If you’ve been an EVE Online player of even casual level these last few years, you know about suicide ganking. The practice of ganking takes advantage of game mechanics and player ignorance to kill expensive ships in EVE Online. The basic idea goes like this. When you’re attacked in high-security space, the NPC police force CONCORD materializes to kill the aggressor. However, there’s only so much they can do. In the time it takes for CONCORD to kill an aggressor ship, there’s a chance the target could be killed.
And then the group doing the ganking has a neutral alt character swoop in and pick through the wreckage left behind. This makes for very profitable ISK-making. Thus the meta-game for ganking was born. The general idea is to use cheap fits and large numbers to deal high volume DPS in as short a time as possible. P I R A T have gotten this down to a science. In EVE Online there is a way around CONCORD though, declaring war.
Thanks to the way these war declarations have worked in the past, groups dedicated to ganking players in high-sec for ISK have become common and well-run. P I R A T is one of the most infamous and hated of these groups. P I R A T has made a massive reputation out of ganking freighters and other high-value targets in Jita. By abusing war declarations these groups can tap into ISK reserves and shoot major targets with impunity. And thanks to the general unwillingness of some players to PvP, they find little resistance.
But today, that all seemed to change. It appears as though the alliance has disbanded and all of the member corporations have been kicked from P I R A T. The current leader, Tiran Taranovich, has seemingly collapsed the alliance with a promise to rebuild. This comes after weeks of “friendly” warfare between P I R A T and a rival group, Hell Dawn.
P I R A T Disbanded
That war between P I R A T and Hell Dawn has gone poorly. To put it simply, many P I R A T members were more interested in making ISK through ganking over fighting Hell Dawn. This led to Hell Dawn being able to win the ISK war by killing many more valuable ships than their enemy. This signaled a general lack of interest in overall conflict, something pretty toxic when it comes to PvP.
Today Tiran sent an alliance-wide mail to the group announcing the closure and vowing to return. Amid the message, Tiran blames developer CCP for making their gameplay harder. This is about changes to the way war declarations work, making it so that only groups with structures in space can be attacked. This change removed many targets from P I R A T’s scopes.
The head of the group also blames various players for the “incompetence of ordinary pilots” and a general loss of vision, as well as group losing sight of “the goal of growth and personal development.” Tiran also puts some blame on the way the metagame is played now, asserting that political pressure toward forming friendly relations with rivals also contributed to this sudden event.
The consensus among players can be summed up in two ways. Players glad that a group that preyed on the weak is gone. And those players who understand why P I R A T fell, and seem to agree with the shift.
Sure the war being lost to Hell Dawn didn’t help, but the real contributor here is more obtuse. P I R A T has spent a lot of time building relationships with other mercenary and ganking groups in EVE Online. Some would argue that this has led to less growth through struggle within their particular gameplay style, which is exactly what Tiran mentioned. Disagree or not with the closure, it seems like trimming the fat and refocusing is a solid way to keep the dream P I R A T wants to live alive, once they make their comeback.
