EVE General Discussion

A gank will be stopped be removing just a few of their ships, they all operate on a fine line.

So yes, ECM, logi and blap boats all work.

Scouts will tell you exactly where the gank is going to take place so you can simply avoid it by going via a different route.

Just tanking your stuff and using the right ships for the job is enough to beat most gank attempts.

Oooh! Comedy option: Scimitar or even Basilisk with all those mids filled with ECM, and the lows with SDAs.
Or, hell, anything with midslots will do, so… Badger II ECM Tayra — nothing like spanking gankers in an indy.

There's no problem with ganking mechanics as they are now if the intention is for EVE to be a game primarily for sadists. If there's supposed to be "space for everyone" though, then there is a problem when it comes to HS ganking whether you like it or not.

I don't think HS should be "safe", but right now the issue is that it's simply too safe for pirates - specifically, it's just not risky enough to gank. Gank targets also have almost no way to fight back - kill rights and war decs are supposed to provide some form of this in the game but they fail miserably. Gankers usually just fly cheap stuff anyway, so even if you manage to destroy their fleet or cause their gank attempt to fail, they don't lose very much. If the intended victim brings a fleet to fight back and win, why shouldn't the gankers lose something of non-negligible value?

If you can't see how the current state of HS and gank mechanics makes EVE a bad game to play for a pretty common demographic, then you're missing something. If EVE simply isn't for those people, then the game is fine as is. Personally, I don't see the downside of supporting both play-styles, though. Give freighters something to fight back with (if this mechanic already exists and is fine as Tippia suggests then why does it *never* happen?).

If you find ganking fun, then there's plenty of that type of content in the game already. Just gate camp anywhere and some shiny will come along and you can have your "tears" and "fun". If you want to gank in HS though, there should be a significant cost associated with it so that value/HP of the target (or equivalent metric) is always meaningful. Otherwise it's just a turkey shoot (and no different from low/null), and only a specific type of people find that kind of gameplay fun.

Yes I'm sure that I am I'm wondering if you are. Yes I understand that you can attack these guys once they attack. When you travel through any of the high 0.5 sec gates on the main pipes you see dozens of gankers sitting there and I know of no ship that can lock up dozens of ships at once so you need wait and see who shoots and wait for them to go red before you can lock and either ECM them or shoot at them in either case they only plan on making it about 15 seconds or so anyway so if you can't even attempt to shoot or jam them for 5 or so seconds you are not taking that ship out of the equation only reducing it's effectiveness.

For gankers to add another ship or two just incase you have help which they will do if more people start having escorts is not a huge expense increase but having escorts is.

As far as -10 pilots I'm not a ganker and don't know how they gank like they do but I am assuming they are off grid and jump in ship stored in an orca and warp to gank when their scouts tell them the freighter will be on grid. Yes you can shoot -10 players but they are going flashy red as soon as they land an lock anyway so the sec status has nearly no adverse affect.

I am not saying that there is nothing that friends could do to help what I am saying is that you need expensive T2 ships like command ships and they need to always be with all of the freighter pilots all the time where as the gankers only need to counter that with a couple extra cheap T1 ships and only when the gank is happening.

On one side you have a need for more expensive ships to permanently be with you and on the other side you have cheaper ships that only need to be there for the time that the gank is happening. I don't do this game play so it does not affect me. I'm just saying there is no balance here and the risk versus reward ratio just does not match up.

You get taken into a special chat room and ...

There is plenty of space for everyone as it is, without having to be a sadist. What you have to be is aware — that is all.

How is it not risky? They automatically lose everything; they might not even get to the gank because they get destroyed beforehand; they have to contend with the RNG, the loot fairy, and the local chancers; and they are almost entirely at the mercy at the decisions made by the targets. No viable target — no gank. Above all, if it's that risk-free, how come it is so exceedingly rare? Why aren't ship blowing up all over the place with pirates flocking to the activity?

And there are plenty of ways to fight back, many of them listed in this thread. What you mean to say is that “gank targets have almost no will to fight back”, because that is literally the only thing that is stopping them. They give up, they soak up the loss, maybe whine a bit, and then do nothing. And all of that is after they've made the decision to be hapless victims rather than hard targets, which is another way they can fight back (but refuse to).

The reason it never happens is because a) the persistent but 100% false myth that nothing can be done so people refuse to even try, b) laziness, both intellectual and in terms of actually putting in an utterly minute smidgen of work, so even if they don't refuse for mythical reasons, they refuse because of :effort:

Weeeell… ok then.

You don't have to lock dozens of them. You just have to lock 2–3 and nullify them. That's all it takes for the gank to fail. More to the point, if you see a dozen ganker hanging around a gate, you don't have to lock any of them to make the gank fail. All you do is pick another route.

It costs them far more than the escort does. More ISK is lost; the loot has to be split in more portions; and above all, you have to actually find those extra people to sit around for ages doing nothing. Cost comes in more forms than just ISK — good old labour cost is one of them and it is hugely expensive, here as everywhere else. The half a dozen additional gankers needed inherently means far higher labour costs than the single escort pilot.

Even those odds seem insanely high, as in “off by an order of magnitude or three”.

e: In fact, just looking back the past week, we have one day with a decent number of freighter kills: the 26th. Uedama saw 4 of them, Niarja and surrounding systems saw 7. How many hundreds of freighters pass through those choke points in a single day?

Given the millions of trips made every month and the few dosen that are killed I would say It exceedingly rare.

Believe it or not, many people find ganking boring af. Doesn't mean it's balanced.

I'd agree, as Tippia points out, my odds are a far worse case scenario than the reality.

Some people won't be happy until Polaris are purveyors of the finest freighters with monster EHP and godlike resists across the board, then moan because they still manage to lose them to gankers.