As a long-time EVE Online player, I truly appreciate the depth and strategy that the game offers. However, with the rise in ganking in high-sec, particularly for industrial players using larger ships like Orcas and freighters, I’ve come up with an idea that I believe could improve the gameplay experience, especially for newer players.
The Proposal:
I’m suggesting the introduction of a new module that would provide temporary protection from being bumped or attacked. This wouldn’t eliminate risk entirely but would offer a short window where ships can escape to safety.
Key Features of the Module:
The module would be available for fitting on mining ships, Orcas, and freighters.
When activated, it would provide 3–5 minutes of protection, during which the ship cannot be bumped or shot at, allowing players to warp to safety.
The module would use a special type of ammunition, adding a cost to its usage and maintaining balance in the game.
Once activated, the module would have a cooldown period of 20–30 minutes, preventing it from being abused for continuous protection.
The module would discourage AFK mining, as it requires active player engagement and has limited usage, making it ineffective for those who aren’t actively monitoring their ships.
Why This Could Benefit the Game:
Improving the New Player Experience: One of the major reasons new players quit is losing ships they’ve worked hard to acquire after being ganked. This module would offer them a temporary layer of protection, particularly for newer players who lack the resources or experience to avoid gankers.
Impossible to Defend Against Gankers: It’s nearly impossible to defend yourself in high-sec from gankers, especially as the attacks happen so quickly that there’s barely any time to react. Even support fleets often fail to protect against well-organized gankers.
Challenges for New and Small Corps: Small corporations and new players lack the ability to organize fleets for protection, putting them at a further disadvantage.
Economic Benefits: If more ships were able to protect themselves from ganking, we would likely see a decrease in mineral prices and cheaper ships overall, which could benefit the in-game economy.
Do you have a source for this or where exactly do you have this information from?
If you combine it with the ability to warp away during this protection time, it basically would eliminate all risk. Because you fall out of warp directly under a Forcefield, next to a tethering Upwell Structure or in Docking Range of an NPC station. You would basically switch from one state of invulnerability into the next, without anyone being able to do anything about it. Bad balance.
Why only for them and not for missionrunners, abyssal runners or explorers that simply want to scan and hack in peace?
Why so long, when the dangerous timeframe of being ganked is only a few seconds? Such a long time would even allow the ship to travel several systems without anyone being able to stop them. PvPers could use such ships easily to get intel on enemy fleets by activating the module and warping right through a camped gate, reporting everything in the system(s) behind. Completely imbalanced.
Thats totally untrue. How to protect yourself against gankers can be learned in less than one day. It’s not even difficult, just watch the local chat, do some research who the active ganker corps are and set them red so you instantly see when they enter your system. Be ready to warp away any time and fit your ships accordingly. You can even do higgs-mining, which allows you to instantly warp whenever something hostile enters your grid. Looks to me like the whole base of your suggestion is made up on completely wrong assumptions or lack of knowledge.
If this is truly to protect “New Players” why does it discuss Orcas and Freighters?
My account is 12 years old and I still can’t fly an Orca.
If you want the NPE to pop, simply make new players un-gankable for 30 days, and when someone tries to gank them, have it simulate like a real fight but deal no damage to the player and instead, pop up a friendly message to inform them of this threat that, once the grace period ends, will be real, and then they know they have 30 days to figure out their strategies. Done.
There are a lot of reasons for new players quitting; this is merely one of them. The evidence is that you either like blob play (being part of the blob) or you don’t like being a victim of the blob. “Git good”, “htfu” or “git more friends” aren’t really options for most.
This suggestion was suggested dozen of times before and it was as many times explained why it cannot happen - it would be 100% safety of transporting very expensive stuff by using a newly made alpha alt. 50 skill injectors in full expanded Tayra on autopilot between Amarr and Jita and nobody can do a ****.
Are you aware of the existence of CONCORD, who eliminates attackers in high security space after a short window of time?
Combine this with your suggestion - a module that provides protection from attacks for a short window of time - and you suddenly are eliminating all risk.
It’s a bad suggestion, and unnecessarily complicated too.
An equally bad but much simpler suggestion with the exact same outcome is to disallow illegal attacks in high security space, or to remove the red safety setting.
Removing a ganking would hurt the game big time because if you not notice ice mining with your one two toons and seeing large fleets go in to ice mine. One way to counter this would be ganking these fleets to make them want to move someone else.