So how is this player able to kill everything so easily by himself in a Tornado in just 3 seconds? Don’t people use shields anymore?
Also how does this player have no Concord losses in his killmail? It seems to me that these are all suspect kills. I don’t think this player is suicide ganking at all.
These people don’t want to:
and then they whine when their ‘strategy’ doesn’t work.
To quote a character in the Simpsons:
Please allow us to reprocess Security Tags to convert to refined materials.
We should hold them ransom and upload videos of these tags being reprocessed.
Yeah let’s rattle this cage!
The counter play, as they say, is to not fly & haul anything that costs much more than however many cheap fitted ships gankers lose, so they won’t gank you and pick more lucrative targets.
ie.
Do not mine in a Retriever fitted for ore yields. At the very least, fit it for max tank so it requires 4 cheaply fitted DDs to gank. Making it unprofitable, besides farming for tears. Ofc, the counter argument to this is stop mining in HS in a tank fit, since the yields are so pathetic its a waste of your time.
Definitely do not bling your PvE ships and fly it anywhere within 10 jumps of Jita. L4 missions are a joke u don’t need bling fits. Abyssals? Do it far away from Jita.
The truly ‘toxic’ thing is the endless flurry of people such as yourself claiming to speak on behalf of ‘thousands’ who you’d never met and have no frikin genuine idea at all as to why they left or even whether they actually did….as these are all people you’ve just invented out of thin air.
That is what is toxic. The endless invisible hordes that you conjure up like some spectral army all supposedly supporting your rant.
Somewhere on these forums ( I simply can’t be bothered finding it again…but its been posted numerous times ) there’s a pie chart CCP themselves produced with their own data…..not stuff you invented….which showed that out of those who left EVE within the first month, only 1% left due to ganking . Actual data. Not invisible spectral hordes.
Yup, he’s doing what I often do. Waiting for suspects to show up. He doesn’t need to know the EHP of the target ship. It either explodes ( Tornado can do 15K or so of Alpha ) or it doesn’t…and he’ll have a safe spot to run to if there’s trouble.
That said, there are actual gankers using Tornados…often solo. They’ll have scanned the target ship first and quickly worked out whether they have enough alpha to gank it. They are usually directly in line with the undock path…so there is minimal traversal. And, of course, the target generally has to drop more than the 100m ISK or so value of their Tornado…..so its generally unsuspecting haulers with low tank.
I don’t know that I would really call any of this “the” counterplay. They’re good survival strategies, especially for players who are newer or are struggling with ganking because they’re the easiest strategies to implement relative to the amount of safety afforded.
It is not like I, myself, am going to fly a cheap brick in the ass-end of nowhere as a ganking mitigation strategy, but I will absolutely tell someone complaining about ganking to do it because it is effective with no particular skill required.
(Smart) ganking has no direct counterplay because gankers only execute a play when they know they won’t be countered. The indirect counterplay is to factor in the risk, tank your ships, or train into blockade runners and ignore it entirely. The sole issue I ever had was unlucky gate spawns (being within uncloaking distance of something), which happens very rarely.
Or do they drone up gates these days?
I’ve traded for years without issue by tanking up (and back in the day containers matterred against scanning, not sure if that’s still the case). A grand total of ONE attempt was made on my ships, it failed, I got a killright, and destroyed the guy’s Orca a few days later. 
That was pure luck though. A smart capsuleer wouldn’t risk an Orca like that.
Also, training into Blockade Runners = problem solved. Remember gankers are F1 monkeys that learned to calculate EHP but they won’t pursue / get off their perch. Their play is countered with (un)docking bookmarks. It sucks having to store hundreds of bookmarks just to prevent landing just outside of docking range, but it helps a ton whne you’re 100% sure you can immediately get in/out.
Either balls of steel or a brain of rock to undock an Orca with a kill right ongoing…
A little trick I often use…at a station where I have no bookmark.
Wait for ‘Docking request made’ to be announced, and then immediately hit afterburner. You can often knock a few seconds off the docking delay, especially at those stations where there’s quite a delay before being ‘accepted’.
Don’t assume there is no counterplay to ganking just because you are too stupid, lazy or dumb to figure it out.
Yet another in a long list of ‘someone needs to do something about this, but not me, but someone does’ ■■■■■ about it until someone else solves your problem idiot miner thread.
Hello,
After reading through the entire discussion, I think the problem many people are trying to point out is not that suicide ganking exists, but that the current risk vs reward balance and long-term consequences for the activity are extremely weak.
EVE absolutely needs piracy and asymmetric PvP. Suicide ganking has always been part of the sandbox. The issue being raised here is not the existence of the mechanic — it’s how easy it is to sustain indefinitely with almost no meaningful strategic downside.
Several points repeatedly come up in this thread.
First, security status has effectively lost its meaning as a punishment system. The whole purpose of the mechanic was supposed to be that repeated criminal activity eventually pushes characters out of high-sec or forces them to accept severe limitations. In reality, repairing security status is relatively cheap and easy through tags or simple grinding. Some posters even broke down the costs showing that moving from outlaw status back into usable high-sec standings can cost surprisingly little relative to the profits generated by ganking operations.
When a mechanic designed as a penalty can be bypassed with relatively minor effort, it stops functioning as a penalty at all.
Second, the decision power in these encounters is completely asymmetric. The ganker chooses:
when to attack
where to attack
what target to attack
and can attempt it repeatedly until the optimal conditions appear
Meanwhile the target often has no meaningful way to force engagement or retaliation. Even players in the thread point out that the attacking side decides when the fight happens, which heavily skews the win/loss ratio.
Third, the economic loop is extremely stable.
Even critics of the complaints acknowledge that profitability is a core driver of the activity. Once the infrastructure and alts are set up, ganking becomes a repeatable economic activity rather than an exceptional act of piracy.
This creates a strange situation where an activity that is supposed to represent criminal risk-taking becomes one of the most mechanically optimized and sustainable gameplay loops in high-sec.
That does not mean it should be removed.
But it does mean that the cost side of the equation needs adjustment.
For example:
making security status recovery significantly harder or slower
increasing the long-term logistical burden of criminal activity
introducing stronger consequences for repeated criminal actions in high-sec
creating more windows of counterplay (for example when kill rights are activated)
None of these remove ganking.
They simply make it behave more like actual piracy: high risk, high consequence, and situational.
And this brings me to something that rarely gets mentioned in these discussions.
If CCP is worried about ship destruction numbers, there is a much bigger structural problem in the game today: the geopolitical stagnation of null-sec.
For years now the game has effectively been dominated by two massive power blocs. Their industrial base, supercapital umbrellas, and coalition structures make them extremely difficult to challenge. Large scale wars have become rarer and more controlled, and the strategic destruction that once drove the economy happens far less frequently.
In other words:
If ship destruction is needed for the economy, the answer should not be relying on permanent high-sec ganking farms.
The healthier solution would be to address the structural mechanics that make large power blocs nearly untouchable and reduce incentives for meaningful large-scale conflict.
EVE is at its best when destruction comes from:
wars
territorial conflicts
strategic campaigns
player driven politics
—not from endlessly farming haulers on market undocks.
Suicide ganking should remain a tool in the sandbox.
But right now it behaves less like piracy and more like a highly optimized industrial activity with minimal strategic downside.
And that is probably why this topic keeps returning to the forums year after year.
o7
The economic loop of ganking is only as stable as result of player choices, or perhaps I should call it player ‘mistakes’.
If people were to consider ganking to be a big risk worth taking precautions against and fit their ships to have relatively high EHP and relatively low cargo or fittings value to the point that killing their mining ships and combat ships is not profitable, the economic loop of ganking suddenly would turn very unstable.
Luckily the majority of players do not consider ganking to be a major issue; these players happily ignore basic precautions or assume they have been lucky often enough and will again be lucky this session and fit expensive modules and move expensive cargo taking big risks.
It is these players who make the choice to supply gankers with as you call it a ‘stable’ income.
I agree ganking doesn’t need to be removed.
I disagree that the cost side needs adjustment.
After all, if players thought ganking was a big issue, say, a bigger issue than it was now the high sec players could easily make ganking unprofitable. But players choose not to do so.
If players do not wish to do so, that’s a sign to me the gank cost does not need interference from CCP either.
Whataboutism.
Yes, I agree null sec could be healthier.
I also think it’s silly to suggest null sec destruction should take over the high sec destruction.
If you ask me, all parts of space should contribute to destruction in the game.
I think this is a very flat and overly simplified way of looking at the situation.
Your argument assumes that the entire ecosystem of players in high-sec consists of rational actors constantly calculating risk, EHP thresholds, and gank profitability. In reality that is simply not how the game works.
First, new players exist.
New players do not have:
high tank skills
expensive defensive fits
large wallets
deep knowledge of ganking mechanics
Telling new players to “just increase EHP” is not a realistic solution. Increasing EHP often means significantly increasing the cost of the ship and its fittings, which ironically makes the eventual loss even more painful. And if you look at killboards, even well-tanked ships die regularly when a determined gank group decides to attack.
Second, the idea that players choose to supply gankers with income is not accurate.
Players are not logging in with the intention of participating in a risk optimization problem against gankers. They are simply engaging in routine gameplay:
running missions
mining
hauling goods
exploring
harvesting gas
transporting industry materials
These are basic gameplay loops. Expecting every single player in this enormous group to remain in a constant state of vigilance and defensive optimization against ganking is unrealistic.
Third, the decision power still lies entirely with the ganker.
The ganker decides:
when the attack happens
where it happens
how many ships participate
whether the target is worth attacking
Even a well-prepared target often has no meaningful opportunity to respond once the gank begins. A competent gank group will not attack unless they already know the outcome. That is why killboards are full of cases where ships with perfectly reasonable tanks are destroyed in seconds.
Fourth, your argument unintentionally highlights the core issue.
If everyone truly followed your advice and increased tank significantly, the logical outcome would not be the disappearance of ganking. Instead it would simply lead to gankers optimizing further, bringing more ships, using more alts, and increasing coordination. The result would be larger and more organized gank fleets, not the disappearance of the activity.
In other words, your reasoning does not reduce the economic loop of ganking — it encourages it to scale up.
Finally, the claim that ganking only exists because players are careless ignores the fundamental asymmetry of the mechanic.
In most PvP scenarios both sides take a risk.
In suicide ganking the attacker already knows:
the exact EHP threshold
the exact damage window
the exact CONCORD response time
The outcome is often calculated before the first shot is fired.
This is precisely why many players argue that the activity currently resembles a highly optimized income activity rather than emergent PvP.
Calling it merely the result of “player mistakes” overlooks the structural mechanics that enable it to function so consistently.
My God….what a load of ChatGPT enhanced word salad verbal diarrhea. And the notion that players are not logging into a game that involves risk is just utter BS.
And why are you anti-gank people always posting on alts that show no sign of having logged into the game since 2013 ? All your 200 alts have maybe 1 kill between them in the past 15 years…..yet you seek to lecture people about the game. Quite comical !
I went through one of your chatgpt posts, I’m not doing it again.
If you wish to have people respond to (or even read) your arguments, don’t make your readers suffer through vastly more lazily generated text than necessary.
Unless that is of course your strategy, to spam chatgpt essays in the hopes that people stop reading and stop responding, letting you ‘win’ the argument.
Reading seems to be the real challenge here.
The irony is that while complaining about the length of arguments, neither of you actually added anything meaningful to the discussion. And that’s usually the pattern with this group of players — dismiss, mock, repeat — but rarely engage with the substance of what was actually said.
you are funny, especially when both of you camp in high-sec while having considerable financial benefits from it. Go ahead, hold on to the bowl. What’s even funnier is that when someone calls you out, you start attacking people personally. Sad…….
A moment will come when CCP cleans up this “sticky dirt.”
That’s because there was no substance.