Ganking is a valid form of gameplay, just like PvP everywhere else in EVE Online, and it takes practice to get good at, more inside

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Welcome everyone,

we have seen many, many posts that talk about ganking and make it seem like an issue. We see posters resorting to ChatGPT, we see them resorting to posting under a different name, all sorts of weird things just to convince everyone that it is a problem, and worse, everyone doing it is a problem too.

After a recent spree of these posts, I felt that it was important to make this thread to broadcast to you, that not everyone shares this opinion. Because ganking is far from being risk-free and easy as these posters would want to make you believe.

The developers at CCP have, over the years, made changes that affected ganking, often for the worse. What used to be a very straightforward activity that let even new players become pirates, has become a highly specialized niche that requires considerable amounts of planning, resources and perfect execution to work.

Anywhere else in EVE Online, destruction happens on a regular basis. Nothing is safe! Even entire alliances can be erased overnight, see pandemic horde for example. Everybody knows this. The game instigates conflict where it can, and the scale that these conflicts can reach is an incentive for grouping up and dealing with problems that you alone couldn’t handle. Sometimes even that is not enough and you lose. Welcome to EVE.

This is a fact for every part of space in EVE Online. It’s also true for high security space. And despite all the adjustments that tighten the margin of error for gankers, and all the big entry hurdles, ganking is still possible there. So in a way, CCP themselves are saying that ganking is a valid form of gameplay. Ganking is not an issue. Ganking is not a problem. It is perfectly fine to gank, just as it is to gatecamp in low-sec, or to bubble gates in null-sec.

Here is the thing: You don’t have to like it. But it’s not like you are helpless against it either. There are plenty of ways to safeguard yourself against ganking. From appropriate fitting, to paying attention, being vigilant, alert and using all the tools at your disposal to detect threats before it is too late, many things are possible and practical to implement. Things can break on my end too, because I don’t have perfect information either - maybe I am underestimating your tank, maybe my warp-in is off, maybe I disconnect mid-gank, all sorts of things can go wrong even at the last second.

So, ganking isn’t a guaranteed success by any means, contrary to what some have made it out to be. I have read a few posts that think ganking is just a mathematical equation, with “no risk” involved. I think in these cases, you may have missed the part where all my ships get blown up as soon as I start the attack. As a ganker, you lose every ship you attack with. You lose security status. After a gank, you lose any ship you undock with for the next 15 minutes. If your security status gets too low, you can no longer dock up and faction police will chase and kill you. You can buy security tags to repair your security status, if you don’t mind paying half a billion ISK every week. All this can happen, and your target scoots away, and you lose equipment worth hundreds of millions in ISK. There is real risk. And real consequences.

Would it be cool if the developers made ganking a bit easier, especially for newer players? Hell yeah. But they don’t have to. Every player in EVE has it in their own hands, what they’re going to do with the tools that they have. Ganking isn’t something that you can just inject a skillbook for. You have to actually learn it, and become very crafty along the way. And once you have practiced it like a maniac and your execution becomes silk-smooth, then your targets will think that the successful gank was a foregone conclusion. But it never was, it’s just a lot of practice making it look easy.

In that sense, I am opening this thread and giving voice to my thoughts. I am sure many of my ganker colleagues feel similarly. Let me know what you think.

With ganked regards
-James Fuchs

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I feel like you should specify you’re talking about high sec suicide ganking. Which is an entirely different play style vs how PvP works in the rest of the game.

Also, as an outlaw, you can still dock up in a pod, and since suicide gankers rarely intend for their ships to survive after they land their gank…

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I feel like Ganking works just fine.

With ganked regards
-James Fuchs

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I fully support ganking.

Its the reason why miners like myself have successful mining careers.

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I’m going to leave a comment as you invited such.

I have always felt CCP “intended” one of the consequences of suicide ganking in Highsec to be player retribution. In as much as kill rights, to the best of my knowledge, have always been a thing in game, CCP must have planned for piracy and player enacted retribution. (Someone, please, correct me, if I am wrong as to kill rights being introduced later in the game’s history.)

Why more players, with kill rights, won’t expend effort in exacting “consequences” in game has always baffled me. Cause it seems to me, and this is just my personal opinion, that if an equal (or perhaps even a fractional) amount of energy was spent in game, on consequences, i.e. player enacted retribution, as is spent on complaining on the forums, there might be “actual consequences”.

I remember, I think it was the New Eden police force?, something like that, posting in Crime and Punishment. They seemed to be having a good time. They recruited on the forums.

This is a game, a multiplayer game. Under the rules set forth by CCP, a kill right issued to a player, whether they actually lost a ship or not, is an invitation (whether consciously intended or not) by another player, a ganker, to play the game.

The fact that players decline this invitation to play baffles me. I’ve been ganked and I’ve ganked, but I always, at the very least, opened a conversation.

EVE is a game you play, willingly or involuntarily, with other players. EVE is not a single player game. Sometimes, I think people forget that.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts on your post.

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It’s not worth my time or effort to go chasing after a t1 destroyer.

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This. By their very nature suicide gankers aren’t going to be flying freighters with 10b of cargo. They’re going to be sitting in station. Waiting to get the signal from their scout to undock in their T1 Cata and warp to the target.

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Nah. KR’s were added in the crimewatch overhaul, 2012ish.

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We used to have a bounty system, but it was so badly implemented that it caused the servers to crash. I believe kill rights was the replacement feature.

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Bounties existed both before and after (with a different implementation) kill rights. They were both turned off for performance/testing reasons and only KRs were ever turned back on because bounties never did anything useful anyway.

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Kill rights and bounties coexisted and I never really saw the purpose of bounties, given that they were hardly impactful and often used to troll new players with big scary yet inconsequential numbers under their name.

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So, right before I started in 2013.

I stand corrected.

Thanks.

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Hey Sere, thanks for replying! I appreciate it.

In principle, I’m open to making criminality in high sec more engaging for both sides. Right now it is heavily reactive - you have to be there right as the gank is happening to counter it. Otherwise you’re just hovering where the fleet is, waiting for something to happen. That works if you’re just temporarily protecting a fleet, but if you’re looking specifically to fight gankers all the time, then that is very lame.

However, I don’t have a lot of ideas on how to make it more engaging without completely changing how EVE works. So, for now at least, I think we have to settle with what we have. If you’re part of an organized corporation, you have a myriad of tools and strategies available to prevent ganks in all sorts of scenarios, especially against mining fleets, so I don’t feel that the current systems in play are getting in the way of stopping a gank.

That being said, I’m of course all ears for good suggestions regarding this topic.

With action-packed regards
-James Fuchs

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I used to put 315,315 isk bounties on miners who whined about being ganked, it sometimes pissed them off something fierce. In general putting a bounty on someone you didn’t like was pointless, gankers would just blap their alts after a finished gank to claim the bounty for themselves, and other players would wait until the bounty got big enough that it was worth logging an alt and blapping yourself in an empty hull to claim the bounty yourself. It was essentially giving someone money with extra steps, exactly the opposite of what it was intended to do. Then they changed it so you only got a small percentage of the destroyed hull’s value when you killed someone with a bounty, which made it even less worthwhile to go ”bounty hunting”. In all my years of playing EVE I’ve yet to find a single self-proclaimed bounty hunter who wasn’t just a carebear angry that ganking existed, with zero kills on zkill.

Freelance jobs theoretically could be used to put a hit on certain players, and I’ve seen a few jobs that probably fit that description, but I haven’t heard of anyone actually losing a ship to a ”bounty hunter”. Which makes it still way more effective than the actual bounty system ever was.

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Often times, the “bounty” would just use a friend or alt to claim the money. ACLs makes that less of an option, but then you only have a limited visibility.

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Yeah, but with freelance jobs you could specify something like “1b isk for killing Anna in a freighter”. That means I now have to be carrying 1b isk less worth of goods to be worth ganking, and since a freighter costs 50% more than the payout, it’s not worth claiming the “bounty” with an alt.

In theory it should work. In practice, I’m not sure the jobs are visible enough for gankers to reliably notice. Maybe could add an icon to the overview “target in a freelance job” to help?

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No one has the right to tell anyone else how to play the game. “You don’t pay my sub” comes to mind.

Until such a day as CCP says ganking is now against the rules it will go on (they’re never going to make it against the rules btw)

TL;DR - Play how you want as long as you’re playing by the rules.

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I wrote a fairly detailed post in another thread about this exact thing, and why it is nuts to me that CCP haven’t invested time and effort into stimulating the cops and robbers element. The crux of it was that there should be a thing that gankers need to do post-ganking, in order to gain any financial reward from the gank. ie: all goods significantly reduced in value (tagged as stolen) until they do something in the spirit of how criminals need to launder goods and not just simply die for the cause.

This would give would-be bounty hunters/cops a chance to track them and engage for the same value that the robbers intended. It would encourage fleets on both sides to ‘dress accordingly’, and not just to get blown up. I’d also say that gankers could get bonuses for escaping more (ie: chaining ganks without dying), so that they are doing more but getting more in return.

I am happy enough that there’s a place for ganking, but suicide ganking in a game where suicide is barely of consequence, feels like players gaming a poorly implemented system, rather than in-spirit use of the sandbox. I think if you incentivise both sides financially, this would not only nix the arguments about ganking, but massively stimulate the organic action in the game.