Zkill and pointless ganking

Played this game for years but stopped about a year ago. But I came back recently to have another look and see If i might get back into it again?

SALT ALERT!

This toon is in FW. I like the fast and furious frigate/dessie pvp. I logged on, got in a coercer and there was a punisher in one of the plexes (yes I know I should have known but i hadn’t played in ages). when I warped to the gate it was outside. It immediately scrammed me and so fight ensued. I was interested to see how it would unfold. I had gotten scrammed (cos im bad) and was expecting it to orbit so I couldn’t track and it would prob kill me. But that’s not what happened. What happened was his mate decloaked in a Loki and wrecked me. These were not war targets they were neuts. I looked at his zkill and this is what he does. They had gone through all the bother of coming to FW space just to kill little ships that were looking for 1v1 pvp. Yes, Eve online is supposed to be hardcore, blah blah. But where is the fun in this? I couldn’t care less about a coercer I can make 1000’s of them, but that’s not the point. It was just a waste of my time and theirs!!! I’ve got no problem with killing explorers, traders or anyone else. I loved being in wh in a little t1 frigate trying to run sites and worrying about cloaky flycatchers…or running expensive cargo through low-sec…great! But what these guys are doing is utterly without reason and doesn’t provide any fun for anyone, not even them! it was just …meh, why do you bother?

Conclusion: I blame zkill. Some people and corps are obsessed with their stats on this and play this average results based crap instead of actually having fun. Prob been said many times but Eve Online would be a better game if there was no zkillboard. If they didn’t get a little bit of green on their page they wouldn’t have bothered doing it.

If CCP cant get rid of it then give FW a bit of tlc and change the RoE in and around plexes somehow so people with this lame mentality can’t stop others enjoying the game.

I’m under no illusions that anything like this will happen, but until it does, i won’t be playing, cos it’s boring and there are better games. (no you can’t have my stuff)

1 Like

Actually i have a better example:

This happened a long while back but it was FW again and i got wrecked by a bunch of guys doing a gate camp I think. (I cant really remember exact details). One of the guys was new player and he asked me what I was doing there (I was Calmil but was over in Ammar FW space) and I was chatting to him about throwaway frigates and that it was a good way to learn pvp and it’s fun etc… You know what he said?

“I’m not allowed to do that, my corp doesn’t like me losing ships”

WTF? Poor guy was trying to learn the game, and was just orbiting a gate all day and ‘wasnt allowed to lose ships’ Reason: His corp leader wanted a badass looking corp on Zkill. It doesn’t even make sense, cos even a little bit of looking soon uncovers what this corp were doing and they looked anything but ‘badass’, they looked like idiots.

Just get rid of it

1 Like

I have my issues with killboards - or rather some people’s obsession with them - but removing them won’t stop these kinds of things happening. Some people just enjoy ganking things, and the salt that brings them. Removing stats won’t change that.

I also doubt CCP will ever consider killing of things like zkill. Just recently they added a bunch of stat collection things to the actual game (Activity Tracker) so they seem to be going the exact opposite route. I honestly wouldn’t be shocked to see killboards be included in-game one of these days.

1 Like

Cheers for reply. I hear you, some people will just gank whatever sure. But no zkill would get rid of a lot of the motivation. That guy would have gotten some small tech 1 modules from my ship. The funny thing is he actually lost a loki a few weeks before doing the same thing it seems! There is the other side too. So many players play with a lot of fear, (particularly younger players i think) fear of losing ships, not because they can’t replace them but because of the perceived shame in ‘gettin rekt’. We all know that actually, overcoming the fear of losing and just going out and yoloing a bit, makes you a much better player in the end and you get a lot more enjoyment from the game. If CCP go down this road they should defo consider having a system where at least the loser remains anonymous somehow which would alleviate that fear factor a bit and encourage people to do some ‘proper’ PvP. More fun, better game imo.

I often wonder what the game would be like without zkill too but we’ll never be rid of it. If Squizz shut it down, someone else would just create another. I do think that a lot more people would undock and take chances given there was no intel report on pilots like that. Also, I too have been found guilty of such and if there was no killboard, I’d lose dumb ■■■■ everyday, lol.

1 Like

Yes me too. I’m not sure how it works exactly but I think that CCP could withhold/restrict access to the info so nobody would be able to do it? A lot if it is very much just an in game culture thing. CCP could do more to discourage that kind of play even without any actual sanctions or rule changes, just by encouraging different play styles. Also, I did notice that solo kills were more clearly marked on Zkill a while back which was very slight improvement. Eg. You could see more clearly so called 98% ‘dangerous’ players who don’t even have a solo kill. If Zkill introduced a more complex system rather than just a running total of ISK. Like a ‘Battle Rating’ System? So the kill only scores points if where the ISK value of the ships involved are of similar value or less, but if you kill a Coercer in a Loki you get virtually nothing.

To some this is fun. Just like some like mining, HS ganking, exploring, market trading, etc…

How do you know they aren’t having fun? Just because you don’t get to have fun doesn’t mean they don’t get to have fun either. Who knows, maybe they enjoy murdering hapless t1 dessies

Oh absolutely, that whole “dangerous/snuggly” deal is so flawed. The math he uses to get the numbers don’t really reflect your “dangerousness”. Although the solo marking is nice.

I’ve been trying to think a good metric for what we’d really want to measure for some time now but it’s actually rather tricky. You know it when you see it, but to put it into a formula that a computer can do is actually not trivial.

If it wasn’t zKillboard, then it would be something else. Too many people make tools for Eve and zKillboard is best at what it does so hasn’t been replaced.

People like stats and a way to see progression. Killing a rookie in a rookie ship trying to get to PH from HS that literally just started the game or going suspect in a dudes Level 4 site trying to get them to attack you with his Rattlesnake, or using the holidays as making yourself look like a good guy in Jita to scam someone are all pretty shitty things to do but also a part of the game. Just mark them -10 and then next time you will see them coming and you can bring in your friends to destroy them. :smiley:

Love this game!

1 Like

You can’t stop killboards from existing, but I fully agree with you on the issue. People are no longer playing this game for fun, they play it for completely unimportant stats on an irrelevant website. So many times I was told that I am not allowed to fly expensive ships, or even do my own fittings, because it might hurt their ISK ratio on the killboard.

I had long debates with the main doctrine designers to get them to realize that other fittings than the standard Ferox fitting exists, but they were so afraid of loosing ISK balance, that they’d rather repeat the exact same battle over and over again before they even consider doing something just for fun.

I even heard of corps that forbid you to fly ships > 80m whenever they have an expensive loss to “recover” from that. This is so stupid it hurts.

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.