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!

Nomenclature

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 names. Oh boy.

What's in a name?

Ninja. Ninja salvager. Ninja looter. Griefer. There are many names for what we do (a lot of them not fit for publication) and they lead to confusion sometimes. The reason for this is that the profession has changed over the years, evolving with game mechanics and player behaviour. The basics remain the same but the focus has shifted considerably.

We'll start with the word "ninja" in general. In EVE, "ninja" is a prefix used to indicate an activity that is done quickly, stealthily and surrepitously – in most cases at the expense of some other party who isn't watching. For example, a ninja miner might sneak into a system at a time where the regular occupants are logged off and quickly munch up their rocks. Ninja plexing is done in low- or null-sec systems where a pilot sneaks into hostile territory and runs their PVE. In RvB's "Ganked" roams, a ninja poop is a quick trip to the toilet done outside the officially sanctioned bio breaks.

Ninja salvaging & looting

The ninja salvager came about as EVE sprouted salvageable wrecks (yielding materials used in the production of rigs) and combat scanner probes (which allowed one to find people in deep space). For a while these materials were wildly profitable and ninja salvagers distinguished themselves by sneaking in after a mission runner and quickly salvaging all his wrecks before he even knew they were there – thus earning the "ninja" moniker. More daring types also took mission loot, earning a nice bit on top of the salvage. Looting, however, causes a criminal flag on the offender and allows the mission runner to open fire.

Over the years, nerfs to loot and salvage in general and the introduction of the Noctis have cause the profitability of this enterprise to plummet. While it remains a good income source for novice players, many spacerich veterans nowadays scoff at sifting through the recyclables. However, ninja looters in particular had found another source of income: blowing up mission runners who opened fire on them. This was achieved by either looting in a PVP-fit ship, or warping out and coming back in something more shooty. The bread and butter of "ninjering" today was born. Those who stuck with the profession after the nerfs have nearly all turned to this type of baiting. They have kept the name "ninja salvager" even though their actions are now focused on blowing up shiny players' ships instead of gathering materials.

Not as shiny as it used to be.

Griefing

To many, the modern style of ninja salvaging reeks of griefing. Ninjas attempt to bait the unwitting into lopsided fights, dropping heavy-duty PVP ships with remote repair backup onto hapless active-tanked PVE boats. Ninjas are therefore commonly accused of being rubbish at PVP and this is generally true. However, CCP holds a very narrow definition of griefing:

"A grief player, or "griefer," is a player who devotes much of his time to making others’ lives miserable, in a large part deriving his enjoyment of the game from these activities while he does not profit from it in any way."

http://support.eveonline.com/Pages/KB/Article.aspx?id=336

Emphasis mine. For ninjas, goading the foolish into unfair fights, violencing their boats and stealing their stuff (and, to add insult to injury, salvaging their wrecks) is a source of income. For most it is even their primary source of income. I made my first billion ISK in EVE purely by robbing other people blind. In this lovely, crazy game of ours, we may cause a lot of grief – but griefers, sir, we are not.

Ninjering 102: Safespots and You

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 safespots. And you. Yes, you.

What is a safespot?

Contrary to what its endearingly straightforward name suggests, a safespot is not safe. It is a spot in space that is off-grid from any celestials. It is therefore mildly safer from the alternative, sitting outside a station or at a moon or some such place where any Tom, Dick and Harry can just warp to you and make your life miserable. In a safespot, you can only be found by combat scanner probes, or by someone stumbling into you on a long MWD-powered trip into nothing.

The “spot” safe

Yes, I made these names up. Deal. The “spot” safe is a bookmark you drop just outside the mission grid you're warping into. From your People & Places menu, you can hit “Save Location” and enter a name for your spot – it won't actually save it until you click the final button. Thus, when you warp into a mission, you can set up a location and only save it just as the distance counter ticks to around 1 million km. Any closer and the deadspace warp denial effect may screw with you (I believe it extends to around 300,000 km from the mission grid). Name it something clever like “KPT Dominix Spot” so you know which mission it is close to.

The safespot is not created until you push this button - even in warp.

The primary use of this spot is to bounce back there when a mission runner is red but no longer in his mission. You can sit at your spot, aligned, with your d-scan set to 360 degrees and about 10 million km range. This lets you see the bear coming back before he actually lands on grid. Is he in his shiny? Warp in and catch him. Is he in his PVP boat? Think before you warp. Is he in a shuttle or pod? Let him land on grid, see that you're gone, and come back in his shiny. Then kill him.

Other uses:

• Quick bounce-back when a mission runner leaves his mission to put rat aggro on you.
• Place for RR to sit on close stand-by.
• General sneaky spot to check up on a mission you've visited earlier without alarming the bear.

The “short” safe

Remember how when we scan with probes, we ignore hits near celestials? That's because there's no point going after people who are transiting jump gates or (un)docking from stations. You can make a safespot very close (inside 3,000 km) to a busy celestial and sit there, your signature cleverly lost in the mess of ships warping in and out nearby. So use a gate or a station for this. Make an off-alignment safespot in the system first, warp to your celestial of choice an drop the bookmark about 3,000 km out. This prevents people warping through your grid when they're in transit between celestials.

So close, you can see the station in the background.

I use a “short” safe in all of the systems I frequent to increase the pace at which I can probe down mission runners. How? Easy: I drop both my scan ship and my bait ship there and eject/board between them. This saves me from having to dock and undock every time I get a 100% hit.

Yes, it's a little risky and you might get your shit stolen while you're away. Never happened to me but it's possible. I've only ever had my short safe compromised twice. Once by a noob who was just probing around randomly. And once because I foolishly made the spot in alignment to another station and someone riding an Interceptor on MWD stumbled into me:

Royal NASA > hello

Yuri Wayfare > herro o/

Yuri Wayfare > so you found my fabled safe spot

Yuri Wayfare > what mysteries is it you seek, Royal NASA?

Royal NASA > was not looking

Royal NASA > just testing ship systems

Yuri Wayfare > says the man flying an interceptor, hmm?

Yuri Wayfare > long-time player I see

Yuri Wayfare > why does he come into our sanctuary I think?

Royal NASA > hi i wasent looking for you i was alliened to gate was semi AFK

Yuri Wayfare > ...

Yuri Wayfare > so this safe is just shit you say

When someone finds your short safe, it's time to make a new one. A better one.

You

Well I painted myself into a corner with that title so I'd better say something about you. You handsome devil, you. Use safespots smart and often. Oh and don't save them to corp bookmarks unless it's in an actual fleet op. And clean them up afterward. I get sick and tired of ancient corp bookmarks cluttering up my systems. Don't be that guy.

Obligatory Intro

Hello and welcome to Modern Ninjering!

Yeah, yeah. I know what you're thinking. Just what the internet needs – another bloody Ninja blog. Well, it turns out I do believe the internet needs another bloody Ninja blog. Why? Because a lot of the material out there today is, to say the least, a little dated. Expansions like Incursion, Crucible and Inferno, not to mention numerous "silent" patches in between, have changed the game considerably for those of the ninjering profession. And even as I write this, "tiericide" is changing the roles of many T1 ships and the upcoming winter expansion promises a major overhaul of "crimewatch", the system which governs the agression mechanics that ninjas live by.

Modern Ninjering will strive to keep the dark arts of ninja salvaging, looting and baiting up-to-date by focusing on simple how-to guides, ship fitting advice and general discussions of EVE Online from the ninja perspective. I may sometimes refer back to older works but will always point out the things that have changed in the mean time.

And who knows, in a few years you'll stumble across this blog, abandoned and forgotten, read some of the material herein and go: "Man, things were different back then." Until then, however, I'll try and stay up to date!