Suspicious kill bursts in the official MER kill dump, looking for confirmation

I do some analysis on the Monthly Economic Report kill dumps (mirrored at data.everef.net/ccp/mer ) for corp/alliance activity tracking. While cross-referencing corp kill totals against zKillboard I ran into a discrepancy that turned out to be a real pattern in the source data, and I’d like some input before I draw conclusions about it.

What?

Three confirmed examples from the full 2026 dump, cross-checked against each corp’s current member count via ESI:

Corp Members Self-kills Window System Killer Victim
Vintage Computer Group 6 500 2026-07-04, 08:24:04–08:24:11 UTC (8s) Enedore (Everyshore) Praxis Minmatar Shuttle
Endless-Fury 21 431 2026-06-10, 02:45:40–02:45:48 UTC (8s) Ahbazon (Genesis) Fortizar Gallente Shuttle / 1x Council Diplomatic Shuttle
Quafe Reserve 2 500 2026-06-16, 18:21:40–18:36:05 UTC (14.5 min) Uitra (The Forge) Maller Gallente Shuttle

The same signature (same-corp massive kill count, single fixed killer hull, brief time window clustering, cheap/disposable victim hulls) shows up sporadically across a much larger set of corps going back through the historical dumps. These three are the ones I could fully confirm as suspicious beyond “shits and giggles” activities or people getting their own AIR Career Program maxed out.

Case 1: Vintage Computer Group, smartbombing its own shuttles

Exactly 500 kills in June and once again in July. A Praxis running smartbombs against a field of its own corp’s shuttles. 500 kill events generated against the server in 8 seconds. I wonder if this counts as an exploit.

Case 2: Quafe Reserve, looks like a scripted test run

This one’s the odd case out. 500 kills spread over 14.5 minutes at what turns out to be an exact 9-second cadence:

  • 70 distinct timestamps across the 500 kills, 64 of the 69 gaps between them are exactly 9.0s.
  • All “skipped beats” are multiples of 9. The pattern skips beats (maybe a failed warp or whatever) but stays on the same timers.
  • One single 10s gap out of 69 intervals is the only deviation from the 9s pattern, and that’s plausibly just jitter. It read like a script running a fixed-interval loop.

So, 14 minutes of scripted kills, right? The fact its against themselves doesn’t matter much. It’s botting nonetheless.

Case 3: Endless-Fury, a Fortizar bombing its own shuttles

The killer: Fortizar, The victim set: 430xGallente Shuttles, 1xCouncil Diplomatic Shuttle.

An 8-second window for a total of 431 kills lines up with Heavy or Light Guided Bombs fired from the structure against a field of parked shuttles. This single event is roughly a quarter of that alliance’s entire monthly regional kill total in the dataset and is undoubtedly a way to cause lag for the purpose of inflating TiDi (for more time to figure out what to do with a juicy target) or overloading the servers.

Why I’m posting

Posting this because generating hundreds of kill events against the server in single-digit seconds, on what looks like a repeatable, scriptable mechanism, seems like something FC would want to know about regardless of who’s doing it or why.

Asking

  • FC/ISD: is smartbombing/bombing your own corp’s shuttles for mass kill generation a known issue, and is this something worth a bug report over, or already on your radar?
  • Vintage Computer Group / Endless-Fury / Quafe Reserve: happy to hear the actual explanation if I’ve got this wrong.
  • Open to hear from anyone who’s seen this pattern before, in these corps or others.
2 Likes

I had not seen this yet.

But I do know that the recent addition of ‘achievements’ introduced various perverse incentives for otherwise unexplainable irrational and strange behaviour.

Could it be that these acts gained the pilots achievement points?

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Well, there’s one for losing 500 ships. Not sure if a shuttle counts, and you should surely be piloting it?

And destroying ships too, but no idea if an empty ship counts.

It was for that one achievement thing that CCP released around that time. System was empty and no other parties were around where momentary lag would have adversely affected anything.

Often the simplest/dumbest explanation is the correct one. Also, I’m not stupid enough to use lag as a game mechanic. That’s an express ticket to a permaban.

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I’m sorry but this is an extremely funny mix of hubris and naivete.

Usually shuttles don’t count for stuff like that?

Keep up the good work Mr. Alpha!

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NOW you tell me