Greedy Goblin

Friday, October 18, 2013

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.



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:

15 comments:

Carson 63000 said...

Damn, I've been out of EVE for a while and had no idea that there were drones worth nearly 200m ISK each, but sure enough, there is!

Nice haul.. but damn, I can't imagine many players would get 200m ISK worth of use out of one of those drones before they got careless and warped off without remembering to recall their drones. :-)

Croda said...

How long would it have taken that person to recover the cost on their 1bn mining drones assuming they stayed in the belts you banked them in?

I am wondering if the economics of those made little sense as well!

Gevlon said...

@Carson: it's hard to call the drones back if you are in a pod.

Anonymous said...

Wow I never thought I'd see someone using harvesters. Not because of their price - they are just awful drones, with t2 giving better results.

Rhianna Ghost said...

@Anon: no, they aren't actually (if you ignore the price point) You just have to get close to the rock they are harvesting. And stay stationary there. Like a duck. A very juicy duck....

Lucas Kell said...

@Gevlon
If you really wanted to gank in a 0.7 you should have no trouble going through any type of retriever, and only macks tanked half decently should cause you trouble. If you want to get the edge, get a third nub ganker and dump him in a T1 cata.

@"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."
I have to say, that nothing you have done is not accessible to "casual gankers". Most gankers have no problem ganking in a 0.7. In fact during the ice interdiction, we did it commonly, and cheaply thanks to our use of T1. We were far more efficient at ganking.

Think about it, you chuck 20m away on a mackinaw. That's the equivalent 10 T1 catalysts. 10 T1 catalysts could gank any non proc/skiff in a 0.7. So how does that make you able to gank in ways we can't? Your screenshot shows loads of retrievers, which I assume you didn't gank as they weren't worth your time, since you'd need to spend 20m to kill each one. Well if you are trying to leave us no targets, you'll have to learn to gank them, as we would gank them in a heartbeat. 4 T1s would would lay down 27k damage in a 0.7, so we would easily gank them with less cost than a single one of your catalysts.
If you simply aren't bothering to kill them, then why are you even keeping up this coer of trying to "save gankers". You may as well start a new corp called - We Gank Because We Want To Buff Our Killboard, then stick to high value targets in 0.5s.

Gevlon said...

@Lucas: you still seem to live in a strange World where your time has no cost and 10 people spending 15 mins GCC for a retriever is fine.

Slinde said...

Lucas Kell: You're skipping the "solo" part of Gevlon's intended result.

Sure, 10 T1 catalysts can lay waste to many ships in 0.7, but how many of these are you controlling?

What Gevlon is doing here, is providing people with a way to do this on their own, without having to be reliant on other players to help them out.

Lucas Kell said...

@Gevlon
"you still seem to live in a strange World where your time has no cost and 10 people spending 15 mins GCC for a retriever is fine."
But what you are fighting against - Which is interdictions and coordinated ganking - they don't take opportunity cost into account. That's YOUR metric. You state that you are doing this so victims learn how to not get ganked, well if there's still stacks of retrievers and macks in 0.7's they will still get ganked. The time spent in interdictions is paid for though economic fluctuations, so it's not a metric we measure.
Do you understand? how will you have any effect if you are ignoring a huge potion of targets that the organised gankers will go after?

@Slinde
"You're skipping the "solo" part of Gevlon's intended result."
See above. His stated plan is to make victims able to withstand ganks, its not about solo efficiency. 4 T1 catas for a gank is nothing to a group like miniluv, who were throwing 40 pilots at a single mackinaw just for fun. How will he have any effect on organised gankers if he is leaving targets? (By the way, I have 4 gank chars available and can easily solo gank in a 0.7)
Unless of course it's all a lie and it's all about killboard efficiency. If that is all it is about, then sure, solo ganking is fine. So he has to decide if this is about making a difference of buffing his KB.

Lucas Kell said...

Oh and just to clarify. It only takes 4 T1's for a retriever. 10 T1s is simply the cost equivalent of 2 T2s, not a requirement to gank.

Gevlon said...

@Lucas: you are keep citing Miniluv after they ADMITTEDLY failed to keep up the pressure in the last interdiction. The ice price spiked before the interdiction and returned after one week it started, meaning people expected Goons to make a massacre, but they failed to.

The truth is that Goons don't have infinite manpower.

Lucas Kell said...

@Gevlon
That may be the case, but you have to remember a few things
1. This interdiction, unlike all others was not a CTA. Attendance was optional, not mandatory.
2. After a week, we were deployed to another war, meaning most of us had to stop ganking, myself included.
3. We still got a good enough spike for profit.
4. We still ganked a LOT of miners in 0.7s.

You seem to be a bit mixed up here too. If the CFC were already unable to do anything, then why are you trying to change miners? Surely if they were too much for us to deal with then nothing needs changing?

We don't have infinite manpower, but at peak, we had around 60 in fleet this time round. Normally we have to have multiple fleets up.

I'm not complaining though. If you want to leave 0.7s fairly untouched I'm happy with that. We can get plenty of ganking done in those next time we go for it.

Spine Ripper said...

The large majority of my ganks have been in Kino, a .7 system. All but one or two have been solo ganks. My target list includes Covetors, Hulks, Vulture Cruisers and by a massive majority, Retrievers. I get the pod on occasion. That is more a matter of the UI updating fast enough then running out of time.

The ships can be moderately tanked. If I see a DCII or a lot of other tank I will pass but the random rig or shield extender poses little problem. I fly a mid 600s Tech II cat with Limited Ion Blaster IIs for dps.

You are right about the large amount of mining going on in .7. For obvious reasons a .7 ice field is going to be popular. In Kino, there are two of them so its a breeding ground for the afk miners. Despite killing literally hundreds of them over the last few months I never have a problem finding unwary, untanked and unmoving targets.

And to think, all they had to do was buy a mining permit to keep me off. Uneducated and uncomprehending fit too.

Unknown said...

Gevlon. Here you go spouting off opportunity cost again. Have you ever looked at your own? You say in September you ganked over 1000 ships. That's 250 hours of ganking. If you would use your scout and your ganker to mine for that long that would be 15 billion ISK. While you haven't said exactly how much you made on these ganks, it's not a huge guess to say you didn't make 15 billion after factoring the cost of your catalysts in, especially as a rough estimate says that almost half your killboard stats come from pod value. And that's comparing your activity to mining, one of the lowest incomes in the game.

Anonymous said...

@ Michael LeBlanc : Wait a minute! I just started to acknowledge Gevlon's campaign and had been really impressed. Although I consider myself a careless carebear that enjoys lv4 grinding and incursion running while doing a bit of afk mining, I admit that Gevlon has a point in "enforcing" proper tank fits. I do accept the need for tank although I would prefer being able to fit a max yield exhumer and start roid grinding right away. But EVE mechanics allow ganks, even in 1.0 systems. People often ignore the fact that there is no such thing as hi-security systems. Hi-security only exists relative to your fit.
You make me wonder though, should one be able to "outmine" ganker goblins's results.
On the other hand, Gevlon didn'T start this campaign to be economically highly efficient. The genker accounts are apparently self sufficient. Gevlon has not started this campaign to show how effective and prosperous a genker's life can be, but that a tanked mining ship will stop even the random ganking. It is not the ganker'S fault if mining ships pop, but the miner's for failfitting and making a gank economically faisible...