I’ve quit and returned to EVE more times than I can count. Most of those breaks followed the same pattern: I got careless and lost a big share of my wealth to a gank in hi-sec. I accept that ganking is part of the game. My question is why hunting gankers isn’t a viable, rewarding playstyle.
Gankers do lose their ships to CONCORD, but that loss is cheap and planned. Everything else about the activity is low risk. Between ganks they wait in pods, cheap hulls, or docked, often on alts. Outlaw status rarely costs them much, since few players actively hunt them and security status can be repaired with tags. Nearly every other activity in EVE demands constant vigilance; waiting in hi-sec for the right target is one of the few where you can idle for hours with little threat.
I’m not asking to remove ganking. I’m asking for tools and incentives that make hunting gankers worthwhile, so the risk runs both ways.
There’s something wonderfully backwards about this argument.
Your own opening paragraph describes the problem pretty clearly: you repeatedly play until you get careless, lose a large portion of your wealth to a gank, and then quit for a while. You’ve apparently repeated this cycle “more times than I can count.”
At no point in that cycle does the proposed solution seem to be stop being careless or change how you manage your risk.
Instead, you’ve noticed that the people doing the ganking have learned to manage their risk. They use cheap ships, pods, alts, docking, and planned CONCORD losses so that their exposure is limited. You correctly identify all of that as risk management, and then somehow arrive at the conclusion that the game needs to make them easier to punish.
You aren’t actually asking for “risk to run both ways.” You’re asking for the people who have successfully minimized their risk to expose themselves to the kind of risk that you repeatedly refused to manage.
That’s a pretty impressive inversion of the EVE gameplay loop.
Also:
Difficult not to notice that there isn’t a single actionable suggestion anywhere in your post. It’s just whining followed by a general assertion that circumstances should be changed such that you no longer feel the need to whine. What incentives would you like? What tools do you think would be helpful?
Can you not spare the smallest morsal of effort towards including an articulable idea in your Features & Ideas post? Must others do everything for you?
agree, hunting the hunters is actually pretty easy, as they follow the same pattern the OP describes: being careless, giving you riches without fire a single shot or getting free kills in the safety of highsec.
It wouldn’t be a full solution to the OP, but having a list of the people with activatable kill rights would be a good start. Maybe they could show up differently in dscan and the probe scanner? Not sure about that.
That would probably be a bit more effective than the original bounty hunting profession.
Personally I’m a firm believer in ‘Actions Have Consequences’…
I think there should be a ‘3 Strike Rule’ implemented in Eve for the use of Security Tags, meaning after their 3rd use of tags to fix their Security status, that character no longer has that option available..
They can still fix their Security status, they’ll just have to go old school and spend time ratting in Low / Null Sec…
Gankers fly in cheap ships because they can be freely engaged.
They stay docked most of the time because they cannot easily dock up.
The moment a gank started you have very little time to make an impactful attack to interrupt them, because CONCORD arrives in mere seconds after the attack starts, so this is not a good moment either.
To make it easier to hunt gankers in high sec I propose delaying the CONCORD response to broaden the window to attack and interrupt gankers, and to encourage gankers to fly expensive ships by making their ship loss not guaranteed, so hunting and killing gankers can actually be impactful.
it is a playstyle, but you ask for it to be profitable. where would that profit come from??? Certainly not from their suicide ships’ loot. It has to be some sort of bounty (hello yet another isk faucet), which would damn sure be exploited to hell by themselves, by fragging their own alts or something like that.
what about the actual loot? There aren’t many ganker systems (0.5 sec) on popular main routes, so their wiggleroom is very limited. Watch them and come with your own freighter and a small fleet of well tanked ships and snatch the loot? Ofc you have to hide your fleet and your scouts well from them, they won’t play when they know they’re being scouted and thus likely can’t keep the loot. On the other hand, whenever they decide to not play, you as anti-ganker win, right?
They need to overhaul kill rights and look at re-implementing an improved bounty system. Edit: I should point out that while I agree it’s broken, I don’t have a silver bullet of an idea to fix it, either.
criminals should lose docking & gate permissions, and unable to board corvettes, both would make some sense as both gates and stations are usually owned by the empire that declared them criminals in the first place.
here you talk about game changes, which would hinge on FC to consider gankers as an issue. I don’t think were there yet, or will ever be. Suicide ganking is a valid playstyle thats being “tweaked” by CCP at times, but they don’t deem it as a real issue that would mandate heavy nerfing like you described. I mean they could foist green security on everyone, which would end all suicide ganking in a second, but they haven’t done it so far.
Like somebody else said here in the thread, managing risks is upon you whenever you load your cargo. You are not supposed to haul 25b in an iteron and get away with that.
or getting free kills in the safety of highsec.