Catalysts cost about a million ISK each and cost about 9 million ISK for a T2 gank fit. They’re not free.
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The only way to understand the impact of ganking on player retention is to actually study it…
Take a typical ganking group, check a killboard, see how many ganked players still play 3+ months later (complicated because most high sec dwellers are unlikely appear on killboards outside of a gank).
However, as an example - take a series of 24 CODE kills in high sec around the beginning of 2017 - 11 of those players were still playing at least 3 months later - of the remaining 13 - research in game would need to be undertaken to see if they were still active or whether their eve dreams died along with their ships/pods
Maybe only CCP could really do this, but I guess no one has thought to do it because it goes against the established ethos - and of course, don’t look if you don’t want to learn.
Ganking itself is not an issue to me but the exploitation of bumping mechanics on freighters in High Sec that allows a perma-“scram” with no legal response is the issue. It’s a loophole to get around the aggression mechanics of Eve that allow pilots to attack aggressors.
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CCP did do this. They found very little correlation between gank victims and people quitting.
You can’t trust CCP to carry out a competent study. People who aren’t invested into a game are less likely to report to you why they are leaving.
There are many aspects of SG that are obviously just bad game design that never get fixed for this reason.
Such as?
OP, feel free to voice your thoughts in this thread that mainly talks about the awful mechanics surrounding cost-free suicide ganking.
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Whilst cool, the CCP research misses the mark - it examines new players (15 days) - high sec hauler ganks are usually for their cargo (high value and therefore less likely to be such new players - think freighters or 100m+ industrials) , and the other common targets are miners (usually in ships a 15 day player is unlikely to be able to fly).
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I disagree with your use of the word “negligible” in this context.
I have decided to post because, in my opinion, this argument against ganking, which is sometimes used, is misleading.
In every conflict between a suicide ganker and the ganked, there is one account versus another account, bare minimum.
The ganker’s account and the ganked’s account.
They share the same “cost”, which is access to the game, i.e. computer equipment and internet access.
And they share the same risk. Will they enjoy how they spent their time playing EVE?
That’s the risk.
Once ingame, as the hit points of the ganked’s asset in play goes up, i.e. the newbie’s mining vessel to a character with more skill point’s freighter, gankers must marshal more and more accounts to produce the fleet needed to explode/destroy the gank target.
More accounts needed. That means either more investment in equipment (computer) for a solo multi-boxing ganker or more players involved.
So, the ganker(s) investment in any encounter is equal to or greater than the ganked.
The efforts of the ganker(s) is not “negligible” in comparison to the effort put forward by the ganked to access EVE, but rather equal or greater.
All parties in a gank must have access to the game.
It is not a “negligible” nor mismatched cost, nor is their risk mismatched.
What it is…is the efforts, and risk, of one player’s free time versus another player’s free time, or many players’ free time versus one player’s free time.
No matter where you stand on the ganking issue.
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Interesting observation. I like how the study points out that newbros don’t mind getting ganked and how you point out players that lose more from a single gank don’t necessary conform to the same mindset.
Here’s my observation: Being able to play for great lengths of time (weeks, months) while safe enough to remain oblivious to the possibility of gank causes players to suffer a false sense of security. They over invest into their ships, only to lose them to devastating effect. Wouldn’t the game be more engaging if we could increase the possibility of younger players getting ganked? Not only would we all see more action, more drama, but new players not necessarily exposed to the brutal nature of the game can quickly learn about it before they try to stuff days, weeks of effort into a single hull.
Worth considering, no?
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As much as I dislike ganking, EvE is supposed to be a sandbox that is player evolved. It is bad enough that CCP meddles in the games evolution on behalf of PvP players often at the expense of PvE players. In this case I find myself siding with a PvP solution.
Evolve your game play. Adapt improvise and overcome. The array of gank tactics and situations are too vast to have a single solution that CCP may apply. Study your opponent, seek out their weakness, counter from that intel.
I take it you are in HiSec. Remember, Concorde is designed to punish offenders, not protect the victims. Do not use static predictable patterns of play. PvP players are attracted to low hanging fruit. Many like prey that is easy to find, weak and easy to kill.
You can turn the tables on them too. Find their hunting grounds, observe their patterns. When those with deep negative security undock to engage, gank the gankers near their prey. Bring tackle,
gankers really don’t like being shot at and will run when engaged unless they have the overwhelming edge.
This is how the players evolve the game.
Well, neither player is risking his account to play the game, and I don’t think it’s fair to say that either player is risking his time or effort in playing. Each is choosing to expend their effort “playing”, and the time passes, whether they are playing EVE or walking their dog or watching paint dry.
Here you have expanded the assessment of what is “cost” to include things outside of the game. You are not taking for granted that each player has access to the system. Unfortunately, when you do this, there is really no end to the comparison. You could say that player A “risks” more because he has a better computer or player B “risks” more because he has more accounts or player C “risks” more because he has brought more intelligence to bear on the game’s problem or player D “risks” more because she grew up in a patriarchal society where people like her were actively discouraged from engaging in “masculine” pursuits like video gaming and other forms of competition such that she is now having to work harder to acclimate herself to a culture and circumstance to which her male counterparts are already adapted and which culture and circumstances could even be said to favor them over her given the differences in how she thinks and problem solves and due to her lack of ability to successfully interact with a good many of her fellow participants due to their unwillingness to accept and/or accommodate her in “their” domain . . . are you sure you want to do this?
Looking at it from a strictly in-game perspective, no, they don’t risk more. They use superior strategy, tactics, and logistics to risk LESS. That’s why they are successful.
Or, not. If the hauling need one hour to be performed, and can only produce 1isk for the service requester, he wont pay more than that for the service. That’s why I said “it’s more than supply and demand”.
That’s TOTALLY not how it works.
you need to create specific groups(of 100 new players), one that will never be ganked, a second that will be subject to 2 gankers, a third that will be subject to 10 gankers, (those numbers are examples) and observe how the retention rate changes between those groups.
You can NOT understand an impact with simple observations.
I think this too. I really think people should get more ganked, more often, in HS. Not necessarly for more devastating effect. I made a suggestion for “more piracy” but … well I think people don’t understand this.
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No, it really didn’t miss its mark. The research was exploring whether or not ganking was detrimental to new players, specifically. According to the data, it’s not. Further analysis of the data suggests that the sooner a player is exposed to PVP, the more likely they are to develop an accurate picture of what the game is really about. The longer a player is left to their own devices, to settle into high sec life unopposed, and comfortable, the more likely they are to be surprised and angered when they are ganked. In my personal experience, this is true - older players who’ve never left high sec and think they know it all do a lot of whining, while the newer ones are much more keen to learn.
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There are some unbalanced mechanisms that favor gankers such as many of them still using the exploit of diverting concord so that response time is slower, then there’s the way they are able to jettison ships so that the criminals can jump in them and then gank someone, this involves more then the gankers.
Orca or Bowhead neutral alts, the toon that scans or looks for said victims, none of those others involved get flagged or kill rights heaped upon them and they should, the “neutral” should have to risk getting kill rights so that gankers have something to risk, now, they risk nothing.
So before they say ‘but our ships get destroyed’ is meaningless, that was the fate of their ships anyway, but our sec status, nope, if it meant anything they would refrain from doing too much, as it is now -10 means nothing to them, if the toon jettisoning the ships was flagged and couldn’t dock or jump, and had kill rights on them then it makes it more level as they now risk kill rights being open season on that Bowhead or orca undocking.
But alas, this won’t happen, and that exploit is still used and nothing happens.
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I agree entirely with the premise that each and every asset involved in an operation to destroy player assets needs to itself be put at risk in some tangible way. The problem is the execution, and a mechanism that accurately identifies which assets need to be in harms way. Used to have the same problem with neutral logi before they introduced flags. Now, logi ships have to expose themselves to risk if they intend to be part of the fight by proxy of flag inheritance.
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There would be no easy way to identify who is helping the gankers or who to flag. For example, if I, as a third party in a random NPC corp, enter a belt in a Skiff and stealth scan a Mack while pretending to just be mining, then report their fit to the gankers via chat or other means, how would the game know what I had done to help them? It wouldn’t.
Not an exploit.
Been nerfed. Can’t do that any more
Why? They haven’t done anything criminal.
Wrong, “We would like to clarify that all methods of delaying Concord’s response time are considered an exploit”.
https://www.eveonline.com/article/exploit-notification-delaying-concord-response/
See, if you jettison 1 at a time, doesn’t matter, it was in your SMB, its yours, if it was used to commit crimes then you share culpability, but CCP could make it that each jettison could have a cool down timer such as the MJD timer, either way it’s way too easy doing this.
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Look, a long time ago the people that created CCP wanted a dystopian nightmare of a game. They succeeded, but back then, gankers had no where near the abilities and advantages they have today. Fast forward about 9 years, give or take. Then some idiot, obviously someone that hated high sec players and likely a member of an RMT cartel, came up with huge alpha buffs to Catalysts, Talos, and a few other ships.
If the old forum had not been closed down for this abomination, you could find my post, among a chorus of others, screaming at CCP that these alpha buffs would be disastrous for high sec industrialists. Of course it fell on deaf ears, or worse, someone at the other end laughing, and saying, “yup, working as designed”.
And yes, our worst fears have been realized. Groups like CODE were formed based on these changes. And they have perfected their griefing. They care not one whit for the shrinking player base, which they are at least partially, maybe mostly, responsible for. And clearly, insanely, a group of devs still in power hate a significant chunk of the player base, specifically high sec players Why they still have jobs, that is another story diving into madness.
Ultimately, nothing will ever change in CCP. No, wait, that is not true. Soon enough, the server will go dark, because CCP management can’t even begin to understand the damage they have done to the game, or allowed to happen. Take your pick.
Until then, the sociopaths and psychopaths will prey on high sec players, and nothing will change in-game.
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