Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

The Orca that broke Burn Jita

The poster of Burn Jita featured zombies swarming for a freighter. The whole event was announced as "no one is safe" and "we kill whoever we want". A proof that Goons can do anything and no tank, reps or Concord can stop them. The pubbies are powerless against the might of the swarm.

I named my Orca "Pathetic Goons" and set it orbiting the Perimeter gate in Jita system. Outside of the time when I was on an alt or transported 10B+ in my Tengu, I was at the gate, usually AFK, sometimes taunting Goons. From Friday downtime to Monday morning, about 21 hours a day. You guessed it: I still have that Orca. The unstoppable menace of Goons who "burn everything just because they can" didn't have time during the whole event to gank me. Their response to belittling them on local and humiliating their FCs was limited to writing "fofofofo" to local and cheering when I logged to an alt, clearly in fear. Note: only an idiot would log an Orca to save it as its hardeners and DCII stops cycling, cutting its EHP to 1/3.

What does it tell us: the infamous Burn Jita was nothing more than being schoolyard bullies, picking on the weak. Several troll freighter pilots reported that they were invited to tear harvesting channel to make them cry. I'm sure many dumb people provided them tears. Luckily more and more took on the task of trolling Goons: These freighters shown unscannable double-wrapped packages on scan. Such thing usually hide valuable goods, so Goons jumped on and expected tears over the lost assets. Instead they got the troll items and laughter. They knew that they can't make me cry by ganking my insured Orca, so they left me. Like all schoolyard bullies, they moved along when someone didn't show fear.

The funniest thing is that you can recoup even the difference between ship cost and insurance by selling your kill rights. It doesn't matter who pays the 10-20M for the right, you get money. Do you remember the moron from yesterday who got Concorded in a Proteus? He didn't get any smarter, as his new Proteus died with so many different people on it that can only happened by going suspect, most probably by someone activating a kill right.

My Orca and the troll freighters couldn't stop them bullying dumb people, who didn't know what's going on. But they shown that Goons can't do whatever they want. They can only pick on the weak and can't hurt anyone else. No matter how many they are, if you are not completely ignorant and poor (morons and slackers) you have nothing to fear from them. They won't even try to beat you.

Now Goons will start their propaganda machine, making themselves believe that those who laughed into their face are an anomaly and since the rest cried, "we can still do whatever we want to pubbies". Their leaders see that their hard counter was created and tested, but can't tell it to the plebs without accepting defeat. So they'll have hard time not to have a Burn Jita next year. But the "highsec pubbies" reading this blog know the hard counter and will drown the next Burn Jita into troll haulers.

Final note: the suicide gankers limit the profitability of large hauling organizations like Red Frog by forcing them to only haul 1B, regardless of size. They could increase it to 2B by driving insured freighters with 2x double-wrapped nothing into the usual ganker heavens until gankers stop attacking them. From there, they can haul 2x double wrapped cargoes. After the gankers got burnt with troll freighters, they will leave the unscannable ones alone to avoid getting yet another civilian miner!

24 comments:

Dunamis said...

Nicely done Gevlon.
However, I didn't expect the Goons to attack you at all for the most part this weekend, as you're a known opponent to them and had already declared that you were going to be there trolling them.

What surprises me though, is that they didn't even throw themselves at you as the event finished. One last ditch effort with the last of their ships to save face and prove their point that they can still kill you just for the sake of it - but it never happened.

Would love to hear the Goon rationale behind that one. :)

maxim said...

Well, the Goon rationale is obvious. Why try to harvest tears if there are none to be harvested? He is "not target audience" for our "content".

The bigger question is, indeed, what happens if Gevlon manages to destroy all of Good "target audience" by converting it into "no target audience".

Anonymous said...

that are no troll freighters. that are bait contracts with high colleteral. Even me created some.
Its more like scamming.

Dunamis said...

Haha, true maxim.
Should that day ever come, maybe Goons would say what they always say, "we didn't want to Burn Jita anyway". :D

I just find it amusing that they brag about killing whoever they want, and yet the person taunting them and painting himself with the biggest target is left alone. To me, it just reinforces what Gevlon's been saying all along.

And yet, if I were in that position and wanted to prove a point with no real care about my loses (which is what the Goons seem to claim), I would have shot him down to show that I "could kill anyone". I mean, they were killing practically empty Orcas anyway; why not one more?
Yet they still didn't do it.

This is where I think they have faulty logic.
If the Goons only find it fun when they blow up people who get upset, and so will only shoot those, then they can't claim that they'll kill whoever they want. Gevlon put this to the test and proved it.
Likewise, if they shoot whoever they want indiscriminately, then they catch the trolls and be laughed at, and that's not fun for the Goons, so they don't.

It's hypocritical and, quite simply, a bit pathetic. If they going to wage war on traders for a weekend, they could at least do it properly.
Instead, Burn Jita appears to be just a day out to the zoo for the Goons - they're not really there to disrupt things; they seem to be there just to pad their killboards with kills. It seems it's not about efficiency, but rather getting the big numbers. Upsetting a few M&S is just the icing on the cake.

Babar said...

Dunamis: The "Goons brag about being able to kill whoever the want" is a narrative created by Gevlon, and you're playing right into it. Can you find a source where Powers, Warr Akini or Mittens have said something like this?

You're putting words into someone else, and then claiming that they are hypocritical.

Anonymous said...

I think Dunamis just put it perfectly to the point.

Gevlon, Mission accomplished.

Goon propaganda will probably no longer work as well as before as it can clearly be dposed of as "Urban Myth". No evidence base behind it.
Apparently there is something brewing in deep Goon territory...

Their rep of invincibility seems to be crumbling down...

Lucas Kell said...

@Dunamis
"Should that day ever come, maybe Goons would say what they always say, "we didn't want to Burn Jita anyway""
Actually, they'll just continue to gank. Even if by magic every idiot managed to fly an empty troll freighter, that's still more of a loss to the target than it is to the goons, and it still means that goods aren't being flown in or out, accomplishing the same goals. That said, idiots will always exists, so we'll continue to get paid for Jita passes and continue to gank multiple billions of isk in cargo.

"I just find it amusing that they brag about killing whoever they want, and yet the person taunting them and painting himself with the biggest target is left alone. To me, it just reinforces what Gevlon's been saying all along."
Why would they attack him? What do they have to prove? If people want to see that and assume that means they can't kill targets, then they'll fly through Jita providing yet more targets. He didn't get shot down because nobody cares that he exists.

"And yet, if I were in that position and wanted to prove a point with no real care about my loses (which is what the Goons seem to claim), I would have shot him down to show that I "could kill anyone". I mean, they were killing practically empty Orcas anyway; why not one more?"
And so you would have wasted time on obvious bait, then we'd still be back here with basically the same posts but with opposed reasoning, talking about how he baited goons into a kill. Either way, he was going to post up about how he "won", so killing or not killing him was irrelevant.

@Anonymous
"Goon propaganda will probably no longer work as well as before as it can clearly be dposed of as "Urban Myth". No evidence base behind it."
So you are saying that following this, when we announce next years Burn Jita event, nobody will take it seriously because we're oh so pathetic?
Sweet, thanks. Even more targets.

"Their rep of invincibility seems to be crumbling down..."
What rep? You realise that's something that the dumbest of the dumb people made up right? I doubt you'll find a quote anywhere of a goon claiming to be invincible, but feel free to try.

Anonymous said...

This 2012 article, which quotes goon members, tends to suggest that in 2012, "burn Jita" was thought up to provide market manipulation to the advantage of the goons.
If that truly was why it was originally implemented (there may have been a different reason) by the goons, then 2014 for them has been a failure compared to the goals they set themselves in 2012.
For goon reference quotes see;

http://www.pcgamer.com/uk/2012/04/28/nowhere-is-safe-in-eve-online-as-goonswarm-suicide-bombs-galactic-trade-hub/#null

Gevlon said...

@Lucas: you can't have it both ways. Either
- Every kill is a win: this case not killing my Orca is a failure
- Killing baits is waste of time: this case enough troll freighters can destroy Burn Jita

Unknown said...

@Gevlon
The strong part of Lucas' argument is that as long as they are able to cause speculative swings by Burn Jita - and profit off those swings enough to cover all lost materiel and then some - they have a reason to do it that is not directly tied to tears, thus a way to deny your logic.

You seem to be of the opinion that harvesting tears is the thing that keeps people logging in as Goons, thus no matter what they say failing to harvest tears is a loss, because people lose their reason to log in as Goons. I understand (and actually sort of agree), but the basis for it seems to be more of a gut feeling and is a really hard thing to prove.

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon: even if Goons accepted your premise that every missed opportunity to kill was somehow a failure, not killing you would only represent one failure, weighed against hundreds of successes during the burn Jita campaign.

Thus, by any objective measure, burn Jita was successful. Failure to kill one target is not a failure of the campaign.

Of course, many of us would reject that premise entirely - and point to other more tangible victory conditions. It is known to be impossible to kill everything entering or leaving Jita - that obviously isn't the goal. The goal was to cause widespread disruption and again, by any objective measure, that was a success.

You are the only person I can see who is trying to make out that killing everything was the Goon's stated intention. Nowhere in any public or leaked broadcast from any official or non-official goon spokesman was this stated to be the goal - so the entire argument, and your entire post, are moot points. Burn Jita was successful and your attempts to disrupt it were at best impotent.

Lucas Kell said...

@Gevlon
Wrong. Just because every kill is a win, doesn't mean every possible kill ignored is a failure. Plenty of people were ignored for better targets. But no matter what way it went, you would be spinning it as a victory, since that's what you do. Hardly the behaviour of a rational person.

You've done the math yourself, even troll freighters lose isk when killed, so trolls can't troll without taking a hit themselves, which most people aren't willing to take. And the only way troll freighters could be enough of the total kills to even remotely matter would be for nobody with a non-troll freighter to go into or out of Jita, in which case mission accomplished anyway. Honestly, there are ways to heavily damage Burn Jita, but smacktalking and trolling in local from an empty ship is not one of them.

Kate 'On said...

Whoever thinks this affects the market has a short memory. Last year it was calculated, and this surges the prices of catalysts and their mods... sleightly, and only around Jita, and only for the first day, maybe second.

Honestly, in order to move the market at this point you need a PL N3 level cap whelp, and even then, it lasts only a week

Anonymous said...

"Whoever thinks this affects the market has a short memory. Last year it was calculated, and this surges the prices of catalysts and their mods... sleightly, and only around Jita, and only for the first day, maybe second.

Honestly, in order to move the market at this point you need a PL N3 level cap whelp, and even then, it lasts only a week"

same happened this time? I did profits. not like last year, but still it was like 40-70%profits.

The "issue" was that goons were very well prepared and handed out free catalysts to their members. Also they rarely used brutix and tornados.

Unknown said...

@Kate_On
Even a relatively small increase in price may constitute a very large increase in profit margins. Especially so for trading and speculation.

Unless we somehow get access on exact details of Goon speculative activities around Burn Jita we can't say they didn't profit from it.

Lucas Kell said...

That's a pretty slim view of the market. Things move in and out of there daily, and shrinking the ability for ships to move in and out freely squeezes segments of the market. If you've done your research and pre-empted the spikes, you can grab a lot of profit in a short time. It's not an obvious 300% spike like smashing ice or anything, it's all in smaller margins spread out over a range of products.

A lot of peoples problems is they look at gank ships and freighters and assume that's it.

Anonymous said...

Goons kill freighters because it's fun, not to make money.

They're so f'ing rich they were handing out free ships to gank with... and then paying SRP on those free ships to their members.

The average goon made money off the deal.

Anonymous said...

@Lucas: you can't have it both ways. Either
- Every kill is a win: this case not killing my Orca is a failure
- Killing baits is waste of time: this case enough troll freighters can destroy Burn Jita

Every worthwhile kill is a win. You claim to understand opportunity cost, but it seems that you only understand it when it suits you. Killing you would have cost us the ability to kill a freighter or JF anywhere from 1.5 to 10+ billion. Why would we waste a GCC for 100-200 people to kill you when we could kill a target thats actually juicy?


We happily killed some empty freighters, or ones with a plastic wrapped damage control. Doing so is better than killing your empty orca. There were always at least some empty freighters around, so we chose those over your empty orca. Additionally, an empty freighter is not necessarily flown by someone who wants us to kill him and has a ton of isk. We would prefer to kill the empty freighter of someone who isnt trying to get us to kill him.


It's all painfully simple

Gevlon said...

Opportunity cost only applies if there is an opportunity. Do you claim that during Burn Jita there wasn't a time window when Goons weren't ganking? Because my Orca was always there.

Anyway, when I have the database, I'll make a timeline with Freighter-Orca kills. If we see constant kills, you are right. If we see hours without a single kill, you are wrong.

Anonymous said...

Whatever their goal is, the fact remains they killed a load of freighters with cheap catalysts. We took some shots at empty pods, in the end they killed the freighter marked for a kill.

So I wonder. Those neutral battleships that bump the marked freighters, how many catalysts would it take to kill one of those? Can't say a faction battleship is cheap.

Andreas Moog said...

The bumping typhoons have around 20-25k ehp, the typical Machariel is at 35-40k. Very very easy to gank, yet the few people who tried failed hilariously.

Arrendis said...

Anyway, when I have the database, I'll make a timeline with Freighter-Orca kills. If we see constant kills, you are right. If we see hours without a single kill, you are wrong.

Remember to include the kills in all of the systems surrounding Jita as well - we had fleets moving across the gates quite freely.

Also, as a minor point, if you're going to say that Goons are harvesting tears, and you obviously wanted them to attack you, then let's face it, it's a lot funnier to us if we more or less ignore you - which, other than I think one attempt by Boat because he's Boat, is more or less what happened, no?

Frankly, Gevlon, your orca simply wasn't and more relevant than Boat losing a covops was. Which is to say, not at all.

Anonymous said...

Hard to tell who's on the wining side.

Goons will have it both ways by claiming the event is a success because they had fun (no way to actually make sure of that).

Gevlon will have it both ways by setting up a trap and then either claiming he managed to make Goons fall into it or that their event was a failure because they refused the bait.

Turns out Goons can destroy noobs/idiots, even in highsec.
I don't know if that's something to be proud of.
I'm pretty sure even some noobs manage to do that on more idiot noobs, without the help of the Goon propaganda machine or its limitless ISKs reserve.

Anonymous said...

Actually, There's little evidence that Burn jita was conceived as a method of market manipulation.
There *is* considerable evidence that it was put in place by Mittens as a statement of "Hey, I don't really care about the ban I was just handed for being a d*** on live TV - I am still relevant - see?" It served the double-purpose of focussing all his goon-drones' "thoughts" on preparing for something in his absence so they didn't (heaven forbid) start to think for themselves about the way they're being used by their "leadership".