It is not just for that, more importantly it is for trying to warp out to a fleet mate in an interceptor who is in line of the bump, this can be done with the bowhead, but not with the freighters unless the bumper is not being serious. So for me it is adding that counter play to being bumped.
I quite understand that.
Good, and I don’t want to make it too safe either.
I would like you to think bump rather than gank for a start. Ganking to me is part of the game, I want to make that clear. I am looking for options to enable the freighter pilot to be able to get out of being bumped, that is it. So I will focus on being bumped as the issue, not the gank.
The most obvious thing is to have a scout, and seeing a macherial on the gate is the first stop. But do you think that at this point the only option for a solo player is to dock and log?
Obviously the next part is a webber, I used a Loki with twin faction webs and a large tank and that worked really well for me as a scout and a webber. Generally you have about five seconds to get into warp with a webber with a bumper on the gate but this can be less if you have a bad spawn.
At this point the counter is a suicide point. That means the webber is countered and I now have a bumper on me. What are my options at this point? He is protected by CONCORD and counter bumping is pretty difficult, it is not like bumping a freighter, you are trying to bump a fast moving BS and you have to try to anticipate the direction to be able to bump it.
From that point I have the option of ganking the bumper. A lot of hisec players have one account, I have two currently, A Macherial fit for bumping can be taken out with two Talos, but if they add a single tank module that goes up to three. I cannot counter that Macherial which is protected by Concord while carrying out an aggressive act which is not treated as such by the mechanics. And no I do not think you should make people suspect for bumping.
So at this point we have no counter for players with one to three accounts.
When you look at game balance you always have to get to the end point, when you look at Sov you look for the end point where the enemy can escalate, such as your super umbrella for Rorqual mining.
At this point there is no counter for the majority of hisec players if they can negate the webber.
They showed with the ganking of JF’s in Jita which they did with suicide points to stop them from using an out cyno that they can do this. This means we have a different more interesting gameplay if we can negate bumping in some way.
First of all those tags will have more meaning because they will need to deal with fac police. the freighter pilot can play with the gate cloak to give him more of a chance if they have not done this. the points of conflict will be around gates and it will be fleets following fleets in terms of trying to stop ganks. It would not be the stale gameplay we have now.
I also think that the value of cargo could go up based on the value of the required gank fleet, having your cargo be limited to 1bn is not an especially good level.
I would like to say that at the end of all this what option does a solo hisec hauler player have to do the right thing? When the game play is controlled by such a poor mechanic.
On the other side of things people who AFK and carry too much in terms of value are doing the wrong thing and do not deserve to survive. But I am looking for what the normal hisec player can do as a counter more than anything else.
I hope I have explained this well and given you something to think about.
And by the way the sheer toxic vitriol thrown at me by the freighter gankers on this issue is incredible. They will do anything to keep bumping in play, so I will warn you that they will be pretty nasty if you try to do something on this subject.
