Crime & Punishment

I think Marmite is about the only outfit cast in the Orphanage mold that's still operating. Many things about wardec over the last year or so have put a ton of outfits out of business. Some have quit, many are in lowsec, and several are just engaging in shenanigans to get highsec violence without advertising it as a service.

Dec shield isn't a merc group and, while some in it do fight, it doesn't actually fight anybody.

Wardecs became too expensive and most of the wardecs against the big alliances were dropped a long time ago (so they didnt have targets coming 24h/24 in Jita).
Also, The Pitboss went inactive and just came back last week.

This. Without the ability to camp jita 4/4 undock all day and all night the kills stopped flowing in. The costs were prohibitive to keep war decks going against the large null sec alliances. Without thousands of haulers and freighters to pvp with they were forced to look for targets that could actually shoot back. This was far too much danger for these fine high sec war machines to handle.

Beyond all of this though, despite what people say about them, Orphanage in its prime really did get the job done in terms of what they were hired to do. This is the reason people kept hiring them. Beyond any insults of their level of skill, or style of play, they caused serious economic damages to targets they were hired against.

There really was no reason for them to shift into different types of contract work when they had jobs flowing in non stop that allowed them to sit in Jita 24/7.

My big question was always WHY targets kept coming in when they knew full well what was waiting for them when they undocked.

Thank you, and yeah... That wouldn't have even been possible for us now. Ouch.

Silly is a good word for it.

When you talk about null sec alliances you are talking entities that have thousands of members, in some cases several thousand members. They are not all on the same page. They are not all serious pvpers. Many are bears. Even in some heavily pvp oriented alliances bears manage to leach on and avoid pvp ops.

When you get this you discover some salient points over time about some of your alliance mates. While not so common in my current alliance it was far too common in some of my previous ones:

1. Some guys dont read mails, dont read MOTD, dont look at war decs before going to high sec, dont log into comms and log into eve maybe once a month or two.

2. Some corps in your alliance (whatever alliance that may be) never seem to kick any of these guys.

3. Sometimes you fail to notice that a few of these guys have gotten into your own corp and fail to kick them yourself regularly.

4. These folks invariably want to get to high sec market hubs to sell off loot, pick up ships and modules at prices that are not insane, and dont bother looking to see whether they are at war (or think that they can avoid war targets for some reason).

While sad as it is guys like these go out and get killed in Jita. They usually find themselves out of corp shortly after but not always. Not every null sec corp even cares about their kill boards. Not all of them watch daily for loss mails like this. Some do.
In any case it is difficult to communicate with folks who play infrequently and avoid all attempts at communication. Corps that do a better job at it tend to reduce their losses of this kind. The ones that dont (or didnt) tend to get alot of them. In the end it is usually the guy who isnt part of the team who ends up paying the biggest price for it. Losing a jump freighter in jita to war targets is a hard way to learn not to be stupid.

We are still doing fine and went from around 30 active skilled players to around a 100. We also know what we can and cant handle and pick our targets carefully. Getting enough clients from 'merc contracts' channel and a LOT of returning clients. Think 3/4 of our current decs are paid decs and 1/4 fun decs.

The decshield thing helped us a lot too.... providing enough fun wars in between the low number of paid decs we had. This way everyone stayed busy and were enjoying themselves. Silly space.....maybe, but also funny isk place....

Now with the new dec fees....omfg.....we need more skilled players

So far......high sec decs are still doing fine....It just takes some time to keep it all in balance.