Can Ganking be done in lowsec?

That will teach him for picking on a girl.

What I find interesting is that the term “ganking” is used generously by the care-bear community, to mean “I shot at you, and you shot back and I lost.”

Much like in that last james315space post. The dude shot first, lost, then started whining about how he was ganked.

Maybe its an anti-anti-gank-gank. Clearly real PvP.

It’s not real pvp because it didn’t happen in null sec, with a blob of 100 ships sitting on a gate.


Real PvP

You have a nice clean keyboard

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I’d cut down on smoking , it’s bad for your keyboard.

Ah…my favourite…a keyboard that is down to hull timer…

Yes. My bout with that executioner had a complete lack of F1, and a complete lack of mouth breathing, cheeto crunching, monster energy slurping neckbeard FC, which further proves that real pvp can’t happen in low sec.

Absolutely.

The most dangerous place to haul: Lowsec.
Second most dangerous: Highsec.
Easiest: Null sec.

Lowsec pirates specialize in tackling even the most elusive and experienced haulers. It’s not uncommon for us to send brick haulers through with crap cargo, so the real hauler can get through.

Highsec. If you go 50-50 with low sec pirates (escapes vs deaths), high sec pirates are simply not equipped to deal with you. Any fit and piloting used to evade lowsec will generally (of course, not always) keep you safe from a high sec group, particularly because they have to know what your carrying before determining whether or not its worth killing you.

If you pass a high sec pirate group with a lot of cargo, and they didn’t’ attack you, it’s because they realized too late what you had before you warped away. They will however follow you. Thus. Once you jump into a high sec gang, warp peacefully to a moon first, then another, then sage log for a while.

Null sec. In general, null secs rely on bubbles and expect to kill other combat ships. They are rarely equipped (or experienced) for tackling nullified haulers and interceptors. A simple +1 scout (alt or friend) will help you avoid anything large.

If you’re alone in nullsec. Cloaking somewhere between two celestial bodies, eject from your ship (boomark your hauler), and pod scouting the other side of a gate is also a valid option. Although it sounds risky to eject from your hauler in the middle of no where, I guarantee you that it’s 10^100 times more risky to blindly jump through a gate in null. Never once have I had my hauler destroyed or commandeered while pod scouting, including the hours it took to return to the system (since my pod gets killed on the other side of the gate).

If you look at my zkill, you’ll see I’ve never lost a hauler with cargo in nullsec. The only time I die in a hauler (in null sec), is when its empty, because I simply don’t care if I die in a sub 10 mil fit.

My thinking: If ganking is highsec only, then why bother to specify “suicide ganking”? My interpretation is ganking occurs when you get jumped and are unable to effectively respond. I’m sure there’s edge cases where it wouldn’t feel right to call it ganking but is fits the definition above, but I can’t think of them offhand. Not saying this is the be all and end all definition, just what I think of when I think about ganking. To be fair, I’m a newbro, although to also be fair, I’ve known about ganking in eve for a lot longer than I’ve been playing eve.

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When Eve Online first came to be in 2003, the gamers that first started up the culture carried over terms from other open-world PvP MMO games which already had the concept and term of “ganking”. Specifically, the term had a very strong and prevalent use in Ultima Online where it probably originated as shorthand for “gang kill” but really was a word that carried a connotation that a PK (player kill) was from an entirely one-sided fight.

As these gamers shifted to Eve they recognized that there truly was no limits to the PvP in the game. Not even in High Sec. A corp called Zombie perma-tanked a smartbombing battleship in high sec, killing a hundred or more pods. Not even CONCORD could kill this battleship. So there was no real “suicide ganking” in the game in 2004. Since PvP was everywhere in all security classes of space there was still useful meaning to distinguish between a “fight” and a “gank” to describe the kind of fights – describing where it happened implied very little about the nature of the PvP itself. The early Eve universe was absolutely batshit wild with conflicts everywhere.

It wasn’t until the CCP developers stepped in later, and updated the game to make CONCORD more powerful and switch targets (eg to be able to shoot logistics cruisers), and declare it an exploit to survive CONCORD, that players were forced to lose their ship when doing what was once “regular PvP (but bring extra tank)” in high sec. Thus, the forced ship loss later int he game gave birth to the concept of “suicide gank”. Suddenly, for the first time, where PvP occurred impacted the kind of conflict one could expect.

At that point, gamers familiar with UO began to recognize there was a dividing line kind of like the post-Trammel UO that happened in 2000. That is also where the term “carebear” really took off as well – people who played the consensual-PvP Trammel world in UO were derided as the gaming culture ruining the fighting spirit of the original game. So by 2005 a good chunk of UO players had instead logged in Eve Online to see what it was about, and they too carried over the term “carebear” and derided anyone trying to min/max ISK/hour instead of looking for fights. That spirit still carried on around 2009 when I first joined – it was wildly looked down upon if someone was more interested in getting wealthy than looking for good fights.

An important difference between UO and Eve Online, however, was that in Eve Online the introduction of CONCORD didn’t create “a different world”. PvP players had to physically share the single-sharded universe with the “carebears”. In UO they were split worlds. As one consequence, that’s led to a lot of arguments here on the forums. And second, because of this single-shard, it quickly became apparent to the gamers of the time that if you were outside of the now-forced-to-suicide-into-CONCORD space it was probably because of your willingness to PvP. So an expectation of PvP became the norm – and yes, running away as prey is participating in PvP – so suddenly the old term “gank” didn’t make sense: you were there to fight or flee, and if it was one-sided it was because you messed up somehow. The kind of fights that could happen were still describable with jargon (ex: triage carrier fights) but even the very-onesided-fights (ex: the famous Rooks and Kings pipebombs of old, the huge BR for structures or hotdrops or JF lances of today) were and still are no longer called “ganks” in the sense of “one-sided fights”. Just excellent planning, scouting, and execution.

So what was left over from all this? “Suicide ganking” in highsec. CCP systematically eliminated most other forms of PvP in high sec, in pursuit of carving out space for carebears and earning dollars. A lot of the UO people saw it as another Trammel and have long quit. If you bump into and talk to Eve players from the first decade, a lot are disappointed with the money-grubbing pursuit of the likes that CCP, Blizzard/Activision, and other gaming companies have done. That’s in significant part why the Summer of Rage happened (a lived memory for me).

So the only ganking that remains is the “suicide gank” of high sec. And over the past 18 years or so since it’s the only kind of ganking in Eve colloquially understood by the community, it’s often just shortened back to “gank”.

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Thanks for the history. That was an interesting read.

baiting is the word you’re looking for

I spent April Fools doing it to Eve Uni xD

https://zkillboard.com/kill/116689269/

Only a couple Takers tho, was a laugh :slight_smile:

Ganking is a Highsec thing, People tend to claim they are ‘Blobbed’ not ‘Ganked’ in Low/null.

Indeed, why?

It’s just ganking.

Source: I’ve actually met gankers.

Do gankers get a say on this?

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Omg Ofc not they’re all bots :rofl:

That’s a brilliant read and spot on , I was in fact around before ganking was really used in eve, we had Endless conflicts in low and high , we had real low sec pirates, high sec groups trying to hold there own . Wars I felt cost a lot and weren’t undertaken lightly . No one called it ganking . Space was the point of a fight not structures, we had groups of care Bears who we protected and in the time of war would still form up and help the best they could . Then the goons arrived and around that time suicide ganking became a thing with can flipping and bumping, maybe just a coincidence but it was around the same time.

like all things our game changes but what ever the changes it’s the people around you really make this game and keep you coming back . The one’s that really mess things up for the majority are the top few percent , the space emperor’s, the cartel leaders, and the RTM moguls , they can make wars boring or distort new game play with bot army’s , like LP farming all in the pursuit of isk. They back ganking with bot fleets, pay mercs to control high sec , pushing any rising group to one side or the other. All for more control and isk.

Maybe eve needs a Revolution. A fight against greed a jihad to free pilots from their isk lords.

We need to find a person who gives us hope, who’s name we hear when he looseens the noose on the rope And frees us from greed.

( Sorry slipped into character then , but I’ll leave it in)