The usual exaggerated hyperbole. The average gank fleet is 6 or 7 people. I’ve been in fleets with just 4.
Plus…most of the time Concord are only at a gate because a gank occurred there in the first place. Gankers usually dock up in their pods and then immediately undock again in a corvette while they still have criminal timer. That causes Concord to arrive and shoot the corvettes. It only requires ONE of the gank fleet to do this for the entire fleet. That practice is allowed.
What is not allowed is using a gank fleet at one gate to pull Concord from another gate so that a gank may occur at that other gate.
So, a counter would be to scout that and then actually escort your valuable double-digit-billion ISK transport with your own “10 or even 20 people”? “Multi-Player-Game”, right? Bring a Commandship to greatly buff your HP and resistances, bring some Logi, EWAR, DPS to quickly get rid of them. I bet your Freighter will make it trough.
There’s an average of 3 to 6 freighter kills in all of high sec per day, doesn’t seem like much… yet if you sit at the gate in Uedama, sometimes several go by every minute. If you think something is easy, go ahead and do it, then come back and maybe you’ll understand why there are so few kills despite all the freighter traffic you’re just a loudmouth.
I have no doubt that scouting is the best tool in the arsenal, but it’s not infallible like you guys make it out to be. For example, these guys were tackled by days-old fresh alts:
E-cyno is not a perfect escape for the same reason, unless you’re planning to bail whenever a ship shows up at a gate. Webber can similarly fail if the server says tackle lands first that one tick.
I’m really happy for you but this actually isn’t as good of a credential as you think it is. It could be simply a matter of TZ tanking - you’ve never flown your cargo around when the best and most dedicated gankers were online. Or maybe you’re paying the racket and keeping it a secret idk. I’m more interested in hearing from people who have been ganked and either survived or were able to improve.
Zaera got ganked by the patriarchy when she was a noobie.
So what did she do ? She made alts, came back and kicked them in the balls
Zaera liked kicking them in the balls, it felt good. Zaera decided that she had a mission , to smash the partiarchy, and show them how it is done, one mining barge at a time.
Looking at the kills it looks like that Hawk is using the good old “permabump” strategy. Just with the caveat that he needs to warp disrupts the freighter once every 4 minutes to prevent the freighter from warping away.
That sure is nasty because obviously he does this only when his fleet is not ready. Their either have a criminal timer or they are in different system or logged off (which I doubt, but I guess it is possible). Still a webbing alt is all you need to avoid this gank. Which I think would be part of that escort fleet that @Syzygium suggested. In fact that escort fleet doesn’t need more than that. And you will even get to the destination faster this way.
Still there are signs that a freighter ganking is ongoing in that system:
typically 20+ alts from Safety / Novus or REMNANTS corporations in local
Machariel on the grid
Maller sitting at the gate 0
combat probes on dscan
It is possible that the ganker hides everything from this list. Extremely unlikely, but can be done. Then it is battle of witts. Either way, if you fly freighter with 6b+ cargo solo you are asking for it. (And I bet a lot of these dead freighters were even autopilots.)
As @Syzygium said. This is a multiplayer game. Stop playing solo, get a friends and play with them.. Or multibox which is today’s way to get “friends”.
The problem is that freighter attacks are so infrequent that this usually isn’t worth the effort.
… which ironically shows how easy it is to live as freighter if an escort like that isn’t worth people’s time.
Imagine an EVE where high sec freighting would be nonviable solo without escort. Some people would still manage to freight goods and make a lot of ISK for their efforts. But that’s not this EVE, in this EVE freighters earn peanuts because that’s how much risk and effort it takes.
Then there basically seems to be no problem at all. If running them unescorted works with a very high probability and running them escorted works with an even higher probability, nobody should have a reason to complain.
As long as people don’t feel pressured to group up and ask corp members to escort their freighters to survive high sec hauling I really think we aren’t anywhere near ‘high sec freight viability problems’.
Lol….you don’t think entering a system with 34 people all called ‘Nado Hawk’ and in Safety alliance is a big clue ?
Well, yes it is. I regularly see ships of the same sort I fly in get ganked. And time and again they are badly fitted, AFK, on autopilot, etc. For example some guy in a 950m ISK blingy Tengu ( my Tengu is just 500m ) with just 23K EHP despite all the blingy shield mods. My Tengu has covert ops cloak and 65K EHP….without any bling.
You’re missing the point, perhaps intentionally. The killmail can’t show it but it’s entirely possible that the 34 people called Nado Hawk logged in after tackle or came from another system. Logoff traps are tried and tested in all areas of space.
Then don’t give them a reason to spring their trap for you? Which means:
don’t put too much value into your cargo, so they will wait to the next freighter instead of wasting their 34 ships on you.
train and use Cloak/MWD on your DST all the time, it prevents scanners from checking your cargo.
always fit high-tank on your BRs, make a gamble really costly for the gankers.
always pay attention: If you get scanned, chances are extremely high there is an active ganker’s fleet in the next few systems. Stop your trip, go docking, do something else and continue a few hours later. Check the eve-gatecheck website for ganks on your route after to see if a ganking crew was active and find out who their tackler was.
if your hauling run is of real importance to you, bring at least an instalock-webber.
if you need to transport a REAL high value, bring a whole escort fleet. Yes, thats exactly what corps are for. Tell them it is an important corp operation to bring the load safely from X to Y and they goddamn have to form a fleet for it. Nobody cares if that is “unlucrative” or does not “generate ISK”. They do it so their corp doesn’t lose a freighter worth 10B or 20B. That should be reason enough. And if you are a “solo” player, accept the drawbacks of trying to play a multi-player game “solo”. Groups that cooperate should have benefits. And one of these benefits is that they can escort 20B freighters while you cannot. Live with it.
No I’m not missing the point at all. That is precisely what scouting is for. Preferably a real-time multibox scout, as anyone who can afford to lose 23bn can afford a second Omega account.
The point of a scout is that you observe everything. Not just whether there are 34 ganker ships in the system. Even seemingly harmless things like that Ibis lurking at a gate. My scout, usually a fast align Anathema, often scouts 3 or 4 systems ahead. One should especially look out for anyone likely to bump at the gates, or for ‘junk’ left at gates that might disrupt warp. I do my journey in stages…with the scout often looking for the next station to dock up at. In dodgy situations or terrain I will do this one system at a time.
There is also value in simply stopping along the route for half an hour or even more ( and log off ). Disrupt the ‘target ship is coming’ anticipation of the gankers….as often the gankers will know you are coming a dozen systems or more in advance. If you just blindly carry on regardless, they are ready for you.
Also, often the perfect time to go through a system like Uedama is precisely when the gankers are flashy. It will mean they have just ganked and still have criminal status and will be concorded if they undock. That is the best time to make a run for it.
Its a combination of all these things ( and more ) that get you through.
Of course it will. If their shipscan shows they will need 3 Tornadoes and they only have two (often at the Blueloot trade stations), they won’t shoot. If they don’t even scan and just shoot, you survive.
My BR has been attacked 3 times so far in HS in situations where I couldn’t cloak because they had littered the gate with Drones, Containers, Wrecks, Corpses etc… - I survived all 3 times in hull because they simply underestimated the tank.
Not listening to me often comes at a price. Sometimes 20 Billion ISK.
Also, you can’t always escape death in EVE. I mean stuff like a logoff trap with 34 accounts sounds ridiculous to me, but there is a non-zero % chance that it could really happen. And when it does, and you walk into it, you are probably dead. That’s not a flaw of gamedesign. Eve is not a game that safeguards you from every risk. It gives you an universe and it’s up to you to figure out how to survive in it.
