Map of military development indices in Tribute.

I mentioned in passing in the last article about ratting that some systems are better for it than others. All 0.0 systems in EVE are characterized by “development indices” on three axes: military, industrial, and strategic. The first two indices directly effect how well you can farm in the system. The higher the military index, the more cosmic anomalies will spawn in the system. The higher the industrial index, the more high value mining sites will spawn.

You can’t just pay to upgrade the development indices in your systems, though. You have to actively raise the development level in the system by farming. Each NPC pirate you kill in a system raises its military development level slightly. If you have enough people killing enough pirates, you can level up the quality of that system for that kind of farming. You have to work to keep it up, though — over time, the development level will fade.

There are two big implications of this system. The first is that a 0.0 system can now support many more simultaneous farmers than it used to. If you only have an average of 2-3 people online over the course of the day, they won’t be able to maintain a well developed military system. The development level will decay faster than they can kill rats to increase it. This encourages people to clump up. Better to max out the development level in one system than spread out across a bunch of systems with poor development levels.

There’s a subtle tradeoff here, though. Every system your alliance owns costs quite a bit of ISK: 180M ISK/month just to own it, plus a bunch of other costs to upgrade it. So you don’t want to have a bunch of systems you’re not actively making money from. And since everyone is clumping up in fewer systems now, all those extra systems you own are burning a big hole in your wallet.

The solution? The farming metaphor shows up again: serfdom! With all these expensive (and fertile) fields, it makes a lot of sense for the owners of the space to install serfs. Serfs pay a monthly fee back to the alliance that owns the territory (a fee substantially higher than the upkeep costs for that system) and moves in its own farmers. This makes sense for the serfs because they get a system that they can efficiently farm. It makes sense for the alliance because they don’t have enough pilots of their own to farm the systems effectively. As with feudal serfs, these space-serfs tend to have some similar obligations to their lord. If the area comes under attack, they’re generally expected to take up arms and help with the defense. They tend not to be as large or well organized as the major alliances that own space, but every ship counts. These serf-corporations are usually referred to as “renters” or “pets” (although pets often has a slightly different connotation).

The other big implication is for long-term warfare. Because un-farmed systems lose their development levels, a concerted campaign of disruption and harassment can scare away all the farmers. If this is sustained, the development level of the effected systems will fall, harming the incomes of all the pilots based there. This can be a super effective tactic for smaller groups trying to weaken larger groups without resorting to all-out combat. Star Fraction, a long-lived major alliance announced just such an operation:

Therefore, Operation Black Lustrum, in which the Star Fraction will wage war against the economic and industrial base of our targets. … In particular, the development indices pertaining to military and industrial activity serve as keen and acute indicators of the economic health of a territory and the alliance that administers it.

There’s a longer overview article about how this campaign is progressing that describes a bit more about how this works. So far, it looks like this kind of guerilla warfare is pretty damn effective at decreasing development levels and choking off income streams. The North is thankfully clear of these kinds of tactics so far, but it may just be a matter of time before our farming gets shut down in favor of serious combat.

Ratting at an anomaly in 0.0. Note bounty value in the upper right hand corner.

Virtual worlds are driven by metaphor. In these new kinds of worlds, we need something to grab on to that helps us make sense of the world in terms of ideas we understand. From this we get notions like “tanking” (having lots of armor that lets you take lots of damage), “pulling” (attracting the attention of computer-controlled ships so they move towards you), and “farming” (doing some task repetitively to gain resources). I’ve been doing a lot of that last one recently, and it’s a surprisingly apt metaphor that I want to dig into a little bit.

After the panic and chaos of fighting Triumverate in Pure Blind, Morsus Mihi has settled back into Tribute, intent on rebuilding our coffers of ISK so we can fund our next big conflict. There are two basic ways that people extract value from 0.0 space: mining and ratting. In both cases, each solar system periodically generates stuff that has value. For miners, this means asteroids that can be mined for ore, which turns into minerals for item construction. For ratters, this means computer-controlled pirate ships (rats) that generate a “bounty” when you kill them (and sometimes drop valuable items). I’m going to focus on how the ratting side of things works, but it’s broadly similar for miners.

The first consideration is where to farm. For some complicated reasons I’ll go into this weekend, there are better and worse systems to do this. Some systems are better tended farms than others. These systems generate more rats per hour. These rats appear in asteroid belts (where asteroids appear, too) and cosmic anomalies (where asteroids are rarer / less valuable). The better the system is for farming, the more anomalies you have to choose from, and the higher value rats you’ll find in them. Battleship rats tend to be worth about 1M ISK in bounties each, battlecruisers are about 200k ISK, and cruisers are about 125k ISK. After you clear out an anomaly by killing all these rats, you have to wait for it to respawn with new pirates. Returning to the farming analogy, each anomaly is like a field on a farm. After you harvest it, you have to wait a little while for it to grow back. Plus, having more fields means more farmers can work simultaneously. A system being actively farmed at capacity can only support maybe 3-4 farmers simultaneously.

Map of Tribute, with darker green / yellow / red systems the site of large number of rats killed.

This is not a super fun process, but it’s an extremely reliable way to make money. I log on pretty much every night and run one or two of these and make about 30-50M ISK/hour. I could make more if I had a nicer ship and better weapon skills which would let me deal more damage to kill pirates faster.

From a macro-economic perspective, farming is a big way that CCP injects money into the world. While miners have to sell their products to other players, money is basically created for me out of thin air. No other player cares if these pirates are alive or dead, CCP just invented this system to give combat-trained players a way to farm in 0.0 space where there aren’t (with some complicated exceptions) agents to give you missions to run. This is also part of how corporations make their money. Every time I blow up one of these rats, my corporation (The Graduates) takes 15% of the bounty in a tax. This goes directly into the corporation’s coffers and funds various corporation expenses, like reimbursing me when I lose my ships doing stupid things in fleet ops.

My transaction history after ratting. Note corporate taxation entries

Farming also requires a certain amount of geopolitical stability. I’ll write more about that side of things over the weekend, but suffice to say that having lots of enemy fleets moving through the systems you’re farming in drastically disrupts the process. (Tribute is pretty quiet these days, but you can still kinda see this in the player-deaths map compared to the npc-deaths map.) So while we have a few moments of peace before the rumored upcoming hostilities between the North and the South, I need to build up a nice reserve of ISK to fund my increasingly expensive war habits. Swords to plough-shares and back again.

This topic is continued in Part 2 of this article. Check it out to see how this mechanic forms the foundation for economic warfare in 0.0 territorial fights!

And with that, my journey begins. After an application essay, an interview, a full background check, and director approval, I’m in! Merry Christmas to you, too.

Major 0.0 corporations pretty much all have admissions processes of varying complexity. Corporations have two primary concerns about new applicants – they want applicants to be effective contributors to the corporations’ mission and they want them not to be spies.

The interview and application address the first issue. I had to demonstrate that I understood the goals of The Graduates, had a skilled-enough character that I could be useful in combat, and could carry on a conversation in English – the main language TGRAD. They also wanted to make sure I had enough money to be self-sufficient. In my case, I have about 900M ISK liquid, with a few hundred million more in ships, equipment, and other items, which seemed like enough to my recruitment officer.

A big part of any of these admissions processes is waiting and perseverance. Corporations want you to prove to them that you really want to join by actively tracking down a recruitment officer to administer the interview, and waiting for the cogs of the admissions machine to turn. If I was content to join any old corporation, I could find a less rigorous one that would take me faster. Making me wait ensures that the corporation is getting dedicated and hopefully loyal applicants.

Waiting doesn’t help much with prospective spies, though. That’s what the background check is for. To support third party applications, EVE has a mechanic where you can give a “full API key” to someone. This key gives the holder (usually a piece of software that provides some service) complete read-only access to everything about your character. Every market trade, every mission run, every corporation joined, for every character on my account. This is a pretty high threshold – to be a dedicated spy you would need to cultivate the account for months and behave like a normal player to build a credible history. Plus, that history has to jive with your interview. A big disconnect between the story you tell and the background check on would be a big red flag that might get you reject.

I was kind of irrationally worried there would be some problem with my background check, since my account is four years old, but I haven’t played consistently over that period. Apparently I worried unnecessarily. Time to get my gear ready and report to the rally point!