Good Content vs Bad Content

If you are on the Facebook EVE Online group you have doubtless seen or heard of the exploits of Thieves Guild, most notably Jim Halescott, who does a lot of stealing of citadels and grinding of structures.

His great new venture is to recruit "50 to 100"newbros to fly Catalysts around hisec and beat up on structures.

Yeah. Wow.

His plan is to split the loot.

In a citadel bash, assuming everyone can get 500 DPS from a Catalyst, nothing goes wrong and no one loses their shit, you need between 10 and 30 characters to beat down an Astrahus  or a Fortizar. This could be spread out over a week to three weeks of chasing timers, but lets say it takes 6 hours of actual player activity to manage. So you've got between 60 and 180 man hours of time spent beating up hopefully idle and loot-filled citadels.

It's hard to know what the loot per Citadel is in high security, but it's probably fuck all what with asset safety. Even salvaging for 10-15% would nett you all about 1.5B from a Fortizar, which is optimistic. If you've spent 180 man-hours bashing it (minimum) then your ISK/hr is about zilch.

Structure grinding as a content driver was the whole reason we had the Dominion patch, which I doubt Jim was around for. It was why we got Citadels in the first place, because the EHP buffer of POSs was often the sole deterrent in their removal. To make it fucking clear for dumbfuck poms used to dropping 6 Leshaks on an Azbel, POSs used not to be that fucking easy. They used to defend themselves without human intervention, unlike these dumb as bricks space toasters. Tackling a decently fit POS was a 6-8 hour exercise if you didn't use Trashcats, 4-6 if you did.

So, yeah, this kind of content model has been tried before. It fails, always, because it's bad content. It's bad content because it's repetitive (oh look, another Athanor to F1 on), simple (F1, AFK), unengaging and devoid of any reward either in ISK or in skills gained. What do you learn here with Citadels except orbit, refresh your guns, and warp away to a safe when the bad men turn up?

Hoping for fights in highsec war decs is also a joke. Thinking 50 Catalysts is a fleet, well, the man has no idea, clearly. I would love to find 50 Catalysts orbiting an Athanor of mine at 1km. A single Orthrus would kill any that were dumb enough not to warp off. And if you do all warp off, guess what, your work is undone.

Jim is entitled to try his hand at stealing the enjoyment from his corp mates as much as his victims, but it's a lot harder to find corpmates than it is victims. The thing is, newbros and bored old cunts alike will quickly sniff out boring content and not turn up for it.

Shame that he's going to burn all his credibility on this bald attempt to get other people to do the boring grind for him.