Razor Leaves(ish) the Imperium

My in-game activity has been somewhat diminished over the past four weeks or so as the NHL playoffs came to an end. But now that they have ended - and successfully, with my Penguins winning the Cup! - I'm turning my attention back to Eve in a big way.

There are some groups in Eve I can't help but track based on fond memories. Alliances and corporations where I had a lot of great fun, but ultimately left for various reasons. Unlike when I was a member, I'm able to look at them a bit more honestly now and see them for their strengths and weaknesses... warts and all, as they say.

One of those groups is Razor Alliance, of whom I was a member for over two years. So, you can imagine that I was somewhat interested in the fact that they're leaving the Imperium. But thye are keeping blue status to "the Imperium" for the time being.

The first reddit posts announcing this departure didn't provide much more information than this, and my reaction was predictable. If you leave the Imperium but don't change your standings, you really haven't left. It's a cheap attempt to remove the target on your back without actually taking on any more risk. And the whole point of World War Bee was to smash a stable coalition to introduce more risk and more conflict into the game. Kill the "big blue doughnut" by smashing the entity most responsible for it.

Now, since then, more info came out in a soundcloud in which it became clear that the blue status would be short-term to help Razor extract its assets and ships from allied areas. And that's a very different animal than keeping permanent blue standing. This is a temporary status to help them disengage from coalition functions.

But, I had the inevitable person comment about unfair standards. And that just doesn't do to go unanswered.

This Is How You Succeed

On my latest post, a reader made a comment about the difficulty in applying the "lose 100 ships" theory to learning PvP:

Most players (most PEOPLE) have a low tolerance for failure. Add in the shame of a killboard and comments, as well as smacktalk in local, or taunting by alliance members, and you'll have people backing off from PVP entirely. You raise that threshhold and not give a crap what people think (including yourself!) then and ONLY then will you see results. Oh, yeah, expect to lose a billion or more before your first solo kill, most likely. Mainly because you wont find a solo player, just gank groups...and THEN you find that single pilot, he has to fight back and not run. THEN you have to WIN. Losing gains you experience but not knowledge; losing ships doesnt teach you what to do. It teaches you other people can beat you a lot.

I hear this argument a lot, and I wanted to decompress it a bit. I provided a quick response, but quickly realized I could put together a whole post in and of itself. There are a few things going on here:

1. Players have a low tolerance for failure.
2. Players don't want to be publicly shamed.
3. Getting meaningful fights is difficult.
4. Losing doesn't gain you knowledge, only that it's easy for you to lose.

At its heart, these four points speak to a very specific mentality that fulfills itself, one that is quite common these days. At its heart, it speaks to the fact that our society doesn't teach us how to either overcome adversity or how to learn.

Such a Small Thing, Such a Big Difference

I'm a big fan of the "lose a hundred ships" philosophy of learning to play Eve. Sure. you need to make sure you learn the right lessons from those 100 losses, but there's no better way to learn to PvP than to simultaneously lose your fear of loss and push the envelope to understand the different ways of flying and the counters to each style. A kiting frigate and a kiting cruiser face many of the same challenges - both when flying and when shooting it - and the lessons transfer pretty well.

Honestly, the biggest pain point to losing 100 ships is getting them to your staging system and fitting them all up. Sure, on occasion I complain about wanting to be able to haul my ships quickly, but generally speaking Red Frog does a great job of moving packaged ships to any high-sec system very cheaply, and a Viator can do the job of getting them into lowsec well enough once you get there.

Yet, until now, fitting was a giant pain in the ass.  Not anymore, ladies and gentlemen.  Bulkfitting is coming to Tranquility with the next patch. Now, you'll be able to plop 100 Tristans and their modules into your hangar, select bulkfitting, and end up with 100 fitted and named ships, all ready to go (after the server recovers from all that work, of course...).

Now, at first, you may think this isn't that big of a deal, but it's an absolute game changer for anyone who does alliance logistics, setting up all those ships for contract. Bulk fitting ships was tedious work that detracted from any engaging gameplay. You'd have to do it one at a time, laboriously flipping through multiple windows and dozens of mouseclicks to get uniform results quickly.

Sometimes, You Have to Give Up

Sometimes, persistence yields benefits. We've all read those stories about players carefully stalking targets over the course of days or weeks, lining up the perfect opportunity. Titans and supers tend to be a target of these kinds of players, and through them we learn never to be predictable when we're flying "the thing". Some players afk cloak for hours on end until the residents relax long enough that they finally let their guard down and get caught.

But for each carefully researched and laid trap is that opportunity that just doesn't pan out.

What separates the "persistent" from the "stubborn"? In the end, doesn't it have to come down to likelihood? The persistent player reviews the situation and recognizes an opportunity that may be somewhat distant. The stubborn player clings to a hope not borne out in evidence.

That afk camper knows - as sure as the sun rises in the east - that the people she's camping will eventually shrug their shoulders and put out a bait ratter. She might respond to comments in local hours after they're made, just to reiterate that she's not sitting at her computer. After nothing happens to it, more pilots will start ratting, then they'll bring out the bling. It's a certainty.

That titan hunter can point to the habits of the target, knows its travel routes, knows active time periods, and has scouts ready to relay intel. Evidence. Fact.

Then, there's the other type. Yesterday, I came across a stubborn player whom I kind of felt bad for.

Transactions

This was a strange weekend for me. Sure, I joined a few fleets and had the chance to get a few nice kills with our fleet as Test decided to shoot one of our citadels. You may have heard, but White Legion headed over to FDZ to have a little fun. The Tartoken/Saranen area was getting a little crowded.

Then, there was the adjustment to zkill, where I learned I'm 75% dangerous and 15% solo. At first, I was a little offended. Then I started seeing the stats from some of my corpmates, and realized that 15% is actually pretty good, considering I've been part of either low-sec small gang alliances or null-sec fleet alliances for the past five years. I'm actually pretty good with that, all things considered.

But really, the past week has been all about capitals. The buying, selling, fitting, and studying of them.

Enough with the False Parallels

I really like Wilhelm Arcturus' perspective on the game. He's a good writer, but recently, he parroted the latest talking point in the Imperium's increasingly desperate repertoire of attempted propaganda:

"In their effort to defeat us, our enemy has had to become us. As the CFC/Imperium had often been called Band of Brothers 2.0, the Moneybadgers have begun to look a bit like the Imperium 2.0."

This is an obvious propaganda point, and a pretty bad one at that. Why? Because it relies upon a false parallel that assumes the reader is foolish enough to believe all coalitions are the same. It's disingenuous, and it frustrates me to know end.

Here's a tip to those who resonate with this argument: the people shooting you aren't a coalition, despite the naming.

Let's consider the nature of the two groups being compared.

Hunting Ratters, A Guide

In January, I spent a lot of time in CFC space (at the time) hunting ratters in my Stratios full-time. This was before my alliance, TISHU, deployed to start brutalizing SMA in Fade. At the time, one of my readers suggested I put together a guide about doing exactly that. I apologize for taking so long.

Now, it's worth noting that I'm probably not the best person to write this guide. Stunt Flores, for instance, is phenomenal at this kind of activity. Following his recent un-ban, he celebrated by killing over fifty pilots in a period of about two days. That's tremendous. But, I haven't seen him put one up; if he makes comments to this one, I'd be happy to append the post with his tips.

This post is going to focus on null-sec ratting, and it's going to start with the assumption that you're doing it solo; I'll get into some small-gang advice later on. I'm not going to talk about black-ops dropping, though, since that's really just an easier form of solo hunting.

So, let's start with a little psychology, move to the vital facts, and end with some tips.

Why do pilots rat in null-sec?