You absolutely can have guns, and with friends it could cost you absolutely nothing.
I’ve been escort on a number of hauling runs, never any action but the point stands.
And I’ve never once charged anyone for it because it is a break in other monotonous tasks, and the potential for something awesome to happen (including my ship getting annihilated) is just an added bonus.
To be fair, you asked for a reason, I gave you one.
And yet once again the only ideas anyone can come up with do absolutely nothing to change the boring aspects of hauling and just make suicide ganking more expensive. You don’t want interesting gameplay, you just want to be able to safely autopilot a higher value of cargo.
Either that or ganking isn’t the game breaking problem it’s made out to be in this thread.
If Uedama is such an issue for you why would you route through there?
If you know you’re walking into gank central, might want to pick a different route.
Buffing freighters so you can AP through Tama isn’t the solution.
Yes, yes, your agenda is transparent.
Even you must recognize that is terrible game design though. You don’t nerf the game system you spent years developing into irrelevance because there is some behaviour you don’t like. That is like swatting a fly with a shotgun. You just ban them. Kick them out of your game. You don’t make your game so boring and unplayable that no one plays it and all your effort designing a criminal system goes to waste.
CCP can ban players they don’t like. They can also just throw in the towel and set safeties to green in highsec, clearly signaling how they want highsec to work. But they like pirates and highsec piracy is working exactly as intended and that is never going to change.
At least there is no sign there is a hint of that in the air. The fact is, highsec will not be fundamentally changed this late into the game’s lifecycle.
I’m just excited it appears we will get to see how unviable a version of Eve with a perfectly safe highsec is when Echos is released with its PvP-free highsec. Perhaps the OP should just go there to play Eve without any risk of loss?
The ships are fine. Hauling as a gameplay activity is boring and really no matter how much you change the ships, the activity itself will always be an “associated activity” in the game.
By that I mean, for most people, and especially those that create hauling contracts for others to complete, moving stuff from point A to point B isn’t the purpose. It’s either, move stuff to sell it, move stuff to shoot with it, move stuff to refine it, move stuff to manufacture with it, move stuff to use it on other ships, etc.
So making hauling engaging is a near impossible task because it’s just something that has to be done, so other intended gameplay can actually happen. It’s a chore, not the purpose of playing.
Some of us make good profit out of hauling, but even in the groups that I haul for, it’s a source of ISK to fund other play, not the reason to play the game to begin with.
So freighters could be designed with full fitting capability and pwn everything defensive pvp capabilities in highsec and hauling would still be a boring activity, because most haulers would never get to use any of those fittings, because in reality hauling is a really safe activity for everyone, and especially so for those that actually look to protect themselves.
For example, you could stick a doomsday on my Obelisk, usable in highsec for defence and I still would never have used it in the last 7 years.
The ships are fine, the activity itself is boring and always will be. At least the small risk of being ganked makes us pay attention through some systems.
Because highsec trash is entitled to maximum ISK/hour without any risk or inconvenience, and the most efficient route goes through Uedama. Taking a longer but safer route is unacceptable, freighters need to be buffed until they can autopilot through Uedama with no chance of loss.
Isn’t Hek also not a safe place by itself?
In the past it was a bit of a wild west. You can autopilot into Hek safely these days.
Eg.
The last freighter to die in Hek was at 2019-05-27T01:45:58Z.
No freighter has died in Hek in more than 8 months now.
EDIT:
Actually, there was a freighter killed in a war on 2019-10-24T17:45:51Z.
Don’t fly a freighter during a war.
If only there were other facilities to sell, reprocess, or manufacture items in the game.
“If you have a slight headache you should get a shotgun and blow your brains out, that will fix the problem”.
Sorry, that’s not a fair comparison. It’s a much more reasonable solution than your idea.
I imagine people living in that space would be sad if their markets dried up.
Too bad for them.
What changed with bumping? I’ve been gone for a year.
Ah, so I can still play space pinball with annoying bot miners…
The topic seems to have pretty effectively derailed at this point, so trying to circle back here.
What actual change would freighters require to make them more reasonably defended?
The only thing I could manage to come up with is the fact that despite their capacity they generally have no real drone or fighter capability.
So if I HAD to concede to any kind of balancing, I’d say give them limited drone capabilities for subcapitals, and limited fighter support for capital sized ships.
While this wont prevent a dedicated gank squad, there really is no way to counter a fleet who wants your single ship dead, sorry but that is a simple reality.
But in more conventional fights being able to field a small offensive or more importantly defensively oriented drone/fighter support team makes sense to me.
Bring friends and corp mates along for support. It’s that simple. No balancing or extra modules necessary…
I’ve tried that angle, they can’t seem to find a way to make that an acceptable resolution as it does not include a god mode for freighters in autopilot.
Which also means, as we’ve seen time and time again following previous changes, that short of completely removing ganking from the game, no other change is ultimately considered enough.
That is only a compelling argument if you are only talking about literally flying on autopilot, not manually flying a route while paying so little attention to what you are doing that you might as well be on autopilot.
You mean like the times I forget what I’m doing to the point where i finally remember I’ve been decloaked on a gate for the past 12 minutes while I was busy banging my head against the wall after reading the forums?
As per the developers, EVE is first and foremost a PvP game…