I had an exchange with you a while back and you basically gave me the HTFU attitude on the subject of bumping freighters in hisec. I have laid out in multiple threads over the years why this is an issue. So I am going to give you another chance by saying why it is an issue.
To prevent you giving me the HTFU attitude I want to make it clear that ganking is part of the game, I have no issue with it overall. My interest is balance, for a long time after the Catalyst had its ROF penalty removed I pressed CCP on the forums to rebalance mining ships and two and a half years later they did. The balance is correct here as miners can select a ship and fit for tank, or they can select a ship and fit for yield.
My issuing with bumping is that it is a mechanic that gets around the consequences of initiating hostile action in hisec, where a bumper can hold a player for hours. For many hisec players they have one or two accounts, if they get bumped they have no options, they are stuck. By it’s nature hisec is for players that are more solo orientated or small groups.
Once you are bumped your only option is to gank the bumper and that takes three accounts with Gallente BC 5 and of coure Large Blaster specialisation to 4. So from that perspective the solo or small group player is screwed, they have no counter on what is a poor mechanic.
And at the end of the day if you are a solo single account player running around as a freighter hauler in hisec you just have to sit and take it.
When you look at player based opposition to this, the ability to hold a freighter up like that means that the gankers can bump someone until they can form up a gank fleet, it gives them total control of the battlespace in terms of when and where. I want to see the gank take place on the gates like they do with JF’s in Jita, it would make the act of freighter ganking more fun and more inclusive and give options to the players to use the criminal status against them with the use of gate cloaks and of course taking out the suicide point and add additional cost to the freighter gankers by making tags required.
There are a number of options, the first is perhaps to adjust the safe logoff so that it works after five minutes if someone is targeting you. Another option is to give freighters the same fitting options as the Bowhead, with the ability to fit a BS MWD to make getting into warp easier and perhaps use this pulsed to warp to someone in fleet.
What are the options that you want to see on this issue to give solo players flying freighters in hisec an option to counter this play which is largely carried out by multi-boxing players backed by large resources from nullsec alliances.
At the moment the main freighter ganking players have got bored with this farming, it could also be that they are aware of interest in this, I did have an exchange with Hilmar on this in the AMA on the forums and he said that they were looking at the collision models which was some way off and were looking for suggestions for a team who was looking at this.
So as a player who defines himself as hisec, what is your view on a mechanic that is unbalanced against solo hisec players?
