Drones Who Use Drones

The use of Harvester drones in highsec is illegal for good reason: It violates the Code's rules against bot-aspirancy. After all, a set of Harvesters costs billions of isk, yet the drones are easily destroyed.

...Or confiscated. Agent Nameless Insomniac spotted an Orca using a set of Harvesters and quickly bumped the offending vessel away. Once a sufficient distance was gained, the blingy drones became vulnerable.

Aramis Rosicrux knew his drones were at risk. Though expensive, a 500 million isk ransom would still be less than the cost of replacing the drones. But could he trust Agent Nameless?

If this guy vouches for you, I guess you must be okay.

Aramis claimed that he didn't have enough isk to make the ransom payment. If true, most of his money was tied up in illegal mining equipment.

Luckily for Aramis, our Agent didn't insist on the full 500 million isk. Nevertheless, once the agreed-upon 430 million was transferred, the drones were immediately confiscated. Aramis couldn't believe it. What a roller coaster this day was turning out to be.

Aramis made another claim: He was a permit holder! However, as everyone knows, mining permits are good for one year only. If he wanted three years of licensed mining, he would've needed to pay 30 million isk--a better investment than Harvester drones, I can assure you.

Agent Nameless did the miner a solid by offering to sell the drones back at Jita prices. Aramis wouldn't even need to actually go to Jita. The miner did not yet understand how lucky he was, though.

Alas, Aramis no longer had even his outdated permit in his bio--if he ever had a permit at all. Remember, miners, your bio belongs to the New Order.

If highsec mining is such a great profession, why do our Agents run into so many broke miners?

To Agent Nameless' disappointment, even more Code violations came to the surface during his conversation with the miner. Aramis violated EVE's most famous rule, one often quoted even by those who do not embrace the Code yet.

The discussion took a dark turn once Aramis realized he wasn't going to get his precious drones back. He would retaliate by putting an embargo on all sales to Nameless. From now on, our Agent would need to make do with whatever he could scrounge up in Jita.

When Nameless questioned the contribution that highsec miners actually make to the economy, it touched a nerve.

In the New Order, principles trump isk. One can only hope that Aramis will do a better job of setting priorities in the future.

Over One Trillion Six Hundred Fifteen Billion in Shares Sold

People send me isk all the time--and for all sorts of different reasons.

That's why EVE allows the sender to label the isk transfer with a reason. I need to know whether someone is buying a mining permit, buying New Order shares, or, yes, requesting that the mighty CODE. alliance wardec a bunch of carebears.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons to send me money. I haven't seen a bad one yet.

Good enough for me.

Ah, here's a fine reason:

Agent Minx Mattel's friendship bore fruit in a beautiful way when she purchased 3,150 shares for Agent Lewak. Though Lewak already had some shares, this purchase greatly increased his holdings, and it took us past the 1,613, 1,614, and 1,615 billion isk marks. As an added bonus, it earned Lewak a Triple Supreme Protector's Tip of the Hat™.

In the New Order, we know what true friendship looks like.


BONUS!

The arc of history is long, but it bends toward the Code.

Long-time readers might recall U-S-A-T-O PRIME from the Liberty or Death series, or perhaps Agent Bing Bangboom's Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war chronicles from the MinerBumping forums. The corp has been inactive since Agent Bing killed liberty in a wormhole four years ago. Now we all may raise a glass to the destruction of its long-abandoned control tower.

Although... Does this mean people won't be able to wardec U-S-A-T-O PRIME anymore?

The Truth About Wardecs, Part 7

Previously, on MinerBumping... The carebearists and theme parkers made attacks on the legitimacy and value of wardecs, only to be rebuked by the Saviour of Highsec.

For many, CCP's sudden turn against wardecs--after more than five years of silence--came like a bolt out of the blue. CCP's new claims about wardecs also seemed to contradict everything they had said in the past about ganking and player retention. What gives? To understand what's happening now, we must first remember what happened back in 2015, the last time CCP undertook a comprehensive study about the effects of highsec PvP on EVE.

Carebears argued for years that killing a newbie in highsec inevitably leads to the newbie cancelling his EVE subscription. Pro-theme park voices on the CSM urged CCP to perform studies on this topic. Said carebearists assumed that the studies' results would validate their assumptions. But when the moment of truth arrived, it turned out that the carebears were dead wrong.

CCP Rise, one of those tasked with finding support for the carebears' theory, explained:

"We have tried and tried to validate the myth that griefing has a pronounced affect on new players - we have failed... Isolating players away from the actual sandbox seems very contrary to what we would like to accomplish."

In a presentation at EVE Fanfest 2015, CCP Rise went further. The results of all of CCP's studies showed that suicide ganking newbies improves retention rates.

Rather than driving people away from the game, killing them makes them more likely to continue playing. It's almost as if people want spaceship combat in their spaceship combat game. Moreover, people who do quit EVE virtually never do so as a result of losing ships or being subjected to non-consensual PvP.

The results of CCP's studies helped shift the company's focus away from nerfing highsec PvP. They seemed satisfied with the evidence showing that they wouldn't increase their subscriber count by making highsec safer. Now, however, we're being told the opposite is true when it comes to wardecs. Which study should we believe?

As I said in an earlier post, CCP has only released the barest details about their wardec study. They claimed that player activity in a wardecced corp goes down and stays down. We know that this would be true even if players continued playing after dropping corp, or if they shifted their attention to out-of-corp characters on the same account or other accounts. The carebear crowd--including those on the CSM--lack access to the results of CCP's wardec study, but they have attempted to interpret what little information CCP gave us in order to show that the study was comprehensive enough to cover all bases. Unfortunately for them, they're missing the most crucial piece of the puzzle--no matter how they try to parse CCP's words.

There's one big difference between the wardec study and the ones that CCP Rise was involved with, and that big difference explains the opposite outcomes. Something very important is missing from what CCP told us about the wardec study. It's the dog that didn't bark. Can you guess what it is? As a hint, I'll show you that Fanfest presentation slide one more time:

Do you see it now?

Subscription cancellation.

When CCP Rise and his colleagues looked into the effect of ganking on player retention, they weren't interested in measuring "player activity" or what was going on inside a corporation. They wanted to know if players were cancelling their subscriptions or not. Either those ganked players were still sending CCP money every month, or they weren't.

Did the wardec study focus on subscription cancellations? It would've made sense for them to do so, but no one at CCP has breathed a word about it. The dog hasn't barked. If CCP had found a negative effect of wardecs on subscription retention, then we would've read something about it in those CSM minutes. We would've seen CCP say something like, "30% of players in wardecced corps unsubscribed within a month," or maybe "Players in wardecced corps were ten times as likely to unsubscribe within a month compared to players who weren't in wardecced corps," or maybe "10% of account cancellations included wardecs among the reasons for unsubbing from EVE." Instead, we heard nothing of the sort.

The most likely explanation is that wardecs don't have a negative effect on player retention. But CCP is beating wardecs with the nerfbat anyway, just to see if it works. Why now, though?

While the CSM summit was coming to a close, CCP made its public announcement about selling out to Pearl Abyss, which acquired CCP for $425 million. Perhaps that's the reason for the sudden about-face. "But James 315," you say. "They just got $425 million. If anything, CCP no longer needs to worry so much about subscription numbers!"

Yes, except for one tiny little detail.

It turns out that when Pearl Abyss bought CCP, there was a catch. Take a look at what CCP's CEO revealed in an interview with Variety:

"The $425 million sale is a combination of a $225 million upfront payment and up to $200 million in a deferred performance-based payout."

$200 million of the $425 million purchase price isn't guaranteed. For the non-guaranteed portion, CCP can get a maximum of $200 million, but only if they hit certain targets. That is to say, the amount of money they get depends on whether they meet their business goals or not. And that puts the following tidbit from the CSM minutes about wardecs into a new light:

"Sort Dragon wants to take a step back and not worry as much about the mechanic specifics but rather what the next steps involved in this change. CCP Fozzie says that at this point they are waiting for a more detailed request from the senior management to see what the business goal is in this case, but are still investigating the potential mechanic changes."

Suddenly the picture becomes clear. CCP's payday depends on hitting their business targets, and they need to hit them right away, on the timetable set forth in their deal with Pearl Abyss. As a result, it looks like CCP has gone into full "frantically turn the dials and see what happens" mode. If so, we can expect a lot of experiments and violent shifts in policy in the near future. Not only in highsec, but in the rest of the EVE galaxy. I suspect nullsec dwellers might be in for some interesting changes, too.

Will nerfing wardecs work? The answer is no. We've been here before. A few years back, CCP allowed itself to be seduced by the idea that getting rid of awoxing would lead to a dramatic increase in the number of subscribers. Here's how that turned out:

It was exactly as I predicted. And that prediction remains relevant here, too, so let's close the series with it:

"As the last several years have shown, nerfing highsec aggression doesn't bring any extra money to CCP. It's the awoxers themselves, people like Psychotic Monk, who will feel the effects. They won't have their favorite activity in EVE anymore. But highsec only needed One More Nerf™ to make carebears safe, so no one else should worry.

One small prediction, though: After awoxing is removed, carebears will still complain about getting killed in highsec."

Not a very bold prediction, granted, because carebears always complain about getting killed in highsec.

Always!

The Truth About Wardecs, Part 6

Previously, on MinerBumping... The carebears and their allies in the CSM and CCP continued to spread the old whopper about wardec mechanics being unfairly stacked against the defending side. This myth was hauled out of the dustbin of history to be busted anew.

As we've seen, CCP has gone to some length to demonstrate how few EVE players benefit from the existence of wardecs. First it was comments in the CSM summit minutes claiming that wardecs "allow a small number of players to negatively affect a huge number of people," and then the EVE Vegas presentation about how only 5 "corps" are responsible for 50% of the wardecs.

A negative attitude about wardeccers, always simmering among carebears in the background, has suddenly sprung to life. Take, for example, PC Gamer's new article about the upcoming wardec nerfs. Below are a few snippits from the article. See if you can detect a pattern in the new narrative being written about wardeccers:

"Conflict is the lifeblood of EVE Online, but how players initiate a war is a serious problem. Right now, 50 percent of all wars in EVE Online are instigated by just five corporations (EVE's version of guilds) who are exploiting the system to sow pain and chaos across the virtual galaxy of New Eden...

For years this system has been exploited by a few groups who act as a kind of mafia, shaking down much weaker, industrial-minded corporations and forcing them into a war they stand no chance of winning. While EVE is a sandbox meant to have as few restrictions as possible, being forced into a battle you have no chance of winning or escaping from is a special kind of hell...

And that these bullies were destroying 105 ships for every one that they lost...

In early 2019, CCP Games is going to redo the war declaration system from the ground up to eliminate this kind of trolling. It's just one more interesting niche playstyle in the EVE Online universe, even if these war mongers are basically just big jerks..."

Ah, video game journalism. Reading this article, one might forget that for the entirety of EVE history, CCP considered wardecs to be legitimate.

In fact, there were good reasons why wardecs were allowed--even encouraged!--to flourish across highsec. Even if you preferred not to engage in wardecs yourself, you certainly benefited from them. Wardecs have always had a positive impact on the game and on the vast majority of players.

To begin with, there's something incredibly valuable about having spaceship combat going on in a spaceship combat game, and especially having it occur in the place where the vast majority of EVE players actually live. Every player who still has an ounce of humanity, any player who has not yet been completely corrupted by bot-aspirancy, benefits from at least witnessing PvP. If you live in highsec and grind isk all day, the sight of wardec-related activities at least reminds you for a moment what EVE is, and what it should be. PvP must always be in the atmosphere, even in CONCORD-patrolled highsec.

Countless newbies are exploited by highsec PvE corporations. If they're not careful, isk-minded older players get drawn in by them, too. They are encouraged to spend all day grinding. They waste their EVE experience on repetitive, unrewarding tasks. Even what little money they make is further taxed by shady ore buyback programs and other machinations devised by their cruel carebear taskmasters. Through sheer force of inertia and habit, or a sense of misplaced loyalty to their fellow corpmates, or out of ignorance of the outside world of EVE, the isk-grinders would languish in these prisons forever. Until they are set free.

Who liberates them? The PvP'ers. People who actually know how to play EVE attack these corp-sized loot piñatas. Inevitably, the bad corporations implode, freeing their members to go elsewhere. Maybe they end up in another bad corp, but maybe they find their way to a better place in EVE. Maybe they become PvP'ers themselves--perhaps they even learn to destroy bad corps like the one they used to be trapped in.

Someone needs to break apart the weak, dysfunctional corps of highsec. Otherwise they'll hoover up all the new players--the ones whose welfare they claim to care about so much. We've seen how bad corps aggressively recruit players who end up slaving away in the highsec asteroid belts with nothing to show for it. How is an ignorant young EVE player (or ignorant old EVE player) supposed to know that they're in a bad corp, unless the corp is tested by fire and antimatter?

And yes, wardecs are needed to help combat the risk/reward/convenience imbalance of highsec. The carebears hypocritically accuse the wardeccers of not taking enough risks. These same carebears insist on absolute immunity from all risk in highsec. Meanwhile, they claim that if the rewards of highsec were nerfed, everyone would quit the game. So in order for CCP to survive, they say, the carebears must receive sufficient rewards with zero risk--all in the most convenient location in the entire game. In Jita, they can buy the maximum supply of every item, at the minimum prices, and they can make a few jumps to their highsec incursion site, all while immune from attack. And these same people claimed that wardecs weren't balanced?

The powers that be want us to disdain the wardeccers, to look down upon their style of play as illegitimate. "If they want spaceship combat, they should go to nullsec." But the wardeccer chooses to engage in solo or small-gang PvP that doesn't involve joining a 50,000-man coalition or getting a pile of carriers or titans dropped on him every time the action starts. "Go to lowsec, then." How are things in lowsec these days?

No, I do not disdain the wardeccer--or the next group to be targeted, once the wardeccers have been done away with.

Think back to the words of that PC Gamer article:

"Conflict is the lifeblood of EVE Online, but..."
"EVE is a sandbox meant to have as few restrictions as possible, but..."

Today, they fill in those blanks with "...but we need to eliminate wardecs." Tomorrow, they can fill in the blanks with any other form of gameplay that still involves PvP.


First they came for the can-flippers, and I did not speak out because I was not a can-flipper.

Then they came for the awoxers, and I did not speak out because I was not an awoxer.

Then they came for the wardeccers, and I did not speak out because I was not a wardeccer.

Then they came for the suicide gankers, and there was no one left to speak for them because everyone else was AFK.


My friends, there are dark forces at work here. Next time, we'll discover how and why we reached this point--and what will happen next.

To be continued...

The Truth About Wardecs, Part 5

Previously, on MinerBumping... The carebears demanded that restrictions be placed on wardecs so that wars would "have an end result". But this was exposed for the nonsense that it is.

Among theme parkists and their allies in CCP, the CSM, and elsewhere, there's a long-standing tradition of complaining that wardec mechanics are unfairly stacked in favor of the aggressor. If you initiate a wardec against someone else, so we're told, you have an insurmountable advantage.

All the way back in 2013, I wrote an editorial for TheMittani.com on this very subject. Not to toot my own horn, but I destroyed the carebears' argument and, also to my great credit, showed magnanimity in victory. For the next five and a half years, CCP declined to nerf wardecs. Maybe they were persuaded by my editorial. Or maybe they were simply too lazy to fix this supposedly dire problem that was killing EVE and costing the company millions of dollars in subscription fees.

But those who do not learn from their history (or from the Saviour of Highsec) are doomed to repeat it. The "wardecs unfairly favor the attacker" fallacy has come back with a vengeance. In keeping with modern carebear lingo, you might call it a "new returning fallacy": It's many years old, but it expects to be given special treatment as though it were brand new. During the CSM summit last month, this myth about wardecs was rediscovered, much to the awe of all present:

"Brisc Rubal speculates that the war mechanics are heavily tilted towards the attacker and CCP Fozzie says this is indeed the case.... The current system is extremely skewed in the favor of aggressors."

As I wrote back in 2013, the most basic analysis of wardec mechanics shows this to be false. The aggressor is required to pay the wardec fee, and the defender can call in allies. That second part is often overlooked, but it means the wardec mechanics are heavily tilted in favor of the defender, not the attacker.

An easy way to judge the fairness of a game mechanic is to imagine a conflict between two identical alliances. The two are equal in every way. Who wins the fight? If the game mechanic is completely fair, then the fight is a draw, a toss-up. In the case of our wardec mechanics, the defending side would win, because they can call in allies. (Without the war ally mechanic, the system would be fair, unless you envision the wardec fee affecting the odds in some minuscule but statistically measurable way.)

If you doubt, consider the nullsec sovereignty mechanics of the past and present. Over the years, the various sovereignty mechanics have come under fire for being too skewed, usually in favor of the defender. That is, the aggressor needed to be significantly more powerful than the defender in order to complete whatever grind was required by the sov mechanics of the day. If the two alliances or coalitions were identical in strength, the defender would surely win.

The nullsec example is important because aggressors could and did succeed in sov wars, despite the mechanics being stacked in the defender's favor. In fact, the aggressor usually did win. That's because the attacking side only chose to become an attacker after evaluating the strength of his potential opponent and calculating the odds of overcoming the defender's advantage.

...Which is a nice way of saying that nullsec powers preyed on the weak. Only when the attacker misjudged the strength of his opponent did the defender win. On the other hand, if we take something more like an omniscient point of view, the defenders won every time a potential attacker decided not to go to war. From the defender's point of view, a war that doesn't happen is as good as a victory--and probably a lot cheaper.

The fact that we can't see these invisible victories, and the fact that we can see every attacker's victory, might lead us to believe the aggressor always wins, even when we know for certain that the sov mechanics favor the defender. When the aggressor does win, it's because the attacking alliance is stronger. The stronger alliance has the advantage, but its advantages are not supplied by the game mechanics. If we fail to realize this, then we would be misled into thinking every game mechanic--no matter how stacked in favor of the defender--actually favors the attacker, because the wars that take place tend to result in victories for the attacker.

This brings us to the presentation given by CCP Burger at the EVE Vegas event a few days ago. During the presentation, CCP Burger released some statistics about wardecs in an attempt to justify CCP's newly announced nerf to wardecs (which we'll discuss in some detail later on). Judging by his profile, CCP Burger joined the company in 2015, a couple years after we dealt with CCP's previous anti-wardec push. If CCP Burger was unfamiliar with the 2013 debate, then that would be another example of why CCP should just let me make these design decisions, rather than entrusting the task to CCP employees.

Here's the relevant slide from CCP Burger's anti-wardec presentation:

The first statistic is that only five corporations (they're called "alliances", Burger) are responsible for half of the wardecs in EVE. (The five should have been identified and given a place of honour in the presentation, but I guess that's too much to ask.) Now, this statistic isn't actually a criticism of the wardec mechanics, but it's an attempt to suggest that few people will miss wardecs after they're gone. In the same vein, I could say that nearly all of nullsec (if not all of it) is controlled by five coalitions.

The next two stats are meant to prove the overwhelming advantage that the current wardec system gives the attacker. In looking at the stats, though, one must wonder: If initiating a wardec makes you so powerful, why don't more people do it? It seems like an easy way to achieve an elite 105 kill-to-death ratio. I suppose EVE players aren't risk-averse or cutthroat enough to engage in the use of such an obviously abusive game mechanic.

The 4% stat is interesting, but misleading. As we learned from CCP's study of wardecs back in 2013, which I discussed in my editorial for TheMittani.com, only a small percentage of wardecs result in even a single kill for either side. This fact is conveniently omitted in CCP Burger's presentation, making it appear the defenders perform even worse than they actually do. Even so, we can't ignore that 105 KDR. How can something like that happen?

Everyone who has experience with wardecs will tell you the same thing. Even if you use use a one-member corporation to do the wardeccing, carebears are usually so intimidated that they'll drop corp, dissolve their corp, or stay docked up. Such wars result in no kills. Some carebears will continue to engage in carebearing during a war. The best of them (a low bar, I'll grant you) will defend their carebear operations with actual combat ships. They might even bring enough firepower to ward off an attack, if the wardeccing organization is small enough, or is a solo operator. Again, no kills, even though the defender has gotten his way.

More often, carebears choose not to bring defense ships, but will stay alert. Either through the use of scouts or simply keeping a watchful eye on local, they'll detect a war target entering the system and they'll run and hide. The defender has escaped. If you call this a win, still, no kill is recorded.

If the carebear is a bot-aspirant, like so many of them are, he'll be caught, and another one of the wardeccer's 105 kills per death will be recorded. It's unlikely that the carebear will score a kill against the wardeccer, since he's probably not even at his keyboard.

Carebears are the gazelles of highsec. The wardeccers, naturally, are the lions. The lions hunt the gazelles, and the gazelles try to get away. We do not expect gazelles and lions to have an even kill-to-death ratio. Most carebears have no more interest in killing wardeccers than gazelles have in killing lions. They want to engage in PvE. They would prefer it if there were no lions, only vegetation. But there are lions, and the weak gazelles are meant to be their food.

Bot-aspirants plague highsec. They go there for the safety and for the convenience. They've heard rumors that nullsec mining is safer than highsec mining, but they aren't interested in the "safety" that nullsec has to offer. They're satisfied with nothing less than the kind of safety that allows them to be AFK. They think they're entitled to it. And they'd rather mine five jumps from Jita than fifty.

We do not expect these creatures to score kills against the wardeccers. PvP isn't "relaxing", and it can't be done AFK. This bot-aspirancy is the same reason why carebears don't even bother to call in allies, even though the wardec system allows them to have someone else do their fighting for them. Carebears simply can't be bothered with anything that isn't AFK isk grinding. They don't want PvP, but for the sake of EVE, they need to have their ships blown up. Next time, we shall discuss why.

To be continued...

Kills of the Week

You've heard the saying, "No good deed goes unpunished." Then came the Code, and all was set right. Now we have a new saying: "No bad ship goes unpunished." For the proof, see these kills from the week of October 14th @ 00:00 EVEtime through October 20th @ 23:59 EVEtime:

KILLMAIL

Jack Jills went up to Jita and broke his crown--among other things. Jack didn't have a mining permit, you see. Nor did he have the good sense to teleport his jump freighter to safety. No matter--I'm sure he didn't mind losing 42.6 billion isk anyway.

Agents Tax Collector Shardani, Tax Collector Kimi, Tax Collector KarlMarx, Tax Collector Hill, Tax Collector Aruka, Tax Collector Larry, Tax Collector BokChoy, Tax Collector Richard, Tax Collector Stroheim, Tax Collector AynRand, Tax Collector Max, Tax Collector Kittens, Tax Collector Molly, Tax Collector HongMei, Australian Excellence, Tax Collector Alison, Tax Collector Daniel, Tax Collector Buck, Tax Collector Yuna, Tax Collector Fuemi, Tax Collector Rachel, Tax Collector Otto, HSM Chief PettyOfficer, HSM Fleet Admiral, and HSM MasterChief brought nearly two dozen Taloses into battle. You know what? They won.

KILLMAIL

Chatherin Yao gambled it all--and lost. Catherin flushed 49 billion isk down the drain when she chose to violate the Code in Jita. Many, many taxes were collected that day.

Agents Tax Collector Kittens, Pod Destroyer Molly, Tax Collector Aruka, Taxman Daniel, Tax Collector HongMei, Tax Collector Richard, Tax Collector Shardani, Tax Collector Stroheim, Tax Collector BokChoy, Tax Collector KarlMarx, Tax Collector AynRand, Tax Collector Kimi, Tax Collector Hill, Tax Collector Yuna, Tax Collector Max, Tax Collector Larry, Australian Excellence, Tax Collector Fuemi, Tax Collector Otto, Tax Collector Rachel, Tax Collector Buck, Tax Collector Alison, and Dr Hattrick had another successful round of elite PvP. Good for them. Excellence should be rewarded.

KILLMAIL

Giant Industrials corp lost its 26.5 billion isk engineering complex after being subjected to an agonizing campaign of bullying and harassment. Isn't that what they're saying about wardecs these days? Agents Kissemurra, Blazing Pancake, Ice is Nice, Discofitta, Delicate Feminine Flower, Chocolate Rainbow, Sigrid Tystnad, Love Humps, Dominated, Jathrine, Rainbow Cake, and Kermakakku brought a fleet into battle. They couldn't lose. Some would say it's because wardec mechanics magically make the aggressor invincible. They're wrong. Only the Code can do that.

KILLMAIL

Selyemsuty laughed at the jump freighter pilots who manage to lose billions of isk while AFK autopiloting through highsec. He laughed because he knew he didn't need a jump freighter to do that; he had a perfectly good Bustard that could do the same job. Agents Gandor Ironfist, iZaEaRl, and Spazmongloid brought in a trio of Tornadoes and detonated 8.5 billion isk worth of contraband.

KILLMAIL

Dimar Press is a very wicked man. Some carebears abuse battleship hulls, for instance, making a Megathron into a mining ship. Dimar made a Vindicator into a cargo-expanded freak of a hauler. This is the kind of ship you'd expect to see in an old horror film--not in our fair highsec. The heroes in those old movies knew how to handle monsters. So do our Agents, like Jake Kusion, Joel Kusion, Jayson Kusion, Jackson Kusion, Jayden Kusion, Johnathan Kusion, Joshua Kusion, Jeremiah Kusion, Joseph Kusion, Jacob Kusion, Jason Kusion, Jonas Kusion, Jack Kusion, Jeffery Kusion, Jeremy Kusion, Josh Kusion, Jimmy Kusion, Josiah Kusion, Jessie Kusion, Justin Kusion, HSM Rear Admiral, and HSM Admiral.

KILLMAIL

Not unlike Dracula himself, who often needs to be killed a few times before he's finally done and dusted, Dimar Press emerged from his blingy cargo Vindi as a blingy Capsule. Agent Jimmy Kusion drove a stake right through his heart.

That's 2.23 billion isk worth of implants that will never see the light of day again.

The Truth About Wardecs, Part 4

Previously, on MinerBumping... Carebears attempted to disguise the selfish motives behind their demands for nerfs, hiding behind a veil of concern for newbies. But their lies were exposed by Malcanis' Law and a piercing analysis of the history of wardec nerfs.

For the past decade, the carebears who demand an end to wardecs have consistently used the same absurd arguments. One of their most frequent--and most outlandish--claims is that wardecs are broken because "wardecs don't accomplish anything". Here's a quote from CCP Fozzie that encapsulates this point of view:

"What really needs to happen with wardecs is that we get to a point where, when one group wardecs another group, at the end of the day, something gets resolved... When wardecs happen, both sides get to have potentially fun gameplay, and the end result has an actual end result."

The source of this quote is not the CSM summit from last month--it's from a Crossing Zebras interview that was conducted with Fozzie all the way back in 2013. Clearly, CCP was too busy with other projects to bring Fozzie's vision for wardecs into reality; wardec mechanics haven't been touched in over six years. But the idea that wardecs require some sort of objective "result" has been echoed by carebears and is still with us.

CCP's recent discovery that wardecced corps often suffer a permanent decrease in activity post-wardec prove that, in fact, wardecs often do have a result: The extinction of the losing side. MinerBumping readers have occasionally been treated to field reports describing the use of wardecs to bring about positive results. The evidence suggests there's no cause for complaint here.

In any case, the complaint itself is bizarre and unnatural. It has no place in EVE: In no other context do we find people complaining that spaceship combat doesn't have a concrete "end result". For instance, in nullsec, coalitions go to war with other coalitions. Sometimes one of the coalitions is destroyed as a consequence, but sometimes they both survive. Some conflicts end in stalemate. Other conflicts burn on continuously, or they change form. In still other cases, one side gets bored or gives up, leaving its intended victim intact. The same is true of the fights that go on in lowsec and wormhole space. Yet no one demands that an arbitrary framework be overlaid so that these wars have a "resolution".

It has always been understood that in EVE, the players make the rules and the content for themselves. The players define their own goals. They make their own plans and attempt to achieve their own objectives. It's emergent gameplay on a grand scale. The Code, of course, is the most brilliant, shining example of this truth. The Code is the crowning achievement of the EVE sandbox. It's something that no one in CCP could ever have conceived or designed.

In the most recent CSM summit, it's obvious that the CSM and CCP have lost sight of this--when it comes to wardecs, that is. A few highlights (or lowlights, if you prefer):

"Sort Dragon mentions the idea of using propaganda structures as a means of ending the war in the form of a victory condition to end the war."

"Aryth brings up a king of the hill scenario as a new war mechanic."

"Jin'taan suggests a goal being ships killed."

Nonsense.

Several years ago, Pandemic Legion leader Shadoo was faced with a dilemma. At the time, PL and TEST Alliance Please Ignore had formed a coalition to rival the power of the CFC (later known as the Imperium). There was a cold war between the two power blocs, and all of nullsec held its breath, waiting for war to break out. PL considered itself to be the most elite PvP'ers in the game, more than capable of defeating the CFC and its Goons. However, Shadoo was afraid that if an all-out war did take place, his side might actually have a chance of losing. That might mean the end of PL. On the other hand, if war didn't take place--if PL didn't challenge its only true rival--then what was the point of being elite? What was the point of EVE?

Shadoo came up with an alternative, which he called "War Games". He outlined his proposal in an editorial for TheMittani.com (the predecessor of Imperium.News). Shadoo's idea was that the two coalitions could have prearranged fleet fights with special rules, rather than actually trying to conquer each other's sovereignty. That way, EVE players could engage in spaceship combat without either side running the risk of losing.

The reaction from the EVE community was swift and vicious. Everyone hated Shadoo's idea, and he was endlessly mocked for it. Players instinctively grasped that EVE was the "war game", and that Shadoo's idea was a fundamental violation of it. Even Ripard Teg, the author of Jester's Trek, wrote a scathing rebuke, calling Shadoo's proposal "Chinese Checkers".

The story had a happy ending: Shadoo's concept was rejected by all as un-EVE. Since PL was afraid to fight the CFC, the CFC launched an invasion of PL's primary coalition partner, TEST. Known by history as the Fountain War, this invasion resulted in the loss of all of TEST's territory in nullsec as PL refused to fully commit to defend its ally. But the Fountain War wasn't the end for TEST or PL. The story of nullsec continued, written by the players.

Wardecs don't need artificial victory conditions. They don't need to become a highsec version of Chinese Checkers where each side engages in a minigame and the "winner" is declared, with some predetermined carrot or stick automatically dispensed by the game mechanics. Wardecs are as they should be: A mechanic that enables the two sides to fight it out without CONCORD intervention. Maybe they bring fleets to camp gates or stations, maybe they engage in small, scattered guerilla war. Maybe one side stays docked up and refuses to fight. Maybe one side dissolves its corp or withers away as its members leave. Maybe one side realizes its weakness and joins an alliance for its own protection. It's up to the players, not an NPC referee.

Anyone can see that the "wardecs must have an end result" crowd is engaging in unnecessary, un-EVE nonsense. Why do they do it, then? Because their true motive is to nerf wardecs into oblivion. Any proposal to change wardecs in this manner inevitably descends into a system of strict limitations on wardecs. They want to force the attacker to have "skin in the game"--beyond the wardec fee, of course. The attacker, in their minds, is the bad guy. On some level, they view the side that initiates a wardec to be the griefer, the harasser, the bully. So the wardec mechanic they propose is designed as a potential punishment, to discourage anyone from daring to initiate a wardec.

To justify this, the carebears and their allies have deluded themselves into believing that wardecs inherently favor the aggressor and unfairly stack the deck against the recipient. As we shall see, they are painfully, inescapably mistaken.

To be continued...