Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

The economy of the suicide ganks

Update: the New Eden Ice Bot lottery has been updated to decrease the work with submitting a kill, comment on that post please.


The Knights of New Order use Catalysts for suicide ganking non-compliant miners. Various freighter-ganking groups use Taloses and Vexors. James 315 wrote a post calling these "terror weapons", things that aren't economical but good to have to strike down some hard target in a show of force.

I have to disagree. The cheaper ships are more expensive. The problem is that you need more cheaper ships as they are weaker so you need more people. Man-hours aren't free. The fact that "ganking is fun" doesn't change that, with optimized costs you can get more ganks.

Let's compare various ships on a gank that needs 3000DPS. Please note that you need an extra guy as scout. How much time a gank is? There is 15 minutes GCC, undock, warp, I doubt if you can go below 20 mins. But there is a problem: the more people, the more waiting for others. One is AFK, the other is fitting ships and also we must simply sit and wait till the group fills up. While a clockwork team might be able to gank in every 20 minutes, I seen such times only on 2-man Retreiver ganks. In my experience every man after 2+1 costs another 5 mins. With this data let's compare the various ships. Please note that half of the fittings drop and can be scooped by the scout, so the "total cost" is lower than their sum:

Now let's see the cost of a gank depending on the ISK/hour of the participants:
As you can see even in very low incomes it's better to use T2 catalyst than meta and better to use meta than T1. Even really poor newbies who joined EVE exactly for ganking are better off in the better ship. Since 15M/hour is really attainable for everyone (hint: mine ice if you don't have better ideas), we should upgrade to Vexors as soon as possible.

Now let's see the multiboxing situation, when you can actually keep the 20mins/gank schedule:
Even in this ideal case the T2 Cata is better than meta and that is better than T1 at low income. The Vexor limit elevates but for a multiboxer 40M/hour isn't that hard. The point is that even if you hope that the group improves and gets to 20mins/gank, the economically optimal move is fit your Cata as good as you can (up to T2 of course, faction fitting would be stupid).

PS: Magnetic Vortex Stabilizer I is almost as good as Magnetic Field Stabilizer II (684 vs 686 DPS on a perfect, overheating T2 Cata), so it can be fitted as T2. Please note that it has higher CPU requirement though and Neutron Blasters eat CPU fast.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The idea that each personn after two participants adds 5 minutes is plainly wrong. Each time i have suicide gank with James&Co it was extremely welll organized... We probbaly ganked targets every 17-19 minutes or so and we were at least 5-6 no counting the scout.

Gevlon said...

Then just the euro zone has to step up, but even then the T2 cata beats the lesser ones in economic effectivity

Anonymous said...

Interesting analysis however I believe your approach to compare everything to isk/hour is not correct. It's only valid if another person is like clockwork doing another activity earning isk during free waiting minutes, but you need to account "human factor", including transition period to another activity, minimum time/attention required to start and complete the task, not to mention if another person would even choose to do another isk related activity.

Also analysis is only valid mostly if you use same account to earn isk or can't multitask another activity that you do for isk.

Now to be more accurate I would evaluate this as a kills/hour/cost assuming there are infinite targets reachable. This is basically same thing, but from different perspective not having isk/hour as an indicator.

Anonymous said...

Don't gankers typically try to recover fittings and shouldn't the likely recover rate be added to the maths?

Anonymous said...

One aspect that James 315's article mentions and you do not is training time. New Order gankers are expected to be alts, and the purpose of catalysts is to provide maximum DPS per training hour. The number of people willing to spend a few days training a spare character to fly a catalyst but not willing to spend weeks training for a T2 fit vexor MUST be non-zero, so I think the current New Order approach is the correct one. Keep the bar for entry low, then wait and see how many people are willing to train for fits which are more expensive, in terms of ISK and also time.

Gevlon said...

Recovered modules already added.

I never said the bar should be risen to "T2 Vexor + Orca alt for quick rebasing". A T1 Catalyst is 300DPS higher than nothing. I'm saying that if you can fit higher, do!