I’ve recently decided to firmly cement my Eve-addiction by acquiring another character for use in various schemes and general mischief. While he’s languishing in an NPC corp until I find a suitable home for him, I couldn’t resist kicking things off right:

…its the little things ;).

o7

-Aiden

Infiltration alts come in two flavors: active and passive. The active ones are the toons you grind time with, work your way into a corps trust with, achieve director rights with, and eventually eviscerate corp-wide isk and assets with. Active infiltration alts can take a lot of time and energy, but with the right mind-set can obviously seriously pay off.

Passive alts though, can almost be more fun (if they work that is), with the sheer lack of effort it can take to achieve similar end results; call it the lazy-man’s con if you want, or the slacker-heist maybe.

Over the past 6 months or so, I’ve had one such passive alt parked in a mining corp and I just managed to walk away, UN-burned and UN-suspected, with about 750mil isk.

This alt had:

• no skills trained. At all.
• no special roles
• no active rights
• no friends in corp
• zero participation in corp activities
• a complete lack of face-time in corp chat or corp forums

Actually, over the course of the past 5 months, I logged this alt in a grand total of 3 times, simply to empty the corporate hanger and log off again. I never even actually left the station where the corporate hanger was located, but every 45 days or so, sure enough, that hanger would be full of un-secured junk and crappy t1 ships prime for the yoinking.

That’s right, the same corp. Three times. Thats just…whats the word?….embarrassing. Completely embarrassing.

I do however feel that I need to emphasize that 90% of what I stole was complete crap. It just happened to be a around 750mil isk worth of complete crap (which is a lot of crap). Among some of my favorite stand-out items of the theft, purely for their total WTF-factor:

• 57 Vigils. No, really.
• 391 salvager I modules. See above.
• 28 Wreathes (tier 1 Minmatar indy). WHY WOULD YOU HAVE THIS.
• A salvage-rigged, armor-buffer Brutix with shield extenders and (wait for it) lazors. My head hurts.

Some of the tastier bits did include 10 Coveters, a shit-ton of salvage materials, and about 200,000 m3 of random high-sec ore. o/

But lets get back to that “un-burned and un-suspected” bit. Today, I decided to log in the alt and see if I could rack up a 4th consecutive theft (I’ve come to think of this corp in crop-harvesting terms). But wait! This is not my house! This is not my beautiful wife! I found myself not in my usual harvester-corp, but in an NPC corp with my mailbox blinking. Figuring the jig was (finally) up, I opened my mailbox full of 200+ corp mails that I’ve never read and found one from the current CEO:

Wut.

Inactivity. Nothing in the way of “every single time you logged in seemed to coincide with us loosing all our crap and terribad fail-ships” or hell, a “hey, who are you, and why have I never seen you in corp, ever?” And if you’re wondering about the censored names, having just walked away scott-free from the piggy bank with 3/4 of a bil, I don’t really see a reason to burn this legitimate looking and incident and burn-free alt now.

So I realize this is in no way an Alliance-crippling, multi-billion isk theft that will rock the foundations of this game, but 750mil isk for doing absolutely nothing? Yes please.

o7,

-Aiden

The weekend treated me well. I picked up a 27″ HDTV as a second monitor for the MBP. Its awfully pretty. :D Over the weekend, I decided to grab a second EVE account just to experience a different perspective (mainly through Caldari eyes) and it has been interesting. I’ve forgotten how much I hate missioning and just how cold and lonely EVE can be. I think that my main will send the alt some starter funds, that newb ship (ibis) is just painful to fly.

The advantages of an alt are incredibly plentiful. For example: I can now either train mining or industry or PI or any number or carebear activities to suppliment my main’s aspirations of doing the dirty work around the universe. On the other hand, I can alway shift my main to training mostly corp related skills and then run my own corp while having the alt play some nasty pirate fun. Hmmm…. thoughts anyone?

Orcas & Alts & Friends, Oh My!

One of the things I love about Eve is its constant evolution. There is no one set strategy that someone learned on day 1 that still beats everything today, because that would have flat-lined the game years ago since by this point, we’d all be using it.

Through expansions, tweaks, nerfs, buffs, etc, the game evolves and changes and you, the player, have to change with it. Other changes however are not direct from Iceland, and are instead a manifestation of change in the actual players and their play-style within the game, which I think is a pretty damn cool concept.

As it pertains to the art of the ninja, especially in the art of “le ganque”, the general perception seems to have arose that there is a necessity in bringing the fight to the mission runner faster and harder. Using sneakier guerilla tactics, the idea is to bait, trap, and destroy your prey before they can either dock up for the next hour or call in 10 rr-ing friends.

Because as much as I hate to even think it, mission-bears have started to get (ugh) smarter. Well, sort of. Perhaps a better description would be more paranoid. A year and a half ago when I first started ninjaing peoples missions, there was still this  confounded, sputtering disbelief from people as to how in the hell you even GOT into their mission, let alone how you were allowed to take their stuff. Today? Its a given: if you run high-level missions out of a major hub like Dodixie, you are GOING to be scanned down by SOMEONE. It’s not an if, its a when, and a larger percentage of the bear population is starting to actually catch on to that concept.

Here’s where the problems occur for your friendly neighborhood ninja. After orbiting and salvaging a few wrecks in some guys mission, our hero finds some tasty meta 4 large guns in a wreck. Yoink! Into the cargohold they go. The mission runner, incensed about this bold theft in front of his very face, locks, and fires at the poor ninja in his frail little Vigil.

Now, the general plan at this point is, warp to station, wait to dock, wait the 30 seconds in station to change ship, undock in gank-ship, warp back to mission, possibly crawl through various gates and rooms to hopefully find that the mission runner is indeed a class-A idiot and is STILL THERE.

The above is the ideal situation, though as anyone who’d done their share of ninjaing before can tell you, it doesn’t always work like this. Even if you’re fast on the dock, change, undock, and warp, there’s still a gaping minute and a half window, at least, where the target can get wise and warp away. Of course, we have our ways of making that aggro stick a littttle bit longer than they’re expecting, but its that initial time-gap thats the problem.

The solution that presented itself about a year ago was, ironically enough, the new carebear fun-mobile, the Orca. It didn’t take too long for most enterprising ninjas (or pirates for that matter) to pick up on the idea that the orca is a perfectly suited high-sec carrier ideal for guerrilla tactics. They can carry any ship BC-sized or smaller in the ship maintenance bay (command ships, T3 cruisers, etc), they can fit and run multiple gang-links at the same time, and they have an on-the-fly fitting service. Why warp all the way to station and wait 30 seconds to change ships when you can warp to an alt or a friend in a fleet-boosting orca, swap ships instantly, and warp back to the mission in under 30 seconds?

They aren’t however, without their flaws, or hiccups. As Paul Clavet at My Loot, Your Tears has already documented, there’s a few unworked-out bugs with the instant ship switching using the Orca. The seriously annoying one is where the ship you’re changing into pops out with all the mods off-lined. This presents a bit of a problem when you’re swapping for pew in font of someone’s face and your point doesn’t turn on. I’ve had other bugs where I board a ship with no cap, or with JUST the guns off-lined. Seriously?

Actually it had never happened to me before a few days ago, when I lost 3 kills in 2 days because of it. First a faction fit Domi when with zero cap and guns off-lined I really couldn’t do much to hurt him, let alone even pin him down. The next day, I managed to get 2 hulks to fire on my shuttle for can-flipping them, and when I switched for the Hurricane, again everything was off-lined. No point = bye bye 2 hulk kills. But, aside from that, having the ability to bring the fight to someone faster, even instantly in some cases, is incredible.

I’ve lucked out with my Orca-readiness, as not only do I have an Orca-capable alt, but it also seems I have some carebear fans of this blog who’ve volunteered to toe the darkside now and again! Its true, there are 2 individuals who shall of course remain nameless who, even though because of their respective roles, reputations, or rules of their own corps can’t really participate in things like ganking, ninjaing, and can flipping, want to at least help out in covert ways. One provided some outstanding RR and fleet-boosting the other day, and the other has volunteered use of their Orca in helping with belt-ganks of rival miners. I have to say, they’ve both been a blast to hang out with, and both would make some pretty damn fine ninjas should they ever decide to come to the dark side.

Another result of the Orca is another adaptation: smaller yet deadlier ships. In the past, the Raven was the king of the gank: its easy to pick damage-types for the mission runner’s resist holes, and also easy to swap out mission-specific hardeners on the fly. However, battleship-class ships don’t fit in the Orca’s ship bay. As a result, more and more are turning towards things like Command Ships and T3’s.

Typically, I’ve been using a massive armor-buffer beast of a Hurricane, with a longer time-line goal of a Sleipnir eventually. However, when I sat down and looked at how easily I could step into a Loki, I decided that that was my more immediate goal; Minmatar Cruiser V here I come.

So, evolution at work. Will CCP nerf the Orca’s ability to basically be a high-sec Carrier/Command Ship? I certainly hope not, but again, change is part of this game, and inevitable, and we the smart and sneaky ones, will adapt.

o7,

-Aiden

image credit: Patric Ayler

Although this character is fairly new (probably due to some mild form of ADHD?) I believe this will be my main. My old “main” was bought off of a corp deal (corp since went under…. RIP ALTRUISM) for 130 mil isk. The character’s name irritates me to no end however, he has more sp then i’d like him to have.. and can fly gallante/caldari bs t2 fitted, freighter, and nowwwww *drum roll* ORCA. SOOO I continue to PLEX him and keep him active. This brings to mind what constitutes the “main” category? Is it simple preference? Skill point total? Anyway, now that the orca is available I believe I can have.. some… fun :d (nooo not a miner, silly pod-people..)

On a side note:
I have been insanely busy with work and uhm real life? But this weekend I should be able to post an update to how Renji San is doing with his skill training.. :D

I’ve created another alt. I won’t say what number alt this is (gotta keep em guessing), but suffice it to say this character is neither Aiden nor the Orca-stealing wunderkinder. For our purposes, lets call him Bob. Bob is about a month old at this point, and currently a member of a fledgling corp that he is coincidentally trying to scam out of some or all of their hard-earned isk. This is what you might call a swiss-army knife “this is my first time making a corp” corp. I mean these guys do it all; mining, pvp, mission-running, industry, research, hauling, grandiose plans for a POS, round-the-world time zone representation, the works! Wow! This sounds like one powerhouse of a corp, except for one small, teeny-tiny, yet glaringly debilitating fact: they have about 7 active members at this point, and that number is dropping. Needless to say, I’m thinking about jumping ship.

Originally, Bob was meant to be a throwaway alt with which to experiment on a few quick scam/infiltration/theft schemes I had. As such, Bob had no skillpoints trained at all. Seeing as I planned on working my schemes using only my wits, quick-thinking, and brilliantly building a false sense of trust and camaraderie, training any REAL skills seemed like a waste of time. However, seeing as I DO get the 100% training bonus on Bob, I decided “what the hey”, I’ll train up my learning skills with the 2x speed bonus so that if I ever do want to use Bob, he’ll be a little quicker on the uptake (plus it’ll help with some screen shots to actually HAVE some skillpoints showing up on a 1 1/2 month old character =/ ). I’m using the standard learning skill ladder found here as described by Tripoli (minus the cybernetic skills and implants), but I’m curious if anyone has any suggestions for using my neural remaps. I’ve never actually used it before, with any character, so I’m a little in the dark about it. Basically, I’m trying to figure out how and when to remap to give little Bob the best (and quickest) schooling possible in terms of learning skills. Any suggestions would be welcomed.

In the meantime, I’ll be looking around a for a new group of suckers….er, corp, and of course, keeping you all posted (in irritatingly vague ways of course). Take it easy. [edit]

o7,

-Aiden

By now, virtually the entire Eve community has heard about what happened the other night in Providence. The CVA alliance was very suddenly and abrubtly disbanded and robbed blind. At first thought to be the work of a Goonswarm mole or disgruntled director in the same fashion in which BoB was taken down, allegations soon followed of account-hacking. *Sigh*, drumroll please! Aaaand que forum-drama, aaaaaaaand ACTION!

In reading the Eve-O forum thread on this, I’ve realized there are multiple arguments about radically different ideas going on here. It’s not as cut and dry as “CVA was disbanded al la BoB from the inside, are you for or against this”. With CCP’s revalation that there is indeed evidence of account hacking, this becomes two distinctly different discussions. Discussion #1 revolves around the issue of corporate espionage and theft, while discussion #2 concerns out-of-game Real Life crime and offense. I’ll address these individually.

Concernng issue 1; I am whole-heartedly supportive of the idea of  Corp infiltration and the like. Actually, I think its one of the more ingenious and unique aspects of Eve. On the above-mentioned forum thread, there seems to be a lot of whining about needing new rules that prevent a single individual from lying and worming their way up to the top of a Corp and then disbanding and/or economically crippling it. The usual weepy carebear complaints ensue: “Whaaa, CCP needs to make new rules against this!!” or “This needs to be addressed! It’s an exploit!” or my all-time personal favorite, “It’s not fair!!”. *Ahem*, to my furry carebear friends out there: you’re right! There should be a rule to prevent this sort of thing from happening to a Corp. But you know, actually, come to think of it…there already IS a rule out there to prevent this! And that rule is “Less Fail”.

Seriously, this is not hard guys. Want a good method of preventing some sneaky prick (read: totally rad and seriously awesome guy I want to be friends with) from breaking into your Corp wallet and assets and robbing you blind? DON’T LET HIM. Even when it comes to huge mega-corps/alliance like CVA, there’s really no need for more than three or four people to have access to anything important. To me this just seems like common sense I guess (albiet “comon sense” and “carebears” are two words that rarely do find themselves at the same party).

Corporate infiltration and gross theft is fascinating to me, and I find myself reading and re-reading the famous ones over and over again. Haargoth and BoB, Guiding Hand Social Club, E.I.B.; these amaze and intruige me. Call it underhanded, spiteful, a dick move…whatever you want. But someone cunning and diabolically sneaky enough to get themselves into a position of power to then abuse it using legal game mechanics is a genius in my book. And if doing that took a long-con approach, I tip my hat even more. That my friends is sociopolitical savvy at it’s finest. Let’s be honest, alts probably make up a quarter of the population of Eve, at least. And not all of them are catalyst-flying mission-salvaging alts with painfully unimaginative names (ie “Mr. Moz” and his super-secret salvaging alt, “Mrs. Moz”…Morrissey-references aside, dude…really?) if you get my drift.

The other subject of debate is the idea (edit: now knowledge) that one of CVA’s directors’ account’s was hacked, allegedly by ISK sellers. Now, ok, plausible enough explanation. Account hacking does happen, especially when it comes to creditcard-fishing ISK sellers. Although that said, was this attack targeted specifically at CVA, or did some ISK seller hit the jackpot when they cracked open some random account and found themselves with the keys to the CVA kingdom?

Personally, for the record, I find both isk-buying/selling and account hacking deplorable and deserving of a life-ban from Eve, if not criminal charges. ISK buying/selling because it undermines the entire spirit of the game, and account hacking because it’s taking things a giant step too far. Let’s not forget folks, this here is a GAME, and to push arguements or disagreements into the realm of real life is breaking the fourth wall so to speak. If taking your anger and agresssion out on a character in Eve crosses over into taking anger and agression out  on the actual person behind the character, you’re doing it wrong. Also, you should probably find something better to do with you time than Eve.

TL;DR version:

Ninjas; totally down with spying, infiltration, theft, and generally sneaky and devious behavior. NOT down with acount-hacking, isk buying/selling, and other shit-headed actions that undermine the fact that this is a game we all love.

Keep it sneaky folks.

o7,
-Aiden

Edit: CCP has announced that due to the fact that this WAS a hack, and therefor a breach of legal game-mechanics, the disbanding of the CVA alliance will be reversed. As of downtime tonight, CVA will be returned to active alliance status. Meanwhile, the rest of us can go on not really being phased by the e-melodrama that has and will probably continue to play out in the far corners of 0.0 space that no one really goes to anyways =P.

Sometimes tears come so easy, you don’t even have to really look for them at all. Sometimes, they even find you! Now, as a general rule of thumb, I avoid talking in local chat in Eve. Local tends to be a.) full of spam scammers, b.) full of epeen-waving children, and 3.) completely asinine and fraught with rediculous arguments (ex: “the vexor OWNS the caracal” “no way noob, my caracal will OWN your vexor” “stfu fag! my vexor will pwn the sht out your gay caracal” “lawl take the can then m8, we c who gets there ass kicked”……aaaand you can see where this goes).

But sometimes a random bit of local-stupidity jumps out as so foolish and cringe-worthy that it deserves to be slapped like a red-headed stepchild. The other day was one such occurrence.  I noticed that fellow corp-mate Boomershoot was engaged in a discussion in Dodixie local about scamming. His argument FOR scamming was that really it only takes one sucker for the scammer to make more in one hour than most mission runners make in a month (and I completely agree with him). This prompted a comment from a certain Gods Vessel that scam-money was nothing, and that he easily made 500 billion a month. Now, thems tall words for an 11-month old player, and I felt a need to call him out in local. I mildly insinuated that, short of isk-buying, there is no goddamn way that anyone short of the ceo of a gigantic null-sec moon-mining corp could make 500bil a month. Boomershoot and I and the rest of Dodi local had a nice little laugh as Gods Vessel proceed to talk all about his “main” and how e-powerful he was. I was ready to call it a day when this little doozy popped up in my evemail:

2009.10.27 20:50
shut up u dick if you dont you can explain to ur ceo why uve caused a wardec you cannot handle and you will see exactly what i mean mr ninja if you carry on talking trash to people

Please, please, “Mr. Ninja” is my father, call me Aiden. No but really…lolwut? This, ladies and gents, is what we in the biz like to refer to as a “Fail-Threat”:

“Fail-Threat – noun (fål-thrEt) def. A war-dec threat so absurd and laughable that you are actually embarrassed for the person making it.”

I had to respond:

Dear Sir,
I apologize for making you cry, and would like to offer you this recently laundered hanky as a symbol of my remorse.

With Regards,
-Aiden Mourn

I grinned to myself. Don’t threaten ninjas. You don’t scare us, and we will turn your words around and use them to verbally abuse and emasculate you. Of course, Mr. Vessel wasn’t finished:

2009.10.27 21:01
give it to Velocity Prime he is gonna need it :P

Oh wow. He done gone and looked up our CEO’s name. That’s no easy sleuthing. Its not like its on our corp info or anything. Way to name-drop douche.

Dear Sir,
I can assure you that we at Suddenly Ninjas are at this very moment, shaking in our boots (and please note that I do mean that quite literally). I can also assure you that we take threats of war-decs VERY seriously, and as such, we are fully willing to offer you a large jar for collecting your own tears and sincerely hope that this no-strings-attached gift will settle the matter.

Cordially Yours,
-Aiden Mourn

This was really getting fun now. At this point I was just trying to egg him on and get as much blog-material out of him as I could.

2009.10.27 21:13
well only your corpse will do that and maybe us playing pod roulette with you after we nail ur nubbins candy ass…. c u real soon on my main mr aiden

Hahaha….his “main”. Sir? Mr. Gods Vessel? You weren’t satisfied making an ass of yourself simply with rediculous comments about unimaginable wealth, now you’re going to start pumping up a puff-piece about your big bad “main” character? Let me guess, he’s the founding member of Guiding Hand Social Club AND the BoB director who defected to the Goons, and I bet hes out there taking on a whole chunk of 0.0 solo. Face. Palm.

Dear Sir,
We at Suddenly Ninjas are always open and welcoming when it comes to meeting new people! We also do love us some games (although I’m really more of a blackjack man over pod roulette…lol!), so that does sound like fun! We will be in contact with you shortly to arrange a play-date (any food allergies?). In the meantime, please accept this pink Disney Princess dress as a small token of our affection. We here at SN feel that every little girl deserves a new dress once in a while ;) .

Best Wishes,
-Aiden Mourn

After that I was blocked =(. But man, tears without even leaving station…that was an early Christmas present. And that folks, is the Fail Threat.

o7

-Aiden