. For some it's 20M/hour, 50M/hour for others, 500M/hour for me (and planning to cut my trading to half, trashing the least profitable items, hoping to get 800M/hour with the rest).

If you wouldn't be in a battle but farming something, you'd be making that ISK. Being in the battle is losing on that profit. Consider this value a consumable cost. Now imagine that someone shows up with the idea to fly a 70M BC hull with 50M fittings and 500M spent on a booster. You'd call him the largest idiot ever. However if I'd fly a Drake, I'd do just that.

Imagine that I participate in 5 battles, each cost 2 hours. I lose 4 logies with 120M hull, 100M fittings, 10M faction cap boosters each. My losses would be 5.9B. 85% of it would be lost time. Now let's consider 1B carrier hull, 1B fittings, 2 lost ships. My losses would be 9B, only 1.52x bigger than before. I can't give exact power relation between a Scimitar and a Carrier, so as quick and dirty method I just compare capital shield transporter (300HP/sec) and large shield tranporter II (85HP/sec). So for 52% more cost I buy 353% power increase. Let's repeat the calculation for a guy with 30M/hour: 920M logi, 300M time, 4B carrier, that's 400% cost increase. For him, upgrading to carrier would be a bad move.

The fleet of traders would naturally fly T2 and faction ships, well-fitted strat cruisers, carriers, dreads. Of course others field such ships too, but we could and should field them like Drakes. Lost one? Jump home and reship. My point is that it's not luxury action, not a "give everyone a finger by wasting billions", it's the proper choice of ships. Anything cheaper would be an unacceptable waste of ISK.

The leaders of any alliance we'll move to must understand this. We will not and we must not fly doctrine drakes. We must fly 1-2B ships just to break even with our time costs. We must not care of losing them, just like a drake pilot must not care about his drake. The FC must accept this and consider it an asset, not an annoyance. The pilots are intelligent enough on their own (remember, they did not get their ISK from AFK-mining) to find a unique niche in the fleet, replacing one of the doctrine ships with something stronger, probably a capital, knowing that they might get left behind if the enemy drops capitals. Remember, no need to worry for ISK, the pilots can pay for the replacement easily.

For a obvious reasons no alliance used a "throwaway 1B ship" doctrine, so it will need some thinking to figure out how can these ships be used out of their standard rules. Tracking dreads against enemy BS fleet? Neuting/ECM carriers in the place of alphafleet scorpions? 15-fighter (or 15-drone) carrier against enemy BCs? Covert ops battleships as moving target beacons to bombing runs? Or equipped with ECM burst and smartbombs, sneaking in the middle of the enemy BC/Tengu fleet? My knowledge about it is very limited, so it is of others. However figuring such things out will be the only way to effectively incorporate traders/industrialists to fleets. Or "keep it simple stupid" and let us blow up the structure while the drakes are busy with the enemy subcaps?

Of course the global optimum for a trader/industrialist is to fly nothing, but make ISK, giving it to the alliance which would use it to allow others to fly. I mean the 500M opportunity cost + 500M spent on pimped combat ship could buy 6 drakes + 6x1 hour of average guy. 6 drakes are definitely stronger than whatever pimped subcap I can create. However the question arises why is it so good for the trader? The problem isn't "fun" in the sense that pressing F1 is inherently more fun than updating orders. The problem is power. The 6 pilots who fly on my ISK will have higher weight in decisions than me. The current culture devalues industry and worships combat, so the one who contribute to the common victory by ISK is considered "whore" or "slave". The only way for breaking it is indeed joining the fleet in a globally sub-optimal, but at least locally optimal ship.

I see that this isn't something great. I'm seeking the answer here for the question: how can a dirty-rich trader meaningfully join a nullsec alliance neither being altruist who just gives nor just one guy in the crowd who collects billions of unused ISK while flying Drake#1532.

Since I'm tired of deleting "get experience FFS" things, let me reformulate: "imagine a pilot who is very skilled in flying any ships. He is also damn rich. What ships shall he fly?" I know I need fleet experience and without it I can't fly anything. I will get it (as soon as my logi skill is ready)


You can join trading discussions on the Goblinworks channel.
Wednesday morning report: 95.2B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 1.3 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).

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The effect of griefing on the victims

At first I'd like to emphasize that ingame griefing has no real victims. Not because "it's just pixels lol", but because all games are designed to let you start over. EVE is called the most harsh game, yet there is no permadeath, you can't lose more than 5% skillpoints if you did the dumbest possible mistake in EVE by not updating your clone. Whatever you lost, you can get back by playing better. You can be annoyed, set back, harassed, but not permanently damaged, which would qualify you as "victim".

The Mittani wrote that "This new generation of players rejects the very idea of adaptation and demands that their desire for a ‘safe’ EVE" and "To prevent EVE from becoming a PvP-optional themepark of the sort that coddles this shameful demographic, something must be done - the players who actually do participate in the EVE community must either educate these people about the nature of the game, or blow them up. Through education or violence, they must learn that EVE’s difficulty is what makes the game unique and worthwhile, rather than just another consequence-free PvP-optional themepark game.".

I replied that "Ganking M&S and hoping that they start to play smartly is just as good idea as punishing a 2 years old for peeing into his pants." I still believe that they can't be punished into thinking. They will just give another rage or cry. But what then? The World is populated by these bio-bots and something has to be done. Writing posts or even books like Ayn Rand did will make no difference since they don't read. The "Goon magic" helps those who are already seeking a way out. But most people would refuse to even try that. They are fine being a sheep.

Of course ganking reaches them. Actually nothing else does. The only way to get their attention is smashing them with something big. OK, we have their attention but what shall we say? Left on his own devices he'll just think "evil thing happened someone come save meeeee!" So without further communication the griefing has no positive effect on them.

However not all communication is useful. A technical answer like "you died because your Hulk had no tanking modules or received any form of repping" don't help. He won't listen to you because you are evil, so everything you say are lies and madness. I think the best would be to say "I know you believe you shouldn't be attacked. I did exactly to prove you wrong. If you keep doing nothing you'll be ganked again by me or someone else like me. Beliefs won't save you. Proper playing will. I failed several ganks to smarter carebears. Find smart carebears, join them, learn from them!"

This answer is good the same way as the "Goon magic" itself. It doesn't try to plant rationality into someone in 1 minute, that's impossible. It doesn't want to turn the person into an individualist, it offers a better social environment. Just like the Goon experiences breaking moral rules with the social support of fellow Goons, this advice urges the victim to seek a social group that will teach him. He doesn't want to be ganked so he is motivated to do something, but he'll be dead before accepting advice from an "evil ganker". The "magic" in this idea is that it tells him nothing else than he'd do on his own: ask for help. However it points him not to the forum to cry to devs but to more rational players. A carebear group which can fit a ship isn't the Objectivist convention, but definitely smarter than a carebear group that cannot fit a ship. A working carebear corp isn't a place of enlightened capitalism, but will demand its members to not just receive help but give it in the form of participating mining raids and such.

The "magic" solution isn't big at all. The opposite, it's series of small steps. For a "special snowflake who deserve it all just because he is existing" joining to a community of mutual help and cooperation is a huge step. This is how griefing will make the world a better place: forces socials to be social with a bit better group than they are in now. So if you don't want to spend the rest of your life with idiots and sheep, next time you see a moron, defeat him, then point him to the guy or group who can help him. If you have no better idea, simply mail him the list of the people you failed to gank.

You shall give no mercy to a stupid, or you give mercy to stupidity. However you should always give good advice how to stop being stupid. If just one out of 100 listens, that's a person saved. The rest of them will be return customers.

You can join trading discussions on the Goblinworks channel.
Tuesday morning report: 94.6B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).

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Goons win BECAUSE of griefing

Goons, TEST and those who share their attitude are hated and despised in the EVE community. They are generally considered immature, anti-social idiots who derive fun from pointlessly harming innocent people. I had my share of Goon-bashing, based on the fact that an hour spent griefing people who were not your enemies is an hour wasted. While I stayed away from the "this is wrong, this is immoral, they are terrible people" moralizing, I considered them bored punks who has nothing better to do than being mean.

However "idiots doing random nonsense" don't win battles against a powerblock. SoCo controlled half of nullsec, has tens of thousands of pilots, lot of supercapital ships. While everyone can be defeated, SoCo is not losing a war. They are being roflstomped. Random idiots don't roflstomp a powerblock.

Unlike most people who adjust the reality to their theories, I thrown out the premise of the Goons being idiots who were simply lucky to have Tech moons. Claiming that they win despite of their defining characteristics is nonsense. Anyone who'd do the same as they are except the idiocies would be stronger than them. There isn't such group. Also, their other activities are pretty standard, they do what everyone else do when they are not "being Goons".

Goons must win because they grief and troll innocents. How? Thanks to my logistics misery, I learned it the hard way: most people are ready to throw away serious power upgrade (like a 80% effective logi) if it's not "cool" enough. It's funny that "play to win vs play for ego" is my core idea, I built the blog around it and I didn't recognize until it slapped my face. Most players seriously gimp themselves by refusing to do anything that doesn't "increase their e-peen". They max-out skills for cheap ships instead of learning strong ships, because with something cheap the PvP loss is a smaller shame and the win is a greater glory. They don't field or even self-destruct supercapitals in the fear of a supercapital lossmail. They refuse pilots on the basis of not being perfect, because having an non-perfect ship increases the chance of having a worse ISK ratio. They would rather not log in than throwing waves of ships to the enemy, even if they have more ships and would surely win at the end: the deaths would ruin their killboard. Of course we can add the standard stuff: logi is boring, ewar is cheap, neuting is cheap, all the usual social crap.

OK, socials are bad, most of my posts are about that, and you are surely bored by its repetition. How does it connect to Goons being Goons? Because Goons aren't coming from Krypton. They are recruited from the very same demographics as everyone else: internet-using young adults, mostly males. If they are the same kind of people, they must be exactly as socials as their enemies. They must care about killboards, e-honor, gaining respect and liking of their peers. And by default they would. Left on their own devices they would be just as "nice, friendly and sweet" carebears or "l33t PvP-ers with e-honor and great stats" as the rest of EVE.

But they aren't left on their own devices. Enters The Mittani and other Goon overlords who tell them to do bad things. They lead them to highsec to do the most anti-social thing one can do: bringing pointless and unprofitable suffering to innocent people who meant them no harm. I'm sure that the first time the Goon newbie feels bad when he does it. He only does it because of peer pressure, wanting to fit in with his Goon pals, or by distancing himself from his actions (it's just pixel ships).

After he does these things, after everyone hates him, curses him, tells him that he is the most despicable rat ever crawled the galaxy, he realizes that nothing bad happens to him. The ground doesn't open and swallow him to the Hell like his preachers, teachers and parents said. He won't be banned from the game as such actions are not against the rules. The rage and hatred of random people cause him no harm, actually they are just funny "tears"-posts. He recognizes that all the moral planted into his head are lies. Only objective things can stop him, words cannot.

Also, exactly because he done these things, there is no going back. A Goon can't return to highsec to be a carebear, nor he can be a "E-honor l33t PvP-er". The carebear/l33t communities wouldn't accept him due to his terrible sec status and killboard (there are always killmail whores on the concord reports who post them). They also wouldn't accept him simply because he was Goon. But above all he couldn't come back because he cannot accept the carebear/l33t philosophy without spitting himself in the face for the things he done.

The acts of griefing, scamming, trolling forces one to permanently reject the judgement and morals of the social herd. It forces the person to abandon the goal of being desired, loved, respected by random morons and slackers. It forces him to face the taboos of the society and experience that there are no consequences for breaking them.

Actually I used a similar, yet much less radical way: trading. Social people hate rich people and I want(ed) to prove that simply by not being moron or slacker you can be dirty rich too. I know it helped many people. They wrote me several mails thanking for my ideas. I did OK, but I surely liberated less minds than The Mittani.

The "standard" way of breaking away from the herd of sheep is rationally question their actions one by one. The social psychology books that started me on my way are collecting and analyzing clearly bizarre behavior like this. However it needs lot of thinking and reading. No wonder that Ayn Rand is considered one of the most influential writers - among academics. Her ideas had zero effect on the World since they never reached the general public. The "griefing way" is great because it's a simple "do it yourself in 1 hour for dummies" method. The shortest way for freeing people from the "e-peen/ego/love/liking" nonsense is to make them break the unwritten rules - even completely pointlessly - and let them see that there are no consequences for such actions. I did and published something like it, but I did not dare to go far enough. Making pixel money from selling crap to morons and slackers, breaking the cartels of 0.01 punks is nowhere near as radical - therefore effective - as blowing up carebears who cry "griefing" or "l33t PvP-ers" who cry "blobbing".

Summary:

1. Social people are motivated not by personal interest but by the will to be liked and/or respected by peers
2. Therefore in games they don't go for victory but for getting friends or "cool stats"
3. So they are either a nice, helpful carebears or a small-gang "l33t" PvP-ers with "great killboard"
4. Therefore they are unable and even unwilling to fight anyone who has effective fleet strategy
5. In short: they lose the game
6. This could theoretically be broken by elevating to a rational selfish level (Objectivism), but it's unreachable unless someone has academic level training
7. So average people were/are/forever will be losers without hope.
8. This can be broken by the "Goon magic": practicing socially unacceptable actions (griefing, trolling). Such act burns the bridges towards the social herd, openly rejecting their norms and ensuring their hate/despise.
9. Such person has nothing left to lose on the social front, he has no chance to find friends or making anyone respect him from the crowd, so he gives up trying
10. Internal social barriers out of the picture he will be much more effective
11. He wins

This post is about the philosophy. "What shall I do now to help implement it?" will come tomorrow.


Saturday morning report: 87.0B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
Sunday morning report: 89.4B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
Monday morning report: 92.4B!!! New daily record! (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).

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Important message

If you liked anything in my blog, don't miss the Monday post. It will be my most important post made.

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Scout checklist

The logistics checklist was one of the posts where I gained much more than the readers. And a good goblin always return to the place of getting something. So here I am again, crowdsourcing my scout.

Her job is to support my null/WH life with finding gatecamps, scanning down signatures, wormholes, baddies and also by lighting cynos. She will fly two ships. The first is the Buzzard, a cloaky ship with bonus to scanning:

Update: forgot bubbles. Warpstabs out, inertia stabilizer and damage control in.
The idea is traveling cloaked. If cloak is compromised: hoping that the warp disrupting ships don't have enough points to stop warp and the DPS ships don't have enough alpha/lock time to break the tank of the overheated med slots. If they do, well, the Buzzard pollution of New Eden decreases by 1.

Since Buzzards can't have cynos, I will simply use a Manticore with T1 modules for that.

She has +3 implants and learns the following skills to level 5:

• Astrometrics
• Caldari Frigate
• Electronics
• Electronics Upgrades
• Engineering

Level 4:

• Afterburners
• Astrometric Pinpointing
• Astrometric Rangefinding
• Cloaking
• High speed maneuvering
• Covert Ops
• Science
• Warp Drive Operation

Level 3:

• Astrometric Acquisition
• Cynosural Field Theory
• Energy Management
• Evasive Maneuvering
• Fuel conservation
• Mechanics
• Navigation
• Shield Management
• Shield Upgrades
• Spaceship Command
• Tactical Shield Manipulation
• Thermodynamics

Comment, discuss, let's find the most efficient plan for a cheap scout. Again, I know that lvl 5 is better than 4 and 4 is better than 3. But remember, falling short means losing a cheap-fit cheap ship while learning 1.7M skills costs a PLEX (as the alternative of stopping my main for a long time is another account).


Friday morning report: 85.9B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).

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