Of course, I think most of the reasons nerf-gankers provide for why ganking is unfair are absolutely terrible. Moreover, I adamantly assert that ganking is balanced heavily in favor of prey, and that the real reason so many people die is because they make themselves soft targets through their greed, laziness, impatience, and/or lack of knowledge.
However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t think that none of their arguments have merit, or that ganking doesn’t have any problems. So rather than arguing with idiots, how about we talk about what we think are the actual problems with ganking. Here is my list:
- Many players perceive ganking as unfair, and whether this is true or not, perceptions are often more important that reality.
- Many players feel like they have no agency. Once again, this isn’t true, but perceptions matter.
- Newbros don’t have agency in practice because they don’t yet have the knowledge required to get better outcomes. Do note, however, that getting ganked as a newbro didn’t make me feel like I had no agency. Instead, it spurred me to learn how to stop getting ganked. So, I don’t think that the solution to this is coddling newbros. Instead, I think it lies in drilling into newbros a strong internal locus of control and teaching them actually useful information (i.e. might be better to teach newbros risk management strats and how to problem solve, rather than tell them to hide in an asteroid belt to mask their signature).
- Ganking is highly predictable. This contributes to players feeling like they lack agency, reinforces perceptions that ganking is unbalanced, and limits the thrill and relief of escaping ganks. But how do you fix this without dramatically altering how suicide ganking works? The only thing that straight nerfs will do is to shrink engagement profiles. Instead you’d need to address the things that make ganking so predictable. Not sure what other people think, but I believe that the reasons include:
- hunters get to determine the terms of engagement,
- Ganking mechanics have turned it into a DPS race against the clock, which makes it easy to calculate if you can kill something
- most prey make it really easy to kill them
- Of course, decreasing predictability is also essentially a nerf to ganking, which means that you would need to buff it in order to compensate. And, I’m thinking a lot of players wouldn’t be to happy with that.
- I am open to the possibility that anti-ganking might need a buff (I do not have experience as an anti-ganker), however that might also necessitate buffing ganking to compensate.
- Scrublords- These are the guys who blameshift in order to protect their ego. However, rather than be content to self-sabotage, their desire for validation and to save face in front of their peers leads them to complain that the game isn’t fair to any and all that will listen -including newbros who don’t know any better. And so they set up newbros for frustration and failure by drilling it into them that the game is unfair and that there is nothing they can do to get better outcomes. In fact, they sometimes even systematically sabotage newbros by creating what Destiny Corrupted calls “carebear puppy mill” corps. By the way, it seems like gankers think this is a much bigger problem than the average player, and I suspect that this is due to casual observation and the availability heuristic. We seek out soft targets, which means that our play style causes us to interact a lot more with scrublords and scrublord corps than the average player.
Do you think these are problems, and how would you address them? Do you have anything you want to add to the list? Do you think we should intentionally implement a player filter into the NPE in order to weed out all the whinebears?
On a side note, did you know that the communities of other always-on PvP games are having the same arguments? In fact, this is all part of what is known as… THE GREAT PVP DEEEBAAAAAAATUH!