I advise against this, because it will attract a ■■■■ ton amount of griefers who will not stop attacking you with their words and passive aggressive nonsense, which will make it impossible to do what you actually want to do.
I am not talking about gankers, of course.
It will be a great learning experience for all of us I think.
I’m currently working on a new top secret project and it will take some days until I’m fully setup to gank again. Once that is done and everything works out as planed I will be sending people your way via standard after-action mail
My way?? What did I do to deserve this? 
I can:
That’s a pretty good service package, if you ask me.
As a nurse, I dont differentiate between patients on any bias, so trolls/griefers are welcome as well, but they wont get much out of it. If someone is clearly trolling/greifing my service, I can just block them.
Obviously I will not be be offering actual IRL clinical advice, just EVE advise and what support one person can provide another nominally in a time of tribulation.
Okidoki. Ill set up the alt and corp within a few days and send you the details so you can forward those possibly in need of my services to me.
I think this will be the beginning of a fruitful endevour, where everyone stands to benefit.
If things go well during the trial, I hope CODE will engage me on retainer as providing a valuable service for their organization towards non-CODE compliant persons to understand what went wrong and how to cope with it.
I’m not sure how you can say that with such confidence, but I would state the opposite. While this is impossible to prove either way, I would assert that the campaign of CODE. against highsec residents has indeed changed behaviour there even if it is more based on minimizing risk of attack rather than the actual damage CODE. does. Anecdotally, the use of autopilot is way down than say five years ago, and while there has been a resurgence of Ventures due to Alpha clones, most other miners have retreated to Skiffs and Procurers (because they are so safe to use AFK) to a much larger extent than when CODE. was just getting started. Others cite CODE. as part of the reason they moved to nullsec, and while perhaps a New Order Agent gave them the nudge they needed, I suspect it is much large profitability there that explains the shift of resource gathering to null. CODE. has changed how mining is done in highsec.
As for ganked targets, it has no lasting effect on them. Aside from the edge case where some new player who doesn’t understand they are playing a full-loot PvP game and puts 90% of their wealth into a Hulk which they lose a few hours later, losing a ship is just an annoyance. A Venture mines its own value in a load or two, and a Retriever three or four. Only the most unlucky, or maybe slow to learn, highsec miner is going to be put into the red by losses to gankers. And on top of that they have mining choices that are immune economically to ganking if they can’t handle losses and aren’t comfortable ISK-tanking their way past the gankers.
It’s not the losses that matter as the game is balanced such that everyone progresses, but the risk of loss that changes behaviour.
The brouhaha around CODE. is all about who are unable to deal with losing in a competitive game. That’s it. Part of the New Order shtick is to unapologetically make highseccers, many of who are actively seeking to avoid losses, face losses and deal with losing to another player, but at the core of it the anger comes from people who are unable, or at least unprepared, to lose a video game to another human. It is a manifestation of people either not understanding what game they are playing, or who lack the maturity to play a competitive game with other humans.
Now freighter ganking, and the massive losses it inflicts at once, might be another story, but even there I think the majority of those are experienced by individuals and organizations with more resources than they know what to do with, and only a tiny number have the majority of their net worth wiped out in a single bad decision on their part. And like miner ganking, while most freighters, even the AFK ones make it safely to their destination, the risk of CODE. has significantly changed the behaviour of how haulers operate. All sorts of people even say they have given up flying freighters altogether because they are too dangerous (a preposterous claim the MER numbers don’t support).
I think CODE. can legitimately make a claim they have significantly influenced how the game is played in highsec but no one expects Venture mining to go extinct because a few ganks or would claim with a straight face that is the threshold for achieving “significance”. This is a game, and CCP’s job is to keep both the predators and the prey happy as one can’t exist without the other.
Very eloquent post with many good points.
Ive been a proponent of CODE for as long as it has existed.
I understand what you mean. I know what CODE is, and why.
What does, however, concern me is player attrition resulting from their actions, or more specifically, those targets not understanding what they did wrong and how/why they got suicide ganked.
I dont want players to leave cos they got suicide ganked.
I dont think any of us do.
Ima called me on that, and that inspired me to draft the service I outlined above.
I’m going to setup a “clinic” (dont have a name yet) to advise/support suicide gank targets.
Ima has already tentatively said to refer suicide gank targets to me, as included in the after-math email. If they contact me, thats when my work begins and Ill do my best to retain them ingame.
Fair enough. While I am sure the number of players leaving the as the result of the actions of CODE. or other highsec content creators is non-zero, I am skeptical many of them are really long-term Eve players who would stay in the game. If it wasn’t their Venture, it would be the first time the went into lowsec or fell for a margin trading scam or whatever that sent them packing.
I am not trying to be elitist here, but Eve just isn’t the game for everyone. Maybe there are some potential long-term players chased out before they can get settled and find a place in New Eden, although I really don’t see any evidence there are many. And it isn’t an easy problem to solve as I truly believe that many-fold more potential long-term players are bored out of the game before they find a place than leave because they are exploded, meaning that more isolation isn’t the answer.
Maybe that is actually a good idea. As long as you provide them with good information on how to be safe and explain this is how the game works, rather than feed their butthurt and fill them with anger and notions of victimhood like some AG attempts at the same, it should be a positive thing for the game. I still expect you are going to lose more patients that you save, but I see no harm.
Give it a go for a month or two and if you can, track your progress, so you get a sense if it makes a difference.
I understand what you mean, but lower attrition is good for us all.
My service will be open to new and old players, and offers advice for both for their circumstances.
I agree, but some leave for the “wrong reasons” due to not understanding that the game doesnt work how they assumed, or just outright self-defeating anger. I can help them with both of those.
Ill try my best to provide good information on how to be safe in future, and explain how the game works. I expect in most cases, even very rudimentary preventative advice/explanation of how/why what happened, happened, will be enough.
I wont feed anger/butthurt, but I will listen to it. Imo most of that anger is due to misunderstanding of EVE mechanics, and/or part of dealing with loss. After that, I will help them understand what went wrong, why, and what they can do about it in future should they hopefully choose to remain in EVE.
My clinic will be a place to understand and deal with loss in EVE, purely in the interest of the client, in a safe space, not a front for politics or bias.
To support that, any contact/exchanges I have with applicants/clients to my service will remain absolutely confidential on my part.
I expect the same, but even a small better retention rate is good for everyone.
I am confident I can make that possible.
If I can help even one suicide gank target remain in-game, rather than leaving had they not used my service, I consider that a success for my client, myself/project and us all.
There is no need to make things harder for suicide gankers. I think it’s well balanced and reflective of the real world. The poor, lazy and uneducated have always been trying to steal from hard-working, rich, intelligent folk.
No game is… Most of the time people’s complaints aren’t because you took something away from them. Some of us have come to EVE and simply couldn’t get a foot down.
Not everyone manages to find their place in the chaos. I know I’ve tried to make friends, and my first years - not months or weeks - were an almost continuous series of failures of finding friends, where I’ve found only a very few like-minded players. It was like meeting strangers in a hail storm at a bus stop with everyone just trying to find shelter. There are so many corps to choose from, and many have so little trust in new players nor the skill to deal with them, that some corps go as far as demanding your ISKs and assets to see if you can be trusted.
When one then sits in a belt, ponders over ones options of how to get into EVE and some happy ganker comes along and dunks one for his continuous joy then one gets to see the depressing side of the game. And that’s that.
One can blame a lot of things in this game for the way it is, but it isn’t the ganker’s fault for having fun.
The thing that attracted me to eve when I joined was the feeling of constant danger. The fact that you could be attacked at any time, anywhere, and that that loss meant something. But also, that there were plenty of things you could do to mitigate the risks (learn the game, tank your ship, pay attention to local / d-scan.) This is not the depressing side of the game, but its main selling point!
No. I’m saying that when this is the only thing that remains and you cannot find the right friends then it becomes depressing.
One can come to the game as an experienced PvP player and end up with no friends. This has nothing to do with game mechanics. It’s simply one of the many things that can happen in an open sandbox game.
Topic boils down to:
You are one of the guys who discards the study they initially did based on feelings or something. If in theory, CCP looked at this in more detail, lets say what the effect of ship loss is over the first 3 months, what outcome of the study would you predict? That losing a ship retains players or that losing a ship drives them away?
Anti ganking can only play with the tools which they are given whilst gankers can use spies, NPC manipulation, warp protection, tethering, multiboxing, alts and all kinds of stuff.
To anti gank there is only word of mouth which doesn’t do much because the spies see it too and can relay the information.
If CCP gave people who anti gank more tools the gankers would just quit and seeing as how the gankers are the main cry babies for CCP they don’t dare touch them.
The worst one is where gankers still get the same privileges as people with high sec, once you go lower than a certain point warp gates should bar you from entering.
Then there is the entire issue of bumping.
It was a ■■■■ study. But as its the only study we have, it is indicative of what you conclude from it, in the absence of a better study.
Probably a higher level of attrition, when specific to suicide ganking.
The issue is whether suicide ganking retains more players, or causes greater attrition of players.
Do you see the difference?
TLDR:
The issue is not ship loss, per se.
The issue is ship loss to suicide ganking, specifically.
And whether that retains or attritions more players.
No, please. Boil water instead, make a cupper. Follow my lead and don’t boil topics.
Boiling down is what I do!
If HS suicide ganking is causing more player attrition, than retention, that’s a problem.
Some players just want to stay in HS, for whatever reason.
Who cares, as long as they play and pay sub.
Changing suicide gank mechanics in HS does not necessarily mean less PvP in HS.
What player retention? I’ve seen the charts at EVE Offline and don’t see any.
What I see is this:
Is this also what you see?
Good news, everybody has access to the exact same tools; it’s not as if anti gankers are given an adjustable spanner made of chocolate, and gankers get a van full of stuff from Snap On.