My Loot, Your Tears

Tweakboy over at the Event Horizons blog took a first step into corporate theft, and won big on his first try.

An excerpt:

During this time i noticed several new recruits in corp chat. I started asking if anyone needed stuff hauled or jumped and listed the major systems that had corp offices. I even mentioned I had a carrier and could jump rigged ships. This was attractive to a few pilots because they lived in lowsec and couldn’t/wouldn’t risk the 7 lowsec jumps to home. After talking to a few guys privately I was contracted a hurricane rigged but T1 fit, 2x rigged and T2 fit ravens, a rigged T2 fit rokh, a retriever, vexor, and a few other smaller ships along with a retardedly huge amount of mods, mostly T1.

I was also contracted a navy apoc fully faction/T2 fit with meta 4 guns, and an extra set of meta 4 guns laying around. Nice grab you might say. It gets better. This is the same pilot who contracted me the cane… and a navy slicer, and then told me he didn’t know me and wouldn’t contract his apoc. I let the wheels spin for a second then told him “Mate, I’m legit. The corp just loaned me a Fenrir to move all this crap. Would they do that if I wasn’t legit?” He responded with an apology that he was just paranoid with his baby. 30 seconds later navy apoc contract was accepted. (it had integrated hammerheads, 2x TS lrg reps, TS PDU, and a imperial navy heat sink).

Another player contracted me EVERY asset he had on 4 characters. EVERY asset. I have 1.5 million units of unrefined ore. WTF, it is like 80 mil in ORE. I took it.

Sounds like Tweakboy has the Right Stuff.

Today Honorless Internet Jerks destroyed another offline POS tower, for a return of around 1.55 billion ISK. It took roughly 6.5 hours with four battleships to destroy the large True Sansha Control Tower.

The Corporate Hangar Array and Ship Maintenance array were destroyed at the beginning, and did not drop anything. The value was entirely in the modules:

Siona Atreus, who had reported this POS to us, received 20% or around 311m. The other 80% was split nicely between the four Jerks involved, so we each got the same – 311m.

We encourage anyone who knows of, or finds, a valuable offline POS belonging to a small or medium sized corporation to bring it to our attention – and claim 20% of the proceeds if we take it down. I will be posting a guide on how to efficiently find offline POSes in the near future.

1) Find an inactive corporation with an offline POS tower full of goodies
2) Declare war on corporation
3) Fit and insure POS-bashing battleships
4) AFK pew tower
5) Scoop modules and profit!

One of our friends from Suddenly Ninjas, Aruca Meyers, contacted me about an offline POS tower he had found in the Kamokor system. Further research showed that the corporation, Shenda Innovations, was both small and apparently inactive. The Dread Gruistas’ Tower had a nice collection of modules:

6x Mobile Labs
6x Equipment Assembly Arrays
2x Component Assembly Arrays
4x Medium Pulse Laser Batteries
4x Medium Beam Laser Batteries
7x Cruise Missile Batteries
2x Sansha’s Small Pulse Laser Batteries
2x Warp Disruption Batteries
1x Stasis Webifier Battery
1x Energy Neut Battery
1x Ship Maintenance Array
1x Corporate Hangar Array

That was going to be worth at least 600M before whatever was in the CHA and SMA, so we figured it was worth a day of AFK shooting at the tower. We watched the area and corporation for a day or two, and didn’t see a single one of them log on. It seemed we’d be ok to AFK shoot this tower for however long it took.

Paul and I both fitted Amarr battleships for damage, insured them, and jumped into cheap clones. Even if we got pewed and podded, it wasn’t going to be a big loss. We put the call out to the other Jerks, but all of them were busy/drunk/working, so we deputized Aruca as a Jerk for a day and had him help us shoot the tower.

We blew up the CHA and SMA first in order to get any tasty ships or loot that were going to drop. The SMA only dropped a shuttle, but the CHA dropped a lot of POS fuel, 6x each of Medium Pulse and Medium Beam Laser batteries, and best of all 2 more Sansha Small Pulse Laser Batteries.

The DG Control tower has the most HP of any tower in the entire game. We weren’t expecting this to be quick, and it wasn’t. We started shooting at 06:50 EVE time, and kept shooting right up to downtime. We resuming shooting after downtime, and didn’t hit armor until around 22:30. The DG tower has 60M shields, plus recharge rate. The tower finally went down around 01:10, for a total of 18 hours or so of shooting.

We unanchored everything, stripped our insured pew ships, and then self-destructed them for the payout. Ending loot:

At Jita prices this comes in just under 900M. We had guessed at more, but that was at non-Jita prices, and I don’t feel like babysitting orders in another market for a week until everything sells.

Not bad for a day worth of shooting a tower, checking up every few hours or so. I actually drove my sister to her college – 2.5 hours away – and back, while this was going on. Payout to Aruca as a finders’ fee is 20%, or around 180M; Paul and I each pocket around 360M each.

Jerks will provide a similar 20% finders’ fee for anyone who provides us information on offline POS towers in small/inactive corporations which lead to a POS takedown. In order to be worthwhile, the tower should have at least 500M worth of modules.

Paul and I just finished taking down a Dread Guristas Control Tower but that story is going to wait for the next post.

My two characters Khalia and Johanes had self-destructed their POS-bashing battleships for the insurance money and were heading the short trip over to Jita. We have a few wars going on, so we weren’t that surprised to find a war target right on the gate inside Jita. Wait, in an Ibis?

Copy Jeff was stationary on the gate, so I assumed he had autopiloted from somewhere else. What to do – charge at him with Khalia’s Imparior and Johanes’ Ibis!

I had hoped for a noobship-on-noobship battle, but no such luck. He sat there while the Civilian Gatling Pulse Laser and Civilian Gatling Railgun hammered his Ibis with blows of 3 or 4 damage. It took 4 or 5 minutes, but the Ibis was no match for our mighty frigates.

But wait! The hapless and absent Jeff was now adrift in his capsule… which has the weakest and puniest of all defenses. How long would it take for two Total Suck class frigates to rupture it’s contents and spill his goo into space?

About 3 minutes.

Sorry Jeff. Perhaps your second day in No More Violence will actually not feature any violence. On the other hand, if you’re game for a rematch – bring another Ibis. See you out there.

UPDATE: As it happened, Jeff’s clone location was Jita. I refit the Imparior for real damage and with a scram and undocked. Jeff undocked behind me in a Raven. So I locked and scramed him. He… docked. A few minutes later he undocks in a Kestrel. I lock and scram him. He… docks. Yet again later he undocks in an Ibis. This time he stays undocked and melts to my Imparior, and then I pod him again. Good times!

This will be the post where everything comes to close, where all the fun stuff we’ve been storing up for later gets to come out and see the light of day. This has been delayed a bit, but we do have real lives… amazing, isn’t it?

Our wardec against Ludi Sacerdotales is still active, but we have suspended most activity against them. Why? We reached one of our end-game goals: The target is disbanding. Ludi has shed more than half it’s membership in the last few days and is down to 14 members from an original high of 40.

In case you think that I’m speculating about their disbanding, let me explain: We had an alt on the inside the entire time. Both Captain Charismatic and I applied and joined the corporation. When Charismatic’s character was outed, Ludi believed they were in the clear and my spy character was able to follow every move they made. With my access to their corporate chat and Paul’s new intel sharing tool, all of Jerks was able to listen in on the corporation in real-time.

We had a blast seeing all of the internal tears, horrible fits, completely wrong statements about game mechanics, and the reactions to our manipulating them from the inside. I will be posting a new series called “The Ludi Files” from time to time – because the amount of material is just too large to cover in any single post.

I’ll start off the series now by talking about Ludi’s attempts to determine our alts. They correctly identified a few of our very obvious alts, but they fingered a number of characters as our alts which were either (a) only people we were friends with or (b) characters that had no relationship with us at all!

This list has all of the actual Jerks members, but that’s pretty easy to find. It has three of our actual alts and one former alt (character now sold); none of this is too difficult to figure out if you read this blog and checked out some corporate history.

Now the lols start: BM Dublyoo, Clantyn, Elias Tarmarr, Kel’airy, and Merktlhu are either friendly with us, or from our days in Suddenly Ninjas – but these guys weren’t involved in our war with Ludi and most likely didn’t even know about it. The real hilarity is the rest of the list: Britney Tears, Casiella Truza, Eliason Phasmatis, Miyamoto Mushai, and Novail. These guys are ENTIRELY UNRELATED to us in any way. At all.

Essentially what happened is that if someone in Ludi saw one of the Jerks on a gate, with a neutral also there, they assumed it was an alt. *facepalm*. They harassed some of these guys, including poor Britney who just wanted to ice mine in peace.

Finally, they missed a very obvious alt character. During our kill of the CEO’s Scorpion we warped in one of my alts with ECCM fitted up. He was on the field long enough for the CEO to have noticed, and would have turned red to him. No mention of this guy ever shows up. Fail corp is fail.

Today when I logged on in Ruvas to look for carebear targets, I saw some strange purple chat in local. Further investigation revealed that this was a pirate invasion live event. I grabbed an interceptor from my Orca and went to look.

I was pretty much immediately popped. Well then.

As I sat there in my pod, I saw an Amarr battleship suffer a similar fate. An idea sprang into my head. I warped back to the Orca, grabbed a salvage Vigil, warped back at 100km, and burned away from the fight until I had a tactical bookmark about 200k off the event.

I saw a Drake pop. I warped to it. T2 loot. Dropped it off at the Orca and warped back to my tac spot.

As I arrived, I saw an Elite Caldari Cruiser wreck. Yes! I warped to it. Faction loot! I dropped it off and set up again.

Another Drake popped. I wasn’t super hopeful, but T2 loot is still money in the bank. Only this Drake also had a faction BCU. Score!

After that, most of the loot was just T2 and best named stuff. After a few minutes some big fleets showed up with logistics and got the situation under control, meaning that fewer ships died horribly.

Then the pirate carrier spawned. Not thinking, I warped to zero to get whatever loot it dropped.

Carriers have smartbombs. My client lagged and my mailbox blinked. I wasn’t sure what had happened until my screen went dark and I woke up in a clone vat in Vylade. There goes about 200M worth of implants. Oh well.

I took my Orca alt the three short jumps from Ruvas to Jita and counted up my loot:

Two Caldari Navy Ballistic Control Units: 160 million
Republic Fleet 10MN Afterburner: 50 million
Gist A-type EM shield hardener: 120 million
Caldari Navy Shield Boost Amp: 100 million
Pithum C-type Medium Shield Booster: 300 million (!!!)

730 million ISK for being in the right place at the right time. If you’re going to do this yourself, my advice is to get to the event as soon after it starts as possible. This takes advantage of the local carebears who have no idea what they’re dealing with and warp in with their faction-fit mission boats.

CCP: Thank you. Eve needs more unpredictable and terrible ways to lose more than you intended to risk. I speak both of the faction BearBoats getting popped and of my own podding at the hands of a GM. Eve is better than WoW simply because there is actual risk involved in everything you do. Keep it up.

The one thing everyone is motivated by? Money. Oddly enough, this person gave me intel without asking for payment. Fortunately it fits the information provided by another source.

Note: Read from bottom up.

Part 2 of the war journal isn’t going to be nearly as exciting reading as part 1.

From our last report, Ludi Sacerdotales had just dropped out of their self-owned alliance to get a 24-hour break from our wardec. Our new wardec against the corporation went live, and the corp members universally stayed docked up all the time we were logged on, with a few exceptions.

With some help from locator agents, we hunted down tej kai and exploded his Tristan. A little bit later, his velator and pod also got the axe. This was the extent of kills for the last two days, due to station-spinning fever on their part.

We did catch some guys running out to lowsec and nullsec, but they rapidly docked up as we were moving in for the kill. We then proceeded to station camp them for hours while doing other stuff with our alts. It appears that their current plan is to move to 0.0 – we’ve seen several members in 9UY4-H a few jumps out into Providence.

I took a Force Recon out there and had the chance to see the Griefers-Be-Gone take ownership of the UNITY station, and then take sov away from Ushra’Khan. Ludi CEO jaksparra was not outside the station, so I’m guessing G-B-G are not blue to them. If Ludi thinks we’re not going to chase them down in 0.0 they’re sorely mistaken. Jerks has been working on its Black Ops program for a while. =)

Ludi has now joined a new alliance: Retribution. I link to the killboard so you can see how fail this alliance is at PvP. Jerks is not exactly worried; we declared war on Retribution promptly.

The usual plan by targets at this point is to try to wait us out by just staying holed up forever, “until we get bored”. People reviewing our war history will discover we’re very patient. When MoonRabbit Collective joined OWN Alliance, we dec’d OWN for about two months and just kept shooting.

In unrelated news, I recently had invested some ISK which was just “in reserve”. The particular investment vehicle was through a friend from a previous corp that I well trust, and I was not disappointed: My 1.2 billion ISK investment returned me 91 million ISK in the first two weeks. That’s an excellent rate of return. I also have a previous investment of 500m in another investment that has steadily returned 20-30m every two to three weeks for almost a year. I encourage anyone with an ISK reserve of a few hundred million to look for a quality investment platform.

Captain Charismatic has a skill for finding corporations which are worth Jerks attention. Most recently he found us Ludi Sacerdotales, who were allowing anyone with a pulse to join.

Captain joined under one of his alts long enough to discover they were incredibly, amazingly, mind-bogglingly, full of fail. We had some fun with his inside information, until by bad luck he was discovered and kicked out. No problem! These guys were going to be worth more attention, so we started the process for a deceleration of war.

While this was pending we started scanning down and can-flipping their miners, which they were not happy about at all. They seemed to like flipping back and/or shooting back, so we managed to down a Badger full of ore, two Kestrels and a Drake. We also got the usual threats of WHEN THE WAR STARTS YOU WILL SUFFER!!!111

[ 2010.07.28 04:36:17 ] Phantomesk > when this war starts
[ 2010.07.28 04:36:19 ] Phantomesk > your fucked
[ 2010.07.28 04:36:29 ] DreamTrooperX > baha this’ll be fun eh phantom?

[ 2010.07.28 04:36:50 ] Khalia Nestune > we haven’t even started and you’re down two kessies a drake and a pile of ore. lol.

[ 2010.07.28 04:55:32 ] Phantomesk > well we’re not gonna cna flip u cause ull take us out 1 by 1
[ 2010.07.28 04:55:36 ] Phantomesk > now if it was war times
[ 2010.07.28 04:55:40 ] Phantomesk > u’d be dead 20 minutes ago

For added insult, I take the 100k Veldspar and contract it to him for about 8 times the normal price. Better, he actually accepts the contract!

[ 2010.07.28 21:14:57 ] Khalia Nestune > woo
[ 2010.07.28 21:15:05 ] Khalia Nestune > thanks for doing business, Dream
[ 2010.07.28 21:17:34 ] DreamTrooperX > got zydrine? thats really what i need
[ 2010.07.28 21:18:05 ] Khalia Nestune > Yeah, but with shipping and handling
[ 2010.07.28 21:18:12 ] Khalia Nestune > it will be about 10k per unit

While we wait for the war to start, we do some recon on their POS. Charismatic hangs out in a cloaky ship while the CEO fiddles with the modules. “Hey Khalia”, I hear over comms, “the CEO is offlining some of his guns.” He watches while the CEO brings five medium gun modules offline. There’s no one else at the POS except for the CEO, and that guy is in a Scorpion.

Clearly this is not an opportunity to be missed, so Charismatic provides my out-of-corp Orca alt with a bookmark for one of the modules. I warp in, scoop it, and warp off. Not a damn thing they can do. Surprisingly we don’t hear a peep out of the CEO in local, nor does Charismatic see the guy do anything! So I warp in several more times and scoop modules, and Charismatic manages to scoop one of them with his Orca alt who arrives late to the party.

Even better, we later tell the CEO, and he actually doesn’t care or doesn’t believe us, because he never says a peep about it.

[ 2010.07.29 00:37:35 ] shoopusmawhoopus > Hey jak
[ 2010.07.29 00:37:44 ] Captain Charismatic > wanna know if you’re paying attention
[ 2010.07.29 00:37:54 ] Captain Charismatic > You were unanchoring pos mods earlier
[ 2010.07.29 00:37:56 ] shoopusmawhoopus > Medium Pulse Laser Battery
[ 2010.07.29 00:38:00 ] Captain Charismatic > that one of them?
[ 2010.07.29 00:38:05 ] Captain Charismatic > it’s in my orca’s hold
[ 2010.07.29 00:38:11 ] Captain Charismatic > We got a fair number
[ 2010.07.29 00:39:20 ] Khalia Nestune > Oh by the way
[ 2010.07.29 00:39:29 ] Khalia Nestune > I bet you’re thinking, oh, they’re messing with us
[ 2010.07.29 00:39:35 ] Khalia Nestune > they’d get shot, right?
[ 2010.07.29 00:39:45 ] Khalia Nestune > Pretend we had friends with haulers… not in our corp
[ 2010.07.29 00:39:50 ] Captain Charismatic > :)
[ 2010.07.29 00:39:53 ] Captain Charismatic > Like…
[ 2010.07.29 00:39:55 ] Khalia Nestune > and we were watching you unanchor mods… while cloaked
[ 2010.07.29 00:39:56 ] Captain Charismatic > orcas…
[ 2010.07.29 00:40:08 ] Khalia Nestune > and then told them to warp in and steal them!
[ 2010.07.29 00:40:14 ] Captain Charismatic > :D
[ 2010.07.29 00:40:19 ] Captain Charismatic > You seemed to be kinda afk
[ 2010.07.29 00:40:26 ] Khalia Nestune > It was funny too, because you were there in your scorp
[ 2010.07.29 00:40:30 ] Khalia Nestune > for like six hours
[ 2010.07.29 00:40:51 ] Khalia Nestune > Capt, three laser batteries and two blasters?
[ 2010.07.29 00:41:00 ] Captain Charismatic > yeah
[ 2010.07.29 00:41:06 ] Captain Charismatic > I got a pulse lazor
[ 2010.07.29 00:41:11 ] Captain Charismatic > what’d you get?
[ 2010.07.29 00:41:17 ] Khalia Nestune > all the rest
[ 2010.07.29 00:41:20 ] Captain Charismatic > heh
[ 2010.07.29 00:41:35 ] Khalia Nestune > The best part is, you didn’t even notice

So the war starts. And, as we expected, fifteen of them stay docked up while we wait in the area for them to undock. Eventually they get bored and start undocking in bits and pieces and end up getting pewed by us. Phantomesk loses a cheap T1 frig. Spacemonster72, who is not very bright, loses a Thrasher and his pod; and then he comes right back and loses another Thrasher.

Dominic Fergas, attempting to be clever, undocks with a warp-stab-and-cloak fit Rifter. He warps off with a scrambler on him, then comes back at range and cloaks. Captain was able to see where he warped in, and we know he will move like a snail with a cloak on. So I go fit up a second scrambler and warp back in at range and buzz around. Guessing that 100k from station was too obvious, I then warp back in at 70km – and immediately decloak him. His Rifter goes up in smoke. We were laughing our asses off at that one.

[ 2010.07.29 00:23:35 ] Khalia Nestune > LOL
[ 2010.07.29 00:23:38 ] Captain Charismatic > Wow
[ 2010.07.29 00:23:47 ] Captain Charismatic > It’s like minesweeper for people we can kill
[ 2010.07.29 00:24:09 ] Khalia Nestune > YES!

Sometime later, CEO jaksparra
drops in on our camp with his ECM Scorpion. This is apparently a decoy in order for his corp mates to GTFO from the system, because they all start undocking and warping off. We’d run into this Scorp before, and we were prepared this time. We let Captain’s hurricane take the brunt of the ECM, and then I warped in an anti-Caldari fit Blackbird. I jam and point the Scorpion, and Captain pounds on his non-existent tank until the Scorpion explodes.

[ 2010.07.29 00:46:00 ] Khalia Nestune > yeah
[ 2010.07.29 01:14:48 ] Khalia Nestune > \o/
[ 2010.07.29 01:14:56 ] Captain Charismatic > Bye scorp
[ 2010.07.29 01:14:57 ] Khalia Nestune > pwned
[ 2010.07.29 01:15:02 ] Captain Charismatic > This is what happens
[ 2010.07.29 01:15:15 ] Captain Charismatic > when you bring shiny things
[ 2010.07.29 01:18:19 ] Khalia Nestune > Jerks: 9; Ludi: 0
[ 2010.07.29 01:18:25 ] Khalia Nestune > Shall we continue?

So what’s a corp to do at this point? Avoid the wardec by dropping out of their alliance (of which they were the only actual corporation). This forces the wardec to end in 24 hours. Rapidly joining and leaving alliances to avoid wardecs is however considered an exploit – and a bannable offense – and Paul lets the CEO know. And that we’ll be declaring war on their corporation – now cheaper outside the alliance!

With 24 hours until the pew pew ends (and then 24 before it starts again), we set up camp and wait for boredom to set in. Which it does – a Merlin tries to get by and gets blown up. Suspecting a scout for a larger fleet, we swap for some bigger ships and wait. Sure enough they show up with a Merlin, Moa, Thorax , Drake and a Caracal. The Caracal is smart enough to get the hell out of there, and the rest fall like rocks. We pod two of them and are starting to actually feel a little bit bad… no wait, we don’t.

We round off the night by chasing down a guy mining in an Osprey and podding him; and then we camp a mission-running Drake who falls right into my lap and suffers the obvious fate.

Are you entertained? We sure are. Stay tuned for the next installment!

To all who volunteered to help with that heist I talked about. You know, the one whose post I deleted for OPSEC reasons? I think I have the pilot I need. I will respond to your post if I need you. I got over a dozen requests on three different forms of communication, so I figured a post was the best way to let you know that I think I’ve got it covered.