Warfare & Tactics

(ISK) efficiency.

You see it on killboards and hear people mention it all the time.

This is how I see it.

In a fight you either loose or you win.
Your alliance either gets the territory or not.
That is a pretty absolute thing. There is no place for "relatives" here.

Why give a sh*t about "isk efficiency", or any kind of efficiency for that matter?

Comparing 2 pilots/corps/alliances with isk efficiency won't give me any really useful information.


Lets say my killboard says I have an efficiency of 30%. That is considered bad among pvpers.
It says I lost more money in my fights then my opponents at the prices the killboard calculates with.
But we don't know who has more money, who makes money faster let alone who cares more about money in the first place, so efficiency is a kinda worthless quotient in my opinion.

Maybe I got more experience/knowledge/fun for my money then my opponents.
Maybe I have way more money then my opponents and I can afford not to think about it and other efficiency matters.


I'm not playing to achieve a certain level represented by a number or to be considered "good" by people.


And in the case of corporations or alliances...

If an alliance can afford to loose 200 hundred ships to get a territory, they won't stop for a second to think "hey, my enemy could get this territory with 150 ships, they are more efficient, I should give it to them without a fight" or something like this.

I bet that no alliance leadership said after loosing their territory, that "Keep your chin up! We were more efficient than the they were".

So why is this efficiency so fashionable?

I'd like to read a lot of thoughts of the more knowledgeable players then me. thanks.

You are looking at it from one perspective only.

Lets say I am a soloer (oh I am!) and I want to fight unrelenting waves of bads (oh thats the majority of EvE).

I can't expect to engage them on any kind of 'fair' or 'even' terms but what I CAN do is engage larger numbers and win by destroying more of their resources than I myself lose.

How do I do this? WINNING THE ISK WAR WHILE BEING SUPER RENEGADE AND ENGAGING LARGER FLEETS OF BADS.

If I jump in like a suicidal maniac and take down a single tech II cruiser in the time it takes them to kill my own BC or whatever then not only have I won on ISK but I have thrown sand in the face of morons that think all PVP combat has to be done with the intention of staying alive & safe. RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

I know I am approaching this from an individuals perspective but not everything in PVP has to be about gaining territory.

Pretty sure unless you kill off their means of making a living, isk destroyed doesn't mean *that* much. You can kill a russians multi-billion isk officer/faction fit tengu and they'll be seen with the same tengu the next day (which isn't exactly a bad thing... )

And here I was thinking Estamel simply changed her name and moved to the drone regions.

Talking Warfare & Tactics specifically here...

It depends on the situation between the two combatants. If one side plans to continue the war for a significant time, and their aims include total decimation of the other side's forces, then ISK efficiency is a fantastic qualifier.

If you are fighting a small gang and they plan to keep harassing you, unless you can get a decent enough ISK efficiency from your fights that you are hurting them more than they are hurting you, then you are losing the war.

If you are the aggressors and only intent to grab a piece of land, or to send a message to the other side, then ISK efficiency is something you can afford to ignore.

tl;dr it depends what each side wants to achieve.

Even if you divided it, it would have issues. For example, BS, etc. on the SC mail with your rifter pal would have their efficiency divided by the rifter's presence, despite it's minimal contribution to the kill.

The inclination then may be to weigh it toward damage done, but that hurts non-damage-dealing utility roles like sceptors.

In the end, it's just a killboard stat and, like all KB stats, holds no real meaning in the actual game. If some alliance crushes some other alliance by winning the ISK war, that will happen regardless of what it looks like is happening on their KBs.

i like killmails for my own record of what ships i do best in etc

Same for my corp and everyone else.

Its not the be all and end all of pvp but it helps way more than it inhibits.

If you dont like them, ignore them no one makes you look at it

Kill mail stats such as isk efficiency don't show who is good. They show who is bad.

If you spend any reasonable amount of time flying through null sec and checking the peoples killboard stats, you'll find that the vast majority of players in null sec are "isk efficient". This does not mean that they are good. They could just fly in 100+man fleets ganking one or two roaming ratters every now and then. However, if someone has poor isk efficiency (less than 1:1) it generally does show that they are 'bad' or inexperienced.

Once you get above a 1:1 ratio, there really is no good metric for evaluating skill imo. A person that solo's often might only have a ratio of 5:1, but a person that only flies in 100+ man fleets could have a ratio of 30:1 even though they never really risked any ships at all. In this case the soloer is probably the much better pvper, but stats won't show that.

On the other hand, the soloer could have gotten all of his kills playing station games with noobs and the fleet pilot could be one of the most competent logi/dictor/recon pilots in the game.

So I'll just say it again. Isk efficiency doesn't show you who is good, it shows you who is bad.

Isk efficiency is just a calculated number and it does not directly tell if player is bad o good pvp:er.

It sure tells something about player or corporation if they have good or lousy isk efficiency.

But to get right answer you have to check other stats too and do some analyzing as whole to tell how things really are.

Usually both sides gets kills and losses on fights, losing fight maybe expected before fight but people want to cause isk losses to enemy before they die, using cheap ships to take down some expensive ones.

For a long run losing expensive stuff may cause problems, for a short term it usually does not matter much.

Lukka.

- -

Now, back to the OP.
War, you see, is about not just tactical victories but strategic victories. On killboards, every so often, you will see people put up campaigns. This records the kills and losses versus an enemy, for an objective or a set time or in a set corner of space. There is also then an ability to calculate the ISK efficiency of said campaign.

For instance, my alliance decided to remove Banderlogs from its rental system. We went in, shot the place up, dealt 120 kills for 2 or so losses (plus a few blues). ISK efficiency 95%. Kill to death ratio, as above. One may call this a success.

SniggWaffe has been trolling us for the past week with a POS in a strategic system that risks throwing our region open to BLOPs gangs, hotdrops and things that make our carebears cry in their picnic baskets. Currently the campaign has seen us destroy their POS and guns, 70-odd ships including their POS-dropping Nomad (luls, farked that up PL) and generally deny them from having an easy time of it. 80% ISK efficiency and a 2.5:1 kill to loss ratio....and ongoing.

At some point, SniggWaffe's PL overlords will get sick of diverting tech goo income towards this operation, and will either front in their supers and whup us, or they will decide that SniggWaffe sucks ass and pull the pin.

An 80% ISK efficiency and a good K:L ratio on our side doesn't mean we will stop them coming and trying, it just means that whoever is paying for the war is going to have to keep digging deeper for longer to fund our GF's.

ISK loss, as pointed out, equates to time or the time-value of money (hence why some killboards track real money equivalence). I killed a 5B Mach + pod the other day - nominally US$100 some russian guy may have spent if he had bought PLEX. Knowing Russians, he probably didn't buy PLEX, so who cares? Well, certainly if he had been ratting like a boss at 50M/hr he spent 100 game hours to afford that ship, which he lost to a Taranis which fell out of a POS in a wormhole 12 months ago. Who won that time-money battle? Me.

I look at ISK efficiency as a measure of the amount of time I made someone mine, haul moon goo or shoot red crosses, versus the amount of time I had to haul crap for market PVP. I am generally 95% ISK efficient, because I sure as hell haven't ratted for 100 hours in the past 12 months.