Is “efficient ratting” about isk/h?

New Citizens Q&A
1

When people talk about ratting efficiency, the conversation almost always stops at raw ISK/hour or ticks. But isn’t that only part of the picture?

For example, faster-clearing fits often require higher attention, more expensive hulls, or operating in riskier space, while slower or semi-AFK ratting can free up mental bandwidth for intel, market checks, or parallel activities. On top of that, ship losses, travel time, and even burnout seem like “soft costs” that never get counted.

So when veterans say “X is the best way to rat,” are they optimizing for spreadsheet ISK/hour, or for long-term sustainability and decision fatigue? And if those aren’t the same thing, how should a player decide which kind of efficiency actually matters for their situation?

2

Usually it’s indeed only about ISK per hour.

Ease of travel, amount of accounts, attention needed, SP needed, risk of getting caught, cost of ship or time to break even, requirement of a capital umbrella… they’re usually all secondary to ‘ISK per hour’.

I don’t rat much, but when I do I don’t stare only at the ISK number, but also how fun it is or how easy I can set it up or get away.

Maybe that is the reason I care less about ISK/hr efficiency for ratting: if I too would spend considerable time doing a specific activity for ISK I too might optimize it.

Personally I usually optimize for fun per hour. I rat if I’m feeling like ratting, want to try a different site or new ship fit.

But others may have their own preferences.

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3

Ratting is usually about how many ratters you can catch.

4

since “fatique” and “attention” is totally different from person to person, the only real useful way to compare “efficiency” is to measure ISK/hour - but that is only meaningful if you include all side-efforts into that calculation. Most claims that person XYZ does a bazillion ISK per hour totally ignore that and thus are pretty much worthless.

Many people see ratting just as a source of income to later spend on other activities (like PvP), so they aim to spend as little time as possible, aka “most bang for the time invested”.

1 Like
5

Because you need to be able to reduce to a unit of measurement to make legitimate comparisons. All of those other things don’t translate well to a unit level --what’s a unit of mental bandwidth? A unit of intel? A unit of parallel activities? How do they relate to ISK generation, if that’s what you’re going by? How do you convert intel to isk/h?

ISK/h isn’t all there is, of course not, this game is a lot more complex than that. But if an activity can be reduced to that level it simplifies the ability to make certain inferences and comparisons with others.

6

We use isk/hr because you cannot quantify fun/hr, which is how activities should really be measured. Additionally, isk/hr is objectively measured where fun/hr is subjectively measured, so isk/hr makes a good comparison tool.

7

There is a large group for which ‘isk/hr’ truly is the deciding metric.

But whenever we talk about efficiency, we can’t talk only about the gain.
We also need to include the cost.
And what is a cost in ratting/mission running?

One cost can be time invested.

Personally, I think clicks per hour can also be a good cost-abstracting secondary metric,
at least approximating the mental and manual labor that is required.

For example, one active and fast player may run their L4s

  • in a Marauder with faction ammo,
  • and salvage on the other char in a Noctis.

For a mission with 50 targets, that will require approximately 50 clicks to target, 50 F1 presses to fire weapons on targets locked, plus repeats after reloading. Let’s say 10 reloads, 10 keypresses.
That’s 50+50+10 = 110 actions to kill a mission.

Plus on a Noctis:
dock to station, reship, undock, warp to mission, (4 actions)
50 clicks to target wrecks, 50 presses to activate the tractors, 50 presses to activate the salvagers. Then dock back to station (1 action).
155 actions to salvage a mission

In total, to kill and loot/salvage that mission, it takes the active time optimizing player

  • 265 actions
  • 2 ships

Another, more passive and slower player might use a T1 battleship with auto-targeting cruise missiles. Salvaging with drones and a Mobile Tractor Unit.

To kill the mission, this player needs only to activate their launchers, and not once per target, but once per reload. These missiles have lower damage, so we expect more reloads, let’s say 15 reloads, therefore 15 keypress actions. Surprisingly, that’s it.

Now to salvage the mission, the passive player deploys the MTU (cargo, rightclick, launch, 3 actions), then clicks “launch drones” and “salvage”, another 2 actions, that’s 5 actions for salvaging. Righclick, scoop, recall drones, dock. 4 actions to end the op.

The passive player achieved the same goal (mission killed, salvaged, op ended in station) with 15+5+4 = 24 actions.

Now, of course the active player completed the activity much faster, but the activity required their attention throughout the entire process, totaling 265 actions (and 2 ships), while the passive player did the same with just 24 actions, while being able to essentially be out-tabbed out of the game most of the time, doing anything else in the meantime.

Are we sure the active player in this case is more “effective”?

Like anything else in EvE (and life), there is no “best”, there’s only “best for a given purpose”.
If your purpose is to make isk the fastest way possible, then you optimize your activities for isk/hours. If your purpose is to have a chill experience, you might optimize to decrease the actions/hour.

8

Yes.

Because “doing anything else” is so highly subjective that it is unfit to be used as tool for measurement.

Also you miss the point where to compare the true time difference between those two options. It isn’t like doing it active takes 30 minutes and doing it passive take 45. The real scale here is like 10 vs. 60 minutes. Which means actively I can make 600 Million ISK from running missions in a session on a specific day when I have time to play. While doing it “passively” I’d need to do that every day for hours to come to a comparable income. Unless I am botting, which is essential cheating.

9

No efficiency matters for me :slight_smile: Yes, we can talk about ISK per hour, but that’s not really important. The more important thing is how much time you have to play in, say, a month and how do you feel when playing.

Let’s say that you have a blinged out Marauder and doing level 4 missions. Sure, your ISK per hour will be higher, but in a given month someone who is able to play more than you will be more efficient even in a tech 2 fitted simple battleship.

I’ve been playing this game for 18+ years and ISK per hour never mattered for me. The more important question for me was always: “What would I like to do.“ I’ve seen many creative (and insane) ratting setups, including exotic ships, fits and multibox setups. Many of them really are more effective than how I do things, but they are simply not types of gameplay that I would enjoy.

In conclusion, it’s useful to know different types of setups and activities just so you can find what works for you, but ultimately it’s your time and your game :slight_smile:

2 Likes
10

I don’t rat for ISK, when out mining in LS I normally will clear the rats from the kernite belt and get my mining ship to work. The rats spawn about every 20 plus minutes in there. I am making a lot more ISK per hour mining than ratting.

I suspect you would want a destroyer class or better for ratting. Even then, the highest bounty I saw on a rat is 1 million ISK on a Mordu rat. They not only seem to be rare, but hard to fight. Mostly I get those tiny guys I can take out with 2 hobgoblins.

I think the best way to rat would be to go in prepared to a combat site. A chained combat site would provide ample ships to blow up. The issue is other players will be doing those as well and could present another challenge.

Mine Safe :pick:

11

No, efficient ratting is destroying the battleships in the belt, leaving the smaller ships behind and not cleaning up after yourself.