Crime & Punishment

I'll preface this by saying that this is a pretty basic guide. Most of the dudes that already do this sort of thing won't learn anything here. This is meant for the budding young ******* who is just finding his feet.

So you've decced some corp, either because you've taken a dislike to some organization specifically or you were just looking for a dec and they crossed your field of vision at the right time. I'll assume you've already chased them into station once or twice and they've shown you that they're completely unwilling to fight you, since nobody actually defends themselves in a war any more.

So you're going to have to begin hunting and ganking, instead of wandering around spoiling for a fight. I've seen some up-and-coming young outfits just blunder around space, hoping to find something, and derping around in system when they do, giving their victim the chance to warp to station if they've even got the same basic situational awareness as room temperature saliva.

Here's a quick step-by-step.

1) Make the list.

You want to make a list of everyone you're at war with and add them as contacts. Not the corps. The individual pilots. Yes. All of them. I don't care if there's 300 of them. Your contacts list tops out at 1024. If you want to make the explosions, this is legwork you must do.

Don't notify them. It doesn't scare anybody. It just makes you look foolish. Let them think you might not know who they are.

If you're lucky enough to be in Marmite Collective or a close friend of the alliance, you might have access to a tool that makes the list automagically, but otherwise you'll have to go to www.evewho.com. The good news is that if you open it in the in-game browser, there's a little asterisk beside each name that allows you to add them from there.

If, for some reason evewho is down or you're just really masochistically old-school, you can try and comb through all the public killboards and also look for names in corp descriptions or whatnot. Don't do this, though. Incidentally, this used to be one of the main purposes of getting a spy into the enemy corp beforehand.

2) Run some locates.

If you're a recovered carebear, you may have the standing to run locator agents. These are agents that will find people for you. Level 3s will find someone anywhere in known space in eight minutes. Level 4s take four minutes. You can use http://eve-agents.com/ to figure out where your locator agents are.

If, like me, you refuse to shoot plusses, you'll probably have to pay someone to do it for you. Go hit Locates Are Us. It's a chat channel. They run locates for 5m each. That **** can add up, though, so if you build a decent relationship with someone, try to angle for a frequent flyer discount. (I'm not joking. When forced to pay for locates I've spent more on locates than I did to dec the alliance. That **** adds up. Also a good way to make some bux if you've got the standings.)

Any time you feel like going hunting, look at your war targets who are online (hence the list) and run some locates.

3) Get an alt.

Those who are just new or have recently come from an MMO where you didn't need multiple characters to be successful may balk at this. You might protest that you're not willing to pay an additional fifteen bucks a month on this ****** game. That's okay. 51 day alts are literally free. And I don't mean figuratively literally. I mean literally literally.

The purpose of the alt is to find your target for you. Skunks don't generally move out of our large piles of 1928 hundred dollar bills and dismembered whores with our mains until someone has eyes on the target with an alt. There's just no reason to present more opportunity for someone to **** it up unless you think you can actually get a fight out of it.

The alt, in an ideal world, would have a set of probes and a covert ops cloaking device. Dumb alts work for finding the system a dude is in, but in order to get a good warp in on that Navy Raven who thought moving 12 jumps was clever, you pretty much need a covops dude.

I didnt learn anything.

Better option : get an alt with suppressed targeting + ship scanner (even a cargo scanner if you want to use the good hardeners, but remember that this one is noticeable).

You already won the fight even before getting in the system. Good job little pirate !

Or a friend who isn't in your corp. Which probably means that'll be his alt.

So... yeah. Unless you feel like showing red way earlier than you should and scaring them off.

Awesome advice for new war deccers. I never understood why I see 3-10 guys camping a station the minute the war starts.

No finesse, your not going to get targets to undock unless they want a fight. And when a target appears to want to fight. Prepare to be outnumbered.

Another thing is never show up the minute the war starts. Targets are more alert at that point in time. You might get lucky but you need a special type of stupid for that.

Oh hey, I was working on something like this, too. Leave it to Monk to beat me to the punch. Good info.

As for getting an alt: the reason for that is, not many people are going to be willing to be your scanning b*tch for very long. Now if you're running in a group, maybe you can each build a neutral scanning alt...it takes about 3 million SP to get a covops pilot with good scanning skills. That way people can rotate through being the scanner however your group sees fit.

Patience: This is the biggest difference between people who get kills, and people who stare at stations. Some people just blunder right into a system and start looking for something to shoot. Of course that means your targets are all docking up while you're randomly warping about looking for them. Then they'll only undock in shuttles or rookie ships, or play station games with you while they call in help. I've seriously had a scout on an enemy Hulk when two guys from another wardec jumped into the system and warped to the corp's home station to start camping. They had no idea the hulk was there until they saw it dock.

I usually hold two jumps out. If I'm in a well-traveled route of systems, I'll look for a way to get just off it so that a travelling corpmate doesn't notice me. I only move into position when I've got my target located on scan.

One thing Monk doesn't cover is knowing the terrain. As you move around hunting targets, you'll run through the same systems over and over. You need to get to know these main routes, and use http://evemaps.dotlan.net to help you navigate.