The Dark Arts: Stalking the Mission Runner

Disclaimer - I make no claim to be an authority on this or any subject, rather I'm just a noob-at-heart documenting my experimentation with the Dark Arts of EVE Online and inviting you to share my journey. Commentary and advice will be appreciated.

So, since my last post I have created my alliance, built my corp a bit more, and had some successful PvP ops. Most of this has been funded from my own wallet up to this point, and the well is beginning to run dry. Reluctant to resort to carebearism, I've decided lately to go full pirate for awhile in an effort to raise some isk the fun way. This will probably be the first of a series of articles exploring my efforts and lessons learned.

The Target: Mission Runners

You all have seen these guys in local if you have spent any time in highsec. They have 5.0 security status and fly around solo in battleships, often blinged out with faction modules, and without any kind of point to trap you. Most of these people are completely antisocial, will not reply if you address them in local, and are never on comms with anybody. Even if they have corp-mates in local, they may not be in contact with them in any practical way. Obviously these fellows are juicy targets. Even if they won't pay ransom they may very well drop loot that more than pays for your ammo, to say the least. The trouble is - they hide behind the shield of CONCORD much of the time and have enough EHP that suicide ganking is a costly endeavor.

Habitat of the Mission Runner

Minor mission hubs with adjacent lowsec systems

The average mission runner lives in deep highsec. They can be located easily by using Dotlan. Choose a highsec region and filter the map to NPC kills. Large numbers of NPC kills in highsec usually come from either mission runners, and to a lesser extent from ice miners. When you locate a system with high numbers of NPC kills, click on it and on neighboring systems to figure out where the Level 4 Security Agents are located. To a lesser extent you may be interested in Level 3 agents if you are targeting battlecruisers. The ideal hunting grounds for you as a pirate will not be the biggest and best mission hubs, where there is more competition, but rather those a bit off the beaten path with moderate levels of activity and adjacent lowsec systems. Check the lowsec systems for both NPC kills and Ship/Pod kills. The higher the ratio of NPC kills to ship/pod kills the better.

Highsec Tactics
There are several tactics that I have heard of. In highsec systems you have basically three options.

1. Wardec mission running corporations. Ultimately this may be the most profitable but requires a significant investment in time and patience to pull it off.
2. Suicide ganks. Unfortunately, mission boats often have a significant tank. This may be profitable if you have staked out a target and ship scanned him, so that you know that he is carrying expensive faction or officer modules. The technique is simple - scan him down, plug his fit into EFT to figure out what kind of tank he has, assemble a fleet that has the DPS to take him out before CONCORD arrives, locate him in a sensitive position (like in the mission pocket), gank him and have a friend loot the field. Divide the spoils. I haven't tried this with mission runners yet, but it is an undeniably effective tactic when you know that the loot is likely to be worth the expense.
3. Bait the mission runner to attack you first. I've attempted this a few times without success, but I have heard of it being done. The idea is to scan down a battleship signature with combat scanner probes, get in a combat ship and warp into his mission pocket, then loot one of his wrecks so that you go flashy, and perhaps taunt him in local or a private convo to get him to shoot you. Then defeat him in combat, ask for a ransom and/or blow him up, loot the field and run away.

Lowsec Hunting
This has been my most successful tactic. Basically, you need to find a good lowsec system. Ideally it has no stations, nobody lives there, it isn't connected to the wider network of lowsec systems and there is no piracy activity there to speak of. And it is adjacent to a highsec system where a significant number of people run level 3 and 4 security missions.

The Mission runner may look ferocious,
but is a docile and foolish beast.

Once you have found a good system, get yourself a scanning alt. Mine flies a Probe with a Prototype Cloaking Device and combat scanner probes. Put him in your lowsec system, park his ship about 100km from the entry gate and cloak up. Then alt tab over to your main character and go about your business, just make sure that you and any friends who might want to come along stay within a jump or two of your hunting grounds. Form a fleet with anyone who is available to come and make your scanner alt the FC.

Once you are set up like this, just be patient. I keep the sound on for my alt so I can hear the gate flash if anybody jumps into my lowsec system. Eventually, a mission runner will show up, thinking he is safe to run his mission.

When he does, observe his ship type and the direction that he warps off heading to his mission pocket, Then quickly get your probes out and alert your fleet to get ready to jump in. Probe him down as quickly as you can and get your probes back in. I've found that most mission runners are blissfully unaware that there is such a thing as d-scan, so your probes probably won't alert them to danger. Sometimes they do, and he runs  away, and you just have to wait for the next one.

Once you have the signature, jump in with your fleet, have your alt fleet warp everybody to the mission runner and do your thing. I like to do this in cheap T1 frigates with lots of ammo in the cargohold. Get in close so that his guns can't track you, warp scramble him and shoot down his drones, then turn your guns on him and chew down his tank. Extract ransom and/or loot and run away.

Oh my, the tears...
The best part of all this is the reaction of the mission runners themselves. This is the main reason why I like to use T1 frigates for this, apart from their disposable nature and low cost. When you warp in on a battleship or battlecruiser and take him down with a handful of frigates (or even just one), it takes some time to get it done while you converse with your victim. These are long minutes of quality gameplay. The reaction typically starts alon g the lines of "WTF haha frigs," progresses to "F%#@ off kids," then transitions to "Please I don't have isk for ransom," and then to "HELP ANYBODY THEY"RE KILLING ME!" This is hilarious good fun for almost everybody involved. Mission runners almost never carry smartbombs, neuts, or points, so if you kill their drones quickly there is little to nothing that they can do to a frigate but watch you buzz around them like flies as you whittle their tank away. This also means that week old noobs can participate in this form of piracy almost as well as older characters.

The ISK
So far the isk hasn't been great. I'm still working out what the best value is for a ransom. My first battleships I've been asking for 200 million and then negotiating down as far as 125, but nobody has been paying. I think maybe I'll have to shoot lower, like 75-100 million. With BCs I've been asking 50 mil, but that's probably too much as well. The loot that I have been harvesting has been fair, 10 mil per wreck or so, but not enough to give decent isk/hour. I have hopes that I'll get a good jackpot officer drop or something, but it seems like setting relatively low ransoms is the best way to maximize profit. Perhaps I should leave it unsaid, but you will make more isk if you accept a ransom and blow the fellow up anyway (not that I would ever do such a thing, of course).

Good luck and fly dangerously.

WTF kind of alliance is ...

Join our aliiance.

So I haven't been entirely satisfied with the rate at which the movement has been growing. We have steadily grown up to about 16 members or so in a month of recruiting. This isn't bad for a start, but some are more active than others, and there are several timezones involved. The bottom line is that the local PvP activity is fairly intense, and where we are not an elite crew by any measure, if we are going to win many real victories we are going to need numbers on our side. Not huge mega-blob numbers necessarily  but I'd like to get to the point where I can call for a fleet and get 10 people or so to show up. That is the point at which I think the quality of gameplay will take a serious turn for the better for our little group.

It seems like the best way to get there is to be a part of an alliance. Since we started becoming active in Curse, I have been approached by several small alliances who have shown some interest in having the Revolutionary Front become a member corporation. I have been tempted to accept some of these offers in the interest of rapidly improving our opportunities for fleet action. The downside is that joining somebody else's alliance means sacrificing our own vision and our own autonomy to help somebody else achieve their goals. Sure, it would be the easiest path to EVE success, but I have never been good at doing things the easy way, when I can do them the right way.

Failscade Inevitable?

So I've decided to take the step of forming my own alliance. Then I'm going to see if I can attract some more small corporations who share my own views of the game to join. Essentially, rather than recruiting people one at a time, I'll be recruiting in fives and tens and fifteens. I'm not sure how well this will work out, but I think it is worth a shot. I'm thinking along the lines of going after the kinds of groups who don't really know what they are doing and lacking direction and purpose, then get them roaming with our fleets and suck them into the fold. Even week old corporations full of noobs who think they want to do industrial things may be fine, as I have found that if you give a new player a taste of blood and a sense that he is part of a movement he will quickly grow to understand what EVE is really all about.

Of course, this is all in the planning stages. The first thing I need to decide is what the new alliance will be called and what its ticker will be. The obvious thing would be to call it some variation of Revolutionary Front. Something like United Revolutionary Front or New Eden Revolutionary Front (NERF), or something related like Anarchists Union or Revolutionary Council. I can think of a hundred possible names like that, but I wasn't convinced that I had the most creative and memorable ideas. So I put it out there on several EVE forums that I was looking for suggestions for an alliance name, and hinted that there would probably be fabulous prizes if somebody gave me a name that I end up using. Here is some of what they came up with

Fluffed Sheep Alliance logo

Suggestions

Space Nerds in Revolt

Fluffed Sheep (BAAA.)

Sheep Fluffers (wtf?)

HELLO MY NAME IS (HELLO.)

Failscade Inevitable (FAIL. - you're going on the list, LanFear TyRaX)

Test Alliance Do Not Ignore

MARX (both alliance name and ticker)

REAL alliance please notice

Space intentionally left ganked

Twisted Technetium

Insert Alliance Name Here

Failboat Roamers

Old Hands Always Impress (OHAI)

Spaceship Hating Internet Thugs (SHIT)

Autocannons Anonymous

Singularity Solidarity Party

No Name Nullsec Nomads (NNNN)

Yeah, I'm definitely not satisfied yet. I need a name that will simultaneously terrify my enemies, be hilariously funny, and be instantly memorable for everyone that sees it. Bonus points if it also ties into the Revolutionary theme somehow. I invite you, internet people, to come up with something better.

Early Roams - Kamikaze Death

For the last two weeks I have been holding scheduled fleet ops on Friday evenings. So far the turnout has been pretty small (2-3 players) although the guys have been going out on casual, unscheduled roams every day of the week and getting fights as well. Because most of the guys are very new and have very low SP, I cooked up the most simple doctrine I could come up with, cheaply fit kamikaze-style frigates that can move fast, take out solo targets up to BCs, and suicidally pick a higher value target out of a fleet and attack it, relying on tank, low sig radius, and tank to survive just long enough to take it out. I've used these sorts of fleets to great effect in other corps, when I have had 5-10 members join in.

Unfortunately, so far we haven't had enough participation to really pull it off. With only 2 or 3 guys, and me the only one with any SP, we just haven't been able to be successful. I am going to keep taking these out, however, as I continue to recruit, as I suspect if we can just get a few more guys we will be pretty well off. I think I'll start encouraging the use of T1 fit destroyers to increase our DPS on the field with the crew we have. Here is a brief after action report on our first two scheduled ops.

Week 1 - Party-Pooped by Lame Falcon Pilot
For our first scheduled op we got 3 pilots to show up, 2 pretty new guys and myself. We got into our frigates and set out from our HQ looking for something to kill. A few jumps away we passed through HLW, a system where Northern Coalition. has set up camp, and played some cat and mouse games while they tried to catch us. They failed, and we decided to move on and look for less blobby targets.

A couple of jumps later we were sitting on a gate, with one other pilot in system, evidently in something cloaky, as we were unable to locate him on d-scan. That assumption was about to be proved correct. As we orbited the gate, a Dramiel jumped into us. He was from a different alliance than the other guy in system, so I crossed my fingers that they weren't related and ordered the attack. A dram seemed like a perfect target for our pretty green crew of 2 Merlins and a Rifter.

Scram, webs, and guns were fired up and cycling, the Dram was stuck in blaster range and going down fast when another white box popped up on the overview, and quickly became a yellow, then a red box. The other guy in local turned out to be flying a Falcon, who decloaked on top of us, jammed us, and took us out as the Dramiel escaped in low structure.

Week 2 - Hawk on Bubble
This week's scheduled roam took us out of Curse, into the Great Wildlands, and into Scalding Pass. There were only 2 of us available at the scheduled time, a few more had said they could come later, but I decided the two of us could head out anyway, and then maybe do another roam when more people were available. I was flying a Breacher, a newly rebalanced ship that I was playing with. My comrade was in a Rifter.

Anyway, we spent a little time in Scalding Pass dodging some alliance war-type blobs, while we poked around looking for targets and generally making a loop back around to Curse. Some more guys logged on and said they wanted to join us, so we began making best speed back to our home system. On the way back, a poorly planned warp landed us in a bubble and right on top of a solo Hawk. This was the kind of fight I would have loved to take with 2 more guys with us, but with just the 2 of us prospects were bleak.

I gave my comrade notice that we were pretty much fucked and might as well go down in a blaze of glory, then overheated everything and engaged. We managed to dig pretty deep in his shields, but the end result was pretty much a foregone conclusion. Assault frigs tear through T1 frigs as a general rule. My fleetmate managed to get his pod out, but I was stuck in the bubble and got an express ride home.

Opening Chapter - Curse

A few weeks have gone by since I declared war on the universe, so I thought I'd fill you in on how things have been developing. After creating the corporation Revolutionary Front, I had my combat alt Kalim Dabo scout around in NPC nullsec for a suitable home for us. It was a bit of a toss-up between Syndicate and Curse as a region. The recent departure of Agony Unleashed and Rote Kappelle have left something of a power gap in Syndicate lately, with a lot of smaller alliances moving in to fill the void, and tactically significant stations temporarily vacant. Curse, by comparison, has been pretty hot, with the usual smaller alliances there and recent deployments by significant nullsec players like -A- and NC.

In the end I decided on LJ-YSW in Curse as a home base. It is a relatively quiet system with cloning facilities pinched in between systems held by Flying Dangerous. and DarkSide. (I refuse to put a period after my corp name on general principles.)

Having decided on a base, I started recruitment efforts. Pretty soon we had our first member, a guy named Durzo, who came right out to LJ and within hours had scored the first kill for the Revolution. It was some poor jackoff in a Velator, passing through the system. A fitting way to begin a new killboard, with the rookie ships. Actually, when he scored the kill I didn't yet have a killboard set up, so that was my next project.

We recruited a half-dozen or so foolish guinea pigs  brave souls within the first couple of days, then I was unexpectedly cut off from internet service for about a week and a half due to a move in real life, and they were left to their own devices. When I returned, I found that they had recruited a few more comrades who were waiting for me to approve their apps. Among them was DT, a veteran player and an old pro PvPer with almost 2000 kills to his name. Very soon our killboard started looking much less bleak.

Once I was again able to log in regularly, we began to recruit some more new guys. We lost a few to attrition, but that is to be expected, as we don't yet have much in the way of resources or support fro our new members. We are making fast progress, though. We now have a killboard, forums, voice comms (Ventrilo), a limited ship replacement program, and regularly scheduled fleet ops. As we build our numbers, more good things will come.

Day 1 of the Revolution

I started playing EVE in the spring of 2011. It was the first MMO I ever played, and sucked me in like no video game ever has. Initially I was overwhelmed a bit by the enormity and complexity of the game. I tried my hand at mining, hauling, exploration, and other pursuits in high security space, never really finding my niche. I was can-flipped in a belt in my noob-system and tried to come back and kill the offender, and got my first harsh dose of PvP when he handily popped my failfit Thrasher with his Punisher.

In those early days I joined EVE University, and slowly began to make a little sense of the mad sandbox. It all washed over me, month by month. The great empires carving up nullsec between themselves, blueing everyone who poses a threat to themselves, and destroying their smaller, weaker rivals. The market-hub griefers who terrorize new players, then dock up and hide at the first sign of danger to themselves. The cowards who hide in highsec behind the shield of CONCORD, and try to convice you that nullsec, lowsec, and wormholes are deathtraps where only evil people live, and only foolish people visit.

Each day that I roamed the stars of New Eden, the hate grew a little more inside of me. This galaxy was is in need of change. Not CCP driven change to the game content, but player-driven change. A new force needs to be established. But how? And who will drive this change? I thought that surely it would be beyond any one player at this stage in the evolution of the game to step up and significantly disrupt the status quo. I struggled with the question of whether I would even want to take up the challenge. Wouldn't I rather just spend all my days in EVE minding my own business, roaming around looking for fights? The nay-sayers had even affected me, after every lesson I had learned in my time here. Lesson #1 that every new player in EVE should be taught is that anyone who says,"You can't..." or "You shouldn't..." is either a coward or an idiot.

I felt that I needed to learn more before I made my move. So I created a legion of alts and sent them to many different corners of New Eden, to gather information and learn the game. I still have more to learn about many things, I still don't really know what I am doing, but the shadow of a plan has begun to form in my mind. I expect it to take years and years to get where I want to be, to where the entire universe has been converted to yellow triangles, and I fly alone through the ashes until CCP declares EVE is irrevocably broken and destroyed, and Haedonism Bot is the winner.

So today, I have hoisted the flag of war. I, Haedonism Bot, am the one and only member of the new Revolutionary Front. Soon I will invite some of my alts in to lead fleets and help with early logistics. First order of business - get friends. If I am going to stand any chance of being successful, I will need to recruit a large number of people. My thinking is to open recruiting wide, lure some of my friends from other corporations in to form an inner circle, and use a massive propaganda campaign to attract members new and old. At first I expect to take almost anyone who wants to join, train the new guys to PvP, and separate the wheat from the chaff as we go along. The main priority is just to get a large number of bodies in spaceships, and get them out there killing people for the glory of the revolution.