Business Thursday: high ISK/LP highsec corporations

Loyalty points provides large portion of mission rewards. If you blitz the mission (complete it as fast as possible, skipping optional NPCs and looting), most of your rewards are LP. You can buy items in the LP store and then sell them for ISK. The ISK/LP conversion ratio gives how good the LP item is. Not all items are available in all stores, you should pick your corporation wisely. Pirate corporations that only have agents in nullsec can go up to 4000 ISK/LP, but we are talking about highsec missioning now. A random corporation provides rewards around 7-800 ISK/LP. With industrial implants, you can go up to 1000-1000 in random corporations.

Update: I made a nasty mistake and did not notice that the FW agents - while present in highsec - give out FW missions in lowsec. Still there are three corporations left in highsec that give much better results than normal highsec corporations:

Corporation	Faction	Items	ISK/LP
Sisters of EVE	Sisters of EVE	Probes and probe launchers	2000
Thukker mix	Thukker tribe	Nomad implants	2000
Trust partners	Thukker tribe	Nomad implants	2000

There is one more LP store item group: blueprint copies. They are harder to assess since you have to get the BPC and the materials to manufacture the item and sell that. While some has good profit, it is not coming from missioning but manufacturing and the time calculating all the possible profits may not worth it. Continue at your own risk.


The daily anti-tears are starting with a happy picture: I did not even gank here on this day and still just one inappropriate ship:
Yes, I know, it's just accident and has nothing to do with my efforts. Like this ship was probably just randomly named:
People like Slavus start to get that proper fitting is important. Well, some. Others are still being informed, like Yoko Darkblu:

Read More

What took me so long?

I started EVE in 2012 February. More than a year and a half. And only now I came up with a project that can change the history of EVE and also I can run myself. Before that I traded which made me very rich but not affecting the course of New Eden. Then I made various nullsec projects that could (and somewhat did) changed EVE but weren't really mine. They all needed an existing nullsec organization to adopt and run them.

Considering that my page about the importance of bashing the morons and slackers predates my EVE career, it's weird that it took more than a year to figure out that the best way of bashing morons and slackers is ... bashing morons and slackers. Why?

Because I was fooled by the bragging of the EVE veterans. Like practically everyone, I accepted that the power in EVE lies in numbers. That "the best EVE-ship is friendship". That if you are powerful, you can do whatever you want with the powerless ones - and often you do it, just because you can. That EVE is a place of griefing and you can do nothing but run or "HTFU". That money doesn't matter, personal skill doesn't matter, all the power lies in the "metagame".

It took so long to see that it's nothing but bullshit. The first step was indeed making absurd amount of ISK. I mean in the magnitude of nullsec alliances. It not only gave me independence to test whatever idea I had, but got me thinking "how could these all-powerful guys be so broke"?

The second step was my time with TEST Alliance, seeing first hand how these "all-powerful" guys are dependent on both ISK coming from the finance/logistics team and on FCs telling them which button to press. Without such FCs they couldn't exist. Literally.

The third step was ganking with the New Order. This is where I first experienced being on the "powerful" side of PvP. This is also the place where I surprised myself with the ability of getting as much kills as smaller alliances like Rote Kapelle.

Yet all these proved nothing but the idea of the "self-made man", that one with dedication and brain can rise from the group of the powerless losers to the powerful winners. It wasn't surprising, nor interesting: it didn't change anything in the EVE landscape.

The turning point came when I finally faced the "powerful guys who can do whatever they want". In retrospective, my plans were ridiculous. I placed dozens of Procurers with fittings in the ice mining systems. Got empty pods for my miner and my Orca pilot. Placed the medical clones in systems with replacement ships. I was preparing for a long an bloody war against CFC during the ice interdiction. I planned to get blown up again and again both in the mining ships and the Orca and returning until my resources allow it. I merely wanted to prove that money at least give you the ability to make a great last stand.

And what could the unstoppable CFC do to the guy who spread CFC hate on EN24 and his own blog and went to mine ice in the middle of the interdiction? They got the shields of one Procurer down to 84%. That was all that they could do. There was no reshipping, no heroic last stand, I could trash-talk the unstoppable powerful guys without consequences.

Only then I realized that the myth of the powerful guys is a big fat lie. There are those who know the game mechanics and there are those who don't. The first group is powerful, not by their friends, their metagame or whatever self-enlarging nonsense they tell, but just by the fact that they know how to fit and fly a spaceship. Those without knowledge are powerless. The Goons could indeed hold Hulkageddons and burn Jitas and massacre "the weak", but not because they have friends or "stellar moon income" but because they knew how to fit a ganky ship while their targets had no clue how to fit a tanky ship.

The victims were indeed griefed because they believed that they were smashed by an unstoppable force and they could do nothing about it. I will disprove it. Every day I will show people how can they avoid being ganked by making examples from those who refuse to fit their ship well, orbit and get ECM drones.

I will change EVE Online and prove that there is no "powerful group" where you must be accepted to stop being the underdog. I will prove that everyone can give the finger to the "powerful guys" simply by learning basic game knowledge. If you want to take part in changing EVE and smash a decade standing myth with all those who live on it, join!

Daily anti-tears:
The ice belts are clear of improper ships after serious teaching efforts.


This is a properly fit orbiting skiff. My teaching efforts on this player clearly worked.

Finally a moron post from my girlfriend:
Lilypad is her alt. She is level 90 for 3 days. She has 466 ilvl. She was the tank.

Read More

Bi-solo and dual-ganking guide

There are two limits front of a solo ganker and both can be handled by having a second catalyst pilot on a different account than the main ganker and the scout.

The first is the 15 minutes long GCC. I'm not sure why this is implemented, a 5 minutes would be more than enough for everyone else in the system to realize that there is a ganker around. But it's 15 minutes, we have to deal with it. Bi-solo ganking is simply using alternating gankers for solo ganking. I've started my own secondary ganker back when I was with the New Order and finishing his training now. Having a second ganker is a great quality of life change. Waiting is the most annoying thing in EVE and it greatly decreases it. After one of them prepared Concord you can go out and gank instantly. After a gank you just dock, loot, find a new target and can undock again. Finally the second ganker helps if you failed to get the pod with the first ganker but it's floating there AFK. After docking the original ganker, you can undock with a T1 cata and volley down the pod with Concord on the belt.

To avoid inventory mess, only one ganker should have items and ships. He fits the ship for the other ganker and just trades it. Give the two gankers different UI color so you can identify them on a blink.

But there is more than saving time with two gankers. You can undock them both and hit a target too big for solo gankers. While a duo gank team can take on a perfectly tanked retriever, they cost almost as much as the target so it would be dumb. Exhumers on the other hand are great targets. A Mackinaw can get out of reach of the solo ganker with an Adaptive Invulnerability Field and a small extender or some rigs, while still being economical to gank. While dual ganking is much more complicated than solo and more risky, in lack of solo targets you should use it. I've performed a half dozen dual ganks after some alt-shoot practices to figure out the easiest way to manage two gankers at the same time:

1. If "white knights" were making you some trouble, don't dual gank, that's asking for podding
2. Place the scout normally
3. Get both gankers into ships, set the target red. The main ganker should fit dual Sensor Booster.
4. Fit the ships and group guns with shift-drag in the station. Load ammo and scripts
5. Undock the weaker ganker
6. Undock the main ganker
7. Squadwarp to the insta-undock with the weaker ganker being the leader
8. Solo warp weaker ganker to target.
9. Switch to strong ganker, sebo, overheat, solo warp after 5-6 seconds behind the weaker
10. Switch back to weaker sebo, overheat
11. Arrive, lock the target with the weaker ganker, open fire, activate scram, use keep at range 1000
12. Switch to the main ganker, lock the target, open fire, use keep at range 1000
13. Start podding the target. Start locking, prestart guns.
14. Switch to weaker ganker, get the pod out
15. Switch to strong ganker, get the pod out
16. Dock both gankers
17. Undock the looter or send the scout to grab the catalyst loot.

This method is superior to squadwarping. When you arrive to the scene, the clock starts ticking for the faction police who may jam you before Concord. Upon firing, the clock starts ticking for Concord. Locking and destroying the pod takes 3 extra seconds. In a 0.6 system you have approximately 20 seconds. Imagine that the target can be killed in 36 seconds by one Catalysts. This way both gankers spends 18 seconds killing the ship, leaving 2 seconds to pod, which they'll fail. If one arrives 6 seconds behind the first, the first one will keep shooting all 20 seconds and explode before the target dies. So the second ganker only needs to put in 16 seconds of damage, leaving enough time to pod. If you gank in a fleet, always choose a dedicated podder, squadwarp the others, the podder should lag behind 6-8 seconds. As a bonus, if the first ganker runs into a trap (get jammed by white knights), the second can abort and run away with his ship.

Clarification of the WGBWC rule on second account (alt) ganker: he must provide 30 solo ganks or 10B any kills to stay. Why? Because if it's a problem for you, you should not have a second ganker, you aren't ganking intensively enough to warrant a second account.

You can use a Thrasher in dual ganks to break Therm-Kin tanked targets with EM resist hole.

The daily anti-tear:
PS: I've added a scanning method to the guide that greatly decreases scouting time. "Using dscan you can easily determine which belt cluster the target is. However one planet can have several belts or several planets can be in close proximity. Set your dscan distance to 300 million km. That's about 2 AU. Verify that the target is within this distance. Launch probes in pinpoint formation, centered on your ship, 2 AU scan range. You shall get perfect location in one scan, you can warp to it instantly."

Read More

The fundamental difference between WGBWC and the New Order

I was member of The New Order of Highsec for months. I was their most productive ganker. I left them for being too lazy and too tolerant towards pointless harvesting of tears. I blamed the leader for being a Goon alt or simply incompetent in keeping the New Order from growing and making impact. I was wrong, there was a fundamental problem with the New Order that I only see now when I'm running my own movement.

The New Order has risen against AFK mining. We can agree that gaining wealth in a game without actually playing it is practically cheating. We all hate when AFK-leeches make the team lose in a WoW battleground, World of Tanks or League of Legends game. CCP already made changes that made AFK play harder (think of the ice change) and no game developer was ever able to completely remove AFK gathering or botting. In a game like EVE Online where players are encouraged to take matters into their hands, an organization fighting against AFK leeching is a good organization.

Now I have an organization fighting against using badly chosen ships or badly fit ships. Being dumb in games is a similar problem to being an AFK leech or worse: more games were lost to outright dumb players than AFK-ers. Why will we succeed when the New Order failed? Not because our goal is better. Not because "we are better people". Not because I'm better leader than James 315.

The fundamental problem with the New Order is arbitrary justice. Who is AFK is determined by a New Order agent and punishment is administered by his hand. It has two results: such organizations attract violent people who do violence just for violence. Such people will misjudge people and seek reasons to punish them instead of seeking fair sentence. Power corrupts. The other problem is that even perfect compliance to New Order rules does not provide safety for miners from anyone but the New Order itself. Therefore miners will only comply if the New Order is already so powerful that its punishment cannot be avoided. Since all organizations start as small, this means that the New Order meets with defiance and evasion instead of compliance.

We Gank Because We Care demands people to choose and fit their ships in a way to resist ganking. Such action is objectively judged. I mean if a WGBWC agent mistakenly or maliciously judge a ship "improper" and proceeds with ganking it, all he gets is a destroyed Catalyst and the miner trolling him while looting his wreck. "Gank resistant" ship is judged by the game server alone, my opinion or your opinion does not matter. You can come up with a very different fit from mine if you like. While I can proceed to try to gank it, I can only succeed if it wasn't good enough and I was right. If I failed, you were right and I was clearly wrong. The WGBWC agent holds no power to judge anyone, therefore he is not corrupted by power, nor the position attracts violent people.

Similarly, while a target can consider the whole WGBWC bad, he cannot blame the individual agent of wrongdoing. The blame "you don't keep your own code" was very common against New Order agents, exactly because of the opinionated justice. A WGBWC agent can't be blamed for being unjust. If your ship blown up, he was right. If your ship lived, he was already punished for his mistake and you can claim compensation by looting his wreck.

The other important point is that if you comply with the WGBWC demands, your ship becomes ungankable by not only WGBWC but by every gankers (remember, not even Miniluv ganks Procurers). You gain something from compliance even if you never see a WGBWC agent again in your life: there are and will always be various gankers in EVE. Choosing a proper ship and fitting it well protects you from all of them.

---

PS: if you are highsec security missioning, start training for large blaster specialization and Kronos marauder. The new rebalance will make it the ultimate mission boat. Its useless web bonus is turned into falloff bonus, so its optimal+falloff with a blaster will be 60km with tracking computer. The MJD bonus gives easy option to relocate, no more MWD-slowboating. And that's without going siege. The new siege module extend that to 70km while increasing its tracking below medium blasters. The siege bonus also makes it unkillable by rats by increasing resistances and repair amount even more. It also gives EWAR immunity, so no more trouble with ECM-ing rats.

PS2: gankers always post tears for entertainment. I get my fair share of tears. But I won't post from this collection of idiocy. Instead I post the anti-tears, miner mails and local chat screenshots where they learned. Here are two:
PS3: of course I don't leave you here without a moron! He was tanked, and usually I don't attack these because I don't have time left for the pod. But I made an exception because you must see his fit. What can I say, a Track-ie roleplayer.

Read More

Corporations/guilds only have their restrictions to offer

Each MMOs have player groups. Guilds, clans, corporations. Why to join them? The answer seems obvious: because these groups control resources: a successful WoW raiding guild can get you heroic epic items, a sov-holder EVE alliance can provide you access to jump bridges, stations, reimbursements and blob kill reports. They all give a collection of players who will help you in various things.

However this is a dumb answer. The corporations and guilds have no resources. Every item, station and piece of currency is claimed by the members. Unless you join to be a leech/thief at the first place, you will work for your own stuff. I mean as all resources are created by members and distributed to members, the average member gets exactly as much as he gives, by definition of the term "average". It is true that often the form of contribution is different from the form of reward. For example the typical EVE Nullsec alliance pilot contributes his time flying in a fleet that capture moons and rented space and he receives ship reimbursements. But such specialization is done without formal grouping in highsec by trading: you run missions that give ISK and LP and can trade the LP shop items for minerals that others mined.

If not resources, then maybe it's "friends". The groups facilitate positive interaction between a subset of players. However such groups could be created by game mechanics too and such attempts are not successful. The NPC corp in EVE has no corp life and the "Looking for Dungeon/Raid" feature is considered a horrible social experience suffered only for the extra rewards. Considering that these features connect you to a sample of the playerbase, collecting another sample of the same playerbase should provide exactly the same result: annoyance.

"But my corp/guild isn't just random players" - you might say and you are right. Not everyone can get into your group. Since your group is a subset of the playerbase, the only thing the group can do is set restrictions. For example a HC raider WoW guild only recruit people who can keep 95%+ raid attendance, have X ilvl and Y bosses killed. In EVE Pandemic Legion only takes you if you have a carrier and decent killboard history. These are all restrictions, locking out large segment of the playerbase.

The restrictions the group looks negative to the player at first glance: "I can do X, Y and Z in the NPC crop, if I join this group, I will be banned from doing Y and Z". Why does anyone submit to such restrictions? Because he gets something important: groupmembers who are similarly restricted. Joe might want to do X, V and W. Since you don't like V and find W especially disgusting, you can't play with Joe in an unstructured environment. But you can both join a group which bans Y, Z, V and W, letting you do only X which you both like. The only thing that the gaming groups have to to offer is a set of restrictions that ban other players from activities that would harm/annoy you.

This came up when comments questioned what my corp has to offer besides restrictive rules? The answer is - just like for every other EVE corp is: nothing. Restrictive rules are all I have to offer. Let me explain these rules from a "what do I get" perspective:

• Provide 5B worth of solo highsec ganks every month. This rule guarantees that every other member is a seasoned ganker. If you see an Orca that needs 8 Catalysts to gank, you can form a fleet of 8 without having to worry that someone sits in a T1 cata, cannot overheat, has his safety green or fails in some other way. You, just need to do your job, they will do theirs.
• Zero nullsec, lowsec or WH kills. Killboard is a simple way of measuring activity and performance. But it has the technical problem of giving every killer the full value of the kill. If you had a noobship in Asakai, you could get nearly a trillion ISK kills by your civilian guns. This rule guarantee that the killboard data of the other members are not inflated by such killmail whoring.
• The corp chat is for sharing kills, asking questions, discussing strategies, trading equipment and forming fleets against whales. Not for jokes, stories, "funny" picture links or other random crap. This guarantees that the corp chat will never turn into something you'd like to turn off, it won't be spammed by irrelevant nonsense and it's not ignored by everyone but trolls. If you ask a question, you get an answer and not trolling and lols.
• Teach! This is why we are here. Your bio should contain teaching (see example below), you should link the kill on local channel to alert others, and to send them to your bio. It guarantees that others are doing the job too, so the goal of changing EVE is reachable, it's not just you against the legion of morons and slackers.
• Be self sufficient, don't beg for ships or modules! This guarantees that no one leeches on you.

Many people think that such restrictions make the game not fun. Which is the point! These people don't belong to the corp and the only way to keep them out is making the game not fun for them if they still join. I want to find people whose fun is not limited by these rules - on the contrary, their fun would be damaged by the activities I've banned: non-performance, kill-whoring, idle chat, porn links, griefing people and begging.

While I claim that every single game group works this way, I do not claim that they use formalized rules. They often run by "we are a friendly group, join and let's have fun". Here the limits are set by actions of the leadership, what they do, what they tolerate and what they don't. This is what's dubbed as "the personality of the leader matters". I could run the same corp without written rules, simply by constantly bitching on kill-whores, yelling on porn-spammers celebrating performers and trolling beggars. I simply prefer a formalized ruleset instead of "unwritten rules".

The main positive of written rules is less noise. No one will join here who doesn't belong. The main negative is harder start. By having a generic "join and have fun", you can collect filler people to make the corp lively and active, make the impression that it's not a "start from zero". I terminated my business, focused all my efforts here, I'm here for the long run, I am fine if the corp will be very small for months.

I seriously hope that people will find this kind of play desirable. I find it desirable, I don't find my play limited by the rules above. Unless I'm one-of-a-kind, the corp won't be empty. It is very likely that 99% of the players would find this corp not fun. But considering that there are about 200K players in EVE, I still have 2K prospective members. To get them in, all I need is to stick to these rules and prove that I mean them.


PS: for the first time I started scanning. Mining barges. I just love my new scout Tengu. I also tested that you can't be ganked in a mining mission as the ganker arrives at the mission entrance even if the scout is standing next to you. A ganky catalyst can't just travel 10+ km because the police drones attack it if it's below -5 security status.

Read More

Business Thursday: Character sell

I've sold my first supercapital pilot, she can fly a Nyx. Since she was sold while I was in TEST internally, I don't link the actual sell page, but here is the relevant skill list (pre-requisites omitted):

Projected Electronic Counter Measures 3
4x Armor Compensation 4
Fighters 5
Remote Armor Repair Systems 5
Capital Repair Systems 3
Fighter Bombers 5
Capital Ships 4
Cloaking 3
Mechanics 5
Repair Systems 5
Hull Upgrades 5
Science 5
Biology 4
Engineering 5
Energy Systems Operation 5
Energy Management 4
Energy Pulse Weapons 4
Shield Emission Systems 5
Energy Emission Systems 5
Cynosural Field Theory 2
Jump Fuel Conservation 4
Jump Drive Calibration 5
Thermodynamics 4
Cybernetics 5
Capital Remote Armor Repair Systems 4
Gallente Carrier 4 (halfway to 5)
Capital Shield Emission Systems 4
Capital Energy Emission Systems 4
Evasive Maneuvering 4
Advanced Drone Interfacing 4

She was 13 months old, and 26M SP. She was sold for 15B ISK. The costs were 13+2 PLEX (about 8.25B), a set of +5 learning implants (social was 4, together 0.5B) and skillbooks for 1B. All together about 10B costs. So I made 5B by locking down some of my capital for a year and logging in for a few minutes.

While it's clearly a very slow form of making ISK, it's also a very low effort way of making billions. So I continue to sell pilots.

---

I used to send a mail to every gank target soon after the gank. I choose a more diplomatic method since I usually got tears as reply instead of acceptance. Now I send the mail before I log out, to all pilots involved at once. It both give them time to chill out and also show them that they didn't die alone. Maybe seeing the other bad ship owners will convince them that's it's a serious EVE betterment project and not someone collecting tears:
And people indeed learn, no matter how much naysayers claim otherwise:
The guide page got a Noctis fit, after I found a Noctis in a belt.

PS: the moron of the day is MevNav Hawkens:

Read More

T(h)ank for your pod!

Corp update: the GoblinGanks channel became pretty lively, many people started their gankers, soon they'll get to the point where they can apply to the corp. Come and join, let's hit the morons and slackers who refuse to read up and fight the social thinking that you need "friends" to achieve things.

---

"It's already replaced", "it earned its price long ago", "idc it was just a ret lol" are common responses to ship losses. However people seem to ignore an important function of a ship: to protect their pod. While you can usually get your pod out in highsec and lowsec, it needs you to be prepared and at the keyboard.

Instead of speculating, let's see some data. I processed all my solo kills from the first to the most recent. I killed 285 ships with pods, 137 ships without pods and 5 lone pods that were just floating there without ships. These were all empty and ignored in this calculation. What is common in these ships? That they were all destroyed by a single Catalyst ganker. Let's see their average costs:

• Pods: 106.4M
• Podded ships: 78.7
• Not podded ships: 98.1

The pods cost 35% more than the ships! It seems the owners forgot that ships needed to be tanked not just for themselves, but for their pods too. The reason why non-podded ships were more expensive in general is that T2 Exhumers have more natural tank than cheaper barges, so they have better chance to die just before Concord arrives, leaving no time for podding.

But there are more interesting results here: I split the podded ships into two groups, below and above 100M value. The average value of the "cheap" ships was 47.5M, their pods worth 83.3M. The average value of the "expensive" ships was 275.9M, while their pods worth 252.6M. So the cheap barges (Covetors and Retrievers, I didn't kill Procurers) held twice their cost in pods, making their actual kill value 130M. Not bad for killing an untanked T1 barge with a 10M Catalyst.

What do I want to say besides "gankers, don't ignore T1 barges"? That the idea of using an untanked Retrievers and just replacing them only works if you keep your pod empty. If the miners would do that, gankers would sooner or later stop killing Rets, as their value doesn't really worth the gank. I leave 1-2 months old newbies alone regardless of tank because their pods usually don't worth my time. But putting an expensive clone into a T1 barge is just dumb and it seems that many people are dumb.

Read More