EVE General Discussion

At the end of the day everybody plays as he see fit and there's no wrong way to play because all choices are perfectly valid. Miner is not worse than ganker, hauler is not worse than mission runner, sov warlord, FW farmer, etc. Game allows you to undock in this ship, go there, and do this stuff to that thing so assigning some kind of moral superiority to any of it is kind of meh.

I have already specifically to you once and Lucas three times. I'm not going to fall for your short memory "show me the same evidence you've shown me two times already" trolling.

I would embrace new gameplay mechanics that allow law-abiding citizens to go after criminals in a meaningful way. If players are willing to spend the effort to secure their space, it should be much harder for criminals to take their stuff. That would be good game play.

But as it is gankers as a profession are completely at the mercy of their targets. If everyone took all precautions, there would be no profit in ganking, and there would next to no ganking at all. Theoretically, ganking only exists because people are willing to take risks with their ships to gain an advantage - to save time, make more money, less effort to do something - and thus expose themselves to the gankers. This is in fact a core part of the game design - balancing the risk vs. reward of your actions to your advantage.

Therefore, it is best to not even think of ganking as a profession, but rather as a in-built game mechanic. The way the ships are balanced dictates an ISK amount that can be fitted/hauled safely, so if you choose to go over that you assume an increasing risk that someone will "cash in" and take your stuff. You can play it safe and take two trips, or take a chance no ganker will notice and overload that T1 hauler to save time. The target is in complete control of the situation and dictates whether they are a profitable target or not. They have the stuff so the risk is on them.

For the ganker, since everything that determines whether an attack is profitable is out of their control, there are no unknown risks for them to take since EHP, DPS, CONCORD times are constant. There is only a small grey area where you don't know the implants and a few other factors, plus the skill in execution which I am ignoring for now. In fact, I have argued this is a failure of game design and gankers should have more variables to process that make assessing gank target profitability less binary, simplest would be varying CONCORD response time. There is also some short-term risk introduced by the loot fairy, but that should even out over a gankers career.

Don't get me wrong, the ganker is still taking risks. Gank ships are paper thin and unexpected ECM has ruined many of my ganks. But these risks come from other players and are inherently less predictable, but also much rarer, and is one reason why it seems that most of the time the ganker is better able to mitigate risk. But unlike the risk of an unseen white knight swooping in and ruining a gank, the risks of making oneself a profitable target to haulers and miners are completely predictable.

This is all good. Players should be able to take on risk to make more reward. And to be honest, most of the time in highsec they will get away with these additional risks. But really they also have to accept these consequences for these risks and understand it is part of the game if a ganker sees them, does the math, and properly executes a gank because the numbers make it in his or her interest to do so.

There was nothing in it.

Yeah, I can agree with the vast majority of that.

While true, this does pretty much ruin the entire purpose of a T1 hauler, since most are restricted to ~10m in value before becoming profitable.

This would be very interesting to be honest. One of the biggest issues with ganking is that there is very little variance. This would add to the complexity of the mechanic in a positive way. It would be good to see a time range from much less than it currently is in a system to much more.

Personally I'd throw into the mix the exit of concord once their job is done to stop pre-prepping systems and to stop concord guarding belts, and I'd further buff up T1 industrials to be low chance of profit below 80-100m or so. I'd like to see more reasons for choice between gank ships too, rather than mainly catalysts and a handful of others for special cases. The hard part though is on the side of retaliation. It's very difficult for someone to get their own back against a ganker because of the disposable nature of them and their ships. Not entirely sure how they could address that one.

exactly! But some people cannot handle it. And you keep getting from them 'these players don't really play this game' or other nonsense.

It sounds like you lost a Jump Freighter in nullsec in which case that kind of thing comes with the territory. It also sounds like you favour overfilling your hauling vessel with expensive cargo in which case you are probably a lost cause.

I will give a few tips for hauling in high sec but most of this is common knowledge:

1) Never autopilot.
2) Consider having a scout vessel and/or a 'web buddy' if flying a Freighter.
3) If setting up a haulage firm keep the contracter/s & hauler/s in separate corporations.
4) You can avoid choke points such as Uedama and stay in high sec systems but the journey will likely be doubled.
5) Consider using a Mastodon instead of a Freighter. A Mastodon can carry one billion ISK in compressed ore.
6) Don't be the guy with billions of ISK cargo in a Freighter or 100's of millions of ISK in a T1 transport.
7) Keeping up to date intel on your contacts list is a good idea to keep an eye out for potential gankers.

Regarding avoiding ganking when mining your primary defence is location. Your secondary defences include being polite and not upsetting other miners, proper ship fits, good intel & contacts lists, use of 'd-scan', low profile, & not being 'afk'.

There's a reason Red Frog limits collateral to 1B isk, and PushX multiplies their fees accordingly for collateral over 1B isk.

That's a possibility, there's several others.

Limiting cargo doesn't do any good if people are using autopilot, double wrapping stuff makes a freighter a piñata, it gets ganked to see what's inside.

Which is exactly why they'll pop the ship it's in, to see what it is. Security through obscurity makes people curious

If the gank is successful and the double wrapped item is worthless or doesn't drop they still get a killmail, if it's valuable and drops they get a killmail and a payday.

Nor do they need to. They are gambling on getting something valuable. Not unlike real life pirates who didn't know if that Spanish Galleon they were taking was full of gold or empty.

Gambling is a legitimate ting in EVE, so long as it's not with a dude named "somer" lol.