Assembly Hall

Let's try something a bit less universal, and individually swap the targets instead:

• The miner, or whichever other industrial target needs protecting, equips an active mid slot EWAR module, called Lock Redirector. Lock Redirector may only be fitted onto industrial and mining ships, requires a special skill to use and has a 10 second reactivation timer, but can cycle indefinitely once turned on, as long as there's cap.
• The bodyguard equips another high slot module, called Lock Beacon. Lock Beacon cannot be fitted onto anything bigger than a battlecruiser - in fact, requires a battlecruiser or a command ship, being a special Warfare Link module, and requiring Leadership skills to use. A Lock Beacon balloons the sig of the user not unlike an MWD, and possibly even higher. This penalty is always active.
• Lock Redirector needs to be activated on a target ship in the same fleet, (which obviously needs to be locked first) that has a fitted Lock Beacon. It has a very short range, say, under 5km. The skill may boost this range up to 10km at level V. While Lock Redirector is active on a Lock Beacon, the Lock Beacon ship suffers a penalty to ship agility.
• One Lock Beacon may be the target of multiple Lock Redirector signals, but staying within their respective ranges is their problem. The aforementioned penalties to ship agility stack.

Any attempt to lock the target equipped with an active Lock Redirector will instead lock the ship with the Lock Beacon it's activated on, using the (penalised!) sig of that ship -- what you click the target button on is the miner, but what your computer instead ends up locking is his bodyguard. NPC rats, drones, FOF missiles, anything except player ships themselves is immune to this effect.

Expected results of the introduction of these two modules are as follows:

• It is actually feasible to shield a weak high value target with a harder, lower value bodyguard, but keeping the protection up requires concerted action and attention from participants, lest they drift out of range. Miners need to come with bodyguards to be safe (or at least splurge for an extra alt - and since it needs a battlecruiser, they can't use a free trial account either) and mining under guard becomes a considerably more tactically complicated affair that is feasible in wider range of sec status systems, hopefully making everyone a bit less bored.
• Suicide ganking in highsec does not become impossible, nobody becomes invulnerable - killing protected targets is merely more tactically difficult regardless of location. You will need to use smartbombs, which don't require a target lock, or ECM Bursts, which break Lock Redirector locks on the bodyguard, or you can bump the protection targets out of range of their bodyguard -- who has an agility penalty and can't easily maneuver to keep up. You can simply endeavour to kill the bodyguard fast enough, and attacking protected targets becomes considerably more interesting and challenging. Killing unprotected targets remains as trivial as it was, if they can't find anyone to guard them, too bad.
• This set of modules does nothing for freighters, which can't fit modules in the first place, or combat ships, which cannot be protected in this fashion because they can't fit the Lock Redirector. At the same time, it enables escorting a smaller industrial with a ship that can actually protect it, disincentivising using freighters when protected smaller ships can do better.

...meh, who am I kidding, it's the forums, when's the last time people supported anything constructive...

The problem I see with this, is it isn't worth the effort required to do this. You would either have to get other players involved who are willing to babysit your miner, and they probably aren't going to want to do it without pay. It's going to be quite a boring task for both parties (mining is already boring, and so is watching someone mine). The income of mining would make this un-worthwhile. The other option is using an alt. This would require that the miner be actively paying attention to what's going on in order to be effective, which miners don't do now because of the income of mining. I think the only possible issues with mining right now, are the facts that it's very boring, and very low income.

As a result mining is usually done semi-afk. This isn't a very big issue as long as it can continue to be done semi-afk with low risk. And it's very possible to do so, if you take the time to find a system that isn't likely to be traveled by gankers, or find a belt to mine in where you're not likely to be the target of choice. I think mining could use a little bit of work, but overall as long as it can be done semi-afk with low risk, which it can, then it's not something that needs to be completely overhauled. I do think mining could use an income boost. But I also think that changes have already been made that will bring an income boost to miners. It will just take some time before the effects of these changes are fully realized.

First, I would like to say thank you. Your someone who recognises their is a problem with the way high sec suicide ganking works and how it doesn't really fit into the way combat in Eve works. Your also someone who recognises high sec shouldn't be safe and carebears dont need some drastic change to to their safety, but rather something subtle. You dont often get these two qualities from posts about this particular subject.

Im going to tentitively say that I like the idea in theory. But I can't help but think there might be a slightly simpler way of accomplishing this. The idea of having two differant mods on two seperate ships in order for them to have their desired effect seems odd to me somehow. Probably because there is nothing in Eve that I can think of that works in this way already.

Well, let me explain my logic in detail, and maybe you'll offer a better alternative somewhere:

1. The problem with suicide ganking isn't that it's possible, and isn't even that miners are the most common target -- it's that mining and industrial ships have very low HP, suggesting that they need protection, but such protection is impossible to render because of how game mechanics works. There are ways to punish the assailant, but no way to offer a reasonable chance to prevent the loss anywhere except the strictly controlled nullsec space, which restricts industrial gameplay in general to where NPCs at least provide very, very certain punishment, or to where players can lock down the entire system. It's not that nobody mines in lowsec, it's that too few people do so. That is, the real problem isn't the high sec Concord mechanics, and isn't the low EHP of industrial ships, but how they all interact with the damage mechanics.

Industrial players need to be able to calculate risk and bet on surviving after having taken measures to do so, like everyone else can. From the general MMO design logic, it is far more desirable for these measures to involve other players. Once it can be done, they won't restrict themselves to highsec anywhere so much, and there's lots of incentives in lowsec already, more fun for everyone, no need for extra universe.

2. Sharing or preventing the actual damage easily creates a balancing nightmare and can make industrial players simply invulnerable, which is no fun. Switching the target to a harder ship is a sweet spot -- it mitigates risk, but can be countered by specific fits and tactics at specific tradeoffs. Most industrial ships tank with their mids, lows taken by mission-critical modules they shouldn't need to sacrifice, a mid slot for this ability to share someone else's tank sounds right. This module should be active, directed at a specific ship, and limited at the very least to the same grid for obvious reasons. Limiting it's distance so that the target and the bodyguard have to huddle together enables specific counter-tactics -- makes it feasible to bump them out of range or smartbomb them both, requiring the module to be activated on a target makes ECM Burst a specific counter. Making rats immune to it simplifies programming and ensures that industrial ships can't get away with bodyguard as their only tank.

3. It should be impossible to exploit this mechanic to become untargetable at the expense of an unaware third party or otherwise misuse it -- unintended consequences can be gamebreaking, someone will find a way to pollute the sanbox into uselessness otherwise. Bodyguard must be very aware of his role in the team and it's consequences. However, it is desirable that the bodyguard needs no extra interface elements for it -- that is easier to code. This is easiest to accomplish by making him fit a module too and requiring both ships to be in the same fleet, which takes care of all confirmations required. This module can be passive, so the bodyguard doesn't have to worry about it.

4. It should be possible for the bodyguard to survive an overwhelming assault for long enough to offer his charges a reasonable chance to warp out, (what this mechanic really does is not preventing damage to them, but preventing them from being pointed while they align) but it should also be possible (but hard) to bring enough firepower to just crush them all sufficiently fast. Cruiser hulls are generally too weak for the purpose, and baiting battleship builds can offer truly silly amounts of EHP on par with structures, so battlecruiser sized hulls are the sweet spot. Making the receiving module a high slot Warfare Link module seems logical then, since those hulls are meant for them in the first place. It shouldn't be possible to fit it into a capital ship, but that's obvious -- no need for capships at this party, it's for small gangs.

5. Ballooning sig radius of the bodyguard ensures that the bullet they take for their charges actually hits the mark, and adjusting the exact penalty value can be used to fine-tune the whole equation to desired survivability of the bodyguard under fire so that the charges can warp off with a desired known probability if a known amount of DPS shows up. It also has the side effect of making the mechanic useful to guard a hauler -- hauler needs to be able to lock use the redirector module on it quickly for this, sig ballooning will take care of that. Agility penalty is a roundabout soft limit on the number of charges a bodyguard can handle simultaneously -- the less agile they are, the harder it is for the charges to keep range while they do their thing, so you can't reasonably protect too many ships with just one battlecruiser. Lockout timer on the redirector module penalises piloting errors and AFK playing.

I wanted to be thorough when formulating this. :)

Or of course make a protection module for Orcas, allows it to boost industrial and mining vessels EHP while on grid, possibly a bubble of influence type of effect where every industrial and mining ship inside that bubble has a greatly extended shield capacity. Make it so it does nothing to military grade shields so doesnt affect anything except barges, exhumers and haulers.

Have it come at a cost, so taking up one of teh Orcas boosti ng modules or something, but would allow miners to increase tehir survivability considerably. Promotes teamwork (apart from of course those who run 22 ice mining accounts (but of course arnt bots1!) who could do it all themselves.)

It wouldnt make ganking obsolete by any stretch of teh imagination, but would mean peopel who are serious about their mining can reduce the risk immenseley.

Mine in fleets.

PAY ATTENTION.

Build/buy a command tengu alt and nearly double your shield EHP. Put it in a safe spot or POS shield.

Properly tank your hulk.

Deploy ewar drones instead of mining drones.

Done right, you can force them to bring three tornadoes to alpha a single hulk. And alpha is the only option, as a swarm of ewar drones will ruin their day if they don't get you in the first few seconds. You'll lose some yield, but that's the price you pay for security.

A couple of thoughts:
1.) While gankers can bring three tornados or a dozen catalysts to gank a single hulk, that isn't the status quo. Hulks can easily be tanked, and very well. I wrote an article about how to tank hulks, how to use logis, and how to counter with ewar: Fighting Hulkageddon. I know people that, using the tanked hulk posted in there, survived 5x catalyst suicide attempts, as well as many other flavors of gankers.

I really don't understand why people feel entitled to max-yield fit their exhumers, put on civilian shield boosters for tank, and still be able to thwart a common suicide attack? Nothing in eve works that way, and many of the complaints about suicide ganking come across as people having a tantrum because they lost their shiny ship in space that they think should be risk free. You can fit a tank with no mining upgrades to have 28k-36k EHP, you can fit a tank with one mining upgrade and still have 22k-28k EHP. Those numbers are not using fancy faction mods, and they're what you get BEFORE standard fleet bonuses (+10%), let alone gang-links (+30%)!!

2.) Your idea is very intersting, and has some promise. Here are my comments on it:

1. -- What happens if I have an industrial ship targetted, and he activates the lock redirector?


2. -- In it's current form, this is typically useless for industrials... The lock time on industrials is quite long and the range is of the redirect modules is too limited, making it worthless for use during transit. It would only be useful for an industrial powering slowly gathering resources on grid with the lock beacon.


3. -- In it's current form, it is useless for nullsec. Nullsec travelers will bubble the entire group (since they are all close to the lock beacon), resulting in the slaughter of your entire mining party.


4. -- It allows you to afk protect a mining fleet in highsec. One of the fundamental dilemmas in the miners vs suicide gankers battle: the miner's playstyle is pretty laid back and somewhat inattentive, whereas, to thwart PvP attacks, you need to be constantly vigilant of threats and situationally aware. This idea of yours caters very well to the miner's playstyle...


5. -- How would this interact with aggression flags? If I'm at war with a miner, but he's protected by an NPC-corp bodyguard via this system, can I attack the bodyguard without concord intervention?? I should be able to!!! Some thing for thieving, kill rights, etc, etc, etc.


6. -- I worry how easily this could be implemented, but that's up to CCP to figure out. I wonder how changes to crimewatch will interact with this...


7. -- The redirect module should not be useable on Orca's and Rorquals!!


8. -- The lock beacon penalty is too weak. I also don't like the idea of 20 hulks using one ship as the beacon... In terms of a bodyguard... they should do a good job guarding one person, or a couple... but their effectiveness should be significantly reduced when guarding many people. In a similar fashion, I'd change the penalty to the lock becon ship: something like a 15% reduction in the Shield, armor, and hull resistances for every ship that uses a lock redirector on them. Then, if you're guarding 10 hulks with one ship, then all it's resists will be reduced to 20% of their original value!


9. -- The lock redirector should give the agility penalty to the ship activating the module (i.e. the hulk), not the bodyguard.

Was this posted in F&I first?? Your idea really should be fully vetted before posted in Assembly Hall!

Having proposed one of those other ideas, I have to say the intent was to alter the face of combat all over. Whether it would be a balancing nightmare hasn't been established, and there are mechanics I describe for keeping it from being too powerful so as to keep it balanced.

That said, this proposal does seem like a good idea, given the adjustments mentioned.

Miners in lowsec adn nullsec have fleets, defensive ships and scouts, sometimes a boosting command ship. Miners in lowsec adn nullsec rarely get ganked because they know what they are doing and are serious about it. Like it or not THIS IS JUST about hisec miners.

Greetings

First: I agree with a players right to blow up anything and everything anywhere he wants, with appropriate repercussions. which I also believe are already in place. "Sandbox for the win!" We already nerfed insurance payouts to gankers.

Second: Your idea is the most well thought out I have seen, not necessarily to stop ganking but to add a beneficial aspect to game play that does not infringe on anyone else's style. Yes gankers will have to rethink some tactics, and Industrial / Miners / Haulers / High value curriers will have to find friends, but constructive change is a good thing.

I however would open it up to other ship types. Not sure how it would work but I can think of some FC's who would love to not be primaried every time they load grid. So it could have second and third order effects outside of the high sec gank.

Well done Sir!
vr
East