Crime & Punishment

Threads on the forums that lead to discussions like this always make me sad. As the threads are always just "Someone is doing something -I- don't like, and instead of countering them in-game, I'm going to come demand it's nerfed"

That being said, bumping is a mechanic that is relied-upon in the game for more than just killing freighters or ransoming miners. Bumping is something used in 0.0 and I'm assuming highsec/lowsec warfare to facilitate PVP. An enemy in a heavily tanked ship burning back to a gate to escape a camp, can be bumped away, forcing him to fight. Enemies on a station that are playing "Docking games" can be bumped off the station and killed where they can't dock up. And yes, it's used as a last-ditch to stop a supercap from warping. I've also seen it used in a spy-capacity to knock ships out of a POS, after getting the password. There are -tons- of uses for bumping besides ganking freighters or bumping miners, that most of the people making these threads don't even know about, because they're focused on their one little slice of Eve, and how they want it to be for -them- and not the game as a whole.

As CCP reads this thread, I hope you consider that any change to bumping mechanics, to make highsec a little more safer and PVP free, will also have a far-reaching effect on all PVP in any part of eve. Bumping is an essential tool for PVP, not just something to annoy miners.

I also hope you consider that there are a large number of ways to avoid being ganked in highsec and avoid being bumped. All of them require paying attention to the game, and effort on the part of the person being bumped. Removing a large part of a PVP encounter from the game, to make it easier for inattentive players to not die, isn't a good way to manage the game.

Bumping is the purest, most honest form of physical tackling this game has to offer. New players can engage in this from day one, and learn the art that allows low and nullsec capital and super hunters keep ships tackled until their fleet has been notified.

If someone is bumping you every day repeatedly and following you around all day every day, then this is harassment, and it needs to be handled by GM's. If you are getting bumped before being ganked, that's just tough luck. If you are getting bumped and ransomed by some new player who's just trying to make a quick bit of isk, that's life.

Don't penalize or remove this form of play because a few lazy people don't want to deal with a valid game mechanic.


Yet we do lead, pioneering new and creative play styles.

Grudges like this are flames and should be moderated from this active discussion.

You forgot to mention the part about making sure a handful of players in bumping ships can't screw with miners rather than fixing the non-existent state of nullsec industry.
Or moon goo.
Or the fact that mining is terrible and boring to begin with.
The horribly buggy state of the ship fitting tool. (Oh god please give us a working bulk fitting option)
Or whatever else really.

Let me add as I could not because of a failed edit:

Further more as a Miner, Explorer, PVPer and more important CUSTOMER of CCP playing the game EVE online.

I pay good money to play on these servers.... and I love the mechanics.


I love bumping the competition off rock and breaking their beams. Helps keep the prices up.

Bumping is not the problem, the issue is more underling and is Social. Foul language and harassing players (read CUSTOMERS) by other players in local is a clearly unwanted action.

Keep it to the game. Don't like being bumped in where you are mining? Try somewhere else or fight them. That is EVE.

Have a problem with vulgar language in your local from the person bumping you? ... petition it.

They (James' crew, some rule they have previously quoted about taking out real petitions on Players in the game which should or is already against the rules) take it outside the game? There is a rule for that also already. CCP needs to enforce it.

Don't like it? (And this maybe and is the #1 reason why CCP as a Real WORLD corporation having bills and needing CUSTOMERS, is what is bringing up this issue) Take your money else ware.

Nial on the head? I have left this game before. Difference now is I am 4x the customer that I was 5 years ago. Will that stop me from leaving again? No. Its not game breaking.

GM's listen to the customer base. If the complaint violates the TOS then follow up and deal with the offender. If its a game mechanic.... that is part of the game.

As for you Miners.... STOP whining. You got your Buffs and the Gankers are tearing up because they can't bully you except for bumping. Oh and stop AFK mining. If you step away and get bumped... your fault.

Gankers cry some more. I love it!

CCP dont change the game mechanics, seems to me to be working just fine. But do tell them to watch their language in local.

What you seem to be asking for is for agression, in which case ships that collide must transfer commensurate damage in the act. Now that would be cool.

It's already a given that GMs should punish people who mouth off in Local. They already do. That's not really the point of this thread.

Besides, I don't know how much time you spend in Abudban, but miners tend to be far more disgusting in terms of vocabularly than Agents of the New Order do.

Have you considered using the "Keep at range" button on the miner?

Now let me tell you about ~my ten accounts~, all PvP (just subcaps, although I'm going to buy a bunch of dreads soonish). I've never encountered this new order before because I don't bother mining. I prefer nullsec-ratting for my income and manage to pull around 350m/hr on 8 accounts flying nagas with my absolutely terrible blaster skills. I have recently been subject to some guy afk camping my area so I just scouted ahead of my fleet and moved a constellation over. Crisis averted.


edit: In a few months when I get T2 blasters I plan on buying 8 vindicators. I'm -hoping- for about 500m/hr before taxes.

I thought about coming up with a constructive response, but then I realized that I'm either just going to be completely ignored or demonized for being a part of Goonwaffe. Whatever, I guess I'll share my two cents from the perspective of a Freighter Ganking Bumper.

Earlier today, we weren't having much luck with getting decent pings for freighters. It was rather quiet, with very little going on. Suddenly, an 11 Billion Isk freighter gets spotted and we move into position to take him out. He was a fairly clever guy, using his Heron to deliver webs to speed up his travel time. However, before he was able to catapult himself into warp, several of our bumps land and the race is on to steal his loot.

Much to our surprise, the pilot stays calm and moves his Heron in line with his bumped freighter, allowing him to warp off unexpectedly and catch most of us completely off-guard. By the time our guys had entered warp to give chase, he was already aligned to a station and rushing off as well.

One problem that's often hidden in the shadow is the process that's required to even execute these supposed 'easy' freighter kills. We realize that it's not an easy task to train up a Freighter Pilot from the scratch, taking several months to fly something akin to a well skilled ship. However, if you're flying around in psuedo-capital class vessels and you refuse to learn some basic concepts of survival in any space, I have some grim news for you. Your opposition, the Freighter Gankers, are gathering together at least 10 guys to do four to five different jobs just to set the stage. That's several months worth of skill training time that's being invested just to even think about curb-stomp your unsuspecting butt into the dirt.

That's a lot of groundwork that needs to be set just so we can hope to rip through your huge ship. If we're putting this much work into thinking about killing you, is it really that bad for us to expect that you do your own homework and figure out how to circumvent our efforts?

Nut up, buttercup. You undocked, therefor you're fair game for anyone who wants to ruin your day. The only question in the equation is whether you have the persistence to figure out ways to adapt to the situation before you're the next item on the meal ticket.

However, the problem we're currently faced with is certainly not the only problem at play here. It's this god-awful cultural difference we have, in my opinion. Folks that we gank have absolutely have no intention of organizing because they want it done FOR them. Yet, the reason we succeed is BECAUSE we can communicate with each other. I can guarantee, if there were an organized front on the opposite end of the freighter ganking, with a similar collective gathering of the minds as ours, freighter pilots would avoid the pitfalls and almost never fall for traps and the subsequent ganks.

I'm sorry, but it's my honest belief that the community is putting the burden of proof on the actual Bumper Pilots to explain why bumping is not an unavoidable gimmick. Apparently, it's OUR problem why we are able to do something that looks 'so easy', it's OUR problem to figure out why so many freighters and miners refuse to figure out how to counter these techniques, and it's OUR problem to explain that a mechanic that's been around since the beginning of the game is not an exploit.

Is bumping really the issue here? It's a primitive form of tackling, for goodness sake!

I get it, alright? Management sees us as a problem to the bottom-line when it comes to holding on to consumers. As a group, we're great for PR and all that jazz. However when it comes time to actually evolve the gameplay mechanics, it's better to dumb down the player-base and put permanent training wheels on for the new players that refuse to ever grow up and break away from their old habits. It's like having a smelly 26 year-old living with his parents, refusing to pay rent and demanding he be coddled because the world is scary and someone might call him a name.

It would be more beneficial for the Dev team just to try the same mechanic out for themselves under similar conditions that the players have mentioned. See it from both the bumper and the bumpee's perspective and see if bumping is truly this unavoidable action that everyone seems to make it out to be.

Actually, here's a better idea:
CCP, I personally invite you to come along on a gank with us, just to see the pitfalls, errors, and the excitement that a high speed freighter bumping chase can produce. Judge for yourselves if this is an activity that you want to eliminate from the game. Come test it out with us in Tranquility, Buckingham, or whatever flavor of the month we're currently using for servers. Borrow my Machariel or Stabber Fleet Issue, participate or just spectate, even fraps the whole thing if you like. We'd love to have you along for one of our ganks just to show you the kind of organized effort that goes into it and how there's always a way for the freighter pilot to somehow make an escape.

It's funny. If you want to disrupt a given activity in a single hisec system, you need a sizeable number of friends to pull it off, and they have to go around bumping miners. If I want to effectively disrupt all activity in a nullsec system, that is, all anomaly running, all escalation chasing, all mining and so on, all I need is a protocloak and a safespot. A hisec miner has no lack of choices when it comes to systems to mine in, while a nullsec miner has to mine in systems where grav sites spawn unless they enjoy mining the same belt asteroids that exist in 1.0 systems.

AFK cloaking is far less risky (let's face it, the possibility of losing a 300k ISK T1 frigate with a 1M protocloak while positioning the character is not a significant risk) and requires absolutely no effort compared to bumping miners. And you know what? I don't have a problem with either.

I'd be cool with this. Although most of what we do is just bullshitting in mumble or doing prep work while waiting for someone to find something. It's really easy to avoid getting jacked, and I don't understand why some people have such a huge problem with this.




Also, I have something I want to ask anyone that mines. I tried asking corpmates in jabber, but none of them mine :V

Is there any reason the people complaining about bumping can't just orbit a rock, or hide inside the belt behind horrible asteroid hit detection? It seems like it might take an entire 30s to get back out and solve the whole issue for them.
Or is it just an issue of people's miner bots not being able to manually pilot around asteroids?