Can’t you ‘counter’ ganking by getting a permit and following the rules of that permit?
I ask facetiously since I can already predict the responses, but social solutions are being completely ignored. I feel like that’s a large part of what these discussions are really about.
I never did buy a permit from Safety or CODE., but I could have. They are cheap and the rules (at least in the time of CODE. that I remember) are fairly easy to follow and probably in your own best interests.
Bowing to another power is a bitter pill to swallow. I, for one, did not want to take it, but I recognized what I had to pay for it. I knew I’d be hunted and perhaps killed, but it was the price I chose to pay to be defiant, and I tried to align myself with others who chose defiance.
Increasingly, though, the people who were defiant wanted to get their way and not have to pay a price for it. Not in lost ships, nor in vigilance, nor in lost time mining or minutes of Youtube watched in the process. Defiance became not much more than endless complaints about this or that being unfair, or people being terrible people because they deign interfere in a monotonous task.
I am getting old, and I am cranky, but I still try to be nice to everyone I meet as much as is practical. This means that I appreciate having a cordial relationship of some kind with my friends and my enemies, and a lot of the enjoyment I got out of Eve came from these interactions, either for weal or for woe. The difficulty of experiencing these interactions has increased and I began to find less and less of interest to me. Neutering gankers, by whatever means, makes players less attentive. Players solving their problems with pure complaints and trash talk leaves me with no allies to consort with to get some in game payback when someone gets the better of me.
I liked a more social Eve, and that’s what I don’t think I’ll ever see again. It is in our struggles that we find ourselves doing the things we didn’t know we could, and coming together to achieve what we could not. It is a shame that, for some reason, people who lose a venture can’t be inspired to make anything of the experience, if the online sentiment is truly indicative of how new players feel to lose a ship of any kind, how they feel they have to grind for eons to afford to play in any meaningful way, or have to wait forever for skills to train before they can do anything worthwhile.
Perhaps that’s true if all that is worthwhile is in your wallet or hanger. I gave away my stuff, though, and the only thing I miss are the people I used to know, lost to boredom in a static universe that no longer interested them.
