How to make EVE a bit safer but much more popular?

There are awful lot of zero-sum PvP games where the loser loses ranking, kill:death ratio and other stats. Yet these games are popular. The PvP games where you can farm XP and credits, therefore “progress” like in World of Tanks or League of Legends are even more popular, despite you still have losses in the individual game. I don’t think that the losses make EVE a small niche game.

It’s not even “unfair”, ganking PvP. You have little effect on the outcome of a World of Tanks game or a World of Warcraft battlegrounds. You are just one soldier in the battle. Sometimes the game is lost on loading screen due to matchmaking unbalance, teammate AFK or something like that. Still these games are popular.

The thing that all PvP games have but EVE doesn’t is the ability to trust in your teammates. In these games you fight side by side with other players. They might suck or even go AFK. But griefing is rare, banned and its effect limited to one short battle. Also, by handpicking your team, you can be 100% free of AFK-ers, noobs and griefers.

Not in EVE. In EVE a single hostile getting into your team can destroy a supercapital fleet, drop Sov, steal everything or simply go on an unstoppable awox spree. This is a bad design, not because these actions are “bad”, but because the individual player is completely powerless to do something about it. Only the leadership of his corporation/alliance can keep spies out. The little guy can only hope that they succeed.

You might say “but EVE supposed to be real”, but such spying power is not real. The president of a country cannot disable all infrastructure, grab everything in the treasury and jump it in a minute to a hostile country all by himself. Such act would need a huge conspiracy to bypass the checks and balances.

I do not suggest to ban spying or GMs reverse awoxes. I want built-in tools to limit the effect a spy can do. My suggestions:

• Remove highsec awoxing. Simply make shooting corpmates a suicide gank. Since there are duels, there is no legitimate need of shooting a corpmate.
• Make set standings take precedence over corp/alliance membership. If you set a corpmate -10, he still shows up as green and not red. Fix it, so a low/null awoxer can be marked after his first awox and also locked out of services. (I understand that instant-kicking is not possible due to abusing it to avoid war targets in highsec)
• Create a time lock for every possibly harmful activity. It can be activated selectively and makes actions like offlining a tower, SBU, TCU, cancelling a job, removing stront from the tower, disbanding the alliance, kicking corps or even members impossible. To perform the action, first you have to switch off time lock, wait 24 hours and then perform it. This way the members have 24 hours to respond before the bad thing happens.
• Daily withdraw limits to hangars and wallets. You can only remove this amount a single day. The limit itself can be time-locked, so the rogue director can’t just remove it.
• “Equal share” setting. By switching it on, the shares of the corporation are equally distributed between members all the time, allowing them to vote out the CEO. Protectable by time lock too.
• Automatic reimbursement feature. The replacement of lost combat ships are the largest ISK sinks of an alliance, so automatizing it would remove lot of ISK from the hands of people who could steal it. You just put the ISK to the reimbursement wallet and automatic algorithms send it to players who lost their ship in an eligible way. It would also remove huge administrative workload.

With such improvements, the players could more easily trust in their blues/greens, allowing much more players to participate in group content. And we know that group integration is the best predictor of remaining in the game.

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The moron of the day is Bar0n Greenback. After losing his hulk alt with his 720M pod, he swore revenge: He spent the rest of the day trashing up local and camping my stations in a ship that was specially tailored to catch Catalysts: If you don't see any kills under his name, it's not a bug. But he surely had lot of fun doing it, because he was around all evenings.

The anti-tear of today:

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EVE Downtime: why 11:00?

Ever wondered why the EVE downtime is when it is? You probably thought that this is because of the lowest connection count: this is when the smallest amount of players are annoyed by being kicked off the server.

But it's not true, as you can see from the chart on Chribba's site:
You can see that the minimum user count is around 6 AM EVE time and from there it's growing until the downtime hits at 11.

Of course the downtime can't be at 6 AM since EVE time is the time zone of the Iceland, where headquarters of the developers is. During downtime they do maintenance on the server, which goes better if they are in the office. However I don't see why can't it be pulled back 2 hours, to 9:00 EVE time.

I know it's not much of a post, just a weird observation, but I'm still puzzled why the downtime is not closer to the minimum user load.

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The moron of the day figured out a ingenious way to hide his covetors:
The anti-tear of the day is a miner who learned a lesson:
Finally, another ice belt saved:

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Morons of the week

I neglected the killboard outside of my own. This was a mistake. Idiotism should not be ignored. Watch, how our fellow human beings, who managed to collect billions of ISK displayed zero understanding of the game.

This report covers the October 14 – 20 week and I hopefully don’t forget to do it again next week. I created 3 groups for them. The first is suicide ganked morons. They simply put way too much value into their ship for its tank and got ganked. No, a freighter isn’t too tanked and not able to protect more than a billion. No, shield booster is not considered tank. Neither shield boost amplifier.

• 6B, missioning Nightmare.
• T1 industrial, 6B cargo, killed by one Tornado. In Jita.
• 4.5B cargo in a freighter.
• 6.5B cargo in a freighter.
• 17B cargo in a freighter. Loot fairy gave the gankers the finger.
• 7B missioner.
• 6B in a freighter.
• 4B cargo in a freighter.
• 5B missioner. His fit is stupid even if we ignore the lack of buffer, which a bunch of tornadoes didn’t.
• 7B missioner.
• 4.5B cargo in a freighter.
• 11B in a freighter.
• 5B thing. I can’t figure out what he wanted.
• 6.5B Missioner
• 7B cargo freighter.
• 4.5B cargo freighter.
• 6B cargo freighter.
• 4B cargo freighter.
• 9B cargo freighter with a nice loot.
• 4B cargo freighter.
• 8B cargo freighter.
• 6.5B cargo freighter.
• 7B cargo freighter.
• 5.5B cargo freighter.
• 10.5B T1 industrial

The second group is even dumber. They flown something expensive in highsec under wardec. Usually a jump freighter. So their death didn’t need an organized gank group, just a few pilots. Because if you own a 6B ship, you can’t afford a second pilot who is in the NPC corp and takes over the JF in a lowsec mindpoint.

• Empty JF. Since the hull is 6B, “empty” is a relative term.
• Another empty one.
• 4.5B cargo + the JF.
• Almost empty JF.
• 1.3B Paladinwith a 6.5B pod.
• Empty JF.
• 5B transport Tengu. At least it was cap stable.
• 5.5B in a freighter. Under wardec.
• One more empty JF.

All together 246B. In a week. Approximately 1T/month. That’s a high price for being a moron in EVE Online. Counting with $13/PLEX and 600M/Plex, it’s $22000/month. It would have paid for basic education. Please also note that the gank losses of overpriced morons are already in the magnitude of the kills of the largest nullsec alliances.

The last group is stupid beyond imagination. I mean the previous ones are bad enough, but they could at least get lucky and pass unnoticed. However these idiots put a few PvP modules, typically a point or scram to their otherwise completely badly fit and stupidly expensive ships. So it’s likely that they were actively looking for being killed. In which they succeeded. Oh wait, they might just wanted to impress Ripard Teg.

• 14B something. I failed to figure out what he wanted, but surely not showing up here.
• 12B something. It’s like the previous one, except having gateguns on the kill and being in lowsec.
• 5B Loki in Uedama. It had a long point, which complements the autocannons, and webs well. Oh wait, it doesn’t.

Finally, let me share a personally found idiot(s). This one has a story, unlike just a kill report and a one-line summary. So, I was ganking ice Macks. Found one with interesting fit: 3 empty midslots and a 400M faction invulnerability field. Ganked him. Got the pod too, 2.2B. OK, losing an expensive but dumbly fit ship and a stupidly expensive pod is bad enough, but the story is far from being finished. After docking up the flashy red pods, I went to loot the faction invulnerability field which dropped. Except it wasn't there. Easy come, easy go, I guess. So I found another Mack and ganked it. Another 600M kill. How? It wasn't expensively fit! Then I checked the cargo: he took the invulnerability of the wreck of his corpmate, and kept mining. His pod was 2.3B. Since the loot fairy loves those who cleanse New Eden from idiots, the faction invulnerability field dropped again and this time I looted it.


PS: a piece of great news by Sugar from EVE Vegas: “Are they done with mining changes? No. They want to do another pass of the barges. The Procurer and Skiff are not as useful as they want. The Retriever and the Mackinaw are too strong with being good in two out of three areas.” The three areas are tank, yield and ore hold. Since Rets and Macks are meant to have the best ore hold, it means that they will either get a tank nerf or a yield nerf, both are welcome changes.

No day shall pass without an anti-tear:

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World of Warcraft: the working class dreamworld

World of Warcraft is a strange "game". Actually it's not even a game as you can't win or lose it. You can't even win or lose aspects of it like an EVE battle. You always get rewards, your character always progresses. Yet it's the most popular MMO. Why?

Surely not because its fantasy world. People just ignore it. They talk about mobs, abilities, ilvl, chat about real life things while playing and so on. If the orcs would be replaced by humans in the next expansion, no one would care, just like there was no comment on the new races in the various expansions.

Playing World of Warcraft is an escapism into an ideal world. But what way it is ideal? It is the working class dreamworld:

• There is no unemployment: there are quests, mobs and instances whenever you want to access them
• Work is needed, not performance: you were in a battleground and lost horribly? Here are some honor points as payment. Damaged less than the disc priest in the looking for raid? Here is your well earned valor point and loot. In WoW your performance isn't judged. If you show up and make some effort, you get rewarded, regardless of the worth of your activity.
• Low income inequities: are you below average in performance? Are you putting in much less effort than most? Nevermind, your rewards are just a bit lower than what the best of the best gets. The ilvl difference between a total slacker and the world first is less than 25%
• Constant progression: you can replace your car... I mean your mount and gear every month, no matter how bad you are

You know, the socialists didn't demand freebies. That's the morons and slackers. The socialist, Marxists always demanded work. These people want to contribute and want to be proud of their work. They however worship working itself, and not its product. If you spend digging holes and refilling them, you are entitled to salary - they believe.

But the World doesn't work this way. You can't get decent salary for flipping burgers or can't even get any job in lack of qualifications. To make it worse, not even games work this way: Basketball, Chess or an FPS game gives you nothing just a "you have lost" for your efforts. To win, you have to be better than the other player/team. So they flock to "games" where you don't have to be better than any standard.

It's sad to recognize, but the dream World of socials is a place where everyone can flip burgers and get paid for it well.

I don't find this world a dream, rather a nightmare. I rather play games where your actions shape your future and you become different in results than the other guys. For example now I have 100B+/month solo and dualbox kills in EVE, something that very few players can achieve. Why? Because I don't just log in and do as told, but think, analyze and act much more efficiently than them.

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Ganking goes on, providing more anti-tears:

Of course you also find morons. Luckly loot fairy hates morons and loves those who destroy them. Also, there are still good pods in bad ships.

The Catalyst ganking guide is updated with this graph:

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Ganking in 0.7

For long I only ganked in 0.5 and 0.6 security. I’m not the only one as you could see from the Mackinaw death chart

The reason of ignoring 0.7 is that Concord responds in 16 seconds, making a T2 fit Catalyst unable to kill anything but bad fit Covetors. Even two T2 fit Catalyst can’t kill a Mackinaw that has tanking modules in the slots which are not needed for yield. So theoretically you can’t gank here.

Practically the amount of absolutely horribly fit ships is stunning. Most Mackinaws have their mid slots empty or filled with an ore scanner and maybe civilian shield boosters. Hulks are widespread. But the best thing is that – unlike 0.5-0.6 miners, the 0.7 miners probably never seen a ganker in their life. The warnings in local channel, docking up when someone arrives to their belt, paying attention to anything are absent from 0.7. You can gank, pull Concord and gank again in the same belt, as the miners in the belt can’t care less until they get the Void S.

The amount of mining in 0.7 is shocking. Much more barges and especially T2 exhumers are chewing the belts than in lower security. You can set up shop and gank all evening in a system and its neighbors. Butthurt miners might camp the station in missioning ships without sebo, point, ecm, web or anything PvP-like, but “real” white knights are missing. Probably even they don’t consider the 0.7 miners worthy of saving.

The problem with 0.7 ganking is the limited time. You can’t solo gank, so this is just annoying instead of "rampage time", like it would be in 0.6: Even dual gankers are limited to 23K kin-therm damage, which isn’t much. And that’s with perfect skills. A pair of 500 DPS Catalysts have trouble killing a naked Mack and most have a passive thermic resistor. So to start 0.7 ganking you need two 700+ DPS T2 Catalysts which is a serious limiting factor for most gankers.

However WGBWC is emphasizing competent, self-reliant solo gankers exactly for this reason: to be able to gank in ways which aren’t accessible to casual gankers. While 0.7 ganking is harder skillpoint- and fitting-wise, it’s much easier piloting-wise. If you are taking ganking seriously and don’t want to be locked into the newbie-friendly 0.5 systems, having a second ganker trained is the way.

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The anti-tear of today is beautiful. We warp into belts again and again grinding barges and exhumers in the hope of teaching people. When they learn, it's the biggest reward:
The moron of today considered using 1B worth of faction mining drones. After he died, I just scooped them in:

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Lilypad on the island

My girlfriend didn’t follow me to EVE and play very little with it, merely skill updates. She still plays WoW. She started a paladin tank alt recently, Lilypad.

The current patch non-raiding content is on some new island. There you must kill elite creatures for quests and for rep. Obviously, such activity is best done in group, probably that was the purpose of the developers. Yet I saw poor Lilypad slowly killing them alone. So I suggested her to form a group from the people present on the island. She did but it didn’t go well at all. To be exact, she got nothing but repair bill and to finish the quest, she had to quit the group and return solo questing.

What? The content that seems to encourage grouping is best done solo? No, when she had guildmates and people she knew online, they could farm them very fast. The problem is that the random guy is simply worse than nothing. We are beyond the “poor player needs help” doctrine. The constant nerfs and catering to the lowest common denominator in WoW decreased the mentioned lowest common denominator to the point where they have negative value, you are faster alone than with them. These idiots run around like chickens, pull everything that moves and wipe the group. First I thought they are griefers, but they continued to do it when kicked from group and couldn’t grief anyone but themselves.

They are simply very bad players who are nothing but burden to any team they join. The game developer keep them progressing via freebies and handouts. However even I don’t think that anyone can be this bad. I mean they are, but surely not because they couldn’t be better. Even a mildly mentally retarded patient can learn to “not click on anything which has no skull icon on it”. These players simply never had to learn anything.

Blizzard nerfed the once great WoW because they wanted it to be a “social game”, where people can play with their friends regardless of their abilities. Instead they got the most anti-social game where people solo or join automated queues and play together without saying a word or even caring for the name of each other. “tank pls pull fstr” is the most human interaction you can get. The only place where people actually talk is the raiding guild where players do the only remaining hard content.

Let this be a reminder to all game developers who think it’s a good idea to dumb down their game to allow lazy and dumb people win.

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The moron of the day was watching dscan to prevent anyone being ganked around him: Watching Directional Scan indeed alert you of incoming hostiles. However it doesn't help if you just chat but don't warp off, as he recognized it himself with his third line.

The daily anti-tears are small gestures of gratitude for my relentless work to teach the miners how to fit their ships:

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What impresses Ripard Teg?

Ripard Teg is impressed by something that I could only call retarded. The impressive guy didn’t make it as moron as the day, because he was already all over the EVE sites. Yes, it’s the one who managed to lose an officer fit tournament ship, the Chremoas, creating a 110B loss report.

This post isn’t about that capital moron, it is about Ripard Teg, the model “PvP-er”: he flies in AT, he flies small gang, has no Sov and permanently whines about being broke. His opinion of the loss: “Full credit to Tropic9 of HYDRA RELOADED for taking a Chremoas out and doing what it was made to do: pick and choose fights to get into, and kill things... lots and lots of things!  Over a two month period, he racked up a really impressive 168 kills -- most of them solo -- before finally being taken down by Mav'Lite in a Dramiel.  That's impressive by any metric I can think of.”

What impressed the good CSM member? 168 kills in the Sept 21 – Oct 12 period, that’s 229 kills/month. The value of his kills is 2.25B (3.06/month). He lost 110B, ending this period with 2% ISK efficiency. Yes, that’s impressive by any metric I can think of. I mean even Hulk miners have better efficiency as their drones get the Catalyst Concord kill report. For comparison, here are the results of my main ganker pilot, Botslayer Goblin for September: 724 kills, 101.7B ISK destroyed, 96% efficiency, all solo and duoed with my alt. And I used a cheap ship, often facing literally a dozen of hostiles instead of a monster-frig in a frig-only complex with perfect links, popping lost newbies in armor tanked Merlins, meta-fit Rifters and assorted comedy. I guess most of his victims thought that “Chemoras” is the new name of Iteron II.

Again, the point is not that Tropic9 is exactly 11x dumber than the one who put 10B into an untanked T1 industrial and 9 times dumber than the one who lost a 13B Falcon to POS guns. The point is that Ripard Teg considers this drooling imbecile impressive, something that worth respect, an example what an EVE player should be. Why?

The best I can think of is conspicuous waste: by purposefully wasting 110B, he displayed that he has 110B to throw away. I got lot of attention when I was throwing similar amount on TEST alliance. Actually got the attention of Ripard too. He wasn’t impressed though, probably because my donation drive wasn’t meant to be lost, unlike the Chremoas. What he did was like buying a titan, self-destructing it and get on the kill with a noobship. Dumb, but unquestionably shows that the owner can afford such nonsense.

Don’t forget that Ripard Teg got lot of votes on CSM8 without being in a block. Lot of people consider him a leader. This post is a window into the mind of the kings of the ghetto block: get into fights, be loud, pay drinks to everyone when you have money, plan nothing, save nothing, regret nothing, live fast, die young. Note: I don’t think that Ripard is a ghetto fighter in real life, but he sure roleplays one in EVE.

The “impressive” loss of the Chremoas should be a wake-up call to everyone. This isn’t a good life, this isn’t where we want to be, not even in a video game. While it doesn’t impress Ripard and the likes, I’d suggest to play smart, don’t waste your money, be goal-oriented, ignore what “l33t dudes” tell, get lot of ISK and lot of kills.

PS: of course, Ripard is wrong about the purpose of the Chremoas. It was a tournament ship and should have given the edge on the next tournament against a worthy enemy, instead of dumbly lost while farming frigs that I wouldn’t bother to shoot even if they’d sit on the station undock flashy yellow.

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Since there are never enough morons, here are some more: white knights protecting … the empty ice field (the ships without brackets are Caldari Police): And as always, an anti-tear, miners celebrating the fall of their dumb comrade. More ice to the tanked miners!

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