Look, being provoked by the gank isn’t a problem. Getting into a bickering war in chat isn’t a problem. People setting out to provoke the reaction and then winding up the person who reacts further is toxic behaviour.
If you want an example of a decent ganker look up Macgybo. He ganks for profit, doesn’t mine salt and will actually teach people how not to get ganked in future.
Ganking is not the problem.
So who exactly?
You’ve come in making big claims that it’s a huge element of the ganking community. So outline who it is. It should be easy if it’s huge.
Otherwise, this is just an example of how you can’t apply perspective and are throwing out claims you haven’t validated, but because you are part of the toxic element of the community that doesn’t like another type of play, so you are throwing accusations at a “huge element” of it’s community without any proof at all.
Right, so how do you identify those people before they do their provokation?
You have no idea what is and isn’t punished by Ccp. They protect that information. If you report someone you literally get an email back saying that they cannot divulge what actions are taken following the report.
Hey I have no problem with ganking. Just the salt mining. And no I don’t have the names of all the gankers mining salt but a cursory Google search would turn up gankers who openly admit they do it for the salt.
Sorry I haven’t recorded on a spreadsheet every time I’ve witnessed it in local. I just put it in a report and let ccp sort it out of I feel it crosses a line.
This whole if you can’t give me exact names and time stamps it didn’t happen is a bit of an absurd schtick.
You can’t you can only deal with it after the fact. I just report the ones where they clearly are taking it too far and let CCP sort it out. I also report the miners if they go too far in their insults to the gankers because if they aren’t moderated too they will never learn that spewing racist and bigoted stuff in exchange for a gank is not acceptable either.
Sure and everyone should. But if it’s a “huge element” then name names. It should be easy.
Or, do you really not know at all the truth of it and are just assuming to know, and then throwing around accusations that you don’t know to be true or not?
As I have said. I haven’t kept a spread sheet. I just report it when I see it and have seen a lot.
I see a lot of capsuleers come and go many of them with mundane and throwaway names that are not going to stick in my memory even if I was good with games.
The game is huge, unless all the toxic players happening to gank around me and the others offering anecdotal information on this, which seems unlikely then you can scale that up to being a big element of the community.
And yet, so far you can’t even name 1 let alone multiples of this huge element. Only deflect.
This is exactly why I said you were part of the toxic element of the community and should be banned. You can’t apply perspective on the issue and instead are applying a broad brush and throwing around accusations.
People should buy a permit to can post on the forums which could be revoked at any time. 
I’ve been quite explicit that I don’t recall names but it’s easy enough to Google and if CcP want to look into it they will likely have a log of the reports I’ve made along the way.
Just put eve salt mining into Google if you really need to see specific examples.
“This isn’t a problem because no one can give be precise names and date stamps.” Is not a counter argument. In fact I’m pretty sure if I went looking in the TOS for the forums naming and shaming specific individuals would be deemed in appropriate. The appropriate thing to do with them is report them which I have.
So now, the “huge element” is something to go Google.
There are definitely toxic elements of the community and all of them should be weeded out. But coming in and claiming a huge element of just one part of that community is toxic, without even being able to name a single example, is typical. No actual validation of your claims, but throwing them around like they are valid.
Even maybe just start with how big is the ganking community?
It’s if a huge element of it, then you must at least know how big the overall group is in order to know it’s a huge element of it that’s toxic?
Generalization. Majority of gankers don’t do that. Thats domain of CODE and Aiko. The rest of us are not talking to our victims either at all, or unless they start chat with us. I can’t talk for others, but when someone starts a chat and is reasonable, ie. no death wishes or verbals or mocking, I do give him advices and explanation of what he did wrong and what allowed me to gank him.
That being said. I ganked quite a lot of ppls, the stats are something like this:
80% won’t say anything
15% will send emails or start convo and is toxic against me
4% will send convo and talk without emotions
There was one victim that wrote gf. (which I don’t write myself in gank and I wouldn’t write it if being ganked so I respect that)
And there were two victims who sent me a roleplaying email. Great stuff, might even post it later.
Anyway considering that gankers are few, but victims are many, the toxicity is highly on the side of the victims. That cannot be denied.
Which is the case even outside of the ganking scenario.
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I think gankers in general will focus their attention on people who have explosive reactions, but I don’t think it’s truly because they enjoy ‘mining salt’.
Frequently, these salty reactions contain dares, or inflated displays of bravado on which a ganker feels honorbound to call the bluff. Also, I think there’s PvP player attrition. When a ganked target becomes toxic enough to wish cancer and death on the ganker and their family or to threaten them with doxing or the like, some of those gankers are going to quit. That, after all, is the whole point. To make ganking as emotionally painful as possible for a ganker so that they will not bother you again. If they quit entirely, so much the better.
The gankers who survive have thick skins and perhaps a particular animosity towards people who inflict emotional anguish on others that they have known. Gankers aren’t often depicted as emotional creatures subject to burnout or misery because it’s not their image, but they are people do have emotions and drowning in the misery of their targets gets to some of them after a time.
Just giving a ‘gf’ after a gank won’t give you a free pass, but it does keep you off the radar. They won’t view you as someone they need to purge because you aren’t toxic to them or their friends. They’ll shoot at you if they see you again, probably, but they won’t be looking for you. They won’t remember that you’re a person who needs to be shot.
The toxic element in a gank with lots of salt is the person dumping the salt. That they are toxic is why they get extra attention. Not really because people enjoy enduring those outbursts. That’s what I think, anyway. A certain amount of bravado is to be expected, but too many people cross the line and don’t get any official punishment for it. It falls to the gankers to punish those who weaponize grief to get what they want.
Huge is a relative term. It doesn’t mean the majority, it doesn’t mean x percent. It’s a vague term used because I’m not in command of the exact facts. That is clear. It means it’s significant enough part of the community that I see it regularly. It’s a significant enough part of the community that I hear people talking about it regularly. It’s a significant enough part of the community that we are having this conversation over and over.
Just last night I was passing through a system on the pipe from Jita to the drone lands. Someone had lost their marauder and the gankers were baiting the guy in chat. I didn’t see the whole conversation admittedly. But what I did see was the ganker saying don’t worry I can replace the ship and no I’m not going to stop talking in local. Then the ganker calling the guy an idiot over and over.
On the same day I also saw a miner being ganked near Hek and getting upset becaus it was his last ship etc. the gankers told him to uninstall the game. Uninstall, literally encouraging the opposite of player retention.
The only other ganking I witnessed that day was some re flashing I think in Osmon. No one said anything, though I could have missed the fireworks.
So of the three ganks that happened around me yesterday two were toxic. Two thirds of them. That for me is a typical day flying around eve.
I can only speak from my experience, but from my experience I see more toxicity from gankers than not. Any time I see a ganker asked why they do it, the answer is more often than not salt. A few of them I’ve heard say they get frustrated by the state of low sec pvp and just want to kill something. The professionals I’m assuming keep it to themselves.
So maybe they aren’t the majority of gankers by they seem to be the most vocal element of the ganking community and from my perspective the problem is huge.
To be clear I don’t think ganking is the only place toxicity happens and I have experienced it myself in pvp. I blew up someone’s Astero in NPC null where they were running missions. They gave me a lot to translate in Cyrillic and none of it was repeatable. I just told them I caught them because they weren’t paying attention to d-scan and if they did they might not lose their next mission ship.
Letting off steam in local isn’t toxic. It’s just letting off steam. If it carries on beyond that it can get to toxic, but a few distasteful words in local from someone that had their ship destroyed isn’t itself toxic. We would be a really sad (and not at all typical of the broader society) if we were so prude that an outburst itself was regarded as toxic. It’s just a momentary release of emotion. Toxic is where that emotion then drives continued, similar behaviour and responses.
Go look up some synonyms of huge. You might understand why throwing that around when you don’t actually know it to be true, doesn’t help anyone and only serves to perpetuate the same unvalidated claims that have been made over and over and over, yet never actually proven to be the case.
Much more tempered language would be more likely to be taken seriously.
Taken seriously like when someone says it doesn’t happen because they haven’t seen it?
Also an outburst in local is one thing. Sending a private message suggesting I should go and fornicate with my mother is beyond what is socially acceptable. That was just the beginning too.