Imposters

One of the things I like most about EVE is the potential to inadvertantly kick the hornets nest. In a game of connections, relationships and conflict it should be impossible to play in a way which impacts the game meaningfully yet doesn't stir up some trouble now and again. Usually I only get to hear of such drama through reading the metagame; TMC, EN24 and various blogs have all the good stories of alliance 'x' upsetting coallition 'y' and getting stomped all over. Living in wormholes, as I do, the likelyhood of getting involved in such quarrels is greatly reduced and other than the odd corp theft or alliance purge I'd never been a true actor in one of these tales. Until now, that is.

The story begins a month ago. We were having one of our regular fleet nights where people pre-warn loved ones and get online relatively early. Any regular reader of my blog will know we are not a large corp so such nights generally result in eight to ten people logged in. Our standard routine is to scan our constellation, see if there is anyone to shoot, if not then we run our sites. We are usually too lazy to roll our statics to find PvP. This fleet night was no different and we had just gotten to the stage where we were going to run sites when a scout noticed people in our C3 static logging on. This pulled us back into PvP mode so we swapped to cloaky ships to see what trouble could be found. Unfortunately and despite our best efforts a good fight eluded us, however we were entertained to a continuous display of the ships our neighbours had as they jumped from one to another to yet another. As a last attempt to get a fight we had a lone Gnosis shoot the planet two customs office. Even this wasn't enough to have them raise a fleet. It was around then we decided to take things personally. After all, the corp who were too risk adverse to face us despite having a wide variety of ships and enough pilots were also masquerading on my alliance name. We were facing the corp Illusion of Solitude. (note the trailing dot).

After sending their customs office into its reinforcement timer several of us logged off in the hole. The hope was they would bring a fight to save the POCO. Based on the number of their pilots we thought any fight they brought would be fairly evenly matched. Our scouts kept watch the following day and our target's alliance flew in a number of reinforcements meaning we were now definitely outnumbered. This gave me two choices: leave or call some of my own friends. I chose the latter and asked my good friend Nashh Kadavr for some help. He obliged with enough pilots to double our number and the game was on. Sadly it was a short game as the locals clearly understood how to best use their local pulsar effects to their advantage. Our three Scimitars couldn't hold reps on anything and were themselves melted rather rapidly. The fight was a wash (and the battle report a mess). We withdrew from the hole and left scouts because we wanted a rematch. With such an overwhelming defeat a counter needed to be worked on.

During the course of the week some of my guys kept making ourselves known. This resulted in me getting a pissy email from the alliance leader of Praetorian Directorate, Sengier. In it he announced grandly that he had "decided ... to take no further measures" and warning that "We do outsource our boring PvP matters". Dafuq? Why live in wormholes if you don't want to ever fight? Anyway I replied politely pointing out the rudeness of a corp hijacking the name my alliance had been using for over two and a half years and I left it at that. By the following weekend a suitable counter fleet had been theorised, procured and distributed by the ever resourceful Nashh. On the Thursday night we flew in a tower to provide safe haven for us and went to sleep. Cue shitstorm.

I awoke the following day to a mail from one of my directors. In it he included a conversation with Troyd, the leader of Repercussus, a fully paid up member of Goonswarm Federation. To say reaching these heady heights of nullsec affiliations was unexpected is to understate it somewhat. Troyd made it clear he was looking for a peaceful way out of this situation without having to shoot at a tower. Who can blame him, that's a pretty dull way to spend your weekend. This view was restated when myself and Nashh got to speak to another character, Thedaius, later that evening. During that chat we explained that we were only here for content and to encourage the fake Illusion of Solitude. corp to change their name. This left us with the most wonderful quote of the whole weekend:

Thedaius > I've been doing this (negotiations and diplomacy) for a long time and this is the most bizarre request I've ever dealt with.

If us wormholers are anything it's bizarre and crazy. Unfortunately he also gave us the bombshell that we had picked a fight with a goon industrial corp. Fuck!

Thedaius > Ok well my corp has a stake in this wormhole; so you are essentially messing with my industrial wing

We stood the fleet down for the night waiting to hear the outcome of our request. The answer came at 03:23 when my C2 CEO, John Younts, sent me a mail saying "Fuck it there are 80-90 ships attacking the pos". In and of itself this wasn't a problem. The POS was disposable anyway. It was never meant as more than brief safe haven while we harassed the locals. The sheer number of ships shooting the POS was the shock factor. This started as a small gang thing and escalated beyond anything I could have imagined. Not only were there members of Goonswarm shooting at the tower we had also attracted Sleeper Social Club. Double Fuck!

The following day we assessed the situation. POS reinforced; massively outnumbered; potential reinforcements available but only if we could get hole control (unlikely). We decided to take the sensible route and slink out the hole and back to where we'd come from. There was no good fight to be had here. There were only wormhole farmers who paid external forces for home defence. Renters by any other name. That night our tower died and the reinforcements parachuted in by the locals left.

And so began our guerilla war. A small number of people declined to leave. Over the past two weeks they did what they could to mess with the locals' ability to do anything useful. I took an alternative route. On the advice of the alliance leader of the Illusion of Solitude. corp, the aforementioned Sengier, I raised a petition to have the (dot) corp name changed. They made it clear in local chat and in the subsequent issuing of medals to themselves that they were intentionally squatting on the name. This is against the EULA of EVE Online. It took a full two weeks for CCP to handle the petition due to other, more important problems. Yesterday I got the good news that the petition was successful (CCP don't tell you, you just see the new corp name). And with that this saga draws to a dull and boring close. I announced a full withdrawal of all combat ships from J160739 as soon as the wardecs they hired against us are dropped. We have no problem with the newly renamed 'EVE Corporation 98379988'.

I hated to get the 'legal team' in. It would have been much more satisfying to force a resolution to this in-game. But when the people you square up against are willing to throw ISK at hiring all comers (and who also happen to be Goon affiliated) there isn't a whole lot you can do.

The futility of war

At it's heart EVE is a game of conflict. This ranges from the macro-scale of massive coalitions down to the micro-scale of little corporations who try to eke out their niche in New Eden. Ostensibly the heart of high security in empire-space provides a safe haven for the workers who provide the materials of conflict. In hisec industrial ships fly hither and thither packed full of the raw materials of construction or completed wares being hauled to market. Of course, these conceivably safe trade routes are nothing of the sort. Your wise and wary industrialist tempers his risk to the hands of the marauding gankers who occupy pinch-points on the most frequently trodden paths. Impatient or ill-advised industrialists may pack just enough value into their ships to tip the balance of risk/reward in the carefully manicured equations of these gankers. Doing so is an almost guaranteed death for the unlucky industrialist but those are the choices to be made and the risks to be taken. And there are wardecs...

A declaration of war, more commonly known as a wardec, is a means to temper the relative safety of hisec space. An essential strategy in any war is disruption of enemy supply lines. Without wardec mechanics any force in New Eden would be able to resupply indefinitely (well, until they ran out of ISK that is). From this point of view the wardec is an essential tool in New Eden life. A wrinkle in the mechanic is the ability for any corporation or alliance within EVE to declare war on any corporation or alliance they feel the desire to. No rhyme or reason is required. A token payment is offered up to have Concord turn a blind eye and weekly repeat payments extend the war into perpetuity. Strategies and objectives are irrelevant in these 'wars' initiated by these bored and wealth alts of nullbears. Just as they desire risk-free mining and ratting rights in the supposed dangerous regions of nullsec, they equally desire risk-free shooting of random pilots who are doing little more than restocking ship supplies in hisec. The phrase "war is meaningless" pales to insignificance when related to New Eden wars.

From the above it is pretty clear my alliance has been on the receiving end of a wardec. In fact we've received two wardecs in the past two days. In the real world this would be as a result of the breakdown of diplomacy but in New Eden nobody has a clue why we were selected for this honour. In the real world two forces would face off against each other to attack or defend strategic objectives in a series of battles. The outcome of the series of battles would determine the victor of said war. In New Eden at least one side (us) doesn't know what the objectives are. Only the aggressing corps can confirm the likely truth - there aren't any objectives. We could go and hunt those responsible for declaring war on us. Their killboard shows an almost exclusive habitation of Jita so finding them isn't tricky. Experience tells us if we take a force large enough to challenge them they will dock, likely to go play something else. For a total cost of almost quarter of a billion ISK, what's the point?

A long time ago when New Eden was half the age it is now a wardec meant time for me to play something else. Just prior to moving into wormholes I realised I could hang out in lowsec where the wardec corps were too scared to go. These days it makes little difference to me as I can be shot in space any minute of any day I'm online. A wardec makes little difference to the vast majority of my corp as they too can be shot every minute of any day they are online. The people it does negatively affect in my corp and alliance are the most active ones who like to spend time out of the hole running missions or incursions when the rest of us aren't around. The wardec means our most active pilots do something else. If all the targets of our brave aggressors are forced offline then the aggressors also log off and play something else. When you really think about it, the only real use of wardecs is to reduce active pilot numbers in New Eden. It is highly unlikely that this is in the best interests of EVEOnline so what is the fix?

I honestly wish I could answer my own question. The existence of a mechanic allowing corps to declare war on each other is essential for far-reaching real wars. How to temper abuse of said mechanic so it doesn't force pilots offline in the face of war which cannot be fought is the tricky part of the equation. Possibly some way for the aggressor to declare what their objectives are and define their success in the war based on those objectives is somewhere for CCP to focus on. Failure to achieve declared objectives during the war requiring reparations be paid to the defending corp would hopefully force potential attackers to pick interesting fights and go out searching for completion of those objectives. Surely that would be preferable to passively hugging the Jita 4-4 dock ring? That's got to be more boring than mining, right?

And my plans for these current wars? I'll be in Jita, Amarr and any other trade hubs I feel like. I'll be buying the ships, mods, ammo, POS fuel and anything else I want or need. I'll be doing all this in perfect safety. How? My hauler alt will take care of it all. No worries. No dramas. No wars.

My Precious Ribbons

As many of you may know, us wormhole dwellers don't make any bounty ISK from killing sleepers in w-space. The exploding of red crosses is simply the first stage in earning our living out here in the deepest darkest recesses of inhospitable space. Once the sleeper drones have been sent to their final sleep we have to loot and salvage, not because it makes extra ISK, but because that's the only way we make any ISK. The main items of interest from looting are 'blue loot' (so called because of their blue icons) and melted nanoribbons. Thankfully blue loot is taken care of from NPC purchase orders around New Eden which means we are guaranteed a certain payout for running sites. The coveted melted nanoribbon has a price dictated by market forces.

Mountainous 12 Month Profile

Selling melted nanoribbons today makes me a very sad capsuleer so I've stopped. If you take even the slightest of glances at the above graph you will easily be able to tell why. From a twelve month high just three months ago we have fallen to a twelve month low today. Recently I could sell a nanoribbon for as much as 6.4 million ISK yet now I am lucky to get 4.4 million. That's almost a third of the price vanished into thin air.

What is causing these low prices? Nanoribbons are a key component in T3 ships. The decreasing prices must be due to an oversupply of ribbons. You can also see the graph tapering off in volume sold each day as fewer and fewer people elect to sell their ribbons on the market. Yet still the price is in decline. My theory is New Eden currently has a dire lack of conflict. I don't follow the news on nullsec politics particularly closely but I'm not aware of any large wars going on. No Tengu fleets eating up ribbons while trying to claim more territory to install dirty renters into. This makes me sad for two reasons: One, EVE is a game build around war and conflict so without war and conflict EVE is lacking something. Two, I can't sell my nanoribbons and make vast chunks of wealth for my corp. So, when and where is the next big conflict coming from? Mittens, it's over to you.

EVE Really Is Real

EVE has some of the largest battles in any online game. For a long time I have enjoyed reading about these in various news sites with the occasional mega-battle making headlines in the more general gaming press. Today I was made aware of the following:

From the BBC's New Eden correspondent

Last night's battle of 6VDT-H between TEST and CFC resulted in a peak of 4,070 pilots in one system. That's a pretty awesome number and one which triggered the BBC to run an story on the battle. I watched a little on Mad Ani's twitch.tv stream and was quite glad to not be suffering the 90% system slowdown. It really is pretty weird having EVE news feature in what I generally consider a 'real' news website.

This Is War

As well as recruiting members to our corp, our alliance is also recruiting whole new corps. An unexpected bonus from this was a new corp who joined us a couple of days ago brought a high-sec wardec with them. Seems this was an unfortunate coincidence, which I can believe. I've been director in a corp who joined a new alliance and in the joining cool-down we got wardecced. Ho hum, these things happen.

I set to work on my usual intel gathering routine. It's been some time since I found myself on the receiving end of a wardec so I'm a little rusty. Taking a look at the aggressor corp I found that they only have three members, of which only one appears to have any kills or losses. Hmm, interesting and not really that scary.

Let's go hunting. Only there is no indication of the guy anywhere in New Eden thus far. The corp description suggests we can buyout the war for a mere 300 Million ISK but I think we should have a little bit of fun with this. I mean, we are over 200 members now and how often do  you get to hunt in hisec?

I'm looking forward to seeing either the aggressor corp numbers inflate or the war getting abandoned. The question is, if they abandon the war do we still have a chance to make it mutual? I've never been in a position before where we'd want to try that. I'll let you know if anything actually comes of this.