Understanding and Dealing with Ganks and Gankers

Communications Center Crime & Punishment
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This post and thread have 2 purposes:

  1. Mainly to support gank victims in the aftermath of getting ganked, with positive input and advice. As such, I hope it will be linked to victims who need it. NOTE: I will report harassment, stalking, trolling and off topic trash in this thread, as useless as it may be to do so. To pilots reporting their gank here, be warned. There are those who will ignore the thread purpose and grief you!

  2. Secondarily to be a guide for new pilots so they understand ganking enough before experiencing it, or better yet, avoid it.

First of all, it is important to understand that you are not alone. Every single day, many pilots get ganked all over New Eden. Next, I want you to understand that the situation with ganking is more complicated than what most people will tell you. So please be patient as you read this.

The next thing I want you to know is that its VITAL you listen to and engage with the right people. For some gankers the PRIMARY motive for ganking is to cause you grief. Emotional exchanges where they get to cause you MORE grief is a positive delight for them. Do not engage. They are waiting for you…hoping for you to join in chat with them. That said, for some gankers it is just a secondary motive. Nonetheless, the result is the same. They know how to grief you, they often grief you in gangs, and they know their game. You will likely NOT make them feel bad. The more you express your grief, the more they will laugh. So talk only to people who want to help you (corp mates for example) and NEVER to those who just ganked you, at least not until you are in full control of your emotions AND know their game. That said, if some gankers are not griefers at all is something I will leave for others to decide on their own. Regardless, some gankers ARE griefers, and they will grief you even here on the forum too if they can. Remember the bullies from school? That is the very type some gankers are. They will never change and remorse is not in their vocabulary. Don’t feed those trolls.

The next thing I want you know is that whether the ganking situation is complicated by design or by accident, I do not know for sure. But its ALL here to stay, and the complexity generates misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding benefits the gankers. I advocate for removing some of the complexity, however, I cannot say I have had any progress thus far. In my view, you should not accept any blame on yourself for any confusion. Not only because it is all complex and information is scattered, but also because gankers are active in maintaining the confusion, and there can be little doubt they will post below this post in an attempt to keep you confused.

Next, don’t let anybody tell you that you and you alone are to blame for getting ganked, or even mostly to blame. That is false. The first to blame is the people who decided, among all the things to do in this sandbox game, to go around ganking people. They chose, not you. That said, there are a TON of ways to avoid ganks, so it is generally true that you COULD have avoided the gank and CAN prevent future ganks. Other threads detail how so I won’t go into that. But take heart. You can recover and you can do better.

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Now this lesson is going to get informative, but boring. I did say the ganking situation was complicated, right? First lets get some terms straight, and if you are not straight, you will get confused. Ganking comes in many varieties and over-lapping modes:

  1. The most often talked about type of gank is the high security (hi sec) suicide gank. This is where gankers attack and destroy ships knowing full well that Concord, the NPC version of Dirty Harry, will come along and destroy their ganker ships. Hi-sec suicide ganking is usually what is meant when someone uses just the term “gank”. Its the main focus here.

  2. Non-hi-sec ganking – This is when a (usually lone and unsuspecting) victim is attacked with overwhelming force in low security space or null security space (wormholes, Pochven etc.). Concord does not respond to ganks there, therefore the ganker ships will survive unless destroyed by you or someone else. This is where you will find true gate camps, however, more loose and less constant gate camps can be found in hi-sec.

Now we have subsets of ganking that could be in hi-sec or other:

a) Miner ganking – This is done at asteroid belts, ice belts or anywhere miners are mining. Mining ships are destroyed. Popular targets,esp. in hi-sec, are the Retriever, Mackinaw, Covetor, Hulk and yes, even the humble Venture. Other mining ships are less targeted but still blow up every day. The motives for miner ganking range from pure griefing (with ridiculous excuses made to cover the fact) to legitimate protection from spies and for their own mining profits (outside of hi-sec). But this is not very profitable in terms of collecting the loot dropped from the miner’s ship. Just one ganker ship is often used for many of these ganks.

b) Freighter ganking – This is very profitable. Generally, a freighter, or other cargo transporation ship, is scanned as it is traveling from gate to gate, and those with high value cargo are targeted and ganked a few gates away from where it was scanned. Usually many small and cheap ships are used to gank, and then a looter ship is used to pick up the dropped cargo.

c) Mission ganking – This is also very profitable. Gankers will find pilots running (usually high level) missions, or even abysalls, and the victims are usually in ships with expensive modules. Popular targets are the Gila and Marauder. Usually the ganker will use a cloaked ship at a warp in for a swarm of small cheap ganker ships. And usually the cloaked ship will have enough cargo to scoop the modules that drop.

d) Station ganking – These will wait at stations and blow up ships that undock. I know very little about this myself, but I do know the Tornado is a popular ganker vessel for this.

e) Random/ other – They will gank you in a pod, a shuttle or a corvette or other, any time anywhere, but especially pilots using auto pilot (AP) at gates on popular routes.

Overlapping all those is the MOTIVE for the ganking. Any one or combination of the below is possible:

  1. Griefing. - Make no mistake, as much as some will downplay this, it IS common enough that you should be on guard for it.
  2. Profit. - Some ganking is very profitable, assuming they can get the loot from the wreck.
  3. Watching things blow up. - Yup. Just that. Easy targets are prefered.
  4. Protection of territory - This NEVER applies to hi -sec though some will roll out half baked role-play excuses to try and make it seem valid. Nope. It applies to Non- hi-sec only and even then, not even most of the time.
  5. Enlist more gankers - Yup. They will show you ganking by ganking you, and then try and win you over to doing it too. Its up to you whether to join them.
  6. Padding the kill board – Speaks for itself.
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Other points:

a) This is not meant to make anyone believe that ganking is super common. Its not. If you are in the right systems, you may see it very little, or never, until you get hit. But that is often why its so successful…some pilots know nothing about it and so are unprepared for it. Remember, many ganks happen just for the joy of it.

b) Mining permits are worthless. If you are in violation of any of the fine print, which essentially states that IF they can and did gank you, then you violated the fine print and deserved to be ganked. Thus, you still have to run if you see gankers. Literally no point. Don’t buy one.

c) According to CCP Hilmar Petursson, there is a “magic moment” when an EVE player loses his or her first ship, whether to ganking, wars, NPCs or whatever. This is where a player decides to continue playing or quits. And the decision is largely based on 2 things. 1) Positive support and 2) the hope for revenge. And this is something that makes hi-sec suicide ganking a problem…hi-sec suicide gankers value next to nothing. Many if not most HAVE next to nothing of value to anybody aside from raw ISK. They don’t care how many times they die. Therefore you often CAN’T get revenge, unless, in months time, you gather an army and destroy a structure of theirs or something, assuming they even have such a thing, and they probably don’t. So get that positive support and maybe just walk away from ideas of revenge. That said, you may still get some satisfaction joining an anti-ganker group and at least get a sort of revenge against most likely different gankers, stealing the loot and preventing ganks.

d) You may receive a message titled “Why did I get ganked?” Its full of a jumbled screed of both pure role play junk and forced excuses. Read it with caution. Or don’t even read it.

e) People will say “Its just a game”. But, ask yourself this: Do you get real world enjoyment playing? Of course you do! Thus you can also get very real frustration, and the griefers who play this game know this. Besides, you used real time to get your stuff and maybe even paid real money. But its important to realize that you put this real time and money on the line for a game. That much is true. But don’t eat the excuse that your stuff has no deeper value. It does. And lies about it will not help you truly get over the loss…though you must get over it, just like so many other players have.

f) Concord is NOT there in hi-sec to protect you. They are there to destroy violators of certain laws. This may seem at first glance like the same thing. Its not. They will usually arrive and destroy someone that attacks you only AFTER your ship and maybe even your pod, are destroyed. You cannot rely on Concord to do anything but destroy ganker ships in their own time. Whether you survive until that time depends on many things, but you probably won’t.

g) Gankers will regularly try to define PVP (player vesus player) as ganking, in an attempt to elevate its status as a type of PVP to something more. In fact, most forms of ganking are considered the lowest rung of PVP, and some forms getting only grudging respect for the amount of effort required. The narrative that PVP is equal to ganking is one pushed by griefers which slips under the radar of everyone else. Don’t be fooled by it. Even non-griefer gankers get fooled by this. Ganking is a type of PVP, not PVP itself.

h) Botting. Botters using bots to mine is real. But the excuses made for ganking, claiming you were botting or using the role-playing BS term of “bot-aspirant” is simple gaslighting. Nobody likes botters and destroying real botters would be heroic. But your typical ganker prefers quick guesses to the time consuming activitiy of identifying actual botters, or way more often, just using this as a handy excuse and fake shield. I don’t know of any cases of people taking the time to concentrate on ganking actual botters. They may exist, but I think they are too rare to contemplate.

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Remember, miners: Stay calm.

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Miners!
Take up your pick and strike back against those you would oppress and demean you

Failing that, Phased Plasma works very well…

@Ridley_Rohan - thanks for a well presented post

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I’ll just sneak a quick advert in :wink:

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I approve. Anti-gank groups are a good place for proper support and the closest thing to revenge that can be had.

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Some gank do’s and don’ts:

Do:

  • ask the person who ganked you what you could have done better, if you don’t understand what happened. (In case ganker isn’t helpful - ignore and move on. Some may have good tips though!)

Don’t:

  • react angry or mad - even if you are, keep it to yourself. Don’t ‘reward’ them with your angry mails or local chat, they like it when you do that

Do:

  • ask yourself what you could have done differently to avoid what happened. Did you haul a lot of value? Did you not respond when that catalyst warped to your belt? Learn from it and do better next time!

Don’t:

  • do the exact same thing again in a bigger more expensive ship. It won’t save you and they will bring enough ships to destroy your bigger ship too.

Do:

  • try ganking for yourself (on another character) - even if you don’t enjoy it it may give you insight into the thoughts behind the ganking process that may save you from getting ganked in the future

Don’t:

  • ask for ganking to be removed/nerfed. Risk in all of EVE is part of the game and high sec ganks are easily avoided if you know how to.

Do:

  • make insta-dock and insta-undock bookmarks in popular tradehubs and use autopilot to immediately dock once you arrive at that bookmark.

Don’t:

  • use autopilot anywhere else.
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I do enjoy saying hello to Aaaarrgg when I pass through town and bust his butt when he’s not blinking. :grinning:

I lost a hulk in the 1st Hulkageddon and learned a lot. I haven’t lost one since. Go figure? :thinking:

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Don’t:
Mine

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A bit harsh but it gave me a chuckle!

Shouldn’t this thd be merged into the …

thd?

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At least in highsec don’t mine. Come down to genesiss lowsec and mine! :))))))

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I am repeating this, from the very top of the OP, because some of you are obviously poor readers.

Either say something sensible to support gank victims or say nothing. Its pretty simple. I may not agree with half of Gerard Amatin’s post, but I do believe he is sincere and making an effort to be helpful. It might even be that victims like his advice better than mine, which is fine and possible. Be like Gerard peeps.

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Nothing wrong with mining!

It can be quite relaxing to orbit a rock with lasers on it and it doesn’t take much attention either (unlike for example exploration) which means you can do something else on the side. As a newbie I spent hours mining ore while reading up on the game. It didn’t pay much but gave me enough of a buffer to give me the confidence I could replace ships in case I got ganked.

4 weeks later I left high sec to join a null sec corp and I didn’t even get ganked once in that time. Disappointing.

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The best advice for a gank victim is to reach out to the ganker, ask them what happened , how it could be avoided in future etc . most gankers are happy to help indeed some gankers specifically gank folk to wake them up and get them involved with the game.

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I have to disagree. Strongly. That some gankers are helpful is true. But its also true that some are griefers. There is no point taking the risk when there is guaranteed postive support elsewhere. Flipping a coin is not the way to go.

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i also disagree :slight_smile: the ganker has all the answers to your questions , only he knows why you were ganked . this is a game and there is nothing to be lost by reaching out. if the big bad ebil gankers say mean things to you then just close the chat.

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  1. What’s the risk in contacting a ganker to ask for advice? Best case, you get helpful advice on exactly what you did that enabled the gank to happen from the person who knows exactly what you did that enabled the gank to happen. Worst case, the guy is a unhelpful and you ignore him - nothing lost.

  2. How is there guaranteed positive support elsewhere? Others may not know the situation, may laugh about your misfortune or even if they are helpful may give the wrong advice as they may not have any experience at all with ganks.

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And he may very well lie and gaslight you about it. Its an obvious possibility.

And as you are a known ganker I have to suspect your motives in pushing someone to take the risk.

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Corp mates. Anti-gankers. Help chat. ME.

Not saying its going to be 100 percent kind words but jeez, we have a suggestion that someone maybe reach out to people who live for tears and know how to extract them.

Obviously wrong answer.