Edited my original post to clarify. The rest of the original post explains how mixed with bumping it makes an exploitable mechanic for ganking. As the original post states:
and
I edited this section to:
I agree with you on this. Despite CCP explicitly calling it out as not an exploit, there are many people that either (1) haven’t read the exploits and misconceptions list, so don’t understand CCP’s position, or (2) disagree with CCP’s view and so claim it’s just crappy design, incompetence or a bad game.
As to ganking itself, in the Burn Jita thread there was a claim we see often, that gankers target new players, so yesterday I took a look at the average age of Freighter/Bowhead/Orca pilots that died in highsec since January 2016 (6000 killmails in total). The average age of pilots:
| Summary | ||
|---|---|---|
| Average Age (Days) | 1749.7 | |
| Average Age (Years) | 4.8 | |
| Std Deviation (Days) | 1287.5 | |
| Median Age (Days) | 1513.5 | |
| Median Age (Years) | 4.1 |
So the mean age of characters flying freighter size ships being killed in highsec is 4.8 years, with 50% of all the values being above 4.1 years (and some well over 10 years). 84% of all the characters are well over a year old.
After more than 4 years in the game on average, how much protection should a player need?
From my perspective, the argument against ganking often reduces to an argument of fairness, where it is seen as a bad mechanic because the freighter can’t shoot back, and so CCP should change the rules of the game to make it a more fair contest for freighters. There seems to be a view that the freighter pilot themselves bears little or no responsibility for their own safety.
But the data clearly shows that these ships aren’t being flown by new players in the main. They are being flown by veterans.
Veterans should know better. They should know the harsh edges of EVE, they should know how to keep themselves safe and they should definitely understand that Freighter EHP gives them a huge advantage, so when they are ganked by 20-30 people, that isn’t a measure of imbalance at all. Until gankers can get those numbers, the Freighters have a huge advantage, and the addition of a single webbing alt/friend makes the advantage even larger for the Freighter.
I’m always one that takes the view that we should be more personally responsible for the things that happen to us in the game. We are just playing for entertainment after all. Nothing real actually gets lost. It’s all just wasted time and not worth angst over.
It’s also totally possible to stay safe if you are careful, so nothing wrong with the system (and that’s from a perspective where I haul in a Freighter, Jump Freighter and Bowhead through highsec regularly).
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Posting in a covert anti-bump thread…
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Yeah, this doesn’t change my post in the least. You see this as imbalanced because you exploded.
Carebearism negates the validity of one’s opinion about ganking/balance.
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Ganking or setting up for a gank isn’t the only use for bumping, by the way. I use it all the time as area denial for miners that piss me off. It’s also the only way to combat heavily tanked Orcas and Skiffs that are commonly used by input broadcast multi-boxers and mining bots.
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The same could be said about gankerism…
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Why go offline entirely? You missed a great opportunity to participate and have fun, even on a day one fresh alpha alt you could have created in a few minutes. You could take loot, PvP (tackle and kill thieves or suspects and criminals in general) or just watch the apocalypse first hand… all of which you can do in a cheap ship, even a free corvette.
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Plenty of non-gankers see the system as fine. NO, and I mean NO non-carebears are on these forums crying about imbalance. They all have the tell-tale signs of blind selfishness.
Your counter point is destroyed.
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So…gankers are the only ones who can speak on balance. Got it. 
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Non-gankers can speak about balance, but not carebears. No.
It’s not a surprise when a carebear feels aggrieved and oppressed, nor anything out of the ordinary, so no one cares.
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What’s a carebear?
I assume you’re not referencing the 80’s cartoon - at least directly.
–Grumpy Bear Gadget
Were i the only one who came here for a BlowJob Rant (BJ Rant) and left disppointed?
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Imo, the power dynamics are largely fine.
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Imo, the existence of Jita is proof positive hauling is too safe and cheap as is. The sheer volume of cargo going to and from protects haulers. Like a fish in a school, or mammal in a herd. predators prefer the weak/maladjusted as targets of opportunity.
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Gank proofness of a freighter is contingent on their preparedness vs how much gankers are prepared to invest to take him out.
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Gankers have the same means to passive income as everyone else.
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“Permit” mechanics are already implemented on a player basis, such as by CODE, and through conventional wardecs, bluing etc.
Really nice analysis!
Inb4 some carebear apologist will claim they all made breaks for 4 years from the game and just recently came back to freighter stuff around and are therefor newbros. 
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Statistics still only tell us the things that are actually in them. I don’t doubt that the data is correct and most of the blown up freighter pilots are old hands. But it doesn’t tell us who is complaining on the forums, old guys who should know better or new guys who thought it would be easy?
Bumping ships to prevent them from warping is an emergent mechanic which is not only used against Freighters, but in many many situations to control the position and speed of another ship to prevent it from aligning, jumping, etc.
The bigger the ship is the more vulnerable it is to this tactic. The whole origin of the problem is actually that the Freighter is a big, fat, slow capital ship with massive inertia, just like all the other capitals. This is a typical weakness of big fat capitals with massive inertia, seams pretty obvious to me.
In other words, the vulnerability to bumping is the balancing to the freighters huge EHP and absolutely massive cargo hold. There are obviously ways to compensate for that weakness by using the tools available like scouts, web alts, etc.
If you want to haul stuff there are a lot of other options. There are 12 different t1 haulers and an additional 8 t2 which have all different properties for different situations and different stuff you want to haul and they are all not vulnerable to bumping in the way the Freighter is.
One class of the t2 haulers is when flown correctly even completely secure, since there is no possible way to catch them except if the pilot makes a grave mistake and some ganker is seriously lucky.
This all seams pretty balanced to me and creates a good spectrum of different options which all have their pros and cons.
I often get the impression from this discussions that some people think, that freightering stuff unbothered around Highsec without the need of any attention or preparation is a game feature and any threat or possibility of other players interfering with this is something CCP has to fix. This is not the case. This is all intended and absolutely necessary to give the game meaning and its perceived depth.
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You made the correct decision to upgrade to a DST, the Amarr one with deadspace hardeners and overheating can be burst buffer tanked to over 1m EHP, you can add slaves and a command ship with T2 armour command bursts to it for added joy and frustration.
RUBBISH!
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Excellent, well explained rebuttal. But you know what? Run that one by me again, I think I misunderstood something.
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Be the data on age of ganked freighter targets what it is, in what proportion new freighters, returning players, or hardcore vets.
Imo, the data on the rate/volume of ganked (ie: non-wardecced) freighters in HS (and LS) is more significant.
I dont have the data bookmarked by those that have posted them, but it was a very small part of HS attrition, and a very small part of loss of value in HS. (Perhaps someone else has the data on hand).
Freighter ganking is nowhere near as prevalent in HS as many seem to think.
If freighter ganking was around 25% of HS attrition, there might be cause for concern.
But iirc, it was shown to be less than 3%.
It’s like we witnessed the noise it made when truth and rational thought bumped his wrong conceptions and ideologies out of alignment for a moment. 
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