There should be a "money trail" so that we can know who is funding suicide gankers, pirates etc

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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I know that suicide ganking took another hit recently but what I’m arguing for here is not that it should go away or be buffed or anything. Instead, I want to argue for why it is not interesting and how it could be made more interesting. Many of these points apply to pirates in general too, whom after like fifteen years of Eve, there is still often no meaningful way to try and get back at pirates who attack you.

IMHO, the problem with suicide ganking is not that it happens, the problem is that there’s usually zero possibility of getting revenge upon the people who do it. Most of these newbie alt fleets in their catalysts do not wear their corp’s name on their sleeve, so when you get swarmed by a ton of alphas and lose your time investment, it doesn’t feel like a player interaction, it feels like you rolled the dice and lost your ship for no reason. The problem is not in losing your ship, it’s in losing your ship to something that is basically not an element of the game that you can expect interaction from.

If you disagree with this, consider the following: if we had “warp storms” or something that killed 1% of ships going into Jita, how would that be different from suicide ganking? The reality is that from the ganked player’s perspective, it would often be no different at all, yet we should all be able to agree that such a mechanic would be lame. Suicide gankers are basically a mechanic like this from the normies’ perspective. Anyone who is not a pure griefer but does suicide ganking should be OK with their real identity being discoverable.

So, let’s imagine that Concord traces the funding of suicide gankers, pirates and criminals in general. We should be able to research who is giving a criminal character his ISK and weapons. Maybe there would be ways to try and launder the money, making it harder to find out who did it, I don’t think it’s for me to try and cook up a perfect system. What I’m saying though is that there should be some kind of trail that people can at least try to follow because that opens the door to more interactions. Otherwise, getting suicide ganked is like having a 1% chance of watching your ship explode for no reason when you warp into Jita, it’s just not interesting because it has no potential to lead to anything.

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Everyone who produces and sells Catalysts, Coercers, blasters, crystals, and hybrid ammo on the market in any station in the entire EVE universe supports gankers by selling to them…

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No longer an issue. Alphas can’t set their safety to red or gank in high sec…

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Wrong. You consent to PvP as soon as you undock. Please learn the game you chose to play kthx :smiley:

Alphas can’t gank anymore. Please stop spreading misinfo :smiley:

Because you can easily avoid the suicide gank unless you’re bad at the game. There are several things you can do. What you’re proposing with the storms, there is no counter. Just random chance. Far from how ganking is.

Ugh. You’re one of those.

Cept it isn’t, You’re just bad at the game :smiley:

Exactly. I feel like he meant to post this before patch. I mean brother doesn’t even know the state of the game right now ROFL.

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Either this will be ridiculously invasive, or useless. If I happen to care, I’ll make a neutral alt and send money from main → neutral alt → ganker. This thwarts any direct tracing, and being able to see not just the target’s wallet history but multiple jumps out is dumb.

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Killrights exist, and so do locator agents.

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You want to know who is funding suicide ganking?

The people that get ganked on the upper end.

Here, this guy for example from today:

The lazy, incompetent people get ganked. The same ones that people cry should be protected from ganking. They take no measures themselves to stay safe and they fund the gankers.

Yeah, those nasty alpha gankers. Destroying the game still.

Lol “investment”. It’s a game. The only thing you’re investing is in your own entertainment and ships blowing up is fun. There’s no other investment going on.

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Dropping truth as always.

Unlike the OP, who is spreading blatant lies :smiley:

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+1 :rofl:

It’s already very interesting and exciting that I can get into a ship and start hunting other players.

You have their name and there are locator agents. If you want revenge that’s enough to go on.

Sounds like hunting terrorists in Afghanistan back in 2003.
Why not get the NSA involved while you’re at it :smirk:

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OP: what if your forensic accounting PVP leads you to… a bland Jita market alt that never undocks? With someone purchasing PLEX directly on this burner alt to buy mats and do contract-shells through intermediaries? You gonna start demanding IRL credit card info and account information? :rofl:

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Yep. He wants an in-game skill to turn their webcam to capture a photo I’m pretty sure.

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Honestly, I’d just like to see the code that the OP would use in order to make this work. The amount of work required to do this effectively would be insane and I think you could sell your nice programming to other people, like the IRS for example.

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Part of your OP is interesting - basically your opinion on how ganking “feels” to some players.

Other parts are wrong or show misunderstanding. For instance, there’s a difference in any game to getting a result from a programmed entity (random ion storm, this is just bad RNG), vs. a more ‘lifelike’ NPC (these bloody rats are programmed to kill me!), vs. another player (“I got ganked by a filthy scum loser no-life basement dweller!”).

People are wired to have an automatic ‘balance evaluation’ in interpersonal interactions. Did my standing go up or down, vs. your standing? It’s a factor in the endless dance of “us vs. them” and also social ranking, “how valuable/secure am I vs your ranking?”.

Most people envision this as a sort of zero-sum game: my standing goes up if yours goes down, and vice-versa. This is an integral part of the ganker internal mentality - every gank is a boost for them, and a minus for someone else, improving their relative standing.

Your point that “there’s no valid meaningful way to try and get back at them” is core to the “bad feels” of a gank. You’ve lost standing vs. someone else, and you have no realistic way to get it back. Hence the bad feels.

(We’ll ignore all the PvPeanut gallery who jump in with “gank them back, anti-gank them, infiltrate their corp and destroy them from within, build a bigger corp and war-dec them”. While theoretically possible, these are nowhere as practical or achievable as the process of ganking, and hence do not balance.)

Your notion of ISK-tracing however is completely unworkable - it’s sort of a blind reaching-out trying to find someone you can “enact revenge” on. The money trail is vague, diverse, easily camouflaged; it’s of no benefit for this. And lots of the funding, as Scipio pointed out, is from the gankees themselves.

Education is one way to approach this, because most ganks are in fact avoidable. Social networking improvements could be another - but the gankers can use this as well.

A game mechanic that creates the perception of revenge/retaliation/punishment could work, since what really needs to be adjusted here is how people perceive the gank abd react to it - not so much the results of the gank itself.

The bounty system did that a little bit, but was effectively useless in practice because CCP coded it the CCP way (Consistently Crappy Programming). It could be made more effective, or other avenues could be taken to make gankees feel a little less shafted, even if the end result was minimal.

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I say “cellar dweller” because it rhymes.

hahahahahahahahaha

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How to protect yourself from Gankers…

There are chat channels called “Gank-Intel” and also “Anti-ganking” … I suggest that you join them and in the Anti-ganking channel, you can engage in discussions about how to not get ganked.

I have been ganked before. It’s not fun. Lots of ganks happen to miners. There is only so much you can do to protect yourself when mining. It’s just a risk you have to accept. However, you can be proactive and mark gankers with bad standings so that they show up in local so you can see when they are in your system. If you see a ganker in system, they could be in warp to you at that very moment so you should take immediate action like warping somewhere else if you have a flimsy ship.

There is also a Twitch channel called UedamaScout that shows the ganking activities of quite a few systems. Watch that channel when traveling about.

About what you were saying…

I dislike the whole aspect of high-sec ganking. I think there should be some sort of cost to the ganker besides a 15 minute cool down timer. I think the timer should be an hour or at least 30 minutes. Ganking is a very lucrative profession or people wouldn’t do it. If I am doing an activity that has the potential to make such a large amount of money, there should be a hell of a lot of risk involved in that activity. There is very little risk involved for the ganker. At the most they are going to lose a cheap ship that they intend to lose anyway. So there is virtually no risk to the ganker to make such huge potential profits. I think this is a bad game mechanic that should be seriously looked at in terms of fairness to the rest of the community that doesn’t gank and works hard to make their money.

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I was thinking a lot about the ganker problem and I think I came up with a great idea for this game! Go check it out…

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Why don’t you try it then and tell us your experience?

After all, it’s easy right :smiley:

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I would agree, that way fleets can be formed to track down the Holder the gankers are fighting proud for, thus high grade elite PvP would ensue as the Holder Dens are located and eradicated.

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Don’t need a reason to blow up a ship in EVE.

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