Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

The medium shield booster conspiracy

You probably seen capital battles between MoA and Goons, featuring a carrier fit with a cruiser sized shield booster. First I considered them ALODs from random idiots. Then I was informed that it's an official doctrine that is planned to stop ratting carrier losses. While the idea is pants on head retarded at the first glance, let's be scientific and check the carrier losses of Goonswarm.

In the first half of November and in October 54 Goonswarm carrier died. In the previous September and second half of August, 42. So the doctrine failed to decrease carrier losses. Go figure! If we ignore the carriers died out of Imperium space (like lowsec or WH), we get 38 carrier without capital repair module and 7 with it since October. So the failed doctrine is pretty spread.

How could anyone come up with such nonsense? Because it's not so bad at paper: a carrier with only a medium shield booster always has enough capacitor to jump, so if any of them tackled, the rest of them can jump to it and save it. This could actually work if you have a PL capital fleet at your disposal. But if you apply it to Goon ratters, you find that they don't jump to the tackled carrier because
  • AFK
  • Faking AFK because too scared
  • Faking AFK because can't care less
  • Have no fuel
  • Have no cap for some retarded reason or another
  • Jump timer
  • "Lol i jumped to YAO beacon instead of u and now im also tackled HALP"
Even if they arrive they aren't much help because
  • having a mess overview so can't target
  • seeing all the reds, realize that their carrier can die and freeze
  • Have no cap to activate remote reppers
  • hard to rep with 5 drone control units
  • Locks hostiles instead because of killmails
  • "where is the paplink?"
As sum of these, if the enemy is more than 5 MoA bombers, they all die.

However Goons don't seem to cancel the obviously failed doctrine. But if we consider that they are called the minions of Evil for a reason, you can explain it. The doctrine is actually working, at least for those who figured it out. Fitting a medium shield booster on your carrier is an altruistic act. You give up the chance to defend yourself for the chance to save another carrier. Those who are "in the know" or simply "Goon enough" know how to exploit this: they fit their carriers with proper modules, if someone else is tackled, they just don't care. If they are tackled, they call for help and tank the attackers with their properly fit carriers until the expendable minions adorable Karmafleet newbies arrive to save them. Due to them being at jump cap, they arrive faster. So the medium shield booster doctrine is a simple exploitation of line members: their carriers are purposefully fit to be able to save their masters, at the cost of being dead when MoA enters local.


PS: for those who whine that bombers vs medium shield booster carrier is not a capital battle, here is one with capitals fielded on both sides and the obligatory 75% MoA ISK ratio.

17 comments:

Provi Miner said...

I love it makes perfect sense to me lol

Anonymous said...

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=6165568#post6165568
I was wondering where did this come from, but now it seems to make a perverted gewn sense...

Maybe the butthurt of carrier ratting is indeed strong with this one. Looks like somebody wasn't saved...

Anonymous said...

eh, you're wrong about the intended purpose of being always above jump cap or at least the primary purpose which is being able to jump out of system (for example, to a nearby beacon in a system reported clear by intel) as soon as a neutral enters local. if you arent terrible and watch intel and dont rat in systems with wormholes, and recall drones and jump out as soon as you see a neutral in local/dscan then carrier ratting is extremely safe

Gevlon said...

You don't need jump cap to get away fast. All you need is a capital higgs anchor rig and you can rat aligned. Warping off allows you to return faster and also to not get jump fatigue.

Anonymous said...

Why is it so hard for you to understand this? It's really not that complicated, I'm certain a 5 year old would understand the benefits of this.

A.) Everyone is at jump cap with great buffer, so they can jump to a tackled carrier and immediately remote rep.
B.) What you aren't including are the innumerable amount of carriers that have been saved by this set up - for every carrier lost 10+ have been saved.
c.) Karmafleet rats in a different area, so no, us "overlords" (who really are just dudes who rat in carriers) aren't ever expecting anyone from Karmafleet to show up.
D.) This is an example of what happens when a carrier gets jumped on and you have other carriers who are at jump cap to provide aid: https://zkillboard.com/related/30002909/201510302300/o/%7B%22A%22%3A%5B%5D%2C%22B%22%3A%5B%2299005391%22%2C%221136157539%22%2C%2299005677%22%2C%2299004779%22%2C%2299004276%22%5D%7D/

I'm sorry you can't understand the simplicity behind our carrier ratting infrastructure. The only way carriers die is afk, no cyno, out of range or bad timing (no one on to help) - so yes, we will lose some, but we have saved an exponential amount more. Gevlon you aren't really this dumb, are you?

Gevlon said...

@Anon: you ignore that the carrier losses are growing instead of shrinking. Maybe the doctrine was introduced with good intentions, but it's not working because
- Goons are bad at EVE and fail to jump in time
- Because it's exploitable by not fitting medium shield booster and still receiving help from medium shield booster carriers.

Anonymous said...

"you ignore that the carrier losses are growing instead of shrinking."
You ignore that carrier ratting may me growing too. If traffic on the roads increases by 100%, but car crashes (in absolut terms) increase by only 5%, then individual car journeys are safer. Same thing with carriers. More are dying but considerably more are being used.

Anonymous said...

"you ignore that the carrier losses are growing instead of shrinking"

Are the numbers of carriers being used increasing or decreasing?

Is there a reason why people are going for ratters lately?

as Anon said...a number used on its own is meaningless.

Unknown said...

An interesting and believable theory. My only problem with it is that they would strike me as pushing it on non-Goons allied to them, not those within their own alliance... but then again maybe that is why MoA is irrelevant 8 times over. Propaganda is propaganda is propaganda.

Tell the alliance to fit X *wink* *wink* and then spin their losses to MoA as something irrelevant.

Either way, the moral and sociopathic implications are interesting.

Gevlon said...

Ratting itself is decreasing badly, that's we know for sure.
It is possible that carrier ratting is increasing at the expense of subcap ratting, but there is no data for it.

LazinessEvolved said...

Makes sense. Also anons: if you are saying that this doctrine has saved innumerable other carriers, do you realize that you are saying that losses would be mounting at a tremendous rate without it? You can't have it both ways...either MoA is irrelevant or they are so relevant a doctrine change was needed to prevent the loss of the innumerable carriers they would have otherwise killed.

Good work as usual, Gevlon.

Hamlym Medley said...

@anon You should know that the only information relevant is the one that can be proved through data... So "increase in captal bla bla bla" without data is irrelevant... If you really know Gevlon of course... and almost every one else who visit this blog too...
We can get this information by observation:
Since Rat itself is decreasing badly (http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com.br/2015/11/october-ratting-data-with-omir.html) in goons space, and the last information we got was "(...)54 Goonswarm carrier died. In the previous September and second half of August, 42." so yeah, we can assume that the doctrine is, ipso facto, not working.

Anonymous said...

"Ratting itself is decreasing badly, that's we know for sure."
According to your October ratting stats, null ratting increased every month since June. Is that data incorrect?

Gevlon said...

Null ratting is record high. Deklein ratting is 30% lower than September. MoA is irrelevant, go back to your medium shield booster!

Tsed said...

I realize this is kinda shouting into the wind but here goes:

There's a pretty simple explanation for the Sept->Oct ratting drop (and, for that matter, why more carriers were dying in Oct). The end of September marked the beginning of the Pure Blind deployment. As part of that, even the core ratting group (the dudes who make up the bulk of the carrier-saving-power) deployed south to raise the ADMs down there. That had two big impacts:

1) Fewer rats dying, for a couple reasons. Firstly, a lot of those systems needed their military indexes bootstrapped, so you had people *belt ratting* to start that -- and even once the systems start spawning sites, the number is low/doesn't support many people at first. That obviously is less efficient than the hubs/havens/sanctums we're used to. Second, PB is obviously a "hotter" region than Dek during Oct, so you probably miss out on a lot of the near-afk people cranking out isk all day.

2) The carriers that *didn't* deploy all of a sudden found themselves without the useful carrier pilots who usually would jump in to save them (that is, the useful people deployed to PB). In that case, yeah -- I actually agree, the Med booster fit is dumb. You need the critical mass of people ready to jump to you for that to work, and if that's a region away, you need to re-think your strat (or ratting location). Once the defensive carrier umbrella isn't covering you, you're just target practice.

Revisit the stats (including ratting carrier losses) in Nov -- I'll be curious to see how that goes.

Unknown said...

@Tsed: 1 - I was under the impression the Imperum ne CFC was only now starting their Pure Blind Deployment.
2 - who rats belts in a Carrier? That is foolishness multiplied.
3 - Which means the people calling for help could not be bothered to help out each other... good team work.

Tsed said...

1) The previous PB deployment. Not related to whatever is happening Thursday.
2) Not carriers in general belt ratting -- the point is that the PB systems military indexes had to be built up, starting with belt ratting, as there were no respawning sites in many systems.
3) Yes, exactly. Contrary to what Gev has implied, it's not newbies dropping in to help people in general. It's a group of mostly-vet-ish players, often multiboxers, dropping carriers to defend those caught. Those people went to PB (and dropped to defend each other down there). Only scattered remnants were left in Dek, who may not even have bothered to fleet up.