So many posts over the years have addressed the issue of ganking, I think I have the answer that will get immediately shouted down by the gankers and it’s a PTW item!
Mission -running?
Buy a Selective Reflective Armour Module (SRAM) that is mounted in a special slot that reflects 60-99% (depending on the SRAM quality) of PVP gankers’ hits, depending on the type of ammo they use. The beauty of this set of modules is that it only reflects players shots NOT the mission rats!
Conditions are
Purchasable from the station agent and only if you have accepted a mission
For a particular ammo type (buy all or just one type)
Limited time - mission based.
Gankers will be red for 12 hours!
Downsides:
Insurance is not available but Concord will turn up in 4 seconds - even in Null!
Don’t know how easy this would be to implement but it helps support the game, protect the mission runners a bit and allows miners to mine the new mineral needed for production!
Hope I didn’t give you the impression that I wanted it gone - the module is an item of choice. I see it as in-mission only and gives limited protection against a collection of very high alpha, very low cost ships on the way back from a mission.
There are a multitude of ways this can already be done, but for some reason people would rather nerf ganking yet again than do anything that might be considered intelligent flying. Don’t make your mission ship a blingy gank magnet and you can smile as you see gankers setup, because you know they aren’t there for you.
You called it an issue, but it’s only an issue if you let it be. Between all the factors that go into it, highsec ganking is in a place right now where you kinda have to try to get ganked anymore. You have to deliberately make the choice to paint that target on yourself.
The same was said about wars, yet after denying it was a problem for over a decade the CSM asked for numbers. Over half the wars were initiated by 5 corporations, with a 100 to 1 kill to loss ratio.
For a time, wars were gone, so its not an unprecedented course of action.
No. Concord should never go to null as part of regular gameplay.
The two are a little different, one was a mechanic CCP said was fine that was not, which caused untold numbers of people to quit the game over the course of a decade before eventually being fixed, the other was a mechanic very poorly named ( delayed local was BS ) by CCP insisting to make null like wormhole space people said was not fine, caused a significant number of people to quit logging into their null toons outside of fleets in the space of a fortnight.
Probably the most vocal opponents of the resulting change were those who asked for it, since the wealth of targets to pound on were not playing anymore and those whom were out in space were near peer adversaries actually looking to fight, which apparently is less fun than bashing ratters and miners.
Honestly though it was not all bad, props to Big Red Boat and Mittani for the podcast where they rubbed their blue super umbrella in CCP’s face during the meta show in the middle of blackout, as it was quickly followed up by ending the ‘everything can fit a cyno’ era of Eve, one of the more healthy changes to cyno mechanics since inception.
None of that will solve the problem with ganking. We want to encourage ganking and game play. More ships we can blow up the more fun but at lesser of cost of the players as it costs way to much isk vs replacement.
Want to solve this problem? Then add 100% insurance on all T1 mining ships and on T2 mining ships only. Fitting can not be included on the ship; only the hull should be covered!
CCP always gets this wrong. If combat ships can have crazy setups with specialized modules, then so can mining ships. New modules for mining ships, not to make it harder to gank, but make the players decide what module to fit and how it should be used to defend themselves. We do this by adding new damage control hardeners like on HACs, and make them burn out as they get used like ammo. Also, allow fit changes on mining ships only during combat.
An active miner should be able to outthink different situations while mining. If you’re giving out great modules for combat, then we should also have the same type of modules to defend from them.
