With all the discussions on ganking and PvP, some people have confused the amount of discussion with the actual extent of the issue. For that and various other badly skewed perspectives, I decided to take a look at some actual numbers.
(This will be more point-form than usual, since topic is so broad.)
(EDIT Update: input from various sources caused a review of these numbers which increased the potential size of the ganking issue significantly. Please see reply 78 near bottom for update.)
Not meant to be scholarly data, just a quick survey. Using Zkillboard for ganks. This is only killmails that Zkillboard picks up and classifies as a gank.
From ZKILL, Ganks since Feb.26, 2018:
- 32,000 ganks, 60 Trillion ISK lost, approx. 20,000 separate victims
- Annually, roughly 8k ganks, 5k victims, 15 Trillion in value lost
- 75,000 gankers approx 600 billion cost, 100 to 1 ratio victim losses to ganker cost
- 30% miners, 22% haulers
- 30% at stargates, 20% mining within 3 jumps of a hub
- Only 9 characters ganked 10 or more times, fewer than 100 ganked 5+ times
- Most targets ganked 3 times or less. After that, never ganked again? Or just quit?
- Top 100 gankers avg. about 1250 ganks each
- Avg. about 2-2.5 gankships lost per kill
Thoughts:
Low number of ganks per victim - either these stone-stupid-stubborn carebears often decried in the forums learn quickly how to avoid ganks, and/or players typically quit after 3 or fewer ganks, and/or the overall rate of ganking is low on a per-player basis. All are true to varying degrees.
Relative Size - as a portion of all PvP, this 4+ years worth of ganking equals about one months worth of all PvP. Ganks make up roughly 1-2% of total PvP activity.
Retention - one active ganker will gank hundreds of victims over several years. Let’s further assume every single one of these roughly 20,000 victims quit because of ganking.
That’s less than the number of players that quit every month before they finish 1 week of play. (Approximately 25,000 per month by CCP’s own estimates.)
PvP:
From Oz’s video on top 10 ships destroyed first half of 2022 (NPC kills not counted):
Losses:
Newbro - Venture 60,725 , Heron 50,499 , Ibis 23,293. That’s 747 “early career T1” ships per day, almost 40% of the top 10.
Cheap - Caracal 42.6k Vexor 35.6k Catalyst 32k Stabber 24k Thrasher 24k - 879 cheap ships per day
Vet - Sabre 30k Ishtar 24.5k - 303 Omega/expensive ships per day
Thoughts:
Cheap - Most PvP is performed in/against cheap, easily fit ships. This applies to the “cheaper ships won’t lead to more PvP” argument some people make.
Noobs not worth killing? - the argument that noobships/noob accounts aren’t worth killing and/or aren’t engaging in PvP appears to have flaws.
In another thread, some people are arguing “PCU down but PvP activity has remained the same” (a supposition backed by zero data):
All killmails from Zkillboard:
June, 2018 497,384 64.5Trill
June, 2022 391,886 43.9Trill
Kills down by 21%. Value of kills down by 32%.
This is in line with every other metric from MERs to CSM votes to Sub counts to PCU activity, all of which show that EVE has lost 20% or more of players, subs and activity since 2018.
No grand conclusions here or anything, just wanted to toss out some actual, factual, food for thought on these common topics.
). It can of course happen, sometimes the ganker is pointed by evil antiganker and thus forced to kill at least something in which case we often shoot some noob as we don’t have time to check their age. Or our primary target escapes the gank and so in the remaining seconds before CONCORD arrives we try to kill the other guy on the grid if possible as a conservation prize. When ganking ventures I also avoided new players, but I can’t vouch for all venture gankers. I only ganked venture (and she escaped me btw) because I was about to self-destruct to get back to stage system and I had to lose my thrasher somewhere. But I don’t do that otherwise, it is pointless.
