Pretext: I’ve been on and off this game ten years, the single time I’ve been ganked in high sec was an empty covert transport probably 5 years ago when I was on autopilot. This isn’t a cry thread, I’m just observing things getting way out of hand.
People are just getting blown up for too little investment and effort. Regardless of if your ship is all pimped out or not it’s still usually tenfold more expensive than the bunch of catalysts it takes to burn it down, that’s just the hull. I’m not sure of a solution or if it’s even a problem. I remember starting eve and if I had just gotten for example my first HAC and saved up for it, then undocked and gotten destroyed making one jump by a bunch of cheap tech i destroyers, I’d probably be less inclined to play. Even if I did have enough to replace it. Well, not me, I’m way too into this game but you know what I mean.
Out of curiosity and boredom I’ve been looking at gank killmails at work on my phone and it’s just gotten way too unfocused. It’s so easy for an older player to make enough money to just infinitely supply catalysts and alts into the ganking engine it just reminds me of like the high levels in other mmos that camp on newbies as soon as they exit the tutorial portion if there is one.
It’s one thing to target high value targets and risk a bit of isk (days of the tempest) to potentially dunk a freighter or blingy mission runner, but this kind of gameplay where they just bob for apples is pretty boring. There’s no counter other than fitting a cloak and micro warp drive to every single ship you fly.
I can’t think of a solution or if one is even needed, just my opinion on the matter that this mechanic has gotten out of hand.
On a more serious note, ganking only seems to have gotten out of hand because more and more players these days are using their credit card and injectors to fly ships they have no business being in the first place, and loading it down with 30 billion ISK in cargo while completely untanked…
Have you ever tried actually ganking at all? Because from my experience it is way, way easier and cheaper to avoid being exploded in highsec than to catch something. Most ships are not profitable to explode and are left alone because of it.
I don’t know what the correct amount of criminal activity in highsec is for a vibrant game, but the Monthly Economic Report shows that only a fraction of a percent of highsec traffic is destroyed. I highly doubt we are in some sort of danger zone, nor is it even clear ganking has changed much. Eve grew just fine in the past when ganking existed and many players pine for those good old days when interesting, player-driven things went on in highsec. CrimeWatch 2.0 sterilized much of that content and turned highsec into a content desert with a declining number of players, rather than the explosion of players the carebear advocates claimed would flood the server if CCP only made highsec safer.
But I digress. The premise of your complaint seems to be that losing ships is somehow a bad thing, when on the contrary, it is the core idea of the game. Not only is ship combat directly content itself, it gives content in the form of providing industrial demand for other players to build the things that were destroyed. I don’t see how this is a problem nor why you are claiming it is on the behalf of hypothetical other players that aren’t you. Seems like a strange thing to spend your time worrying about.
He studied it on his phone during work time so it must be true!
In reality ganking delivers excellent rewards if you are looking for killmails and tears, but the ISK/hour is pretty bad. If you are very diligent on scooping loot you break about even on ganking miners. There is profit in ganking haulers or freighters, but that 1> needs a core group of very dedicated players who spend a lot of time scanning cargo and 2> requires stupid people to fly huge amounts of stuff in a freighter. It is very easy for any player to not be in the “stupid people with huge amounts of ISK in a flimsy ship” group. You could even pay a modest fee to a professional hauler to be that person for you.
Sometimes we do gank random ships if we think it would make an interesting killmail, but that only happens if they are auto-piloting through a well known choke point, again easily avoidable.
People have been complaining about ganks for ages and CCP has done a number of targeted buffs to miners, haulers and freighters. But CCP can’t fix stupid or lazy, that is up to the individual player.
Eve has a player driven economy where things don’t wear out or become obsolete. The only way to balance production is with destruction - ships must die for the economy to work. As long as 70% of players choose to live in Highsec - that’s where most of the destruction must occur. If gankers didn’t exist - CCP would need to create roaming NPC pirate fleets to do the same job.
A look at the production vs destruction statistics on the monthly economic reports suggests that ganking isn’t out of hand - if anything, we need more destruction!
What you (and we) need are some statistics to determine if this is really the problem you think it is because while ganking has increased, so has overall trade and traffic flow so they could be proportionate? Over time players optimise activities so you’d expect to see an increase in ganking but also hauling, trading and PvE as well.
However, given that ganking is an ISK sink, one possibility is to distribute this cost more equitably by having the aggressor pay more. Currently, the cost of failure for victims is high (almost 100% aside from insurance payout) while that for failed ganks is low. There are tweaks that could be made to re-balance this.
For example, reduced insurance payouts and increased insurance cost for replacements if your ship was lost in a criminal activity.
My bad. I’m an old player returning to the game so I’ve forgotten some things.
However, that was just one example of the sort of game mechanics changes that can be made to rebalance things and it seems CCP agreed!
Perhaps insurance premiums should increase based on criminal activity? For example, they could depend on Sec Status. E.g. A fixed percentage increase for every point below -5.0.
Perhaps also link the insurance cost to system Sec Status so that a criminal insuring a ship in station will pay more depending on the sec status of the system. This would specifically penalise suicide gankers who refit into cheap ships at hi-sec market hubs.
EDIT: This only affects criminals who reship (typically into small fast ships) in market hubs to avoid being destroyed by Concord or other players.
I can’t entirely disagree with this - though I would also point out that security tags and the ability to dock at any station (regardless of security status) make it incredibly easy to being an a**hat with little or no consequence.
It is one of those “one more nerf and it will be balanced” things, and once the nerf was implemented the demands for the next nerf started. You just demonstrated that in your second post when Cookie told you that your “one more nerf” was already implemented. You are like a carebear community micro-cosmos.
At the time most serious players just ignored the forums and there was little push back for those bad ideas. That changed…
So how about you demonstrate that there actually is a problem before attempting to come up with nerfs. Some vague gut feelings by a random forum poster are not very convincing.
It’s like If I would start a thread that NPC bounties in lvl 4 missions are too high and getting out of hand and then we would immediately start to discuss how we could lower them without even checking if my claim is actually true.
So how about you demonstrate that there actually is a problem before attempting to come up with nerfs. Some vague gut feelings by a random forum poster are not very convincing.
Calm down and learn to read.
In my initial reply I stated that it’s not clear if there even is a problem.
Without some evidence to support it, the OP’s premise remains unproven.
It is one of those “one more nerf and it will be balanced” things, and once the nerf was implemented the demands for the next nerf started.
I disagree the change wasn’t needed but the impact should be monitored.
As for incremental changes, I’m all for them. This game is too complicated to re-balance with a single modification and every adjustment has consequences so keeping things balanced is an on-going process.
Also, I’m just making suggestions. Ideas from these forums don’t make it in game without a lot of testing.
It’s like If I would start a thread that NPC bounties in lvl 4 missions are too high and getting out of hand and then we would immediately start to discuss how we could lower them without even checking if my claim is actually true.
Pretty much everyone, including myself, has pointed out that the OP is making an unfounded assumption so I don’t know why you’re getting your panties in a twist.
Cleaned up the thread a little and moved it over to Crime and Punishment, as after reading the post there is no Suggestions or ideas to replace/Edit Current mechanics.
If you are going to make a claim like this you should probably back it up with some data. zkill has a nice ganked feature, but when I look at it I guess I don’t see anything that suggest things have gone too far.
I’m seeing mostly ganks that make sense. BR lottery, some way to valuable freighters, a bunch of mining barges, some shiny cruisers that were probably running abyssal deadspace content. Sure there’s a few that are pretty low value and don’t really make sense, but the chance of that happening to any one person seem so low I’m not really worried about it at all. Also give it a few weeks and once the hype about the new content has died down some I doubt there will be as many ganks, also the gankers seem to be operating in a handful of systems, there’s a lot of places you can move to where they aren’t active.
I’ve been playing for 11 years and posting on the forums almost that whole time, and most of that has been on this character. I’ve yet to get ganked, a little common sense and some defensive piloting makes it pretty hard for gankers to get you. I’ve been waiting for it to happen I figure some day it will, and whenever it does all I’ll be able to do is laugh about it because I feel like I’ve gotten away too many times.
There is one, and I don’t mean to be rude, but not creating a new thread on ganking each week would help to take away some of the attention ganking is getting. When everyone talks about it will some always try to be on the fun side of it. That’s just how it is. And the more attention it gets, the more likely you’ll find somebody who is willing to take it to another level.
There is however no other fix needed. Ganking happens, it’s as blunt as PvP can get and it’s exactly meant to deliver this as a message, and one can fit ships with a reasonable tank and load up a reasonable amount of cargo to keep it under control for oneself. You’ll find plenty of information on it in the other threads if you only search for it.