Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Eviction

I'm in WH space for less than a month and I'm already behind my first eviction. Flying with "Insights" indeed gave me some good insights, tomorrow comes a post how the issues I've faced are responsible for killing WH space by cutting off new players. But today: pretty pictures and battle reports.

So, after multiple failures to find a WH mercenary, as their price offers were way higher than the value of the WH, I contacted Noir. They weren't cheap either, but in the range that the WH can reasonably pay for. After I finished training to be able to build the dread, I started producing "Insights", the POS-shooting Phoenix. Phoenixes are controversial dreadnoughts. They are completely incapable of hitting anything that moves, including slowboating titans. But they have the highest DPS against stationary targets like structures and sieged dreads and also the highest self-repair, combined with the ability to shoot any kind of damage they want, always shooting into the weakest resist.

Hauling the materials and fittings wasn't easy. Actually it was 3 almost full freighters which had to be moved into the hole with T1 industrials. Every freighter load criticalled the hole. Of course you can save some jumps by anchoring component assembly arrays and building the parts inside, but as it was my first POS-job, I preferred the less complicated way. After repeated anchoring and unanchoring and digging in the settings for an hour I found which option must be set to see my own POS manufacturing slots:

When I had the date for the dread completion, we scheduled an op with Noir. They came in an Eagle-Basilisk fleet, I had the dread and a fleet boosting Tengu. Luckily the idea of evicting someone was interesting enough for my girlfriend to join with her Rokh (which had to be built inside the hole too):

Then bad luck hit: it started with a new wormhole into the system from a C6. Technically it was a wandering hole from my wormhole to J105705, but I still had to close it. I jumped microwarpdriving Blackbird cruisers in and out until it collapsed. Then the target, despite being mostly inactive for weeks, managed to be online right when we started and onlined hardeners, have 3+3+2+1 on your POS. That turned our little adventure into a 4 hours long POS shoot. At least I've learned something important, guns are not as powerful as hardeners. He had lot of ECM jammers too. The Eagles had it bad, but even my girlfriend couldn't shoot a full magazine without interruption, despite having 2x ECCM and shooting from 249km (and still within optimal range, due to my Scimitar remote repping and tracking linking).

But there is no bad without good. Since he was online, I tried to negotiate with him, offering a safe passage out of the hole, the ability to unanchor and carry out his 1B faction tower and market price for every POCO. While the negotiations failed they provided us laughter in the long shooting. It turned out, my beloved neighbor didn't know Noir or Alekseyev Karrde and believed them to be some random pirate bunch. I don't think how could he managed to play for 2+ years without knowing them. Therefore he refused to believe our offers, despite they were honest. I surely wouldn't waste hours shooting a POS for a few killmails, and would have very much preferred to buy the POCOs instead of shooting them and then having to plant them. But the joke came at the end:

Yes. The "pro" who gave me "insights" about "proper wormhole conduct", was a simple grunt in a corp with 140 members, yet horrible killboard stats. The corp leadership was inactive and he had no roles in the hole he "owned". He also made us laugh with the idea that I should have figured out who lives in the hole, despite he had no killboard activity or even PvE activity; then negotiate with him directly about the POCO access and not with the inactive leadership. I wonder what could we negotiate if he had no roles to give me POCO access anyway.

After 4 hours the damn POS went into reinforce with a very bad exit timer, so we went to shoot a customs before downtime. WH dwelling people wrote lot of stuff about the horrors of customs office removal. Well, compared to the POS shoot, it was refreshing to refit to short range to blow up one of the remaining NPC customs in less than 25 mins. Let me add that I heard the term "girlfriend aggro" many times as a reason for one cannot play. Since we met due to common interests and not looks, she didn't even aggro when she was shooting a structure for 4 hours (OK, she played WoW in the meantime).

At the evening we formed up again to destroy the remaining 2 NPC customs and reinforce the hostile customs. We almost finished when No Holes Barred (big WH alliance) fleet arrived and blown up poor Insights. There were 36 pilots on the kill report. Honestly, I didn't know why they did it. They clearly didn't want to defend the target, they did not interfere with finishing the job in subcaps. The time to form such a fleet, come down on their chain, travel in highsec and go back was at least 2 hours. So they spent 72 man-hours for 3B kill. If they'd went ganking miners, they could easily get 20-25B kills with this effort. They did not contact to harvest tears and actually, they did not even harm me, as Noir reimbursed the loss, since they couldn't complete the contracted job of defending it. This shows how seriously Noir take their contracts, I can recommend their services to everyone. Just make sure that the deal has a "no singing in comms" part.

Some tips if you want to use a Phoenix in a C1-C2 to evict someone or just to speed up customs office cleaning greatly:
  • Critical the static wormhole by jumping in and out. This way hostiles can't swarm in. They can still sneak in earlier and log off.
  • Dread gankers neut, so the fitting shouldn't base on active tanking. The repper is just needed to negate tower damage. Against enemy ships, you shall just live as long as possible via passive tank to let your support kill them.
  • The dread is a ganker magnet, hostiles will bug you till they have a chance killing it. So after usage, just unfit and kill it with your alt. This way you get 670M insurance (see above) and any bounty you had. Make sure the alt has API at the killboard so everyone can see that you don't have a dread anymore.
Monday we returned to take out the POS coming out of reinforce. With no dread, but with current and former CSMs:
I filed with the fleet again in Naga and Scimitar, we were doing well with the POS and even joked that we should critical the hole because NOHO might come back for a few million worth of subcap kills. And they did. It was just surreal, as a major WH entity descended to get some kills that cost less than an exhumer. No, they weren't paid mercs, they didn't try to save the tower and they told that clearly. Yet the target guy - despite NOHO clearly wasn't supporting him - came up with the ransom of 5B. Or else, he will leave scanning frigs in the hole. Yes, you read it well, he was threatening with frigs to get 5B and clearly didn't get that if I'd pay, even highsec miners could ransom me. Anyway, I repeated my offer that I let him evacuate his stuff, just to speed up things. No, he insisted to pay 5B or on day suddenly Heron.

Then a doubly hilarious thing happened. As the NOHO FC was clear that they came for just some kills, I looked up their killboard statistics and informed him that I alone had twice as much kills while ganking miners than they had on an average month. While I was laughing on how horribly inefficient they are in their stated goal of "getting some kills", I didn't notice that my ship is moving and floated out of the POS. I also forgot to clonejump to the combat clone and lost my highsec learning one. Later we chatted again and he told he'd rather uninstall the game than gank miners. When I ask why gank equally self-defense incapable dreads, there was no answer. But he told they came after the subcaps out of boredom.

Anyway, happy about having as much kills with a 20 man fleet as I had alone in the same timeframe ganking miners, NOHO left, we reshipped armor, criticalled the hole and went back to the POS:

Boom! There goes the faction tower and the 600M SMA. I collected 250M POS modules, Noir got the following loot on top of a fit hulk, 600M worth of research on the BPO and several ships:
Can someone tell me what did he do with a Charon BPO in a wormhole? Anyway, his losses were about 5B, which he could save if he'd accept my offer of evacuating peacefully. But he didn't, since "Noir is just a bunch of pirates" and would gank him.

On Tuesday evening the POCOs came out of reinforce and we destroyed them. The entry hole was properly criticalled this time. The eviction is complete, all hostile structures are now destroyed. My only regret is that I planned to refit the dread with civilian stuff after the job is done and let Noir destroy it in noobships. But the dread died a bit earlier than expected, so we finished in subcaps:

What can I say? People keep telling to "fit some frigs and lose them to learn PvP". Well, in my case it was "fit capital", but I clearly learned more PvP mechanics in 2 days flying with Noir than in the previous 20 months. I even start to like it ... a bit, which is important for the plan I'll outline on Friday. I'd like to stress that I do not think that it's OK that a major WH alliance have half as much kills as a solo ganker and I hope they - and other wormholers - read the idea. It is aimed to bring exactly what WH space needs: new blood. Remember, I'm new blood, so on this topic I can speak from experience. I'm not sure it worth mentioning as WH people are PvP-ers who don't give a damn about ISK, but there is some in the plan too. About a trillion per month.

But before the plan, tomorrow comes the description why WH space is dying: it's the undead! Seriously.

29 comments:

Foo said...

Charon BPO was probably there for researching ME. We do a lot of WH POS based research, but keep our expensive BPOs to NPC stations.

We have toyed with the idea of dreads and carriers, with the issue being that they attract as much attention as they solve.

Pilots will go a long way for a capital kill.

As far as the so called ransom goes (or I will leave a heron in here), again, you have no guarantee whether the pilot in question would leave or stay. What paying ransoms gets you a reputation for being farm-able.

In that regard; him not paying a ransom is something I can understand.

Psianh Auvyander said...

It was a fun contract and I'm glad we made yet another happy customer.

Contact us any time.

Alekseyev Karrde said...

Working with Goblin was a direct contrast to our last job. Last time we couldn't find any characters from the employer or his corp. This time Goblin had more characters than I could keep track of lol.

Also major props to his girlfriend. If she'll stick with you through a POS bash like that she'll stick with you through anything.

As an aside, Goblin really needs a mic!!! Your readers should really donate to get him one.

Anonymous said...

you gave him the option to evac.
you point out all the drops you got that he might have evaced.

I would suggest if he didn't have roles to offline towers he may not have had access to anything worth evacing.

Gevlon said...

@Foo: I wouldn't bring a BPO to a WH, lowsec stations do better. Or highsec POS if you do professional research.

Dread is good as long as you don't fancy keeping it. After the structures are down, it must be self-killed with API to prove it.

@Alekseyev: I just brought one. I just have to figure out how to configure it. Will have it next time.

@Anonymous: that's possible. After all, he could have evacced the BPO with a covops frig.

Paul Dejean said...

The reason NoHo came for you, is that there's no reason to have a large penis if you can't show it to other people.

NoHo needs to constantly be ganking lesser wormhole dwellers to make sure they know who is in charge.

Anonymous said...

Ok most WH "PVP" is the hunting part so scanning down a guy for hours .. setting up a nice trap and then maybe loose the kill .. but it is more a "hunting" game then an "statistics game" for many WH guys .... but then getting a capital kill .. to be honest I think if a RvB ganked roam would come through a system conecting to your hohle ands would hear from a cap shoting a POS they would go for it also ... you know flies and shit thing ...

Lucas Kell said...

So in short, you built a dread and paid a merc corp to "evict" a barely active WH corp, while meanwhile setting yourself up in the crosshairs of an actual WH alliance, and that's taught you something about PVP?
What exactly have you learned? You still seem to be comparing ganking to PVP like they are the same thing. And basically you paid billions so you could do some PI in a wormhole.

You may as well pay Noir to move in with you, since you will be incapable of defending yourself should someone decide to evict you.

Gevlon said...

@Lucas: my POS is much stronger than the one we evicted, so I'm very unlikely to be evicted (the NOHO FC confirmed that it would be a huge pain to get me out).

The main goal was to learn the ins and outs of low-class WHs, which is needed for the next plan.

Raziel Walker said...

I assume the knowledge gained from this eviction was worth the isk and time spent on it.

But looking purely at payback times of the investment you made wouldn't it have been better to locate another wormhole?

I should really calculate the profit of a 0% poco planet creating P4 from P2 imports.

Anonymous said...

NoHo probably turned up because you were posting about WHs again. And you moved into one. And they have a fantastic intel network. And they were probably bored...And perhaps to stir up a fight if they could.

They do tend to honor their ransoms though. If they come for you then make sure you have your singing voice ready. They'll leave you alone in exchange for a song.

Also congrats on your first eviction. And on doing some PvP.

E'dyn said...

I enjoyed reading this. And I'm so happy that you did evict him ^^
I'm not sure why he didn't just agree on the offer, it was obviously a good one that you made, and they could have left with a lot of their stuff still intact.

But thus is the life of someone who thinks they know more than others :D

Now I really want to finally join in WH.. Darnit

Lucas Kell said...

@Gevlon
"my POS is much stronger than the one we evicted, so I'm very unlikely to be evicted (the NOHO FC confirmed that it would be a huge pain to get me out)."
Aren't you in a high sec static C1 though? You'd be incredibly easy to evict. All they need to do is get someone in your hole to scan out the static, then jump a brick fleet in from high sec. they wouldn't need to worry too much about a collapse since they could get ~60 ships in a single spawn, and it would immediately respawn in high sec. Hell, if they declaw it first, they could nuke it down with bombers in under an hour, with a minimal support fleet to keep you tcuked behind the shields. It would take a little time, sure, but a "huge pain", I think not.

Setsune Rin said...

well they'll have left those frigates you seem so unconcerned about.

expect a few more visits while you're doing PI or something else outside your shields.

they'll likely be wanting some more blog posts about the topics, reading them and laughing endearingly like you would at a retarded child

Gevlon said...

@Lucas: you heard of pos guns? Bombers would be popped before they lock up the pos. "Brick" means Legion? Because you can't bring in battleships and anything below that dies before reps land.

@Setsune: you know that a PI ship is 5M and its full cargo is 20M, right? I'm so scared of losing those!

Anonymous said...

The big difference between Ganking and WH-PvP you are missing is that gankers have a rich and fertile target environment in Highsec, ganking Miners 24/7 if you so desire. If you live in WH you have to find your target, watch them POS up 90% of the time or form up a fleet composed of 6 dreads, 2 carriers and at least 6 lokis, eagerly awaiting your jump in to their wormhole and blap you off the field.

We, NOHO, probably could've ganked an entire constellation of miners, joined the giant blue ball in Lead farmers Homesystem or hunt careless and dumb Pilots in 0.0.

But if you get the chance of killing that guy with "the awful blog" in his cap and a day later a chance to get Noir to fight: why not go for that? This probably created more fuss then anything we could've done.

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous:
"NoHo probably turned up because you were posting about WHs again."

NOHO showed up cause the guy panicked and jumped into pretty much every public channel of known WH groups begging for help, giving them the HS entrance. NOHO was just the first ones to show up. If your saying NOHO got a "fantastic intel network" cause they had a quicker response to their public channel than SSC, VoC, KILL and the like, then i guess your right.. Or maybe those groups was busy with other things (bro, do you even follow the news?), instead of a unimportant C1 WH with 1 ok kill? Like Paul Dejean said, I guess NOHO does have to show 1-5 man low-class WH guys how is in charge, when they dont have the balls to pick sides in the fight that involve the other big power-players in WH space.. Chicken much?

He also contacted us in Bombers Bar, but forgot to inform NOHO/BB about more people coming to his aid, so standings was not sorted, and NOHO just got some more bombers to shoot at, while BB rage-formed for a HWT, only to get 10 of our guys on the kill, but 10 bombers and 1 Tengu lost.. How nice of the guy to pit his defending forces up against each other :P

Von Keigai said...

Congratulations on evicting that guy. Also congrats on moving up from ganking highsec miners to killing things that can potentially fight back. I note you are still comparing apples to oranges, though, in your attempt to compare your kills to NOHO's. So you've got more to learn about PVP.

As for evicting people: there is a huge advantage to the side which has a dreadnaught, because it can blow up ECMs to allow other ships to operate. Or it can just ignore the ECMs and directly attack the shield.

Using only battlecruisers (which is as large a ship as you can get into C1 without building it there), you are going to need a lot of ships to overcome the defenses. A dickstar can mount 60+ ECMs. I have not tried them, but my understanding of the way ECMs work is they target randomly. 60 of them of various flavors will keep perhaps 30 or 40 ships jammed on average. So, yes, if you have 100 friends willing to spend hours grinding in battlecruisers, a C1 grind should be pretty easy. But not if you have just 30 friends, say.

Lucas Kell said...

@Gevlon
"you heard of pos guns? Bombers would be popped before they lock up the pos. "
That's why you "declaw" the POS first, IE shoot the guns with a small fleet that can take the damage. Guns go down real quick. You can even bomb them with bombers if they are clustered (which most people tend to do).

""Brick" means Legion? Because you can't bring in battleships and anything below that dies before reps land."
Not specifically. Brick is a type of fit (a type of tank to be specific). For a POS bash it would generally be a Brick fit Naga. So large guns on a battlecruiser, laying out battleship DPS from a battlecruiser, with a pretty decent tank. Even against a deathstar POS, a handful of logi could keep a brick naga fleet up against the POS guns.

E'dyn said...

Oh wow, he did that? I bet that guy made few friends by begging for help and pitting up "defence" against each other..

What a glorious way to go, although I'm confused why people actually heeded his calls.. Why help someone who's so close to eviction and showing weakness? Or did he promise ISK for your help?

Anonymous said...

Yes! Congratulations.

So what was this? A whiteknight sitting duck without the means to even evac?

[NOIR], the "lol" and the "mic advice" aside, you did a good job! Good to see that some people do their contracted spaceship jobs somewhat seriously.

@Anon with NOHO showed up cause the guy panicked and jumped into pretty much every public channel of known WH groups begging for help, giving them the HS entrance.
screen or it didn't happen.
A afk wh entity with a whiteknight striped of all important roles .. askes for help in public chanells .. gets NOHO response with mega fleet. Yeah right. please screen or it didn't happen.

Lucas Kell said...

@Von Kegai
"Using only battlecruisers (which is as large a ship as you can get into C1 without building it there), you are going to need a lot of ships to overcome the defenses. A dickstar can mount 60+ ECMs. I have not tried them, but my understanding of the way ECMs work is they target randomly. 60 of them of various flavors will keep perhaps 30 or 40 ships jammed on average. So, yes, if you have 100 friends willing to spend hours grinding in battlecruisers, a C1 grind should be pretty easy. But not if you have just 30 friends, say."
A POS is pretty stupid. It tends to multijam a lot. Dickstars are to put people off bothering in a small group just reinforcing your tower for the hell of it, or to give you a bit more time to show up. 30 people would be able to grind down the ECM in a fairly short time, and as each one incaps, the next becomes easier, and without a defense fleet they wouldn't be deterred. Basically if a group is serious about dropping your tower and you can't form a fleet to defend it, it will go down eventually.

Rahvin Dex said...

Instead of just criticising you for your many glaring errors I will just say this:

Your main problem with pvp is how you so obviously view it in statistical terms: The person with the best isk iffeciency is better.

If you keep on with this viewpoint you will only end up risk averse and will effectively hamstring yourself in your ability to learn pvp. If your interested in learning ofcourse.

Here is how you learn to pvp:
You pick a ship, you go out and you die. You will try to figure out what whent wrong and then repeat this process (probably changing ships and fits many times to find something that suits you) untill you can manage to pull something off that resembles good pvp. When you get beyong the "shaky" stage and can actually keep a logic thought pattern during a fight its the first sign that you are improving.

By this time you killboard will look horrible. You will have several embarrasing deaths and people will probably make fun of you and laugh at some of your lossmails.

Thats okay, that just shows your willing to put yourself out there to improve. So change your viewpoint goblin, and you might discover what a rush it is when you take 1-3 guys on by yourself and kick the shit out of them. Thats satisfying as hell.

Tithian said...

@Rahvin Dex

You're making it sound like trial and error is the one and only way to learn, if that was the case humans would still be trying to invent the wheel every other year.

And if you actually read the blog post, he's already had some emabrrasing deaths, due to the involvement of NOHO. He's just willing to put the time to actually collect information before failing, to soften the blow and making the learning curve a bit smoother, which is the smart thing.

There are some people however that will be unable to grasp something without hands on experience, I'll give you that, which again is a valid way to learn something (although a bit more painful).

Anonymous said...

well props to the guy for scrounging up the backup to kill a dread not an easy task considering he showed up in the middle of his tower getting blown up.

Also you may have gone a bit overboard with the dread prob coulda done it without one since the guy is afk most of the time.

Anonymous said...

Wait, you seriously compared your suicide ganking miner antics with someone hunting down capitals in which space?

Gevlon said...

Why? Capitals are just as defenseless gank targets as AFK Mackinaws. Of course they can be protected by a subcap fleet. Just like Mackinaws.

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon
Why? Capitals are just as defenseless gank targets as AFK Mackinaws. Of course they can be protected by a subcap fleet. Just like Mackinaws.

Because Capitals can shoot back and require a lot more than a 1mil isk Catalyst to blow up. It requires skill, thought and preparation. A week old mental midget can gank afk miners who can't fight back--which is a point you've very well proven.

Gevlon said...

No. Capitals can only shoot back if they have webbing and target painting subcaps. It's much easier to protect miners than capitals.

Killing them needs no skill, thought or preparation. Just enough warm bodies in ships to zerg down the subcap support.