Who would have thunk, eh ? Perhaps the solo pilot referred to was, in fact, a solo orca pilot. Plenty of those too. Yes, yes, my suggestion is slightly provocative. I fully deserved some sort of irritated reply, even one based on misreading.
We can learn 2 things from this and similar threads:
1 the video from fanfest 14 was quite interesting, as it gave us some numbers. It says that about or less than 1% noted loss of ships etc as a reason for quitting the game. In a userbase of approx. 500.000 accounts 1% would make 5000. Which isn’t - nothing. But we don’t kow how many leaving the game didn’t answer this question at all. And we don’t know how many players are actively doing suicide highsec ganks (as opposed to combat in FW, losec, null). My bet is on: far less. So what we’re really talking about here is balancing the playstyles of 2 minorities. And since we’re civilized people and don’t suppress minorities, we need to find a balance here. Which leads us to point…
2 It appears that whenever someone is bringing up the subject of highsec ganking, there is immediately a flock of players talking this down as whining. Mostly the same guys, mostly using minor insults instead of reasoning. Quite opposite to the “other side” of so-called carebears, who’d stick to (ad causam) arguments.
What if we all would agree, that New Eden is a dangerous place where one could get shot down any moment, while the game mechanics for this are slightly over-expanded these days and need to be looked at? We do know exactly what the answers will be, right?
True but not really relevant. Without observable phenomena you don’t even have a valid hypothesis. The idea that ganking drives away significant players is testable, and has been tested, and could not be demonstrated.
Also how many newbros are getting ganked for their 7 billion isk cargos and then coming here to unload about it? Other than a very small number of whales that aren’t statistically relevant I’m gonna go ahead and say none.
The people complaining are established, and pretty well established. The newbro argument is a red herring, it’s “doesn’t anybody think of the children?”
That’s not to say that I believe ganking, and the current mechanics that enable this gameplay are necessarily OK — but the thing about it driving off newbros is not based in observable behaviour.
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Didn’t I just say I trust CCP to have done a comprehensive enough analysis to rule this out, and further elaborated on this point? 
Yes it is.
No it’s not been tested. If you want to test it, you attribute to each player a random “victim” level and make it so that the player is ganked more when its victim level is higher, and nothing else changes in the game. Then you can observe the correlation between the “victim” level and the % of people of that victim level who played the game (to exclude alts) and actually kept playing after one month, 4 month, a year.
That’s what CCP said in the other video, where he says you need actionable variable in order to test hypothesis. The hypothesis that suicide ganking in HS is bad has not been tested, mostly because it’s a very costly and complex test.
Yes, the people who are beginners and leave because this system seems stupid won’t complain. They just leave. The only people who complain are people who have a hope for better things. They have no reason to answer a survey about why they left.
That’s the survivor bias Survivorship bias - Wikipedia
Yes it is. It’s actually based on circumstantial evidence, that is people who actually left the game because they were ganked in their fresh new venture, barge, orca, and just realized that this game requires you to know about some specific things like EHP/isk in order to enjoy it without the feeling that you just lost 10H of gameplay to someone you can’t do anything against.
Now those circumstantial evidences can’t be used to generalize, so we can’t say that “suicide ganking is bad in HS” for the sole reason that some people left the game because of it(whatever that quantity of people is). As other people pointed out, it’s also a reason for people to play the game and a valid gamestyle, and it can be an interesting way to meet people, discuss.
It’s not a question of there being “a problem”. It’s a question of whether something could be better.
It’s possible. Maybe the Gnossi I’ve been seeing are actually beginners joining the game with friends who are more experienced.
On the other hand, tags aren’t super cheap, are they? So the ganking would have to be very profitable in order to finance the tags…
If they’re not using 1 month throw away subs, then I have no problem with it. (I don’t have a problem with ganking itself.)
On the other hand… I would really like if there were a skill to scuttle ships instead of destroy them.
In the real world Earth history of piracy in the Atlantic ocean, it was actually quite common to successfully capture whole ships. I would love if Eve would give us that!!!
If Piracy is done with experienced toons, and has a skilllset so your toon can be seen to be a “professional pirate”, then it can become a more core part of the game instead of just one that happens to exist.
You know what also would be fun??!?!?!
If there was a way to bribe Concord in advance!!! Have it be like a social skill. Pay off the local captain in the system, and he “looks the other way” for a bit.
Removing suicide ganking deprives a core element of gameplay without compensating for that loss with any quality of life improvement.
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I’ve always thought (though never been told) this was the idea behind war decs and their fees in highsec.
Afterall, in a dystopian universe where the powers that be “are losing their grasp” it makes sense.
So then more people will kill just for fun …
… and the assholes will once again cry for a nerf.
How hateful can you be for wanting to grief players with this ■■■■■■■■.
Why would you want a game with no risk ?
Remove ganking but I want battleship npcs to spawn in all belts below 0.9 and they drop no loot or give any bountie.
Or is this another clever ploy by the afk miners coalition?
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Locking it behind a skill set might actually make ganking better.
Just have to make sure the skill gives you a bonus to ganking once you’ve trained it.
Long term subbed players would have more fun ganking. Throw away alts would become useless.
Arbitrarily restricting a mechanic to a skill??? “Suicide Ganking L3”?
What other bonuses can you possibly have on top of weapon bonuses (damage/precision)? “CONCORD evasion bonus”?
Long term players are having fun already. Throw away alts are not a problem. Never gave been a problem. They are in fact useful. Anyone empowered with knowledge - that is all they need, knowledge - can roll an Alpha and with very little ISK and SP and become an effective suicide ganker.
You are desperately pitching a poor solution in need of a non-existent problem.
I’ve been discussing this for a while.
What would happen is, without the skill, the kill would basically drop nothing. The loot would blow up with the ship.
You could reach a point where nearly 100% of the time, nearly 100% of their cargo survives.
At advanced stages, perhaps using a module, you could have the option to “scuttle” the ship, so its engine shuts down and the owner is ejected, but the ship is still intact. (Then you could come along with a bowhead, take it to a station, and fix is for like… maybe 25% of the hull price?)
What you just described is the problem.
In Eve, nothing is supposed to happen without consequences.
You shouldn’t be able to gank in a recently subbed alpha, get your sec status down to -10, and then just ditch the alpha and get another.
That runs against one of the core principles of Eve.
Did you ever think for a moment this would negatively affect the pilot who might want to come back to reclaim his goods? Suicide ganker might purposefully leave it at L0 to guarantee goods are lost for maximum grief.
Once again: a “solution” in need of a problem.
Do you think that happens very often in a ganking situation?
The ganker just leaves the goods sitting in space, for anyone to get?
But you’re right that I think it would negatively impact the gank victim. I’m not suggesting we make ganking stop, or that we make life easier for gank victims.
I just don’t want it to be done with throw away alts.
Any EVE player has access to these alts (equal opportunity), and any EVE player can mitigate ganking through the power of education.
Nerfing suicide ganking/alpha accounts is not the solution to the non-existent problem.
What other area of eve can you use a throwaway alt for?
Mining? Sure… in a venture.
Manufacturing? Sure, up to maybe 4 runs.
I guess there is mission running, except that it takes a long time to get good standings.
Why let suicide ganking use them?
I have an idea that is about as good as all this baloney - add space vampires! We could even have skills that would allow you to do cool stuff like fly during the day or eating the skillpoints out of podded pilots.
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A sufficiently large number of space ships is going to be able to destroy a target as long as a mechanic exists such that the target can be killed at any place, at any time, for any reason (except in abyssal outside of PVP arenas and while docked) - this is the core tenet of EVE that undock is your consent to PVP. YOU have a problem with it because YOU never learned how to mitigate it. That is YOUR problem. The game should not change because YOU refuse to learn and adapt as an individual and/or with the help of fleetmates.
Look, I used to be in your shoes. I used to be one of the biggest crybabies when it came to suicide ganking. I’m sure if I bothered to look it up maybe one of my earliest posts on the forums might have been to abolish or significantly nerf suicide ganking just like you’re proposing right now - but then I got educated, and I realized that it was not in fact a problem at all whatsoever once you learn how to mitigate it. It’s not a big deal, it really isn’t. Not only is it not a problem but it’s not even a nuisance. It’s part of the core experience. It’s what makes EVE EVE. Removing suicide ganking makes EVE into not-EVE. It castrates EVE. It deprives from the EVExperience. I spend a lot of time educating newbies like how to mitigate EVE so they stop complaining and start enjoying the game and even appreciating the mechanic as hunter or prey (or both).
Furthermore, suicide ganking serves a vital function to the economy: it purges EVE of krabbers and punishes players for engaging in passive gameplay, which is heavily frowned upon in the community, and the community will respond accordingly via the undock-is-your-consent-to-PVP tenet of EVE. If someone wants to play passively… well, it suffices to say there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it, and if they go about it the wrong way, blaaaaaap, and if they don’t like that, then they can adapt or leave. Certain players don’t belong in EVE, because EVE is not for everyone and it never pretended to be. EVE is the caviar of MMOs - it is an acquired taste, very niche.
If you want to propose balancing suicide ganking - we’re all ears. But you’re not proposing balancing, you’re proposing neutering. Forget it.
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This is a terrible idea. It doesn’t fix anything (because most suicide gankers aren’t using disposable characters) and it removes anti-ganking counterplay like coming back for your loot or loot interception by a third party. This is a breaking change.
And this removes basically all the risk from ganking making it insanely profitable with effectively zero loss. This significantly reduces the value you can safely haul.
Also, who’s skill applies? If you’ve got 15+ tornado pilots in a gank, do you apply highest or lowest? Just asking so I can game my gank squad for maximum loot at minimum training time.
This idea is so, so very bad.
Yeah let’s just wreck the T2 and capital
Ship manufacturing markets. Not to mention the griefing potential.
How about you think through your ideas in terms of how it changes the game and not just novelty?
Given that most of the highly profitable ganking requires omega for multi-boxing and T2 fits, where are you getting your figures for alpha ganking?
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