Tackling Tempests and Trailing Tengus

Close only counts...

A few days into faction warfare, and I'm fleeting up and roaming around.  Today I'll give a three informal after action reports of situations that didn't work.

Tricky Tengus

On a roam starting in Nenn, intel told us a pair of Tengus were running mission sites a few systems over.  We take a look at our fleet, mostly frigs and destroyers, and decide that between an Arazu and some tacklers, we had a chance to sneak a point in and hold at least one Tengu long enough to get the rest of us in.

Operations commence with the fleet holding on gate outside the Tama system, home to our pair of would-be kills.  They don't appear to notice anything aside from one fleet member warping through system.  We get cloaked eyes into the mission room.  Then it comes to light that the Tengus have a Buzzard hanging out off-gate watching traffic.  This doesn't seem to be a problem, as we just need to sidle our tackle in and then once point is accomplished, the Buzzard is irrelevant.

Then a fleet mate jumps the gate.  The Tengus spook and dock up.  Good game.  The moral of this story the importance of fleet discipline.  We were just about ready to get our tackle in on the targets, from another gate that the Buzzard couldn't see.  One nervous jump ruined the planning, and the glorious killmail we might have scored.  My killboard efficiency would have skyrocketed!

2 v 1... then 2... then 3... then None.

5 or 6 of us are holding at a small outpost, after clearing out the pesky squids that had been hanging out there.  A second outpost had a few hostiles.  In a sane world, the gang would align as a unit and warp in, grabbing points and taking targets out while FC calls them.  Eve is not a sane world.  I was unsure what was going on.  A hesitant newb, I was holding on the plex while one, then two, then three members warped off in staccato fashion.  I was waiting for the FC to give the go ahead.  He realized what was happening, and simply said "Ok, how many people still have ships in local?"  Turns out we were down three ships, with nothing to show.

We had more force, more ships, but not better timing.  Again, discipline was the key missing factor between feeding a choppy line of kills to the foe and clearing the field.  I blame the ease with which we had mopped the previous complex.  That nice high of dropping your gang on a target and managing the field carried over into overconfidence and sloppy execution.

Twin Tempests

The frigate roam continues!  We spot two Tempests chilling at the gate to a complex.  We manage to hold discipline, warp in, land tackles, and most of us orbit under the Tempest guns.  I'm in a long-point Atron, so my job is mostly holding one of the Tempests.  Things are going fine until they go pear shaped.  Drones come out and start taking a toll.  A few frigs are orbiting too far out, and are taking fire from the 800mm shells the Tempests are raining upon us.  Eventually I realize I have a stack of drones chipping away at my armor at alarming speed.  I burn out, as things are falling apart.  I manage to make it out of scram range in deep structure and warp out.  The Tempests hold the field, with one nearly out of hull.

A few things went wrong.  A few frigs managed to orbit into those 800mm shells.  I failed to focus on the drones soon enough to mitigate the incoming damage.  This fight was far from a given on either side.  Had we downed one of the battleships while losing our hulls, it would have been a victory, but we came up just short.  Perhaps I should have kept my blasters on the Tempest, and perhaps I should have targeted drones sooner.  Both would have eliminated half of the incoming damage or more.  This was a better managed fight, but still eluded us.

***

I had some victories today as well, a few kills that padded my efficiency.  I got part of a kill in my first pirate act in Eve.  A fellow militia mate and I fell to an obvious mismatch out of stubborn anger and honor.  It was a good day overall.  I look forward to the next.

Taking My Ball Home!

Edit: For a nice dose of schadenfreude, read through the comments on this one.

There has been a lot of talk lately about high sec players and how they ruin Eve for everyone else.  I find the volume of chatter unsurprising, given the resent Ivy League and Goonswarm Shrugged antics.  What I do find surprising is the lengths to which each side goes to delegitimize the other side, and using the “Eve is  a Sandbox!” argument to make the point.

A sandbox game is in general a game where the world is laid out for players with rules and mechanics to govern interaction, but without an endgame provided by the developer.  I would posit another fundamental assumption of sandbox style games is that if the mechanics allow for something to occur, then it is a valid play style unless it is explicitly addressed by the developers.  In other words, every play-style that a player can engage in is valid, until restricted.

So it seems very funny and shortsighted to claim pirates are bad or miners are evil just because you think the mechanics of the game favor or hinder a play-style.  The fact that you can mine, and the fact that you can gank shows that both play-styles are valid.  So is a market trader that never levels the station, the missioner that grinds for hours and the Sov warrior who does whatever it is that sov warriors spend their time doing.

My assumption is that anyone who tries to argue that a play-style is completely invalid and should be spurned or banned is in fact one a few sort of people.  The first is the person who got burned by another player.  The second is someone who cannot, likely for ability reasons, compete with other players in a specific play-style, and so seek to disparage it.  The last, and alternatingly most entertaining or insidious one is the true griefer, who plays games not for the game in front of them, but the metagame of making someone else angry.  I don’t want to get into semantics of competitors versus griefers, save to say there is a difference.

And these reasons come through in the arguments often seen against pirates and miners.  They have no basis in actual mechanics, and devolve into ad-hominem attacks on the players themselves.  Miners have no souls and might as well be the bots they claim to hate.  Pirates are horrible people with no hearts who are probably social miscreants in real life and shouldn’t be allowed to play.  One of these arguments is meant to inspire angry forum posts, and the other fails to grasp the inherent meanness built into the human race, but both miss the point of the sandbox.

What makes Eve interesting is the fact that it encourages both play-styles, even though they are openly antagonistic to one another.  And both styles are generated by the players.  If miners, carebears or pirates were eliminated, Eve would fail.  Each plays a vital role in the ecosystem, and pays for subs.  So if you want to debate fairness of mechanics, or imbalances that push players in a certain direction please be my guest.  The sandbox should be constantly tuned to increase  and balance player options, thereby generating more play-style options!  But if you just want to use personal attacks, well, I suppose everyone loves to feed the trolls now and again.

Bounty Hunting

If you have read some of my previous posts, I would understand if you think I view pirates as the scum of Eve and they should all go die in that fire people talk about.  But this is not true!  I do want them dead, but by the hands of other players!  I have spent some time thinking about the mechanics of sec status and piracy, and I have a proposal. Tweak the boundaries of legal pvp in eve.  Here is a brief, chart based explanation:

	System Security Status	Legal Target Sec Status*
High Sec	1	<0.0
	0.9	-0.5
	0.8	-1.0
	0.7	-2.0
	0.6	-3.0
	0.5	-4.0
Low Sec	0.4 to 0.1	-5.0
Null Sec	Null/WH	All

Of course there are caveats.

• Any pilot with a negative sec status is a legal target according to the chart above.
• Only players who have participated in an illegal action can be given a bounty.
• Legal actions are any hostilities under the auspice of a war dec, taken after another player initiated hostilities in sec of 0.1 or greater, or anything occurring in low sec.
• Non-sanctioned bounties (i.e. pirate bounties ) can be placed as contracts in null sec.
• If a player has a legal bounty, he is a legal target in all sec statuses until podded.  Once this occurs, his legal status reverts to the chart above.
• Causing initial aggression (legally or illegally) invalidates insurance if a ship is lost during the ensuing aggression timer.
• If a player has a bounty active, insurance does not pay out on losses.

The whole point of this is to increase the motive for players to actively hunt pirates, and to help make the sec from 1.0 to 0.5 more of a slope.  Right now the incentive is mostly pride and possibly loot drops.  This system tries to change the rules of engagement a little, and provide more of a career for Bounty Hunters.  If you wanted to really push the system, you could add a map option that gave time delayed heat maps of systems with bounty targets.  I mean, the gates know who is going where, right?

Observers might also notice that this system does make it theoretically harder for Pirates to get to higher sec systems.  This would maybe require some tweaking of system sec status, belt deposits and agent distribution, I have no idea.  The point would be that along with risk/reward for carebears, pirates would also have a risk reward for coming after high sec targets.

There are definitely some holes in this, but I would love to see anti-piracy become a viable career in Eve.  If a valid implementation could be found for the bounty system, it could also lead to new stations, factions, ships and mechanics.  Most importantly it would incentivize some high-sec residents to both place bounties and hunt for them (possibly leaving high sec!), creating more player-driven content in Eve.

Sandboxing

Eve, as we are often told, is a sandbox experience.  The point of the game is what you make of it.   It is equally valid to be a carebear, pirate, null-sec warrior or market trader.  Most players are adamant that their way of playing is the right way, and so is the other guy’s.  But is this true?  Given the current game mechanics, I would argue that there are right and wrong ways to play Eve, because some styles of play are inherently more robust.

If you thought I was talking about piracy, you win one internet!

Big Disclaimer:  Although what I am about to propose is easy to take as anti-pirate, I am not saying that current pirates are bad or wrong, just that the system heavily favors those who define fun as blowing up non-combat ships.

Let’s illustrate this point with a topical example, courtesy of everyone’s favorite group, the GSF.  For those unaware, the current Ice Interdiction is based on at least two pilots flying in tandem in a given system,  a ganker and what we’ll call a tanker.  The tanker flies an Orca with pre-fit Brutixes (Bruti?) ready and waiting.  This pilot has to have above -5.0 sec status, and preferably is not hostile with the local Empire Faction either.  The other pilot, usually a goon, can have any sec status he wants, and just has to fly around not getting CONCORDOKKENED if that applies.

The setup for the actual gank consists of getting both pilots into a system, and usually moving the Orca to a safespot or series of safespots, off-grid from anything else in system.  This will be important!  Once in place, they find a ship to kill, the ganker hops in a Brutix and warps to the ship, pops it, then CONCORD shows up and there are two big explosions and two pods racing away as fast as possible.  The Orca pilot follows and loots the wrecks.

This pirate play-style is much more favored by the current system that the victim’s, and I think I can prove why.  This is especially true in 1v1 and small scale situations.

Mining is a very visible, very slow, and (in order to increase the reward in regards to time) a very optimized activity.  Fitting is limited, and offense is not really an option.  Evasion is limited to docking up once a potential hostile enters the system, if you are aware of this (not all gankers have a sec status that appears on the local list).  Most mining sites are warpable without any effort required to locate the destination (exploration sites are an exception).

In an actual encounter, there is almost no way most industrial or mining ships can align and warp or target and jam faster that a BC can lock and fire, or target and scram   I say almost no way, because any situation in which one would actually want to use an industrial/mining ship precludes a fitting that would have a chance at escaping a PvP fit BC.  I am ignoring Tech II industrials.

Further, the system is stacked to help the pirate.  If he is using safes, he will be almost impossible to find, especially if he is below -5, in which case he will be warping around the system every 6 - 10 seconds AND drawing CONCORD out of places where anyone lawful might actually be.  In a pod or shuttle to maximize align times.  Good luck scanning that down and catching it.  I know this is technically possible, but in practice, have your friend go out in his pod and warp around a system and try to scram him.

Finally, the pirate loses far less, even if caught, than the industrialist.  If the pirate is already below -5.0, then any sec status loss is purely academic.  Currently the value of his loss is very little, probably in the neighborhood of 1m ISK.  This will change soon, but the value of a lost BC is in the tens of millions.  The loss of a mining or industrial ship is likely in the hundreds of millions.

Systematically, piracy of the Interdiction nature is favored by the mechanics of the game over industrial pursuits.  I won’t say that this is right or wrong, but if all play styles are supposed to be equally valid, it seems odd to give such an advantage to one style over another.  If I were a miner, I would maybe look at more secure methods of generating income, or other fictional places to spend my spare time.

If you have thoughts about this, please let me know if the comments!