How to be a Scumbag Pirate - A Guide to Evil Shenanigans

Hello readers, I'm back in the game again, lured in to check out the nullsec blackout. Today we're going to revisit an article that I wrote many years ago - The Dark Arts: A Newbie's Guide to Evil Shenanigans. This old article was well received in its day, but now it is terribly outdated. I have long intended to write a follow up to reflect the current state of EVE piracy, and I guess today is the day. 

Gold skull thing

The usual disclaimers - I am terrible at EVE, don't even know what half these new-fangled ships I see flying around are, everything that I say is probably wrong, and you're probably a frickin' idiot if you follow even a single word of my advice. Now then, let's get to it, shall we?

What is EVE piracy?

This is the great debate, isn't it? Some people call themselves "pirate" just because they do lowsec PvP and have negative security status. To me, these are not pirates. In EVE developer lingo, they are "outlaws". Other people think of piracy as flying around in lowsec RPing as "yarr matey" buccaneers, attempting to tackle non-combatants in order to demand ransoms - which must be honored as a matter of principle, of course. This, I would agree is a sort of piracy. A lame sort. A relic of an era of EVE history in which this was a more viable practice, combined with some e-bushido and weird cultural baggage.

But this article isn't just about how to be a pirate, it is about how to be a scumbag pirate, the Hedo Bot way. No e-bushido allowed. Take what you can, give nothing back. My definition of piracy is anything that involves using spaceship violence, theft, or deception to extract isk and salt from people who would rather you didn't. 

There are as many ways to be a scumbag pirate as your imagination can conceive of, and we will discuss some of those specific tactics later. More important is to lay down some general guidelines for a pirate to live by. A pirate's code, if you will, to help you harvest both plunder and tears, and be the biggest scumbag you can be.

The Pirate's Code

A pirate does not grind PVE, or industry, or markets for his isk. He does not buy PLEX or skill extractors, or any other gimmicky things to get by. He funds his EVE career entirely from what he can steal, or ransom, or loot. Sometimes that may mean he is poor, but so be it. If a pirate has only a Merlin to his name, he should undock in that Merlin and head out into space looking to see what kind of trouble he can get into.

Ever the opportunist, a pirate is constantly assessing the players that he encounters for signs of weakness that he can exploit. A pirate must have creativity. The game changes all the time. If a pirate gets really really good at the specific tactic he is using, CCP will inevitably step in and make his playstyle impractical or impossible - so he must be ready to adapt. To find creative new ways to ply his trade. The internet is littered with obsolete guides on one strategy or another for separating carebears from their isk. A good pirate is flexible enough to carry on no matter what roadblocks CCP throws up in his path.

A pirate is a skilled manipulator. He understands the mentality of the carebear. He anticipates how carebears will react in different situations. This understanding allows him to employ his greatest weapon - akin to Jedi mind tricks, he is able to bend the carebears' actions to his will with a few timely comments in chat, a clever name for his ship, a gimmicky fit, a strategic use of Crimewatch flags, or any other of a thousand subtle manipulation techniques. A scumbag pirate is also an outrageous liar when it suits his purposes.

A pirate appreciates the value of intelligence. He knows that a carefully placed spy alt or two are often the difference between success and profit, or wandering aimlessly around space and finding nothing more than a goodfight or two if he's lucky. He does not "roam", he identifies targets, makes a plan to exploit them, and then adapts that plan to the realities on the ground.

A pirate likes killing stuff. Although profit is often his objective, fighting and killing are also worthwhile for their own sake. A pirate never needs a reason to kill someone.

A scumbag pirate cultivates an inner voice which constantly whispers, "Sure, what you are doing is pretty evil, but you know what would be even worse…" He trusts this inner voice and follows its guidance in all things. He is constantly challenging himself to stoop to new lows. He is evil for evil's sake. He is an agent of chaos. A driver of conflict. He strives to be the villain that every good story needs.

A pirate is a part of a greater community of scumbags. Whether he joins some scumbag friendly corporation or SiG, or participates in an informal community, he networks with like minded pirates - sharing ideas, supporting comrades in their plots. We will speak more about pirate communities later.

A scumbag pirate is bold. He does not wring his hands about "burning bridges". He torches bridges without hesitation or remorse, secure in the knowledge that for every carebear who may be offput by the reputation he acquires, there will be a dozen fellow scumbags or admirers cheering him on. For every door that closes to him, another one opens up somewhere.

Hurricane approaching Orca in Metropolis

Tactics

Being a scumbag pirate is not about any particular tactic or playstyle. It is about an attitude and approach to the game. Trying to describe exactly what tactics you should be using is trying to hit a moving target. Any time a community of pirates arrives at a formula which consistently works incredibly well, the result is that CCP steps in to put a stop to it. We can lament the nerfs to wardecs, or ganking, or safariing, or ninja salvaging, or canflipping, or whatever, or we can move forward and ask, "ok what are we doing next?" A true pirate is so strong in his devotion to chaos that he cannot be deterred by mere game mechanics.

That said, I will try and offer some ideas on tactics which work right now, and to explain my own methods as best I can. I would love to hear any input from readers who can expand on any of these ideas or suggest other tactics, and I will probably update this section accordingly.

Suicide Ganking

This staple in the cupboard of scumbag pirates has carried on from the earliest days of EVE, in spite of numerous attempts by CCP to discourage it. For that we can thank various committed enthusiasts of the art who, by their ingenuity, have found ways to work around every nerf and keep this playstyle relevant.

The concept, for any very new players who may be reading, is very simple and understood by nearly everyone. Suicide ganks are performed in high security space. The ganker sets his safety to red and attacks a target, relying on a high dps fit to destroy the target very quickly, before CONCORD or sentry guns destroy his ship too. Then a friend or alt loots the wrecks.

Over the years, CCP have attempted to eliminate most suicide ganking by increasing the tanking potential of a majority of noncombattant ships, to the point where one would need to spend more to gank someone than the loot would likely be worth, unless they were carrying some exceptional cargo. This challenge was single-handedly overcome by one of the most influential pilots in EVE history, James 315, who created a system whereby suicide ganking is crowd-funded by the entire EVE community in the form of New Order shares. 

Any suicide ganker can have their losses reimbursed by James 315, ensuring that not only individuals who choose to haul ostentatious bling in flimsy industrials are in danger of being ganked, but rather every single pilot in highsec who fails to take action to protect themselves faces the danger posed by scumbag pirates and intrepid CODE agents alike.

If you want to learn how to gank, mosey on over to www.minerbumping.com and learn from the experts themselves.

Spy alt tethered to the Beanstar

The Bump & Duel Trick

This is another tactic for high security space. It requires two pilots, one in a bumping ship and one in a dps ship. For a bumping ship, the Machariel is currently preferred by serious bumpers, fitted for pure speed and agility, but any other ship with enough mass and speed can work, with practice. The dps ship can be near anything with weapons and a warp scrambler. Destroyers or cruisers work beautifully.

The ideal target for this tactic is freighters. The bumper chooses his target and bumps into it repeatedly at a high rate of speed, thereby pushing it away from any gate or station where it might find an escape, and also preventing it from warping away.

Then the dps pilot comes along and, seeing the freighter pilot in distress, offers his assistance. "I can web you into warp," he says, "You just need to accept a duel request so I don't get CONCORDed." If he can talk the freighter guy into accepting a duel then the battle is already won. Freighters are defenseless in combat. He can then warp scramble the target and begin shooting. 

At this point, it is also customary to initiate a conversation about ransom. Depending on the freighter pilot and the cargo they may be carrying, a billion isk or so in ransom is typical. Then once the ransom is secured, a true scumbag pirate will listen to that evil little voice he has cultivated, which will tell him to blow the guy up anyway. Ransom is nice. Loot is nice. Ransom and loot is very nice indeed.

The trick here is to get them to accept the duel. Some pirates are naturally more convincing than others. If you are having a hard time getting random freighter or Orca pilots to accept duels, try using the bump and gank trick on pilots who are in the same corporation as your dps pilot - they tend to be more receptive.

Suspect Baiting

Back in the day we had can-flipping and ninja salvaging. Some forms of ninja salvaging still exist. CCP tried to get rid of both of these practices a few years back. They introduced ore holds on mining ships and then rolled out the Crimewatch flagging system, in a blatant effort to eliminate these classic scumbag tactics.

Clever scumbag pirates found that Crimewatch opened up some possibilities of its own though. Suspect baiting is the practice of giving yourself a suspect flag, usually by looting a wreck or can that doesn't belong to you, so that everyone can see that it is legal to shoot at you, and then contriving to control the engagement once they do. Then you can get loots and ransoms, if a target of value attacks you.

There are many suspect baiting techniques. A classic is to scan down level 4 mission runners in a highsec mission hub and begin stealing their loot, or shooting at their Mobile Tractor Unit. If you keep at this, maybe 1 in 10 will try to kill you. Mission invasion isn't the only way to suspect bait though. Some people use a PvP fit Skiff or Orca, flag themselves and hang out where they will be seen, mining or pretending to be afk. Many people will be tempted to shoot a suspect Orca, which turns out to be a surprisingly formidable PvP ship. I've also gotten battleships kills in a T1 frigate, just sitting off a mission hub station with a suspect flag, just far enough away that anyone who wants to shoot at me will have to chase me out of docking range.

Mostly you will be killing PVE fitted ships, so with a purpose-built PvP fit, it is quite easy to punch above your weight and go for larger ship classes than your own. Suspect baiting is not without its risks, because CCP has removed most of the dirty tricks we used to use to control engagements - like neutral remote repairs, offgrid boosts, swapping ships mid-combat with an Orca alt, things like that. You are best served to fly something small and cheap, and go whaling for more expensive targets than you yourself are putting on the field.

Some scumbags, after getting a ransom in these situations, will try another dirty trick. They tell the target, "ok, we'll let you go. But first we need a bonus killmail to pad our killboards. Eject and go get a corvette from the nearest station, then come back. We'll kill your corvette and let you go." Once they are gone, a pirate can board their ship, which flags it as being owned by the pirate. Then he ejects again and the crew target locks the ship. This makes it impossible for the target to re-board their ship when they return. Usually by the time the target returns in a corvette, the limited engagement will have expired. The pirates will then helpfully advise that the target should set their safety to red and fire on them. 

Once they do so, the gang of scumbags can move on, enjoying their ransom, their stolen mission-running battleship, and a killright which will enable them to kill the same guy again tomorrow, when he typically resumes missioning at the same hub. This sounds complicated and unlikely to work when I explain it - but I have seen this scenario play out dozens of times. It works.

Another twist on suspect baiting is to bait targets to suspect flag themselves. Self destruct a ship in a high traffic location, put some fancy looking, but inexpensive loot in the wreck, and watch over it with cloaky PvP ships. You will get a lot of kills that way.

You can even suspect bait in lowsec on gates and stations, and get kills. Unfortunately, most of them will be unsatisfying "goodfights" instead of the kind of profitable loot piñatas that you easily find in highsec.

Corporate Infiltration

In the old days, some friends of mine got very, very good at joining highsec corporations in order to simply go on killing sprees, legally murdering as many corpmates as they could. We called this "going on safari." We are the reason why today's corporations have the option not to allow friendly fire. When this nerf was rolled out, much of the safariing community considered their playstyle dead and dispersed to the four winds.

I, however, continued to infiltrate corporations on a regular basis. I have found that there is still a lot of damage I can do, I just have to be a little more creative about it than the old days.

For one thing, the carebear population has shifted in recent years. In the old days if you wanted to murder bears you needed to focus your efforts primarily on highsec. Nowadays at least half of all the most outrageous carebears in the game are living in nullsec. In nullsec, the friendly fire switch is always on. Wormholes too contain numerous carebear corporations, ripe for safaris. It is true that a scumbag pirate cannot fully control all variables of a PvP engagement in lawless space quite the same as in highsec. That just means that he needs to be bold and take greater risks, but he can also take heart from knowing that carebears are still carebears, no matter where they live. And if there is one thing we know about carebears, it is that they will almost never lift a finger to defend their comrades.

The vulnerability in going on safari is that you can be kicked out of the corporation, but there are a couple of workarounds to that. First, the only situation in which your PvP character even wants to be a member of the corp is when he is safariing a highsec corporation that has their friendly fire switch turned on. In that situation, he cannot be kicked unless he docks up or logs off. One cannot be booted from a corporation while flying in space. This means that staying logged in and cloaked at a safe spot will keep you in corp. Of course, they may switch friendly fire off, but there's a 24 hour timer for that to take effect, and most safaris will run their course in that time period anyway. Oh, and neutral remote repairs still provide no crimewatch flag when used in highsec during a safari against a corporation which has friendly fire on, and is not at war. That means they need to suicide gank your neutral logi to take it off the field - easier said than done! You will want to take full advantage of this when you identify such corporations as targets.

If you are safariing a corporation in lowsec, nullsec, or jspace, or a highsec corporation with friendly fire off, you are better off to keep your PvP main out of corp. Join with a spy alt. Use that alt to identify your targets and provide warp-ins to your PvP character. This is incredibly easy. You can tilt the odds even more in your favor by asking your target to share their fit in corp chat, so you know exactly what to prepare for. Another advantage to this method is that you can be simultaneously safariing a corporation and trying to get director roles or hangar access for your spy alt, opening up the possibility of heisting assets or doing a hostile takeover. It is also hilarious to sit and read corporate chat on your alt while you are terrorizing them with your main.

If it is a wardec eligible highsec corporation with friendly fire off, plant your spy alt and wardec them with your PvP main. If they have both wardecs and friendly fire turned off, it is still possible to safari them, you just need to use deception to lure their shiny ships into a nearby lowsec system or a wormhole. This is not hard at all. Just lie. "Hey, buddy, I'm in this wormhole off our HQ system and these sleepers are kicking my butt, gee golly I'm such a helpless noob, could you help me out for a minute, just jump through that wormhole I bookmarked and warp to me, don't worry nobody is in here." Works like a charm. If you are clever about it they won't even suspect the setup until the second or third time you do it.

Beyond safaris, there is a world of potential for corporate heists. Almost every corporation at least has a public hangar or two. When a corporate infiltration scheme has run its course, always steal everything that you can, even if it is only 50 mil in T1 modules sitting in a public hangar. For a scumbag pirate, there is no amount which is too small to be worth stealing. If you choose criminality as your full-time playstyle then you should not balk at petty theft, if that appears to be your best option. Although Ideally, you should be working towards getting greater access, or hopefully even director roles, while you are there. 

Large, old, well established corporations may never give a new member any kind of high level access. With smaller, less established corporations it can be surprisingly easy. Again, just lie. Offer to FC some fleets or to donate some citadels to the corporation. "I just need a few roles to get things set up…" works half the time. If you can get access to the corporate wallet, check for shares. Often you will find 1000 shares sitting there neglected. Transfer them to your personal wallet. As a shareholder, it takes a shareholder vote to kick you out of corp. As 100% shareholder, you can't be kicked. You can then hold a shareholder vote to make yourself CEO. Should you get director roles, shares or no, at the very least you can transfer ownership of any structures in space to your holding corp, and loot the corp wallet and all hangars.

Loki departing Hek on newbean-murdering expedition.

Reverse Safariing

A twist on the concept of corporate infiltration is reverse safariing or reverse AWOXing. In this stratagem, the scumbag pirate recruits carebears into his corporation, where the friendly fire switch is turned on, and then holds their ships for ransom and kills them. 

I have gotten some of my finest kills in this way. Sometimes you can convince a new recruit to put all of their assets into a freighter or something and travel to your location, then simply sit on a gate and wait for them to arrive, and murder them when they jump into your system. Sometimes you can convince them to put all of their assets in a courier contract with zero collateral, supposedly for you to haul for them using your own freighter. Then you murder them, fail the contract, and keep all their stuff. Reverse AWOXing can be an extremely lucrative isk-making tactic for a scumbag pirate.

The drawback is that recruiting people is very hard work, and extremely boring most of the time. Spamming ads in the recruitment channel is soul-crushing labor. There are a few ways you can ease the pain. First, it is easier to recruit people into a corporation with a bunch of members than a 1 person corporation. If you happen to be in a scumbag-friendly corporation with other pirates, then you can do it nas a team effort. Or if you have stolen a corporation in a hostile takeover, and still have a number of inactive members still on the rolls, that's another fine setup to use for reverse safariing. If you want to do this solo in a 1 man corp, your best bet is to create a lot of alpha accounts and make free alts to artificially inflate your member count.

Even with a lot of members in your corp, real or fake, recruitment can still be painful. For a long time I have been maintaining a 1 man corp for my PvP main in order to do wardecs, and I also keep friendly fire on and just occasionally drop a recruitment ad here and there while I'm going about my business, rather than reverse safariing in a focused manner.

Most of the recruits I end up getting tend to be new players in Retrievers. I'll hold them for 10 mil ransom and kill them too. I'm not some kind of elitist pirate, too snobby to murder newbies. I treat them just like any other player. Kill them all, reimburse nothing. Noobs deserve the opportunity to participate in scumbag pirate content as much as everyone else - far be it from me to deny them that experience. Then once in every four or five recruits you will usually end up getting someone who is really worth killing.

Another twist on reverse safariing, which I personally have never had the patience to try, is the slave labor scam. The gist of it is that you run your fake corporation almost exactly like a real one, recruit a stable of carebears and put them to work accumulating wealth for the corporate wallet. You continue this for weeks or months, until you can't stand it anymore, then you cash out and murder everyone. For myself, any kind of "long con" type corporate shenanigans that require you to pose as a carebear for an extended period of time quickly become intolerable, so I never do them, but I have heard some hilarious stories of admirable scumbags pulling off the slave labor scam in various clever ways.

War Declarations

War declarations have been my bread and butter for many years, but at the same time I'm not completely sure how to speak to this one. For most of EVE history, the ability of any corporation to declare war on any other corporation has been a core feature of this game. Many thousands of EVE players have enjoyed this content over time. For me, getting wardecced regularly as a new player in EVE University was what got me hooked on this game. We organized ourselves, fought back, and won many battles in the pipe between Aldrat and Hek. It was glorious.

Unfortunately, CCP recently decided to carry out their anti-fun agenda on wardec mechanics. They have tied wardecs to structures. One must have a structure in space in order to be eligible for wardecs. Obviously, this allows any carebear corporation to simply keep their structures in a 1 person holding corp and opt out of wardec content altogether. Meanwhile the aggressor also needs a structure, which is utterly pointless and serves only to throw up a fairly small but not insignificant financial barrier in the way of any solo operator or small group looking to get into the business.

CCPs intent here is clear - they no longer want wars in highsec as we know them. They are preserving what is left of the mechanic exclusively to serve the purpose of permitting players to bash structures - not to hunt players, not to create great stories, not to encourage heroism and villainy. CCPs agenda is clear - the question is how we content creators can overcome it and continue to enjoy wardecs. I have not yet resumed wardeccing since the nerfs, so it is hard for me to say. Perhaps I will edit this guide at a later time when I better understand the new realities of wardecs.

Still, I don't doubt that scumbag pirates can still make use of wardecs to have some fun. There were always ways for carebears to opt out of wardecs if they chose, and there were always carebears who failed to take advantage of them. I expect there may still be many promising targets out there still keeping their structures in the same corporation as their members. I'm also sure that a small group of scumbags, willing to bash a few structures, could drum up some content by doing so. Perhaps they could get ransoms or protection fees. Having a structure of their own is no real obstacle - an unfitted Raitaru is fairly cheap and could be easily replaced in the unlikely event that some superior adversary was to destroy it.

Scumbag Pirate Communities

The community of players who are interested in the niche playstyle of scumbag piracy has been in decline for years. Many of our best and brightest have been permanently banned. Others have gotten social lives in the real world and never been seen again. Yet there are still a few remaining spaces where our sort may find support and fellowship. Let's talk about a few of these.

It is likely that I'm ignorant of other scumbag friendly communities and corporations, so drop a comment if you know of any that I don't mention here.

CODE propaganda

The New Order of Highsec

Obviously, nobody can accuse James 315 or the Agents of the New Order of being scumbag pirates. They are paragons of virtue, bravely protecting highsec from any and all who threaten order and the rule of law.

However, James 315, in his wisdom and charity, has always made scumbag pirates feel welcome in highsec. Many of us have tried to pay it forward by enforcing the Code in our free time. Some CODE. Agents are so skilled at multitasking that they manage to act as virtuous defenders of highsec and as scumbag pirates simultaneously. 

The fact is, this is the last true active, inclusive community where a player can openly act as a scumbag pirate, receiving nothing but support and encouragement. "The last bastion of hope" it has been called by players wiser than I. James 315 has truly, all RP aside, created something really special, long may it last. EVE might not even still be here today if not for the emergent content which the New Order has generated. As other, older scumbag communities have atrophied and become inactive, the New Order has welcomed the refugees, making it the last true, active community which appreciates our playstyle in New Eden today.

Read more about the James 315 and the New Order at www.minerbumping.com, or join the minerbumping channel to chat in-game. The 3 digit channel password is top secret, of course, but I have a feeling that if you are worthy you will figure it out. If not, ask James 315, he will weigh your soul and decide if you have what it takes to be an Agent. Just make sure to buy a mining permit for 10 million isk right off the bat, if you don't want the hard liners to haze you about it.

The Belligerent Undesirables

Psychotic Monk

A few years back, roughly in the same time frame that the New Order was founded, Skunkworks veterans Psychotic Monk and FloppieTheBanjoClown had an idea - basically to invite all the most evil, most prolific content creators into an informal community, transcending corporate or alliance loyalties. Scumbag pirates, wardeccers, AWOXers, gankers, ninjas, can-flippers, isk-doublers. They brought all of us together in a sort of griefer illuminati and challenged us to be as bad as we could be. "A highsec Legion of Doom" was how James 315 described us.

The resulting chaos of that first couple years or so of the Belligerent Undesirables will echo down through history until the day they shut the servers down. Nobody in highsec was safe. We reaped fame and fortune everywhere we went. All EVE media was plastered with our names and accomplishments. The game was nerfed at least a dozen times as CCP scrambled to put a stop to us.

FloppieTheBanjoClown

Most of the guys in BU back then were focused on safaris, although it certainly wasn't our only tactic. Nevertheless, when CCP introduced the option for corporations to turn off friendly fire, it hit us pretty hard. Psychotic Monk, our Dear Leader, also got himself a wife or something and permanently vanished from New Eden at about the same time. A lot of the community dispersed, or washed ashore in the New Order.

Today the Belligerent Undesirables channel still exists, and a few of us still lurk there. If you want to get into this playstyle, I highly recommend that you join. EVE will always have a need Belligerent Undesirables, it will always need spaces for scumbags to collaborate with one another. One day we may even see a revival, the potential for our kind of gameplay is as great as ever. All we lack is a new Monk to unite us, and spur us on. I'm not that guy, but maybe one of you will be one day.

"But what about newbies who want to be scumbags, Hedo Bot?"

My regular readers may notice that I haven't said much about newbies in this guide. These days, in the era of skill injectors, newbie status is mostly irrelevant anyway. Most of these tactics don't require much SP, when it comes down to it. However, being a pirate often depends on understanding game mechanics better than the carebears that you are terrorizing. This is usually a low bar, but nevertheless a true newbie can benefit from at least a few months of well rounded EVE education before committing fully to the scumbag lifestyle.

My recommendation for true newbies who aspire to be scumbag pirates is this - join the minerbumping and Belligerent Undesirables chat channels. Then join Karmafleet. It is true that 99% of Goons are carebears of the worst sort, but nevertheless there is a certain appreciation for the scumbag pirate playstyle in certain dark corners of Goonswarm Federation, so long as you aren't messing around with their carebears. Karmafleet is generally a great place to learn almost all aspects of the game from folks who know what they are doing. While there, join Miniluv - you will find some kindred spirits there, and learn the art of the gank. 

Meanwhile, strive to live by the Pirate's Code. If you can do that, the rest will sort itself out.

Parting Thoughts

Thanks to those of you who read this far. I barely play EVE now, but my best years in this game were in the heyday of the Belligerent Undesirables when scumbag pirates were many, and evil, and had a level of mutual solidarity never seen before or since. To me, that's what EVE is all about - it's a grand contest to see who can be the biggest asshole. And it is glorious.

Players, the best sort anyway, come to this game because they are looking for the experience of being part of a good story. All good stories need conflict. All good stories need a villain or two. Yet we have so few players who really want to be that villain. There are lots who want to be the hero, and legions ready to be the F1 clicking sidekicks to the hero, but bad guys like us are few and far between. Less every year, it seems to me.

So I encourage all of you, listen to that little voice, that devil on your shoulder that sometimes whispers, "do it!". Be the bad guy, be the villain. Or as Psychotic Monk would say, "be the chaos you want to see in the universe."