Prolific Griefers in History, Part One

Prolific Griefers in History is a series that puts the spotlight on various Honorable Griefers of a time past. Rhapsody Vice is an Eve blog but most of these masterful tacticians of grief won't be Eve players -- that is by design.  In Eve, griefing is a honored pastime, and most Eve players, even if they are not practitioners of the craft, can appreciate well executed griefing. Please read these heroic accounts and be inspired. 

As always, if you have any amazing stories of scams, heists, bamboozles, hoodwinkes, flim-flams, or any general emergent gameplay, please email it to me at SydsSinclair@gmail.com or contact Suds Sinclair in game. 

..In this introductory post of Prolific Griefers in History I would like to introduce you to Angwe the Rogue, a Horde player in World of Warcraft, who was an exemplary deliveror of grief. 

Angwe prospered as an emergent player in WoW, a game that is not typically considered a very great vehicle for tear collecting. You see, Angwe was a Horde rogue in a time in WoW where stealth gameplay and surprise burst attacks were very powerful. Not against equal level opponents mind you, rogues sucked in endgame PvP. But against players who were 30 levels lower then him?  It worked wonders. 

If camping a lowbie zone (like a 1.0 sec system in Eve) and murdering low level players for hours on end isn't enough for you, I and Angwe would agree. The relentless wholesale slaughter of these lowbies was just the catalyst for the tear extraction. Angwe bought and subscribed to a separate WoW account just so he could put an Alliance toon at his same camping grounds, for the sole purpose of trash talking to his victims. 

There is almost absolutely no reason to own and pay for two accounts in WoW. Having one account grants you the ability to create as many toons on a many different realms as you would like. I say almost because the one reason where having two subscribed accounts is needed is being able to talk to the other faction. Let me clear that up:

Angwe- Horde Rogue who massacres lowbies all day. Can't trash talk the Alliance lowbies. 

Angwespy- Alliance Rogue who trash talks the Alliance lowbies after they have been victimized by Horde Angwe. 

We all know that most Eve players have 37 different accounts. So what's so special about Angwe having two?  Two things. First, you can't PLEX a second WoW account like you can in Eve. Second, the only benefit of having two accounts in WoW is the tear collections. That right there is dedication to the art of griefing. 

But with such high quality tears, who could blame him?

A little backstory on Angwe's ganking spot is needed to fully appreciate what was going on here.  Angwe set up camp in Menethil Harbor, which was an incredible choice for two reasons. First Menethil Harbor was a zone designed for level 30ish toons. Combat superiority? Check. Second, the harbor had two boats that would ferry players to the other continent in WoW. Choke point? Check.   Those boats were actually one of the very few ways to get to the other side of the world in WoW, and Angwe was such a hassle to players who were just trying to move around for quests that someone even wrote a guide on how to avoid him. 

You might say killing low level players in a noobie zone is great and all, but what about it brought out so much hate and loathing?  Well, getting killed over and over again without fail is one thing, but the icing on the cake was that in WoW, after you were killed, you had to walk back from the graveyard to your body. In Menethil Harbor, the graveyard was about a 10 minute walk back to the docks where Angwe just killed you. And upon retrieving your corpse, Angwe would kill you again. It was a delightfully frustrating circle to be locked into. 

Everything about Angwe was designed to cause as much hate and anguish for the inhabitants of WoW. Even his name. 

The correct pronunciation is "angry", but in baby talk. "Aww are you angwe?" Genious.

Aspiring space pirates and well seasoned gankers of Eve, be inspired by Angwe and his dedication. What more can you do to further the emergent gameplay cause?  If you are on the fence about spending a few hundred million ISK on a new ganking ship, consider this. Angwe paid an extra $15 a month for his second account to harvest tears. That equates to a PLEX a month that he spent, being dedicated to the cause. 

Take a look at the rest of the screen caps of Angwe.  There are many more, and all are hilarious.  

More Angwe tears

Angwe also did an AMA! on reddit. An excellent read and well worth the time. 

Reddit AmA

What do you think about Angwe the Rogue and the hours of torment he caused to thousands of WoW players?  Leave me a comment and let me know if you like the idea of this series. 

State of My ISK 3/29/14

..This post will cover my ISK earnings for February and March. Future State of My ISK posts will be a monthly report.

At the start of February I had recently resubbed both of my accounts to Eve. I had ~12b in liquid ISK and ~1b in miner poop (spoils of being a Knight of the New Order).  After I resubbed, I quickly joined a WH corp with my two combat pilots.  Wanting to go full speed ahead in my new C5 corp, I purchased about 6b in PvP ships, some blingy T3s and some run of the mill ships, so that left my Jita alt with ~6b to trade with.

My market activities before venturing out into WH life consisted of utilizing Syds Sinclair, with her excellent trading skills coupled with her very good standings, to buy in Jita and the. Export out the goods to my *snip* who was stationed in Amarr. As I was mostly just goofing off doing nefarious things in HighSec, this situation worked out nicely. I could always fly Syds back to Jita every day to update my orders.

But moving her into the C5 did not allow me to continue with that strategy, so I had to transplant *snip* to Jita. Knowing that hub trading is easier and more prosperous then station trading, I moved and sold my stash of miner poop and activated dual training for *snip* to become my new Amarr importer. As some of you may know, *snip* has always aspired to be a prolific importer/exporter, as well as an architect.

The end of February finds Syds out of my C5 WH corp and *snip* on the cusp of his new career. We also find *snip* positive by ~5b ISK in trading profits. Hurricanes were absolutely killing it for me that month, bringing in in average 120m a day profit in just that one commodity.

Start of March. I liquidate my WH assets and inject about 5b into my trading. So now my trading kitty is at a respectable 16b ISK. And with *snip* almost ready to set up shop in Amarr, we're lookin' pretty good.

So now we are at the end of March. Syds and my other combat pilot, who shall remain nameless for now, haven't done much in HighSec. I'm still on the fence as to what kind of trouble I can get them into. I'll talk about that in another post.

*snip* and *snip are a dynamic duo operating a fine import/export business. *snip* exports ~6-12b ISK out to Amarr each day. My ISK/day is just shy of 300m, which I'm a little disappointed about, but my net worth is ~22b -- 8b profit for March.

That IS good ISK, especially considering I only update my orders 1-5 times a day, depending on if I am on duty in my real life job.  And I think that my profits were stunted because I only had my import/export operations set up for the last half of the month. I can live with that, but I would like to see my ISK/day improve to 1b. To that end, I have just activated another dual training for a new import alt. I'm thinking Dodixie.

So that is the quick and dirty. 5b profits in February. 8b profits in March. Two trade pilots operating like a well oiled machine, and a third trade pilot in training. And two wishy-washy combat pilots without a directive. Hopefully in April I will have improved everyone's situation.

Fly drunk!

New Trading Markets

..I make my ISK trading, more specifically hub trading.  I export anywhere from 5-15 billion ISK a day out of Jita.  With my trading capitol at around 23 billion ISK, it becomes hard to spend all of that into items to export.  

This past week of trading I have profited about 4 billion. Couple that with me not updating my Market Quickbar, I'm finding that I have anywhere between 2-4 billion left over in my wallet, depending on how the markets are swinging on my portfolio.  I really don't want to have that much sitting in my wallet doing nothing, so I had to browse the markets looking for new areas for my ISK to go and multiply.

I happened to find eight new products that I was able to dump about 1.7 billion into, and my projected profits are in the 10-30% area.  These products also move very quick, and I've only tried to elbow my way into about 10-20% of the market share.

I'll report back in a week about my profits and experiences with these new products.  Hopefully I'll have made a good amount of ISK and also found a permanent item for my portfolio.  

After I've tested the waters for a week, I might try to up the ante and muscle some competitors out.  That will involve lowering the arbitrage to next to nothing for a few days, and forcing those who have stock to sell at break even or not worth the effort prices.  If I'm able to, I'd love to get 40% of the market for myself, even if I have to settle for a lower % in profits.  

Tell me what has been your experiences with searching for new markets to exploit.  

Jester's Bystander Effect

In Jester's latest blog he describes a pitiful victim of Erotica 1's bonus room, and his lackluster plan to eliminate game play that does not fall in line with his own.

For those of you who are not familiar with Erotica 1 and the bonus room, here is the quick and dirty:

Erotica 1 is an ISK Doubler, and the Bonus Room is just an escalation of that time old scam.

For most of us Eve players, once we read the words "ISK Doubler", the jig is up.  For those of us who don't immediately see the scam for what it is, you usually lose a few billion ISK.

In this specific situation, Erotica 1 took a naive Eve pilot for a few billion ISK and assets, and had said Eve pilot on TS recording him doing various tasks that involved humiliation and degradation.  Horrible activities and poor moral character from Erotica 1 and his fellows is out on full display.  In this specific situation, the victim endured two plus hours of unthinkable injustices, all with the guise that he would receive 5x the amount of ISK he put into this freak show.  And they recorded the ordeal and put it up on Soundcloud for the whole world to listen and laugh at this poor soul!

So let me get this straight:  What Erotica 1 and his cohorts did/do is very wrong.  Their engagement in this sort of scam put the victim through a lot of mental stress and punishment.  This is one activity that I would not want to be associated with, and an activity that most Eve players would find deplorable.

But I don't think Erotica 1 or his partners should be banned as Jester has advocated.  I don't think that they should receive any punishment at all.  In my book, all they did was scam a pilot of of a small amount of ISK.  Yawn.

Jester and his fellow court jesters (laf) mostly seem to think that what Ero did was way outside of the bounds of not only Eve, but moral functions.  They are calling for his head on a spike.  How dare he scam someone out of a small sum of ISK!  How dare he use his social engineering skills to prosper!  There is no room in Eve for this sort of behavior!  This is an outrage!

Well to that I say:  Eve was not built for the typical honest social MMO gamer.  Eve was built for the scamers, the lairs, the cheats, the gankers, the win at all costs type of player.  This is our game.  Eve was built for us.  Eve is for the type of player that gets banned from WoW.  Eve is for the players who cannot play nice with others.  Eve, and the entire galaxy, is for the pilots who can see the snake pit and profit from it's existence.

Now that is my official position.  Let me begin to debunk Jester's moral high ground.

So sohkar got scammed out of a small amount of ISK, and Jester has gotten his panties all bunched up.  Jester doesn't like to hear about this sort of thing.  He doesn't want it in "his" game.  I'm okay with all that.  That is the essence of Eve:  "I don't like what you are doing, and this is what I'm going to do about it."

What I have a problem with is Jester's "and this is what I'm going to do about it".

Jester wants Erotica 1 perma-banned.  He wants Erotica 1 out of the game completely so he doesn't have to hear about these kind of atrocities.  He wants to continue living in the world within Eve that he has built for himself, which is PvPing with an "elite" group.  This event that tugs on his moral fiber is something that CCP should handle quickly and swiftly, just so Jester can sleep well at night again.

That is bullshit, and a cop-out.  If Jester really cared, he would offer sohkar some ISK from his own pocket.  The tiny amount that sohkar got scammed out of is but a pittance compared to the likes of Jester and
Rote Kapelle.  If Jester honestly feels like sohkar has been wronged and his situation deserves to be rectified, why hasn't he put his money (ISK) where his ban-happy mouth is?

Additionally, since we all know ISK is quick and dirty, why doesn't Jester reach out to sohkar and take him under his wing?  Jester is a prolific member of Rote Kapelle, he has some pull.  Wouldn't the benevolent thing to do be reach out to this poor scammed and tortured soul and bring him into the flock?  That alone is worth 100x the ISK that sohkar gave up freely to Erotica 1.

I find what happened to be completely acceptable, but even still I have reached out to sohkar and offered my services to help him acquire ISK and my advice to prevent this sort of thing happening to him again.  This is my "and this is what I'm going to do about it."

But no, this is not Jester's mission or recourse.  Jester's "Trek" travels the path of petitioning the higher ups of CCP via his CSM position to remove an element that he doesn't want to hear about or deal with.  Jester want's CCP to feed the starving children in Africa so that he himself doesn't have to.  Jester wants his sandbox and it's participants, just not that kid over there who is building something that offends his senses.

No Jester.  This is not WoW.  This is not some Facebook game.  This is Eve.  And in Eve, there are no boundries.  You will not, and you cannot, pussify Eve.  What happened to sohkar and things of that nature are one of the spices that flavor Eve.  This is not your Grandma or Aunt's MMO.  This is Eve and we don't fly what we can't afford to lose.  And if we do, we don't make that mistake again.

This is Eve and the pain inflicted from losses are a feature™.

Let's talk about the things that Jester does not like about this whole sohkar incident.

Time lost by sohkar.
Assets lost by sohkar.
Humiliation inflicted upon sohkar.
Publication of these things against sohkar.

Let me refute and rebuke these incidents with one link that Jester fully endorses:

Rote Kapelle Video

All of the victims that are showcased in this video have been subject to all of the "injustices" that Jester is condemning.  The trick is that Jester is a participant of these "injustices."  So Jester, why is it okay for you to partake in this sort of game play, but not okay for others to?

And that is what I have to say about that.  In closing, Jester, don't mess with Eve.  This is our game.  We scam.  We Awox.  We are dirty rotten scoundrels, and we will take your ISK.  We will feast on the tears of the scammed, and we will laugh in their face.  This is our Rite.  We have prospered in the face of all this, and the ignorant or naive are our Tribute.  This is Eve.  Maybe you are the one who should be permanently removed.

Fly retarded.