Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The fall of Miniluv

Miniluv is the "premier highsec ganking organization" of CFC, the force behind their terror campaigns. Their first famous action was to perma-wardec those who criticize Goons to force them into silence. You probably heard how it went: Jade Constantine wardecced them back, called in mercenaries and Goons had to beg to CCP to save them from being massacred.

Then they continued with Burn Jita campaigns which they called successful in the sense of collecting tears. But something was odd already: despite I jumped in an out of Jita, they refused to gank me. Maybe just bad luck. So came Caldari Ice interdiction and I went mining ice, after posting various bad things about Goons, the CFC and the interdiction itself. To make things less boring, I taunted the Goons and Nemo Omnes in /local. Nemo is the worst miner bumper of New Eden, he tried to bump me for an hour without hitting once. Other "pubbies" joined in trashing the mighty GSF:

Someone found a great picture that could serve as an official poster for the Miniluv:

The scourge of highsec pubbies did not take the insults lightly:
Where is the loss report you might ask? Nowhere, probably not unrelated from the fact that ganky Catalyst optimal range is not 4000 m. But they did not give up and attacked again!

The kill right notifications give the times and numbers:

After these shamefully bad "ganks" on Sunday, I couldn't make them come out again, despite I was mining ice all day. On Monday, I alarm clocked for USTZ and did not take chances:

Despite there were 70 CFC in local, the Orca wasn't attacked. Finally I went personal:
Insulting the Miniluv leader himself worked and they took bloody revenge. Almost.

What can I say? If the leader of Miniluv flies a T1 cata, you need no more proof that the Goons are broke. But the really important thing is that Miniluv and by extension Goons are no longer a threat in highsec. They can't gank you even if you literally chase them down and mine front of their nose. I'll run a more objective report when I collected a bit more data, but the result is clear: sell your White Glaze and Nitrogen Isotope stockpiles now, the prices will only go down. This interdiction is a joke.


PS: Having serious ganking experience, I'm surprised by the incompetence of Miniluv compared even to the pretty casual New Order. Highsec ganking is a valuable activity and I'm a bit sad that only Goons have a ganker arm. Since it seems no nullsec power is interested in either the Donation Board or the Fleetbear concept, my future is in ganking. The Goons would obviously not take me as I'm a "carebear pubbie", so it seems I'll have to build my own ganker corp. "Building a corp" doesn't sound well. Anyway the more detailed analysis of the interdiction, ganking in general and my own ganking plans will come Friday.

34 comments:

Anonymous said...

This interdiction is a joke.

Uhm...

http://eve-markets.net/detail?typeid=17888#history

Prices for Nitro Isotopes and Volumes haven't been higher in the last half year?

This looks pretty successful increasing the sales worth of stock by almost 20%
by having some "important" guy write an email saying "we gonna gank someone, somewhere, somehow".

At the same time, volumes of catalysts haven't really spiked, so probably the "gankersquads" are only a couple of show offs to keep up the illusion.

I'd say it was a job well done, and even though I'm not affiliated I do send them my regards on pulling it off once again.

Gevlon said...

The price spiked because of the belief that Goons can pull a serious interdiction. Goons live on their former fame.

The prices spiked before the interdiction even started. The next action of Goons will be judged based on their current (nil) performance.

Anonymous said...

Why "perform"?

All they have to do is create the illusion of performing.

Roaming around: Check.
Killing Miners: You yourself have shown how easy it is. They could probably Alt- Gank each other for a while and still create the impression of performing.

It's a stupid idea to rule by force when you can rule by fear of force, and the upcoming days will be nothing more than reloading the gun for the next project. And there is no way they can mess it up with their propaganda machine.

The problem (or good thing, depends on your position) with propaganda is that it works on masses even if individuals can look behind the lies.

Anonymous said...

Even worse than the incompetence of the l33t Goon gankers is the fact that the interdiction is a success.
If the intention was to raise the price on Nitro Isotopes.


For your ganker corp... are you doing it alone or can I train a new in catalysts xD

Bobbins said...

@Anony 10.18
Apparently the Goon control a large supply of Caldari ice so the rise of nitrogen isotopes has nothing to do with the interdiction but mearly the goons manipulating supply.

The interdiction itself seems to be going quite badly with ice mining targets being left untouched and them going for unrelated 'soft options'.

Lucas Kell said...

I get it... You hate goons... So everything you write will be anti goons. The problem is, this whole article comes across like you have no idea what you are talking about, and are just butthurt over something.

The problem is that both the KBs and the price of isotopes show that they have in fact been making an impact. The interdiction started Sunday downtime, so It's obviously a slow point to start, with Friday and Saturday evening being the biggest play time, and yet the killboards look pretty good: http://miniluv.apoff.com/
It's not exactly what I would refer to as nil performance.

And I know, I know "The price spiked because of the belief that Goons can pull a serious interdiction. Goons live on their former fame."
You are a market guy so you should understand this. Isotopes rose as a result of people stockpiling preemptively for the interdiction. The start of the interdiction will not affect prices very much as that stockpile will not deplete. Once it has depleted, the price will rise again. Essentially what we have is a situation where there's an artificially depleted stock. The interdiction won't hit home until the artificial stock depletion is turned into a real stock depletion. It's the same in every announced interdiction.

I've been in a few of the fleets so far, and seen the orca kills, and the billion+ isk pod kills, and seen the tears come off the back of them. Just because they don't gank you on command doesn't mean it's a fail. Of course they choose an untanked hulk or mackinaw before they hit your tanked procurer. Not only are they a juicer target for less loss, they also mine ice faster (http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/73098) and the insurance on a T2 is absolutely dire, so it's a bigger hit to the miner.

Anonymous said...

@ lucas: allthough i don't aggree with most of gg's opinions, i must say, goons, and their highsec-events, ain't what they used to be.
maybe because goons have changed from "let's be different" to "let's be like those that we used to hate".
it's natural.

probs to gevlon for starting to risk virtual stuff ;)

Unknown said...

People like to pretend there is no functional difference between prices of isotopes rising because their supply is reduced (due to miners getting ganked) and prices of isotopes rising because demand for them spiked (due to everyone stockpiling in fear of interdiction).

There is no immediate difference, to be sure: less unsold isotopes on the market, higher prices for the remaining ones.

There is, however, a long-term difference in terms of amount of satisfied customers.

When there is a real shortage incoming, then stockpiling a good is a perfectly viable market tactic with very low risk. All (or most) stockpilers will turn a good profit when the shortage hits, by serving people who find themselves unprepared for the shortage.

However, if Gevlon is right and goons are not REALLY creating an isotope shortage, then there is no real shortage incoming. Therefore the stockpiling that's going is not about preparing to satisfy a real need, but is rather speculative in nature.

And speculation is always a zero-sum game. Which means some stockpilers will make a profit, and some will find themselves holding a lot of isotopes which suddenly got way cheaper than what they bought them for. And those people will think "hey, everyone cried shortage, but it never came, i got played :(".

And next time the interdiction will be called, some of those stockpilers will choose not to stockpile, lessening the whole impact.

Now, the big question here, is whether the goons are actually creating a shortage, or just making themselves look good through propaganda while largely being occupied with other matters.

Gevlon said...

@Maxim: the really interesting question is "CAN Goons create shortage at all?"

With the old infinite ice belts the amount of ice collected was linearly proportional to miners wanting to mine. Kill or scare off half of the miners, half amount of ice will be mined.

With the new setup, the ice is limited by respawn. The miners compete for the ice. If you kill half of them, the other half will take the ice.

Anonymous said...

The goons can easily create a shortage in highsec.
The ice isnt fully being mined, so, the 80% from highsec is not being met.

It is feasible that caldari ice mining in null has increased by a factor of 10, to meet the gap between 80% and 100% (assuming that the 80% is being sourced from highsec).

If volume even drops by 10% due to the interdiction, then that creates an even larger shortage.

The factor preventing this showing so far is something you overlooked...stockpiles. People have extremely large stockpiles of isotopes due to doing maths prior to odyssey, and figuring that yeah..high sec was not going to supply 80%, and it was unlikely that null would immediately go from 1.8% to 20%.

Look at when the prices spiked. There was no increase in volume that day, so orders were pulled.

Lucas Kell said...

The killboards speak for themselves. You can't say goons aren't ganking, as clearly the billions in miner losses already show that they are. The only thing Gevlon is highlighting here is that the last target they pick will be a tanked procurer, but that's not a surprise.
Here's the stats for just yesterdays kills (combat ships that were ganked have been removed)

Jump Freighter - 1
Mining Barge - 16
Capsule - 22
Exhumer - 20
Orca - 3
Freighter - 2

Even if you don't consider that it was a Monday, that's pretty good going. And some of the capsule kills are worth more than the orcas, and provide no insurance payout.

You can't even say there's no impact. Fly around Caldari space. Just last week finding an ice grav was not that common. Most systems that had them instead had a bunch of miners sitting around saying "when is the new one spawning". Now look around, and there's gravs everywhere. Clearly less ice mining is happening now than last week.

Anonymous said...

Jump Freighter - 1
Mining Barge - 16
Capsule - 22
Exhumer - 20
Orca - 3
Freighter - 2

That's everything Goons managed to kill in an entire day?

@Lucas
Seems a little bit underwelming.

Are you understaffed, too picky in your targets or are there a lot less miners than I thougth?

Lucas Kell said...

@Anonymous
That's everything that shows on the killboard for Monday, in high sec, on the ice campaign.
It's a fairly decent amount of isk being dragged out for a weekday for a gank fleet. If that was done every day for the campaign it would be about half a trillion isk by the end of the campaign. Weekends should be a considerable amount better though due to the increased time available.

There are considerably less miners on the field than there used to be. As above, a lot of the ice gravs are going untouched at the moment whereas last week they were mined out almost constantly.

Anonymous said...

That's not a lot of miner kill, I expected far more... and not a single procurer either.

LR

Lucas Kell said...

Again... wait until the weekend. 40 miners and 5 capitals are is a pretty good outcome for a weekday.
Procurers are the lowest target. They are tanked more than the other miners, and have the lowest output of ice (only 58/h compared to a Covetors 69/h). This means they have the least impact. Don't assume that means they are unkillable though. It still would take less than 20 T1 catalysts to do even at full tank.

Sgtbinary said...

@ Lucas How much are the Goons paying you to do PR? The whole point of this interdiction was to raise costs of Ice. Ice has gone up in price. They sold their stock. Now they just need to make a ""presence"" during the actual interdiction. Make some High Number in ISK kills. That is it. Goons are not to be feared. If Mittens speaks, the Eve world listens. He caused a panic on the markets, and his goons took financial advantage. Kills are a very low priority. A low minority of goons are ganking, and mainly for the fun, not to prove a point. This weekend will probably see some high numbers, but it will basically end after that. **shrug** This interdiction is a Non-Event.

Lucas Kell said...

lol?
I'm not "doing PR", and i should imagine they haven't sold their stock yet. We are 2 days into a 30 day interdiction and already people are going "zomgs, not winning fast enough?!?!?".

You don't have to fear goons, go ahead and carry on mining if you want to. The fact is though that mining numbers have heavily reduced in Caldari regions, and most the miners that are there are in procurers which are staggeringly less efficient. All the goons need to do is keep up the current pace of ganking, keep orcas down as much as possible, and stop a few freighters getting through. One freighter by the way had the equivalent of 13.5 hours mining in a procurer in its hold. That's a lot of wasted man hours.

You are right, kills are not the goal. The goal is to slow down the mining output of Caldari space. Just the announcement did that well, and killing off transports and boosters furthers that impact. Every miner that stops mining furthers that impact. The goons just have to raise the risk enough that people think "Why am I mining here with high risk, when i could mine in Amarr space for the same amount of isk I used to make without all this risk?". Most smart industrialists will see that there's better steady profit in si9mply staying out of the way. The isk in kills is merely a measure of how much risk the goons are introducing.

The hilarious thing is there are so many different ways to measure the interdiction. Price are are STILL rising. Caldari space has loads of untouched gravs. More procurers and less hulks/macks than you would normally see are the main miners out there still. you can sit in a single pocket saying "look at me, I'm mining, thus the whole interdiction is a fail", but it's just not the case.

Osmon Iceminer said...

@Lucas Kell:
You are right at some points.
On saturday an ice belt in Osmon lasted for about 70-80 minutes pre and past downtime, sunday afternoon and on monday one belt lastet 3-4 hours which is a significant reduce in the amount of harvested ice.
However, as the multiboxer have seen that there is no ice-interdiction going on, they returned this morning. Belts in Osmon lasted for less than 80 minutes each.
Freighters, Orcas and Mackinaws and even Hulks are back in place.

The only reason I trained ice-harvesting was to be part of some kind of "eve history", getting ganked and keeping my killmail as some kind of "ice interdiction 2013 - i've been there!" sticker.

Now I do have several killmails where my Hobgoblins killed Catalysts :-/

It's hard to believe how CFC could push TEST out of Fountain and Delve while they don't seem to be able to kill 50-70 unarmed iceminers.

At least on sunday I had expected some kind of big bang with 200+ Catagoons celebrating a homocide on iceminers.

Still you are right, Mittani could have had announced "a slightly impact on the amount of ice being harvested due to some minor ganks every 4 hours" but he announced an interdiction.
Don't blame us for taking Mittanis serios... or maybe you want to tell us that he doesn't know what he is saying and CFC shouldn't be measured by his words - that would be ok!

Bobbins said...

@Lucas Kell
'Price are are STILL rising'
Nitrogen prices peaked before the interdiction started and are not back to that level. Since you yourself stated that the cfc supplied the majority of ice I am amazed that the cfc must still supplying in vast amounts to Jita.

Anonymous said...

"Since it seems no nullsec power is interested in either the Donation Board or the Fleetbear concept, my future is in ganking."

Why?

Winning EVE by total domination of 0.0 (iirc that was your goal when you first joined up with TEST) is something I can understand but randomly ganking miners strikes me as very ungoblin-ish.

Bing Bangboom said...

The Goon attacks are having an effect in Kino to some degree. The ice fields there are lasting a very long time compared to pre-interdiction and the number of Procurers is WAY up.

The complaint I have about the Goons is that they aren't clearing CONCORD from the ice fields after the gank. When they leave 10-15 squads on CONCORD there and just depart the system they effectively innoculate that ice field from further ganking. It doesn't take that long to dock your pod in a nearby station, grab a noob ship, and undock to pull CONCORD clear of the ice and set up the next attack.

The New Order destroyed 10 miners in Kino while the Goons took out 5 yesterday. There could have been a lot more killed if the Goons would adopt better practices.

Highsec is worth fighting for

Bing Bangboom
Agent of the New Order of Highsec
Belligerent Undesirable

Lucas Kell said...

lol @Osmon Iceminer
Honestly if you want to shut your eyes tight and scream "they're not doing anyfink" that's fine, but the killboards are there. every hour miners are dying, billions in ships and billions more in ice is being destroyed. It would literally take you 5 minutes to go look at the stats, but you feel its much easier to say "I've spent half hour mining and thus the interdiction must not be happening."

When you guys want to sit there whining about how much goons suck, you should really stick to stuff where there's no evidence against what you are saying. So far today, 5 more orcas have gone down, taking the total since Sunday to 15. We are only just on day 3 of the interdiction, and you guys area already claiming nothing has happened. I think you're not only wrong, but jumping the gun on judgement altogether.

Keter said...

@Bing Bangboom

Name and shame son! The only excuse to not pull the popo is if you get podded before docking up. If you see Goons leaving the system before pulling Concord shoot a few of them a message. They're supposed to be doing that anyway and it's screwing up future ganks for everyone.

After all, we're all in this together.

P.S. Please take it easy on my scanning alts, I need them alive to provide warp-ins and to eventually AWOX some chumps.

TIA!

Unknown said...

"I'll have to build my own ganker corp." Grow some balls man and go after real combat ships. Ganking is for those who have no friends or can't win a fair fight. I'd rather you become a pirate than a ganker. They at least appreciate a GF.
Ganking would simply make you no better than goons, no matter how "successful" you were at it.

Von Keigai said...

Gevlon, the proof is in the pudding. Look to the price of Caldari ice products over the next three weeks. If it is up, Goons have won. If it drops, only then will it be time for you to crow.

As for your baiting the Goons with your 130000+ EHP procurer: meh. They were stupid to go for you even once, but it appears at least that they learned and are properly ignoring you. But you simply cannot extrapolate what is happening to you personally to what is happening to a wide variety of players across a huge swath of highsec. Most miners have little idea of a good fit, much less how to go about deriving one by themselves. You know this because you have ganked them yourself. It is these players, who are still mining in retrievers and macks and even the occasional covetor, who are the Goons target. They certainly exist.

What is in question here is not whether the Goons would affect ice prices very much if everyone mined like Gevlon Goblin all the time. The answer is: they would not. The question here is what percentage of miners mine like Gevlon Goblin, and what percentage mine like normal average-IQ people.

I am curious whether you plan to mine ice for the next three weeks. If not, then even you do not mine like Gevlon Goblin. Certainly I can think of no good reason you have mine ice -- can't you make at least hundreds of millions per hour moving skillbooks? So your only point must be to prove something. As if you need Goons to help you prove that a 30m ship with 130000 EHP is not a cost-effective target.

Could it be you baited them because it is fun???! Heaven forbid. Slacker!

Anonymous said...

Reading how you don't get it, Lucus, almost hurts. The point the others are making is not that Goons don't have any impact.

It's that for a Alliance of their size, their impact is ridiculous. They killed, what? 39 Ships the first day. That's a joke for an interdiction. But you say, it's not the number, but the worth?

Okay, their overall stats for August gives 120bn. That means, in those two days, they killed 60bn a day at most. You realize that is only about the same Gevlon ganked in a month (~50bn), completely alone?

You really mean to say its worth of an alliance with thousands of people, claiming of doing a ganking campaign to only manage about 35 times as much as a single player. Really? Seriously?

Gevlon said...

@Von Keigai: No, the real check will be the price increase of the NEXT interdiction. The current price change started on the announcement, based on the fame Goons earned.

@Mabrick: don't miss Friday post! You'll see that gankers aren't bad!

Anonymous said...

Over 120 billion isk destroyed so far. At current rates, this will result in 1.2 trillion isk of various ice miners' barges and idiotic billion-isk pods destroyed by the time the interdiction ends.

5 orcas went down on tuesday, as well as another ice-hauling freighter. I'm not going to count up the barge and exhumer kills, you can do that yourself if you really want to know.

Of course, the rate of killing may drop off somewhat as fewer and cheaper targets present themselves. In the meantime keep telling yourselves how much of a non event this all is

Lucas Kell said...

Anonymous said...
"Reading how you don't get it, Lucus, almost hurts. The point the others are making is not that Goons don't have any impact."
No, I do get it. But I still stand by the fact that 3 days into the interdiction, anyone saying it's a failure is an idiot. It's way to early to jump on your high horse. Not to mention that the amount of miners now mining in procurers is staggering, and procurers suck for efficiency. Then when they eventually get a freighter load, it gets blown up. If we can make miners damage their own profits just to prove they can still mine, when they could make twice as much if they just moved to the Amarr hub, I'm happy.

"You really mean to say its worth of an alliance with thousands of people, claiming of doing a ganking campaign to only manage about 35 times as much as a single player. Really? Seriously?"
No, but that's why most of the alliance isn't involved. You should really read around, then maybe you'd realise that the whole interdiction is run by a subgroup withing goons. All CFC members are welcome to join, but it's not a mandatory thing. Any CFC member that wants to blow off steam and low up some nubs can join, and it's achieving it's economic target as well as providing us plenty of fun.

"You realize that is only about the same Gevlon ganked in a month (~50bn), completely alone"
Yeah, and if we we just running around ganking untanked miners, that achievement is not that tough even alone, it's only 24 per day. Using 2 characters you should be able to alternate them and get one every 5 minutes or so. The difference here is we announced it, so people are more tanked, we go after orcas and freighters first, which takes more coordination, and we also go after higher tanked targets with support that take 8-10 people to hit. For example, yesterday we hit a mackinaw that the owner claimed was ungankable, because he was tanked, had a logi, dps support and 3 sets of concord on grid. He exploded.

Bobbins said...

@Lucas Kell
You can't see this interdiction for what it is. It is a joke the miners are basically having to come to the goons in order to 'be part' of this so called interdiction.

As for requiring 30-60 goons to gank single targets in cheap t1 ship. Is the cfc really that broken? Why punish your fellow goons in this way. Freighters get blow up every day the only difference now is that the goons take 5 times the men to do the job.

Really I do feel for your fellow gankers to see them at work is painful even for an innocent bystander such as myself. I do agree that the market manipulation is as always outstanding from the goons it is a pity they are failing so badly in the military aspect of the operation. Perhaps replacing the inept leader of the interdiction and providing decent fitted ships may help... maybe.

Lucas Kell said...

@Bobbins
"It is a joke the miners are basically having to come to the goons in order to 'be part' of this so called interdiction."
Then explain the teary eyed mails from the pilots that are getting hit. Just because there's still places where people are mining doesn't mean there aren't miners dropping elsewhere. You guys seem to think that anything less than a 100% kill rate on miners is a failure. That's not the idea of the interdiction. The idea is to ramp up ice prices (which has already happened) to make profit, and to have a lot of fun harvesting tears (which still happens every day).
If we have an orca to kill and 60 people want to get in on it, we don't deny them that. Sure, we could use less, but then that's not fun for everyone. If we had 300 people wanting to shoot a shuttle, then we'd bloody well give it a try (though it would probably pop before everyone got on it, so everyone that missed will shoot at anything nearby that would get them concorded).
All the time people think we have some military goal to this and are measuring % of miners killed as some strategic measure, you'll continue to not get it. Once you realise that the only thing we care about is the people involved having a laugh and blapping some noobs, you'll see its an op success.

Unknown said...

"Once you realise that the only thing we care about is the people involved having a laugh and blapping some noobs, you'll see its an op success."

Anyone who thinks that this isn't the underlying reason behind most of what GSF does really doesn't get it.

Bobbins said...

@Lucas Kell
The thing is I don't think they are 'having a laugh'. Being given a really bad ship not fit for purpose is a bit embarrassing. Not some belts but nearly all the belts barely have any (if any) goon presence in them. I do not think the goons are having fun and anyway where is the mastermind of this disaster?

Lucas Kell said...

@Bobbins
Most of us are running around on nub alts. T1s are easier to get into and don't drop millions in loot for the miners to salvage. Saying they are not fit for purpose is not entirely accurate. If you have more people, T1s are the best solution. If you are limited on people, then a T2 gank squad is preferable. Remember though that at best a T2 fit is equivalent to 2 T1s, and costs about 4 times the amount, and drops anything up to 7m (compared with 1m at a push with a T1) This means that if you halve the number of people, you must still double the cost. A tanked orca will take about 45 T1s, costing you about 90m and dropping up to 45m. So a T2 squad will take you about 23, costing you 184 million, dropping up to 161m.

Everyone I've been grouped with seems to be having fun. And obviously you can't cover 100% of the belts in Caldari space, in fact you can only cover a tiny fraction of belts at the same time. But the idea is reducing mining. Just yesterday when we got a dual boxer with an orca and a mack and both pods, after speaking to the pilot, he was moving on to other regions. That's 2 characters no longer mining, and that's just from 1 gank run. Overall the time you see the belts up for now is greatly increased, which shows that mining volume has decreased. And we haven't even hit a weekend yet. So from my point of view, both the fun factor and the strategic objective are being achieved, and I've made plenty of isk from the event. Anything outside of that is just the usual damage control and propaganda.