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[Jade Constantine]

  So again my question; Assuming I have willing members, what tactics, methods or means should a willing and dedicated anti-pie corp employ to effectively hunt their chosen foes and kill them, in order to aim for maximum effect?

1. You need a few discrete fleet concepts that your corp trains and have all your members prepared to ship too as and when the need arises. Amongst these concepts:

a) Cost-effective mainline fighters - this pretty much means HAM Drakes in the current state of the game. Pirates hate them (with good reason) they take a disproportionate time to kill while having the ability to deal reasonable damage and have 2 tackle mods. These are backed by scimitars. All things being equal a fleet of ham drakes with scimitar support will beat anything else in lowsec pound for pound that it cannot escape from. When fighting a pirate battleship gang that is taking gate fire you'll gain an economic victory even losing 2 for 1. Note, you will not get many of these fights - but when they are offered you must be prepared to take them. In my experience we've defeated 12-15 pirate bc/bs groups with 6 drakes 2 scimitars utilizing tight discipline good flying and the fact gate guns rule out enemy fast tackle.

b) Cheap seats economic terror vessels. These are the "annihilate" standard cruiser that SF used in the Kamela sequence of fights. Its high(ish) dps cruiser with plate + ecm drones (thorax/rupture). The idea is that you fit them vanilla or cheap meta named. You are literally leaving nothing of value on the field when you fight with them but you hope to destroy t2 cruisers and battleships. Even losing 10 of these will get you the economic win if you go down shooting an enemy recon ship (rapier, pilgrim, falcon etc). Insured - they should cost no more than 3-4m isk a loss to you. Feeding fleets of these vessels into pirate gate camps will get your pilot experience while doing nothing to provide income to the pirates. Winning encounters with these ships will prove an incredible slap in the face to your opponents. Losing encounters can convince the pirates in question you are a joke - then consider upgrade to a).

c) Stealth bombers. These are extremely potent against pirate gate campers. Surprise high levels of dps without the likely counter of enemy tackle frigates as hazard. In a popular pirate choke you can infilitrate numbers of these into place and watch the gate being camped, gradually increase the numbers. Wait your moment, and then then engage when enemy is at the weakest. Can be during a gank, during counter action from other groups, can be at the end of a period of gate camping when the enemies start individually warping off gates (you decloak and point the last one). Bombers terrify pirates because they cannot really be stopped, cannot be scouted, and are capable of being a significant threat to an emplaced enemy. Beware only smart bombing Battleships and make on grid warp to scout points around all likely camped gates. For bonus points combine with some of the below.

d) Black ops battleships (initially use for projecting to the covert cynos on board your pathfinder stealth bombers) this will let you spring genuine surprise attacks against emplaced campers. Get used to hiding the black ops in range but at discrete lurk systems. Be aware of what your trap can kill and realize that the 1min pinned bomber will only survive if you panic the enemy into running (or simply kill them all).

e) covert probers for on grid manouvering (simply deploy combat probes around the camped gate) this might well make the campers flee immediately but if it doesn't. Gives a cloaked covert gang leader ability to move to position on any ranged pirate threat on grid and call in the gank from a bomber group.

Combined together these tactics give you the ability to be a right royal pain in the ass to a pirate group:

2. Bombers are horrible to them. Just knowing an increasing number of bombers are watching their activities secure behind the cloak who could attack at any point is a nightmare scenario for a gate camp. You should look at ab+extender+tackle bombers with as much dps as you can squeeze on. In the fraction we use hounds and purifiers primarily for dps/paintig and manticore/nem for web/scram/disruptor. People will tell you its insane to decloak a nem and scramble and web a macherial while orbiting at range 5 but ignore those fools! As long as the tackler has 5 bomber friends the macherial will die before you do.

3. cheap seats annihilate cruisers "bring the fight" but fill the enemy mouths with ashes. They can serve a dual role of winning the economic war and harvesting kill rights and ruining the sec level of enemies who are not yet -5 gcc. As long as you are disciplined in your use of good fits and ecm drones you will find them surprisingly effective and great at training your pilots.

4. effective combat bcs (drakes and scims) will break enemy will and win a pitched battle when you need to do it. It may wel be that the pirates get extremely pissed and bored to tears with your bomber ganks and annihilate rushes and demand you "bring a real fleet" and when they are frustrated beyond reason is the moment to hit them with the ham drakes and wipe the field.

5. Additionally you will need to cycle your own scouting alts and train them with covert cynos. Pirates will ruthlessly address book your membership and you need to develop out of corp scouting and blackops cynoing capability. It can sometimes be worth making your scouts -5 gcc themselves (by shooting at random out of corp alts) simply to make them look like other pirates (ie less of a threat) to the pirates in question. I've occassionally created fake pirate corps and put my cyno/scouting alts inside those corps just to get the drop on our targets.

6. Make alt haulers in fake  "industrial corps" that you can run into pirate gate camps in empty industrials simply to keep them interested and trigger aggression to make them take gate gun fire. Pirates are focused on the gank and while a single unknown in local will make them paranoid they will generally find it hard to ignore a bestower jumping in

7. Be aware of every potential cheesy tactic you can think of might be employed. If you see carriers expect the swap out trick. If you see Orca's likewise. Prefer the fight on lowsec/hisec gates if you can - (you deny enemy retreat options - but try to station a quick lock scout on the hisec side so you can point and bnc on pirates choosing to suicide to concord rather than dying to you.)

8. If there is an asteroid belt that is notorious (top belt amamake etc) then book mark it. Use bait out of corp "ratters" in cheap cruisers to go hunting npcs in lowsec (followed by cyno bombers or indeed the entire bomber pack) ((have on grid 150+ warpable for each belt))

Bah, I could go on. But ironically the Anarchists of the Star Fraction are probably one of the most experienced pirate hunting groups in Eve end of the day - comes with the freespace revolutionary ethos!

[Jev North]

So you need to start your theorycrafting on the assumption that the Pirate in question has a bounty hunter alt that will be abusing the system as much as humanly possible - the trick is to ensure that scenario does not produce a net positive for the pair.

Yes, no, kind of; that's part of where the problem lies. We'll get to that.

So perhaps you remove insurance to people who are -5 gcc. I can see the argument from gameplay angle. And you maybe adopt a sliding scale of bounties depending on ship. 1m for a cruiser, 3m for a battlecruiser, 5m for a battleship 50m for a carrier etc etc.

And you aren't allowed to claim the sec bonus from a given pirate character more than once a week. (to encourage hunting a range of targets)

So far so good. You have a system where you provide incentive to positive sec people hunting -5 gccs. Every ship flown by a -5 gives a cash reward split between the hunting gang and sec bonuses to go with it. The net loss of the -5 people is higher than the net gain of the hunters. Its not exploitable because jonny pirate and his hunter alt would lose money doing it.

That's one of the better proposals I've seen floating about, actually; I suspect shenanigans involving insurance costs and returns are the right trail to follow. But so far the main effect I can foresee is that you've given a fairly large disincentive to be below -5 sec status. Money-conscious pirates will spend more time ratting up sec status; more casual PvPers, pirates, or anti-pirates with more permissive RoE without the time or inclination to rat a lot will just suffer, or quit. And suddenly the game of cops and robbers does not have robbers anymore.

The cash bonuses as written are nice for the people already shooting pirates, but I doubt they'll draw a lot of people out of hi-sec; even if a player BS will yield a lot more ISK than blasting away an NPC one, it's also infinitely more likely to kill you.

So what do the pirates get out of the deal ? They've lost insurance. But they get more targets eager to engage them. That may not be enough. Lets give them a highslot module called (non lethal targeting computer) that when its turned on turns structure hits into disabling hits (say 1000 points of damage for a minute of all ship systems and movement disabled). This means they can pirate properly. Turning on this module means that people jumping into systems can be caught and pinned and ransomed with impunity. Might help the golden age of ransom pirates to return. They lost insurance, they gained a ransom income.

Save for the usual grumbling about warp stabs, I haven't heard any pirates complain about being unable to pin down and be a credible threat to ransom targets; the problem is that paying up is at best gambe for the ransom-ee, due to the widespread habit of pirates and ninjas having their cake and eating it too.

Its not that difficult to incentivise both sides of the equation you just have to ensure that jonny pirate and his alt cannot exploit the situation meaning the engagement between two characters must always be a less than zero sum encounter (in destruction mechanics). And the payoff to make things nicer for pirates is generally in providing ways for them to actually pirate rather than being simple combat mechanic advantages.

That's the problem in a nutshell; mechanics must be close to zero-sum while materially incentivizing both sides, or at least not massively disincentivizing one side. And yet not be exploitable. I think that's quite a difficult set of demands to live up to, actually.

[Matariki Rain]

Reinforcing the mentions here that pirates aren't necessarily outlaws, that fixing your sec status is a regular part of anti-piracy, and that there's little or nothing that's objectively viewable by the game software that distinguishes the actions of pirates and anti-pirates.

[Shaalira]

One issue is the fundamental mechanics in EVE that encourage treating neutrals in dangerous space as probable hostiles.

As far as combat mechanics go, so much in EVE PvP hinges on information and initiative.  The use of neutral alts for scouting, repping and warp-ins is commonplace.  Additionally, opportunistic piracy and ganks are common, even with neutral pilots who have deceptively high sec status.  There are a lot of 'weekend warriors' out there, after all.

Even if neutral players don't intend to do you harm, they're often economic competitors if they operate in the same system as you.  Either they're mining minerals you want, sapping PI deposits you're harvesting, or sitting on moons that you can use.  Neutral players could be customers if you're operating out of the local market.  But they can just as well be rival traders who will 1-isk your prices and/or bring cheaper goods for sale.

In short, there are a number of incentives in EVE towards being suspicious or outright hostile towards neutrals, and precious few that encourage collaboration with neutrals.  Of course, players can (and do) buck the incentive system, but by and large players will do what rewards them.


For that dynamic to change, there has to be something that awards players for encouraging and protecting high levels of activity in a system.  There are already a few examples of this, such as outpost docking fees, POCO taxes, and flourishing local market hubs.  But the first two are secondary, and minor, sources of income.  The last is highly situational, and doesn't necessarily require you to guarantee the security of your customers.

The game could use more mechanics that encourages white-hat style play.  A lot of players have fond memories of the time that CVA played the cops, U'K played the robbers, and neutrals could operate in Providence as long as they obeyed CVA's rules.

[Alain Colcer]

Well to me "bounty hunting" is a very very easy mechanic to do:

A type of Contract published by a "client" that specifies a "target" and a "reward", within a timeframe.
Conditions on said contract are in the order of N-ammount of ship killmails plus/or Z-ammount of pod-kills, with killers being of different corp and alliance than the target.

This type of contracts could eventually be expanded to include "corporations" as targets.

A pirate won't publish a "reward" on his own head, but could collect them with an alt. That loophole can't be closed without gimping the ability for real players to actually do "bounty hunting".

But, the real treat is that a group of pilots could work as "mercenaries" collecting bounties, or pirates could target anti-pirates and give prizes to other pirate organizations for kills.

Also, you need to decouple the bounty system from the sec rating increase/decreases, if you kill an person of negative sec-rating, you are effectively fighting against tresspasers of the CONCORD regulations, it does not make sense if i fire first or not, so the current mechanic does not promote fighting in low-sec. I do understand the GCC flagging obviously, and the automatic sentry response, but the rest is just annoying, most militia members just go full flashy to have less problems enganging "potentials".

[tarunik]

This actually reminds me of another nagging Eve PvP problem , namely the holy sepulcher of ISK efficiency as a measure of PvP skill.  This is what drives people (and not just pirates) away from going for risky fights, especially at the small-gang, "pick-up" scale.  It also favors swarms of cheap ships (T1 cruisers, etal) over smaller fleets flying more advanced/specialized doctrines (HAC/logi, T3/logi, BlackOps), unless you have highly efficient/skilled logistics pilots in sufficient numbers to be able to fight outnumbered regularly (see: Rooks & Kings, Rote Kapelle).

[Bacchanalian]

And I think thats the kind of thing that Rote has been historically unwilling to commit too - hence no real surprise that people aren't that interested to just attacking you for the sake of it.

To some degree we're a victim of our own defenses.  STIM grew up in an atmosphere of being under siege.  We had hardly been formed for 48 hours when one of the best-known and most-respected mercenary organizations in EVE at the time wardecced us along with two other random mercenary organizations.  Their combined numbers were something on the order of 10:1 over ours, as we had about 20 in corp (which counted quite a few alts, it was probably closer to 12 people) to their combined 200 or so.  We immediately developed a policy of guerrilla warfare wherein we would never put down static assets that could simply be blobbed, we would secure our assets internally in multiple layers of security with redundancy, and we would never put ourselves in a position where our entire existence could simply be turned upside-down because someone had the isk or connections to bring down 10 times our numbers on us and put us in a position where we simply would not be able to defend our assets.  Attacking when you're outnumbered is far easier than defending when you're outnumbered.  I think the fact that the majority of the Rote Kapelle leadership are old-school STIM leadership (or Gorion, who had his teeth kicked in hard enough to appreciate the mentality we adopted) that the mentality never really went away.  I still hear Tyzzara marvel every month or two that our super garage hasn't been shot to pieces yet--it's been around for a few years now and has only been sieged once and rather half-heartedly at that (some residents of the system we had moved into got mad and shot it and were unfortunate enough to have a Cry Havoc scout pass through the system and spot them--the siege ended rather quickly). 

In any case, we did for quite some time have a lot of static infrastructure, and no one ever really made a serious attempt to harass it.  We had moon mining towers spread across lowsec, I think as many as a dozen at one point, in The Forge, Metropolis, Placid, and probably one or two other regions that I forget.  I put them down the first weekend Rote Kapelle formed when I read about the moongoo changes and the fact that Cadmium was going to be worth something, and we lived off of that income for a long time.  We learned some things there too.  First off, putting together a well-fit medium tower is enough to make someone want to end their existence.  Putting together 3 in one night is enough to make you consider biomassing.  And then repeating the process for several nights makes you question your sanity.  Secondly, being the poor bastard who has to JF all over EVE with POS fuel and back out with Cadmium to sell is a very unfortunate position to be in, and it burned out more than one of our directors.  Third, if at some point some failed 0.0 entity decides to regroup in lowsec and is bored, they can come along at a moment's notice and obliterate your POS and there's really not much you can do about it.  We lost one but managed to take the rest down, and within a week there were some fights that still blow me away happening on them.  It was around the time Reikoku joined one of the militias, and they and Goonswarm wound up having some clusterfuck of a 300v300 capital fight over our humble little moons.  Not much to be done about that, and we all just watched killboards and were happy we had evacced our assets in time.  But that's always going to be a possibility and indeed a likelihood.  There are high-end moons within 5 jumps of TXW.  I've watched over the years PL, CH, and BoB fight over them.  Sure, we could go knock down the tower on them, and a week later we'd have whoever owned the alt corp's real alliance back there to knock it back down.  Why bother?

Don't get me wrong btw - I think what Mittens/Seleene et al are arguing for is quite terrible. I'd much rather they fixed 0.0 sovereignty to de-emphasize current blob-grinding afk renter mechanics before they started messing with npc stations in null - but I do try to be open-minded on it. I can see why people are annoyed to have raiders in null they can't do anything really about (though in truth) "live there and grief them" is probably an option they should try first before trying to get CSM to change the rules.

The most serious threat we could face would be an entity like Pandemic Legion or Goonswarm moving into our system with the express purpose of attacking us.  And we're too insignificant to attract that kind of attention (though I did stir up some concern with the Viper scam, and for a few days we argued about whether or not we should tear down our tower and move the supers out), and we like it that way.  That sort of combat would be the kind of combat that players come to our alliance to avoid.  How could CCP give groups a way to harass us and fight us without promoting some 2000 man alliance of the month to decide to cut their teeth in Syndicate?  If I knew that I'd have yet another speech prepared for the first CCP dev I pin down at fanfest.  As it is I have one in mind about sec status mechanics (that's very fresh in my mind as I grind back to -1.9 after a fight in lowsec)

Well ultimately its your choice of course but if you don't really like triggering fights over structures and you prefer it when people come to you (ie syndicate) then again I do have to say that its not that surprising you haven't gotten any meaningful RP wars Bacc.

Oh, but we do.  We have a running list on our forums of every customs office we spot within two regions coming out of reinforced.  90% of them end in blueballs.  I've CTAed probably a dozen capital ops in my time in Rote Kapelle.  Every one of them has turned out between 40-100 pilots, which is absolutely insane when compared to our typical gang sizes.  2 of them were to reinforce towers and didn't get counterdropped as initial tower hits generally don't.  About 5 of them were towers coming out of reinforced that didn't get defended and after an hour of not showing up, trying to throw a bite-sized force in, and generally doing retarded enough shit that we'd give away kills just to get a chance to counter.  The rest were times when other completely unrelated entities, random alliances from around our region (or as far away as Minmatar space, in one instance) had a tower fight going down and one of their leadership contacted us for batphone.  Every single operation involving capitals and towers that I have ever CTAed has ended in blueballs save one.  We formed up one night to see if a guy who was sieging towers with his Nyx and a couple of dread alts would do it again as the tower he shot the other night came out of reinforced.  We had no Rote Kapelle eyes in system and no eyes on us, and only one of the owners of the tower knew we were on standby for them.  The guy never turned up.  We had a monstrous fleet with a stupid amount of capital firepower.  We sent out a cyno dominix and chose two carriers to jump to him to see if we could find someone dumb enough to counterdrop.  8 jumps later we happen upon a TEST group hitting a tower with a Revelation, Thanatos, Avatar, and some support.  They take the bait and we kill them.  That was literally the only time we have formed up for a POS-related fight and gotten one, and it wasn't even on the POS we formed up for.  We found it roaming around.

I think you *could* achieve something like another Mito but for it to happen you'd have to be prepared to move lock stock and barrel from TXW and relocate into the enemy base of operations and think like we did in Mito - literally being prepared to siege and strangle a foe for the months it takes to get them to fight. Because nothing motivates an outfit to a death or glory attempt like becoming aware the enemy raiding their non-military traffic is simply not going away until you die.

We did that a few times.  We found that people are willing to find something other than EVE to do for amazing amounts of time (months) and while you can shut them down temporarily, as soon as you let off the pressure they spring back up like weeds.  We reduced several alliances to simply not logging in anymore except to switch skills.  And they came right back the day we moved out, 6 months later.

So in this, Rote has become a bit of a victim of your reputation - everyone knows you are great fast pvp gang specialists and are the big fish in the pond in syndicate - but everyone also knows you won't consider leaving TXW and you have short attention spans. The latter means people don't need to take you that seriously as a long term war prospect.

There's something to that.  And I don't see it changing in the current status quo of EVE.

Case in point. It won't surprise you to know that I did talk to quite a few people about *ahem* "setting you up the bomb" over the Ostingele tower attack. Lots of people were interested in joining forces to hand Rote Kapelle your ass but sadly the majority of discussions included the line "first you have to bait them out of TXW ... then ... x" So nothing really happened because the only way you guys come out of TXW is in a fast roving fleet a couple of times a night.

Which is why we didn't feel that coming back to finish your towers off directly after a patch downtime was the smartest idea.  While (no offense, but you said it yourself, we had firepower and numerical superiority when we mustered everyone together) we were not worried about SF defending the towers, we were concerned about who you could call in to back you up.  And there are, as you say, enough people around who would love to dogpile a Rote capital fleet that you'd have no problem finding them and turning them out.  The strategy then would shift to hitting the towers repeatedly and forcing you to rep them up repeatedly without ever showing so much as an alt scout up for the second go.  After enough such blueballs, we'd be able to show up and take down the towers relatively unopposed because eventually crying wolf does taper off activity.  No entity that anyone will call in can muster up that kind of force 10 times in three weeks only to go home without firing a shot.  Incidentally, this was the same strategy we employed against Rooks and Kings when they tried baiting out our supercaps last year.  We have a pretty good hold on Syndicate intel, and RnK rather ham-handedly threw bait our way a few times, and every time it was obvious enough that there was no doubt (hey look, my carrier is 20km off station in Vestouve and no one else is in here!  oops!  I just triaged and now I'm stuck!), so we logged all our supers on, sat them at the POS, and sent in a conventional BS fleet to shoot the bait.  As soon as they finally realized that we were not bringing the caps in to assist, they would pull the trigger and we'd bail.  Sometimes we killed the bait and escaped with minimal losses, sometimes we failed to kill the bait and took heavier losses, but we never deployed our caps in those situations, and eventually Mostly Harmless and Rooks and Kings got tired of alarm-clocking in their off timezones to bait us only to be blueballed.

If you had been a capturable system with vulnerable infrastructure I'd have looked seriously at promoting a bomber based harrassment campaign as we did against Sev3rance and invited allies to stage in range for hotdrops etc and to keep mashing your stuff with cloaked terror etc etc. But against an NPC station as is ? there is no point. But as mentioned earlier I'm not in the Mittens camp of wanting to take your npc station immunity away - I just think you should realize that immunity comes at a price of people not being that interested in coming to attack you there.

End of the day anything that is going to require any sort of alarm clock operations, or massive logistics pushes (fueling towers, etc) is simply something we won't do.  We'd do more damage to our alliance implementing those things than anyone else would shooting us.  Hell, when someone put down a TCU in some random system in Delve or something for April Fools last year, we had an epic shitstorm of "what the fuck is this sov shit" in alliance mail and had at least two STIM members actually drop roles until people realized it was April 1st and a massive troll (one of the best pranks I've seen played in a while actually).

Serious question now. Do you believe that Rote Kapelle would ever be prepared to come out on IGS (or FHC) or (wherever) and make a serious statement declaring your intention to annihilate a target organization (ideally a RP one) or (die trying) in the current state of the game? For example could you nail your colours to the mast and say you were going to remove Electus Matati from Eve? Then do everything neccessary to make that happen including leaving your base in TXW and relocate everything for as long as it takes including likely pressing and extending the war to the Matari Militia if a beleagred EM should take shelter there?

No.  For one thing, it would take an incredible change in the climate of EVE for us to consider a full move anywhere ever again.  We collectively have an unbelievable amount of stuff to move.  Road trips where we bring a hangar meant to last a month for limited operations somewhere generally require a good 30+ carriers making 2-4 round trips.  Most of us leave 75% of our shit at home when we do those moves.  The idea of spending days doing that sort of jump chain would result in people simply not logging on.  Our guys want to log on, get in fleet, and go get blown up.  That's what we advertise, and that's our endgame.  Our one and only real goal is to have 24/7 in space participation such that you could log in any time of day or night and find that there is a gang about to leave or already out.  And we're not far from it.  But the idea of moving entirely is almost completely out of the question unless Syndicate dies entirely (and frankly, in the past even when it has died entirely we have road tripped for a month and found that it respawns without fail).  Doing it to camp in a group that might fight us for a week and then will require us to hunt down lone mission runners and alt corps and chase them all over EVE?  Unlikely.  That's easier to do when you're the size SF was back during Mito.  When you've 300 in alliance and on any given night of the week can put 20+ in fleet in the US timezone, 5-15 in the AU timezone, and 5-20 in the EU timezone, you're going to have a lot of people with no one to shoot (as in, XYZ alliance could simply have no one online during the AU timezone) and a lot of bored pilots.

This would be 100% serious/nonironic and if you fail it'd probably kill your alliance style bid. Is it the kind of thing you could do? Or do you prefer (organizationally speaking) the non-challenging humdrum of random nbsi pvp because it doesn't involve this kind of stake?

I think if we tried it'd kill our alliance.  We'd bleed membership as we bored them to tears (and this is something we saw happen to SF when you committed to that war of attrition against -7-, is it not?), and eventually would either resign ourselves to having to recruit an entirely different style of EVE pilot to replace them or dying as an alliance.  We're not so committed to leaving that kind of mark on EVE as we are to being one of the best small gang PvP groups in EVE and being able to do that 23/7.  And that's hard enough to keep up with.    It's probably also worth mentioning that I don't think I could sit down and find a target that would really match up to something like that. 

I still think its been a useful discussion and helped focus the mind on what is responsible for your lack of potential fights from rp corps rather than "rp pvpers suck" etc. Understanding how one gets a particular enemy to fight is quite an important discipline as well.

Fair enough.  Though I do stand by the statement that in the majority of fights I have personally been in against RPers, I have been sorely unimpressed, and most of the RPers we have recruited into Rote Kapelle over the years have needed some serious help learning how to do basic things like fit their ships or pay attention to their ranges in combat.  Even the good entities have bad pilots.  For all the drum-beating I've been doing for IRED's skills in this thread, I loaded up our killboard last night to find them losing a Hurricane missing a midslot entirely.  That said, losses like that are not atypical of 90% of EVE.

But it is worth being realistic about it. Pirates on the whole are amongst the most risk-avoiding pvpers in eve (second only to 0.0 nullbears) and in this case I mean it as a grudging compliment to their powers of sidestepping any fight they think will cause them to lose significant assets. The pirate playstyle is about preserving their assets and making a profit over removing the assets of others. To this end they will have scouts all around their location and will immediately flee the gates etc when they see a potential threat moving in. Sometimes they get lazy, greedy, etc, and you can catch them mid-gank or otherwise engaged but thats rare for a roving gang to achieve. Mostly it takes cloaked intel, alt scouts of your own and some kind of regional intel channel where random neutrals report acts of pirate depravity for common knowledge.

Indeed.  You can also simply rely on them being overconfident, but that's harder to do because it assumes a certain level of skill/trickery from you that not everyone has or wants to try.

Then it usually takes some kind of an ambush, black ops drop, titan bridge, hisec rush to relieve a super tanked bait etc. What happens if you do this well isn't really pvp either - its a counter gank if anything. The pirates will produce some amusing bleating in space most likely and you might score a nice kill - but it would be wrong to see it as the summit of pvp experience in eve online.

I think black ops are woefully underused in lowsec.  They're fantastic for the situation you're talking about, and for your average level 4 runner they're not much of a train.  You need the jump skills and the black ops battleship skill if you're already in a marauder.

And I'll disagree that it's not really pvp either.  You can get into situations where you're seeing multiple levels of escalation and counter escalation.  And you can bait those levels of escalation.  Good example:  http://www.rotekapelle.com/killboard/?a=kill_related&kll_id=62753

We had the BC fleet out and it found their fleet hitting a tower.  In addition to what you see there they had another dozen BS, one more carrier, and a super.  We scrambled a cyno to the BC fleet, logged on a titan and caps, and sent in the BC fleet.  Their subcaps warp to gate and engage our BC fleet.  BC fleet opens cyno and brings in one triage carrier and the BS/Damnation.  Their cap wing warps in and we open a second cyno and counterdrop the rest of our caps.  We held HICs off the field in the desperate hope that their Wyvern pilot was an utter idiot, but no dice.  But we had yet another level of escalation behind that just in case.  Yes, the battle report looks like a total gank.  Realistically, if they hadn't been caught completely off guard and overconfident, they could have put up a decent fight and we would have at the least lost a few caps.  And to me, setting up the engagement in your favor is as much PvP as the target calling and individual piloting.  If we don't play our hand the way we did, we don't get those kills.  And there's something to that too.  Most people expect that your first ace-up-your-sleeve is your whole hand, so once you play it they play their entire hand.  At that point, you can decide whether or not to play the rest of yours.

Still you learn a lot of tricks watching pirates operate that much I won't deny. And it is funny, I've had random neutrals offer me money to log on my titan just to clear rancer of the smartbombing rokh for half an hour (who has clearly addy booked one of my titan pilots and flees the moment they login). "Wouldn't it be cheaper to go round (i say)? " "Hell no then we don't get to listen to them whining about people abusing jump portals in lowsec while we haul."

Heh.  We don't use ours much, but it happened recently that we logged it on for something or another and one of our FCs got a mail from an FC in another alliance about 15j away asking him to please log the titan off, we just spooked the fleet he was about to fight.  Hilarious stuff.  We started leaving it logged on at random times of the day just to fuck with people.  I used to do the same thing with the Nyx and rotate the pilot around so that people would see Mishka online, assume I was about to drop the Nyx, find her in station and be confused.  Even after I sold it I borrowed it back from the owner recently and used it and it spawned a comment on FHC about how someone thought I had sold it and yet here I am in it. 

[Desiderya]

This actually reminds me of another nagging Eve PvP problem , namely the holy sepulcher of ISK efficiency as a measure of PvP skill.  This is what drives people (and not just pirates) away from going for risky fights, especially at the small-gang, "pick-up" scale.  It also favors swarms of cheap ships (T1 cruisers, etal) over smaller fleets flying more advanced/specialized doctrines (HAC/logi, T3/logi, BlackOps), unless you have highly efficient/skilled logistics pilots in sufficient numbers to be able to fight outnumbered regularly (see: Rooks & Kings, Rote Kapelle).

I disagree.
K/D ratios are the same. If there's a high threat of a loss people get less and less motivated to put up a fight. Doesn't matter if they fear their ISK efficiency their K/D ratio going down. While the way ISK damage is distributed by the killboards is very generous and therefore, as agreed in another thread, not a very meaningful tool to gauge the skill of a player, the kill/loss stats are distributed in the same fashion.
10 People shoot one poor guy, and now there's 1 loss and 10 kills / X ISK lost and 10*X ISK inflicted in the system.

[Louella Dougans]

Hell, when someone put down a TCU in some random system in Delve or something for April Fools last year, we had an epic shitstorm of "what the fuck is this sov shit" in alliance mail and had at least two STIM members actually drop roles until people realized it was April 1st and a massive troll (one of the best pranks I've seen played in a while actually).

 

 

[John Revenent]

Even the good entities have bad pilots.  For all the drum-beating I've been doing for IRED's skills in this thread, I loaded up our killboard last night to find them losing a Hurricane missing a midslot entirely.  That said, losses like that are not atypical of 90% of EVE.

Yeah everyone has that one guy who just doesn't get it, the loss before the same guy was missing a lowslot. I called align to gate he sat there wondering why he died.. derp.. >.>

[Alain Colcer]

hehehe, its funny, i think galmil in particular makes fun of those kind of guys, but gets them up to speed quite quickly.

[tarunik]

I still think its been a useful discussion and helped focus the mind on what is responsible for your lack of potential fights from rp corps rather than "rp pvpers suck" etc. Understanding how one gets a particular enemy to fight is quite an important discipline as well.

Fair enough.  Though I do stand by the statement that in the majority of fights I have personally been in against RPers, I have been sorely unimpressed, and most of the RPers we have recruited into Rote Kapelle over the years have needed some serious help learning how to do basic things like fit their ships or pay attention to their ranges in combat.  Even the good entities have bad pilots.  For all the drum-beating I've been doing for IRED's skills in this thread, I loaded up our killboard last night to find them losing a Hurricane missing a midslot entirely.  That said, losses like that are not atypical of 90% of EVE.

I can't speak for the "I am dumb and can't fit ships" population at large, but most RP games treat theorycrafting as a strictly OOC matter (your character doesn't know that his cloak gives +7 intellect, he just feels smarter; likewise, he doesn't know it takes exactly 3.3 seconds for him to swing his sword).
This fails to hold in Eve (for the most part, HP are a bit of an issue due to the fact it's an arbitrary unit) due to the setting (Tarunik can pull the specs on his ship's guns and find out they have a tracking speed of .135 rad/s or tell you that a Tech 2 MAPC adds exactly 12MW of powergrid capacity to one's ship).  From there, it's not a hard leap to imagine, say, Tarunik and Esna sitting down at an establishment and having an hour-and-a-half back-and-forth about how to set up a Tempest for fleet sniping work or which EWar modules to put on a Manticore that is being flown solo in 0.0.

But, the background of most RPers in fantasy games/worlds is that they avoid theorycrafting discussion as OOC at best and a side effect of "powergaming" at worst, when in Eve, our characters ought to be just as busy tinkering with ships, running simulations/projections, and bouncing ideas off each other as we are OOC/OOG.

[Bacchanalian]

I can't speak for the "I am dumb and can't fit ships" population at large, but most RP games treat theorycrafting as a strictly OOC matter (your character doesn't know that his cloak gives +7 intellect, he just feels smarter; likewise, he doesn't know it takes exactly 3.3 seconds for him to swing his sword).
This fails to hold in Eve (for the most part, HP are a bit of an issue due to the fact it's an arbitrary unit) due to the setting (Tarunik can pull the specs on his ship's guns and find out they have a tracking speed of .135 rad/s or tell you that a Tech 2 MAPC adds exactly 12MW of powergrid capacity to one's ship).  From there, it's not a hard leap to imagine, say, Tarunik and Esna sitting down at an establishment and having an hour-and-a-half back-and-forth about how to set up a Tempest for fleet sniping work or which EWar modules to put on a Manticore that is being flown solo in 0.0.

But, the background of most RPers in fantasy games/worlds is that they avoid theorycrafting discussion as OOC at best and a side effect of "powergaming" at worst, when in Eve, our characters ought to be just as busy tinkering with ships, running simulations/projections, and bouncing ideas off each other as we are OOC/OOG.

It makes sense in other games to an extent, but not here, as you say.  And I've had conversations IC with more than one person about ship fitting and theorycrafting, so there are some that get it.    HP is an issue, as you say, but I either avoid directly referring to the numbers or just suspend my ZOMGTHATMIGHTBEOOC filter for lack of any other better terminology that would still make sense.

[BloodBird]

Jade, thanks. I'm a bit annoyed that a small part of me wants to feel offended that you suggest using 'cheap' BC's fit for main-battle duties supported by logis, or that 'herp, she thinks I don't know of/never though of gank-cruisers and stuff like that derp', when I was the one asking for advice. I did, and you answered, and noticing that I'm thinking along these tracks already is good to know.

I'll be digesting the part of this that is new to me, for example the more terror-centered angle to bombers and the whole 'feed em an empty hauler' to get them eager and flashy before you hit them. That one sounds down-right evil but what do I care

Ultimately I foresee that that the biggest 'problem' with this will be to build the needed member-count of willing people to help out and how we bring the fight in between. I've a few ideas on this but I think the biggest test will be patience - my own and theirs. Well, at least it's something to think about whenever I consider actively returning to New Eden on my main toons.

In the recent days I've come to think of one thing however. With the launch of Crucible, CCP is aiming to fix their spaceship game's flaws and lacks. IF they manage to actually fix FW and the whole alliance join system don't fuck everything up (that is, if I'm wrong) there is still a chance they manage to get a workable set of mechanics behind piracy/anti-piracy too. Even if I leave, it may not have to be for good.

[Crucifire]

It makes sense in other games to an extent, but not here, as you say.  And I've had conversations IC with more than one person about ship fitting and theorycrafting, so there are some that get it.    HP is an issue, as you say, but I either avoid directly referring to the numbers or just suspend my ZOMGTHATMIGHTBEOOC filter for lack of any other better terminology that would still make sense.

EHP = External Hazard Parameters 

It can totally be done.