I was thinking about this earlier. If a gank fleet has no remorse and uses warp scramblers to lock down their target why do they need to use a Bump Ship?
Can’t they simply warp to the target, mass web and scramble it and then attack it?
LOL, you’re still crying about this? I do it for no other reason than because I can, and that’s the only reason I need…
By the way, bumping isn’t just used for a gank set-up. 90% of the time that’s not even my goal. I mostly use bump tactics against AFK miners or as area-denial.
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gotta love the highsec mechanics, why it seems that the only counterplay to bumping/ganking is to counter-gank?
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you can bump the freighter while you get the fleet in place to gank it. easy for one person to run cargo scan + bumper, then ping people to log in gank alts. Plus if you bump the freighter far enough you can get it out of the range of gate guns, highsec gateguns will kill a destroyer or bomber pretty quickly, by bumping it out of gate gun range you can likely use one or two less pilots to freighter gank.
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The “fewer pilots argument” is completely invalid as CFC and CODE always brings more people to the gank than absolutely necessary. The only reason why people bump is that the gank fleet is not ready and needs to travel to gank system. There is no other reason for it (besides obviously extortion or duel traps).
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No. The combination of the faction police, the time it takes to warp, and the short range of high DPS weapons systems means even a freighter will be long gone in most cases by the time you undock, warp and land on your target even if you have a fleet on standby and ready to undock in many cases. Bumping keeps the freighter tackled and it would be much more costly and difficult (possibly impossible in some cases) to operate as an outlaw. Like tackling does everywhere, it is what enables non-consensual PvP to take place (and PvP where one side changes their mind) in this game.
It’s not really. There are probably a hundred things you can do to counter the criminals ability to bump or gank you which have been enumerated endless times over the years. With small effort and preparation you can eliminate almost all risk of being ganked profitably, and bump-tackling is only a weakness of the largest, and most powerful industrial ships. The inherent agility of most ships make them completely immune to bump-tackling.
Almost nothing dies in highsec when you look at the total amount of goods moved around or even mined there. The game is balanced such that only the most greedy are profitable targets and only the most inattentive are even vulnerable to attack given almost every ship in highsec is immune to traditional tackle as CONCORD will clear them off you in seconds. In the vast majority of cases you are only vulnerable if you walk away from your keyboard, and even then you aren’t profitable to kill so you will most likely be fine.
Freighters (and Orcas) are big and lumbering and vulnerable to having their navigation interfered with by intention bumping of them out of alignment while they attempt to warp. That’s the trade-off for their massive industrial capabilities. Don’t use them if you don’t want to take the risk of being bumped, or prepare in other ways by bringing some friends along for protection.
But Dryson does raise (unintentionally) an interesting point. I wonder how much bumping would go on if the faction police went away (or were changed to a much rarer, not guaranteed spawn)? Gankers would find it much easier to loiter a criminal fleet on or near a gate so perhaps they could just warp directly to a freighter and tackle it with traditional mods instead of bothering with bumping. Maybe there would be less bump-tackling and more opportunity for pew-pew between vigilantes and criminals? Or maybe the increase in highsec gate camping would be too much for the residents of highsec to handle and trade would grind to a halt. Who knows?
Something to think about anyway. 
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Is this even an issue any more? You can anchor citadels on gates. I don’t know why there aren’t any in Uedama by CODE affiliates, but Niarja is littered with citadels on gates. You can just sit there and align to the gate once your scanner has found a target.
15 minute criminal timer means a need to hold targets if the gank fleet can’t undock.
That’s a non-ganker perspective, so not sure how common its used for that purpose.
Maybe, maybe not. Having a gank fleet on grid with a gate might be sufficient to allow gankers to dispense with bumping (although you are limited to targets appear on only that grid), but it doesn’t allow white knights to mess with the gankers as it keeps them invulnerable. Increasing the opportunity for that I think would be a good thing.
But maybe you are right though that criminals will choose to risk a structure to get that sweet tether protection even if the FacPo went away. Not sure. Too bad Upwell structures are such a pain to remove. More unintended consequences there but that is another topic.
Depending on where your scanner finds the target, you can be on a suitable citadel on the targets in-gate. Since structures can and are being placed every where, that should not be a limiting factor. In many cases you don’t even have to use your own structures as other people have already placed some.
That’s hardly an issue. Just recently, CFC and CODE added another ganker family to their roster. In addition to the already known kusion, love, fizzleblade, whyte, uninstall, rozei, tax collector, those WWWWWWMWWW corp alts, tornado girl alts, (and some others that slipped my mind) there are now 15+ Seyllin alts. Since this alt army creation does not seem to subside at all, the 15 minute criminal timer is hardly a hurdle for ganking. Theoretically, you can gank a freighter every 3 minutes in Uedama and Niarja if you have 5 alt armies stationed in each system – entirely without bumping. I think the bigger issue then would be to have enough throwaway alts to loot the wrecks. 
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Sure.
Have you looked at the data to see how many different gank fleets regularly operate at the same time?
Yes. Kusion, Seyllin, Rozei, WWWWMW, tax collector, etc are all active at the same times. That’s because they are alts of one guy. 
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So how many gank fleets are running in parallel all the time? Have you actually looked at the data, or is it just a feeling you have?
Look at the killboard that I linked… It is hard data, not feelings.
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So how many are running in parallel all the time?
If you’ve looked at the data (and just eyeballing off zkillboard is not a great approach to doing so), then it should be an easy question to answer.
All of them run in parallel all the time because the 1 person who owns them just logs in more or less alt families depending on the needs.
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So how many are running in parallel?
Or alternatively (it shouldn’t be hard to answer if you’ve looked at the data), what’s the average time between ganks?
10 gank fleets run in parallel all the time because the 1 person who owns them just logs in more or less alt families depending on the needs.
The times between ganks vary depending on when a scanner finds a target. They can be as low as 3 minutes and as high as almost a whole day.
You’re kidding right.
So the average time between ganks is ~3 minutes then?
That’s what you are saying the data shows, that there is a gank every 3 minutes on average?
No, I am not kidding because there are at least 10 gank alt families … which you would know already if you read my previous posts.
No, I am not saying the average time between ganks is 3 minutes. Only a moron would do that because, as I said previously as well, the times vary depending on the findings of the scanners.
You say there are ganks every 3 minutes on average and I do not know where you get that information or data from.