One of the most significant drawbacks to anti-ganking is that thereās no money to be made from preventing a gank. Where ganking is highly lucrative and much easier to accomplish. I wonāt get into all of the advantages that gankers have, as there are too many to list.
Solution:
CCP/ CONCORD can place a bounty on -10ās and anyone that commits a criminal act in High-Security Space. (Gankers can easily be compared to rats that have bounties on them.)
We all know that Kill Rights and War Declarations against -10ās are useless.
Perhaps giving a financial incentive to pilots wishing to kill āpiratesā would bring more people to the table and therefore more content for the game.
There are tons of ISK sitting in Kill Rights or other ISK faucets that could be āreassignedā.
Imagine an AFK ganker tethered to a structure in HS. IF there was a bounty on the -10 wouldnāt someone be more likely to take the time to bump them off the tether and pop them?
There is no countering a gank. If a group warps in on a barge with 20+ Catalysts, thereās nothing you can do to stop it, short of patrolling every single belt in every high sec system with 30+ ships of your own 24/7ā¦
There are ways to counter a gank but getting people to freely commit to AG activities is not easy. As I said, thereās only the reward of helping another person (many of which never even acknowledge it) and the risk of becoming a target themselves. Jason Kusion has caught me more than once trying to help and popped my ship (GF).
If people could actually make ISK from AG like they do with ratting, I think the number of active AG would swell overnight.
So part of the perceived imbalance (itās hard to determine factually just how significantly the ganking bias affects the game) is as you say, that ganking has clear rewards (dropped loot, ransoms) but the rewards for Anti-ganking are much less reliable.
Anti-ganking/pirate hunting/bounty hunting should be an equally viable career path, financially. The difference should be that piracy has the potential for huge sudden payoffs with huge risks (it currently has the payoffs, not the risks), while āspace copā careers should have a smaller more steady income.
However ābounties from the etherā arenāt a good method since they can be self-farmed. It might be possible to have some sort of āfunded by ganker finesā system as Githany suggested, but still farmable.
One approach to minimize this is to always make bounties a percentage of total value destroyed. (This requires a more reliable āestimated valueā algorithm than EVE currently uses.) If you can only get back 50% of what you lost, you canāt self-farm.
Another approach is to make all combat ships carry a droppable āenergy coreā - cost based on the DPS/ship class ratio so that āpure gankā ships need more expensive ones, PvE fits cheaper, and (most) indyās only a very cheap one. This would make hunting any ships anywhere more desirable as well.
Another possible approach would be to expand the contract system to include āsafe deliveryā contracts, citadel defense contracts, vengeance/targetted destruction contracts (where you pay for destroyed value of the target), etc.
The aim shouldnāt be to eliminate ganking but simply to expand the list of careers and options available to all players.
Letās imagine a world where carebears are given EVERYTHING youāve asked for here and STILL die hilariously with no real consequrnces for thr evil doers.
What about loyalty points for concord so if you kill a ship without concord or faction police thatās flashy red you get a higher amount of lp
i wonder if they can find away to give lp to ships that help save a ship from a gank so, when we fail we get no points but save a ship and we get lots and ew and shield reps need recognition as its sometime the most effective part of AG, maybe gankers get outlaw points for a successful gank.
What about we all sign up to be criminal Hunter or high sec pirate to allow us to get these points
Sorry just writing things down as they come to me.
So for example today i activated a kr which we failed so no points for us where as the pirate evaded the kill so gets points.
How about extra bonus isk, after all these AGs try to stop me and still fail? Now I could get bonus isk from their wallet, for trying to interfere with my gank and miserably failing!
Wouldnāt that provide more incentive for people to try ganking?
Sorry just writing things down as they come to me.
An issue is that almost any āgiveawayā can be gamed. Give LP for stopping a gank and people will set up a gank super cheap, then stop their own gank and get paid. Or theyāll set up a cheap gank at first gate, stop it, get paid for thatā¦ then gank the freighter at the next gate and get paid both ways.
You basically want payouts to only happen after real risk is taken. So if the payout is a ship core the ganker had to buy (like Citadel cores), thereās no way to game it. If the payout is based on āvalue destroyedā (and a proper āvalueā algorithm) thereās no way to game it.
If a player pays you for a safe conduct contract and gets ganked on the way, he pays nothing and you earn nothing, etc.
Whenever youāre noodling new ideas, one thing you want to check is āhow would the most rabid hacker nolife nerd in the world exploit/abuse/twist this?ā. Because as soon as you program it, those guys will crawl out the woodwork to do just thatā¦
Change CONCORD mechanics to spawn CONCORD if the target activates a distress signal, instead of being an automatic spawn. Anyone in the process of āgankingā a target would become suspect automatically, unless the target activates the distress signal, in which case they become criminal. If the target fights back instead of activating the distress signal, or fights back any time during the CONCORD engagement, the ganker remains suspect/becomes suspect again, and a limited engagement is created between the target and the ganker.
This way, some gankers would hunt for targets that they think are AFK or not attentive, and would likely use bigger/more expensive ships for the activity, which could actually be viable for bounty payments that function as a percentage of the total ship value. This would also create baiting opportunities for pirates, and actual gameplay for AGs, who would tail these gankers in order to try to interfere in their ganks for the opportunity to collect loot and bounty payments.
