An idea to make bumping irrelevant, and to make high sec more awesome

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
81

Yes but I’m not saying remove them in all circumstances, this is what I am suggesting

Mach bumps Orca, after three minutes of bumps mach goes suspect, if anyone other than bumped orca engages, limited engagement follows
If bumped orca engages, no limited engagement, the bumping mach will still be concorded if he fires back or switches ships, however the orca can use drones or witch ships and kill bumping mach at will, as long as he can keep it pointed.

With a freighter this would be different as freighters do not have high slots, but then the freighter does not have an issue with the limited engagement as they never did, they have no guns, however others can assist, as they do now, in the form of second accounts, friends and AG types.

This will trigger a limited engagement with the bumper, however he is suspect and can be held down and killed without needing a gank squad and to worry about getting it done before concord arrives.

So on the jita undock for instance, that bump mach becomes easy pickings for anyone who fancies taking a shot, and its set up to bump, not gank or tank, so…

But yes, this thread is really telling me that bumping is ok as a mechanic, does the job, has counters in place, and there are probably more important things for the devs to work on.

But still it seems strange, that so many would say bumping is unfair because there is no risk for the bumper, I have an idea that increases risk for the bumper, does not seem to increase risk for the freighter pilot (still needs opsec and escort/alt/on coms with others to halp), but no one who flys a freighter seems to like it,

but some do seem to like the idea that they just get to warp away after a set time, which just means quicker ganks, not less ganks

82

I am fine with this refinement as well.

I am fine with this too. Personally, if you are getting bumped, the (vast?) majority of the time you screwed up. So it is the consequences of screwing up. Why is that bad?

As for troll bumping, not sure why people do not file a harassment ticket. CCP considers it harassment if you follow a person around the game making their game experience unpleasant, but you have to have made and effort to “get away” from this person. If that person is making your game experience unpleasant and is not letting you get away…file a ticket with the above explanation. Make it a given period of time, say 15-20 minutes 30 should definitely do it. Even try logging off, as troll bumping a logged off ship seems particularly ridiculous.

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83

I think if you filed the petition after 30 minutes, saved the logs and whatnot to show they were doing it to harass you over that length of time, and logged off, and got ganked because of the timer, you would get reimbursed.

You would say in the petition, this has been going on for 29 minutes now, I have got to walk the dog/feed my child/whatever, they are not going to gank me and I have tried to get away so I have got to log off, this is harassment’. Then log I bet you would be reimbursed if they ganked after.

One thing I am learning from these forums, is that the line between harassment and bullying, and normal gameplay, is usually pretty clear, its just some people use a lot of rhetoric to make normal gameplay seem like harassment, and they spend a lot of time and effort trying to achieve this,

I think this means that sometimes people don’t petition actual harassment when it happens, because it muddies the waters. And others get so used to people crying bully bully over normal pvp, they get over defensive when someone has a legitimate complaint- though name calling like ‘greifer’ and ‘sociopath’ often gets this process off to a bad start.

CCP Falcon made his and CCP’s feelings about harassment and bullying quite clear when he had to close a thread I foolishly opened about the bonus room-

I think we can assume that real harassment gets dealt with pretty harshly, but most bumping isn’t its spaceship pvp.

I am glad that at least someone liked the idea that we could have some sort of suspect timer for the bumper, or something, but I don’t think the current mechanics are broken at all, as long as people use the tools at their disposal, including reporting harassment if they think they are being repeatedly targeted for bumping without a gank actually occurring. It does not sound like this happens much though?

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84

I was talking about troll bumping–i.e. bumping for the sake of bumping and to annoy another player. If you have tried to get away, your friends have either been unsuccessful or currently not online, and you have logged to come back 30-60 minutes later still being bumped. Heck, file a petition. I would.

Usually when a whale is being bumped there is a sense of urgency in terms of bumping/ganking. First of all he could get away. Second he might have friends show up and help him. Third, another gank group could claim the prize.

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85

I think we all had a nice discussion tbh, not even much name calling and no trolling as far as I can see. Rivr was quite vocal and passionate, but lots of different views were aired.

Does it feel good to be proved wrong on this at least?

You watch, next post will be a ■■■■ post of epic proportions and clusterfuck ensues…

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86

Fun fact, if you’re being bumped and the other players show zero signs of ganking you then you can actually file a petition with the GMs to have the situation dealt with since bumping for the sake of bumping on a ship that can’t get out of it is actually considered harassment in practice if not in actual writing anywhere.

From what I’ve heard it generally takes less than an hour, sometimes less than 15 minutes, for a GM to respond and basically teleport you to the out-gate of the system.

And because I can’t resist poking a hole in a designed system…

At which point I bring two Machariels and have them alternate off, or more if that’s required, and I’ve avoided going Suspect at all while still bumping the target.

And on a final note, I don’t exclusively fly Freighters, I fly just about everything given the chance, so I tend to take a balanced view of the game with shades of trying to guess CCP’s intent from presented mechanics. This has resulted in me taking both “sides” of a debate in the same thread, much to the annoyance of the people intent on just having a good argument without any of those pesky shades of grey… :stuck_out_tongue:

Still I do think this has been a good discussion, I think the main issue with your proposal was a lack of awareness of the wider potential consequences of your proposed change. It’s a pretty common thing with these ideas because even at CCP no one has a full picture of the entire game at any given point in time, there’s just too much of it.

You did a good job of adjusting and explaining your idea though. 10/10, would participate in future threads :slight_smile:

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87

Good. Nice to at least agree with you on something in this thread. :sunglasses:

And…I agree again.

Not sure that I was, nobody liked the idea which is what I predicted.

88

Yes but it didn’t devolve into a ■■■■ fest either

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89

Heh, I don’t expect us to really see eye to eye on ganking in general, but you’re generally very logical and when discussing opponents of this particular issue you seem to give in a bit to the base urge to set up the other side of the argument as a strawman.

I’d hardly claim innocence of doing this myself on certain other issues, but it gives me a bit of cognitive dissonance in this particular case. We both know the economics of ganking generally favor the ganker in practice at the moment.

I think the main thing keeping ganking down to reasonable and economically sustainable levels is the required investment in time and people, which are largely subjective to the individual ganker, rather than any particular ratio of cargo to EHP.

Personally, for me at least, the thing about bumping that bugs me is the lack of counter-play by the bumped ship. If it was reasonably possible to skill your way out of a bump without the intervention of a second pilot I’d be pretty happy with the state of the mechanic as it pertains to Freighters, but right now there isn’t. IMO no ship or mechanic should completely require enemy error or a second pilot in order to be countered, except for something that absolutely requires a second pilot to execute, like a hotdrop where by definition your enemy is using teamwork as their weapon of choice.

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90

I’ve seen a lot of complaints about bumping or not bumping, and I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but I have to ask a simple question:

Regardless of any technical issues about how to detect what was intentional, is intentionally bumping a freighter to prevent warping a hostile act?

  • Yes - it is a hostile act
  • No - it is not a hostile act
  • It Depends

0 voters

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I’m not trolling in asking this, but looking at the back and forth on these topics, I can’t even see if everyone agrees on this point.

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91

Of course it is. It’s pretty hard to argue bump-tackling a capital ship has any other purpose if you do it to prevent the ship from warping away other than a hostile intent.

This is intentional though. At least, capital ships were purposely made slow and vulnerable to interdiction.

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92

I consider it interdiction and thus direct pvp, however unlike other forms of interdiction it does not involve only operating a module on a target-

this assumes ‘hostile’ is not taken to have a meaning beyond an act which opposes another player, in this case by limiting their movement and ability to escape, and an act of war or piracy- etymologically speaking it means the act is of/from an enemy- so yes in this sense it is a hostile act and an act of war.

I do not believe it is a ‘hostile act’ in the sense of being ‘unfriendly’ or ‘vindictive’, an act of war or an act of piracy need be neither unfriendly or hostile in this other sense.

I add this distinction in the, hopefully unfounded, possibility that this dual meaning of hostile could be used to argue that because it is a hostile act ergo it is vindictive, and griefing.

edit to add- because it is the form of interdiction which involves the piloting of one ship towards another, rather than the operation of a module, it strikes me that while it may not be the most elite form of pvp, it must rank as the most skilful form of interdiction/tackle. I can just about hold a poit, I think I would have to train to successfully hold a bump-

This makes me ask- if we have a timer, why only three minutes, shouldn’t the ability to hold a ship for a long time without other support be rewarded in some way, perhaps by a 5 or 10 minute timer.

Of course I would prefer suspect mechanics to come into it,

TLDR:
Yes it is a hostile act, see my use of hostile above.
Thanks for a neat poll.

2 Likes
93

It is generally hostile. I was once bumping a carrier back into the POS shields. The guy left while logged in and thought he was orbiting the POS…but there he was slow boating off in some direction. He came back just as I was getting him back inside. But these are probably very rare cases.

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94

Such a long detailed reply. :slight_smile: The main idea I’m trying to get at is that if it is agreed to be hostile, then it should warrant a suspect/criminal flag or being CONCORDed or something of that nature. Just following these threads it doesn’t even look like everyone can agree on that.

I was trying to avoid in my question anything about what should be done, or how we could know if the act was “intentional”.

I like cool toys. :slight_smile: You’re welcome.

That is a great counter example, when looking at an issue it’s always good to be aware of the exceptions so they can be accounted for. I this case, I think it could be clearly seen that bumping a friendly is not hostile just like targeting a friendly doesn’t mean you are about to shoot them (normally).

95

What about accidental collisions? Jita undock would be (more of) a nightmare.

96

The problem with this whole premise is that you’re basically glossing over the massive issue with any sort of feature like this. In probably 5 years of these threads I have never once seen someone dispute that intentional and repeated bumping of another player was akin to pointing them and that it reasonably deserves to be a suspect flagable action. Everyone immediately points out that if you make bumping cause Suspect status the Jita undock is going to be hilarious and then just hilariously unworkable after about 12 hours.

There’s no good way to definitely determine that bumping was intentional and who initiated it with any reasonable certainty, and in a way that isn’t then either immediately exploitable or has a massive loophole that would do nothing more than make bumping slightly more time consuming or labor intensive, rather than actually creating an in-game consequence for the action.

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97

Pretty much everyone recognizes that stopping a freighter (or other capital ship) by interfering with its navigation for the purpose of holding it long enough for friends to arrive and shoot it is hostile. Some will argue the technical point that bumping itself isn’t a “criminal act” under CrimeWatch because no module or weapon is activated on the target, but everyone knows that it is part of an overall hostile intent of ransoming or exploding that ship.

I’ll argue though that there is no reason interdiction of a capital ship should automatically result in CONCORD getting involved. There are plenty of “hostile acts” that take place in highsec that result in no flags, or just suspect flags. Freighters have a massive amount of EHP and, more than most ships in highsec, require methods to hold them down, especially if we are talking about outlaws with low security status wanting to shoot them.

While freighters are suppose to be slow and require support, the meta that has evolved with bumping as the primary form of tackle was more of an emergent thing. Changing that method to something where the tackler gets a suspect flag I think is something almost everyone can support, although you will get push back from one side if you just want to make bumping impossible so freighters cannot be tackled at all, or the other side if you make it open season to scramble people’s warp drives willy-nilly. Removing all tackle would be a major buff in safety for the ship class which is already one of the safest ships in the game to fly, immune to attack by anything less than 20 or 30 pilots working together, and making every pilot in highsec open to troll pointing is not going to be tolerated by a large number of players used to playing Eve as a solo game.

I don’t think there is a simple fix, but also not much of a problem to fix. It would be nice if there was some limit or cost on bumping to limit extended tackling of a target, or better yet a way to shoot the tackler without invoking a CONCORD response, but the truth is permabumping requires a fair amount of attention so it isn’t like just activating a warp scrambler and going to walk the dog. And almost all freighters make it to their destination unmolested even if they use autopilot.

I’d love CCP someday to take another stab at reworking Crimewatch and allow a more dynamic interaction between criminal, hauler, and vigilante, a system more open for escalation of hostilities, but for now what we have works well enough.

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98

I’m not glossing over anything, I’m logically addressing the issue one step at a time: establish there is a problem, clearly define the problem and it’s limitations, then, and only then address solutions. Arguments get very confused when you try to argue all points at the same time.

So, the first questions should be nice basic things like:
Is intentional bumping hostile?
Is bumping/ship collision a necessary game mechanic?

Then we can talk about things like:
Are all bumps the same?
Can different areas of space have different bumping rules?
Are certain areas more prone to accidental vs intentional bumps?

Then and only then, can their be a reasonable and logical conversation about how to fix the problem.

You, and others, say that bumping can’t give a flag because it will break Jita undock. Sure, but that assumes that station undock, prone to accidental bumping, must be treated the same as gate bumps to pin someone down. Why can’t bumping within X metres of a station be handled one way, within x metres of a gate another, and in open space still another? I’m not saying that is the best solution, but we are kind of missing it because everyone is just jumping to the end without clearly thinking about and defining the problem. :slight_smile:

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99

Can someone answer this?

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100

Sure :slight_smile: