Downtime August 18 marks the beginning of the fourth Ice Interdiction run by the CFC. Hundreds of suicide Catalysts will descend on Caldari ice fields with the goal of destroying or driving away high sec ice miners. The architect of the carnage is Warr Akini, head of the GSF’s Ministry of Love.
TMC: What is your role in the Interdiction?
Akini: Since my little group within GSF (the Ministry of Love) began to establish itself as the premier highsec ganking organization, I’ve become the most vocal spokesperson for empire activities in the coalition. I actually wanted to do this before the Fountain war, but things got rather heated rather quickly and we didn’t have the chance. So, when the war kicked off, I said to our directorate, “when this war is over, Nitrogen will burn.”
Since then, I started to stock gankships and ammo, working to place them in key locations to hit as many miners and their friends as possible. I’ve written up the forum posts, gotten the troops together, and I’ll be waving the flag.
TMC: What’s the motivation for the Interdiction? The last two GSF-wide interdictions were Gallente ice. Why Caldari this time?
Akini: You no doubt know that the CFC controls almost all of the Nitrogen-producing belts in nullsec. Spiking Caldari ice would provide more economic benefit to the denizens of CFC space. Except for FA down in Fade, but they don’t deserve it anyway. More like Fatal Badcension.
TMC: The first Gallente Ice Interdiction was billed as a macro-economic event. In dev blogs, CCP said that it resulted in an 80% drop in Gallente ice trade volume. How much do you pay attention to these kinds of goals when you make your plans?
Akini: I guess the fact that I’m not really able to properly come up with an answer to this question indicates that the answer is “not really.” We say “yeah, we’re gonna spike this bitch,” but we don’t really say “yeah, we’re gonna spike this bitch to 1980isk/unit and slow the daily volume traded to 1000 blocks per day.”
TMC: You mentioned that Bat Country ran a Caldari interdiction in 2012. Was that related to the famous GSF interdiction?
Akini: I -think- we did that because we were bored. We saw Oxygen go through the roof, Nitrogen was down, and said “meh, let’s blow it up.” So, it was tangentially related, but with none of the same people running it. That in itself should scare you for future events. I did the second, brief Gallente interdiction as well, and that was a very spur-of-the-moment thing. Who knows when the next one will get hit!
TMC: Was Bat Country part of GSF at the time?
Akini: Yep. I hadn’t formed Miniluv yet, but the thought did occur to me during the interdiction…“what if I did this all the time?”
TMC: When and why did you form Miniluv?
Akini: I think I answered that question in an interview for TMC before… Basically, was a couple of years ago, suicide ganking was a lot of fun, figured we’d make an official group out of it. Right after Burn Jita the First.
TMC: When you say “I’ve become the most vocal spokesperson for empire activities in the coalition.” What are those activities?
Akini: Pretty universally blowing stuff up. The only difference is where we blow stuff up, and when, and what we do with the stuff that got blown up. It’s not as if I tell the directorate I want us to run our own freighter service…as much as I’d like to see Red Frog struggle to stay in business :3
TMC: Do you spend most of your time in high sec?
Akini: Yep. I’d say 90%.It’s actually a surprisingly entertaining place.
Maybe it makes me a bad person, but ganking is just hilarious. The sheer amount of damage you can do, provided you put in place the proper assets (I count people as assets here, because I’m a cold-hearted empire tyrant), is marvelous. There is not another single group in the alliance, bar maybe our capital fleets, that can claim it does as much damage as we do on a regular basis. If I had the time, I could do 100b of damage in a day with a little (read: a lot) of coordination and a bunch of friends.
TMC: How many active pilots in Miniluv?
Akini: Not as many as you might think. We have a handful of core, active people who run several different support roles, and a large pool of guys who hang out and help strategize and come out when everything’s on the line. Believe me, when you broadcast for a 50b whale, everyone comes a-runnin’.
TMC: Did the sec status tags significantly change the game for you?
Akini: Not all that much. The nice thing about tags is that going from -10 to -5 is a hell of a lot easier and cheaper nowadays. I think right now those tags are in the dirt-cheap range, probably due to large supply and not much demand (as far as I can tell, dread pirates tend to like to remain dread pirates).
Under normal operations, I wouldn’t really care about the -10 to -5 tags, but after the interdiction, I imagine I’ll be using a lot of them myself. The -5 to 0 tags are still stupidly expensive though, especially if you multibox a lot of characters. Add that to the removal of the security status caching system (where you could jump from system to system and gain separate sec status ticks) and a decrease in the maximum amount of sec you could get per tick and CCP dealt us a very negative hand with that change.
TMC: Were you heavily involved in Hulkageddon?
Akini: I think we went into the most recent Hulkageddon with a lot of assets, and saw a lot of people out ganking, got a few kills (I think I held #3 on the leaderboard for awhile), got bored, and went off to do something else. Noticed a few very talented, very…OCD goons ganking that we later recruited to Miniluv.
TMC: How have the mining hull rebalances affected your work?
Akini: Not at all? People are still too dumb to tank their stuff, and when they do, we have to drop more on them. OK, so it’s a bit of an effect; being able to take a Mackinaw down with one T2 Catalyst super-easy was damned hilarious, let me tell you.
TMC: How is Miniluv funded?
Akini: Kill bitches, get loot, sell loot for dolla, buy gank stuff with dolla, repeat. We are completely independent of the alliance’s finances, which makes me laugh when people use the same “hrr hrr Goons is broke they in highsec gankin’ de pubbies” line.
TMC: So the rebalance hasn’t significantly hurt your finances (people seemed to think that they’d make ganking unprofitable).
Akini: Maybe I should be more specific. We don’t gank mining barges for profit. That shit’s just for laughs, and it’s really small-time. But there are plenty of other targets out there that pay for themselves.
TMC: How much of your time is spent ganking and how much on setting up the logistics to gank people?
Akini: It’s about a four-to-one ratio? Maybe? We do a lot of hauling and fitting and then gank-gank-gank until we’re out. For this interdiction, we’re hoping it’s more like ten-to-one on a large scale.
TMC: Is Miniluv running around high sec in freighters full of Catalysts?
Akini: It ain’t that big. We don’t entirely operate with Catalysts, either. But the next bit might be opsec, so I think I’ll leave it at that.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Sun Win.