A hard three minute limit isn’t a very happy middle ground. The way ganking is currently done would be impossible and gankers would be much more limited in where they could operate. Some will argue that is “good” for some reason, usually self-interest, but regardless, it would provide a significant increase in safety to haulers by increasing the cost in both time and ISK for gankers to operate.
Also, I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to code such a thing. It seems like major use of server resources to constantly track contact between ships, but of course I don’t really know so maybe such a thing could be done. If the problem we are trying to fix is hours long bump-tackling, I think I would prefer CCP’s originally announced solution which didn’t make tackling impossible, but did impose a significant cost in attention, and a moderate one in ISK, on a tackler by forcing them to keep sacrificing ships to maintain tackle. Making ships magically pass through one another after a set number of bumps is kinda immersion breaking (and would just be circumvented by using multiple bumpers). I’d rather they just enter warp without needing the alignment after a certain period of time.
That’s the solution if CCP want to do something like it. Or just have an on-the-fly stats adjustment on the ship stats so it get a uncountable align time. If you give the ship a mass of 0, I’m pretty sure it would align and enter warp faster than anyone can bump it.
Considering gankers use disposable ships to help counter webbers, this will almost surely happen.
So they are insta-locking but
Bunk. I see freighters fly through Uedama, Niarja, etc. all the time an not getting bumped.
Those costs are always their, either explicitly or implicitly, right now.
Sure they do, they have to get that fleet into position while maintaining the bumping.
As Black Pedro points out, they’ll just burn cheap ships with a point to keep you tackled, then pull CONCORD when the fleet is ready then gank you. Which of course will just lead to more raging on the forums.
I read it, which highlights my point that the costs of ganking are already there.
You don’t? You say in one breath that bumping does not cause a suspect flag, when somebody suggests that using a point on a freighter could result in a suspect point thus making the tackler vulnerable to an escort fleet with guns…you don’t like it. Really? You don’t see this in the least ironic?
Patti’s suggestion is a broader version of one of Black Pedro’s suggestions. His refinement was to limit the idea to just freighters. Thus, the issue of using it to infinitely point the hapless mission runner is out…unless he is running a mission in a freighter.
Toran’s idea is just a variation on the 3 minute timer which of course it totally passive and can be circumvented as Black Pedro notes.
Not with a suicide point on a noob ship.
Magical warping ignoring a suicide point would be a really, really shitty mechanic.
More irony in that is often a complaint. Suggest something that carries consequences and they hate it. Because imposing those consequences is bad for :reasons:.
See…:reasons:.
And those reasons are largely Bravo Sierra.
@Rivr_Luzade, did you not read the part about how bumping is nerfed. In other words, bumping would not work like it does not and the idea is gankers would use the point which draws a suspect flag.
No, but the escort could, couldn’t they?
Which is why it should be via a module not via bumping that draws the suspect flag.
Nope won’t fly. Why go for this when you can hide behind the skirts of NPCs?
Wut? No really, this is just a variation on Patti’s OP. From the OP:
Did you miss that highlighted part?
That isn’t a happy middle ground it is letting CCP save your bacon vs. saving it yourself after you have screwed up several times.
The last time CCP proposed a change or nerf to bumping it was to implement a hard timer on warp-attempts where anything over 3 minutes would cause you to enter warp regardless of where your ship was pointed. As @Teckos_Pech said this wasn’t anything either side really liked, though I’d personally stop short of saying everyone hated it with a passion.
The idea here being that you can’t just bump a ship to troll them and when ganking you can no longer spend 15+ minutes bumping a Freighter off a gate and well away from gate guns with the Freighter more or less unable to do anything about it.
As for your ideas about escorts and tackle they’re rather laughably off base from actual gameplay.
Realistically speaking if you have someone escorting you it’s probably your alt and they’re probably webbing you which negates bumping basically in its entirety as a concern since a Freighter starts warping (and thus stops being bumpable) off a gate in about 2 seconds with a web on it.
If you remove bumping but allow Suspect Points then you open up a huge number of options that weren’t available with bumping and have little to nothing to do with it. What’s likely to happen here is that anyone going after a valuable Freighter will bring a brick-tanked and ECCM fit Battleship as their main point with a small fast-locking ship to get initial tackle. The big ship will take longer than the CONCORD timer for a single escort to burn down and will be fit to counter jams making ECM impractical. They may die, but since a Freighter can easily contain billions in cargo that’ll be an acceptable loss.
Meanwhile you’ve just made trolling mission runners (and basically everyone else honestly) incredibly easy as well as enabled ganks that would never have been feasible or profitable previously because the time difference between getting point on the ship and getting decent DPS on it was enough for CONCORD to show up and save the day. If points only cause a suspect timer then that goes away.
my idea isn’t escorts and tackle
its allowing ALL points webs and scrams in high sec, but with a suspect timer
I think it would be crazy and awesome, and would change the way freighters are ganked full stop
it would probably be a failure
but it would not necessarily involve escort and tackle beyond the extra characters I assume freighter pilots are using anyway
the emphasis on escorts and tackle etc realy comes from others replys
I mean I’m not considering people moving too much in untanked ships without scouts and webbers, they are just there to be ganked aren’t they?
As long as freighter bumping would go away as well, I would be for it. As said before, the problem with suspect flag points and bumping I see is that it makes intercepting a freighter for bumping too easy. In general, this whole bumping, in other words the non-flagable tackle, is the only issue that keeps most suggestions to ganking changes and ship interception in the underwhelming department.
what about ships taking damage when they run into other ships (not in their fleet)?
Damage applied could be dependent on the difference in size of the ships getting their grind on.
Small ship vs Big ship = big damage for small ship, little damage for big ship.
I think that would keep bumping a fair-play, but not for extended periods of time if there’s just 1 pilot doing the bumping.
The usual counter point to this idea is:
Presumably this application of damage would not trigger a CONCORD response? (since bumping currently does not).
Then what if some mean person decides he will fly a big fast ship and ram small ships. or a swarm of ships into a big hauler. You get ship ganking without CONCORD retribution
If you make this application trigger a CONCORD response, why not just have CONCORD respond to bumping?
For this problem, there is little in the way of easy answers. I actually quite like the OP’s idea. Keep CONCORD responses to actually damaging ships with weapons, tackling becomes a suspect offence capsuleers can deal with by themselves (if they rise up to the responsability) and remove bumping since it provides very little as a mechanic.
If you are going to fly a freighter with billions of loot in it, you should be bringing more than an alt as an escort…or break up the cargo so that it is less gankworthy.
The solution here is simple and was articulated by Black Pedro, have it so only scramming a freighter causes a suspect timer, everything else causes a criminal timer.
Your core assumptions here are pretty much entirely wrong here.
The vast majority of Freighter movement in High Sec involves exactly zero alts because it doesn’t generally involve enough cargo to be gank-worthy. The reason it doesn’t involve enough cargo to be gank worthy is because of the numbers required to gank something with that much raw HP, not because it can’t be ganked profitably based on ship costs.
If you make it so you can easily hold the Freighter indefinitely without bumping then you can pretty easily hold the thing for half an hour or more on an unpopulated gate and basically just suicide destroyers into the thing on a 15 minute interval. Yeah they’ll get CONCORDed but you can now kill a Freighter for much cheaper because you no longer needs 40 people in Destroyers, you just need like 5 or 10 and you can gank targets carrying only a few hundred million if you want.
Plus, as I said, the trolling potential of unconcorded points VASTLY outweighs the gank potential, and the gank potential is pretty high. I can fit out a Frigate that a mission battleship can not kill and I can just take that into missions, scram the mission runner, and when he shoots me I get a free kill because he just instigated an aggression timer against me.
As pointed out above, if you run the EHP on a Freighter and the number of ships required to kill it basically via CONCORD suicide-party you end up with a number that is rather depressingly low if you’re a Freighter pilot. Normally you can’t hold a Freighter that long because even bumping is unreliable, but with a point there’s no such restriction and you can’t radio a friend to fly in and web you out.
There’s no reason for a change like this though. We already have bumping, and that at least takes a reasonable amount of skill to pull off and can be countered because I can web a Freighter out of a bump gank, I can’t web him out of a scram-gank if CONCORD isn’t going to remove the scrammer. If said scrammer is tanked sufficiently I probably can’t kill him either, and if I try and he has guns he can probably make a decent stab at killing me because of how aggression mechanics work.
Bumping holds freighters for as long as is needed typically. And with a suspect timer you can now shoot the tackle. Frankly I’m just not seeing the problem with this. Limit your cargo value or bring friends.
Sure there is, the idea is to promote player driven interactions that is more dynamic and interesting than the current approach.
No, instead you’d shoot the tackle. Really, why is this hard? The tackle gets a suspect timer and then you shoot him.
No ship is indestructible. You are assuming away any and all solutions, you assume the ship cannot be destroyed. That is not a valid argument.
This is no different than the AFK cloaking complaint about cynos. That argument hinges on essentially an infinite number of hostile ships will come through the cyno beacon. Here you are basically assuming infinite EHP on the part of the tackle. Not only does he have a monster tank, but he has guns and tackle and can withstand any and all DPS.
In other words, “Have CCP remove bumping.” Yeah, no. How about you just stop being foolish and imprudent when using a freighter?
Why is it people want to have CCP protect them when they are imprudent and take on huge levels of risk? Are you people children or adults? Really, mitigate your risk. It isn’t hard.
I also want to point out that the issue here is not simply bumping, but also the foolishness and imprudence on the part of some freighter pilots. If you are prudent and sensible your risk is low. If you load up your freighter with billions of ISK, do not have a scout, your scout does not have a webber, you anti-tank you freighter, etc. You are taking on considerable risk. And no, that risk does not have to be the same on the part of the gankers. That is not how risk works. Risk, in game, is due to one’s actions. If you take foolish and imprudent actions you increase your risk. If you take prudent and sensible actions you reduce your risk. If you are in a hauler and get ganked you should sit down and look at what you did wrong.
As such, this thread really applies to those people who are taking on high levels of risk. You do not have to do that. But if you are going to move a cargo that has a high ISK value you should bring friends. Will this ensure you won’t be ganked? No, but then again nothing should do that. Yes, you can try to do it all with alts, but IMO, having another person there so your attention is not split between different windows would be better. Bringing 2 friends is probably even better.
Edit:
Yes, yes, yes. I know somebody some time ago was ganked in an empty freighter. BFD. I don’t care. Looking at outliers and basing changes to game mechanics on those is just dumb. Unless you can show that such events are not outliers kindly feck off. And that means going out and finding the killmails and posting them. Here is my guess when you eliminate empty freighters killed in NS, LS, w-space (do they even use them there?), empty freighters killed during war decs, and also exclude those with double wrapped containers…you won’t have many kill mails unless you look back over several months and even then you’ll have a few–i.e. they are outliers. Exceptions. Something that is uncommon. Not the norm. An anomaly, aberration, oddity. Unless that outlier is a fat tailed event, and ganking an empty freighter is not an fat tailed event, game mechanics should not be changed as a result.
ccp says bumping is working as intended, my bumping mach I made to harass to corp war dec against some newish guys I know led to the the destruction of 5 nestor 2 vindi citadel destruction fleet.
Though the mission running ship also has options to break tackle without an escort or alt-
a web and some guns, or a flight of light drones
They also have the option to get other mission runners through the gate to assist as the tackle will be globally suspect
And the tackle has to tank the room as rats shift aggro- if the mission runner removes all damage from rats and only concentrates on the tackle then the tackle has to tank the whole room- indeed perhaps the activation of a scram on the mission runner should immediately switch ALL AGGRO to the tackler, including scramming npc frigs
So not trolling mission runners, which currently involves baiting, stealing loot and rewards to get a response etc, just making high sec mission running a bit more balanced risk/reward, and removing the need for ‘baiting’- if someone wants to get a high sec mission runner they need to gimp their pvp fit to deal with the mission, just as the runner would need pvp mods on their pve fit.
Perhaps only have this mechanic in 0.5 systems where concord response is slow enough that freighter and bling mission runner ganks are possible.
However… after reading the rest of the replys I am now leaning towards keeping bumping as a mechanic, as it has many uses outside of high sec ganking, having a timer to define what a ‘criminal’ interdiction would be, and having the bumping itself activate a suspect flag once this time has elapsed.
This would not affect mission runners at all- except the ones, if any, susceptible to bumping
OK, I know mulit- posts are bad but I am feeling naughty, and I cant multi-quote
But what if the activation of a scram on a mission runner, not only gave the scrammer global suspect and full rat aggro, but elicited a region wide agency (or whatever its called now the new find content thing) ‘help the capsuleer in distress’ beacon- directing other mission runners to the location, there could also be a call for arms in local 'capsuleer in distress;
and perhaps the killing of this PC/NPC could have a dynamic bounty payout that would offset the loss of isk/hour required to fit a web and take some light drones with you into a mission, that would scale with the number of players who came to assist- so maybe 10 milor 20, or 50mil per player on killmail, depending on the ship killed.
If this was only in 0.5 as well…
could make some interesting balanced content AND mission runners would have every reason to join corps and make friends
the carebear dream of bounty hunting would even be a thing.
It seems a shame that CCP would spend so many hours developing AI for PC like NPCs when we have them now.
This is ‘blue sky’ thinking now, as a system it may be flawed, but I do believe there are options beyond the current mechanics that would level the playing field between pve and pvp players and make
evil piracy as viable as real pirate hunting as opposed to min maxing shooting red boxes unti youhave the best ship possible and quit.
Totally off the wall?
Further edit- assisting the mission invader rather than the tackled runner, could also incur a huge standing loss to both the empire faction the runner is working for AND the pirate faction running the mission, I mean a huge standing loss so the individual can no longer run missions and get LP for that faction at all.
The difference between bumping and tackle with a point is that I can quickly, easily, and very safely bring a ship in, either an alt or a friend, to break the bump chain with a web and get the Freighter off grid. Plus bumping takes so long to initially set up that even if you need to wake someone up and have them travel 20+ jumps the gank still may not have even started. I’ve had friends batphone someone to save their Freighter or Bowhead from 10+ jumps out against a bomber gank, and others that started dumping cargo to an alt.
Points and Scrams can’t be easily broken by a single ship if the person scramming is at all competent, and if you shoot them then they can shoot back which often in practice just feeds the gankers another kill.
I’m not sold on the idea that this is any more dynamic or interesting. As I’ve already said a friend can do more to help against bumping than they can against a point or scram, and it gives the gank-y more time to react.
Because if I’m a ganker I’m going to make my tackle something silly like an ASB fit brick-tanked Tempest or maybe even a Marauder, that either can’t be broken with a single ship or can’t be broken with any reasonable number of people until I’m sure the gank is done.
Plus there’s the non-Freighter use-case to consider for something like this. The number one thing taught in both Eve Uni and the various Incursion groups I’ve flown with is not to shoot suspect timers unless you can absolutely GTFO right after, because he’s probably coming back with something that can kill you now that he has a limited engagement. The same problem holds here.
You can solve the Freighter problem with a hard restriction on only allowing this to work on Freighters, but now you’ve applied an arbitrary restriction just to make your idea not ridiculous, and generally I’m of the view that if your idea needs arbitrary restriction to not break things horribly it’s probably a bad idea with more unintended consequences than benefits. This isn’t always true but between the aggression mechanics and how this changes ganking dynamics I’m inclined to believe it’s the case here.
No, I’m looking at the basic math on Battleship tank, the DPS of any ship I could reasonably expect to get to me in anywhere between 7 and 25 jumps before my ship dies in a fire, and figuring that unless I somehow manage to rally a large crowd I’m screwed.
Reasonably I think you can only expect one or two people to respond to any Freighter being ganked, either from friends or corp mates.
If they respond in Battleships they’re going to have plenty of DPS but likely won’t arrive in time unless they’re very close.
If they bring smaller ships they’re unlikely to have enough DPS to break a brick-tanked tackle setup before the ship dies.
The responding force might still kill the tackle, but anyone ganking will assume their gank assets are dead the moment they get used, if the tackle survives that’s just bonus ISK.
This isn’t an assumption of invincibility, just math, where I know for a fact that I can make a ship that will tank one battleship pretty much indefinitely, and 2-3 Frigates for a similar period of time.
Actually it’s less an infinite number of ships and more that a cloaked cyno gives the attacker complete freedom to decide the terms of the engagement, which means they can attack at a time where they feel they’re almost guaranteed an advantage. Probably the best example of this being the couple dozen Rorquals that got knocked off right from under Goons’ cap umbrella because they waited until they knew no one was online to lead a response fleet.
You don’t need to assume infinite ships to say “yeah this is massively weighted towards the attacker”.
The people complaining about AFK cloakies aren’t the ones who have a massive response fleet around like 22/7/360-ish, they’re the ones who are pretty sure that whoever is behind that cloaked ship has more ships than they do, which for an appreciable minority of null players is a pretty reasonable assumption.
Techos, what you’ve done here, in both of the above cases, is constructed a strawman based on assumed exaggeration on the part of the other party. You’re a statistics and econ person by trade, you absolutely know that something doesn’t need to be infinite or 100% overwhelming 100% of the time to be unfair or weighted towards one group by a statistically significant margin.
The main thing I have learnt from this
is that it actually is pretty easy to deal with bumping, to as you say break the bump chain.
I can now see that the whole scram/point/web give suspect not criminal flag, while simultaneously nerfing bumping, does not ‘solve’ the bumping problem- perhaps because it was not a problem to be solved.
(I do still think it would be awesome and game changing but would also utterly change what high sec is and that is not what this thread is about).
How do you feel about a bumping timer, but not one that allows warp out after a set time, but one that gives a global suspect flag at a set time- giving both gankers and AG time to form a response?
Regarding shooting the suspect tackle, or suspect bump tackle if we went that way, giving a limited engagement, if we changed the mechanics in high sec to allow suspect but not criminal interdiction, we would not have to give a limited engagement at all, we can change any of these mechanics if we change any at all.
In this iteration of the idea, anyone can tackle anyone in high sec, either via a point or scram, or via bumping, but they would do so knowing they incurred a global suspect timer and that their initial target, the tackled, could engage them without opening a limited engagement- they get a free shot so to speak.
Would that be too balanced against the ganker and in favour of the gankee?
As more people chip in it seems like bumping as we have it may well be a ‘silly’ mechanic, but it may also be the most balanced mechanic available.
Yes and no. It’s easy to break or deal with if you have another account or a friend who is both online and able to get to you, but neither of these things is a given, which is the primary complaint against bumping, that it’s not something the ship being bumped has any counter against, at least if that ship is a Freighter.
The whole thing came to a head a while back after some troll decided to bump a Freighter around off the Jita undock for like an hour or something stupid if I recall right.
99% of the time bumping is a perfectly legitimate mechanic, and in Low and Null it can be pretty important for dealing with capitals. I’ve personally used bumping in High Sec to save someone’s drake with a T1 Frigate.
Still has massive trolling potential and would make the Jita undock into a mass of flashies, which is why the whole “Suspect/criminal flag for bumping” thing has never gone anywhere except the Eve comedy circuit.
Ditch the whole “you can point but suspect timer” thing. Being able to point people is half the reason players intentionally go suspect around PvE players, letting them do it for free would basically force the PvE ship to engage, which would turn them into a free kill.
The reason shooting someone who is Suspect has to give some kind of limited engagement is because CCP wants someone who is Suspect to be able to shoot back once engaged. If you remove the limited engagement flag then anyone who goes Suspect can be shot with impunity in High Sec because as soon as they shoot back they get flagged as criminal and CONCORD gets involved.
Personally I agree with CCP, the interactions between suspect and limited engagement flags are sometimes confusing but they’re also interesting and allow for a lot of gameplay to happen around them. Making a change that removes that for the sake of changing something that really doesn’t need changing in the first place, namely scrams in High Sec, would be throwing the baby, his brother, and probably the family dog too out with the bath water.
