Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It is just me or has the advent of the tier-3 BC made highsec suicide ganking of freighters way too inexpensive and easy? So much so that it has become an EvE career path.

The killboards show a huge number of such actions and while I don't think suicide ganking is entirely wrong, the DPS abilities of cheaply fit tier-3 BCs makes it so cheap and easy, shiny payloads are no longer required to justify such actions.

I think a buff of freighter structure or armor points is in order here but that's just me, anyone have thoughts on this? I have placed a few recent highlights below but if you look at the killboards you will see a whole lot for any given day.


*snip* Posting of kill reports outside of the Crime & Punishment forum channel is prohibited. ISD Ezwal

Without offering an opinion on the thread topic (because 6-7 BC pilots working together to take down a freighter being overpowered seems like something I'd disagree with (cooperation > solo) without a careful analysis of the stats, I'm not staking a position) I'd still like to know why killmails are banned from Features & Ideas. This suprised me.

Especially in this context, when discussing questions of ship balance, and amid a neverending cycle of balancing by ship class, I can't see why the same rules that apply to the Crime & Punishment subforum couldn't be extended here. As long as you're not abusing other players but using a specific instance to reference an idea or proposal, why not allow the discussion to proceed?

It's pretty crazy that in a game about blowing up spaceships you can't reference the spaceships you blow up almost anywhere, no? If it were up to me, and as long as the criticism was constructive, I'd probably allow killmails to be linked in Jita Park proposals too.

What am I missing?

YK

Don't change freighters at all. SO many freight services in Eve, MWD warping Orca's, Jump Freighters, Blockade runners.... lots of other options to move your stuff. If someone still chooses to load 20b into a freighter.... well.... Eve is a game of Opportunity.

There was a time when freighter ganking was done by battleships... that could be insured.

Then insurance was removed from ships that were killed by CONCORD.

Then Tier 3 Battlecruisers were introduced.


Net result: suicide ganking has a lower set up cost than before... but the loss is now total... meaning that it actually costs more to suicide gank than ever before.

To a certain extent yes, to a certain extent no. There is an issue with how there isn't a meaningful defence against a gank other than 'don't be there'. There is no easy solution for that one though.

But freighter pilots deserve to get to make meaningful fitting choices rather than carry low value and hope the gankers don't decide it's enough today to be worth it.

Every 'meaningful defence' boils down to 'don't be there'.
Once you are actually there, there is nothing you can do to defend, since you will get concorded for firing first. You can attempt to take retribution on the pods & protect the wreck.
So allowing the Freighter to make fitting options is only fair. You just have to make sure those fitting options don't loophole capitals into highsec, which is why I posted above how to prevent that, while still making those fitting options meaningful.

This.
Ganking doesn't need to be nerfed, but freighters need to be given options to make steer it's defense and make it more complex than just "X catalysts destroys maxed freighter Y".

The old defense of "but the CARGO BAY?!?!?!?" is utter nonsense. They already showed how you resolve it with mining barges. Just make a "special" bay called a "freight" bay and allow it to carry all types. Tada! cargo expanders don't work.

Then drop the base HP and add slots so that you can specific tank for considerably more EHP that you can currently get, you can omnitank for slightly more than now, but you can only reduce ehp from the current with a passive tank (so no running DC/hardners). They'd just need to tweak each race in the same way they do with other ships to achieve this. This will make freighters that people want to put the effort into making defensible and fly manually into a good position, while making AFK auto freighters easier to destroy.

1. You don't have to fire first.
2. You don't have to fire at all.
3. You seem to think that people still do Alpha based freighter ganks.



Don't nerf Freighters, please.


Anyway, why do you have a problem with Freighters being more expensive to gank than ever?

1. Get a second account or a corpmember with Teamspeak
2. Get any fast frig or a Rapier
3. Fit 2-3 Webbifiers (on the Rapier they will have 40km range, which is great)
4. When the freighter decloaks at the gate, target the freighter and web him
5. Instant Warp (Rapier needs only 1.2 seconds to target the freighter, without moving)

With this fast align time, you can't be scanned and no one would take the risk ganking a empty freighter.

I always fly my freighters like this, even with 20b on board. No Problem at all.
So if 6-7 ppl are needed to gank a solo freighters, only two ppl are needed to counter this....

looking at the kills i can guess they used drone assist AND ISBoxxer