Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Let's look at why people are bumped and subsequenlty ganked
1) you are autopiloting
2) you are carrying more value than is necassary/safe
3) you are pissing people off in local
4)a combination of the above
5)gankers gonna gank

We don't need new mods and gameplay mechanics if you got ganked once too often trying to autopilot officer mods into Jita, don't be a target and you won't need to worry about being bumped/ganked.

Yes it's avoidance, but if you can avoid it, why wouldn't you?

To be fair I'm preeeeeeetty damned sure RFF know about webbing. Only just noticed OP corp, interesting.

It takes a minimum of two webbers to guarantee one will be available on every gate owing to the weapons timer. One webber is insufficient and leaves a freighter open to bumping at some point on shorter warps. And if those two webbers are not both perfect Rapier pilots, there can and will be gates where there is plenty of window for a bumper to get there first. Plus, webbers can be ganked too. Which is fine, I have no problem with that, but popping a webber should not allow an attacker to transition the mechanics into something that is now 100% in their favor.

And again, this is all focusing on avoidance. Avoidance is great; I'm not asking for more avoidance techniques. I'm proposing a mechanical counter to the actual mechanics of active bumping. As it is, in high-sec, once bumping is initiated it is 100% effective. You think 100% effective tactics are healthy for EVE?

I have been bumped for none of these reasons, in empty ships. I have been bumped just because I showed up. So the bumper decided to just bump away. What is being proposed here is to have a tool to deal with the bumping but still allowing interaction after the jump away. The way it is now, as Annette Nolan states and it is true, once you get into a bumping situation, that is pretty much it unless they either get a ganking squad or they get bored bumping and abandon the activity. How is that fair game play? Just asking!!!

Look at the last item on the list

Sometimes, sh*t happens and people blow you up, there's really not much you can do about that, you consent to non-consensual PvP when you undock, first rule of EvE.

Alright let's talk about non consensual bumping then. Your proposed module sounds good for when you are being bumped for no reason, the bumper in question is not looking to gank you, just to ruin your day, in which case, yes, it is unfair that a 1 day old pilot can lock your fully trained ship down with minimal effort.

However, what happens when an organised group of people get together and make an effort to bump you out of align to gank you. Your mod now makes all of their hard work redundant as you disregard physics and slingshot yourself to the nearest celestial. Sure they can follow you, but what's to say you're not already aligning back to gate with a webber freind to speed things up?

How can your proposal help in the first situation but not be a pain to balance for the second?

I am going to leave most of this debate untouched primarily because I can see the validity of most of the arguments on both sides so I will simply say this. The bumping mechanic definitely needs to be looked at again by CCP. No I am not saying it is broken, or that changes are needed but it does need a good long look.


Not specifically true as the OP has stated. The ONLY way this will work is if you properly guess the direction the you are being bumped and get that fast ship in the proper position. If the bumper has a few brain cells still active they will not bump you in the same direction making this technique totally worthless.

This tactic will work rarely as the EVE client does not accurately display your alignment vector during active bumping.

You don't have a 90 degree margin of error and I've watched my freighter snap to new alignments that extreme routinely during a bump. When you have burned 200km in one direction only to find that, in fact, your freighter was pointing 75 degrees off to the left the whole time and the client JUST NOW decides to inform you of that fact, well, that's not gameplay nor is that a reliable or even defensible counter to bumping.

Your other argument is, once again, avoidance, not a counter.

And your final counter is "more bumping", which sounds eerily like "the only counter to supers is more supers". Funnily enough, ALSO a gameplay state no one is particularly happy with :)

I'm sorry you disagree with reality, but that IS what happens when a freighter is bumped. The EVE client gets *very* confused about alignment.



A Bat Country representative should not be stooping to deception about the mechanics of ganks. You know as well as I do that a single pre-spawned CONCORD squad will barely diminish the DPS output of a full-size gank fleet. More importantly, what exactly does that have to do with bumping? Oh yeah, nothing. So I'm not sure why you'd bring CONCORD into this discussion.

Don't conflate this thread with one about freighter ganking. It's not. It's about a warp assist module which has one particularly useful case of being helpful as a counter to the bumping mechanic, a mechanic which is often but not exclusively used to pin down freighters in highsec, and not always for ganking. The module has other features unrelated to bumping entirely, and unrelated to freighter bumping in highsec specifically.

I have no interest in arguing about ganking because I have no interest in reducing or nerfing highsec ganking.

I AM interested in keeping bumping around as a valid mechanic, and in order to be a valid mechanic it needs a valid counter. If you guys keep arguing against valid gameplay counters to bumping you'll very soon find CCP simply nerfing what is clearly an OP mechanic in a way that is far less appealing to the highsec freighter ganking crowd.

My suggested mechanic would do nothing to prevent 95% of freighter ganks and would in no way be a guaranteed escape button for the remaining few % of cases either. It WOULD, however, provide a legitimate gameplay mechanic counter to active bumping so that bumping is not 100% certain to succeed.

The suggestion also has a number of other implications for pvp in general, though I find it amazing that no one seems to care to discuss any of those aspects.

Here is an old thread discussing the idea, for you.