theres no point anyone doing that, they dont fight, they only gank, if they aint ganking they are docked up chattin on local about mining licence scams, or how good they are at pvp.
Did you know that CCP made a study to try and verify the carebear hypothesis that ganking makes people quit? They found absolutely no evidence of it:
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As ganking can be done by throwaway alts on an Alpha account I doubt your suggestion would have the desired effect. I also doubt that the âfun of highsec warsâ is dependent on ore Prices. Risk averse pilots complain about losing a venture that costs less than a hold of concentrated veldspar.
Lets be real though who hasnât killed solstice and keeps that delicious corpse in their aldrat hanger along with holeysheetbaitship1, their first gnosis, the ship that earnt them their first solo kill and many more trophies.
What were we talking about again
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Did you know that CCP made a study to try and verify the carebear hypothesis that ganking makes people quit? They found absolutely no evidence of it:
I would change that to âfound little evidenceâ. Otherwise, I would challenge that statement. In my travels I met people who eventually quit due to âgankingâ. We can argue âgankingâ whether the reason for quitting was direct (the kill itself) or indirect (the rules around ganking vs. player expectation).
Did you watch the video?
Not only did they not find any evidence which suggests ganking makes new players quit, they found that the numbers show the complete opposite. The people who got ganked where the most likely to subscribe. This is not âfound little evidenceâ, this is âcompletely demolished the assumption that gankers make new players quitâ.
They looked at 80k players and not just at two you picked because they reinforce your view.
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If you want proof that ganking causes players to quit all you have to do is read the forums. Every so often someone will make a thread or post a comment and bozos like you show up and completely trash talk any opposing view. âWahhh!!! CCP did a study!! EVE isnât for you!! Everyone must PVP!!â Just because some dev (most likely a former ganker) did a biased study dosenât mean it doesnât happen. I know players who have quit. So do a lot of others. We try to explain it but your type wont listen. All the while, EVEs player base keeps getting smaller. So go ahead and trash what I say. Soon you will be playing alone.
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Because you have nothing to backup your claims. CCP did a study which showed you are wrong. This goes against your narrative, so logically you try to talk it down and ignore the results.
There are people who are not compatible with EVE and yes they quit if they lose a ship or someone steals from them or whatever, they just donât like how this game works. And that is fine, there are a lot of other games out there that those people can play.
The question is if ganking discourages more people to subscribe than it actually retains and the answer seems to be: No! Ganking has no such effect and if it has an effect it makes more people subscribe.
Your ilk can cry all day about this, but we have actual data which completely contradicts your views and you have nothing but a few forum posts, some gut feelings and made up friends who quit because they where so bad at the game they could not even figure out how to mine safely in Highsec.
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@Charley_Varrick You say âeveryone must PvPâ then what is EVE online? Itâs player vs player in every aspect and not just the obvious.
Things must be getting bad if gankers are now actively trolling forums for new targetsâŚ
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This is such an old argument, it is astonishing that it still goes around. The CCP study concludes that new players who have been ganked are more likely to subscribe. The likelihood of subscription is not 100% for either new players who have or havenât been ganked though. There are new players who have been ganked who quit and there are new players who havenât been ganked who quit too! People quit for all kinds of reasons.
Ganking someone is not automatically making that specific person more likely to subscribe. The relationship works on a population (or sample from a population), it does not necessarily hold for every single individual player. Maybe the player you ganked got a boost of adrenalin from trying to save their ship, then got thinking: âNext time that wonât happen to me you bastard! Iâll get you insteadâ and they got hooked. Maybe the player instead was completely defeated and decided to quit. What we know is that more new players react in the first way than the second, but we do not know how a given player will react until they get ganked.
So should something be done to limit ganking? In general, no, because in general, it is beneficial as far as we know. Now could we find a way to cater to the portion of new players who do quit after they got ganked and the fraction who never got ganked, but quit because they found New Eden too scary? Probably. Say make them members of NPC miner corps and, if they are mining in HS, the NPC response fleet will defend them like other NPCs. But, those NPC mining corps have a really high tax and also tax you for item sales (so if you sell on the market, you pay your NPC overlords a large fraction of your profits). Low risk, low rewards, but they still are playing the game and paying CCP (more money to CCP is good for all of us!). Worth it? I donât know⌠It might help retain them, but the question is do we even want to retain them? The general perception is that if you are one of those people, EVE is not for you and you should leave sooner than later (and I tend to agree, you canât be overly risk averse and be a good member of this community for long).
TL;DR: Donât claim that ganking a specific player did them a favour as far as their staying in the game is concerned, thatâs not what the study shows. Donât claim that ganking is bad for general/average new player retention based on anecdotes either. Anecdotes are not useable evidence and donât stand up against the CCP study. It might have been bad for your friend specifically, but CCP showed that he is a minority in his population.
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Ganking is not the problem, it is a legit tactic, but I think the real problem which you identified gets ignored because everyone tries to bury it under ganking complaints.
The real problem is a -10 can fly around hisec at all, where Concord is this futuristic police force of an almost infinite proportion, able to warp from anywhere in any hisec system in under 2 seconds, able to kill anything in under 2 seconds, has clearly identified a problem pilot who is clearly a criminal but doesnât do anything about it.
This argument keeps getting clouded with ganking is bad, which it isnât, the bad part is the people ganking have no real penalty for their actions.
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It takes a certain personality type to quit Eve in the first week. Fix the gank mechanics, and theyâll end up quitting over gatecamps or bubbles or NPC miners or some other aspect of the game that they canât be bothered to learn about and adapt to.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
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Come now, how can you have a game that supports piracy everywhere but have an all-powerful and infallible police that keeps criminals away from potential targets? Further, what is the point of making them free-to-shoot to let players enforce the law, but not allow the white knights and the bad guys to ever interact?
Itâs clear why bad guys are allowed in highsec, just as it is clear that CONCORD is just a game mechanic to punish certain forms of aggression rather than a fully fleshed-out realistic NPC. I mean, if CONCORD are that powerful, why canât they step foot in 0.4 systems either? None of it makes much sense from a lore perspective.
But from a game design perspective the whole thing makes perfect sense. You are suppose to be possible prey for criminals in highsec, by design, just like criminals are suppose to be content and targets to vigilantes. CONCORD is just there to impose a cost on aggression to shape what conflict takes place in high security space, and it does a very good job of that while still being compatible with the core tenet of the game that nowhere is safe, and PvP is allowed everywhere.
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It isnât the ganking that is the problem. Itâs the shitty attitudes like this one here, being espoused.
EvE is a niche game. Always has been, always will be. Ganking, and crime are not bad aspects of gameplay. But the overwhelming go â â â â yourself attitude expressed, and the jeering, gleeful malevolence is what I believe actually causes new players to quit.
So they quit a week in. So theyâd quit, in your belief, from another reason if this one were addressed. Youâre likely correct.
But one thing no one on earth needs in their life is some e-sociopath deliberately trying to spin them up.
Thereâs just⌠Too many better things to do with ones time.
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It isnât the ganking that is the problem.
no, indeed not.
People just need to htfu
You do not need to be -10 to be able to be attacked by regular people in hisec. There is your âcontentâ.
The point isnât that these people are criminals, (-10) its the fact they are the lowest possible criminal rating, which should have a consequence other than being a number.
The easy and very obvious fact is gankers have it way to easy, they gank and gank and only have to worry about avoiding a few players, which really isnât avoiding anything when they go straight from a station to a fight and then die to go right back to that station. There is no work to maintain being a pirate and in no real world would a force like Concord completely ignore a pirate especially in a area like Hisec.
It seems obvious to me the solution has been to force people to repair their sec status after they go below a target like -9.5 to make people work for their ganks, and choose wisely, not just choose every person they can find in Hisec. Hisec non wardec ganking has become so commonplace and easy it basically allows anyone to participate without ever any consequences. In a world that is supposed to be based somewhere in reality, this subject is not.
A different solution would be to make people who achieve too low of a sec status to not be able to activate a pod in hi secâŚperiod.
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I hate posting this. I know everyone has a strong opinion on this subject, but please donât burn me too hard. This is simply my opinion, and my judgement. You donât have to agree with it. I only ask that you consider it:
Pardon me if Iâm mistaken, but isnât our current situation a result of a body of players lobbying for harsher penalties for criminals in highsec, getting it, and the criminals adapting to those penalties?
Being negative 10 sec status is definitely a penalty. I couldnât be -10 and go about my business. Faction police harassing you everywhere, everyone being able to shoot you on their terms without CONCORD intervention, etc.
Iâm of a mind that the NPCs are a bit too good and donât provide enough room for âgood guysâ to do any meaningful work. Put another way, criminals donât suffer any penalties that NPCs donât tirelessly exploit for us, and so weâre not really aware of how difficult the situation is. Couple this with the criminals not feasibly even being able to put themselves at risk to real humans because of constant perfect NPC harassment, and I think a feeling of powerlessness in player law enforcement is likely to be the result. We donât like being ganked by criminals, we want to get back at them, but we canât do anything because NPCs beat us to the punch with rare exception.
Which side represents the âgood guysâ or âbad guysâ varies by opinion and Iâd rather not get into that aspect, but interactivity and player agency are powerful driving factors. When players feel robbed of their agency, they conclude things are not worth doing. Player to player interaction provides unscripted, unpredictable, and therefore interesting experiences that engage people in ways scripted events and AI do not.
The clash of cultures is good for Eve. Thatâs âcontentâ for both sides. As I see it, though, that the âtwo sidesâ in question tend to be Criminals and CONCORD/FacPo is an issue. NPCs donât need content.
CCP should look into capitalizing on the conflict with criminals to make Eve interesting for all parties. In that sense, criminals are an untapped goldmine.
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Itâs amazing how two people coming from two different perspectives looking at the same set of facts can come to such opposite conclusions. Flying as a -10 outlaw in highsec doesnât only have consequences, it has all the consequences. Just try it and see: you literally cannot do anything in highsec as a -10 other than fly around in a small, fast aligning ship or shoot something (or just sit in space) for 20-30 seconds. You cannot do any other PvE or PvP at all on that character.
The only other possible consequence I can think of that you might be able to apply and still allow criminals and non-criminals to interact in highsec would be to lock them out of NPC stations now that Upwell structures exist. That doesnât really make sense from a lore perspective, and has some issues for newer players, but I could see that consequence being added. Otherwise, the criminal canât do anything but move around, loses their ship in any fight they are part of in less than a half a minute if just pointed. The deck is completely and near-totally stacked against them.
The only plausible way I can reach your conclusion that there are âno consequencesâ is if you accept the purpose of being declared an outlaw is to mechanically prevent criminals from interacting with you at all. If that is the high bar you set, then ok, the consequences an outlaw suffers do not totally prevent a criminal from interacting with you. But as I said before, that is unreasonable and not the intention of the developers - they want criminals and non-criminal players to interact in highsec. They have spent a huge amount of effort over the years engineering an intricate CrimeWatch system to allow crime to take place in highsec when it would have been way simpler to just lock everyoneâs safety to green or at least lock outlaws out of highsec completely.
Criminals are suppose to exist. The system is designed so you, the law-abiding citizen hold all the cards in any PvP encounter with an outlaw, but CCP still wants you to play the game and isnât going to just make you immune to other players by fiat.
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Your post is absolutely spot on.
What I always found is, that the conflict/anger introduced by ganking a ship is something which has to be used to create more content.
So when I gank I have my looter/scout in a seemingly harmless mining ship, he is sec positive, goes suspect when looting and it is absolutely clear that he belongs to me.
This makes for some interesting gameplay indeed. It is just another suspect trap, and Iâm prepared, but it looks legit because the flag came from looting the wreck.
The point is that indeed a lot of content is created this way. Miners try to come back at me and get rekt, their friends try to get revege and get rekt. And sometimes they organize and then I get rekt.
So one really has to think how much more content would be produced if players actually had a chance to come back at the ganking characters. But fact is that the reason they hide in station is that you canât actually do anything at all with a criminal character other that warp directly to a target and kill it because FacPo will just kill you if you stay in one place for more than a couple of seconds.
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