While I’m here I thought I’d make another suggestion…
High sec ganking is a problem. I know people who have left the game and never come back after getting their freighter full of stuff ganked in one of the many high sec areas where this is frequent. And it’s no wonder why… someone with 15 accounts can gank multiple freighters a day and make enough from the drop to pay for all their ships, all their accounts, and even fund their nullsec war activities…
The solution is easy.
All high sec suicide ganks drop zero loot.
Simple. The game has the ability to distinguish between what is and is not a suicide gank. All it needs to do is make a new rule that any suicide gank in high sec will produce zero dropped loot.
Of course suicide ganking will still happen, but it will be at the total cost of those ganking and will reduce the frequency of suicide ganking significantly.
Risk vs Reward applies in all sections of space. High sec is NOT SAFE. Suicide ganking is a valid gameplay mechanic that has a relatively high risk (insofar as destruction is guaranteed) and player-driven reward (people being careless with large ISK value in undertanked ships). Removing all reward for a high risk activity is not balanced, and just makes space falsely safe - EVE is 100% PvP all the time.
Players need to learn to manage their risk level so they aren’t juicy gank targets.
Firstly, suicide ganking is only a “problem” in the sense that it’s a form of someone else’s valid game-style working within well established game mechanics. It’s a case of “you” encountering someone willing to attack you and face the consequences of that attack. The only “problem” is that “you” don’t like it.
Secondly, suicide gank “victims” usually tend to be those who are lazy or ignorant of how things can work, and they also believe that High Security space means “safe” space. It’s not. Avoiding suicide ganking is quite simple; you just have to learn and make yourself aware, exercise some basic precautions and tactics, and mitigate your risk.
Thirdly, calling for a game mechanic change to essentially nullify a tactic you disagree with is selfish. There have been changes made mechanics-wise already that impact suicide ganking “negatively” such as shortening the autopilot “slowboat” distance from 15km to 10km, limiting the time frame where bumping is effective, nullifying insurance payouts and auto-abandon gankers’ wrecks, and buffing the raw tank on freighters and such. The gankers have had to adapt and overcome. Those that wish to avoid being ganked also have to adapt and overcome.
Best thing you can do is roll an alt and go do some suicide ganking with it. It can be very cathartic.
By the way, been a victim a few times to suicide ganks. The most costly one was a case of me being lazy and complacent with what I was hauling.
Finally, EVE Online is a player-driven conflict game. There is strength in numbers; don’t try to solo stuff like hauling and mining. There is no safe space in the game. You can be attacked anywhere and at anytime while undocked. There are just degrees of complication to that depending on the security status of the system you’re in.
Rage quitting is common in Eve. Nonetheless, it is exactly this type of gameplay that makes Eve irresistible to many of us. I’ll bet that a good fraction of those freighter pilots were incredibly bored with Eve and might have been about to quit anyway, and discovered new depths to the game when they were exploded. When they come back they can play a much more interesting game.
False premises always lead to a wrong conclusion. You are proposing a solution to a non-existent problem.
There needs to be a balance between the ability to suicide gank and the ability to defend against it mechanicswise, yes; however, the absolute best defense, however, is and has always been knowledge. Suicide ganking is part of the EVE experience; there is no good reason for it to be removed from the game. EVE has always been and always will be founded on the principle that, with the sole exception of abyssal space and being docked up, PVP is global and you can be ganked at any time for any reason (CONCORD is there to punish, not to protect). To change this is to change EVE into not-EVE.
Victims should learn and adapt - if they are unwilling or unable, EVE is not for them, and they would not integrate well into the EVE community as anything more than cannon fodder. EVE never pretended to be for everyone. The only thing I can say to this is that more effort can be made to educate players before and after ganking. A not-insignificant number of gankers reach out to victims to educate them afterward after how-and-why they lost their ship and what can be done to avoid losing them in the future (and also the fact that passive gameplay is discouraged, frowned upon, and ultimately unprofitable even without ganking)
No it isn’t. It’s a solution to the problem of stupid and entitled players who don’t belong in EVE.
I know people who have left the game and never come back after getting their freighter full of stuff ganked in one of the many high sec areas where this is frequent.
Good. Nothing of value was lost. In fact, competent industrial players gained from these events. The gankers needed to buy new ships, and your friends stopped putting excess production on the market and driving down prices. It’s a win/win for everyone who isn’t bad at EVE.
All high sec suicide ganks drop zero loot.
Or stupid people could stop flying expensive ships through dangerous systems. I think this is a much better solution than changing the game mechanics to reward EVE’s dumbest and laziest players.
So, do you see how you have defeated your own key point here? Your friends KNEW about ganking yet they still overfilled their hauler. They KNEW there were “problem” systems for ganking but choose to go though anyways. When they didn’t get what they wanted, they left which means eventually they would have left anyways because they are fickle as F…no loss at all…
fit your ship properly…
multiply your EHP by 6000 and that should be your max cargo (guideline)…
scout your route via friends, zKB or in game map aids…
know that when you undock, you can lose your ship ship so prepare acrodingly…
if all that is too much, use PUSH…they are fast and cheap…
Historical statistics collected by CCP say this is wrong. Not gonna bother reading the rest of the whining post since you’ve already made it clear you don’t know what you’re talking about with this statement.
The number of people who leave the game and never come back specifically citing highsec ganking as the main reason are so insignificant, that it can hardly be classified as a “problem”.
The annoying thing about suicide ganking is : the ganker’s whole advantage here is they don’t care about their standings, but I do care about mine.
It’s not that they are smarter, or quicker, or that they fit their ship better. It’s just that they have no long term goal of keeping up their sec status.
And when you see guys camping a gate in a Gnosis, you know they’re just starting their character over when sec status gets to -10. Not investing in a character.
I think that only happens if they get really lucky.
But it does seem kind of unrealistic that you can’t put a bomb in your cargo bay, and if it looks like you’re going to lose the ship, detonate it, and blow up your cargo.
That is what I would do if this were all real, and someone were about to blow my ship up. I would blow up my cargo to spite them.
But this is a game, not real life. And “high seas” piracy is fun for some people.
(It’s also fun for me too. I’m not really that mad about suicide ganking. It makes high sec shipping exciting and adventurous!! I just wish it wasn’t possible to do it with throw-away characters, because I want to be able to get revenge and there’s no point in revenging a throw-away alt. )
Do you suppose that an Exxon oil freighter or some cargo ship in the Indian Ocean would have a giant bomb installed for the captain to detonate if pirates come along? Don’t argue for realism and then suggest such a thing. Sheesh.
If oil didn’t harm the environment? And the crew were immortal and would respawn somewhere afterward?
Yes.
Actually I had to look it up to be sure, but there are historically valid examples of ships scuttling themselves deliberately in order to avoid the ship being captured:
Although they usually didn’t do it to destroy their cargo. Just the ship itself so the enemy couldn’t steal it and use it.
What bugs me about suicide ganking is that it can be done with characters that are only a month old (or alphas a few months old, but which the owner only intends to sub for one month and then throw away).
One of the core principles of EVE is that your actions should always have long term consequences. (For example, not allowing name changes so you can’t just re-identify yourself after you betray a corp).
This works against that principle.
My change to his proposal would be : blowing up another player’s ship drops no loot unless you have trained a certain skill (or better yet: a whole skill tree).
The skill tree should take a long time to train and be totally unavailable to alphas. That way only a character that you’ve invested a few month of subbed training in (or purchased equivalent skill injectors) can participate in high sec ganking at any profit.
The idea is that your character is skilled at blowing up a ship in a way where you don’t accidentally blow up the cargo with it.
Or an alternative would be to have a “don’t blow up the cargo” combat mode where your ship barely can deal any damage, but with skills you can deal more damage in that mode (but most of the damage must have been dealt in this mode for any cargo to actually drop - otherwise you accidentally blew it up).
I’m really sorry, but I must ammend this one more time:
It should be when damage is done to a ship’s “structure”.
So armor and shield damage doesn’t matter, but every time you deal damage to structure, there is some % chance that you also destroy some of the cargo.
With no skill at “careful attacking”, all, or nearly all the cargo will usually be destroyed.
This is perfect for freighters, because they can’t fit reinforced bulkheads, and by the time you tear through their structure you would have usually wrecked everything in the hold.
That would make gangking of all sorts into a skilled task. You could get module drops with no skill, but the cargo would always (or nearly always) blow up.
OH! and the skill doesn’t have to be part of a tree necessarily. It could just be locked behind other skills you can’t get as an alpha. Like you would need Hull Upgrades, and Mechanics to 5, for example in order to start training.
Freighters can fit Reinforced Bulkheads; they’re low slot modules. WTF are you going on about?
Sorry Zozoll, you’re in the camp of nerfing one form of pvp because it you think it’s “not fair” re how quickly a pilot can train into a ganking destroyer.
To you and the OP, just drop the silly idea that “loot shouldn’t drop”. It’s 50/50 across the board; the RNG Loot Fairy is a most-fair goddess. And she is present should the pilot decide to self-destruct (i.e. scuttle).
I’m not sure why this bothers you. New players may want to play as pirates or criminals. More established players may want to try something new and like they often do for all the other activities in Eve, make a new character. That’s part of the reason why CCP gives us three character slots on each account.
But more the to point of your, and the OP’s idea. Removing or restricting loot drops is the exact opposite of what you want to do to the incentive structure of highsec crime. You want highsec criminals preying on richer, complacent established players who have stuff worth taking, not newer players in their weaker ships and less skills. Criminals should be attacking the most profitable targets, not the most easy targets to kill.
If you remove/restrict loot drops, or remove intel tools like scanners, it primarily benefits the established players with stuff who should know better and be forced to balance yield/cargo against defence. Crime would probably large dry up, and most of what is left would be the vandalism of a few players looking to break stuff and create pretty explosions, and they would go after the easiest target - newer players in their easiest to explode ships.
So no, please. Highsec crime has suffered a great deal from neglect over the years and could use a top-level look by CCP to see how to make piracy and crime work more as intended, have more play and counter-play, and be more fun in general. But yet another nerf like this one isn’t going to help anyone, especially the new players the OP is championing for.
