First point, they aren’t all alts of 1 actual player.
After grabbing the last 13069 highsec losses of barges, exhumers, freighters, jump freighters and orca (back to 26 December 2017), the activity of the alt fleets is easy to plot.
Here is the Kusion fleet versus the Tax Collector Fleet:
Kusion’s activity matches a US player, while the Tax Collector fleet activity matches an AU timezone player.
Comparing one’s that are similar though, here’s Tax Collector versus Rozei:
The Rozei fleet and Tax Collector fleet could easily be the same person, both fleets having a very similar AU timezone like activity, and the peaks in activity are very close.
Similarly, there is a small fleet of 4 characters (3 with the last name Poddington and 1 with the last name Lawton) that focus on ganking mining ships. That fleet seems to most likely be a US player, but could also be an EU player (though additional discussion below the graph):
While the Lawton-Poddington fleet hits more miners than the Kusion fleet hits freighter size ships, there is a lot of similarity in the times of peaks - peaks at 02:00, between 02:30-03:00, peaks at 06:30, just before DT, between 12:30 - 13:00 on weekends, 16:30-16:00, ~17:00, ~19:30 and again at ~22:30).
These could very easily be the same person.
However, the owner of the Kusion Fleet is not the same person as the owner of the Tax Collector fleet (which I assume is Australian Excellence based on plotting his activity as well).
The owner of the Lawton-Poddington miner ganking fleet isn’t the same as the Rozei fleet owner.
So despite pointing out that the zkillboard data was hard data and not emotions, and that I should look there, it doesn’t support your view that they are all alts of 1 actual player.
They aren’t.
In addition to that, there’s this claim:
Again, nope.
There aren’t 10 active fleets that can be identified as all alts of the same player.
To identify alts of the same player, there are a couple of indicators:
- name (this is the easiest):
- character_id (easy to do programmatically).
The easiest to see this is with the Tornado Girl alt fleet. They aren’t very active, but the character ids are all close:
This holds relatively true across all of the alt fleets (sometimes some alts in a fleet are created at one time and then others later - the Tax Collector fleet is a good example of this). There are always close groupings of character IDs.
So even if the character names aren’t even close, the character_ids help to identify alt fleets.
The zkillboard data you pointed me to, shows 7 gank fleets, not 10.
They don’t operate in parallel and cover primarily US and AU timezone players, but there is also at least 1 EU timezone player.
They don’t operate in parallel all the time.
So I’m currently back to my eariler post that a reason to bump is to hold a target during a period when a gank fleet can’t undock because it’s waiting out a criminal timer.
Average time between ganks will confirm that and I’ll edit with that data when I have it.
