Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Sorry I wasn't clear enough, I meant you cannot avoid the risk of PvP but as you say you can certainly greatly mitigate it via effort/time/simple 'devil may care' attitude/other counter measures.

I'm not proposing that hisec should be more safe, simply that the ganking mechanic is balanced as is right now and doesn't need to be changed. Prepared people will survive, unprepared (or unlucky) people will die. In terms of people leaving the game if they get killed too mcuh I'd say we were at the tolerence level for hisec ganking etc right now.

There are many facets to the game and many of those are best carried out in hisec. I have absolutely no problem with this and feel that each sec area should have its unique 'best field' But with the rewards to match the increased risk.

You hope they do, but I have strong doubts that new gankers will. After all, why should they? Fighting in Low sec involves nearly unrestricted combat against them and they wouldn't be able to do what they were doing in High sec. One just needs to look at the Conference Elite KB and you see page after page of exclusive High sec kills, only on page 9 I finally found the first Low sec activity with some kills and many losses on subsequent pages. The same goes for BeBopAReBop RhubarbPie's corp who even manages to get a Viator killed in Tama. (I am not going to discuss about these, they are mere examples for the sake of illustration.)
So, people with ganker background are used to what High sec currently provides for them, they get enough activity and more importantly activity that does not hurt them back. Why should these people and more importantly new people to the business go to areas in space where that is not possible? I would even go so far -- if these changes actually achieved that people in High sec can more effectively hunt gankers and for some miraculous reason would do so -- as to say that making ganking harder with these changes and "allow" people in High sec to shoot gankers before they can gank would make their preferred activity untenable and cause even less activity.

People like to look at "carbears" and call them risk-averse and their presumed risk-aversion the root of all activity and other problems, but does anyone look at the other side of the medal? Risk-aversion among PVPers or those who call themselves PVPer is all but uncommon and not less of a problem and not less a part of the root of the problems.

I do not accept the claims of the unknown nobody in the OP that White Knight fleets exist to counter gankers. Nor that most of his ganks were opposed or that he too has flown in many anti ganking fleets. He claims 130 freighter kills (which may be true) but only has 290 total kills, with many of the remainder being non freighter suicide ganks + pods and some low sec stuff. That doesn't leave many, if any, white knight kills? I'm sure he doesn't regular fly in fleets that routinely make no kills.

I can accept that in the middle of a suicide gank any passing dps ship might take a few pot shots at the gankers to wh*re on the Concorde KMs, but that doesn't amount to white knights or a defence fleet.

So when you peel away that layer of bullsh*t, what is the OP actually asking for?

The ability to drive around high sec in a flashy red ship baiting carebears into shooting at him and then turning on the would be 'white knight' and killing him without NPC interference. Utilising non flashy remote reps and offgrid links of course.

Oh and lets extend the limited engagement timer, so that when someone does wh*re on the Concorde KM in mid gank, you can wait out the criminal flag and then go after them.

So in short this whole suggestion is about frightening people off the idea of shooting at a ganker en route to a gank, or interferring with a gank if they happen to be on grid when one occurs.

I'm really confused about the insinuations that this isn't my main. Yes, I have older characters, but this character occupies the vast majority of the time that I am online. I guess I should have posted this before leaving TCE and CODE. I wrote it last month, and asked someone to proof read it for spelling and grammar. Eventually gave up on having that done.

I am currently living in w-space with a variety of like minded players, most of whom aren't even in this corp.

I urge you to contact Jennifer en Marland, Gorila Vengaza (defected to code as of christmas eve \o/), Blackhole Kelly, and Thomas en Chasteaux if you want more information about that play style. Also spending even a little bit of time in the Crime and Punishment boards will probably open your eyes significantly. I have only been in a handful of their fleets, primarily because of my obligations to the New Order, and when I have been in them it has either been as a scout or in one case as an awoxer. I plan on spending more time in that style of play once I return to k-space next month.

Uh, repping target involved in a limited engagement will get a suspect flag. I fail to see how remote reps won't be flashy.

Why? I personally feel that any mechanic that encourages players to alternate characters is badly designed. I want to role play being a high sec outlaw. I don't want to have my actions strewn across a large number of different characters.

I'm fine with nerfs to ganking, but they need to be nerfs that players have to take advantage of (additional ship abilitys, modules, items, ect.) not just flat effects. We've already had repeated buffs to mining and hauling ships to the point where you have to blatantly mis-fit or overfill your ship to make it worth ganking. The reality is, people do this all the time, and consequently allow gankers to turn a profit while still hitting some empty ships. No mechanics change should protect players that don't protect themselves, and too many so far have done so.

Not until the victim has committed they don't.

Victim jumps through a busy gate in a Harbinger and finds a flashy red Thorax on the other side in among a cluster of neutrals. He has a second to decide whether to engage before the flashy potentially warps off. He has no time to check the status of the flashy against the system status and work out whether the NPC are in the process of spawning. Currently that is a no brainer.

So he shoots, next thing 4 Guardians around him go flashy and no NPCs spawn. GG. Another leet PvP kill, well done.

Don't play dumb dude, you should know these mechanics better than I.

How is what you just described any different than flipping a can or shooting an mtu to suspect bait currently? Why is this an issue? Engaging hastily in eve is always dangerous, it doesn't matter where you are. Any competent pilot knows that the gate cloak is one of their strongest tools.

I have personally spoken directly to BeBop on TS about these ideas.

As a ganker and general criminal, I fully support them. Sure having shorter GCC's would be nice for me, but even if you remove that idea the others are still very good by themselves. Right now, for the most part, ganking is us vs our target with Concord ending the fight either way. FacPo are a nuisance that you can easily learn to avoid. White Knights are so rarely a consideration in matters that they do not even register as a factor except in freighter ganking. In that case you simply bring extra gankers to offset the interference.

BeBops goal with these changes is to make White Knights more relevant, and even dangerous for gankers. If you think his goals are anything other than that, you are sorely mistaken.

Like all things we can only make suggestions and provide ideas. It's up to CCP to make the actual decisions and implementations. BeBop is providing them with some brainstorming ideas on how to make High Sec more interactive and more dynamic.

All you naysayers are missing the point.

If you have better ideas on how to put law enforcement in the hands of the players, then please, say so. Start a thread, link it here. After all, it has been stated numerous times from members of CCP that the long term goal is to have everything done by the players including law enforcement and High Sec station management (as well as destruction). We are already seeing them put the seeds of those changes in place with various references to the weakening of the 4 empires in relation to the growing power of the capsuleers.

Believe it or not, we criminals would generally be in support of changes that would make White Knights relevant and meaningful as well as effective. As long as it doesn't prevent us completely from doing what we do, but they should certainly be able to make us work for it. That is what BeBop is trying to work towards with these suggestions.

Just to be clear I'm not naysaying as such, rather trying to provide a balancing view of the proposed changes. I simply don't think they would work for hisec for the reasons stated but to have a healthy discussion and drive out viable changes both sides of an argument need to be put.

I'm pleasantly surprised that this thread hasn't descended into flames so far to be honest.

I like where you're trying to go with this. You want to open up more opportunities for direct player interactions and make protection in hisec more a matter of player action instead of reliance on NPCs, and I agree that this is a good direction to go.

I share a few concerns that others have raised however, and I'll re-state them for emphasis.

Making -2.0 the limit of when players can freely engage you is, in my experience and opinion, simply too high (or low, depending on your standpoint) of a bar for two reasons.

First, I rang in the new year with a security status of roughly 0.0 and killed a frigate and a pod in a 0.3 system and landed myself at -1.0. Granted, pod kills do murder your sec status, but if only a few fights in losec can brand you a criminal freely engagable by anyone, anywhere, that would have a seriously chilling effect on losec PvP. Hardcore losec-ers who live at -10 already wouldn't mind so much, but folks like me who skirt the edges would be seriously dissuaded. This doesn't even cover the rookie player who podkills someone in a -1.0 system without understanding the consequences, which is a real concern as well.

Second, for all of the faults of the current system, penalties are currently applied gradually. There are consequences to your actions, but those consequences are applied gradually in this case because of their profound impact. You start off facing penalties in 1.0, then 0.9, and so on until, by the time you hit -5.0, you're facing them everywhere. With what you propose, you get hit with an Empire-wide penalty right off the bat, and then get progressively stiffer penalties added onto it. That seems highly counter-intuitive to me.


I agree with what some folks have proposed regarding criminal timers. Keeping them at their current length only artificially prolongs hisec criminal activity, it does nothing to really deter it. I have no strong feeling one way or another on LE timers, but I feel that the judicious application of suspect timers may be the solution here.

Here is my counter proposal to yours BeBop:

1. Keep FacPo and player response by sec status the same as they are currently. Long-term penalties should apply gradually, not abruptly.
2. Reduce the existing criminal flag to be 5 minutes in length. I think most agree that artificial delays do nothing to promote emergent gameplay.
3. Change the criminal flag such that it spawns a 30 minute suspect flag once it expires. This means that anyone who pulls a suicide gank in hisec, even a 5.0 character, will have a long period where they are vulnerable to player reprisals without undue long-term burden to those who are learning, making mistakes, or live "on the edge of the law".

This achieves your goal of making it easier to preemptively engage criminals before they hit -5.0 without overly penalizing rookie mistakes or casual losec PvPers and it does so with a minimal number of changes.

Thoughts?

EDIT: Clarity.