Crime & Punishment

I've not ganked mining barges in a while but when I did it was with a baby alt in a group of maybe 6 other similarly skilled pilots. Currently she has 829,000 SP. The catalysts were provided funded through my own income and partially through James 315's New Order reimbursement scheme.

1. 117m sp, and i am the main :-)

2. Mainly if it is the ship thrice or more times the value of my ship, then I offer my victims to the loot gods and hope for the goods to drop. I sometimes jojn one of my corp mates for high sec miner ganks and I get those ships free :-)

You're a miner, right? If it's a simple flaw in the game mechanics then come do it.

The question Ripard has posed has to do with player SP, in particular, as it applies to solo ganking.

I'm a new player and have only just started taking out small targets solo, for the benefit of the under-informed I think it's important to outline exactly what's involved here, GreenSeed, you might want to take notes, there'll be a test on this later.

In my case, 'solo' ganking isn't really solo. If I'm consistently using the same character for blowing ships up then I'm going to get to -10 pretty quickly, that character obviously can't be used to scout and provide a warp-in, so I need to be alternating between two characters.

i have done it before where I've scouted, bookmarked a target, logged, relogged as DPS and then hit the target, so it is doable, it's just time consuming.

My scout has 2.5mil SP as of right now. He flies around in a stabber with a cloaking device, scanner probes and ship scanner.

In my usual area of operations he gets to be pretty well known, so anyone who isn't AFK mining who sees him suddenly appear usually bolts right quick. For the rest, he will scan the ship from a distance so that I can EFT their fit and also confirm that the player isn't already in possession of a mining permit courtesy of the New Order.

Then my scout will warp out to a safe spot, release the probes, get a fix on the target and go cloaky.

My DPS character just finished Rapid Firing V and is now sitting at 1.9mil SP, for a long time I had both characters on the same account but had to split them because training was just taking too long. Win for CCP, right? Who'd have guessed that ganking actually creates income for them?

Before I can jump in and kill the target, I have to prep the system so that I have the best chance of completing the gank, Concord response times vary from system to system so I'm currently only operating in 0.5, a few of my colleagues have moved up and are now ganking Exhumers in 0.6, but they are much better organised than I am.

Once I launch my DPS character from a station, the timer is ticking, FACPO will blow me up if I linger and station and gate campers can take me out at any time. I either utilise station instawarps or bounce to a celestial that's already closely aligned to the station undock.

After jumping to whatever system my target is in, I uncloak my scout (we're in fleet BTW), warp to my scout, I switch to my scout, he fleet warps to the target, I switch back to DPS, sebo heat and all the things, land on the target and (hopefully) take it out. Once I'm killed by Concord I have to warp my pod to a safe or celestial, then head to a system station, get into a noob ship, undock and draw Concord away from the belt. It's very rude to litter. When I've done that it's hightail back to a station and wait out GCC.

In the meantime I'm switching back to my scout to loot my DPS ship so that I can recycle equipment and possibly also looting the target, this means that I'll go suspect, is risky and also keeps me from scouting out more targets for another few minutes.

Other gankers will have a third alt who flies a mining ship to scan targets and provide warpin. Personally I find it hard enough ALT-TABing between 2 characters, I don't know how people do it with 3 and even 4. Runeme Shilter is another solo ganker who taught me a lot, Buck Futz, as I mentioned in another thread, has also been very helpful.

Once the gank is finished, an Evemail goes out to the client with an explanation of why they were ganked and how they can avoid it in future. Sometimes a convo results where, more often than not, the miner showers me with expletives, promises of real life violence and threats of reportage to CCP for violation of the EULA.

Ripard, did you know that there are a lot of players who already believe that it's against the rules of the game to get blown up in Highsec? These are probably the people who are keeping you "under-informed".

These convos are handled diplomatically and I invariably offer to show the gankee how to become a ganker, sometimes the offer is taken up, more often than not I'm told to insert said offer into some kind of bodily orifice.

Every now and again, I get a hearty 'gf' from a client, but I could probably count the number of times this has happened on one hand. On failing a gank it's generally considered proper for the ganker to offer a 'gf' in local. This is rarely returned, when it is, friendship often ensues.

The only way solo ganking currently works is because miners go AFK. A miner who tanks, orbits, d-scans, watches local or keeps an eye on the ships around them is virtually impossible for me to gank. "Or" not "And".

There's an Eve myth that anyone solo ganking in Highsec must be a sociopath 2003 character with a monocle, it's a lie.

It strikes me that it's the responsibility of CSM candidates to stand for the truth, tell the truth Ripard, consider yourself informed.

Shush Fawn, yer talking too much again.



Everyone else do as Fawn says. It's great fun.

That's so wrong. I can't believe people stick to this bullshit, as if it was true.
Just because most people are noobs at ganking and need it easy, doesn't mean anybody needs an alt for anything.

It's *more* challenging without an alt. Every time i hear somebody needs an alt for this
and hides in station all day, i feel embarrassed. Grow some balls and learn highsec game mechanics.

I would love to hear how you use a -10 sec status character to gank without having some means of getting warpin on your target, anytime I stay in the same spot in Highsec in anything other than a pod for more than a handful of seconds I get blapped by facpo.

I guess I could use a pod to place a bookmark, but then there's no option to scan the ship and work out if I can actually take it out or not.

But like Agent Trask said, we are pretty new to this, so please, how do you do it?

20,224,000.

In Gunnery.

Jinrai Tremaine, just because players we gank who AFK mine are only 2 clicks an hour away from being bots, is no reason to lable them as somehow less than people. Shame on you!

The New Order has a very strict, "No miner left behind" policy, we believe that nobody is beyond being turned from the path of botness and back to the welcoming arms of peopleness, nobody.

Giving this one a friendly bump, because I'd love to hear from more gankers on this topic. I'm still particularly interested in the question of how you finance your ganking as well.

Add-on question: do you feel like CCP is deliberately trying to put ganking out of business to attract new players? Or are you feeling like you're able to keep the ganking up despite what CCP throws at you by changing how you operate?

Thanks again for all the feedback, guys! I do want to learn more about this topic! I tried ganking myself about 18 months ago, but overall just found that I liked targets that shoot back.

Oooh Ripard, that's a rookie move, we all know that's code for, "...but overall I just wasn't very good at it."

You should have taken me up on the offer of coming along on a gank with us, you missed out on getting in on this kill. Note the name of the guy who was flying with us and got the KM. You might have had a chance to talk to him, as we did, and find out more about the history of ganking in Eve, the little tweaks to the game that CCP have made that only someone with an in-depth knowledge of the relevant mechanics would know about and how things have changed for Highsec gankers over the years.

You already know that Highsec ganking is at an all time low in Eve, one of the posters in your candidacy thread even provided a copy of the relevant portion of the minutes.

As an aside, I may have missed the part where you acknowledged the effort he put in to provide the facts you asked for, if you did, then well done, if you didn't, you really should do that.

This would seem to provide a pretty clear and factual answer to your question of, "Or are you feeling like you're able to keep the ganking up despite what CCP throws at you by changing how you operate?" If CCP is putting in changes and ganking is decreasing... well, do the math.

In the further interests of giving you the benefit of the doubt, and so that we never have to hear that "under-informed" line again, these articles help answer all of your questions, and more:

• Guide to Ganking - A recent 3-part guide to ganking, includes a section on how to make it profitable.
• The Truth Behind the Exhumer Rebalancing - Yes, it's written by James 315, but if you really are against the turning of Eve into a "theme park" MMO, then you need to inform yourself, and this article will help you to do that.
• Should Freighter Ganking be Nerfed - Again, this is an article by James 315, but again, you need to read this. Specifically because the article provides a beautiful counter to an idea that you haven't-quite-but-nearly-come-close-to-espousing known as the "More Challenge Fallacy".

I have a nasty feeling that you're going to continue on your "fact finding mission" right up until the votes close so that you can have some kind of plausible deniability later on in the game, just like a RL politician would.

Hopefully, I'm wrong.