Seems to me that with announced changes to include T2 small/medium modules and BC/BS on Alpha accounts sometime around Christmas, there is going to be a profound shift in how much firepower an Alpha gank participant (specifically in HS) can bring to the party.
What are your views on this?
What are your expectations?
What will be the new gank ship of choice?
How much harder will transports/miners have to tank?
Let us speculate in true GD fashion for better or worse!
They should probably just remove aggression in high sec unless it it sanctioned by war or crimewatch. Then completely re-do war mechanics to be more like it was before it became nothing but trade-hub camping. ie: You can only dec 5 entities at a time, each dec costs 5-50 mil depending on if itâs a corp or alliance, then give wardeccers some tools to locate and track targets.
Personally iâm going to pause in my alpha alt training for saving that precious 5 mil SP for t2 guns when i get access to it.
Looking forward and searching for ways to stop paying for my currently omega alts.
Noway! Suicide ganking is needed in high-sec.
Im unclear on how the system will prioritize the SP limit on which skills.
Say for example a toon with 200mil SP defaults to Alpha.
Which skills will be active on Alpha?
Which ships will be the new Catalyst, especially for larger targets with less gankers, now that T2 weapons and BC/BS will also be useable?
Tornado alpha volleys, or hulls with sustained dps to remain below CONCORDs response?
Yeah. There was something in line âplayer will be able to chooseâ but i have no ideas how it can be implemented.
Having good choosing procedure would be OP and game breaking i guess.
On a tangent, undefended POCO/small POS destruction is post-change far more feasible (as faster) with Alpha accounts.
I think that is a good thing.
Polarized Tornado fleet should chew through pretty quick.
Unfortunately, most true noobs still wont have the capacity to fly BS (which makes the change a bit counter-intuitive).
The possible skill pool for an Alpha will be around 20m SP. If you pay for Omega time on that clone and train all those 20m SP, then revert back to Alpha, all those 20m SP will be available, not just 5m SP of them. (They explained this during the Vegas presentation.)
Only the Omega specific skills will become unavailable.
This is impossible to ask for a million reasons that make EVE, EVE.
Crime, as a player activity, is an integral part of EVE.
You need to put notions like this out of your head.
Returning to topic: Gank fleets will, post change, have far more firepower as Alphas than ever before. That is what we are discussing.
Did not they say âno large guns for alphasâ?
I somehow doubt ganking fleets will be investing in battlecruisers/battleships, unless they are going after specific high-value targets. So weâll probably end up with similar gank fleets we have now, just with T2 weapons to up the DPS a bit.
Really?
So you arm an Alpha BS with medium weapons?
I donât remember them saying that, and logically it would be ridiculous, so it doesnât really sound likely.
So whatâs the point of alphas in BS?
Edit: as a matter of fact what is the point of alphas anyway? Those changes to do not seem to be like unlimited free trial but way of gameplay actually.
This would depend on how the market for BC/BS reacts to a potential influx of Alphas flying them. The irony here being that even though they may be Alpha, an account that can fly a BS is not particularly a noob. You dont step right into a BS.
So we would be talking about returning vets or alts of existing vets.
Im sure there are gank specialists that have already crunched the numbers.
Intuitively, Id think it is cheaper to gank with lesser ships, if you have more participants, but with the newly available firepower, you could gank with less participants in larger hulls.
Certainly it means that gankers have far more firepower at their disposal as an Alpha, than before. They are no longer limited by cruiser limit or module tier (barring large).
Furthermore, as many have said, profit is not always the purpose of a gank.
2018 may be the Year of the Gank.
Are there even corps using alphas to gank? I mean the fact that you get (almost) free omega gank alts with SP draining which can actually be multiboxed and are way more efficient at it makes this a bit pointless.
They said no large T2 guns, so Alpha BS limited to only large T1 guns.
Actually that is not the case. The standard gank ship, a t2 fitted Cat is around 10mil ISK while a high-end Talos is over 100mil ISK but only delivers 2-3 times the damage. And the lower you go the cheaper it gets. For example a t1 fitted Cat is only ~2mil ISK while still having ~70% of the damage of a t2 fitted one. The cheapest version is obviously all corvettes with t1 fitted which is only a couple of 100k ISK.
But you obviously need more people or alts and that is actually the limiting factor. The more people you get into the gank fleet the cheaper you can gank. Based on the target you then have to upscale with ships if you donât have enough people to do the damage.
Which is what most gank nados are fitting anyway, might have to look in to skilling an alt then 
What, if any, change to HS ganking do you see from these Alpha changes?
Surely this must make it possible for a smaller Alpha fleet to gank a harder target, than ever before?
Inb4 flood of Alpha gankers? Or?
This must be a huge impending buff to CODE activities?
If nothing else, Alpha Cats can now pump out more DPS with T2, thus reducing the amount of participants required by 1/3.
They can always alter game mechanics if it would hurt playerbase a lot and ban gankers from highsec after few acts of aggresion, with dropping their security status massively, it would include CONCORD destroying them and podding when they would go to Highsec. Then they would end up in the âprison systemsâ in low sec for few weeks, when they would have to boost up their security status in hard challenges, before being allowed into high sec again. That reminds me of a book I read few years ago - âPrison Planetâ - by William C. Dietz. 
But in the usual CCP way they would probably just alow turning everything to hell before considering there is any problem. 