EVE General Discussion

I think it might be a ping redfrog or pushx makes, if a freighter warps off I warp to it and roughly 25% of the time that's where he lands.

Let's just say that CONCORD is in the game to deter player on player aggression in highsec, and it does so with a huge factor of success. If there was no CONCORD, I'd kill tens of dozens of freighters a day without losing a single ship, until no one hauled any more. That statement of yours is as wrong as wrong could be.

Also the reason it is lucrative is because people AFK and log off in highsec to avoid interaction with other players. If no one logged off and everyone was at their computer while playing then you'd have a fraction of deaths due to gankers, and hyperdunking would be borderline impossible.

"It is only as lucrative as you let it be. If everyone hauled properly there would be no ganking."


Right, this is what happens in a game with mechanic changes. This happens in every single game, ever. I'm glad you had this revelation.


Are you saying a tactic that punishes AFK, bad, lazy and arrogant players while rewarding the attentive, smart, proactive and adaptive players is a bad thing for eve online?

CONCORD is doing just that. Highsec is still incredibly safe. Almost every ship makes it to its destination. Red Frog Freight completed 99.89% of its contracts last year.

Criminal game play is suppose to exist. CCP has enabled it on purpose so there is actual real game play in highsec which would otherwise be: fit-max yield and AFK. I think they are quite happy with a few career criminals picking the most egregious of the lazy and greedy players off at the edges and providing some risk to professions in highsec.

If too many freighters are dying, I am sure they will look at rebalancing that ship. But the reality is is that there are already two incredibly strong alternatives that are highly-gank resistant: the deep-space transport and the blockade runner. Both when fit and flown correctly are nearly uncatchable. I would not bet on CCP doing anything to fuel the unengaging game play that seems to have taken hold of always moving everything in an AFK freighter.

Players should be the ones adjusting. Hyperdunking is no threat to a hauler that makes any effort, freighter ganking is nearly perfectly avoidable (see Red Frog above) with a single webbing escort, and the T2s can be used alone. There are plenty of choices to move your goods. With the recent trend to increasing risk, CCP will not be doing something to make AFK freighter hauling even safer any time soon.

I'm saying I made the same argument, almost verbatim, about my nano-phoon. It was only a threat to the sick, lame, and lazy, easy to counter, and not an issue. I, the inventive, proactive, and smart player shouldn't be penalized just because those awful players QQ non-stop.

Yeah, but no. It was busted, and even I knew it was busted even while I was making those arguments. Like I was years ago, you are going to become the victim of your own success. Sorry. The nerf-bat cometh for all men eventually.

PS: Damn I miss my nano-phoon.

As i said, ccp will do as it sees fit.

When dueling freighters is nearly as effective as hyperdunking, you know it's not the mechanics that are wrong.

So RFF starting to charge more than spare change for their services to do what is potentially horribly tedious, mind numbing* and soul crushing activity for most is somehow an indication that hisec is not working as intended?

* - the reason I don't quite blame people for not wanting to invest more effort in that... I mean, it's absolutely necessary these days, I understand, but if I were one of them, I would've said "f*** it" long time ago. So props for persisting, I guess...


Ew...
Please, stop killing my faith in people.

It is really neither hear nor there.

In terms of my ops it just means if I want to keep my freight costs the same I will need to stockpile the PI that I haul in from losec until it hits 800 mill instead of just red frogging it off whenever I get a batch of 500 mill.

That is just PR. Freighters are not dying at a much greater rate than last year, if at all, and certainly not 50% or 100% more. They just want to leverage their brand to gouge their customers and cover increased costs due to PLEX. Regardless, Red Frog pilots very well know how to move a freighter in highsec with near perfect safety. If you take some reasonable precautions, you are safe from over 99.9% of typical ganks - ganking losses aren't really a major cost for them as I linked before.

I never said you or other gank victims were "stupid". Highsec is so safe now, that if you lose your freighter it is because you did not bother to protect it (lazy), put so much in it that you drew the attention of someone willing to go to much effort to go after you (greedy), or perhaps were just clueless to the risk.

This is what Eve is all about - judging risk vs. reward and effort vs. reward. If you decide to AFK your load while you go out and catch a movie, you have made a choice that increases your risk but decreases your effort. Similarly, if you decide to shove 8B ISK of goods in that freighter and make a single trip over splitting into 4 or 5 batches and moving them separately, you are increasing your reward, but significantly increasing the risk someone will explode you because it is so profitable to do so.

The game is about trade-offs. The lazy and greedy choose not to spend the time to protect their cargo for whatever reason and sometimes another player calls them on it and destroys their ship. The careful pilot spends effort to protect their ships with escorts and avoids making themselves a target by keeping their cargo values low and scouting the route and therefore is nearly 100% safe. That is why ganking is balanced - it is possible to avoid it with near certainty. Therefore the game is to find the correct amount of effort to spend on an activity appropriate to the risk level to succeed at what you are trying to do.

For example, when I am in high (0.8+) highsec, I'll occasionally use the autopilot button (James 315, please forgive me!) to move my empty, bulk-headed freighter a few jumps through some quiet systems. I know that the risk of losing that ship in that situation is near zero so I am comfortable with that behaviour and risk. However undocking in a trade hub or near a choke point I am on full alert, scouting and webbing, taking every precaution to keep my ship safe.

It's time for you to HTFU and get over whatever loss has brought you to the forums on this crusade. Learn what you did wrong and don't do it in the future. If you lost your freighter to a hyperdunk, then just stay logged-in next time and have a friend come by to steal/blap the hyperdunker's ship. If it was just a regular freighter gank, Google around for the easy rules to follow to keep your ship safe or mail me in the game and I will tell you how you can be essentially perfectly safe moving a freighter in highsec, just like Red Frog does every day. It isn't rocket science, but it takes a small amount of effort, effort that many freighter pilots feel entitled not to have to spend.

Eve is a game all about losses. Ships are suppose to explode: it fuels the war economy this game is based on. Yes, that includes in highsec, and yes that includes ships that "can't shoot back". That is how the game has been designed. A trillion is just a fraction of the losses in the overall Eve economy each month.

And besides, no corp lost 1 T ISK in a month. Red Frog "failed" only 245 contracts (of ~248,000) in all of 2014, and they don't even say how many of those failures were due to ganks. But even 20 a month is nowhere near 1T ISK.


More the second. There is no loophole - criminals are suppose to operate in highsec for exactly your second option, that is to drive conflict and make content in this game. Fight back against those dirty gankers, you really can make a difference and make highsec a more interesting place.

I agree. Highsec income should be nerfed into the ground so that there are not billions of ISK being generated and transported around there in near perfect safety. A massive nerf there would make things more fair and help push people into more content-producing space.