EVE General Discussion

The two massive holes in your logic (if your drivel can even be called that) are:

1. That the gankers destroy all mining, industrial, mission and ganking (???) ships, instead of just the ones that are improperly fit and/or being flown by imbeciles.

2. That the players piloting said ships will certainly leave if their ships get destroyed. If ship destruction leads to quitting in absolutely every case, then each and every subscription can't be viewed as anything more than temporary, because it is nigh impossible to play this game and not be destroyed at some point.

Yet this game has grown from a few thousand subscribers (and a time when space was indeed much less safe), to what it is today; an overpopulated cesspool of cowardly, over-entitled, self-proclaimed sperglords.

VC is whoever brings the most 'content' I think.

Learn of the dangers of your new world and master them, don't snivel until daddy makes them stop kicking sand at you.

According to the official statistics released this week by CCP Diagoras, the volume of ore mined in highsec has dropped by a staggering 45.53%. Nearly half of all highsec mining has been wiped out, thanks to coordinated anti-highsec mining operations (most prominently Hulkageddon V), and the extraordinary shift in public opinion about highsec mining. You can read CCP Diagoras' tweet here.

If we were to believe the conventional wisdom among the carebears and the pseudointellectuals of Market Discussions, highsec mining is too vast and pervasive to stop. Prior to the latest round of Hulkageddon, they confidently predicted that gankers wouldn't put a dent in the amount of mining. They were wrong.

Miners have been slaughtered by the thousands, but that's not all. Anti-mining operations are primarily instruments of terror. While thousands of miners died, more importantly, thousands more miners have given up mining. Ordinarily we wouldn't be able to quantify the effect of the latter, and the carebear apologists would be free, in their ignorance, to keep crowing about the absence of any impact. But thanks to CCP Diagoras, we can make our enemies eat crow instead.

I know there are some skeptics who will grasp to the straws of any alternate explanation, so I'll provide a preemptive debunking service here. The mining of ore in highsec did not decline during the measured period due to a drop in botting. Over the relevant period, there was no mass-banning of bots by CCP. Quite the opposite, in fact. My own observations, corroborated by the dedicated bot-watchers in Crime & Punishment, have actually seen a proportionate increase in botting of late; a new network of easily-identified botters is crawling over the belts in highsec as we speak.

What's happened is that the human miners, unlike the bots, became aware of Hulkageddon and have ceased mining. When humans abandoned the belts, the bots became a larger percentage of those left behind, and they stand out more. For example, a new type of ice-mining bot, very common today, flocks in the ice fields. They use an identical ship name scheme (a space before the ship name, easy to spot groups of them using your D-scanner), and they warp out one-by-one if you lock them. I have cleared out entire ice fields with a frigate just by locking up the bots, because there are no humans left mining there.

The drop in mining has been disproportionately--perhaps entirely--caused by a decline in the number of human miners, not bots. Thus, the decrease in mining among humans in highsec is greater than 45.53%. We don't have official statistics on what percentage of the total mining in highsec is done by bots, but by all accounts it's a hefty amount. Therefore, this is the bottom line:

The majority of human highsec miners have quit mining.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a Manifesto II in which I called upon the people of EVE to put a stop to all mining in highsec. Most people probably thought it was crazy to even consider such a thing possible. Not anymore. We're already more than halfway there!

Granted, some miners will return to the belts once Hulkageddon ends. But many will not. Having been forced to adapt and try out other professions, and having found them more rewarding, they will leave mining for good. As the miners' numbers diminish, so does their power and influence over CCP.

As for the gankers, their numbers are growing rapidly. Each day, more and more pilots are getting hooked on ganking. They see the miners for what they are: targets. And they will prey upon an ever-decreasing number of carebears.

In light of these facts, we must now realize that the extinction of highsec mining is not just an impossible dream anymore. It's something that we, as the EVE community, can realistically accomplish together. If you have not yet committed to the fight against the carebears, then I encourage you to join us now. This is your chance. Kill some highsec miners before they're all gone!

- 315

Uh, we have something called "passive targeters" and "ship scanners." No, really! Come on, you can't not believe me; just look in the market for yourself!

Well, enjoy losing your Drake to CONCORD for the satisfaction of killing a rookie ship that the guy will just get another copy of when he docks at the closest station.

And when I play CoD, I'll shoot at the enemy's leg to get him down to low health, after which I'll stop shooting and offer him to surrender. In a nice game of ball, I'll aim my shots to only go near the basket/goal/hole, and then tell the opposing team that they need to play better.

We wouldn't want to hurt anyone's feelings in a competitive gaming environment, would we now? Scoring a goal in soccer (football to the European barbarians) might make the opposing team stop playing, and then no one will play soccer anymore. :(

There's a difference between not being able to afford expensive fittings, and not being able to rub two brain cells together to fit properly. Also, where the hell do you get off calling Hulk pilots new players? New players don't fly 250+ million ships.

So what we are doing in this post is comparing Hulkageddon, an event in a video game, with real torture?