Ninjering 102: Ackbar

Ninjering 102 is not about how to probe mission runners, how to d-scan or how to fit a hilaricane. That would be 101. 102 is about some of the finer tricks of the trade. This one's about “Ackbar” ships and how you can bait and kill without needing to swap.

So, now that Retribution has failed to kill our profession and all the self-congratulatory bullshit is out of the way, it's time to return to our regular programming and talk tactics. Ninja salvaging with an eye to killing mission runners is a numbers game. Not many mission runners actually shoot at us, so the ones that do are precious. The most basic ninja tactic is to bait in a frigate, get shot at, warp out, dock up, grab a kill ship, warp back, then hope the mission runner is still there and will stick around long enough for you to get a point on him.

Shooty bears are precious!

Unfortunately, Retribution lowered the engagement timer to five minutes. That's not a lot of time. The mission runner is essentially in control of the engagement for the entire time until you're back in your death mobile and have him firmly tackled. All he needs to do is dock up for five minutes and the entire exercise has been futile. We used to get around that by fitting a point on our bait frigates and keeping the mission runner in place until an alt or a friend could bring us a kill ship to swap into. With the 60-second weapons timer now preventing you from ejecting, that got a whole lot harder (not impossible – but we're still working on that).

Project Cruiser and the Ackbar method

Way back in 2010, ninja celebrities Aiden Mourn and Solomar Espersei launched Project Cruiser. Mostly an exercise in finding a new challenge because Orca swapping was the near-infallible tactic of the time, Project Cruiser resulted in some very interesting fights that took mission runners by a whole new flavor suprise.

Oh no!

In ninja parlance, the tactics pioneered by Project Cruiser became known as “Ackbar”, after everyone's favorite space squid. Because it's a trap. You essentially invade the mission, loot the things, get shot, grab point and kill the mission runner with an all-in-one ship. It works fantastically well when it works, but it's a bit of a challenge. Cruisers – the only hull type with enough power to do this consistently while still looking fairly harmless – are generally easy pickings even for PVE-fit battlecruisers and battleships until you can tip the odds in your favor.

Revisiting Project Cruiser

Under Retribution's new Crimewatch system, Ackbar tactics have become a very desirable method of ninjering. Retribution also gave us some much-needed T1 cruiser overhauls. It's a perfect storm. As such, over the past weeks, I've been experimenting with new ships and fittings that can do the job. This has met with mixed success. So far I'm looking at four kills and two losses.

While both losses can be chalked up to pilot error (derp), they do show the weakness of the Ackbar tactic: it's hairy. Both Stabbers were lost just seconds before RR landed on grid, klaxons blaring and modules overheating – great fun but a bit too unreliable! You'll also note that both cruisers are fairly expensive for what they do on account of the Ancillary Current Router rigs required to cram far too much stuff on them. I've since switched to a much more Powergrid-friendly active shield tank and a rack of Gyrostabilizers and that looks much better on paper.

Can I Ackbar?

This post is not about specific fits though – it's about the basics of the Ackbar method. Once I get a few good fits hammered out, those will go in a post of their own. If you want to Ackbar you'll need the following:

1. High skills in Racial Cruiser, your weapon system of choice, fitting, capacitor and thermodynamics. Navigation helps too.
2. Deep enough pockets to stomach a few losses as you try out different fits.
3. A fair amount of confidence in your manual piloting and micromanagement skills. You need less of this if you have more of item 2).
4. Backup. Whether supplied by friends or alts, Ackbar ships really benefit from things like gang links and especially RR and cap transfer.
5. EFT-warrior skills. Remember that Meta 4 modules can often make a fit possible at only a slight loss in effectiveness over T2.

And that's *after* culling all the obvious failfits.

Ackbar is not restricted to T1 cruisers. Faction cruisers like the mighty Cynabal or T2 cruisers (especially of the Heavy Assault or Force Recon variety) can do the job just fine too. Better even, except for two things: they're more expensive to lose and they're more intimidating so they might not attract as much fire. Flying Ackbar involves a lot of compromise in fitting to achieve a sweet spot between speed, tank, DPS, cost and perceived threat. Good luck!

The Rumors of Our Demise

The Den collects articles of general wisdom, from philosophical musings to the examination of game mechanics, to simple tales of great hilarity. This one is about Retribution and how it has not quite managed to kill ninja salvaging as a profession.

Well it's certainly been an interesting few weeks! Retribution brought many changes to EVE Online. Of particular note to us are the new Crimewatch system, killrights and bounties, and the new mission AI. All of these would bring about the long-awaited end to ninja salvaging. Of course that didn't actually happen.

Yes we will, Gloria.

Crimewatch

Perhaps the biggest deal in Retribution for us, the new flagging system means that when we yoink someone's stuff, we become a legal target to everyone in EVE. This opens the door for white knights to come to a mission runner's rescue and violence our boats. I wrote about that last month and my sage predictions have so far come true. Eath that, Jester :-)

What did change is that two of our old tricks – in-situ ship swaps and aggro extention – no longer work. The Weapons flag means you can't eject from your ship for 60 seconds after running a hostile mod, like a warp disruptor, and that means no more quick jumps from a Slasher to a Hurricane. The cleaner Crimewatch flagging system also means that odd loopholes like resetting the combat timer by shooting a wreck are gone. It's back to basics for us.

Killrights and bounties

We can be short about killrights – they don't affect us at all. We operate under Suspect flags, not Criminal flags (the sort that get you Concordokkened) so we don't generate killrights. And bounties? Well, if anything, they make people more inclined to shoot us which is a good thing. Former corpie and ninja icon Waagstrom gave us a 250 million ISK corp bounty for Christmas which looks very sexy on our avatars. Thanks!

The predictable wave of frivolous 100k ISK bounties that has washed over New Eden in the new system has resulted in some great tears, mostly from people who don't understand the system and believe it makes them legal targets in High Sec. The common response to such complainers has been to put more bounties on them. They've become an excellent, cheap little trolling device.

Thank you Morbo.

New mission AI

I'm still not entirely sure how this thing works. There was a lot of brouhaha about different levels of AI in EVE and a sophisticated signature radius-based target selection system being implemented. Judging by the patch notes, somebody said "fuck it" and just slapped on the Sleeper AI instead. This has made mission rats jumpy and unable to focus. They switch targets seemingly at random, though they do seem to reserve a particular hatred for drones (with more rivers of salty tears emanating from lazy Dominix pilots who can no longer go fap while their drones finish the mission for them).

Yeah, it's a little tricky when a full room decides to direct its blind anger at the little ninja Slasher that just showed up, especially when EWAR is involved. But we've dealt with rat aggro before and a good speed tank, or a quick warpout and return, remains an excellent counter.

Odds and ends

Some other bits and bobs changed that weren't immediately apparent from the patch notes. One thing that's slightly hard to quantify is the new default overview settings for Suspects and people in a Limited Engagement (LE). The former is now flasy orange: not nearly as aggressive as the "corp red" of the past, this makes us somewhat less intimidating. Whether that's a good thing or not is hard to judge. People have been shooting us regardless. And the LE display color is something called "dark indigo," a friendly-looking greenish blue that inspires no sort of terror whatsoever. I suspect it will make the unwitting more likely to stick around in their missions after taking a shot. After all, that soothing dark indigo isn't going to hurt anyone, right?

But... It was indigo!

And then we come to perhaps the most exciting and somehow overlooked change in Retribution: legal pod killing. A Suspect, Criminal or LE opponent can now be podded without sec status hits or CONCORD intervention. As such we've been separating triggerhappy mission runners not only from their pimped-up boats, but also from their expensive old clones and shiny implants. Make sure you add "biomass" to your overviews, folks – CCP gave us an early Christmas present!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Crimewatch 2.0

The Den collects articles of general wisdom, from philosophical musings to the examination of game mechanics, to simple tales of great hilarity. This one is about miners, things that go "bump", and high-sec mentality.

The times, they are a-changing

One of the biggest changes coming to our little slice of EVE this December is the overhauled Crimewatch system with a new "suspect" flag. If you do something illegal, everyone in EVE can shoot you for fifteen minutes. This opens the door for vigilantes, "white knights" or whatever you want to call them to come to the aid of a mission runner and asplode your boat. Even opportunists sitting at gates or stations might take a shot. This makes ninjering a whole lot more dangerous than it was.

Oh shit I got a flag!

Me, I'm not worried. I believe the vast majority of high-sec residents simply don't have the chutzpah to actually get up and do something with this new flag. Allow me to illustrate.

James 315 and the New Order of High Sec

You may have heard about this whole miner bumping business which has gradually been picking up steam over the last few months. If you don't follow the official EVE Forums (which you probably shouldn't) you'll have missed some hilarious shitstorms which have been stirred up by miners who are really, really angry. Angry and utterly incapable of helping themselves.

The "too long, didn't read" of it is that James 315 came up with a new way of torturing miners after the hitpoint buffs to mining barges and exhumers made suicide ganking impractical. An overpowered ship can bump a miner out of range of his rocks and, with persistence, keep him out of range indefinitely. This might be classed as harassment were it not for the New Order offering the miners a way out: pay 10 million ISK and adhere to a code of conduct to be left alone for a year.

Whether you buy into the New Order's professed ideals, or consider it simple extortion, a donations scam, or even just a clever facade to keep the petitions at bay – it works. The New Order has collected billions of ISK in donations from entertained players. And tears. Mighty rivers of sweet, sweet tears the likes of which haven't been seen since Hulkageddon.

One angry miner.

Have a look at their bingo card and spot the similarities to some of the things mission runners throw at us. "This is an exploit?" Check. "Try working for your ISK honestly?" Check. "I know powerful people in null-sec?" Check. I love that last one. It's a well-known fact that the major null-sec coalitions are all about keeping high-sec carebears safe and unmolested. Heh.

Resistance is futile

Compare the success of the New Order to its counterpoint, the Proveldtariat. It is composed of exactly one bloke with a blog. It has achieved exactly nothing, save for some mildly entertaining reading. It has a list of suggestions to counter miner bumping and they're actually pretty good, but no-one is employing these techniques. But why? Why do miners not take some of the simple precautions that could safeguard their operations? Why do they not band together, even if just to share intel? Why do they not stand up and do something to protect themselves?

Here's why.

The answer is simple – these people don't want to play with others. And the majority of high-sec mission runners is like that too. I have no statistical data to back that up of course. I say this from experience, having encountered hundreds of them. Old players who've never been out of their NPC corps. Players who have no idea how to fit a ship (the fact that they can run missions in them being a testament to how borked EVE's PVE is). Players who couldn't find Local if you wrapped it around a trout and slapped them in the face with it. They're out there in great numbers. And they don't want to play with you or anyone else. Not even to help themselves.

Ninjering 102: The UI

Ninjering 102 is not about how to probe mission runners, how to d-scan or how to fit a hilaricane. That would be 101. 102 is about some of the finer tricks of the trade. This one's about the UI and how to set it up for ninja work.

Make it easy

In September I wrote a post on setting up the Overview. The objective there was simple: to make life easier on yourself by sorting information in a sensible manner. It is a good idea to do the same for your user interface (UI). The UI is basically all the stuff on your screen – the various windows and displays that provide you with information and allow you to interact with your ship and your environment.

Before you read on, I invite you to check out this excellent article by PVP virtuoso Azual Skoll. His thinking on screen layouts is sensible and you'll see that I've shamelessly copied many of his ideas. That's why he put them on his blog, after all! Of course, for ninja work there are a few things you'll probably want to do differently. I'll outline my own UI setup according to a pretty picture.

My UI setup

Yes, that's the same screenshot I used in the Overview article. It works because it has pretty much everything active. Let's go over it by the numbers.

1. Local Chat. Local is an invaluable intel tool. It allows me to quickly check if my target has any corpmates in system by setting his corp to an alternative standing. This will cause any pilots in that corp to light up in a different color. I have also set known “white knights” and ninja hunters to a separate standing so I know if I need to look over my shoulder for them. I've set the list to names only and the font to fairly small. I don't talk in local but I do like to see the ubiquitous tears in there.
2. Other chats. Should be fairly self-explanatory.
3. People & Places and Scanner. I'm quite happy with these two being tabbed in the same window. Obviously I interact with the scanner a lot, both when probing down mission runners and for D-scanning while in or near a mission. I also use People & Places a lot for setting standings and making spot safes. But I never need to use them simultaneously.
4. Cargo and Drones. For looting purposes, I have activated the option to open every new container in a new window. By doing so I can keep my ship's cargo window small but easily accessible. When I'm in a ship with drones, I also have the Drones window tabbed here. This keeps the interaction close to the ship's HUD where my cursor spends most of its time.
5. The ship's HUD. With passive modules not displayed, and shield/armor/hull percentages shown. These options can be accessed by right-clicking the little four-bar icon to the bottom right. Come Retribution, you'll also find your safety setting here, which should be at “Partial.”
6. Locked targets. They're a bit of a pain to move around – you need to have something locked and then fidget about until you find a little crosshair to the bottom-left. You can drag this to move your locked items around. I put them above the HUD modules with enough clearance for EWAR effect icons (points, webs, neuts etc.) to show up.
7. Selected Item. This window goes just above the locked targets. This keeps the targets, mods (from the HUD) and various commands from the Selected Item window very close together for quick mouse cursor transit.
8. Overview. The Overview needs a fair bit of space because, especially when looting and salvaging, there can be quite a bit of stuff on there. I've elected to not take it entirely to the top of the screen though. In combat, the Overview will be notably less filled up and I don't want hostile ships or drones to be all bunched up in the top-right of the screen while my main action items are at the bottom.
9. Fleet window and Watchlist. This is a screen I don't interact with very much, but when I do it's mostly because a fellow ninja needs remote repairs. I therefore keep this window open at all times. The last thing a ninja wants is for his RR to be late because the pilot was looking for the fleet window...

Up to you

And there you have it. As with the Overview, personal preference will factor in to how you set up your UI just as much as occupational needs. How your UI works best for you is ultimately up to you. But I would encourage you to take some time to really sit down and think about how you can make the UI as user friendly as you can. Don't just grit your teeth if some ergonomic nightmare is costing you precious seconds in combat – fix it!

DOA

Most blogs die within a few weeks of being born. The internet is littered with their sad husks – once full of promise, now lingering on servers that no-one has bothered to clean up for years. Some have an overwrought, apologetic wall of text on them excusing the author's inaction. Modern Ninjering is not one of those blogs.

What's going on?

Imagine writing a particularly fine post on the use of the current T1 logistic cruisers, then having this pop up right before you publish it. No biggie, you'll just push your schedule up a bit and start writing that article on mission mechanics. And then this happens. Damn you CCP! Now you have to write that in-depth analysis of aggro mechanics that you'd been saving for next month. Except, oops.

That'll leave a man speechless.

Throw in some family business after that and the release of a new XCOM and you have about a month's worth of hiatus.

All in all, Retribution is promising to dramatically reshape the ninja salvager's landscape. With so much change on the horizon, it would be folly to do guides for ships or mechanics that will be obsolete in a couple of months. Instead I'm going to be doing some sporadic brainfarting on whatever interesting new bits of information come out until the winter expansion hits. And then I'll get back to my regular programming: bringing you the latest, shiniest, state-of-the-artiest in ninja tactics.

Food for thought

Here's some things to mull over in the meantime. I intend to cover these topics in depth one by one.

• Ship re-balancing. We're getting some viable new combat vessels added to the roster, mostly in the frigate and cruiser department. We're also losing the Hurricane as our go-to gank boat. Most exciting to me, as stated before, is the prospect of viable yet cheap T1 frigate- and cruiser-sized "support" ships. These will allow even our youngest ninjas to step in and provide remote repairs to their friends, and grab aggro in the process. This is fortunate because the new Crimewatch is likely to lead to escalating fights.
• Crimewatch 2. CCP is finally giving the old, convoluted, and in many places broken Crimewatch system (which governs aggression, ie. who can shoot whom) a thorough overhaul. The new system looks a lot more transparent. Some of our old tactics, like dropping bait cans or extending aggro, will no longer function. Global "suspect" flagging means more opportunities for white knights to come in and escalate the fight in all sorts of hilarious ways. We'll need stronger teamwork to ensure we always have the upper hand in combat. 
• Enhanced mission AI. We'll need to look carefully at how the new targeting routines for mission rats work. Given that our mission runner prey generally fly battleships or battlecruisers, our smaller bait ships may need to prepare to fight off a mission's complement of frigate and cruiser rats. The fact that these rats often carry e-war (webifiers, target painters and the like) makes that a challenge. Plundering an active mission site is certainly going to become a lot more interesting.
  
  

It's our turn to HTFU. Again.

That's EVE, baby

We have a bit of adapting to do this winter. We'll face some new dangers in the form of target-switching mission rats and global suspect flags allowing everyone and their dog to shoot us. We'll also be given improved ships to handle those situations. Solo ninjering, even when multiboxing, will become more dangerous. Teamwork will allow us to take cruel advantage of any wannabe heroes' good intentions. There's new mechanics ahead. Modern Ninjering will be here to help you break the hell out of them.

Waka Waka!

This post is uncategorized so far as I didn't intend to be reading a lot of tea-leaves in this blog. However, with the amount of dust that CCP Fozzie's been stirring up it seemed I would be amiss not to write something. If he keeps this up he might get a blog category all to himself! Anyway, this one's about the winter expansion and what it means to some beloved ninja ships.

CCP Fozzie and tiericide

So who is "CCP Fozzie" anyway? Let's start by saying that EVE is a huge game which works well overall, yet is broken in many, many places. Some glaring imbalances have been around for so long that people have generally stopped crying about them. Tech 1 subcapitals was one such issue. We were all used to having only a few truly battleworthy hulls to play with, while some of the other hulls found niche roles owing to some peculiar ship bonuses. Nobody really cared about it anymore.

Then this guy Fozzie came out of nowhere and started fixing it.

Actually, it turns out one does.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Let's start with the winter rebalance announcement. While we were expecting the full line of T1 frigates to get overhauled, Fozzie apparently doesn't need sleep so he decided to go over the T1 cruisers as well. Most of these ships are getting buffed. This is good news for ninjas who fly cruisers as kill ships and we may well expect to see "Ackbar" tactics (baiting in a PVP cruiser) picking up more steam. What I'm most excited about though is the "Support Ships" role where, according to these plans, we'll be seeing T1 logistics cruisers that are actually well-suited to their task. I expect this will allow younger ninjas to get into the RR game quickly and effectively, without having to slog through the long skill queue for T2 Logistics.

But the big one that hit yesterday was, of course, the announcement that the Hurricane is about to lose 16% of its powergrid. The reasoning behind it has something to do with the Hurricane apparently being given the role of an artillery platform instead of an autocannon platform. I've played around in Pyfa a bit and fitting a Hurricane with a full rack of T2 220mm autocannons and two medium neuts is going to be next to impossible without some serious sacrifice in either tank or firepower. The ninja 'cane as we know it will, effectively, be no more.

...

The sky is falling!

Not quite. I'm not going to go with the "it's not final yet" thing because though the details may change, Fozzie's made it pretty clear that the Hurricane nerf is not really up for discussion. I do have my reasons for not being too worried about this whole business though:

• The Hurricane was already hilariously overpowered for our pruposes. We don't fight bleeding-edge PVP, we fight mission runners who are half asleep in unbelievable shitfits.
• We already have a good alternative in the Harbinger, which can be fit to pretty well match the Hurricane's specifications. Kinda sucks if you haven't trained for energy weapons, but you should still have a month or two until the winter expansion.
• The Hurricane can easily do with less tank if you fly with friends who have RR on standby. The announced T1 Support Ships should help here. Teamwork is a good thing.
• There's more changes coming. Hulls which are currently considered underpowered, like the Prophecy, the Cyclone, or pretty much anything Gallente may well become viable gank ships once the Battlecruiser class as a whole gets overhauled.

The bottom line is, we're ninjas. We're not a group that CCP really pays attention to. We operate on the fuzzy edges of "working as intended" and that means we'll always have to adapt to changes made for the benefit of larger demographics. We'll find new and hilarious ways of squeezing the most out of the toys we're given to play with. And on the whole, CCP Fozzy appears to be giving us more toys rather than less.

Ninjering 102: The Overview

Ninjering 102 is not about how to probe mission runners, how to d-scan or how to fit a hilaricane. That would be 101. 102 is about some of the finer tricks of the trade. This one's about the overview and how to keep your feeble brain from shorting out.

Information overload

Last week I mentioned the loss of my first Harbinger, which happened not long after I first moved from pure ninja salvaging to baiting and killing. A quick look at the killmail will tell you the story: I jumped a shooty Dominix and was jumped in turn by his corpmate in a Celestis. Said Celestis kept me pointed and neuted while the Dominix pounded me with blaster fire until I exploded.

That was not how it happened in my mind, however. I never noticed his corpmate until I studied the killmail. It was a pretty nasty failure of of situational awareness. Thing is, my overview was so cluttered by drones, rats, wrecks, containers, mission structures and whatnot that, ironically, I had no overview of the situation at all. I fixed that and I recommend you do the same.

Getting started

Right-click the little four-bar icon in the top of the overview window and select “Open overview settings.” From this menu, you can edit almost everything about what is displayed in your overview, and how. I won't go into all options in depth, you should consult the EVE manual for that. Wait, what? Oh. Well, in lieu of a manual, check out this EVEUniversity article and/or download ISK The Guide.

There's a lot of options in here. A LOT.

Don't feel like you have to set up your overview to EVE University specifications: a good overview should be matched to your needs and the circumstances you will most frequently encounter. I'll explain how I've set up my own overview and the thinking behind it. And it's the thinking that counts. I am still frequently tinkering with the overview but I am happy with the basics of my current set-up.

Tabs

First of all, you should know about tabs. By right-clicking one of the tabs in your current overview, you will be given the option to “Add tab.” You can have a maximum of five and I recommend you use them all. These tabs will allow you to quickly switch between different overviews as situations change. It's also useful for d-scanning if you have the “Use overview settings” box checked. It will use your overview settings as a filter, leaving out lots of junk you may not want to sift through, like wrecks and cans while in combat.

I use five tabs: Ninja, Gank, Drones, WarpTo, and Everything. I'll go over them one by one. When setting up your tabs, start by removing everything and then fill in the bits you think you'll need. This will prevent you from overlooking things like POS modules which can really mess up a d-scan result at the worst possible time.

Ninja

This is the tab where I spend most of my time. It has quite a lot in it: containers, wrecks, NPC ships, player ships and drones, and acceleration gates. What it leaves out is various celestials (suns, planets, moons, stations), structures and other inert stuff that I don't need to keep an eye on. While this particular setting can get quite cluttered in a busy mission with lots of rats and wrecks around, it is only used during the “baiting” stage of getting a mission runner to shoot me, when I don't yet need to worry about overextending my limited brain capacity.

The Ninja tab in action. Notice how all non-essential information has been stripped.

Gank

When things get funky, I switch to the Gank tab. This is essentially the same as the Ninja tab, except it leaves out the cans, wrecks and NPC stuff. I leave the acceleration gates in because I often find myself chasing a mission runner down a room or two (or six). One thing I also take out is drones. Once there are three or four ships on grid with five drones each, the overview quickly fills up, so it helps to get them out of the Combat tab. They are in the Ninja tab however, because it's intel: being able to gauge the tech level of the mission runner's drones from d-scan will give me a quick indication of how far up the skill tree this guy has gone.

Drones

Hah! Thought I didn't care about drones at all in combat? That's not true. In fact, drones can be a very critical factor, especially when I'm flying a flimsy little frigate, holding on for dear life while a friendly pilot is bringing me a Hurricane, and the mission runner starts launching Warrior IIs at me. That's why I give drones a tab all to themselves. It has the drones, all the drones, and nothing but the drones. This allows me to quickly target those drones I want to shoot down.

WarpTo

Sometimes I just need to go places. Or check on where a mission runner is aligned to. WarpTo has the sun, planets, customs offices (easy to forget those), stations and beacons. Not moons or asteroid belts though, because there's generally too many of them to be worth the hassle of warping to each one. If you do need to find someone whom you suspect of being at a moon or belt, it's better to warp to the planet and use some narrow-angle d-scan magic instead.

Everything

Unsurprisingly, this tab includes everything. Sometimes you'll want to see something that you can't visually pick out. Like moons or asteroid belts. It's more of a backup than something I use often, but when I do use it I'm always glad it's there.

Brackets and appearance

Some final tricks that have made my life in the overview much easier involve the use of brackets and the appearance of neutrals. Brackets are the things you see in space. EVE allows you to use a different overview filter for the overview itself and the brackets in space depending on which tab you have selected. You can configure this under “Overview tabs.” I use the Ninja setting for all tabs except WarpTo and Everything. This allows me to keep an eye on mission rats and enemy drones, or quickly select and save the location of an object for a tactical warp, even when I'm in a more limited overview tab. Best of both worlds, so to say.

Brackets in action. Though displayed in space, the wrecks are not in the overview.

As for appearance, this affects the colors and symbols of pilots and their drones. From the overview settings menu, note that only the “Filters → Types” settings are tab-specific. The other settings apply to the entire overview regardless of which tab you're on. I've used the options under “Appearance” to set neutral and no-standing pilots to a yellow icon with a yellow background. This makes them stand out much clearer from whatever other stuff there may be on my current tab. It gives a good visual cue whenever some third party shows up and it means that I'm always able to pick out players from NPCs and inert items at a glance.

Mess with it – a lot

The overview tabs and settings I've described here work well for me. As I already said, however, I'm frequently tinkering with the details and I'm sure other ninjas use other setups. I'd be delighted to hear how other people have theirs laid out. Why not drop a reply to this post with your thoughts? You can earn a cookie if you add a screenshot of your favorite tab in action. Apart from that, my advice to you is to grit your teeth and dig into those overview settings. They're a bit of a pain to figure out but you'll find it is well worth it in the end.

And finally, special thanks to Sihoja for involuntarily supermodelling in these screenshots. You were born for the catwalk, baby!

Ninjering 101: Fearless

Ninjering 101 covers basic techniques that all ninjas should master. Stuff like using scan probes, fitting a salvage ship and rudimentary combat. And not talking in local. Please. Never talk in local. This one is about not being afraid of getting your ship blown up.

Baby's first kill

When I took my first steps on the path to hilarity, I started asking for fitting advice on kill ships in the Ninja Dojo public chat channel. I got some fits linked to me and noticed a lot of T2 modules. It would take me months to train for all that. Wide-eyed, I asked: "Can I fit it with T1 mods instead?" The response: "LOL nothing works with T1." I, however, was undaunted. Well OK, I was a little daunted, but I spent my hard-stolen ISK on a Harbinger anyway, threw the best T1 gear on it I could afford, and lo and behold – I killed my first Battlecruiser the next day.

Baby ninjas are kinda cute, no?

Not long after that, I lost that firstHarbinger. It hurt. 60 million ISK represented pretty much my entire liquid capital at the time and I was decidedly space-poor once I had replaced the ship. But I had learned some important lessons about this silly profession of ours which convinced me that carrying on was the right thing to do. And from the dizzying heights of mediocrity where I now dwell, I'd like to pass those lessons on to you.

Being on top

What you want to keep in mind is that nine times out of ten, the mission runner you're baiting is not prepared for a fight. His ship is not equipped for it. His mindset is not suited to it. He has no friends to back him up and, frankly, doesn't really understand what's happening to him in the first place. By taking advantage of your prey's shortcomings you can punch well above your weight. And I mean well above. If you have a couple of months of skills in the right places, you can go toe-to-toe with 2004-born characters in faction battleships and come out victoriously.

It's all about getting your kill ship set up for the task. Suddenly Ninjas alumni Solomar Espersei once wrote a fine (and still valid) guide on the Hurricane, which remains the go-to ninja kill ship today. 9/19/2012 NINJA EDIT: CCP Fozzy has just announced a significant nerf to the Hurricane's powergrid which will make Solomar's fit impossible. Click here for MN's thoughts. But any Battlecruiser hull fit properly can do the trick because your advantage over most mission runners is just unbelievably huge. Here are the things you'll need:

• Tackle. This includes first and foremost a warp jammer. Most ninjas favor the Warp Disruptor for its extended range, but a Warp Scrambler can work too and has the added advantage of shutting down a target's Microwarp Drive. You'll probably want to bring a Stasis Webifier as well to prevent the target from outrunning you, especially if you're in a slow ship like the 'Cane or the Harbinger.
• Propulsion. You can't tackle very well if you can't get close to your enemy, so make sure you throw at least a 10mn Afterburner on your ship. If you can fit it, a 10mn Microwarp Drive is even better.
• Neuts. Most mission runners have active tanks (ie. Armor Repairers, Shield Boosters, or – in some hilarious cases – Hull Repairers.) These are very cap-hungry and a pair of Medium Energy Neutralizers can effectively shut down their ability to absorb damage. Notice that neuts are cap-hungry devices too, so getting your Energy Emission Systems skill up to IV should be a priority.
• DPS. Damage Per Second, that is, the amount of hurt your weapon systems throw out measured over time. This is actually not as important as you may think. A fairly modest amount of DPS will kill a passive tank given enough time, and an active tank should already be down because of the aforementioned neuts.
• Passive Tank. Given that you'll often be fighting bigger, heavier-hitting ships than your own, a solid buffer tank (ie. Shield Extenders or a big Armor Plate, supported by a Damage Control Unit and relevant resistance enhancers and rigs) is needed to give you the time you need to burn your opponent down.
• Cap Booster. Running tackle, neuts, weapons and probably a propulsion mod (afterburner or MWD) is going to drain your capacitor in a hurry. Don't compromise too much on your own tank or firepower by trying to fit a lot of capacitor mods: just drop a Capacitor Booster a mid slot and be done with it.

And that's it. Don't fit anything on your ship that does not aid one of the roles above. Don't try to be cute with ECM or Nanofiber Hull Upgrades or Sensor Boosters. They have their place in more advanced or experimental ship fittings, but for a basic kill ship, the above set will be fine. You can, however, add drones to taste. Getting your drone skills up to the point where you can operate Tech 2 scout and medium drones is a surprisingly short train for a surprisingly large improvement in DPS.

Pew pew! Zap!

Be fearless

The final thing to do is to take the fear of loss out of your mind, and to focus on getting your kill ship fitted out as soon as possible. Don't fret over T2 mods, run with T1s where you need to. You'll do fine. If things do go south in a fight, just warp off! Proper mission runners never fit a warp jammer of any kind so you're free to leave whenever you want. And if you get caught by a PVP ship? Well, that's your one out of ten. It happens. Re-ship and carry on.

To make things a little more interesting I would like to announce the following competition to all new Suddenly Ninjas members: the first one's on the house. That is, the first one of you who's been in corp for less than three months and gets his kill ship, fitted to this article's specifications, blown up by a mission runner will have it replaced by me. All I require is your lossmail and a little write-up of the incidet sent to my EVE-mailbox.

Now get out there and get shot at!

Fear and Loathing in Eglennaert

The Den collects articles of general wisdom, from philosophical musings to the examination of game mechanics, to simple tales of great hilarity. This one is about paranoia and irony. Oh my.

An odd bear

On an otherwise perfectly normal Monday evening, I warped my Slasher into a mission which my probes told me had a Brutix and a Gravy Raven (more commonly known as the Raven Navy Issue) in it. I started some slow salvaging as I gathered intel. Both pilots were in the same corporation which was ten characters strong in total. A look at local told me there were no other corpmates around. Both characters checked out as very young – a little under three months for the Brutix pilot, and just over a month for the Gravy Raven.

Come again? Less than a month old and flying a half-a-billion ISK faction Battleship? Well, nothing's impossible, but this did not smell like your average mission bear. Spacerich players often create alts to run high-sec missions for ISK and outfit them with expensive ships and modules for the purpose. These players tend to be quite a bit more experienced than their alt would seem. The older Brutix suddenly grew more dangerous in my mind. An escort, perhaps? Ninja hunters had been active in Coriault recently. I was on my toes. Sure enough, the Gravy Raven launched a volley at me as soon as I stole some loot and I raced back to station to switch ships.

Yuri Wayfare > shield RR in Eg please

Yuri Wayfare > double take

Leffy Skaramour > k

Leffy Skaramour > ready say when

Yuri Wayfare > scratchthat

Yuri Wayfare > armor

I'll just fly this death machine instead.

At the last second, I decided to fly my sturdier and significantly less expensive Hurricane instead of my normally favored Cynabal. If these were serious ninja hunters, they would have corpmates standing by in adjacent systems and things could get very ugly, very fast. Leffy was at my back though, and Radonicon (with his small army of alts) just a couple of jumps away. And the old ninja adage rang in my mind: always bet on stupid. If you're not sure whether your enemy is an idiot or a highly accomplished PVP-er, assume he's an idiot.

Into the unknown

And so it was I landed my Hurricane on-grid with Leffy's RR hot on my heels. I pointed the Gravy Raven and started laying into his shields. The Brutix responded. A target painter came on to assist the Raven's clunky torpedoes, followed by a web, a nosferatu, and then the hallmark of a PVP-er: a scram. It was a trap!

The Brutix closed up and pounded blaster fire into me, stripping off my shields and proceeding to take chunks out of my armor. Leffy landed on grid and threw on his repairs. I gritted my teeth. If they were going to take down my 'Cane, they were damn well going to lose their shiny bait too. The Gravy Raven was melting. There was simply no way a month-old character could have built enough tanking skills to effectively keep a ship like that alive. It exploded satisfyingly.

Yeah - that.

I glanced over at my armor. 75%. Not bad. Local showed no other hostiles in system yet. This was proving to be a remarkably poor trap. My warp disruptor and web found the Brutix. So did the neuts and the array of 220mm Autocannon II's. I was surprised to find the Brutix already in armor when I locked it, but assumed it had been tanking the rats. What do I know about missions anyway? I just loot them.

There was a flash and the Brutix immolated. The field was ours. We took our spoils and laughed all the way to 'Dixie market.

Aftermath

That's when things got interesting. Examination of the killmails revealed a tremendous fail-fit on the Gravy Raven. The Brutix was better, a fairly typical starter's PVP-fit, but the devil was in the details: the Raven had put damage on the Brutix. A lot of damage, in fact. More than my 'Cane.

Then came the convos. The Gravy Raven pilot came first, begging and pleading for his 500 million ISK back. I blocked him after his third attempt where he threatened a lawsuit. It was too emberassing to publish here. I mailed the Brutix pilot and advised him to have a chat with his friend about target selection. This went a lot better – the Brutix pilot was upbeat and friendly, and seemed to be just delighted to have had his first taste of PVP. I congratulated him on his attitude, told him not to be too hard on his friend, and wished him luck in his future adventures.

And so, a trap turned out to be not a trap after all. In this crazy, lovely game of ours, the pilot who had reason to be humble was tearful, and the pilot who had reason to be upset was cheerful. I love EVE.


NINJA EDIT: Somehow I overlooked the fact that the Brutix had put damage on the Navy Raven too. As it turns out, the two pilots had fought a friendly duel on the acceleration gate before warping into the mission. I showed up early enough afterward that the damage was carried over on the killmails. The figures are therefore a bit out of whack. The Brutix pilot confirmed, however, that his friend shot at him in the confusion that followed.

Ninjering 101: Probing

Ninjering 101 covers basic techniques that all ninjas should master. Stuff like using scan probes, fitting a salvage ship and rudimentary combat. And not talking in local. Please. Never talk in local. This one is about using probes to scan down mission runners. And it has video!

A thousand words

This is a lazy post. I could go on and on about the finer points of using scanner probes, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So a movie must be several million of them. My good friend Leffy produced the following scanning tutorial using the most up-to-date technique, the seven probe method:

Watch it in 1080p full-screen.

There are a number of things I should add for your understanding:

• A lot of the material on probing you'll find out on the internet today is out of date, based on older iterations of the system. There were weird mechanics whereby using four probes gave you better hits than using six, or where hit brackets would already give away the type of signal you were after. All that is now bunk.
  
  
• Make sure you either switch off any scan filters you have, or set them up sensibly. Using a bad filter will cause hits to disappear from your scanner if their type is identified as one you're not interested in, resulting in you chasing ghosts.
  
  

  

  Right-click that button to open the filter settings.

  
  
  
• You may have read things about using the D-scanner to check hits before warping to them, or ship-scanning and tracking mission runners from their mission hub to their destination before probing them down. I would advise you not to waste your time on such things. Quantity has a quality of its own and the best way to get lots of hits is to sit in a busy system and just probe, probe, probe.   

Ninja Fits: A New Icon (Vigil vs. Slasher)

Ninja Fits is about – wait for it – ships, and how to fit them. This one is about the Slasher, prophetised to be the new ninja go-to.

Getting with the times

For years, the Vigil has been the main workhorse of the ninja salvager's arsenal. Its combination of high speed, copious CPU and balanced slot layout made it the perfect ship for taking advantage of someone else's hard work. However, the times, they are a-changing. "Tiericide" is taking place and the T1 frigates are getting major overhauls. The Vigil is among the next batch on the chopping block. According to these plans, she will soon be out of the running when it comes to being a salvager.

Goodbye, old friend.

But there is a silver lining. The same series of overhauls has recently given us a set of T1 tackler frigates that are just perfect for our line of work. Those who have until now relied on the Vigil will be delighted to hear that the newly revamped Slasher is a worthy succesor indeed. Let's compare a couple of fits.

[Vigil - Ninja]
Salvager I
150mm Light AutoCannon II, Barrage S
150mm Light AutoCannon II, Barrage S

1MN Afterburner II
Medium Shield Extender II
Warp Disruptor II

Micro Auxiliary Power Core I
Damage Control II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II

Small Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Small Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Small Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer I

Warrior II x1

[Slasher - Ninja]
Salvager I

150mm Light AutoCannon II, Barrage S
150mm Light AutoCannon II, Barrage S
150mm Light AutoCannon II, Barrage S

1MN Afterburner II
Faint Warp Disruptor I
Medium F-S9 Regolith Shield Induction
EM Ward Amplifier II

Damage Control II
Beta Reactor Control: Diagnostic System I

Small Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer I
Small Projectile Ambit Extension I
Small Processor Overclocking Unit I

These are fairly typical "bait" frigates. They rely on a small signature and high speed to go places and avoid fire, while being beefed up with a Medium Shield Extender and some resistance enhancements for added survivability. Both are capable of pointing a mission runner in case you can have a kill ship delivered to you (or just let the mission rats do the dirty work instead). They have small autocannons mounted to defend against any drones an angry mission runner might send after you.

Comparison

I won't bore you with a lot of numbers, but on my skills, the Slasher gets a bit more EHP and about 30% more DPS. It gives up roughly 150m/s in top speed and 0.2 seconds of align time. It also has 30m3 less cargo capacity and it doesn't have a drone. On the upshot, its signature radius is only about two-thirds of the Vigil.

This makes the Slasher a better ship when it comes to baiting and potentially pointing a mission runner. Its higher EHP and smaller signature radius make it more survivable while its extra turret and tracking bonus are great for taking out enemy drones (the bane of the bait frigate). The sacrifice in speed and agility is negligible. What we do lose, however, is a good pure-bred salvage frigate. The Slasher does not have the CPU to support a significant number of salvagers. In fact it already needs an overclocking rig in the fit above. If you're more interested in munching wrecks than pointing bears, you'll need to look eslewhere.

The Vigil is dead – long live the Slasher!

With the upcoming changes, the Vigil will need to be retired as the ninja ship of choice. I'll have a lot of painful goodbyes to say. As some of you may know, I have named all my Vigils after pornstars and grown emotionally attached to them (to the point where I once cruised thirty minutes in a shuttle to retrieve Kitty, whom I had left several hundred kilometers from the acceleration gate after a particularly lenghty pursuit). That said, I'm already enjoying my zippy little Slasher and I know there are ninjas out there getting kills with this ship alone. Expect to see more T1 frigate fits over the coming months!