So there's a very very very limited number of places to do AFK farming effectively, creating harsh competition with denial and suicide tactics in a dark little corner of the universe, and CCP snuffs it out.
I don't really see anything wrong with what he was doing.
After I got my setup going in Aphi, I went on a hunt for other similar COSMOS sites. I only found one other candidate. There is a COSMOS site in deltole with a room where a bunch of sentry guns spawn really rapidly. I think it could be camped in the same way and yield about 5 mil isk/hr.Originally Posted by Ohh_No
Besides these two sites, I never found another place where this type of activity was possible.
That's why I can't figure out the devpost. Instead of diving facefirst down the "if you AFK for longer than a 'normal' person would then it's an exploit" slippery slope and kicking off an EvE-O pubmaster sh1tstorm, why wouldn't they just decrease the ISK payout for the stupid COSMOS rats to a level where they wouldn't be attractive to farm? It's not like these farmable sites are everywhere.
Because Sreegs is pulling a political maneuvre on the Game Design team.
Contract stuff to Seraphina Amaranth.
"You give me the awful impression - I hate to have to say - of someone who hasn't read any of the arguments against your position. Ever."
It's me
I broke EvE
Here's the deal:
There's a COSMOS complex in the Aphi system called "The Labyrinth". It is a maze of 9 rooms. In each room, there are four gates, and a special battleship and cruiser that spawn over and over relatively rapidly.
You can sit there and manually farm them, but this ISK is pretty bad. Works out to about 5 mil ISK/hour for each room. At first glance, the rooms do not seem AFK farm-able via sentry drones, for two reasons:
#1, the battleships do enough DPS to kill the sentry drones, even with a large remote repairer aimed at each drone.
#2, sentry drones can't track the cruisers, even with multiple drone tracking mods.
These problems combined to create a situation where after a few spawns, the sentry drones would invariably get caught firing at a cruiser, while the battleship would move out of range.
However, if these problems could be solved, I realized that farming the rooms 23/7 with a fleet of AFK dominixes could yield about 24 billion ISK per month, without breaking the EULA. (24 billion AFTER paying to PLEX the necessary accounts).
~5 mil ISK/hour * 9 rooms * 23 hours * 28 days = ~29 bil/month
I decided this was something I wanted to try. I quickly solved the problems I mentioned earlier via trial-and-error.
#1, I came up with a domi fit that was basically 5 large RRs, all omnidirectional tracking links, cap power relays and 1 local rep. Paper-thin tank, but just enough to keep the domi alive vs. the spawn DPS.
#2, I used a fleet booster to increase the amount of reps the RRs put out, solving the problem of the spawn killing sentry drones.
#3 (THIS IS THE IMPORTANT ONE) I dropped the drones in two groups, so one group of sentry drones could always hit a cruiser orbiting the other group. Getting the drones to stay apart was a challenge. Anyone who has used sentry drones knows that they invariably end up at 0 on your ship. That is because sentry drones actually move. They move at 1 m/s towards their current target, and 1 m/s towards you if they are not firing. By dropping three drones, then setting the dominix to "keep at range" or about 7km from one, then dropping the other set, it was possible to keep about 7km distance between the two drone sets that would not close. This spacing allowed the drones to successfully kill the cruiser rats.
With these problems solved, I started farming a few rooms with a few accounts. The ISK was great. However, after a few weeks, I got really sick of flying the ships into place every morning (I always get up around the end of downtime), even though I was making bank.
Another emergent problem was that people had noticed what I was doing and started copying me. People had started to scan my ship and copy my setup.
So I was faced with two new problems:
#1: competition
#2: lack of a desire to set up my fleet every day
I solved these problems together. I decided that rather than farm the rooms myself, I would recruit other people to farm and I would be the overlord of the operation. With a combination of suicide ganking and denial tactics, I would push out the competition. I would use these same tactics to keep my farmers from rebelling against me.
First, I recruited some people. I told them up front that I would be running what amounted to a protection racket. They would farm and pay me a percentage. If they got out of line, I promised I would park a drake AFK in their rooms, which would eventually get aggro and prevent them from AFK farming. I also told them that they would each be required to help me block others from farming if I requested their help. Each room generated about 3.2 bil/month. I would take a 33% cut.
This might seem silly, but for these people, all the incentives were in place for their cooperation. A few people tried to cut me out, and I either blocked them from AFK farming myself, or had other farmers do it. One of my mates referred to this tactic as “pissing in the pot”. If anyone tried to farm without giving me a percentage, I would make sure no one got any isk. There were a few people who tried to keep farming despite my blocking tactics. I started suicide ganking these people with torp ravens and killing their AFK pods with suicide destroyers. It was easy; the farming setups had almost no tank, and Aphi is a 0.5 sec status system. (This was before the insurance change.) Getting into the Labyrinth required a rare and expensive re-usable key. I bought them up. After being ganked, many people found that they could not get back in.
Within a month, I had either driven off or recruited all the competition into my organization. I had farmers in all 9 rooms farming 23/7. Each one paid me a 33% tax rate. For the next year, I collected about 9.6 bil/month and did virtually nothing other than suicide gank a few people and settle occasional disputes between my farmers. Occasionally, haters who knew what I was up to wardec’d my corps, but that was easy to avoid with corp-jumping.
The best part was that this was all done within the scope of what was allowed. It was a goal of mine to not violate the EULA in any way.
Unfortunately for me, eventually a lazy GM mistook my AFK farmers for botters and banned them all. After a lengthy petition process where I was forced to explain all these details, I was able to get the bans reversed, but was informed that what I had done would no longer be allowed, and that the devs would be implementing changes to prevent it from happening in the future.
TL;DR:
I got rich and forced CCP to change their bad game design
+rep for winning eve good sir!
lold
Yeah fuck him.
Next up, AFK mining in a Industrial is exploiting.
We know of the two COSMOS sites this is possible in, what about the static DED plexes? Theoretically the same sort of setup would work in them. I'm not sure how feasible it is to say, park a pair of carriers in a 10/10 (static 10/10s still exist right?) and go to town, but if your alliance owned the space and it was safe enough that seems like it could be a very nice income stream.
-O
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those Thukkers, that way I wouldn't have to have any goddamn stupid useless conversations with anybody.
Afaik, the closest you get to a static 10/10 anymore is a site that spawns in a certain constellation every 12 hours or so, that you can blitz for an overseer's effects and a random mindlink. Even the old 10/10s were nothing like this, anyway, because IIRC they only respawned at downtime, anyway. Also since they were gated you wouldn't be able to bring a carrier or even assigned fighters into them anyway.
me w/ 4 ishtars was limited purely by time between gates, i normally had the next one scanned down... depends on drops but up to 1-2b an hour with lucky drops i guess.
Hello? Oh, hello! I'm sorry it's a very bad line. No, no no... but that's not possible, she was sealed in to the Seventh Obelisk after the prayer meeting. Well, no, I get that it's important... an Egyptian Goddess loose on the Orient Express. In Space. Give us a mo....
... don't worry about a thing, your Majesty; we're on our way.
In all seriousness though, everyone was thinking they were talking about carrierbombing forlorn hubs, right?
Big up to the guy who farmed that COSMOS site.
Nice story!
I guess it would require looking at all current and future plexes with the same keen eye you used, which takes an effort and ability CCP seems to be lacking.
There's an Obfuscated C Contest with a special prize "Best abuse of the rules". I guess you'd have won that.
PS: Do your drones really keep shooting after you log out as per the double warp scram domi setup? I doubt that. The warp scrambler switching off is a non-issue, since emergency warp is initiated only once, also, your guns keep shooting so why would the scrambler switch off?
Guns, scrams, mining lasers all keep running until DT, tested with a pair of noobhips in Perimeter or something sometime. Didn't think to test drones.
After I got my setup going in Aphi, I went on a hunt for other similar COSMOS sites. I only found one other candidate. There is a COSMOS site in deltole with a room where a bunch of sentry guns spawn really rapidly. I think it could be camped in the same way and yield about 5 mil isk/hr.
Besides these two sites, I never found another place where this type of activity was possible.
That's why I can't figure out the devpost. Instead of diving facefirst down the "if you AFK for longer than a 'normal' person would then it's an exploit" slippery slope and kicking off an EvE-O pubmaster sh1tstorm, why wouldn't they just decrease the ISK payout for the stupid COSMOS rats to a level where they wouldn't be attractive to farm? It's not like these farmable sites are everywhere.
if memory serves the first mission on the main faction epic arcs is a scannable static anomaly site in 4 different systems ( it is for minnie anyway ) this site constantly respawns rats. no battleships that i can remember but mostly loads of 100k elite cruisers. people might have been doing those as well.
Seems to be kind of a feature of highsec. Why did we leave static plexes in highsec again, when we refactored?
Jade Constantine > You are a creature of bended knee and herd instinct addicted to a cult of mindless nihilism and institutional abuse.
because some of them are COSMOS related?
EVE has backstory.
I can understand the cosmos related ones - odd that there are 1/10 and 2/10 permenant plexes spread all over.
Wasn't the reasoning something along the lines of 'it's the first step of the exploration profession, if we remove it new players won't even realise it exists'?
Somewhat moot, now that the tutorial has an exploration agent.
so... the drones dont go after that really close target that's doing the scrambling?It workswhat
Not if they are deployed after the aggression has been initiated.
I thought if you log/initiate warp the drones stop what they are doing and attempt to return to the drone bay?
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