Crime & Punishment

To begin with, you can't really be proactive about protecting yourselves beyond fitting your ships intelligently, since gankers generally aren't vulnerable until they've actually started murdering people (either because they aren't criminals yet or they use bookmarks and warpins intelligently). That means any defense has to be purely reactionary, but also able to respond effectively within a window of ~15 seconds. To put it succinctly, that sucks..

I don't think it's realistic to expect a combat pilot to stare at other people's mining lasers for long periods of time while experiencing no gameplay of his own.

Funny, I've been in that channel for over a year now and have never noticed anything of the sort. You must be in a different time zone than I am. (Either that or you're just full of ****.)

Cannibal Kane: Firstly, thanks for sharing your (correct and wrong) ideas and contributing to the discussion. I don't disagree with you about the lack of organization on our side.

Having read your entire post now, it looks like your general opinion on the AG community is entirely based on observations over a single chat channel and a war-evading player.

And I notice, you (not only compare it to an alliance, but also) comment my online kill Board without knowing that I'm far from being a very active, hardcore PvP player.

Hmm, you have some good points but also some misconceptions, it's good to see an anti-ganker talking about content creation instead of the usual whining and gloating over whoring on CONCORD killmails without preventing the gank.

This a minor point, but I think you fully understand why our catalysts tend not to have creative names and it has nothing to do with being bot-aspirants: they are not flown for long and very rarely return to a hangar. The ships have throwaway names because they are throwaway ships, as required by highsec aggression mechanics.

Your ideal of ECCM on every catalyst is inefficient, unrealistic and possibly ignorant of the fitting parameters of a gank catalyst, to say nothing of your more "creative" astronomically expensive suggested ganking activities (are you not even aware that we do not get insurance payouts on our ships?) In the first place, there is rarely ECM on grid for our ganks. No, I do not mean 20% of the time, nor 10%, the real figure is well under 1%. A scram is far more important for securing a kill, and multiple scrams in the fleet are better because of the possibility of losing point through ECM or ship destruction (which can sometimes even occur before reaching the target grid, -10 life is unpleasant). You also misunderstand the purpose of sensor boosters, they are not for competing over the pod kill, they are to make the pod kill possible at all under the strict time limit imposed by CONCORD without a dedicated pod catcher, though they also occasionally are the difference between pointing a ship and letting it warp off.

Now about fitting: after 8 light neutron blaster IIs and 3 magnetic field stabilizer IIs we have 24 CPU left to play with if the pilot does not have CA-1 and CA-2, 31.5 if he does (CPU implants are not a reasonable option for a suicide ganker because the small turret damage implants use the same slot and while a CPU rig is possible, it also comes at the cost of dps, which is always the overriding consideration when we are not specifically aware of organised resistance). The best option for increasing the available CPU is swapping some of the blasters for light ion blaster IIs, saving 4.5 CPU each and getting 94% of the dps (but only 80% of the alpha, which does matter under highsec gank conditions even for a rapid firing weapon system like small blasters) of a light neutron blaster II. A scram is 26 CPU, ECCM is 16 CPU, and a sensor booster is 8 CPU. The fitting concessions you have to make to fit ECCM regularly on a catalyst are not worthwhile under normal conditions. In addition to everything above, I will point out that individual gankers do not normally have any freedom in how to fit their ships because the logistics of ganking demand that the FC can provide a very large number of prefitted ships which will work with little or no modification. Inexpensive spare mids for alternative fits in the cargo would be a nice addition but sadly the in game fitting tool does not save modules in cargo, something I would very much like to see as a feature.

I'm glad that players like you are creating content for gankers as we do for miners, but I think you overestimate your influence. We can only gank a small percentage of afk miners, autopiloters and other bot-aspirants at any given time and you can only attempt to stop an even smaller percentage of our gank attempts. If you want us to take pre-emptive measures against your methods as a matter of course, step up your activity, or better try to educate the lazy, whiny, wilfully ignorant players you choose to try to protect. Everything's more fun with some resistance but are you having fun? The only thing more boring than mining is watching someone else mine.

I have not had the fortune of ganking before the last round of CONCORD buffs, but I can sum up what they are currently: completely inflexible space gods who have complete control over your warp drive (from the moment you break a law), your sensors, capacitor and drone bandwidth (from the first response after they arrive on grid) and your insurance firm, making you suffer the full cost of hull replacement unlike every other method of losing a ship. Their armaments are mechanically irrelevant because you are so completely disabled from first response that there is no longer anything you can do to influence the success of the gank, but they have a ship which destroys absolutely anything in one shot because why not. The only variable we consider is the time between the offense and first response, all room for creativity in dealing with CONCORD has been carefully eliminated leaving only a thinly disguised manifestation of two rules: you have a specific number of seconds to execute a gank depending on system security and the status of CONCORD squads already in the system, and you will lose your ship with no compensation. This is boring and forces us to do certain boring things to operate at all.

"Pre-aligning" is a myth btw except in the sense of ensuring that there are no objects that you will bounce off if you attempt to warp. The visual heading of your ship does not affect time to warp.

Funny, I've been in that channel for over a year now and have never noticed anything of the sort. You must be in a different time zone than I am. (Either that or you're just full of ****.)