I find this stuff very frustrating for a lot of reasons.
The main one being explaining to new people why I can’t fly with them and help or protect them even in a fleet. To me, from a real life standpoint, if I’m walking down the street and some thug comes along and starts bothering me the cops have little or no problem with someone who comes and helps me knocks the thug senseless, and even less if it’s someone I’m with. In both cases the cops will usually pay them on the back and say “nice work”. In Eve, if I escort someone in a hauler and they get attacked the cops come and kill me for helping the person I’m escorting. I have no way of knowing all of the possible reasons for the attack, like war or what ever, and even less time to figure it out so I have to keep safety on green and hope something good happens where I can shoot the baddie or rep the person I’m escorting or whatever. That’s never happened and I don’t really know why.
Something I would love to be able to do is screw with groups like CODE by repping new people’s ventures and helping them by shooting back. This is something that in real life any decent person would do, but can’t in Eve as near as I can tell.
To be honest, I can’t, after over a year of playing, get my head around this stuff, it makes no sense to me so I just keep my safety thing on green all the time and tell people there’s no point in having an escort since they can’t defend you. I tell them to use a scout instead but those are of limited use in most situations. CCP wants us to kill each other for whatever perverse reason they have and get they make it into something that’s not worth doing. If I shoot someone in lowsec for being a dink I loose standing, if I shoot them in highsec I get killed by the cops. What’s the point?
As I said above, my understanding of all this is limited by how complicated it is, to me is makes almost no sense though I understand that it might have something to do with people being obnoxious… Like CODE.
To me, not grasping this stuff after so long, I just tend to want to avoid everything, not because I’m afraid to get in a fight, but because concord is an idiot with a huge hammer. The result of this is that I hate flying in high and lowsec so I live in null and in wormholes instead. Just to make things less confusing, which to me is a pretty daft reason.
I see no reason why I can’t see someone in another corp getting beat up and step in, I see less reason why I can’t defend someone in my own fleet, and even less reason for someone in my own corp who is also in my fleet. It makes me wonder what a fleet is even for and why corps are even mandatory (I made my own just so I could get out of the NPC ones and not have to join someone else’s).
If there is a way to do this stuff I would love to know how, but I can’t get my head around all the rules and as an old boyfriend I showed Eve to put it “what do you mean? If I defend you the cops come and kill me? Wait, I can’t kill the cops either? What the hell kind of crap is that?” He logged off and never logged back in again…
So after that wall of text, here are my questions:
How do I defend people?
What is suicide ganking in terms of mechanics and why is it allowed?
What is concord baiting, is it allowed and how does it work?
And last, if CODE can do those last two things why do we get killed for standing up to them?
I’m using CODE as an example here since that’s all they seem to do and they always get away with it, I’ve seen their fleets of abandoned rookie ships and I know that somehow that is how they avoid concord…
Anyhow, enough typing, sorry about the wall of text.
Cheers!