EVE General Discussion

Id say everyone would dispute that the inventor is taking a risk. Simply because its not a risk when you knowingly lose the materials in an calculated process that you know evens itself out profitably for you in the long run.

This same process goes for suicide ganking ... nobody ganks 1 target ... they gank many .. the operating cost (lost ship vs dropped loot) will balance itself out to be profitable for the gankers.

Both inventors and suicide gankers are essentially same booring industrial farmers.


Only possibility to create artificial risk to both actions would be to do it with your last money knowingly that unless you get big payoff you wont have enough isk continue the cycle. But for either profession that is not the case in 99.99%

Of course since Concord still only spawns after I've triggered my 1400mm howitzers, your barge is still space debris regardless of my currently targeting predicament.

I'll assume you're speaking to Herr Exploitus

Can you stop talking about stuff you have no idea about and then going the usual TRALALALA I AM RIGHT when people kindly points you out how it's COST OF BUSINESS.

If you had a 100M ship in low sec that shoots a 3M projectile that always kills a Mackinaw, then 3M is the cost of business.

If you "are" the 3M projectile that always kills a Mackinaw then 3M is the cost of business.

The risk is there: 20% of the time the Mackinaw will NOT die (for many factors), that's your RISK.

If you're suicide ganking in hisec and not losing your gank ship to CONCORD, you're committing an exploit by evading CONCORD.
The clue is in the word suicide

Some of us call the loss of a suicide gank ship the cost of doing business, some of us call it risk.

Either way it basically breaks down to balancing your guaranteed cost/risk against the possible lols, loot drop and tears to be had.

I'm firmly in the "it's a cost of doing business camp", as you say suicide gank boats are a consumable albeit an expensive consumable, the same way ammunition is a consumable.

Eh, sounds like some hair splitting going on.

My issue is with people that go around propagandizing that suicide ganking involves no risk to the ganker, therefore deserves no reward - and therefore should be removed from the game. One could easily turn around the 'cost of business' angle and say that miners losing their Barges is simply a 'cost of business' as well. Over a long enough period of time AFK-mining without a tank, you are going to lose Exhumers to gankers.

However, it sounds like you acknowledge that ganking involves significant risk.

Certainly, the odds of any given suicide attack are in favor of the ganker - but that is because he chooses when and where to strike - and 95% of the mining population do not even take the simplest of precautions. But that doesn't mean failure is impossible. Gunnery has a random number component which widely modifies artillery shots. 3rd Parties can always interfere on your behalf. Even lag plays a significant role when your window of operation is seconds.

A miner might even L2tank - or be at the keyboard and warp out. Crazy, I know.

Losing any ship to concord is not a risk factor. Once you decide to suicide your ship you take all risk out of the equation because it was a choice you made that is 100% certified for you to lose your ship.

Risk is the "dangers" of any action that you will take. By knowing the "dangers" you face you calculate how much is at "risk" and how you can lower your "risk level". When you know for certain that you are going to lose this for doing that then to say something like suicide ganking is risky means that you are a ******.

Now where the monetary risk lies is in the person that is going to scoop the cargo. Anyone can target and hit F1 and kill a hulk or a cargoship. Who is the fastest at grabbing the contents that survive though.

I also don't understand why you guys act like there is a fixed price to ganking.
But it is not - its highly variable and based on a random number generator.

A typical gank-fit T2 Catalyst (capable of soloing an Exhumer) costs around 1M for the hull, and maybe 10-18M for the mods.
A typical 50M ISK T2 Tornado (capable of killing 2 Mackinaws or a Hulk + a pod) is sporting around 40-50M in mods.

Anywhere between 0 and 100% of them could survive - and in the case of Destroyers, thats 95% of the entire cost.
Leave the target and explosion out of it - I could lose anywhere from 1M to 20M per Catalyst.

You can pretend that 'consuming' your own ship is a 'fixed' cost - but thats wrong because there is a significant 'random' factor there because you are 'rolling the dice' on your OWN costs on each attempt.

....as well as the chance of success
...AND the chances of getting good drops.

Over a long enough time period, drop rates should approach 50%, but on any given attempt the actual costs are somewhat out of your control - unknown until you actually perform the gank.

Sometimes you get all 8x of your T2 1400MM arties back, sometimes you don't get any - assuming someone doesn't manage to steal them first.

I'm not saying that there is a fixed cost to suicide ganking, it is indeed a variable cost depending on what drops from the target. What is a fixed cost is the price of your ship, you lose it no matter what, the variable part of it comes into play with loot from your target and the modules you recover from your own ship, the variable is the profit, sometimes you win sometimes you lose.

Either way you have to offset the initial cost of your gank ship, which is fixed, against the possible returns from your gank attempt, which is variable (call it profit/loss if you will).