Greedy Goblin

Friday, August 23, 2013

You can't really grief in EVE

Many people did not understand my point with ridiculing the Goon Ice Interdiction. They linked the Miniluv killboard as a proof that they do gank a lot. I do not question that. What I disproved is their ability to grief.

In PvP games destroying the game items (pixels) of opposing players is normal gameplay. It's just normal to shoot members of the opposing team in an FPS game, this is how you win the match. No one gets mad at you. The term "griefing" refers to pointlessly harming random players, just to make them sad while receiving no in-game rewards. The Goons claim to be such griefers who "drink pubbie tears". Let's look at their killboard since the start of the interdiction!

Day Mackinaw, Hulk, Covetor Retriever Skiff, Procurer Orca, Freighter
Sunday 53 21 2 10
Monday 21 15 0 5
Tuesday 17 17 0 5
Wednesday 16 20 0 0
Thursday 10 21 0 5

From the mining ships, only two died from the kind I suggested, and their fits were horrible: the Skiff had no afterburner, the Procurer had no Damage Control. Retrievers probably earned their pricetag before dying, as that's what retrievers do, though it was probably a bad idea to use them during a campaign. The largest losses came from ships I explicitly called "not belong to highsec". Pods? Since highsec has no bubbles, no pods shall die. If you can't warp it out, you were AFK. Don't be AFK with a valuable clone!

Let's check the whales, Orcas and freighters:
  1. (Sunday)No DCII, cargo rigs.
  2. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  3. 5B Freighter, unrelated to highsec ice.
  4. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  5. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  6. 1.5B Charon in belt.
  7. 1.5B Charon in belt.
  8. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  9. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  10. No DCII, drone rigs.
  11. (Monday)1.4B Charon in belt.
  12. 1.5B Charon in belt.
  13. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  14. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  15. 9B Jump Freighter, unrelated to highsec ice.
  16. (Tuesday)No DCII, cargo rigs.
  17. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  18. 1.5B Charon in belt.
  19. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  20. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  21. (Thursday)No DCII, cargo rigs.
  22. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  23. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  24. No DCII, cargo rigs.
  25. No DCII, cargo rigs.
Besides unrelated kills that greatly boost the Miniluv kill ISK, the interesting thing is not a single big ship died which wasn't completely stupid. Flying an Orca without Damage Control II or putting a freighter, especially the weakest tanked Charon to the belt are both idiotic moves. The interdiction killed only idiotic ships and it doesn't matter how many of them died. They shouldn't have been there at the first place!

EVE is a spaceship PvP game. Shooting spaceships for their loot or killboard value is not griefing, it's playing EVE. Griefing would be shooting ships at loss just because you can. This is what griefers claim to do: "we just want lulz and tears, we don't give a damn" they say, but the above data shows it's a big fat lie. The truth is "we look for easy pickings to pad our killboard". There is no shame in that, killboard numbers are a valid form of "winning EVE". However there is no griefing involved. The killers did the smart thing and got rewarded.

The point is that the myth being at the mercy of unstoppable griefers is a lie. If you are in a properly chosen and properly fit ship, you won't die to Goons or any other "griefer". My earlier post proves that they can't really kill you at loss even if they really-really want. I'm probably the most controversial guy in EVE. Every post of mine in EN24 gets hundreds of haters. Yet I wasn't "griefed" once in one and a half year of playing EVE, despite I was literally asking for it and went directly to the biggest "griefing" campaigns.

What you need to understand in EVE is that your fate is completely in your hands and not in the hands of even the "mighty" Goons. By choosing the proper ship and clone, learning basic moves and fitting your ship right, you cannot be harmed.

OK, that's probably obvious to those who are informed. But what about the rest? People come to EVE and get "griefed out". Why? Because they are bad in the game and no one teaches them. On the contrary, everyone lie to them, claiming that they can't do anything against a "powerful griefer" or that they need "powerful friends to protect them". No wonder they leave the game, who would want to play when he is just a toy of older players? Of course they could figure out that it's a lie, but most people are socials who believe what other people say and also naturally believe that people and not things matter. Their social attitude makes it hard for them to seek solutions in ships and fittings instead of in "friends".

The power of griefers comes from the ignorance of socials. It's time to break this. It's time to make EVE a nice and newbie-friendly place without griefing. To do so, I terminated my business, liquidated every assets (not complete yet). I planned to earn money forever to support a nullsec alliance and fly titans but those aren't important compared to what I found here. My wealth is enough to play this way for decades without making a single ISK. So hereby I announce my crusade against "griefing" and the lie "you need friends to succeed" and call you to join!

On Monday I will post the details of corp. Today I just outline our way: we will gank. We gank miners, missioners, haulers, autopilot-travellers. We pod whoever we can. But instead of harvesting their tears or giving them self-enlarging lies ("i haz skillz", "i haz freinds"), we teach them. Our bio, our corp details, our mails and our chat will all teach them to seek power in nothing but knowledge: how to choose their ships and how to fit them. We will be the living vaccine against griefing. Next time Goons come to "grief" they shall find no Mackinaws and Hulks, just competent players. How is our "good gank" better than the "bad grief gang"? The griefer says "you died because you suck and I own" while our slogan will be "Your ship sucked, not you!".

Get into Catalysts people, the most noble cause of cleansing EVE from dumbness, ignorance and social thinking awaits! The corp details and recruitment rules come at Monday, but I already found out the name:


PS: this is the DPS of a proper ganky Catalyst, not 300 like that T1 crap Miniluv flies:

58 comments:

Anonymous said...

728 dps is good, could you share the fit? I didn't think you could get one that high..

Anonymous said...

I'd join your corp but sadly, I'm already in another.

Can you post your catalyst fit please?

Gevlon said...

Fits and guides come later. The corp is for Catalyst alts, you can join while having a main somewhere else.

maxim said...

Erm, so you gank people, then send them letters as to what exactly caused them to be viable gank target in the first place?

It's kind of a schoolyard bully taking your lunch money and then telling you "dude, you really need to go work out".

Not sure how effective that's gonna be :/. Actually the whole "cleanse Eve of stupididty" slogan comes off as more than a fair bit Don Quixotic.

Elec0 said...

Actually, Maxim, it makes perfect sense. The difference between the schoolyard bully and what Gevlon proposes is that fixing their mistakes in EVE is as simple as buying a different ship, or fitting their ship differently. Doesn't take much effort, and has a lot of reward (i.e. not getting ganked.)

Römer said...

Gevlon, isn't this in the same lanes with the time you had with MinerBumping, educating the masses of leeching miners to tank their ships and be present? How successful do you think this corporation will prove?

Also, will you enforce rules similar with the PuG?

On a final note, this looks very ungoblinish. Is there absolutely no premise of making money in this venture?

Lucas Kell said...

Wow, so much wrong in one post.
Let me address the important bits:
"The truth is "we look for easy pickings to pad our killboard"."
No, not quite. WE will attack skiffs and procurers, but since they are the highest tank with the lowest efficiency, there's no point in hitting them first. Hitting untanked orcas, freighters in belts and the T2 ships that return bad insurance (hulks and macks) the damage is maximised. Retrievers and covetors generally go down as part of another gank. Once the main target is down, every blaps away at whatever they can before concord wins.

"Since highsec has no bubbles, no pods shall die"
We've killed billions in pods. Miners do like their implants, and we're generally geared to lock them quickly minimising their chance of escape.

"Yet I wasn't "griefed" once in one and a half year of playing EVE, despite I was literally asking for it and went directly to the biggest "griefing" campaigns."
You weren't griefed because you had nothing to lose. You were in a 10m isk ship, and we know you are a billionaire. Killing you literally would have accomplished nothing. Killing people that have scraped together all thier isk to get their first orca however accomplishes the goal. Some goons claim they are in it for the tears, and I have to admit the tears we do get are pretty funny, but most of us are in it for the fact that it's fun to do. You don't understand that, and that's fine, but it doesn't mean you can claim it's untrue just because you say so.

"PS: this is the DPS of a proper ganky Catalyst, not 300 like that T1 crap Miniluv flies:"
That I imagine is a T2 catalyst. Firstly, lets just get out there that if you are flying a T2 catalyst, then your T1 variant should be higher than 300 DPS. 360 at a minimum.
Now let's understand the choice. a T1 catalyst come in at about 2.5m. A T2 catalyst come it at around 9b isk. That means that if you have a lot of people, you can simply use more T1 catalysts and get more damage for less isk. You also don't leave millions of isk around for miners to collect to replace their loss.
You need a T2, because you can't get a group of people together large enough to blap an orca with T1s. We can.

"giving them self-enlarging lies"
Have you REALLY TRULY not realised yet that this blog that you do is a massive ego stroking endeavour? Have you ever asked yourself why it is you feel superior to everyone, and why you feel the need to link to your own posts whenever you talk to anyone? Everything you do is FAR more to do with you making yourself feel superior than anything the goons have ever done. Even in this post you are starting a corp whos goal it is is to get your message across to other players by force. Anyone that doesn't listen to you will get ganked, that's what you are saying.

I really doubt you'll keep your corp up for more than a month. Most of your endeavours last a few weeks, you decide that's enough info to create some overgeneralised post, then you move on.

maxim said...

@Elec0

If people were rational asocial beings, driven by performance-maximisation over anything else, then yes.

The catch is, we are not that. What will most likely happen is public outrcy and derision towards Gevlon's corp without any real change for a long long time.

Stuff like that only works in the span of generation shifts. These happen faster in virtual games than in real life, but we are still talking years of incessant ganking and letter-sending, while constantly being attacked both personally and ISK-wise from all sides.

Gevlon said...

@Drez: Minerbumping was a good idea but it turned into a "for fun" tear collecting bullshit.

Money is only in PvE in EVE, no PvP activity will earn you money.

@Lucas: so you WOULD grief in an alternative universe, but here in EVE you just hit profitable targets. Got it.

How do you know how much money that Orca pilot does? Maybe he is a billionaire too.

The time is free, right? GCC takes 15 minutes. If you don't gank solo, no way you can undock in the second GCC is up. People need to X up for ready and someone is always AFK. So let's say 25 mins/gank. Using T2 means saving someone 25 minutes for 6 M ISK. If you can't make 6M ISK in 25 mins, you are dumb. Using T1 Catalysts is the worst waste of man-hours I've seen.

I've never ever claimed to BE superior. I claim to be spreading superior METHODS that anyone can adopt. I do NOT think that my actions cannot be copied by anyone, which - by definition - makes me an ordinary guy. Also, I don't lie in the meantime: if Goons would say "we pad our killboard with dumb people who fly bad ships", I wouldn't give a damn. The whole thing came from the LIE of "we can do whatever we want we are the big bad Goons, fear us!"

Anonymous said...

Sounds good. I quit Eve after joining up and playing with a RL friend who turned out to be a hopeless noob in game. I played WoW with a different noob RL friend who vehemently denied the virtues of group questing. It'll be nice to blast some sense into people. I've got zero ganking experience and limited eve experience though.

Anonymous said...

"I am not griefing you, I am teaching you about safety"

That is sweet, Solstice Project does a similar thing if you are APing your pod or ship.

He does this, because he wishes to teach people that High Sec is not safe. (Or, depending on your view, because he likes griefing AFKers).

If your claim is you are doing it from altruism to teach people about fittings, then my corp used to teach miners not to AFK, we used to teach people not to AP during a wardec and we used to teach people that buying PLEX with RL money just means you fly an expensive wreck.

You can tell we were not griefers, because we used to send mails offering to train them in PvP or high sec mechanics, and ship fitting.

Although, I guess if you asked them, they would say we griefed them. But then, griefing is in the eye of the beholder, right?

Call a spade a spade, and say "I want to blow stuff up in highsec", for an asocial, you sure seem to need to justify your actions to a lot of people. The only justification you need is "I want to". This is an internet spaceship sandbox game, where you dont need to find some noble excuse for war etc.

Anonymous said...

-Lucas

In all the years I've read this blog I have never seen ego stroking. In fact, years ago there was a pic of Gevlon's almost comical desk-fan computer cooling set up. I do agree that this corp plan may fizzle out within months, but I suspect there will be interesting learnings along the way.

Gevlon said...

@Anonymous: my point is that "griefing" is not opinionated, but very exact action: "destroying game pieces of other player while damaging your own position too, just to make him sad/mad".

Suicide ganking on T2 fit 150K EHP battleships would be griefing. Suicide ganking procurers would be griefing. Suicide ganking hulks is killboard padding = playing EVE properly.

The breaking point is the alt-kill limit: 1/3 cost. If you destroy something that costs less than 3x more than your ship, you would be better off killing your own insured alt (no concord). If you proceed killing other player ships, you are griefing.

Lucas Kell said...

"Money is only in PvE in EVE, no PvP activity will earn you money."
Go tell that to whores in space. Or any of the other groups that make isk from PvP.

"you WOULD grief in an alternative universe, but here in EVE you just hit profitable targets."
No, but obviously if there is an inefficient target and an efficient target, we'll pick the efficient one. You seem to think that unless we're being as inefficient as we possibly can be, we're not griefing. I don't think you understand what the word means.

"How do you know how much money that Orca pilot does? Maybe he is a billionaire too."
We don't but he's in a 800m ship. You have said yourself that procurers can make their own isk back in a short amount of time, and we know you have a lot of isk, so why would we shoot your procurer? If you were sitting around in an orca, you might have got a different response. But you weren't, you were in the cheapest most tanked mining ship and killing you would have achieved nothing.

"The time is free, right? GCC takes 15 minutes. If you don't gank solo, no way you can undock in the second GCC is up. People need to X up for ready and someone is always AFK. So let's say 25 mins/gank. Using T2 means saving someone 25 minutes for 6 M ISK. If you can't make 6M ISK in 25 mins, you are dumb. Using T1 Catalysts is the worst waste of man-hours I've seen"
Again, you add up man hours as isk. It's not that simple. We have lots of people, they are all doing their own thing. I'm running 2 traders, 3 miners and an orca while I'm out ganking, and we have at times hundreds of pilots available. It's much more efficient to take a group of T1 catalysts on a gank when the think you have most of is people. All using T2s would mean is that our nub alts need more training, more expensive clones (to hold our SP, not imps) and we would have a bunch of people sitting around bored as you can only run a finite numer of simultaneous ganks.

You can bang on about how you wouldn't use a T1 catalyst all you like, but they are effective, they can be used with nearly no skill points, and they leave behind less than a million in loot every time for salvagers. Killing a barge (not an exhumer) with T2s potentially leaves more in loot than you just killed behind. The only reason T1s aren't effective for you is because you don't have hundreds of people to gank alongside you. If your corp gets off the ground and gets a decent amount of people, guarantee you will start using some T1 catalysts before long.
Oh, and yes, 6m isk is not hard to make, but since i can make it regardless of whether or not i use a T1, using a T1 means it's profit, rather than just paying for my unnecessary loss.

"I've never ever claimed to BE superior. I claim to be spreading superior METHODS that anyone can adopt"
But you are spreading YOUR methods. YOU say they are superior. YOU say that people should be using them. And with your new corp idea, if they don't want to take your methods on board, you will kill them for it. So basically you say only skiffs and procurers can be used in high sec, and only if they are tanked and inefficient at mining. Who are you to be dictating what other can and can't do?

"The whole thing came from the LIE of "we can do whatever we want we are the big bad Goons, fear us!""
Where did you find this written? Most goons say "we are terrible at EVE", "fofofo" or "HODOR". The whole point of the ice interdiction was to raise the prices of Caldari ice. To make profit. And that's never been hidden. After that, efficiency, tear collection, KB padding, it all means nothing to the group. Sure maybe some individuals want that, but that's never been the goal of the group. If all they wanted was KB padding, then how come so many out of alliance alts are allowed to be used? Surely they'd want to keep it in the alliance.

Lucas Kell said...

@Anon
"In all the years I've read this blog I have never seen ego stroking."
Really?
So his "I can kill more than a whole null sec alliance" and "check me out with my 0.5T" doesn't sound like EGO stroking? You might need to go back and reread.
What about the way he relinks back to his own posts, generally only linking back to stuff that states how well he accomplished something. Or how he drops links into those same posts while trash talking in local?

You really should try reading into the subtext a bit. Gevlon comes across as having a superiority complex. The fact that he repeatedly hides behind the guise of "Everyone can do this, I'm just showign you how!" actually reinforces this. I'm fairly sure he'd be a prime candiate for being a potential serial killer. Read his posts on M&S and you should understand. He groups people into 4 tiers of people, which are ranked one above the other, with no overlap. He clearly considers himself to have achieved the highest tier, the "Rationals" and considers everyone in the lower tiers below him, with their only goal being to move up to the next tier. He tries to show people how they can accomplish moving between the tiers, which is to help reinforce his desire to "make a difference".

@Gevlon
"destroying game pieces of other player while damaging your own position too, just to make him sad/mad".
That's not exactly right. Griefing is simply the act of taking away something someone else has with the goal of lowering the desired output they get from having "that thing". The efficiency of and cost to the griefer has absolutely nothing to do with it. ("That thing" by the way can be items, it can be money, it can be friends, literally anything can be what people need to have a positive experience and taking that away is what is griefing. That's why killing your procurer would mean nothing, as it means nothing to you).

Gevlon said...

@Lucas: unless you are some liberal extremist claiming "everyone is a perfect snowflake", you have to accept that some people do better than others. Winning something is not superiority complex, it's simply being superior.

Personal losses of the attacker defines griefing. If we'd accept your definition, you couldn't play any game or do anything in your real life without "griefing" as you can't do anything without harming the interest of someone else. When I buy the last piece of chocolate in the shop and someone behind me in the line wanted it, am I a griefer?

Taking things from others is being competitive. Taking things from others without getting anything is griefing.

Lucas Kell said...

@Gevlon
I'm not saying that there is no such thing as a superior person, but what I take issue with is that your make the assumption that you are superior and your methods are better, then are choosing to make a corp with the dedicated plan of forcing your methods on other with threats of violence. If they don't fly what you want and fly it your way, you will kill them right? So if someone wants to fly a hulk with max yield and ship with a cargo expanded orca, you will kill them over and over until they adopt your method? That automatic assumption that you know best while you have very little game experience compared to most, and your method of forcing your playstyle on others is the problem. And when it comes down to it, the reason you want to do it is not to make them play better. It's so that when people thank you for improving their play style, or when groups of players simply adopt your method, you feel better about yourself.
And let's face it, you only come across as superior using your metrics, and your measurements. You only require your self-validation, and you place that behind the guise of saying that requiring external validation makes you a social, which is a lower tier of person. Anyone can pick measurements and metrics to make themselves look better on that particular scale.

Griefing has NOTHING to do with personal loss. You can grief somebody by 1 shotting their ship over and over, with no loss to yourself. thing about the word. Grief. The aim is to make the other person suffer. Whether or not you have to sacrifice anything to do that is utterly beside the point. It's about the goal, NOT the method. Strictly speak the overall aim of the interdiction is to make money, so no, overall it's not griefing. But the goal of the individuals is to grief miners until they stop, reduce or move their mining operations.

Lucas Kell said...

Oh and i missed this part first time round:
"When I buy the last piece of chocolate in the shop and someone behind me in the line wanted it, am I a griefer?"
That entirely depends. If you are buying that piece of chocolate because you know it's the last, and you know the person behind you wants it, yes it makes you a griefer. If you are buying it because you also want it, then no, it makes you a winner of that particular event. Again, it's about your intended goal, not your method.

Gevlon said...

@Lucas: "Anyone can pick measurements and metrics to make themselves look better on that particular scale."

Not at all. This is exactly why most people pick the unmeasurable "fun" as they can't compete on any scale.

Your intentions are invisible from the outside. The personal loss matters because it allows the other party to defend itself. If I gank ships that I can economically gank, you can avoid losing ships by not being economically gankable.

If I destroy everything just because I can, you can't do anything, you are at my mercy. This is griefing. And my point is that in EVE no one can do that in a significant manner.

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon: Money is only in PvE in EVE, no PvP activity will earn you money.

Do you consider trading as PvE then?

Gevlon said...

During trading you don't act against any NPC so it's not PvE. You don't act against any player either (you can't make them accept your buy or sell offers) so it's not PvP either. Trading is trading.

Lucas Kell said...

"Not at all. This is exactly why most people pick the unmeasurable "fun" as they can't compete on any scale."
No, most people pick fun, as they aren't trying to compete, most people actually play games for fun. Not everything is a competition. I play EVE because I enjoy playing EVE. If it was purely about competition it would be another career.
But that doesn't change the fact that if you control the metrics, and you control the method of measuring those metrics, you can control where you appear in them.

For example, you measure your success in PvP as isk killed divided by characters in alliance. Since your ganker is not in an alliance, you don't have to divide his kills by anything, but the alliance you are competing against does. You have picked a metric by which you can easily win against your opponent because you know they have the handicap of having thousands of alt chars who never combat (some of which are on the same accounts, so can't log in at the same time). You then take this single metric and use it to state you are better at PvP.
Taking another metric, let's go for K:D ratio, yours will be between 1:1 and 2:1 depending on how many pods you get, as if you don;t lose a ship to a gank, you are exploiting (by CCPs rules), while alliances (let's take pandemic legion) are for this month, 5:1 (approx).

An equivalent of this, is if you casually play football, and you take your total goals for a year, then you take all goals score by all football players, subs, managers, trainers and coaches, and anyone else involved in a professional football team, then you divide their total goals by their number of players, you are almost guaranteed to beat their average. Does this mean you are better at football than that professional team?

Like I say, it's easy to pick a metric and a method to measure that metric that makes you look superior.

"If I destroy everything just because I can, you can't do anything, you are at my mercy. This is griefing. And my point is that in EVE no one can do that in a significant manner."
I think you misunderstand what the word griefing means. It's simply the act of intentionally making someone else's game play suck. It doesn't matter if you are winning or losing by doing it, intent is the only thing that matters. Sure that intent is generally invisible to the outsider, but that's just what makes griefing such a touchy subject, but it doesn't change what it is. In most games, griefing is done with absolutely 0 loss. Tell me that on a PvP server in WoW, that smashing a noob in one hit over and over again is not griefing, yet it has absolutely no cost to do.

At the end of the day though, Goons have clearly specified their intentions. They intend to make mining ice in Caldari space tougher and less appealing for the duration of the interdiction.

Bobbins said...

@Lucas Kell
'At the end of the day though, Goons have clearly specified their intentions. They intend to make mining ice in Caldari space tougher and less appealing for the duration of the interdiction.'

By clearing away then weak odds and ends the goons have actually made my ice mining in eve a little bit easier for me. Also the initial buff in the ice price was nice too while it lasted.

Anonymous said...

"During trading you do not act against any player"

So, those competing with you on the market are not players, those "morons" who irritate you and crash your margins are not players.

Sure, you cannot force a player to buy, but, if the player wishes to obtain items, they have to interact with the market at some point.

And, you force them to buy your items by having the top order.

Apart from that, and the fact that players can (and I hear, do) influence the price of items,then no, there is no interaction between players on the market.

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon: During trading you don't act against any NPC so it's not PvE. You don't act against any player either (you can't make them accept your buy or sell offers) so it's not PvP either. Trading is trading.

But isn't updating your order, and therefore blocking those above you from getting a sale until either yours sell or they update their order, a player vs player interaction?

Also wouldn't crashing a margin, making an item unprofitable to manufacture or trade be considered griefing? I hear a lot of people saying they do that for no other reason than to annoy people.

mynnna said...

I am unironically interested to see how your teaching endeavor goes.

Somehow, though, I do not expect much from a program that requires the ganked party to be receptive to communications from their gankers.

daniel said...

what stays unclear to me is, if it's about teachinng those that don't know any better, why not just convo them?

as much as i like the idea itself, as much as i share your vision of playing eve without the wannabe-1337-douches - i already am afraid that this op might turn into the same as the minerbumbing-ego.wanking-dickheads-thing.

another thing, as far as i understand, ganking will kill my secstatus - what will you and your members do about it, once it hit's minus 10?
obviously secstatus grinding in a catalyst is not the way to go - and, as this will be a nonprofit thing, ppl might not want to buy the sec for tags.

maxim said...

@Lucas Kell
<< "success in PvP as isk killed divided by characters in alliance ... you take all goals score by all football players, subs, managers, trainers and coaches, and anyone else involved ..." >>
Erm, are you saying that Gevlon's metric is wrong because it puts him on top? That's kind of biased.

Sadly, if you accept that PvP is all about ISK, then Gevlon's metric works and is correct. If an average member of an alliance is not destroying as much ISK as a single unallianced goblin, then this alliance has no point at all ISK-PvP wise.

If you don't accept the premise that EvE PvP is all about ISK wars, then you shouldn't argue from that standpoint to begin with.

<< "Tell me that on a PvP server in WoW, that smashing a noob in one hit over and over again is not griefing, yet it has absolutely no cost to do." >>

Only if you think time costs nothing. Do you think time costs nothing?
Then i'd like to borrow some of your time for that little pet project i have, which involves you farming a lot of ice :D,. I'd pay you one ISK and you'd make a profit :)

themittani ;-) said...

@mynna

at least i, after being ganked, canflipped,whatever, enjoyed a chat with my aggressor, learning what i did wrong, how to do better next time.
those that refuse to learn ... well, like in real life - darwin and such.

Tabletop Teacher said...

@ Lucas

As you say, griefing in other games comes at zero cost. This griefing campaign is costing Goons 2.5 million or more per gank. Hence, griefing can't really be done in Eve. There is a cost.

@ Various anonymous people on trading

When trading you deal with market forces, not players individually. Someone may try to crash the market, or set their orders artificially high or low, but it won't be sustainable and in the end, only they will make a loss.

It's not really PvE or PvP... there's no real 'winning' with trading. It's simply a process of negotiation, which (should!) benefit all parties involved.

Gevlon said...

@Daniel: convo -> i play as i wanna lol stfu nolifer.

Gank is something they can't ignore.

Lucas Kell said...

@maxim
"Erm, are you saying that Gevlon's metric is wrong because it puts him on top? That's kind of biased."
No, if you read what I have written before, I'm saying that you can't pick a single metric and the method by which to measure it, then use that metric to claim superiority overall in a field. Obviously with everything, there's different metrics and methods that will favor different people. Gevlon is claiming he is superior and wants to force other players by killing them to play the way he wants, yet only shows superiority by his measuring and metrics. That's kind of biased too. And that's the point.

"Sadly, if you accept that PvP is all about ISK, then Gevlon's metric works and is correct. If an average member of an alliance is not destroying as much ISK as a single unallianced goblin, then this alliance has no point at all ISK-PvP wise."
Except it's not. Gevlon is only counting his one ganking character. So why should any non PvP character in an alliance be counted? He's not removing the thousands of alts before making the division, he's just doing a straight division. Take only PvP characters in an alliance and measure them against him and you'll probably find the result differs considerably. Again, it's the method of measurement. Remember, this is just an example for the point that should you be the sole controller of any given ranking, the means by which it is ranked and the method of gathering the ranking data, you can make it say whatever you want.

"Only if you think time costs nothing. Do you think time costs nothing?"
Sigh...
The point is, it does not cost more for the griefer than the victim. Gevlon is saying its not griefing if it doesn't cost you more than you gain from it. Which is obviously incorrect, and this was just an example of griefing in a context he might understand.

@Behnid Arcani
"As you say, griefing in other games comes at zero cost. This griefing campaign is costing Goons 2.5 million or more per gank. Hence, griefing can't really be done in Eve. There is a cost."
Are you serious? Are you really saying it's not griefing if it costs, while Gevlon is saying it's not griefing if there's no cost? This is stupid on both sides. Griefing is the act of causing someone else grief on purpose. And that's the end of the definition. Cost and gain is entirely beside the point.

Von Keigai said...

Rorka Goblin ganks using overheating and +3 implants. And yet you deride T1 Cats as "crap" with "300" DPS. Well, if you allow the T1 pilots to overheat and use expensive implants, then they get 443 DPS. And their ship costs about 2m ISK, whereas yours costs 11.5m ISK. 60% as much damage for one fifth the cost. In terms of DPS:ISK, T1 is much better.

As for your weird computation showing that T2 ganking is better because of opportunity costs: this shows your misunderstanding of other people. Most people do not gank because they've assigned themselves a mission to optimize kills:time or to educate the most newbs:ganker. They gank for fun. As such, what matters to them is not the cost of the cat (and especially not if James 315 or Goonswarm is paying for it). What matters is the fun of popping people, and the comradery found in a group. And maybe getting some tears, too. T1 is not notably worse for any of those; by contrast by shrinking fleet size T2 is notably worse for comradery.

Von Keigai said...

Your plan, such as it is, is incoherent. You talk as if you can tell in a context-free way whether or not someone is a moron/slacker. But you can't.

I did some ice-mining last night. Goons were ganking in the system. Just as I arrived on ice, a gank happened close to me. Not sure what ship type. But after that in my anom, there were all procurers except for two retrievers and one mack. Who do you think died next?

But at any other time, that guy mining in the Mack would have been pretty safe. His tank was 32000 EHP, so he said. That is twice what the retrievers could have had.

Context. When the goons are around, flying Macks is a bad idea. Otherwise, not so bad.

Or take the issue of AFK mining. So long as you are not ganked very often, it is the rational way to mine ice: not only is your income just as good, but you don't have to sit there bored staring at a screen doing nothing at all. You can read a book or the web, or go do chores around the house.

So let's posit that your do-gooding killers see a guy AFK mining in his Mack. He is rational so long as you are not around. Will you gank him and tell him that he should never never mine AFK in a Mack? How will you argue that? You know it is the rational way to mine -- you have argued that yourself -- so long as you're not ganked too often. He hasn't. It is only you that are his problem.

Gevlon said...

@Von Keigai: you have to see that kills itself are a resource. Practically every alliance has the killboard on top of its page. A mack is expensive compared to its tank. Also it's likely AFK so you can kill the pod.

It's a selfish goal to kill him: pad your killboard.

Lucas Kell said...

"It's a selfish goal to kill him: pad your killboard."
However a fair few of the gankers are out of alliance alts. Nobody is sitting around in our comms going "come on guys, our killboards need more meat!". You assume that to be the case, and you assume wrong. If we wanted better kill stats, with the amount of people we have, we'd be sitting on the Jita gate killing loot pinata freighters stuck in traffic control.

Anonymous said...

When are you going to open up the corporation to new members? Recruitment is currently closed.

Gevlon said...

Corp details come on Monday.

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon

Another more things you missed about rapid-fire ganking...

If you have an Orca base at a safespot and go there to get a ship out of the SMA instead of docking, and you sometimes get your pod out, you might be able to run things faster than once every 15 minutes. If you don't mind arriving on grid flashy, that's certainly the case. Since, if you do this a lot, you'll probably end up below -5 in sec status, you might be flashy anyway. No reason not to keep ganking while flashy if you're that way anyway...

When your Orca hangar runs out of ships, it docks up (because it's not -5 or suspect/criminal, after all...) and grab a new load for the next set. If someone's looting wrecks with, say, a hauler, they also don't have to brave undocking with a suspect flag by taking it to your base.

Tabletop Teacher said...

@ Lucas

I understand your objective is to ruin someone else's play experience. But if you're losing money faster than your target, you're simply ruining your own.

Hence why Goons aren't ganking Procurers, even with those piloted by goblins hurling insults at them.

Griefing usually involves no practical way of giving retribution. Take FF11's old mob kiting to spawn zones. Since there's no PvP, targets had no way to exact revenge. In Eve, you've already paid the price of one catalyst for the mining barge kill mail.

maxim said...

<< No, if you read what I have written before, I'm saying that you can't pick a single metric and the method by which to measure it, then use that metric to claim superiority overall in a field. >>
Correction. YOU can't pick a metric.

I can, ISK gain/loss is that metric. A corp that runs out of ISK either has to spend time farming ISK, or dies, either way it is unable to PvP until it gets more ISK.

If a corp has a huge amount of members doing something that's not PvP, that's fine by me. But then it needs to be understood that this corp is not a PvP corp and is rather something else entirely. However, in terms of PvP struggle, it is then necessarily inferior to a true PvP corp. Sure, it may have other value outside of Eve PvP, but i'm not concerned with that value, and neither is Gevlon it seems.

<< Except it's not. Gevlon is only counting his one ganking character. So why should any non PvP character in an alliance be counted? >>
It is true that the only thing the goblin misses is that people who farm ISK can contribute to other people's ability to PvP. ISK-farming alts fall in that category as well. However, given the sheer extent of difference he shown (35x in some cases), it should then follow that it takes 34 ISK farmers (real people or alts) to support a single PvPer able to wreak as much destruction as goblin did, even with his 9ish alts. Which is kind of sad.

The only way out of it is trying to say that characters who don't contribute to PvP efforts have value to the alliance. Well, you'll need to convince me on that :D

<< Remember, this is just an example for the point that should you be the sole controller of any given ranking, the means by which it is ranked and the method of gathering the ranking data, you can make it say whatever you want. >>
I don't see any PvP community out there which is able to provide some sensible alternative ranking that's controlled by the community as a whole.
In the absence of such ranking, individuals have full right to step up and produce their own metric. The benefit of having full control over said metric comes with the ability to do it. And you can't call a metric bad on the basis of an individual having full control over it. Or rather, you can, but that just makes you appear weak and whiny.

<< Sigh...
The point is, it does not cost more for the griefer than the victim. >>
In WoW example, it really doesn't.
A high level character earns more cash per attack than a one-shottable character can earn, even if he spent the entire corpserun time farming. That's discarding the notion that high level character has already incurred travel costs to get to a place where he can find one-shottables.

<< Griefing is the act of causing someone else grief on purpose. And that's the end of the definition. Cost and gain is entirely beside the point. >>
There is an very interesting effect at work here. If the griefed person knows that you are actually turning a nice profit doing what you are doing, then he doesn't feel nearly as griefed, as when he knows that there is no profit to be had outside of simply hurting him.

Cost and gain are not beside the point, because they influence the target's perception of your actions, thus the grief the target derives from your actions.

Lucas Kell said...

@maxim
"I can, ISK gain/loss is that metric. A corp that runs out of ISK either has to spend time farming ISK, or dies, either way it is unable to PvP until it gets more ISK."

I think you misunderstand. Gevlon is claiming superiority as a PVP player because his overall kill value is higher than the divided kill value of an alliance by its member count. Any idiot can see that's a flawed statistic. Do you think Gevlon is 6 times better at PVP than any other player in the whole game? That's what his chosen metric is saying. Statistics can say literally whatever you want them to say if you control the entire process and procedure of measurement.

"However, given the sheer extent of difference he shown (35x in some cases), it should then follow that it takes 34 ISK farmers (real people or alts) to support a single PvPer able to wreak as much destruction as goblin did, even with his 9ish alts. Which is kind of sad."
Again, if you accept the method he has used. If you want to, that's fine, but it's a stupid method to use. If you honestly think that's a proper way to measure PvP then there's no hope for you. somehow though, I think you will simply say anything to be argumentative, no matter how ridiculous.

"And you can't call a metric bad on the basis of an individual having full control over it. Or rather, you can, but that just makes you appear weak and whiny."
Of course I can. Do you know anything about statistics at all? A very large point of it is proving controls work without bias, which there is no attempt to do here, and it's clearly a bias. Again I ask the simple question, do you think Gevlon is the best PVPer in the game?

I'm not goign to continue arguing over what griefing means. It's defined everywhere, and you are simply going to argue from any stupid standpoint you can grasp and we will stay in this never ending loop of a discussion. I tell you what, when I stop getting tearful rage mails, I'll believe you.


@Behnid Arcani
"I understand your objective is to ruin someone else's play experience. But if you're losing money faster than your target, you're simply ruining your own."
Except those ships are put aside already, and my income is not hurt. It's the equivalent of ammo to me. would you say that any time you have to fire your guns, its runing your own experience as you are devaluing yourself by using ammo?
And my ammo, being a T1 catalyst, costs only a bit more than a bomb. And that cost isn't even on my shoulders.

Besides that, its still griefing even if I make a loss. If I'm with a group in an plex and I purposely fire on a trigger ship to pull a new wave, I'm losing out too, yet I'm still griefing. Running a Leeroy Jenkins just to kill your group in most games is griefing.

Anonymous said...

@Lucas

i believe your main problem is an issue of reading comprehension.

Gevlon never said he was better at PvP, whats more he has many times said, he is rather average. But, he has proven he is more efficient when it comes to cost/gain in the ganks.
It's also clear you are confusing your objectives with his, yours being griefing, his being effective.

maxim said...

@Kevin Kell
I'll let you know that i know i won the argument when the opponent resorts to ad hominems. "Aggression is the last resort of the helpless".

Beyond that, a few points left to address
<>
I'm using the method that i have. I don't have a better one and you haven't provided a better one.

You have provided a kills to deaths ratio metric, but since amount of ships destroyed has very little correlation to amount of combat power actually lost, this metric is also stupid.

<< do you think Gevlon is the best PVPer in the game? >>
My current definition of PvPer means "one who destroys ISK value of others". My current definition of "best PvPer" is "one who destroys the largest ISK value of others while losing the least of his own".
I am sure you can figure out Gevlon's position on your own from these definitions.
Alternatively, you can challenge the definitions. That is, if you are able.

<< I'm not goign to continue arguing over what griefing means. It's defined everywhere, and you are simply going to argue from any stupid standpoint you can grasp and we will stay in this never ending loop of a discussion. I tell you what, when I stop getting tearful rage mails, I'll believe you. >>
Would you believe me if i told you that there is an easy way to be getting that much more?

Lucas Kell said...

"i believe your main problem is an issue of reading comprehension.

Gevlon never said he was better at PvP, whats more he has many times said, he is rather average. But, he has proven he is more efficient when it comes to cost/gain in the ganks.
It's also clear you are confusing your objectives with his, yours being griefing, his being effective"
And still, do you really believe he is 6 times more effective at PvP than anyone else in the game?
Since he is pitting his solo activity against a grouped average that involves non combat toons, OF COURSE he will seem more effective.

Again I shall point out that the method he is using to come up with that stat is incorrect. Ganking aside, his method of measurement is flawed.

Now with the ganks, he's not more efficient, since he is using a ship that costs 4-5 times the amount to make up for his lack on man power. HE generally only hits untanked targets as any other target is beyond his reach. He's not better or worse, his goal is simply different from ours.

He's the one trying to say that we are shit, and a fail because we are not working by his methods and measuring ourselves on efficiency. an he's the one claiming that griefing is not possible, because if you are not effective, the target can't be that sad, which is obviously nonsense.

Gevlon said...

@Lucas: I never questioned that dividing alliance kills with member count is a bad metric because of alts and inactives.

I still used it in absence of better one and because the result was absurd: 100x more kills for me than the alliances. Even if you assume that the average alliance guy has 5 alts and every second guy is inactive, my results are still 10x better.

Lucas Kell said...

"I still used it in absence of better one and because the result was absurd: 100x more kills for me than the alliances. Even if you assume that the average alliance guy has 5 alts and every second guy is inactive, my results are still 10x better."
Except you are still comparing 2 completely different activities. all you are showing is that on average, ganking is more efficient than standard PvP. Any ganker should have a better average isk efficiency than people that fight with titans. That's not in question. But it's when you start then using that figure to make other assumptions that it becomes ridiculous. It's when you start using that to claim superiority that it becomes utterly wrong.

Honestly though, I get bored arguing these same points over and over. At the end of the day, if you are that amazing, then the whole game will change. Realistically I think your corp will end up as you a few randoms who run around for a couple of weeks before realising that you are doing nothing different from the New Order and make no changes to peoples behaviour.

Anonymous said...

@ Lucas, you obviously missed the point, we are talking ice interdiction scenario, which is by default a ganking scenario.

So yeh... we are comparing apples to apples, its is you who has brought oranges to the equation

Lucas Kell said...

@Anonymous
Actually, we are only talking about ganking from the point of view of whether or not it's possible to grief a player without costing yourself as much as it costs them.
The other part of the conversation is the general attitude Gevlon has that he is superior, and thus should enforce his opinions on the wider community by force. If you actually go and read the PvP post, it's not comparing ganking to ganking, it's comparing ganking to fleet PvP then stating he's better at PvP because of his sole ganking stats vs an alliances fleet combat stats divided by the number of players in the alliance. I'm not doing the comparison, it's already done in his post.

Let me be clear.
I'm not disputing that Gevlon is good at ganking. It's a relatively straightforward skill. You need a bit of understanding about how concord works, a couple of fits and a pilot with about 1m SP, so being good at that is not surprising.
What I am disputing is how Gevlon feels his opinion is important enough to kill anyone not mining his way and essentially bully them into following his advice. It's no real different to the New Order though to be honest.

Unknown said...

Gevlon why are you assuming that "griefing" and ganking proftibaly are mutually exclusive things? Griefing is the act of unexpectedly taking something of value from another player, thereby making him sad / mad. Choosing the more profitable targets first is a rationale choice as it brings more utility, more tears and more profit. Doesn't mean you can't do both at the same time.

I agree with you that there seems to be a disconnect in the cost of man hours in EVE in general. But you have to take it from the point of view of the supplier of these free ships. For them (miniluv) the bottleneck is not the man hours but actually the ships. As administrators their primary goal is minimizing the cost of their ganks, not solving their members' cost of their time fallacy. Also t2 ships take (relatively) much more skill intensive character than a t1 alt.

In regards to your plan to educate, it just seems a little bit hypocritical after the minerbumping thing. You can't argue that even if most minerbumpers kill for fun, the effect, sending mails, not condoning minning afk, advice on tanking your ship, is exactly the same as your new "corp". Your are only trying to be different on a technicality, with the results being exactly the same.

I don't want your to take this wrong way, but it looks like you are trying too hard just fishing for a cause in EVE. You come with a new idea almost every week, and they all seem to just fall flat.

And please mentioning once that you get a lot of hits is beneficial, but if reading in every other post about the number of your viewers, just seems very weak, like a king saying "I am your king" sort of way.

I really like your blog, and I hope you get back to the old informative posting you used to do (at least more often).

Gevlon said...

@Mike Dados: griefing and efficient killing are mutually exclusive because efficient kills are never unexpected. If I autopilot a Kestrel with 20 PLEX in hold, I can completely expect to be ganked. EVE has PvP so lucrative targets will be killed.

Griefing comes when the guy feels completely safe because he done everything right and yet he is killed by overwhelming force.

I left minerbumping exactly because I realized they are lollers.

Unknown said...

Given that any Goon should be able to make considerably more ISK per hour than a miner, any gank costs the goons more than the ganker, so by Gevlon's definition it's griefing.

In any case, I think that's a definition whose only merit is that it's measurable. I'm more inclined to agree with Lucas that griefing is anything that causes grief. If you get tears, you griefed.

@Lucas I really don't understand why you keep coming back to 'you're going to threaten anyone who doesn't agree with you with violence'... isn't that a perfectly reasonable and common MO in EVE? Gevlon wants to make a ganker corp, great. I'm glad he's finally stepping up to actually run something. I may well join up just because I imagine he'll be low tolerance for 'lolling'

Lucas Kell said...

@Gevlon
"Griefing comes when the guy feels completely safe because he done everything right and yet he is killed by overwhelming force."
Again, not quite right. Griefing is any time you are purposely doing something with the intent of making the other person unhappy. Efficiency, cost and profit are a separate issue. Miners don't generally expect to get attacked, and they really don't want to be attacked as it ruins their gameplay. We attack them knowing this, then they email us to say "why would you do this" and "what kind of person ruins the game like this", so we know it's working out.

@Michael LeBlanc
"I really don't understand why you keep coming back to 'you're going to threaten anyone who doesn't agree with you with violence'"
It's not so much the action, it's the reasoning. Plenty of people will try to force their way on others through bullying, but Gevlon is phrasing it like he's doing them a favour, by giving them his advice. Realistically there are many reasons not to follow his advice, mainly, efficiency. A Miner that has been mining in a mack for years without getting ganked isn't going to see him ganking them and saying "use a procurer, it's crap at mining but its tanked" as a good thing. All they are going to see is another ganker. If he wasn't there, they wouldn't have a problem.

It's like that joke where you push someone over the edge of a wall, then grab them and say "saved your life". It only needed saving because you pushed me... douche.

maxim said...

I agree with the notion that Gevlon's advice, delivered in the manner he intends to, is unlikely to be followed.

But i also appreciate Gevlon's intent. Eve is way too peaceful for miners, and that keeps down it's true potential.

If miners aren't worried about securing themselves against ganks, a whole lot of potential builds fly out of the window. Which, in turn, both reduces the fun to be had in the game and weakens demand for miner-tanky items.

Making the mining situation more deadly is a good in-game goal to work towards.

But now i wonder why Gevlon is so up-in-arms against goon interdiction. Ultimately, it should serve the same goal he aims towards with his new ganking initiative - making the space dangerous enough for miners for them to start tanking themselves more actively.

Lach said...

Azual had a great post on kill-or-advice dilemma while ago: http://www.evealtruist.com/2012/11/welcome-to-lowsec.html?m=1

Anonymous said...

Have you considered that I'm not interested in investing time to get better or learn? I do that at work, or when helping people in real life. Game time is when I get to relax and not care how I'm performing. Same reason I don't min/max in MMOs - games aren't about being the best, they're about having fun. I have fun doing some mining and watching TNG.

Luckily, Hisec will eventually be gank free, regardless of where the money is, because CCP is moving more and more towards a "carebear" type game, as the last few pacthes have proven. I love the tears of the gankers and hisec PvPers shireking "Look out, CCP is setting the framework to make hisec ganking almost impossible! They're separating CONCORD standings!" Damn straight they are - most of CCP's money comes from hisec carebears and AFK'ers, so the time is coming where we'll be able to AFK for the whole day, never caring about fits or such, and neot worrying about you, Goon/TEST alts or the New Order. You're fighting a losing battle. Enjoy it while you can.

Tanknspank said...

@Anonymous, how exactly do you figure that CCP is moving towards a more carebear game? Two of the biggest recent changes in terms of hisec-vs-low/null have been the increase in minerals in null and making sec status regainable with tags+isk, both of which are the exact opposite of carebear-friendly.

@Michael "In any case, I think that's a definition whose only merit is that it's measurable. I'm more inclined to agree with Lucas that griefing is anything that causes grief. If you get tears, you griefed."

By that definition both everything is griefing and nothing is griefing. There's people who will qq over being undercut on the market or killed in nullsec and people who don't care if you blow up their hisec retriever.

So I would say that griefing is causing another player loss in a way that is not pursuing the designed or generally accepted "win" conditions of the game.

"ISK war" isn't Goblin's invention but rather a metric important enough to enough of our community that most KBs include it. Ganking ISK-efficient ships (ISK lost < ISK destroyed) is thus no more griefing than me undercutting someone by 1M instead 0.01 ISK and getting an angry eve-mail.

Lucas Kell said...

@Tanknspank
As I've said before, Griefing is about motive, not about method. If you do anything with the intention of making somebody upset, it's griefing. Regardless of cost. Regardless of gain.

If you intend to cause grief, then you are griefing. This is what makes griefing so hard to counter in game where it's strictly forbidden. It's hard to show that people are intentionally causing grief and people who are causing grief as part of their regular gameplay.
Even CCP defines it as "A grief player, or "griefer," is a player who devotes much of his time to making others’ lives miserable".

I don't know why it's such a hard concept to understand that motive is how it is categorised. In the real world, if I run someone over in a car though my own fault, it's manslaughter if it was an accident, but murder if they can prove I meant to do it. In the same way, if you meant to cause grief, it's griefing. If grief was caused by an action you performed while trying to do something else, it's not.