The New Order calls those who attack the Knights "vultures". This came from what they are doing: whoring on Catalyst kill reports and stealing from wrecks. They don't really look like someone who means to stop the New Order, but someone who wants to leech some ISK, kills and fun on the side.
Since I moved away from the main New Order fleet to fight AFK-leeching alone, I learned much about these "vultures". Obviously no one would try to leech on a single player. Sitting in an ice belt with whoring guns where 10+ Knights operate can net you lot of kills. Camping a single one? Not really. Yet I have lot of personal "vultures". They are busy camping the station I'm in. They try to camp my scout, figuring out where the gank will take place. They organize in local and above all, they don't stop despite their poor results. They are really motivated, ready to camp for hours.
It took some time to realize that they aren't vultures. They can't care less about the loot or that few kills, hell many of them don't even upload kills. They want to stop me from doing "evil" and want to protect the "innocent". Just like in WoW, the morons and slackers are supported by a group of socials who believe in friendship, niceness and helping the weak. They are random people in the system who are upset that someone "griefs" the "little guys" so they go and grab whatever combat-looking things they have in the hangar and go to fight. They are so unsuccessful that they were misidentified for killpad whores and thieves. They aren't even recognized as a threat. Why?
The key to their failure - as always - has nothing to do with gaming skill, though the lack of it plays a part for making them a comedy. But even if the best PvP-ers would come to highsec to save the AFK-miners they wouldn't fare better. The reason is simple: to win, they must defeat me. I don't have to defeat them. I just have to defeat an AFK mining barge to win. This theme appears many ways:
The vultures should stop trying to protect AFK-ers who are unworthy of support. Since EVE doesn't have welfare like WoW, they will learn it the hard way: they will fail and their efforts won't even be thanked by the miners, since it's hard to thank anything while AFK.
Since I moved away from the main New Order fleet to fight AFK-leeching alone, I learned much about these "vultures". Obviously no one would try to leech on a single player. Sitting in an ice belt with whoring guns where 10+ Knights operate can net you lot of kills. Camping a single one? Not really. Yet I have lot of personal "vultures". They are busy camping the station I'm in. They try to camp my scout, figuring out where the gank will take place. They organize in local and above all, they don't stop despite their poor results. They are really motivated, ready to camp for hours.
It took some time to realize that they aren't vultures. They can't care less about the loot or that few kills, hell many of them don't even upload kills. They want to stop me from doing "evil" and want to protect the "innocent". Just like in WoW, the morons and slackers are supported by a group of socials who believe in friendship, niceness and helping the weak. They are random people in the system who are upset that someone "griefs" the "little guys" so they go and grab whatever combat-looking things they have in the hangar and go to fight. They are so unsuccessful that they were misidentified for killpad whores and thieves. They aren't even recognized as a threat. Why?
The key to their failure - as always - has nothing to do with gaming skill, though the lack of it plays a part for making them a comedy. But even if the best PvP-ers would come to highsec to save the AFK-miners they wouldn't fare better. The reason is simple: to win, they must defeat me. I don't have to defeat them. I just have to defeat an AFK mining barge to win. This theme appears many ways:
- They have to find me. They have to scout multiple systems and stations. For my scout they have to scour the belts and even finding him can be a decoy, maybe the target is already bookmarked in another belt. On the other hand all I have to find an AFK mining barge. That goes as "warp to random belt, hit dscan for nearby belts, bingo".
- They have to catch me. I have instas, I have safes, I have an Orca so I can rebase without taking gates in Catalysts. They have to be quick, they have to set up traps, they have to have the right ships and they must avoid being spotted. Compare it with the task of "catching" a barge that is standing still for half an hour or more.
- I have full control over the time. As AFK barges always present themselves, I can undock for a gank any time I wish. They obviously can only catch me when I undock. If a situation is too risky, I don't take it, there will be another target for me in a minute or two. I often "AFK-cloak" them, by keeping the ganker+scout logged in while I'm working, sleeping or doing household chores. They can't know if I'm going to undock in the next minute, so they must keep camping. In the morning I look at the local chat and giggle on them writing "I think he is AFK" 3 hours after I went to bed.
- They take risks, I don't. Due to the rules of suicide gank, my ship is lost in the second I take GCC. Since I'm going to take GCC, I undock with being sure that my ship will not return. The question is only if the target dies or not? I obviously undock something I don't mind to lose, so losing my ship to them can be annoying, but definitely not a loss I'm unprepared for. However if they make some mistake, they can easily end up with serious losses like this one who lost his ship and his 1.2B pod.
- My victory is sweeter than theirs. If they win, all they have to show off is a 6-12M Catalyst kill. Very rarely a 40M podkill. If I win, I have a 50-250M ship kill and very often a pod around 50M.
The vultures should stop trying to protect AFK-ers who are unworthy of support. Since EVE doesn't have welfare like WoW, they will learn it the hard way: they will fail and their efforts won't even be thanked by the miners, since it's hard to thank anything while AFK.
20 comments:
Don't make the mistake of thinking that the primary motivation of "vulture heroes" is protecting anything.
The primary motivation of "vulture heroes" is in hunting specifically you down. Maybe the notion of "protecting" did something to have them pick up this activity in the first place, but from what they are saying this simply doesn't matter anymore.
The fact that they are both persistent and consistent in going through all the energy-consuming motions that you illustrate shows that this activity in itself seems to be pretty fun for them.
You, my friend, are being bullied. Bullying is a self-supporting activity that aims to harass the target in order to elicit any kind of response at all. The fact that you made this post will show those "vulture hero" bullies that they are getting through to something, and they will just get even more encouraged as a result.
In virtual worlds, this issue is not really solvable. IRL, you deal with bullies by being scary. Virtual worlds are simply not scary in themselves.
This, in turn, should make it that much harder for bullies to find pressure points. But since you seem to be rattled by their very existence, pressure points you have plenty.
I say, let them do their thing and chalk them up on the "inevitable losses and risks" tab of your accounting.
But shouldn't bullies be scary? They are merely puzzling.
Love the hippocracy of this quote "I often "AFK-cloak" them, by keeping the ganker+scout logged in while I'm working, sleeping or doing household chores"
Gank yourself goblin, or better yet submit yourself to the new order and have them do it for the betterment of high sec!
It's not hypocrisy. I gain nothing by being AFK in a station. I harm no one either. I'm just that, AFK. Equal to logged out.
They gain income while AFK.
'They gain income while AFK'.
So do traders, whose goods are sold while the traders are not logged on. Why aren't you ganking traders?
Traders only earn income if another player (who is active) accepts their market order.
Screw me for saying this, but isn't trading a AFK way of making ISK as well? You spend 45 minutes updating sell orders and the ISK pours in throughout the day. The only difference I see is that traders are good for the market whereas afk-miners destroy the livelihood of non-afk miners.
To be honest, I really think mining needs to be more fun. Do you see people using bots to control things they consider fun? If CCP could implement a type of mining that was not just spending 3 minutes staring blankly at the screen/watching TV/whatever, I'm pretty sure the number of botters will decrease drastically. They could also make player participation a vital part of it. For example, you don't see cosmic anomaly prober bots, because they absolutely requires human intelligence to accomplish the task
The problem with afk mining is what it leads to. Right now in Eve we have a highsec where people think they can take their 200 million ISK ship, park it next to an ice block, and go do the laundry. They expect to come back after some 30-60 minutes and find that ship not only unharmed, but full of ice that they can drop off and then do it all again.
We got to this point because highsec miners complained and whinged so much to CCP that they received numerous buffs along with nerfs to the PvP players. And if the response to miner bumping is any key, they STILL aren't satisfied. If we continue down this path the Eve that is supposedly a dark, dangerous place will be just an advertising ploy. Even now, the CCP and CSM are discussing the future of non consensual pvp.
James 315 and the New Order of Highsec, at its root, are dedicated to turning this threat back. Read what Gevlon says about the behavior of the bot aspirants and their supporters. Read www.minerbumping.com for both James' CSM platform and for what the miners say to us in local.
Eve is really at a fork in the road. Eve can go down the same road as many MMO's have and cater to the risk adverse, constant reward types and have the same fate as Ultima Online and many others. OR they can return to the true ideals of Eve and make it where you cannot undock in something you aren't willing to lose. Remember that?
315 4 CSM8
Highsec is worth fighting for.
Bing Bangboom
Agent of the New Order of Highsec
Belligerent Undesirable
"Since EVE doesn't have welfare like WoW"
Is the new order no risk play style not also considered in game welfare? Are you not also engaged in a risk inequity game play style that you claim to abhor?
@Bing Bangboom
I refer you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
your argument is falacious. Balancing mining ships and increasing the difficulty of ganking unarmed ships in supposedly high security space does not lead somehow to a highsec without non-consensual PvP or consequences.
You (and Gevlon) want consequence free 'PvP' (if it can be called that) and you care nothing for driving the newer players and the casual players out of the game to do it.
Whilst I have nothing against what the New Order is doing (emergent game play and all that), please do not hide behind some rhetoric based entirely on fallacious reasoning.
Have the courage to say that you are in the new order to gank and get miner tears, pad your killboards and be e-space bullies and internet hardmen.
Gevlon, You should read "The power of Habit. why we do what we do in life and business" by Charles Duhigg.
A couple of the comments here have tried to draw a (false) equivalence between botting and trading, claiming that they are the same.
While both activities allow income to be earned while the player is afk, the similarity ends there. Both buyer and seller must be at the keyboard to offer and accept the transaction; the market interface allows players to exchange goods and money asynchronously, but the actual actions occur during at-the-keyboard time.
"Traders only earn income if another player (who is active) accepts their market order."
How do you think AFK miners make their money? Are NPCs buying minerals now?
@Gevlon
'Traders only earn income if another player (who is active) accepts their market order.'
A miner can also earn income only if they actively control their ships. I would also say mining requires more actions than both sides of trading and is greater risk.
Just because some person on Wikipedia does not like the slippery slope argument, does not make it fallacious, Anon.
Wikipedia is mostly a collection of opinion, not fact.
Bobbins: Mining is the activity that is most easily botted in Eve.
There are a couple of cheap packages out there already, and forums dedicated to their use.
And Ice mining can be nearly totally AFK ... start your ice miner, and go AFK or alt-tabbed for a half hour or more depending on your lack of skills.
Station traders do not undock, so they do not fall under the CCP maxim of don't undock with anything you can lose.
Miners have to undock ... so it behooves us folks who think that PvP is important in Eve to gank them senseless if they like to AFK while undocked.
@Agent Trask: way to show your ignorance of how wikipedia works.
There are mechanisms in place which prevent opinion from being put forth as fact. Whilst the article linked has flaws, it has not been modified in substance for quite a long time, despite an active talk page and active contributors.
You contend that A - B, B - C, C - D, D - ...X therefore A - X so we must stop A....There is no logical basis for this assumption.
Just because some person on Wikipedia does not like the slippery slope argument, does not make it fallacious, Anon.
Err... what? The Slippery Slope argument is fallacious because it is a specious argument for some action (or against another action). It claims "If A, then Z" without accounting for all the steps inbetween. At most, it is an appeal to paranoia.
Or to put another way:
"The Slippery Slope is a fallacy in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any argument for the inevitability of the event in question. In most cases, there are a series of steps or gradations between one event and the one in question and no reason is given as to why the intervening steps or gradations will simply be bypassed. [...] This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because there is no reason to believe that one event must inevitably follow from another without an argument for such a claim. This is especially clear in cases in which there is a significant number of steps or gradations between one event and another. (source)"
\o Goblin
Very interesting to read your perspective of solo ganking. I think you're giving your gank targets, the 'vultures', and 'white knights' great content to enjoy!
Maxim Preobrazhenskiy said...
"You, my friend, are being bullied."
Interesting that he brought this up. I wonder whether vultures following you across highsec could be construed as harassment?
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