Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Plan B: the massacre of highsec-M&S

While the negotiations with nullsec alliances go on, I must prepare if they'd fail. Thanks to my vast wealth and my 4K+ daily visit blog, I'm not in the sad position where I must accept unacceptable terms.

My goals in EVE are clear: hitting the M&S. My nullsec plans focus mostly on those who leech on sov-holding alliances by either carebearing for their own good but not contributing in defending the field and those who leech on the fame of their alliance without adding anything to it besides demands for others to stay docked. They are the most visible and loud, but they aren't the only M&S in EVE. Without an existing nullsec alliance I can't hunt them, as the 100+ people who sent me mails with the will of joining are mostly new players who don't yet have money and especially skillpoints to fly capitals/supercapitals which is a necessity in the sov game.

So both as an intermediate stage and as a great activity itself, the backup plan focuses on highsec M&S. They are not equal with carebears. Carebears (PvE-players) are playing the game in an avatar-selfish way which is completely OK. They have only what they've earned. The only thing they do wrong is undocking instead of trading in Jita but that's not a philosophical problem. As I pointed out, playing in a group is an ineffective way of making ISK or even individual fame. If you are a highsec PvE player, you should be in an NPC corp, or in a small corp with only your alts or real friends/family members. Joining with random people to make ISK is doing it wrong.

The highsec PvE corporations "do it wrong" because they are a collection of leeching M&S and socials who are helping these "new players". This is totally pointless and creates just another hive of idiocy and entitlement. We are here to end these. The plan is a highsec wardeccing corp that keeps as many highsec PvE corps decced for months as possible. Instead of gifting away titans, I'll spend my money to pay wardec bills. A wardec cost is about 500M/month on a 3-500-member PvE corp. So I can keep quite a few such corps decced forever just from my own income.

We will focus on the large PvE corps and keep them decced until they shrink down. We will hunt the members and every time tell them to quit that M&S-hive and play in NPC corp or a small corp with real friends. Alternatively they could join EVE-UNI or RvB where they could actually learn to play. If we force the supporting socials out, the rest of the M&S starve to death. If we force the M&S into NPC corp, he'll starve to death anyway as he can't support himself. The best thing in this is not needing any high organization, planning or alarm clocks. The average member just comes online, asks where other 2-3 are, join them and kill reds.

Important: in a highsec deccing corp you should not do any PvE activity. Have a separate ISKmaking character (hauler, trader, miner, missioner). You can (maybe should) have out of corp scout and maybe an also out of corp fleet booster. Remember that in highsec, a PvP corp must be pure-wolf. Even with very casual trading you can easily replace lost PvP ships and pay for PLEX to upkeep 2-3 accounts. I suggest to do so as sooner or later a move to nullsec will be in order (I assume the significant highsec PvE corporations can be fully exterminated in a year). For nullsec you'll need a capital ship pilot so I suggest to have a dedicated account with a pilot having +5 implants and sitting in a station, training for (super)capitals. You can have your PvE and PvP pilot on the same account, but it will slow them both, especially if your PvE activity is mining/missioning. Also it's good to have an NPC scout who can be logged in the same time. Anyway, if you plan to fly supercaps any time soon, being able to upkeep 3 accounts is an absolute minimum. If you are not especially excited about highsec M&S ganks, consider it a training period for our nullsec plans.

We'll seek cooperation with highsec PvP corps, but we are not like them. We don't care about losses, we don't care about ISK ratio, we measure our success in the number of M&S hives shrinking into non-existence. Our cooperation with highsec PvP would be limited to form an alliance where everyone is on his merry way, we just pay the deccing costs on the alliance level. I mean there is no point for our corp and corp X to dec corp Y independently, when our alliance can dec for all of us together.

What will happen if another PvP corp decs us for killmails? We'll form blobs and ruin their kill:death ratio. The only danger to us is an altruistic "protector" PvP corporation that wants to defend the "innocents". However as long as we can keep flying, we are winning even if they have much more kills, as the M&S and the supporting socials still don't dare to undock so their terrible corp will slowly but surely die.

Why would it work when similar plan of the Goons failed? At first because we'd live in high while most Goons could not bother to come here and also because we don't have in-corp freighters to retaliate on. Also, they were picking on corps of intelligent people like Jade Constantine while we'll be preying on M&S hives. It won't be hard to find them, their cans litter the newbie systems, luring the unsuspecting new players into their stinking "help each other" leech-fest.

Please comment on the possible problems, pros and cons of this plan. I'll make the corp if the immediate nullsec plans fail and I will participate with a scimitar (the fleets will be shield for higher speed) and two out-of-corp fleet/wing boosters/commanders for camps and larger engagements (a Tengu and a Loki).


Wednesday morning report: 116.6B (2.5B spent on main accounts, 1.8 spent on Logi/Carrier, 1.5 on Ragnarok, 1.0 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.3 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).

38 comments:

Nomazar said...

1) HiSec M&S are you main source of income as trader.
2) Hisec M&S are main source of income for CCP.

You will be stopped, one way or an other.

Gevlon said...

@Nomazar: completely not true. Tomorrows post will be more or less about that, in preview: they pay one subscription if any and they generate barely anything to trade.

Nomazar said...

I can not agree with

" they pay one subscription if any and they generate barely anything to trade."

It seems that my definition of M&S does not match with yours.

Could you please state your definition of "M&S"? Probably with subclasses.

Steel H. said...

"Those who leech on the fame of their alliance without adding anything to it besides demands for others to stay docked." - Who exactly are these people? Have you met one? Have a name and number? Chat logs? And stay docked, in what context, when, where, how?

Anonymous said...

My guess would be any sort of systematic total effort like this would be like trying to flatten blobs of Mercury with a spatula. You can fracture the original blob, but it will just reform elsewhere under different name(s).

Have you done an analysis of how many corporate targets for such a plan exist?

Anonymous said...

Also, who is your prospective corporate member?

What are they doing now that they'll leave to join you?

Gevlon said...

The prospective corporate member is someone who wants easy kills. I think it's a very large group.

Yes, the "smash and they reform" is a possible danger, however can be mitigated by targeting those corps which have cans anchored and those who send out mass mails to newbies. If they stop doing these, their recruiting power will significantly decrease.

Also, we will openly motivate the gank targets to join EVE-Uni and RvB (we will never dec them) and anyone who does will be permanently removed from the idiot-circulation.

Anonymous said...

So, basically you want to create another 0rphanage?

Anonymous said...

Did you read that link to the cost of wardec page? Guess not, because your numbers are way off. If you only have 1 war, a 500 member corp will cost you around 150M to dec, at 10 wars 1.5B, at 100 wars 15B.

Foo said...

@anonymous worried about costs ... 100 wars = 15B.

Of all the things that concern me about this; 15B is the least of Gevlon's barriers.

@Gevlon; I am curious to see that sending players to Eve uni is a desirable outcome; I would have thought that Eve uni would have been a target.

Gevlon said...

Missed the dec multiplier but it's not a big issue. Keeping the 10 biggest hives decced still provides thousands of targets.

Anonymous said...

Congrats on your 4000 views. I originally came for the trading advice - I stayed because I thought you seemed like a well-intentioned eve newbie who needed guidance. I'm becoming more and more convinced that you're at least an M and potentially an S in terms of non-monetary things.

I am increasingly aware that I am feeling more and more like the socials who try to help the M&S who drain their time and energy.

Yesterday you were giving away titans, today you're war deccing everyone in highsec.

you continually state things as fact that are axiomatically wrong to those who have spent any decent amount of time in nullsec. Sure, you're asking some good questions, or at least you're getting good advice on people who know how to use supercaps. great! sure: perhaps the difference with you is that you at least have a desire to have an overall goal for eve.

Best of luck in whatever it is that you end up doing in wherever you end up doing it.

Gevlon said...

@evemonkey: "axiomatically" is the key word here. There are so many people who accept the status quo without question.

I question everything. In 95% some smart people comes along and explain why the status quo is right. In 5% I figure out something new. Since I focus mostly on trading, this is where I'm most successful.

However the point is that I learn something in 100%.

Anonymous said...

@serpentinelogic
since orphanage was just a privateers clone...

Dioxin said...

If everyone who joins your corp thinks and plays like you, then who's going to actually pvp anybody after you've made your wardecs? Or does this mean you're finally going to start doing some pvp?

And what will you do against highsec corps who mine the starter system belts all day?

Gevlon said...

@Dioxin: the trick is that the others don't need to think like me. The average member comes simply because he can ramp up kills easily with relative safety.

Anonymous said...

"And what will you do against highsec corps who mine the starter system belts all day?"

extra rules in rookie systems only apply to dealings with rookies

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1198764#post1198764

cleaning high-sec from M&S is a Herculean task, there are way too many of them and they are scattered over many really small corporations (just had a look at recruitment channel and most corporations advertising there have 5-50 members).

Anonymous said...

i had two thoughts.

my initial thought was for my own safety. how do you determine my tax haven corp with all my alts isnt one of your potential targets? but i guess lack of spam invites and high membership levels would rule me out.

my second thought occured to me after reading the comments. if gevlon is creating an alliance, and will be looking for recruits anyhow, what is to stop him recruiting existing war dec / mercenary corps? sure he might have some quality control issues recruiting existing corps. but it would probably be a quicker process.

would the corps be able to have their own war decs or would they have to rely on alliance level decs?

Glau said...

Heh, I've been part of a hisec wardec corp for a while, and trust me, if we can get targets while someone lese is footing the bill, we're all for it. I've been following your blog for a while, and this idea is more appealing to me then going to nullsec (although I'm ok with that too).

Hivemind said...

A few points I'd like to make:
> "[nullsec M&S] are the most visible and loud"
Really? I've seen occasional meltdowns on forums from nullbears, but they are far, far less common than hisec M&S complaining about hulkageddon, suicide ganks, OTEC etc etc. Where are you seeing all this evidence of Null M&S?

> "As I pointed out, playing in a group is an ineffective way of making ISK or even individual fame."
You didn't actually provide any evidence to support this claim; you simply said Null isn't profitable and left it at that. I'd still like to see actual numbers that support this view.

> "Joining with random people to make ISK is doing it wrong."
Why? Hypothetical example: I have a high skilled Orca pilot and 2 Hulks mining in hisec. I can boost mining yield by 52% (15% yield from mindlink, -32.3% cycle speed from ganglink). One of my corpmates (who I only know in game since I joined the corp) asks to join, I say yes but I want some of the extra ore they’re mining (Of their 152% normal yield, I take about 33%, they keep 120%). They agree as long as I haul the ore. I get a significant chunk of extra ore/time and the only cost to is that I have to empty the orca and change belts slightly more often, while my corp mate also makes more than they would solo.

Less numbers-based example: I’m running missions on one account while salvaging with another. A corpmate who can fly a Noctis but for cannot do level 4s asks to salvage my missions. We agree to split salvage, loot and agent rewards while I keep all the bounties (the salvager only warps into a room after I’ve cleared it). I then use my salvaging account to fly a second combat ship and am able to complete missions twice as fast, at a cost of less than 50% of the rewards while my corpmate also makes more ISK and LP than they could get running lower level missions and builds up standings for their own L4s.

What is it about these two examples that is “doing it wrong”?

>”The highsec PvE corporations "do it wrong" because they are a collection of leeching M&S and socials”
What proof have you got of this? I’ve just given a couple of examples where cooperating with other corp members allows for mutual profit above what can be achieved separately. I know you’ve got no experience in player corps because you’re proud to call STI home, so where did you get this conclusion from and what evidence do you have to back it up?

>”If we force the M&S into NPC corp, he'll starve to death anyway as he can't support himself.”
How will that work exactly? M&S are the least likely players to be paying for gametime through PLEXes , so cutting them off from income is far from a guaranteed way to get them to quit. In an NPC corp they’ll be safe from your decs so ship replacements won’t be ongoing, so what is it they’re going to be starved of exactly? Are you seriously implying that M&S are so bad that they cannot do *anything* in game without social players supporting them? If so, where on earth did you come to that conclusion, and once again what evidence have you got to support it?

Finally, others have asked about the scale here but I’ve got to reiterate it myself; have you actually looked in to how many corps you would have to wardec for this? There are hundreds of active corps with 20+ members based in hisec, probably thousands, and there’s not much stopping a corp from evacuating en masse under your dec to another hisec corp. The stacking fee for wars prohibits you from maintaining more than about 15-20 wars based on your current income of 1.5-2bn ISK/day (based on your last few earnings reports), once those are declared you will have to cancel old wars and make more ISK to fund new ones, and nothing stops your targets from moving back to their old corps as soon as the war is dropped. You’re trying to play whack-a-mole, except that there’s hundreds of holes and the moles can dig new ones whenever they’re threatened.

Hivemind said...

@ Anonymous 11:28
As far as I understand it, corps in an alliance cannot make individual wardecs, nor can they be decced individually. Any decs have to come from and go to the alliance as a whole and are valid for that whole alliance. As for Gevlon recruiting Merc corps, firstly they're unlikely to sign up and lose their autonomy like that (they want you to pay them to dec people, not to be recruited by you) and secondly Gevlon is a very... polarising figure. I doubt too many mercs would want to be directly associated with this crusade of his as members of his alliance.

Also as far as I understand this is a backup plan if getting into Null fails, which means it won't necessarily involve an alliance.

Oh, and I should add that I do at least approve of Gevlon getting some actual combat experience in a Scimi at long last; if nothing else comes of this that alone would be worth it.

Gevlon said...

@Hivemind: tomorrow I'll post a clear proof that low-null is ISK-ineffective.

About the playing in group: Your orca-hulk example is right, that's what multiboxing players use. However there is a difference between multibox and group: schedule. When your multibox-orca is on, your multibox-hulk is also on. They are in the same system.

On the other hand players are not on on the same time (unless real-life connected) so the random Hulk pilot rarely finds you online, too rare to actually count on you. He is better off getting his own orca pilot.

Also, the larger group you are in, the more likely gankers, canflippers show up.

To make things perfect, enters the M&S who don't accept that they shall give you share of the ore (as you are already there and letting them in the team costs you nothing).

The Whack-a-mole situation is correct. However I figured out the solution: the targets will be picked after sending unsolicited newbie invite mails and anchoring cans. While we are absolutely no danger to the individual player (there will always be more corps than we can dec), but we are dangerous to the corp leaders who don't want to see their corp shrink. Remember, the other corp is not THEIR corp. So we can scare them from using spam-mail and cans, making them invisible for the average players who use no forums.

Not our decs, but their fear from being decced and losing followers will put them to stagnation.

Also, targeting the largest ones will hit those which have somewhat good management, demotivating those who altruistically keep them alive.

Coralina said...

Gevlon, I am really starting to worry that you might be descending into madness!

It is as though your war/hatred against the M&S is becoming obsessive and irrational.

I don’t see how realistically you are going to achieve anything. You are wasting your time harassing these people instead of enjoying your own game. Unless you just enjoy making their lives a misery for the hell of it? Or maybe you are a lost soul with no clear objective/goal now that you are playing a game that doesn’t have raid bosses?

It seems to me that the M&S are winning the war by forcing you to waste energy on a futile crusade against them. When can we expect to see this “better world” you are promising?

You won’t change their ways or encourage them to quit so it is all for nothing. After all these years of war and even a change of game you are clearly still in an environment rife with M&S and have had no impact on their numbers or influence. You have failed!

Example: Back in December 2010 when Cataclysm launched, the new dungeons descended into chaos as the M&S kept wiping everyone on dance bosses. There was a dance boss where M&S had to step in and out of beams at a certain stack level or the entire group would die and boy oh boy did a lot of people die!

I got bored of repeatedly explaining tactics, trying to educate them or kick them and quit after a couple of months of this nonsense. The shocker is that I read on the WoW forums THIS WEEK that M&S are still constantly wiping groups on this boss almost 2 years later!

Don’t you see? There is an infinite supply of these people and they never learn! What do you seriously hope to achieve here? You cut off one head and two more grow in its place! The “better world” will never happen. You need to stop fighting M&S and just work around them.

Admit it: they have us totally outclassed in terms of sheer numbers and their resilience.

Play your own game, rather than try and screw someone else’s in vain. Then again that is the public perception of EVE – a game that really isn’t much fun in its own right and where the only fun to be had (if you are that way psychologically inclined) is to disrupt the game experience of others?

Agent Black Cat said...

Well, if you're picking from corps that advertise in newb systems, it certainly won't be difficult to get infiltrators in to pick up intel.

Unknown said...

@Gevlon: i like the hisec idea, btw a even more ISk efficient way would be to simply hire multiple hi-sec merc's. Those "mercs" act more like payed pirates than mercs, since they won't take "boring" jobs even at a reasonable price. So i consider them not "real" mercs, but they fit into your idea. Hi-sec mercs would like to take jobs against large corps, so they have many targets. If u can generate 15b per month to hire additional mercs, u could see a really fast impact.

Just an idea but try evaluate this, since this is mainly a ISK issue :p

bye Andy

Bobbins said...

Since there are valid reasons for joining an high sec corp (low tax, learning in a group, access to pos slots etc) wouldn't such a crusade hit intelligent players who opted out of the npc coorps more than the M&S who most likely would still be in an npc coorp.

Perhaps identifying coorps (targets) with idiotic flawed recruiting criteria and explaining why they deserve to no longer exist would give you something to blog about and provide some reasoning.

Hivemind said...

@ Gevlon

On the orca example: The schedule would be why you look for a corp that operates within your timezone and don’t depend on other people showing up to make ISK; in the example you seem to have missed that I said the Orca pilot already had 2 of their own hulks mining, so they make ISK regardless of whether corp mates join. The point with travel time/location is also easily solved via members clustering around corp offices, which tends to occur naturally. My example was just demonstrating how adding another person to an existing solo operation can be mutually profitable, and it works regardless of how many Hulks to first player is multiboxing; they can always add a corp member for more profit and little effort. If a corp member doesn’t want to pay some of their bonus ore I can reason with them and point out that they’re still getting 20% more than they would solo, that I’m offering quality improvements from boosted mining range and defensive improvements from a shield link, protection from canflippers as they can offload ore to the orca’s corp hangars and hauling for them. If they still don’t want to accept that then they can join my fleet for bonuses but do everything else themselves as that doesn’t inconvenience me (as long as the leadership skills exist to spread boosts to my own pilots), or they can mine solo. If they agree to pay the split but then refuse when the time comes… the Orca’s been hauling all their ore to settle up at the end of the op, meaning they don’t have a lot of choice in giving me my cut. As I said, canflippers are no problem (the brief periods when an Orca isn’t there can be covered with anchored, passworded GSCs) and there are tank bonuses against gankers from the gang link and passive leadership boosts, plus defensive fittings on the Hulks are standard practice.

I think you’re missing that most corps don’t recruit via spam mails and anchored gatecans; most recruitment happens through the recruitment channel ingame (also the forums, but that’s not nearly as applicable to M&S). If I recall there’s also a recruitment tool you can use to search for corps based on various details like timezone, activities, size, location ingame and so on; I have no idea if it gets used much, but if so that would probably be another M&S tool since smart players would do more research than just using that tool. I’m not even convinced that there are the sorts of M&S-bloated hisec corps you seem to imagine; my experience is that they are more likely to be a layer spread evenly across the large and small corps.

@ Unknown/Andy: My experience of those merc corps, which comes from being on the receiving end of a dec from a couple of them (admittedly, as part of a large, nullsec-focused alliance, which may colour things) was that they will happily take people’s money, launch a wardec and then do absolutely nothing to prosecute that war. That probably doesn’t apply to all mercs, but at the very least research on war history etc needs to happen rather than just throwing money at any corp that offers its services; the mere existence of a wardec will work in some cases regardless of actual fights and losses, but for best effect the M&S do need to actually lose ships (some of them won't even realise there's a war on until WTs show up and shoot them).

Avensys said...

@Hivemind Gevlon's point about the non-profitability of 0.0 is trivially true.

Look at some numbers for TEST Alliance Please Ignore:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlnyNGc6PAOwdG1LaW5EQlJ6VTNNQXZiU3haQmtZemc&authkey=CKbl8ZwI&hl=en&authkey=CKbl8ZwI#gid=0

total monthly income of 178b ISK, 19.8b of which are from bounties
dreddit runs at a 10% tax rate so members get 178b in ratting income per month.

I am not sure if other corporations' ratting income gets taxed by the alliance but we can double the number to make up for this (which is generous giving that many of the other 4k characters are alts) - 356b personal income/month.

Assuming every ratter earns double what he/she would earn in high-sec that's 178b ISK/month extra income in personal money and 178b in alliance-level income for a total of 356b ISK/month more in gross income than the same people would earn in high-sec.

TEST was spending 205b ISK/month on sov, fuel, SRP, ... (and that was before their mad landgrab) leaving us with 156b ISK/month in extra income.

Now take a look at the opportunity cost that supercapital pilots incur each month for having sunk so much capital into the character & ship (which they could e.g. have used on the market otherwise).
I think 10%/month would be a conservative estimate for how much these pilots could earn investing their capital into trading/industry/...

supercarrier pilot: 20b
supercarrier+fittings: 25b
============================
4.5b/month per sc pilot

titan pilot: 30b (can go much higher than that)
titan+fittings: 90b (bro price)
============================
12b/month per titan pilot

And at this point it should be completely obvious that the extra income from living in 0.0 (156b/month which already includes member income) does not even pay for the opportunity cost of the capital tied up in TEST's comparatively small supercapital fleet (but if you doubt that I can spend an hour or two compiling a list of TEST's titan and sc pilots), nevermind paying for the opportunity cost of the countless man hours TEST members spend in fleets every month.

Dioxin said...

"extra rules in rookie systems only apply to dealings with rookies"

Except CCP has never released their internal definition of what is and is not a rookie.

If you want to test the banhammer through trial and error, then be my guest.

Anonymous said...

Dear Gevlon,

As a member of RVB I would like to ask you to stop using us as exemples in your posts. You have no understanding whatsoever of how RVB operates, who is in the corps or what keep us playing together.

I'll be happy if you count us on the M&S that you hate so much. We are lazy people who can't be ask to fly more then 2 systems to get in a fight, we don't make any money as our alliance run on donations, we couldn't care less about fame and fortune and we help every slacker/moron noob that we can find.

We are not PVP strategists, or social theoricrafters, we are just a bunch of people that look at explosions and say: "Hoo cool".

So please, if your plan B ever come into action I recomend start with us. We are the biggest group of M&S that you can find in high sec.

Dioxin said...

Gevlon: "the trick is that the others don't need to think like me. The average member comes simply because he can ramp up kills easily with relative safety."

So you're going to use the worst killmail padding M&S of the PvP player base to change the face of highsec? Good luck with that.

Hivemind said...

@ Avensys

That sheet seems a little out of date; I checked current jita price and tech moons are now about 227 mil/day, for example.

In general I think you're falling into the trap of assuming that everyone is homo economicus rather than homo sapiens - that they're perfectly rational and would always choose the outcome that offered them highest ISK income rather than anything else. My argument, which apparently I didn't make as well as I thought I had, was only that the ordinary members in a Sov Null alliance make more ISK in null than they would in hisec, counter to Gevlon's claims that the average 0.0 member would be better off making ISK in hisec/lowsec/NPC null. If they make twice as much in null as out of it and have to spend 50% or less of their time PvPing then as long as they want to be PvPing and operating in null with the various requirements then that’s where they should be.

You're also making a chalk-and-cheese comparison when you look at members' ratting income and then say that their supercap pilots could have made more ISK if they'd invested the price for their SC pilot toon and the ship itelf in hisec; the spreadsheet has absolutely no data on individual members' non-taxed income sources, so for all that we know it’s possible that every supercap pilot is making billions of ISK trading in hisec already, or importing from null to high. Taxable bounties also fail to include windfalls from faction and officer spawns which could add a significant amount to the value of players’ ratting time. How many 10bn+ officer drops do you think were generated in the course of racking up 198bn worth of bounties?

Finally, I have to admit I have no first-hand experience of how alliance supercap wings grow but I was under the impression that acquisition of supercap hulls and possibly pilot characters was normally an Alliance level investment rather than a personal one; if so then saying that the opportunity cost of having that capital tied up in a supercap falls on the player is definitely incorrect. If I’m wrong and supercaps are normally funded personally by alliance members then please correct me. If you’re saying that the opportunity cost is on the Alliance as a whole and it’s the organisation that would be benefitting more from investing it in trade than in supers, you might well be correct (leaving aside the thorny issue of how much of the rest of the alliance income would be unsustainable without that super fleet) but again that isn’t the point I’m arguing; I’m saying that null space is profitable for the rank and file. If TEST are in the red as it seems here, it would be interesting to know how they’re continuing to operate with significantly higher sov fees, since if this was from pre-Delve they should have already run out of ISK. That said, you pointed out yourself that it doesn’t include income from non-Dreddit corps, so working on the assumption that that is equal to Dreddit’s (which has plenty of alts in it as well) they’re a lot less deep in the red than this sheet shows.

Frostys said...

Where will your income for ship replacement/additionnal war decs come from if you ever put enough of a dent in the M&S numbers they stop filling your low price buy order? You keep saying only idiots sell to buy order and anyone with a brain would setup a sell order to maximise his profits. Where will all the cheap or required to produce every single item you probably sell come from when the M&S stop selling for cheap because they are gone?

The plex you buy with ISK to support your 4 account most likely come from M&S who can't get the required ISK to fulfill thier PvP fun. If tehy are gone, so are the plex at current price which will affect your bottomline.

This looks like it will be interesting to read about as ISK and ships get burned for no results.

Avensys said...

"If you’re saying that the opportunity cost is on the Alliance as a whole and it’s the organisation that would be benefitting more from investing it in trade than in supers"

that's indeed what i claim and the way I understood Gevlon's comments: banding together to take space in 0.0 is not financially rational unless a significant share of your members enjoy holding sov or pvp for its own sake (and are thus willing to subsidize those that don't).

Of course I had to leave some income sources out of my calculation but I also left out some costs and I ahve o idea how to get reasonable estimates on e.g. the additional profit alliance traders make by seeding the local 0.0 hub compared to high-sec trading, the number of active miners, faction/officer spawns, ...

The spreadsheet is dated to June 23th, both Goons and TEST tend not to update their public finances during wartime.

TEST is in a tough financial situation as they never had a lot of Tech moons to start with and worked hard to build a supercapital fleet with what little income they have.
In one of the recent SOTAs it was openly discussed that goons had confirmed that they would provide TEST a line of credit for the Delve war if needed.

Hivemind said...

@ Avensys

Interesting, but in that case how do other alliances handle the same thing? I've never heard of an alliance asking its members to contribute ISK to keep itself going before, though my first hand experience is admittedly limited. I assume Goons are sound because of the volume of tech moons they control, as is PL, but pretty much all of sov null is held by one group or another regardless of the lack of Tech.

Are there that many people pumping their own ISK into null simply because owning space boosts their ego? If so, how are they doing it?

Alternately, are there steps TEST and others could take to raise income but choose not to, like charging membership fees to corps or renting space to others? Are there costs they could scale back like limiting SRP to strategic ops only?

If there's stuff they could do but choose not to because it runs counter to their own culture then that's not necessarily evidence that null is inherently unprofitable, as other alliances could potentially use it with no problems.

If the money that backs Nullsec isn't coming from Null, where does it come from?

Kristophr said...

Nomazar: Highsec M&S that lose ships need to buy new ones ... from trader alts.

Looks like a big win to me.


I approve of this M&S festival of blood plan.

Avensys said...

@Hivemind I am pretty sure that TEST operating at a loss on alliance-level in June was the exception, not the rule.

They did encourage some fancy fleet comps during peace time (AHACs, T3s) which contributed to high SRP costs - you'll notice that they stick to Drakes in Delve now trying to be cost-efficient.

However, TEST has never been rich and money has usually been a concern - e.g. betacanes (which TEST used roughly a year ago) was an attempt to allow FCs and pilots to learn about alpha fleet compositions without incurring the high cost associated with having to replace Maelstroms.

Maybe they are just investing more into political capital - they didn't get any new tech (as many CFC alliances did) after the victory in Venal but they did get Cobalt Edge for their friends Executive Outcomes.

When I was in TEST taxing other corporations' tax income (dreddit wallet is effectively the alliance wallet so they already contribute their taxes) was frequently discussed but I don't know if anything came from it.

One way to reduce bills is to recruit more pets and have them take of their own sov cost.
If you looked at a map from the start of this year you would see that BDEAL, -TF-, .EXE and ESG held a sizable amount of sov in Fountain between them. Three of these entities "left" (got kicked out) and .EXE has mostly moved to Cobalt Edge (but still holds sov in Fountain).
I think at the time of this spreadsheet TEST held basically all of Fountain except for the .EXE space and 4 systems in the Y-2 area that were 99% sov. Since TEST has handed off some sov costs to their newest pet "Mistakes Were Made."

My point that 0.0 is unprofitable is mostly a point about opportunity cost (of invested time and capital), not a point about 0.0 alliances going bankrupt.
The industrialists who mines his own minerals and values them at "free" is working unprofitably (on the industry side of his business) but will never go broke.

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