Nerf Ganking Megathread

Communications Center Crime & Punishment
979

Okay, I do think the costs of certain ships are too high. However, I think we a different way of looking at things.

More expensive is not necessarily better in Eve. You do not need to fly expensive ships to be competitive, make isk, or have fun. I think the problem, however, is that players bring to eve a mindset that they have developed from years of playing other video games. You see, in most games, bigger, more expensive, more skill intensive is usually a straight upgrade, may be necessary in order to progress/compete, and, in some cases, it may even be exponentially better than it’s counterparts (i.e. items in borderlands scale exponentially in power). Eve doesn’t work that way, however. So bringing such a mindset to Eve doesn’t help players to find success or have fun.

Devs have a maxim that states, “if you leave it up to players, they’ll optimize the fun out of your game.” Well, I think we have something similar going on here - “players will chase bigger numbers, even when it’s not necessary or fun for them.”

Don’t want to grind for a 14 bil Arc, or 120 bil titan (or whatever they cost nowadays)? Well, I think the solution is pretty clear - don’t. If it’s not fun to you, then don’t do it. You don’t need to. It won’t help you win or have fun. No one is forcing you to. And, if anyone tries pressuring you into it, tell them that you ascribe to Eve’s golden rule, and that you don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose.

https://c.tenor.com/CL3erQ4G-nMAAAAd/eric-head.gif(image larger than 4 MB)

The costs of the ships I fly in PvP and PvE has scaled up over the years, but it’s always been in proportion to my isk efficiency. Moreover, I always try to skew towards cheap with my ships/fittings. I do this for 3 reasons:

  • In Eve, power increases linearly while cost increases exponentially.
  • I know for a fact that skill, knowledge, and effort trumps ship cost.
  • This is a PvP game with a full loot death mechanic, and I don’t particularly feel like spending my life grinding for ships.

TLDR: if it’s not fun, don’t do it.

I’m not sure why this is such a hard concept to grasp. “No one wants to grind 500 hours for a titan.” Okay, so don’t ■■■■■■■ grind for a titan. I don’t understand the problem here. Fly something else. Or better yet, join NPSI whaling fleets or whaling SIG’s, and hunt them instead. I don’t know about you, but I think most people would have more fun spending 500 hours killing capitals, than 500 hours grinding for something that’s purportedly not even that ■■■■■■■ fun to fly.

Oh, and tell me you haven’t seen this one play out before.

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God, I can’t stop making walls of text. I think I have a problem.

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980

I have pointed out to gankers many times in the past that while I find the cat and mouse game of moving stuff around Eve without being ganked a challenge, which adds a certain amount of danger and suspense, it adds a deeply negative amount of time and effort to moving stuff around. Time that many players would rather spend elsewhere.

While I, have a lot of time to spare, and two accounts so I can scout , I can move things piecemeal through the main choke points and take things out of Jita in well tanked and small loads, many people do not want to, nor have the ability to spend the time, thus they become easy targets of gankers.

Overall as the game gets older and the player base gets smaller this issue will only get worse. If this perception of being such a negative thing for the game is perceived by CCP then ganking will have an issue.

The best thing that happened to ganking was the ending of unlimited bumping, the thing is most gankers don’t understand that. They should look at war decs as an example of what can happen if their gameplay is perceived as being too negative for player retention.

981

This is absolutely going to be pointless to respond to and we’ve been here before, but as I’m at work and have ample time to waste…

Look at where ganking is now. A lot has rapidly changed since the bump timer was implemented. Most freighter kills you see are a small handful of players multiboxing a ridiculous amount of characters. Now while the bump change isn’t the sole reason, it is the primary factor that sped us up to this point. Skill injectors and SP farming is largely at fault.

Immediately after the bump changes and groups knew that they needed to be immediately ready to gank a freighter, you saw a massive decrease in individual pilots participating. Yeah gankers such as Globby and Jason Kusion had already started building their army but it wasn’t quite mainstream as it is now.

The change was something that made the activity less appealing because it shifted to something you had to actively do and be ready for. So to adapt to the massive decrease in individual interest, gankers that wished to continue were forced to expand ganking into an activity that utilizes personal armies of gankers.

I myself have the characters and capabilities to gank a triple bulkheaded freighter in a 0.5. I think that’s absolutely bonkers, but I’m going to exploit that because I want to continue the activity.

So what is worse? Honestly I feel what we have now is worse because ganking still happens but fewer individuals collectively experience it. The cries of being bumped for hours were largely exaggerated and I was one of those bumping. I played with those that bumped and yes while it has occurred it wasn’t some plaguing issue. The tiniest bit of player agency found being bumped reasonably countered.

Wardecs weren’t perfect and they are in my opinion in a worse state, content-wise. The current state of wardecs is the result of what a good witch-hunt gets you. The entire witch-hunt revolved around the community feeling that wardecs were unfair and harmful to the game… as if many of the other plaguing issues with Eve Online weren’t contributing. I find 0 coincidence where PCU declines around the time that CCP starts catering to casuals and whales. We were never presented with any data that proved the argument true. Just a biased CSM that backed up CCPs decision.

I know I’m off topic but you opened the door… to me the issue is that the vocal playerbase doesn’t see themselves playing the same game I’m playing. I’m playing in sandbox where I use every tool and mechanic available to gain an edge. A game that is dark in nature and unlike any popular MMO currently. I can only assume from my experiences that the biggest complainers want fair and honorable pvp where victory is decided by who can fit more players in a system. Any edge that a player can manipulate is seen as unfair, imbalanced, and bad for the game. An attitude of selfishness where if they lost then something is wrong.

Creativity is ■■■■ on, being clever is shunned if you’re on the receiving end, and if you have to exert any more effort than what you want to counter it, then it’s bad for the game.

The examples used at Eve Vegas for why wardecs were bad for the game were ALL groups that collectively mass wardec’d mostly Nullsec groups. Groups that care little for their individual members. Groups that think that telling new players to deathclone to their staging and handing out shitty frigates to be cannon fodder. Groups that exploit CCPs ignorance and in doing so participate in absolutely murdering the economy, forcing CCP to make drastic changes years later that has these entitled brats throwing fits on social media and on the forums.

I’m done ranting. Thanks Drac for helping me waste time at work. I’ll end with this though… CCP has done more to drive players away than any amount of wardecs and ganking could ever have dreamed.

4 Likes
982

I went through all the people that you scammed ganked after bumping them for hours and found 60% of them had left the game. When I made that reply CCP Falcon deleted my posts, which were at the time that PA were looking to buy CCP.

I think this is so much better, you seem to think that only players that can multi-box can gank, but isn’t Eve supposed to be a team game? While bumping was happening it was the same number of excessive multi-boxers ganking freighters, Kusion and Australian Excellence and every so often that corp white bull to name the main ones, now we have you, Don Purple, Safety. grouping up and that Avallon guy who is now in Safety, and Kusion makes the odd showing. It is the same. It was like that for ages and to suggest otherwise is wrong, sorry.

No, it was a terrible mechanic and I am so glad it got changed to what it is now.

War decs were in a terrible state for a long time, we both know that.

If those mass war deckers had just war decked nullsec alliances then I would agree with you, but they war decked anything that moved. They made the mistake of over doing it and brought the changes on themselves. I have zero sympathy for mass war deckers as you know, but I did for people who did selective war decs, which I believe added to the game.

I think you are nervous of CCP in terms of this. I guess I am too, but I wanted to make sure that people are aware that if you get the balance to far out of kilter bad things happen.

And I really must emphasise that the changes to remote repping as in making people not in the same alliance / corp go criminal, it killed group AG and war dec defence with allies, seriously bad mistake. If only CCP had not done that…

983
  1. Yes, agree 1 billlion x quafe percent
  2. You have learned to EVE
1 Like
984

More than ever, they have become the “we don’t want to destroy the game, we only want to destroy your game” crowd, all while complaining that the people who just play the game are the ones destroying it.

Unfortunately, the one more nerf calls will continue.

1 Like
985

Eve offers so many options and I think you have to play eve to your lvl and time allowance. You can be a space emperor if you have the time and skill but you have to be realistic , I always want to play more but I have picked an area of eve where I can come and go, we have many alpha’s in our group that are happy to plod along in T1 ships and we alway cater for low skills so everyone can join in when available.

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986

I have only ever bumped maybe 2 players for hours. I don’t doubt that some people I’ve scammed or ganked have quit the game, but the way I see it they would have quit anyway. If it wasn’t me that scammed them it would have been someone else. It’s not like I held some bonus room and grieved them out of the game. Again if it wasn’t me ganking then it was only a matter of time before it was someone else…

Yes Eve is a team game and that’s what I’m talking about. There are less individuals ganking now. Less people involved with freighter ganks. I would know, I bumped for Miniluv fleets a little and remember all the people in fleet and in Teamspeak. Yeah you’re right, you had your main ringleaders than did the heavy lifting and work but it’s very literally now just a handful of individuals. Now the meta is to SP farm your own personal army and the handful of gankers just use that to form a critical mass of cheap ganks using T1 catalysts.

Quoting isn’t working for me but you’re just DEAD wrong about wardecs. You have to make your mind up Drac… we’re wardec some blanket dec thing or was it some plague that hunted small groups and rooted them out of the game? If you go look at the “Big 5” that CCP Burger presented at Eve Vegas you would see that the largest majority of kills are on Nullsec players in the immediate area of trade hubs and pipes.

The data is there. You can ignore it like the echo chamber on Reddit. Wars are absolute ■■■■ for content being based around structures. CCP has completely dropped the ball but they don’t care as long as the Reddit mob was pleased.

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987

That happened before bumping was changed, sorry.

Blanket war dec’s period, they did not just blanket war dec nullsec entities, but anything that moved. You know that I had no issue with small scale focussed war decs.

988

It’s a ridiculous line to push, the implication being that your bumping of them is somehow responsible for them leaving the game.

That isn’t possible to establish by looking at a killboard. Even in the event that there was causation, there isn’t even a clear view that this percentage is somehow bad for the game, except in the mind of the “one more nerf” brigade.

What percentage of people who only mine, leave the game for example?

It could very well be (also unsubstantiated) that 40% staying is above average in comparison to other players, and your playstyle might actually help keep more people around, for a host of reasons.

That position is also completely dismissible because we simply can’t know. However the “one more nerf” brigade can’t even fathom the possibility that they could be wrong.

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989

No. Bumping nerfs killed Miniluv, whom was providing a substantial amount of individuals. You seem to think you know who and how many were in the fleets…. Better than I? This isn’t posturing, it’s just truth.

Again… my experience here is with intimate knowledge. I know what kind of groups were being war dec’d. I think this is another example of you thinking you’re right because how could you be wrong with some many on Reddit also think the same. Go dig through years of wars dude and you’ll see that Nullsec received the brunt of attention

Just think, when you have every Nullsec entity under wardec that’s a lot of whining on the forums and on Reddit. This was never about the little guy or the new player. It’s always been about the large groups operating in mill, but wanting combat in Highsec on their terms.

We’re obviously going to disagree no matter what.

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990

You are talking about Miniluv as it was a long time ago, long before bumping was changed. And I had a spy in Miniluv too, so yeah I know better than you. Bumping nerfs did not kill Miniluv, it was pretty much dead before that.

You were focussed on the nullsec groups, I was not looking at them, I was looking at the hisec corps and alliances. You ignore the hisec entities because nullsec entities is mainly what you saw and blew up. While I saw people not logging in and giving up which is what CCP eventually found in hisec.

It was never about the little guy until it was, CCP in the end found out that this was the issue and not the nullsec blocks.

And Reddit is full of crap.

And yes we really disagree on this. And you are wrong.

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991

Tosh…

992

Yes because ending with I’m right your wrong is how it works. Not gonna argue cause again, it’s pointless… You don’t have any evidence to your claims… it’s all observation and what you feel.

Thing is that we all know that Eve is a niche game. It was never going to appeal to a mass audience. These things you’re talking about that push weaker, more casual, more soft, and lazy players out of the game ought to be intentional parts of this games design. We play in a messy dark universe that leaves it’s players vulnerable to things that other games and it’s developers intentionally protect its playerbase from.

The players that quit were going to quit no matter what. Wars didn’t magically shove them out of the door. Poor and toxic leadership pushed them away. Look at how imbalanced, broken, and cut throat the game was and what the PCU was at… wars didn’t all of a sudden start to become too much for the playerbase and there just be this steady exodus. No, want to know what it was? CCP intently set out to grab and obtain players that fit into a different mold. Players that aren’t capable of playing the game as designed and being happy or content with it.

So no, the problem was never wars. The problem isn’t ganking or scamming. The problem is CCP trying to capture players that don’t belong here in New Eden. Imagine playing a sport knowing full well what the rules and game is, then complaining that the rules should be changed or that it’s not fun or it’s unfair.

With that, I’m done. It’s shocking to me that Incare so much about this game when creators are cheered on by people that seek to destroy what even made this game worth playing. You bring up claims that I’ve made ALL my ganking and scam victims quit - I say good, and good riddance.

993

You said the same to me. I had a spy in Miniluv, OK done dusted… Miniluv were dead well before the Bump changes, period…

And CCP actually did the analysis on wars, you don’t like what they found, they did real analysis, but you have your feelings and what was on Reddit, I have my feelings and you know what, CCP found what I felt.

Seriously, not a good idea thinking like that, and I said 60% of your scam gank victims, I was verified by the simple fact that CCP Falcon saw the need to remove my posts during the takeover period. The people who you blew up in this manner were extremely fed up with what was a trash mechanic.

And all this waffle about fairness, I should point out that good balance is not about fairness, you presume so much by lumping the two together in your thoughts. A problem that Scipio has too, but he is incapable of acknowledging when he is wrong.

At least you are honest enough to admit that you liked this game because of trash mechanics, and for you people who can’t accept said trash mechanics should not play Eve.

994

That’s a fair point and highlights yet another problem with eve. And before i make it, understand that i love this game and don’t have any issue with it.

But

The stuff you spend ages waiting for and costs more and isn’t even better. The stuff you may want requires such a time sink in waiting and isk costs that you may as well give up and fly trash, or open your wallet.

Again, another problem in the game where the progression borders on regression.

This game is open to the entire world and yet more people are playing runescape ffs :laughing:

I am hoping that the end of scarcity at least lowers the cost of ships and modules for the average gamer.

995

We are actually in the realms of mobile games with Eve. Either grind forever or open your wallet basically and you also have to wait a year for that ship,or open your wallet… Oh and it’s not even that good bu the way…

Trollolol :laughing:

It may not seem to matter and quite frankly doesn’t bother me personally, but people do look at these things and it’s not good.

996

You don’t know if they did or not. They didn’t give us any numbers or hard evidence… Has it not been clear that CCP clearly doesn’t understand their own game? I can agree with the war immune changes. Makes sense, and I have no problems with it… What I have a problem with is wars being tied to structures. No it’s not because I’m scared to put my chips on the table…

When CCP first talked about wars being tied to structures at Eve Vegas all my foreshadowing about how it would end up as a content generator came true. The entirety of the game frothing at the mouth to finally get revenge on Highsec wardec groups and what happened? A few good fights and since then…. Nothing. We were told that our war hqs would constantly be under siege!

This change does very little to deliver content to those that use wars the most and instead threw Nullsec and their CSM a bone that they played with once. Why? Nullsec doesn’t care about Highsec. The extent of their interest in it is to have a safe place to retreat to for hauling, trade, incursions, and other PVE. They don’t care about how the change impacted those that use the mechanic the most. CCP had a good opportunity to communicate with the wardec community to get ideas and suggestions but instead chose to go with the easiest solution - please Nullsec.

Speaking with Brisc about various views and opinions about how CCP can work with wars instead of tying them to structures, the response I got was that it seemed like most of the playerbase supported and wanted this, so it was going to happen.

No you think you were verified by CCP Falcon for whatever reason. Lots of assumptions go on in that head of yours Drac… How do you know the people I blew up were fed up with the mechanic? Like for you to know this you would have needed to contact that 60%.

Hmmmmmm sounds familiar!

997

I would have preferred observatories that the war decker put down and had to defend.

I also suggested a maximum of five war decs per entity, but if the war decker had a war office in one of their structures that would increase the number of possible war decs to another 20 wars. I would not have had the defender have to have a structure.

One of the reasons why there are not many under siege is due to how the RR works. I should know as I have been involved in the taking down of three war HQ’s, causing the end of many wars.

I don’t think that is true, they were focussed on the hisec players first and foremost, one of the few times to be honest.

You are just focussing on the nullsec side of things and ignoring what many players in hisec wanted.

I talked to many people who were bumped and blown up not just from you but from bump ganks and they absolutely detested this mechanic, many times they said they were going to quit because of it. I spoke to a lot of gank victims, so sorry you are wrong.

LOL, he can’t even apologise for making incorrect statements in terms of me hunting a AFK cloaky camper.

998

But this situation already exists. By definition the easier to gank ships will be ganked more often. The people in their 2bn ISK blingy combat ships with an EHP to match just casually stroll about highsec, while its people in lesser ships that get ganked. Sure, Orcas get ganked…but for every Orca there’s 100 Mackinaws or Retrievers or Proc. So the notion that ganking is stopping the rich and powerful swanning about Eve in their blingy things is really not true.