Smart Marketing

Just a quick update today:

The last few days were pretty busy as I relocated my industry dude to nullsec in an effort to get into some serious PI and manufacturing (which should help me Plex at some point, ideally). 

Before doing so, I wanted to sell some of that character’s assets that I no longer had any use for. It was mostly useless crap that was barely worth selling, but there was also a Skiff from back in my mining days that I wanted to sell for profit.  And as we all know, there is only one great way to sell such a supreme mining vessel for good ISK: set up a (slightly) overpriced sell order and then gank the crap out of everything in the area not called Skiff or Procurer.  

1MN MWD - classic

I cruised through the belts of Scheenins looking for potential customers and soon found a person that definitely looked like he needed to upgrade his mining vessel. Being the nice person that I am, I went ahead and took care of his old Mackinaw, relieving him of all the worries that go along with getting rid of such an outdated and inferior ship. 

After the deed was done I sent the miner the usual decommission notice and offered him the chance to acquire his very own mining permit, which he sadly declined – you can’t win ‘em all, I guess.

I actually wanted to gank some more ships to increase the pool of potential customers, but it was late and I was tired, so I called it a night. 

Next morning I saw that my Skiff was sold - bought by the guy I ganked.

I supplied a tanky mining ship and created demand by wrecking an untanked vessel – basic economics working in my favor.

Keera fails on a Safari

Last time, I wrote about my first Awox and the associated explosion of an Orca. Now it is time to pick up where we left off and share with you the end of that particular adventure. I would love to tell you an exciting story about how I tackled two battleships, extorted billions of ISK and went down in a blaze of glory - but alas, none of these things happened.

Instead, the aftermath of the Orca’s destruction turned out to be less than thrilling, as virtually all corp members logged off and left me camping an empty home station. Truth be told, I actually missed out on killing one guy who went right by me in a shuttle because I was trolling the AG channel, but I guess I would not have been able to lock and scram before he went into warp anyway, so whatevs.

So there I was, sitting in my Thorax, thirsting for blood and with no targets to shoot at. I even entertained the idea of going to work on the corp’s undefended POS for a moment, but then I remembered that I had a lowskilled char in a T1 cruiser and that it would probably take ages to even make a noticeable dent on the POS, so I warped to a safespot a few systems away and called it a night (choosing a German corp to play with turned out to be pretty cool because of the same TZ).

The next day came and I planned on causing some more chaos and destruction. My character was still sitting in his safe, that was good – but nobody else was logged in, which was bad. With not much else to do, I placed a handful of containers around the corp’s home station to commemorate the loss of their Orca and played around their POS for a while (and with me knowing next to nothing about POS mechanics, I even learned a few things!).

My nice little safari cam screeching to a sudden halt when I received a phone call from my boss and found out had to get to work for a few hours. Seeing that it was roughly 11:40 Eve time, I realized that this meant I would not be home during and immediately after downtime, which in turn meant that I would probably be kicked from corp before I got back home. Even worse, I had to leave immediately in order to catch the bus, so I had no time to make my way to one of my off-system bookmarks. I did the lazy (read:  dumb) thing and warped to the POS, foolishly hoping that the bubble would keep me safe for those 20-odd minutes until downtime.

 A few hours and lost nerves later, I came home, looked at my PC and saw the familiar surroundings of a station. Yay!

Turns out, one of the guys in corp logged in a few minutes before downtime and actually managed to bump me out of the bubble before blowing my poor little Torry to smithereens.  While I was sad my awox ended like that, I fully appreciate that guy’s decision to take matters into his own hands and use the awesome power of the bump to get rid of me. I can only congratulate him on that feat; he totally deserved to send me those smug evemails afterwards.

Since I figured that it’s probably best to get right back into business, I applied to a few corps right away and once again was accepted to a few apparently very trusting outfits. I signed up with a group called Kamikaze Kings, because I figured that name is as good as any for a corp being about to be awoxed. 

Sadly however, that whole operation was pretty much doomed from the get-go. I had very little time to play Eve and even less time to play on Esteban, so I just logged in from time to time and did a whole lot of nothing while telling myself that I was collecting intel or whatever it is that competent people would do in that situation.  I once again got some free money as one dude gave me 10Mil ISK to “get started”, so thanks for that, I guess. I did what I was told, got started and bought myself a new Thorax as well as some cheap modules to make it somewhat useful. 

With the timer to Tiamat (and thus the implementation of the dreaded anti-awox tickbox) ticking down mercilessly I began to worry about not getting any kills (in retrospect, my panic was not at all justified as the majority of corps seems to have friendly fire still set at legal right now). My corpmates did not want to play prey as all I saw were unblinged missioning boats (which I did not feel comfortable attacking) and the odd exhumer here and there. I was about to give up and even thought about dropping corp and trying my luck somewhere else when I realized there was a Hulk+Orca operation going on while I was busy dicking around with various other things. After scolding myself for being such a terrible spy, I decided for some reason that I should not warp to the belt with Esteban without having scouted the area in a neutral (it make sense to me at the time, don’t ask why and how). So I went ahead and grabbed my indy/logi dude and made him my scout as well – with the one problem being that the only ship he had was the logi vessel – not really what you would call subtle.  I quickly bought the only frigate available in station and warped to the belt at fifty. In a move that can only be described as derpalicious I was now scouting a mining op in a Slasher with New Order Permit in my bio. It is not hard to imagine that my targets got the message and warped away before I even had a chance to think about how to reach that Orca sitting almost 100km from warpin.
I tried to save the situation by moving the scout to a different system and doing some Venture-mining on Esteban, but those efforts turned out to be in vain, I never saw this Hulk or Orca again. 

This operation found its less than satisfying end when somebody read this article and actually went to the trouble of looking up my character, finding out which corp he was in and alerting the CEO that he had an awoxer in the corp. I found myself back in Aliastra when I logged back in a few hours later. That was unfortunate, but I once again have to tip my hat to the guy that actually cared enough about all that to ruin my operation – smart thinking.

Here’s what I took away from those two adventures (apart from the ISK and killmail, of course):

The implementation of the awox-switch is something that will only help those careless CEOs and so called recruiters that do not bother with any kind of background checks of interviews. Both corps I infiltrated here have accepted my application without any knowledge of me and my character. Had they requested an API (even just a character API) they would have seen that Esteban received a significant amount of ISK from Keera Erquilenne, and quick google or killboard search would have shown her primary occupation, which in turn should have raised quite a lot of suspicion. Even a superficial interview might have prevented me from joining, as I am a terrible liar and did not prep for that at all. Essentially handing CEOs a tool to completely remove the danger of being awoxed is (another) step towards protecting those who cannot be bothered to protect themselves. This is, in my opinion, not desirable, because I would much rather see rewards for diligent CEOs and recruiters than a removing a threat to incompetent people. As many people have stated before, leading a corp is a privilege, not a right – and if people do not pay attention, they should pay the price for their laziness and not be protected.

Keera goes on a Safari

I have mentioned on several occasions that a significant part of both my EVE experience and my views on issues like piracy, awoxing and ganking (all the good stuff, so to speak) have been shaped by the stories of people like Psychotic Monk, Haedonism Bot and James 315. These stories of anarchy, chaos and mayhem made me the player I am today. With the recent changes to game mechanics, awoxing is likely to disappear from New Eden, and I wanted to try my hand at this great art (and it is nothing less than that) at least once. I am neither the prolific writer nor the skilled player that people like Monk, Bot or James are, but if you are into this kind of stuff and you have got a few minutes to spare, my story might just entertain you anyway.

Just in case you have not yet read about the exploits of the people I just mentioned, I hereby command you to grab yourselves a nice hot cup of tea and go read THIS, THIS, THIS and of course THIS. I’ll see you in a few hours.

The quest for my own Awox-Experience began a few weeks ago, when I decided that one of my scouts, Esteban en Bauldry (yes, another generic surname that shows my complete lack of creativity – I usually come up with witty names about a week after character creation) would be developed into a one-month combat pilot. 

I trained some of the basic skills needed to cause a fair bit of destruction, prepared myself a lovely little Thorax and skimmed through the corp ads in the ingame browser. I found quite a few groups that seemed promising and threw in a bunch of cold applications (because I am a lazy fuck and did not want to deal with any recruitment channel stupidity). To my surprise and horror, four of the five corps I applied to offered me an invitation without speaking to me even once.  

I eventually joined up with a small German industrial corp called Hobel Dynamics Inc. (which is a pretty awesome name for an indy corp, at least compared to your usual array of silly corpnames) and moved Esteban to their home system of Jel. At the same time, I also moved my logi in the area, although calling that char logi might be an overstatement, it’s just my industrial guy with a week’s worth of logi skills.

Because I felt that I was still lacking some firepower I thought it best to train up a few more drone skills before starting the proper safari, so I played the newb for a while (which is not really that hard for me, to be honest) and collected as much intel as possible. I knew that there were two Orca pilots with one Orca each in corp, but as one pilot had significantly better support skills, he was usually in charge of providing boosts and collecting ore with the Orca. Sadly, the guy was keeping his Orca-piloting alt in an NPC-Corp and thus made my job a whole lot more difficult.

In a rather bizarre turn of events, I logged in one day to see my wallet fattened up by 50 Million ISK. I asked the CEO (who was also the secondary Orca pilot) about that and he told me that the money was payment for my participation in a mining op a few days earlier.  Well, that was nice. Especially since I was there for about 20 minutes and spent most of that time scanning ships and noting down fittings. Not a single shot fired, and already 50mil ahead – things were not going too badly, but I still wanted to blow up something big and shiny.

I stuck around for a while hoping for the best, but soon realized that there was no way to get my dirty little paws on that out-of-corp Orca without causing too much suspicion. So I figured that I might just as well burn everything else. 

There were only four people on (neither the Orca pilot nor his alt not among them), but I knew that one guy was slaving away in the belts with a Procurer, so I fired up a Venture and joined him, hoping to start a little impromptu mining op and at least lure out the CEO in his Hulk. I almost didn’t believe my eyes when I read that the CEO was about to go semi-afk, but wanted to park his Orca in the belt to make it easier for us.

Jackpot.

I tried to keep my cool, mining for a few minutes before docking up and hopping in the trusty Thorax. Before I undocked again, I grabbed a handful of ore (about 30Mil ISK, thank you very much) from the corp hangar and confiscated all the equipment I could get my hands on.

Once I hit that undock button I became nervous as hell. I was about to go through with my first awox, stab a corp member in the back and destroy a huge ship. Needless to say, I was as giddy as a fourteen year old about to reach under a girl’s sweater for the first time. 

I warped directly to the Orca and chaos began to spread immediately. Being the eternal noob that I am, I got a little overwhelmed with all of the things going on and completely forgot about the Procurer, but meh. I locked, scrammed and attacked the Orca, dropped fleet and fleeted up with logi to get him into position and start repping the Thorax (drones were eating through my virtually unskilled defense pretty quickly). 

This was the point I realized that it might be a good idea to launch my own drones, so I did just that, being a total pro and all.

With the Orca going down (slowly, but actually not as slow as I had expected) I began negotiations, as any good pirate would.

please note, the original conversation happened in German, I did my best to provide a somewhat accurate translation:

Hobel Eseth > ???

Michael KekZ > ey#

Hobel Eseth > what’s going on?

Esteban en Bauldry > awox, sorry

Hobel Eseth > awox?

Hobel Eseth > what are you doing?

Esteban en Bauldry > I am asking what your Orca is worth to you

Hobel Eseth > why ?

Hobel Eseth > please stop

Esteban en Bauldry > 500mil

Hobel Eseth > come on, please stop

Hobel Eseth > ok 500 mill

Click here for full transcript (German)

I was expected that awesome blink on the wallet icon, but sadly it did not come. Hobel played the old “I don’t have that kind of money right now” and his corpmate was trying to drum up help in everybody’s favorite cesspool, the Antiganking channel. 

Click here to read all about that.

As Hobel did not want to play along any further and initiated his Orca’s self-destruction mechanism, I began throwing some more Antimatter charges at him and soon got this juicy beauty of a killmail:

There you have it, my first awox and my first Orca kill.

It is not much, and I didn’t even get any ransoms (which I could have used, being space-poor and all), but it was an incredible experience for me.

I dedicate this kill and the whole operation to the following awesome people:

• James 315 and all the great folks in the New Order and associated groups, for accepting me into their community and teaching me so much.
• Psychotic Monk, Floppie and all those other Belligerent Undesirables, who were my motivation to do this kind of stuff.
• Haedonism Bot, for writing great guides for newbies.

Next time: How my derpness brought an end to this safari, how I fail at my second attempt and what I learned about awoxing.

Bot-aspirant behavior…and a step beyond (plus: much derp by Keera)

As everyone should already know by now, the New Order of Highsec actively fights not only actual botting, but also bot-aspirant behavior. Some people might argue about the exact definition of this term, but I think we can all agree that many miners behave not totally unlike bots. 

Here, however, I encountered a particular interesting example.

And I screwed up a lot. But that’s par for the course.

I found an ill-fitted and unlicensed Retriever violating both the Code and the asteroids in the belts around Scheenins V and decided that I needed to step in and protect these beautiful  natural Veldspar deposits from being completely drained by this careless poacher. I felt like using the scan-down and warp-in technique on that particular day, so I had my scout bookmark the location and transfer the BM to Keera via direct trade in station.

I had fitted a couple of Cats the night before, so I grabbed a random ship and undocked, ready to pounce upon my prey. It was a few seconds later that I realized that I had forgotten to repair some of those Light Neutron IIs that I had looted from previous ganks. Derp. 

The red bar around my guns indicated that they might not survive another overheating, and having your guns shut down mid-gank is among the most embarrassing things that can happen. Docking back up right away seemed a bad idea since there was a lot of whiteknighting going on, so I warped to instaundock and back, repped my guns and tried to play it cool.

With blasters in pristine condition I undocked once again and warped to my staging point near the belts (in order to minimize warp distance to the actual target). At this point it dawned on me that I was missing something. Something quite important for this operation. I had left the bookmark of the target’s location in station. Herpaderp.

While Keera once again docked at station (waving to the fans outside) to retrieve the bookmark, my scout made sure that the location was still up to date (it was). Before I undocked for the third time, I triple checked that I had the BM transferred to the location tab and once again tried to repair my ship (just because). This time, things went smoothly and the Retriever was soon disposed of.

Nothing outof the ordinary here. Just an untanked Retriever. There are many like it, but this one is definitely not mine.

                           

Things got interesting once the miner began begging in local. 

Surprisingly, he did not beg anybody to shoot me or to pay for his losses like I have gotten used to. Instead, he begged the good people of Scheenins to trade him 2 MTUs via direct trade and offered 14mil worth of Plagioclase in exchange. 

This, of course, raised more than a few eyebrows.  The miner soon explained that he had a negative ISK balance and therefore could neither sell his ore (because he couldn’t pay the sales tax) nor create any contracts (due to the fee). For those who do not know, a negative ISK balance (basically being in debt) is a common consequence of breaking the rules of the game, it is used as a form of punishment by CCP.

This is, by the way, something that pirates, gankers and all other folk of so called ill-repute do NOT do. We operate strictly within the rules set by CCP. We may not like all of those rules, and we may not always appreciate changes made to them, but we adapt. We may break a social convention here and there, but we do not break rules.

Our miner here, however, has done so at one point. When people in local inquired about the nature of his offense, the miner made some vague comments about “mining like a bot” and “third party tools”. 

[ 2015.02.07 22:10:57 ] Miles FromHome > Fined by CCP
[ 2015.02.07 22:11:05 ] Kim Peek > for being an uber shitbird?
[ 2015.02.07 22:11:21 ] Miles FromHome > No for mining like a robot
[...]
[ 2015.02.07 22:11:52 ] Miles FromHome > Macro's / bots that's their reason and they banned me for 30 days too

It became rather obvious that I had just ganked a person who had very likely been botting at some point of his career.  feelsgoodman.

Even one of the resident whiteknights, who had actually spent quite some time station-camping me in an attempt to save those miners from teh eveel Keera, could not accept this behavior.

[ 2015.02.07 22:15:33 ] Kim Peek > Keera Erquilenne if you gank this guy you deserve a promotion
[ 2015.02.07 22:15:41 ] Keera Erquilenne > just did
[ 2015.02.07 22:15:45 ] Kim Peek > lol

I think that the miner should have thanked me for decommissioning his Retriever and saving him from sliding further down that slippery slope of bot aspirancy  he was on. I gave him a fair warning and the chance to purchase a permit and to remain at the keyboard while mining, so nobody can ever accuse him of breaking the rules of the Code or the game itself.

By the way, he did eventually get his two MTUs – for free. So don’t say I never do anything nice around here.

Things we learned today:

• Make sure you have everything prepped before you undock. Don’t derp
• Don’t break the rules of the game. Don’t bot, don’t use any third party tools.
• It is a common misconception that I am evil incarnate