Crime & Punishment

Freighter pilots of the High-sec.

You are not safe. No matter how many people are around, or how clear the area looks, no matter what anyone says, no matter what you think, you are not safe. It only takes one second. One second and it's over. Never let your guard down, ever. I want you to promise me.

I am not sure you understand these terms you are throwing around. A 'themepark' is a specific gaming term to describe a video game experience where the player's path is largely determined by the developer. The content is usually scripted and the the choices open to the player are limited so they must follow a predetermined path. Eve missions are a good example of largely themepark content.

Highsec ganking is none of these things. It is an embodiment of the opposite type of gaming experience, the sandbox, where the player can generate content in whatever ways they can think up. Gankers form groups, hunt targets, and effect ganks in whatever ways they choose, in ways that are not necessarily planned by the developer using the emergent rules of the sandbox. Hyperdunking, the nominal topic of this thread, is a good example of this as CCP never intended for the Bowhead to enable this form of freighter ganking. As we all know, when they looked at it they decide that hyperdunking was indeed an emergent tactic and completely legal. Maybe CCP will change that, maybe they won't but it currently is how CCP expects highsec to work.

Highsec is not "unbalanced". CCP intends for their to be risk there which there currently is. Clearly you think you should and couple of your AG associates should be able to shut down the combined effort of dozens or hundreds of highsec gankers, but as any reasonable outsider would agree, that would be unbalanced. You have all the tools already - probably too many tools - to be nearly perfectly safe in highsec and that is enough for game balance. And you are getting yet another with the T2 destroyer.

Ok enough of this. Dracvlad, you said your time "was better spent elsewhere" in Eve than as a anti-ganker, and by extension, whining about ganking on the forums. Shouldn't you go back down to nullsec and shoot some things rather than complaining on the forums about things you said were not important? Freighter ganking isn't a threat remember?

Code tears are the most tasty tears ever, period. I always enjoy a lot when CCP bring some new ganking nerfs, just to see all that pathetic "tough guys" producing rivers of salty water on forums https://bookhoarding.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/crying.jpg?w=645

A spot on post, to me it is pretty obvious, to Lucas it is pretty obvious and he ganks.

You lot the gankers, are just unable to jump out of you rhetoric and assess the issues of just how easy it is for gankers and how difficult it is for AG players.

I repeat I see the hisec sandbox as a gankers themepark which is why you can just gank and gank and gank and there is nothing that the hisec players can do about it except just take the hits which is not fun and you are fine with that, the hisec player base has shrunk to those that can take it due to wealth and those that make themselves difficult to gank, all the casual players are no longer playing Eve, I am sure you are happy with that too, maybe CCP is happy about that too, if they are thats pretty suicidal...

Well done, I have not lost a single ship to gankers either, well apart from one thrasher when I charged into a load of Russians ganking a freighter, but that was actually me going for kills I was not the helpless gank target.

My aim is to make it so that anti-ganking is actually possible to create a more fun environment for hisec players to fight back, you of course just retreated back into rhetoric.

Yeah that's a fair comment and I agree with it, ganking is fairly straightforward in its execution. The hard bit is keeping enough members active to form a fleet on demand. Lets not forget, straightforward as it may be it's also fairly time intensive in terms of man hours, a single freighter gank consumes 1 man hour for every 4 pilots involved; with a fleet of 20 gankers, every kill requires 5 man hours of time.

I think that part of the problem is that they aren't prepared, or are unable, to field the numbers required. As above a freighter gank fleet of 20 puts in 5 man hours for every gank, successful or not; is it not reasonable to assume that to counter a fleet of that size that AG should be fielding a fleet of similar size/ability or putting in a similar amount of effort?

I can't comment on the first part, I don't know enough about how AG works to do so; with reference to the big fat pile of loot, that is entirely down to the person who decided to undock with it in cargo in the first place.

There are other reasons that AG is considered a joke, this is but one of them

Making ganking harder and more expensive wouldn't overly affect them, as with every other change to their play-style in the past they would adapt and possibly escalate their operations. 6-18 months later, we'd be back with people saying "If only ganking was harder and more expensive", just as we are now.

@Drac if you can keep it on topic I'm willing to take part in a civilised discussion with you, accusing me of rhetoric and ignoring the main question that I was asking is not keeping it on topic.

Your new name is CCP Betelgeuse

I stopped quite a few, it was just a case of patrolling around the pipes, picking up the signs such as a freighter, catalysts, flashy reds, lurking freighter and bowhead then just scan it down. After that get reppers on the freighter and blow up the catalysts, after that a number of things could happen, the freighter would warp out and there was a save, the bumper keeps at it and brings in a gank fleet, or the bumper manages to trick the freighter into accepting a dual with an alt having held him for hours and then blows him up.

Misdirection is good tactics, I'm going to paint a theoretical picture here using Uedama as an example.

I believe Uedama has 5 gates and 3 stations giving 8 viable ganking areas, only 3 of which are especially dangerous. In this theoretical picture, gankers have a bumping Machariel staged at 3 of the 5 gates; what is to stop AG using the gankers tactics of already having a warp in (in the form of these Machariels) by closely shadowing those bumping Machariels and using the Dscan to watch for incoming gankers within a range and direction that makes it pretty certain they're headed that way, and providing a warp in to your logi/dps fleets as required?

Do you think that waiting out a 15 minute GCC timers for every 2 or 3 minutes that you're undocked, because Concord will kill anything you undock in, is engaging gameplay?

Man hours and hours are not the same thing.

Do you know what makes ganking engaging, despite spending 90% of the time being docked up due to timers? The people they do it with.

We are talking about easy to train up gank toons and people who are null sec players with large numbers of accounts, I have two support toons on Dracvlad that could gank, I have one of my other account, would that 15 minutes bother me, nope, therefore the 15 minute GCC means nothing to them. And as you know they undock once in a shuttle or noob ship and that is that in terms of CONCORD effectively. I waited for that then blew up the pod a couple of times, had a couple end up back in null sec, but most of the time no impact.

It was not just Uedama, it was all along the pipe, we would have people shadowing the Macherial's, but there was so many that were actively bumping that we often had to rely on passing intel. The gankers with Hyperdunking as a tool therefore focussed on the Au TZ late US pacific TZ to do their stuff which had very low coverage by AG players.

So you comment about the GCC is wrong, I also know that many of teh gankers were in Goon fleets on their mains at times too.