Renters are people. Goon ratters are mostly not.

The last ratting analysis made me think about the amount of real players participating in PvE activities that lead to dead rats. The basis of the analysis is the fact that more people play in weekends than in weekdays. You can see how Saturdays and Sundays are larger than weekdays on EVE-Offline.

I looked on the highsec ratting data gathered since June and divided the rat kills with the weekly average and averaged the same weekdays, getting this distribution: As you can see, Saturdays and Sundays shine out, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are low and the bordering days are intermediate. To describe a week, I calculated average(Sat,Sun)/ average(PrevTue,PrevWed,PrevThu,PostTue,PostWed,PostThu). This value was calculated for every week for 7 months. Then I calculated the median of the same days. It's better than average, because a server outage or battle can create a point that stands out, affecting average, but not the median. Below you can see these values for all nullsec regions, highsec and lowsec: On the top stands highsec, showing that highsec has the largest weekend/weekday ratio, it follows the player activity the most. Then - to my surprise - stands the land of RAZOR. In the first half you can see mostly renters, NPC regions, Provi and HERO. In these lands people rat.

Lowsec is somewhere in the middle. It's not a surprise, most residents aren't there to rat, which is obvious from the fact that total lowsec ratting is about 1/15 of total highsec ratting, despite roughly equal number of solar systems.

Now let's see the bottom regions: they are littered with CFC proper members. Not PBLRD members, they are on top. I have no idea what C02 "people" do, but Team Security probably should have. But let's not be unfair, various N3 proper regions are visible in the bottom.

The result is the direct opposite of what everyone expected: renters are people and proper alliance members - especially CFC members - are botters or nolifers. But if you think about it, it's pretty logical. A botter/nolifer rats a lot, so it's better to invite him and then take 15% ratting tax from his lot of rats. He also won't mess up the killboard as a properly programmed bot insta-warps when neutrals enter the system. On the other hand a bunch of casual players who want to try themselves out in nullsec are best charged flat. If they fail to kill many rats, the rent is the same. If they fail to defend themselves from roamers or awoxers, your killboard is unaffected.

Knowing this, it's understandable why the Evil Cabal rejected renting for so long. It gives a chance to new and casual players to try themselves in null. While most will fail, some will stick and can become a threat. It's best keep them in highsec and let only financially dependent F1-monkeys and botters/nolifers to null. This also explains why Goons rejected my generous peace offer. Since the "adorable newbie" Goon player ratting or hauling with his main is irrelevant to the CFC income (as it's based on botters and nolifers) his death is also irrelevant to the Cabal. I wonder if his departure will be irrelevant too. If you want to figure out, MoA is recruiting and collects donations!

Finally, I would advise CCP to create renter UI features that makes renting simpler, letting more people into nullsec as renters.


PS: I sometimes have doubts if Goons are the most evil in EVE. I never liked "falconmate" Vince Draken, but his latest alliance update is a new low: "Don’t be that guy I get made an example of for being a fucking jew!" It's hard to not go Goodwin on that.