I’m going to try again, and will keep it entirely academic this time. No jokes, humor, memes, etc. Obviously that’s being used as an excuse to brigade the post, so I’m not going to give them an opportunity to do it a second time.
Dracvlad is inventing a history of EVE Online that never actually happened in an attempt to support his emotion-driven, logic-lacking perspective. This can be evidenced from his lack of activity in the game during the period of its existence regarding which he’s making claims, in particular the period mainly encompassed by EVE’s first decade, during which the server was able to reach 65,000 concurrent players.
The claims he made about the game, such as that it “wasn’t a niche game at the time” and that it “wasn’t just for PKs” because the “-25% ROF penalty wasn’t removed from destroyers yet” have no bearing on how EVE was genuinely like at that time, when it “ran in the 65k plus,” as he put it.
To the untrained eye, this might seem like an attempt at intentional intellectual dishonesty. But I don’t feel that this is truly the case. To me, these claims are indicative of him not being an active EVE Online player. The game he’s describing never existed. He does not know the game’s history, and as such chooses to conjure up an entirely new one; one that conveniently fits the agenda he’s trying to push.
Since he wasn’t an active player, there’s no way he’d know about how during EVE’s first decade, when it “ran in the 65k plus” and “wasn’t just for PKs,” we were using 2,000 DPS battleships for suicide-ganking, and groups like the Privateers were at war with the entirety of high-sec, including pretty much every single tiny mom-and-pop, PvE-only corporation in existence. Yes, as in during the period of time when EVE was growing exponentially, and was able to reach peaks it hasn’t seen in over a decade since.
As far as “consequences” for gankers go, it’s an entirely irrelevant point, because it has been proven that gank victims and their sympathizers are unwilling to enforce any consequences on anyone regardless of opportunity.
Case in point: some Safety. members, including Aiko, Several, and Krig, performed an experiment this year. They’d tell their gank/bait victims that I’m their main, that I hired them to perform the attack, etc. Aside from a few RL death threats and “terrible standing” notifications with descriptions like “kos this [insert sexist/racist/homophobic slur here]”, not a single one of them actually ever did anything to retaliate against me despite repeatedly swearing to do so. Even when I personally killed Thotamon (the premier representative of the “AG” play style), did he park himself outside of my station, proverbially put up his dukes, and taunt me to undock and engage in honourable PvP combat so that he could “enforce consequences” and exact his revenge upon me? No, he did not. In fact, he was back to losing PvE ships that very same day.
The only time that AGs (and I’m using this term very loosely to define pretty much anyone who is against ganking these days) are willing to enforce any “consequences” is during the 20-second window when the gankers go red and CONCORD is already in the process of deleting their ships. AGs don’t want to enforce consequences; they want the illusion of consequence enforcement by virtue of having the game do it for them. That’s why they keep asking for nerfs to destroyer damage, buffs to industrial EHP, improvements to CONCORD response times, et cetera. That way they can feel like they’re more effectively interfering with ganking without actually contributing anything more than the anemic NPC kill mail leeching they already are (the few of them who bother to do even that, that is).