Jita Park Speakers Corner

As we have all learned, one of the greatest aspects of EVE is that, in highsec, "suicide ganking" is possible. It functions as a wonderful way of adding content to the game, and acts as a wonderful tool to combat several problems with EVE highsec.

First, botting. As we all know, most highsec professions are heavily botted, with mining being a significant offender. It is rare, in fact, to find a human ice miner: tests have shown that in an ordinary ice belt (non-interdicted) you can systematically gank each mackinaw in the belt in order, with virtually no one realizing that after the fifth gank, it may be time to put the ship away. Likewise with veld mining: roidripper was such a massively popular bot that it was one of the first ones targeted by CCP. However, all is not lost: there's nary a bot in a gallente ice system anywhere in Empire. Suicide ganking has been an extraordinarally effective method of delivering an anti-bot message - and, through creating situations novel to a bot but easily understood and reacted to by a human, provided an excellent method to identify and report bots.

Were highsec to take up its often-alleged anti-botting fervor that mysteriously only shows up when bots are being ganked on an unprecedented scale, bots could be eliminated from far more than a small subset of belts. By making min/max ships like the Hulk and Mack easy to gank, CCP has done something great: it's prevented them from being used by botters effectively. If you choose to bot, you can't use the best ship avalible.

Similar things should be done to the other commonly botted EVE profession: mission-running. As we all know - or should know - mission botting is wildly popular and has resulted in massive deflation of the value of LP, with some 5% implants going for a mere 10m isk (such as medium hybrid turret damage implants). It's not viable, of course, to simply turn mission-running ships into hulk-like paper. What should be done, however, is restructuring missions to do all DPS of a specific damage type, forcing mission runners to heavily tank for a specific type of damage. This prevents bots from using omnitanks for missions, and once the bots become advanced enough to use the correct tank, leaves giant resist holes a proper ganking team can use to express their anti-botting message through destruction of the offending ship. Or, to take another solution, Concord could react significantly more slowly in deadspace, allowing gankers to more easily destroy the offending ship with less people, but still ensuring that Concord eventually gets their man.

Second, is monotony. EVE has bad PvE. It's true, and nobody can really argue with it: missions, ratting, and mining are all extremely boring activities. There's not really a good way to make them better, either - minigames will quickly become tedious clickfests and the player will rarely, if ever, be challenged. Instead, players simply perform the correct min-maxed actions and essentially roleplay a bot. Increasing their gankability makes the activity more exciting. Gallente ice miners have discovered recently that mining can be much more exciting than monotonously dragging ore into stations: fitting tanks, baiting gankers, and learning how to survive is infinitely more rewarding - and the difficulty makes it financially more rewarding as well. This same excitement can be spread to all EVE highsec activities - though increased interaction with other players, people will encounter new and novel situations to keep their EVE activities exciting.

Naturally, they'll be free to "tank up" - much like a miner can mine more slowly but more safely in a Rokh, they'll be free to choose safer missions - level threes, perhaps, would allow missioners to overtank to resist ganks while they learn the ropes. But because there's rewards for placing yourself slightly at risk, though never in a place where your attacker is not destroyed, people will be encouraged to play EVE in a more interesting way.

Lastly, Content. Highsec is boring: nothing really ever happens. No grand battles, no shifts of territory, nothing. Ganking provides the sort of conflict that Highsec sorely needs. Nothing in Highsec has been nearly as interesting in years as the Goonswarm Ice Interdiction: it has provided exciting opportunities to thousands of players, ranging from mackinaw inventors, to brutix builders, to market speculators, to mercenaries. Naturally, there are a few who cannot adapt and spill veritable gigawats of electons on the forums decrying the interdiction, but the vast majority of highsec is too excited and interested in EVE to bother with forums. It even encourages highsec organization, which may help them in the upcoming CSM elections avoid being a horde of disorganized malcontents who cannot even agree on candidates to stand behind. It provides excitement for everyone who has become disenchanted with EVE, and wonderful news coverage that makes people interested in the exciting possibilities of EVE, a dark and violent universe.

For these reasons, I believe CCP should rebalance most highsec money-making activities to make them similar to mining in gankability; to min-max or bot the activity, you ought to be required leave yourself open to ganking, while maintaining the well-balanced system of penalties EVE uses to keep such ganking restrained and in fits and spurts rather than a low-level hum.

I believe in this poster, I believe in this post.

Increased interaction with other players? Wait this is a multiplayer game? I am confused. F1

This is exactly why new players leave the game, instead of trying to pick on highsec carebears then perhaps CCP should make PVP more available. LIke battlegrounds, ladders etc.. More 0.0 NPC regions, etc. Seriously we need to start preserving the new players..

Look at this guy who read the title of the thread but didn't read the first post.

No thank you, no World of Eve please. Especially not now since Blizzard is running its flagship into the ground with their latest batches of not really thought through changes. In fact, they are so scared about their (still immense but dropping) subscription numbers, that they just devised a clever scheme to bring people to commit to a 12 month subscription by giving their upcoming game for free if you commit yourself.

As for new players leaving or not taking on the game. It has less to do with what the game provides and so much to do that new players get pissed off by this craptastic UI that's an abomination unto itself. Not even 3$ steam games have such a bad, non configurable, buggy and badly designed UI. I'm constantly amazed that they haven't completely replaced it in all this time. Upcoming changing font is a very very small step. It needs to be burned down and buried and completely redone, with nothing taken over, but yeah, fat chance of that happening in the next 5 years. Alone out of the fact that this horrible horrible UI exists in pretty much this form with only minor interations since all this time tells me that new player gain is a very low priority at CCP. Whyever that is.

I'm glad you agree with me on the serious need to combat highsec bots. As you can see from my post, one of the many features of suicide ganking is its dramatic effect on bots. Goonswarm has done in weeks what CCP has been unable to do for years: eradicate botting in a specific region of eve. Imagine what we could all do, working together, if given the proper tools.

pray tell, what are these anti-botting mechanics you propose?

or do you have an extra chromosome?

This post is relevant to my interests and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Being -10 is no reason not to go into highsec and gank people, you just need an alt to move your ships for you.