You can absolutely enjoy a peaceful and chill play style while keeping an eye on local and pinging d-scanner every 3-5 seconds. If you teach yourself how to do this, muscle memory and habit, just kicks in, and you won’t even be aware of doing it!
And because I am feeling generous tonight, I’m going to toss in this extra tip, absolutely free!
You can even have your ship pre-aligned to a safespot so when you see those combat probes, or that gank fleet of cats show up on d-scanner you can make your getaway even faster!
Muscle memory is when you need to perform a complex action and your brain remember which muscles to use, how. eg climbing, cleaning your gun, or performing a combo in a fight game. NOT pressing the same key, which is a complete retarded gameplay and only makes idiot people proud of their lack of brain.
IMO, the problem with ganking is not how many ships are lost. I roughly think that number is probably about right. It is that the gameplay for the gankee is terrible. They basically just are doing their thing one second and the next second they’re dead. The end. There are things you can do with fitting or scouting, but they’re pretty limited, and the experience generally leaves the target just feeling like it is random chance. From the perspective of the ganker, there are all these tactical and strategic elements of gameplay, but from the perspective of the gankee, the “gameplay” mostly consists of looking at the killmail to try to figure out what happened. That isn’t fun gameplay.
I’d prefer to see some kind of more involved process where skill comes into play. Maybe make some ships, probably including the Hulk, a bit tankier, but make CONCORD slower to show up to balance it out, for example. Or maybe increase the rewards of ganking by giving pirate LP or something, but give gank targets more of a strategy to defend themselves, like making gankers stand out somehow on dscan. I dunno what the right tweak would be, but something to at least give the target something to do.
There is a ton of stuff the gankee can do after the fight. Aside from looking at their loss mail, they can usually start a conversation with the ganker and cry about the unfairness of it all. They can also make impotent threats.
Ideally, the gankee can join the gankers for some real fun.
But, here think of it like this: the PvP experience for miners in low sec is 1,000 times as fun as the PvP experience for miners in high sec. In low sec, you can reasonably assume everybody is trying to kill you, so things like local and dscan are valuable tools. In high sec, 99% of the players are not trying to kill you, and you can’t distinguish them from hostiles in dscan or, depending, local, so those tools are useless- if you aligned or fled or whatever every time you saw somebody on d-scan, you could never actually mine because there is always somebody on dscan. There must be a way to make the PvP experience for miners in high sec more fun.
Yeah, I mean, that’s one option. CCP could just conclude they can’t figure out how to make high sec mining fun and they could get rid of it. But they’d need to shift those rocks out to LS, NS, WH or Pochven. Or change the material requirements for manufacturing to rely on them less. But, IMO, it wouldn’t be all that hard to make it fun and challenging instead, and I generally favor changes that result in more options for players rather than fewer. The dynamic where CCP basically requires that somebody mine in HS, and at the same time, they just leave it boring, seems like bad game design to me. I don’t think mining has to be boring. Mining in more dangerous space can actually be kind of fun, so I don’t see why it has to be boring in HS.
