The weird thing to me is that “ganking” seems to be a much bigger issue on the forums than it is in the game.
First off, EVE is always touted as a hardcore, dark, PvP game (even though it really doesn’t live up to any of those labels). So nobody playing EVE should be surprised or uncomfortable with taking losses.
Second, I see very few players come on forums saying “I was ganked, I hated it, I quit!”. A couple of these a month maybe, maybe less than that. I see way more people talking about the bad/good effect of ganking on the game, than people actually complaining they got ganked.
Third, if ganking was all that common, players would start fitting for tank! The only reason someone fits a miner for max yield and little tank, or a hauler for max haul and little tank, is because they haven’t been ganked enough to teach them to tank. They operate for a while, they think it’s safe, they make the decision that “I would rather make more ISK/carry more payload this run than fit for tank”.
If they didn’t feel somewhat safe, they wouldn’t do that. They feel safe because ganking just isn’t happening all that much (in proportion to how much trade/hauling/mining is actually occurring).
The real problem is less about ganking, and simply that EVE is designed so poorly that for some people, mining and hauling in vulnerable ships seems like a productive thing to do. For other people, PvP is so boring and limited that they are willing to hang around high sec scanning for valuable gank targets and ganking them for loot drops instead of participating in actual PvP.
If CCP admitted their management knows nothing about game design, that their designers are basically flailing in the dark, that their programmers are barely competent enough to get chat systems working… then they could maybe start working on the real problem: designing EVE to work the way it’s actually supposed to work.