Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Entitlement vs opportunity seeking

I started reading Minerbumping after its author posted some really good economy posts. I kept reading for the hilarity. The author is a roleplayer in EVE who tries to enforce ice miners in the neighborhood of Halaima to be not AFK. When he finds one AFK-mining, he bumps it away. "Bumping" in EVE means crashing his ship into other one. This action does not harm either ships but they both bounce from each other according to their mass. Since no harm was done, the act of bumping does not considered hostile by the game code.

The act becomes amusing when the miners call him various less-than-nice things, form hate groups, spam petitions against him rather than simply not AFK mine. It's true that he collects "mining permits" but I don't accept it as being extortion, since the sum is trivial (10M/year) and also he has no means to punish a non-paying but non-AFK miner. The point of bumping is to move the miner far enough from the asteroid to be out of range, making its miner beams to deactivate. An active player can of course re-activate them, so bumping an active miner is a waste of time. Also I don't think it's possible to bump a miner from zero to 12 km if he actively navigates and has a propulsion mod. Bumping a bot is equally pointless but bots can be reported.

OK, funny roleplayer gets hilarious forum/chat tears, what's the point? The point is that the ice miners can't recognize his actions as useful service that can be turned for their own profit. You know, if life give you lemons, make lemonade. If I were so poor that I had to mine myself, I wouldn't mine anywhere else than his space. Why? Because for the trivial payment of 10M/char he would clear up my competition! The space patrolled by the Minebumping team is the perfect one for a multi-account, Orca supported gang. With several accounts you always have things to do: empty hangars, scan, reposition ships, move cargo to reprocessing, move minerals to a hub, so you can't really go AFK anyway. AFK mining is typically done by solo account PvP-ers who have a miner alt left to run when he is not around. When he comes back, he has a full hold of ice which he can sell to buy himself another cruiser for lolpvp. Serious miners don't go AFK because they like mining.

The reason why the Minerbumper effort is not valued by active miners is either because there aren't enough active miners (majority of the miners can be lolpvp alts) or because they are so full of entitlement that they can't even consider the benefits. All he can see is "someone wants to tell me what I can't do" and then focus his efforts to defy it. This is idiotic. Almost everyone and everything can stop you from doing things. Such is life. Giving a tantrum makes no effect. You just have to find the best possible outcome of it. Whenever you are about to say "he can't do this to me", remember that he just did. You are entitled for nothing. If you want something, you have to take it yourself. Of course if you can stop someone from stopping you, go for it. But "can" comes from your abilities and not from some "moral" or "ethics".


For EVE trade and industrial discussions join Goblinworks channel.
If you want to get into nullsec, go to the official forum recruitment thread and type the name of the alliance you seek into the search and start reading. I'm in TEST by the way.
Wednesday morning report: 169.7B (5.5 spent on main accounts, 4.8 spent on Logi/Carrier, 3.2 on Ragnarok, 2.7 on Rorqual, 2.4 on Nyx, 2.8 on Dread, 17.4 sent as gift)

8 comments:

Babar said...

I agree that James315 is roleplaying to a degree, but I think the whole purpose of the blog and the New Order is to show how you can abuse high-sec mechanics.

The irony is of course that because of the way high-sec is being done safer and safer, it's simply impossible to fight back. He uses those mechanics against those who wanted them in the first place.

I won't be surprised if we'll suddenly see miners asking for changes to make it possible to kill him, not realizing what he really is doing.

Anonymous said...

seems the iceminers you know are simply to stupid to press the "orbit" button.

Anonymous said...

The only thing that must be done is to make possible to declare a war against those NPC corps where all the players with no other corp are put in.

Then you can declare war to anybody, pursue him and kill him if you wish so.

Anonymous said...

Icemining can be afked even with orca+8 miners.
Heck, probably even 12.

mordis mydaddy said...

1) Ice is infinite. What competition do you get rid of when they move to a different system? NONE!
2) Why pay anything no matter how trivial when you can just move to another system?
3) Bumping mining ships is just stupid. Even AFK can just orbit with a prop mod and be pretty safe from bumping.
4) Bump the ORCA instead. A Cynabal can bump an Orca about 60km from its mining ships. Orca takes forever to get back into position. So much time they usually warp off and back.
5) Petitions were valid complaint against continual bumping with no intent to fight. That changed and it is now considered a valid fighting tactic according to GM. I know because I petition bumping my Orca so I accept it as part of the game.
6) If it is valid fighting tactic, it should at least flag the aggressor. But of course not...then miners might fight back. But he does want PVP, right? Or is he just another weakling who uses some excuse to pick on people who can't fight back?

Anonymous said...

The role-playing thing really is very clever. On the one hand it acts as a reminder to the miner that he's playing a game, so he's less likely to get mad and refuse to pay; I think you even suggested that as a strategy yourself in an earlier blog post about ransoming. It also acts as a defence against GMs- if a guy just randomly flies about maliciously bumping people he's much more likely to be banned than someone who runs a bumping business with a creed, clear goals and the reasonable expectation of profit.

Pim said...

Re: last paragraph

Well spoken. Reminds me a bit of the What a man can do and what a man can't do pirate scene.

Kristophr said...

heh.

Hell, it is even easy to counter if you have a clue. Anchor a secure can, and order your Mac to maintain a 500 meter distance to it.

Only the clueless are raging at him. Very amusing.

I'd even pay him his fee, and complement him for chasing the other miners off for me.