High Sec Ganking Isk/Hour
There was a recent discussion about high sec gank mechanics, and some gankers were pointing out how they "do it for the money" rather than tears. My argument has always been that ganking is poor isk/hour and people do it because they enjoy ruining other people's day, not for the money.
But what if I'm wrong? What if gankers are making bank and I just didn't realize it? So I checked zkill for some of the more prolific gankers, picked one at random that seems to have a high kill rate, and mapped out their earnings for a month. And what I found was enlightening.
The person I picked was Teal'Crayon from Box of Colors. They seem to have a decent kill rate and some pretty high value targets. The corp has 53 members, but only 29 are regularly active in PvP, and most ganks involve 20 of the "crayons" plus a tackle, so I rounded down to 21 ships. Each catalyst fit was worth about 12 mil, making a single gank roughly 252 mil.
I checked every kill in April. I only counted days the player was active and getting kills, so days where they tried to gank and didn't get anything were ignored. I added up all zkill data on drop amounts and assumed they were able to loot every kill and received 100% of the value. Based on kill times, the player is in space anywhere from 10-15 hours on days they are active, but I rounded down to 8 hours. All of these assumptions lean towards better ganking outcomes.
So, how much loot did they get? A little over 39 billion isk. That's just loot, not total value destroyed. Woah, seems like ganking freighters is pretty lucrative, right?
Let's look closer. They also lost a bit over 5 billion over 20 ganks due to lost ships. So the actual profit is about 34 billion. Still really good, though.
Closer. The total days of successful ganks were 11, and each was estimated at 8 hours of play time. So for raw isk/hour, if they were ganking for 88 total hours, the actual isk/hour is around 388 million per hour. That's pretty solid, but incursions and abyssals can reach those values with single (blinged) ships, or even go higher. So it's not looking nearly as amazing.
But wait. They were using 21 ships for this activity at minimum. That's at least 21 accounts (I suppose it's possible there were other actual players involved in at least one or two of the ganks with 30 people). So if we break it down by ship, that's less than 19 million isk per hour per ship.
That's...pathetic. You can earn that isk per ship doing high sec mining with an Orca. Even if we assume they are the God of Ganking and only spent 4 hours average over those 11 days per gank to get the goods, we're talking about ~37 mil per hour per ship. That's like half the isk/hour of Ishtar ratting.
So what's the point? Even highly successful gankers are getting terrible return on their time. Maybe they're too dumb to do the math. That would certainly fit my preconceptions, but I doubt that's it. The more likely explanation is they know it's barely profitable but simply enjoy shooting defenseless targets in no-risk and no-skill PvP scenarios. They like the killboard and the real value is the tears.
But maybe I looked at the wrong person. So go ahead. Show me the "best" ganker's killboard, and show me how much isk/hour they're getting. I'll be genuinely surprised if the absolute best high sec ganker is getting higher isk/hour/account than the average null F1 monkey.
I suspect, however, the numbers won't lie, and the reason people do it is exactly why we all think they do.