Welp, your false assertions make it obvious that you have no significant experience with ganking. You’d think that you might defer to the knowledge and experience of those that actually do actually know what they’re talking about, but you probably wont, because that’s generally how it goes. The nerf-ganking crowd will dismiss ganker arguments out of hand, “reasoning” that they are just trying to justify their behavior, or are outright lying in order to promote their ganker agenda. Hell, you don’t even have to take our word for it. You could go out and try to get experience ganking on an alpha toon. But you won’t. Because you already think you know everything that you need to know to speak confidently on the matter.
But, I shouldn’t pick on you too much, because you’re just the last in a long line of people like you.
So, it is pretty hard for an anti-ganker to stop a gank in progress because gankers will generally factor in anti-ganker activity when deciding whether or not to execute a gank. However, anti-gankers can pick off ships, kill haulers, steal loot, and bait. Which can hurt a ganker’s profitability, waste his time, decrease his engagement profile, encourage him to move, and/or encourage him to end his session earlier than he otherwise might. In short, anti-ganking is real, and extremely common in systems where gankers like to hunt (i.e. lower sec status systems with lots of traffic). In fact, @Knowledgeminer and @Githany_Red are a few anti-gankers that I know of that use the forums. So, perhaps they might want to chime in.
Ganking has been nerfed so hard into the ground, that it’s completely dependent on players making at least one stupid mistake, if not several. Truth is, is that it’s quite possible to reduce your chances of being ganked to damn near zero. So, the real reason why so many people get ganked, is not because ganking is unbalanced in favor of the ganker, but because there is a never ending stream of knuckleheads doing stupid stuff. P.S. If you want to learn more about how to manage the risk of ganking, see the last section of the first post in this thread.
Anti-gankers, faction police, gate-guns, perma-flashy status, a strict time limit, guaranteed ship loss, and a local population that will slowly learn and adapt, all serve to make ganking a challenging activity that requires plenty of effort. You’d know that if you actually had any significant experience ganking.
P.S. I say “significant experience ganking,” instead of just “experience ganking,” because challenge will actually ramp up as you gank more (i.e. you’ll become perma-flahsy, potential prey will dock up when they see you in local, anti-gankers will start ■■■■■■■ with you, faction police will kill you). And then there’s the matter of hard and soft targets. Yes, it is quite easy to blap a random noob sitting still in a venture. But just because some guys make it really easy, that still doesn’t mean that ganking, as a whole, is easy.