You know, I see the ‘if you undock, you consent to getting killed’ remark getting thrown around like ‘Trickle down economics works’ at a GOP rally here.
That doesn’t really make sense.
Ganking takes literally NO skill. Instalock, oneshot. Literally no skill. No money. It gives people huge killboards, there’s no defending against it, and the gank ships are so cheap, it doesn’t matter if they get blapped by CONCORD.
So, why is this a valid mechanic? Let’s RP this. You got a huge trade hub, surrounded by thousands and thousands of pirates, and the police do nothing about it. Sounds legit.
I have a solution. Disable all weapons in 0.9 and 1.0.
I mean, seriously, this is like the entire KDF sitting at ESD, uncloaked, just shooting any freighter that undocks, and THEN, Starfleet sends a response fleet out to them. Really? Come on.
I podded a random once, just to see what would happen. Got bored immediately. But I was astonished at how there were effectively no consequences for me.
There are plenty of defences against trade hub ganking. Whether you bother to find out what they are and use them or not is your problem.
RP is there for those who want it to enhance gameplay. It doesn’t dictate how the game works. CONCORD has always been a reactive, not proactive force. That’s how the game works and it doesn’t get changed because people whinge about it.
How can the gank ship be both cheap and able to oneshot stuff? My basic T1 industrial has 21455 “health” before I do anything, something that oneshots it is worth serious cash. My destroyers are only between 5 and 9K, but they are fast and can fight back, and someone chewing through my PvE fit BC (54K) or BS (70K and active tank) needs heavy hardware. And ofc, the cargo isn’t worth it.
But thanks for making me check those ships, I noticed that the fit of my larger industrial is atrocious! Seems I just threw on whatever was lying around when I last moved home base. I’d be ashamed to see that crap on the killmail.
The atrocious one is the bigger model which seems to have picked up small mods… Shame on me, and lucky no one noticed it when I moved. 21K would seem pretty nice for the small one, at least it has survived a gank attempt.
If someone says they never made a mistake, they never learnt anything. You ‘level up’ every time you make a mistake and learn from it. This is is the most realistic aspect of Eve.
Okay for the fact that OP’might not have done ganking for a long period, and that a killmail would be an interesting proof as much as it could help the other to help the OP to improve his defenses against gankers.
But seriously, the “you are just a hater” argument is older than the game, would be nice to see something else than some sentence a five year old could use to “prove” he have the best beyblade of the playground.
Pressing ‘F1’ takes no skill. That describes a large part of Eve gameplay, both PvP and PvE. So yes, any Tom, Dick or Harry can shoot a ship in highsec. It’s kinda the point of the mechanic.
But ganking to make a profit or running as a criminal in highsec? That does take skill and/or effort. We can debate how much, but it definitely is more than 90% of the other Eve game play out there. You need a fleet, you need to do some math, you need to keep in motion, you need to react fast to secure the loot, and there is little room for error. You also need time and patience as 99%+ of the targets you run into will be unengagable by your fleet or unprofitable.
Come now, there are several dozen ways to avoid being ganked. Almost everyone moves around highsec in complete safety, and the professionals like Red Frog report something like a fraction of a percent loss rate.
This is a game and avoiding pirates is part of it. It is even a simpler math calculation to see if you are an unproiftable target which is probably your best strategy to stay safe. But you also can employ other ones that make ganking you either impossible, or the next thing to it requiring either Herculean effort by hundreds of players or an unfortunate disconnect/power outage/heart attack on your part.
It’s a valid mechanic because being attackable anywhere is a core pillar of the game:
As you correctly point out it would be trivial to lock people’s safety setting to green in all or part of highsec but that breaks one of the main design principles of Eve. CCP went to a lot of effort to engineer CrimeWatch to enable players to interact anywhere so I don’t see why they would want to change that now.
You are intended to be a potential target for the other players in this game. I’ll agree that the RP explanation for CONCORD is pretty weak, I mean come on, magical and omnipotent space police the react infallibly and it is a declared game exploit to interact with? If it bothers you that much the solution would seem to remove them entirely, or replace them with some other NPC that was more realistic and lifelike.
But I don’t think that would be a very a good idea. They exist for a simple game design reason: to impose a cost on aggression in highsec, and they do that just fine. That keeps most people and most ships safe in most situations, but still leaves the possibility of player interaction and player-imposed risk everywhere in the game.
If I had my way, CONCORD would just go away and your ship would automatically explode after a set time (maybe with some randomness) after you commit a criminal act say by a magical space beam or by a CONCORD-implanted detonator. This would cut down on lag and remove the lore-bending and confusion around is it an NPC or not.
I agree with one statement at least (I’m too drunk to read everything you wrote). Ganking is easy. I would say ganking is newbie pvp. But ganking for profit, yes, that does take skill.
Your words change nothing about OP being a hater, who more likely is the five year old here anyway.
It is not an argument, btw, so wtf are you even reading there? A statrment is not an argument.
Sorry, but that is a crap solution. What about wardecs? War targets flee into 0,9 and stay there for any time required?
If we do need any solution here, and I stress that ‘If’, CCP has all tools necessary long ago. Just do not use them right.
Any toon with -5 security will be chased in high sec not by some faction militia NPC, but CONCORD it self. You jump into high sec with -5 sec status - you die. End of the story.
There is a concequence for ganking, just not strong enough. Make a security status penalty 4 times bigger and together with previos point you will make gankers life much more problematic.
Those two things are so simple to implement, that I am sure, CCP will have them in game long ago if they will see ganking as a problem. But they do not. It is legid game style for risk averse loosers, who do not have balls to shoot ships, that can fight back. Gankers have balzam on their creeped RL self esteem, Eve economy has some ISK removed from it (at the moment there is a much more ISK incomming into it, than getting out of it and that IS a problem), industrialists has what to produce to replace the lost cargo, CCP get eventuel PLEX bought with the real life money… Everyone happy except for the ganked dude.
An interesting statement. Are there any statistics?
Mr Pedro is himself a shareholder of the “Mighty CODE.” ™ [sic]. How does his ganking record stand? Sadly, no killboard entries for 2018 and the most recent 30/40 entries for 2017 were all against deployables or structures. Hmm not much skill there, surely?
So what about the “Mighty CODE.” ™ [sic] itself? Page 1 of their combined killboard entries shows 16 kills, by three different pilots, and for which immediate (or close to) NPC action against said pilots can also be attributed. Outcome as follows:
total dropped by those ganked … 35 338 062.73
total ganker assets destroyed … 47 003 876.94
Too small a sample to make any profound comments, but it’s still not a good look.
What kind of statistics are you looking for? There are public killboards that show how much explodes, but says nothing on those that get away and if something isn’t profitable to explode, it usually isn’t. However, both the MER data and the data published by Red Frog in the past show only a fraction of a percent of haulers are lost in highsec. I’m not sure that says anything about how “hard” it is to make a profit as a criminal though, only that in aggregate losses due to highsec piracy are a minuscule fraction of the total economy.
I am not sure what your point is. Shooting structures requires a legal declaration of war, and deployables just invokes a suspect flag and has no CONCORD response. Neither have anything to do with suicide ganking, nor do I typically gank for profit when I do suicide gank someone - I usually do it to generate content. But I am familiar with the mechanics and understand the amount of time and effort it takes to skim a profit of the unaware.
The truth is almost no one - like maybe a hundred actual humans in total - are regularly suicide ganking other players in this game anymore, and only some of them are doing it for profit. Again, I am not sure what that says about how “hard” it is to make a profit, but does seem to me to argue that it isn’t an easy ticket to riches when most people choose to grind the much easier L4 missions or Incursions for their ISK rather than turn to highsec piracy.
Again. I have no clue what point you are trying to make. The CODE. Alliance ganks for extortion/ideology/content creation purposes, not ISK. So it makes sense that their ganks aren’t all profitable. Still, the Alliance does currently have a 97.3% ISK efficiency with 63.6T ISK worth of kills versus only 1.8T ISK worth of losses. I’d say that is a large enough sample size to make some conclusions, and I’d say CODE. was pretty effective in their self-described mission to purge highsec of the non-compliant, at when it comes to the efficiency of their resource usage.
And while everyone loves big numbers, including CODE. pilots who love to shoot them whales, profit isn’t the primary motivation of CODE. as had been demonstrated over many years so perhaps they aren’t useful for this discussion. If we look at the newly added ‘Ganked’ tag at zKillboard you can see a broader representation of who is getting ganked. Almost without exception, they are grossly overload and undefended haulers and missioning ships that are expected to drop many-fold what the gank fleet lost cost.
I think though from the tone of the OP, she seems more upset about the smaller, solo gankers indiscriminately picking off shuttles, pods and Ventures than the organized big fleets hunting overloaded haulers. I guess there is an analysis to be done there, looking at which types of ganking are most profitable normalized by ship cost, but I am not sure how useful that is as a metric of how much skill suicide ganking takes to pull off, and pull off profitably.
So to answer you question, no, I know of no statistics to address how much skill suicide ganking takes relative to other pursuits or even what metrics would be appropriate, but in my estimation pretty much all forms of suicide ganking take much more skill and effort than what most players put into the game, especially the lazy/clueless ones that become the victim of the criminals. I mean, how hard is it to tank (and not overstuff) your ship and not use autopilot?
As a duly appointed representative of Petulant Luddite GmbH I would like to speak up on a few things.
We are a for profit, small, Hisec SOLO ganking corp. We have a single pilot the does the damage and a support network that manages the less violent aspects.
We have been doing this for 4 years and have made a tidy sum from wrecks and leave behinds.
We do not have a 100% kill rate on target, because, it is in fact possible to defend against/avoid a gank.
Ganking is, variably difficult, “hitting F1” is easy, yes. The logistics of setting up the gank is where most of the difficulty sits. What my corp does, I feel, is challenging, and if done correctly looks effortless to the recipient.
