How do P I R A T Support so Many War Decs?

Communications Center General Discussion
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As many of you will already know, the recent events regarding botting in Omist have led the community to believe that a director of the high sec war dec alliance, P I R A T was running the operation. This has already been discussed extensively and will not be addressed here.

So I wanted to ask the question, is P I R A T able to fund itself for its impressive number of war decs, or is it likely that some “outside source” of funding is maintaining their play style?

Some useful stats regarding P I R A T:
50 active PvP characters (ref. zKillboard)
188 active war decs, excluding mutual (ref. Eve Online alliance information).
Est. value of big kills in past week: 70B (First 6 pages of ZKill top kills)
Est. value of drops from big kills past week (first 6 pages of ZKill top kills): 13.45B

From P I R A T’s killboard, the first thing to strike me was their impressive range of kills, the highest of which were several billion ISK in value. But then I found myself asking at what cost did these kills come?

The minimum cost of war decs for PIRAT is 50m per war per week. From this, the minimum possible cost of hosting 188 wars, assuming all targets to be small is 9.4B ISK/week. Well, fair enough, the group could easily afford that. So I decided to delve a bit deeper and investigate how much extra it would come to for all of the big juicy alliances they are at war with. So, methodically, I went through the lot, testing in-game how much it will cost to declare war on each of them and, equally methodically, I totalled up the values. As it turned out the additional cost would come to a nice, round 20B/week.

So now we have a small group making 13.45B in the past week at an expense of 29.4B to maintain the war decs. I thought, perhaps, the other pages of kills which I have not read might be the source of this extra income, but alas, as it turned out most of the valuable drops were in the first two pages of top kills on Zkill. After around 6 pages, the bulk of every kill was in the ship value itself. We would also have to assume that members are looting all wrecks and donating all value back into the alliance war dec fund after selling articles. An unlikely situation to say the least.

This left me looking at a gaping 15B/week deficit in P I R A T’s finances. How possibly could they be obtaining this income to maintain their wars? Perhaps people are hiring them to harass others. Are P I R A T of the sort of quality that would entice players to hire them? Enough to cover 15B/week?

I’m not certain of what’s going on. All I can say with reliability is that their finances don’t seem to add up in the way we might expect.

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I’ve never really looked into hisec wardeccers all that much, but are we certain that they are earning the bulk of their ISK through hisec “piracy”?

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as dar i remember they are relted with the recent OMIST nyx bot destroyed as bulk in bubbles, then look in a first glance as some members of PIRAT uses ratting booted nyx in null sec to fund the war declarations. Recently was a reddit/r/eve thread about that in the pc gamer article.

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The same way MYM8, LICMY, VMG and so on: earning ISK by other means and by selling loot of dumb feeders.

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If you take the corp/alliance name off, then I would say look for PVE/trading alts.

But if you’re here to blast these guys, well… carry on.

–Gadget grabs some pop-corn before the thread is shut down

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Magical “helpers”?

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They catch nullsec people bringing all their loot to jita to sell and blow them up and use that loot to pay for the wardeck + blinging their vindicator’s. Also if you don’t want to be war-decked make alt corporations and wardeck yourself and fill all the spots :stuck_out_tongue: or just have out of corp alts doing all the leg work, probibly the easier solution xD

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Pirat (or any other merc group) will never make enough isk in loot drops to pay for hundreds of wardecs.

Reality would be closer to - People pay mercs to maintain wardecs. I imagine Pirat is well enough established that they would outlay very little if any of their own isk for wardec fees.
Any loot gained from kills is cream - Used to sub accounts, bling out ships, buy shinies for their nulsec alts or just grow in a pilots wallet.

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The money from loot they share between participans. So it’s like salary for them. There is even something like accounting bookkeeping for that.

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tldr: how do mercenaries earn money?

Uhhh :thinking:

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I’ve some experience with this; the short answer is yes, they’re likely hired to hit alliances by other alliances. They are good at one thing in particular: camping trade hubs. I’m not going to talk down to them, this is a sandbox game, and can be played any number of ways. The easy answer to dealing with them is to use a neutral alt to haul goods to your shopping, starving them out. Most alliances do this already.

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Too bad they weren’t in the United States.

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Also take into consideration that people have SP farms.

Lets say I have 2 account just for selling sp on the markets. you can roughly train just under 1.9mil sp a month per char. You can do 3 injectors a month. It is enough isk to plex the account buy 3 extractors and have cash to play with. However the current plex prices making profit from this a lot harder. :slight_smile: But buying extractor that can be supplemented with the loot drop which is also very inconsistent depending on the targets.

Now 3 injectors a month does not sound like much isk but it is enough for me to have fun. Yes you need to make sure you have enough ISK to have the character high enough in SP to start extracting but still.

Now…

Lets say you have 10 SP toon… 20 SP toons… 30 Toons. + that with members that do the same. and BAM. You can have a lot of isk to play with.

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Exactly. What most of the eve community does not know is that players are actually paying to support the mercs. The players fuel the merc war machine.

Most of people think that mercs function like Marmites, sit on a gate alone and pop shuttles, haulers and afkers.

Far from the truth. Serious highsec entities like VMG, PIRAT, PE support themselves from paid wardecs, assassination contracts, citadel defense / attack and other contracts. Popping juicy hamsters around the tradehubs generate isk for the members wallet. You keep what you kill. If you also happen to be a member of a proficient merc group you will have to fly very expensive doctrines and usually get SRPd. As a member you may also get paid for attending alliance ops.

From experience I can tell you that from popping hamsters alone you can make at least 10 bil a month with a minimum of 2h/day relaxed gameplay.

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It’s quite incredible, really. If this is true, that entities are paying the group to maintain wars, they are making at least 15B a week on these contracts to continue aggression.

It’s a rather lucrative business!

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It also helps when they take contracts against their allies alts, and share the iskies?

But yeah… there’s enough people around with isk to fund mercs massive amount of wardecs, its just that the quality of service has dropped.

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We had a rather detailed presentation at Evesterdam but CCP did not bother recording or putting it live, afterall it was a free event for them LOL Marketing.

It is not an easy job, it requires dedication, online time and people skills to negotiate. It is probably the most misunderstood aspect/style of playing Eve. I for one hate shooting rats or running missions and shooting people for isk is so much fun than any other isk for bullets activity in the game.

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Well done!

Due to rumors, CODE is an Imperium project, while PIRAT is a DRF project. Nice acronyms btw: CODE, PIRAT.

Can you find other strange community activities in EVE? What forces (motivations) people to do strange things?

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Strange activity? High sec miner’s? I don’t see why people would put themselves through that torture for 10mil/hour

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Some corps pay to avoid wardecs.

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