Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If this comes in, you'd be posting here demanding that looting while aligned be removed too.

No, ganking does not need another nerf. Go away.

No, this is at the bottom of a long and slippery slope. The OP's post is reasonable as the mechanic in question is basically a circumvention of the Crimewatch system. As you point out here, there's nothing stopping you from aligning, looting, and warping, it just increases the risk (you know, up from zero) of looting a wreck.

Besides, Ganking is currently nicely buffed by the Bowhead Freighter as well as the increased possibility for "stupid" provided by the Freighter changes.

What you are describing takes more time than doing it the way you consider to have risk. There are many things you can do to thwart their efforts in the meantime. The mechanic doesn't need changing, your mindset of what you will and won't do to accomplish your goals is what needs changing.

Time is the issue, the loot is at risk the entire time it sits waiting to be scooped. As I said, if you don't want them to scoop it, then do something that will thwart their efforts and make them change their tactics. Don't ask to have the mechanics changed when there are already solutions to the "problem."

As much as everyone likes to believe gankers are mindless idiots, it is simply not the case. Sure there are some exceptions but if you change this mechanic, they will simply come up with something else that you can't use your brain to come up with a solution for and then you will be back asking for....


"One more nerf"

Perhaps forbidding the use of fleet hangers while suspect flagged for theft? This could get annoying fast for people living in low sec or other scenarios where suspect flagging occurs quite often though.

The risk/reward balance is skewed here and seems like the laundring of stolen goods is rather too easy in some scenarios, but the issue rests with how it is handled by crimewatch.

Discussion has already happened somewhere in Crime & Punishment.

Sparing a repeat of the same discussion, one thing I did want to touch on is the conflating of criticisms with circumventing Crimewatch with a desire for 'one more nerf'. This is a phenomenon that closely resembles guilty by association. Since the 'one more nerf' crowd would like this change it is assumed that anyone who supports the change must be of that mentality.


I think they can still jetcan it. They'd have to forbid fleet hanger use and jet canning but there could be some unintended consequences to that. Particularly for lowsec pilots.

So they just jet-can it...

Either steal the loot first or gank the shuttle and/or hauler. Or gank the wreck.

Your solution is, of course, hilariously exploitable as now there is a way to give a fleet member a suspect flag without thier knowledge.

Suspect flags are currently not, and should never be given to a player without thier active action. Otherwise, like the brief drones-defending-MTU situation, you will have a lot of carebear tears as expensive ships get flagged and destroyed without the pilot taking an action.

But really, what are you trying to change here? Freighter ganking is already incredibly rare and easily avoidable. Making loot scooping more difficult will only have the predictable effect of reducing the number of freighter ganks. Do freighters really need more safety? Do developer resources need to be spent on a mechanic that will only provide more safety for freighter pilots and that will have many unintended consequences for other pilots using fleet hangers?

You can already deal with the situation in several ways as alluded to above. Steal the loot yourself, or just blow up the wreck and deny the loot to the gankers. You know, generate some content like the freighter gankers rather than just passively sitting there complaining you don't have free targets to shoot so you can't do anything.

Tell that to the miner who has his Orca destroyed when the new player who just joined his corp goes suspect during the mining op by purposely stealing from a nearby can and uses the hanger right before a T3 cruiser uncloaks nearby. Once you explain to him how he should have known someone could make him suspect even if he was just mining, and that this unintuitive mechanic is necessary to protect AFK freighter pilots, I am sure he will understand.


Yes, setting the safety to yellow (which could happen weeks before), and joining a fleet? How is it obvious (outside a looting context) that those two things now make you open to attack by anyone?


Rare is relative term so it all depends on your definition, but compared to all the ship losses in New Eden, or even just highsec, freighter losses are a tiny fraction. Why institute more, complicated Crimewatch mechanics to fix one tiny edge case. And a "fix" that will reduces content (and lower conflict) to boot?


The mechanic isn't wrong, it is just the mechanic. There are rules are put in place and enforced by CONCORD to provide some structure to PvP and to provide a disincentive to random ship violence in highsec. Like all laws and rules, there are loopholes and ways to get around the rules. The more you understand them, the more you will find ways to deal with them. Like hyperdunking, using fleet hangers to loot stuff is just emergent gameplay that players have adapted to.

CCP is not trying to prevent PvP or ganking with these timers as your proposal assumes. There would be much more effective (and easier to code) ways to do that, like in this case just make ships not drop anything, or not drop anything if they were ganked. CCP is trying to foster conflict between players. Perhaps there is a way where some changes could be made to the stealing mechanic to encourage more content, but your proposal seems like all it is designed to do is nerf ganking yet again for no net benefit in engaging gameplay.


No, plenty of players gank freighters for profit. In fact, I would say most, and in fact, that is the type of gameplay that should be encourage the most. Ganking is most useful in the game when it is a disincentive for overloading/AFKing/undertanking your freighter. In an ideal game design, it is the most expensive freighters that get ganked to make fitting choices and escort behaviour matter most. If you remove loot, then the game degenerates to where gankers will mostly stop ganking, and the few that do till will just do it randomly (since there is no benefit for choosing targets) making fitting choices and hauling behaviour not matter. There would be no incentive to carry a "safe" amount of cargo as players rightly would recognize that would not influence the chance of you getting ganked.

Gankers are for freighters the only risk, and the only real gameplay for haulers. For that gameplay to be the most engaging, gankers need to be able to identify targets, and to recover the loot or they will be ineffective and will (mostly) stop ganking.

I can see this from both sides (some good arguments made), and feel that the level of work to fix this exploit would simply be too large to be worthwhile, since it won't make any real difference...... (people will swap to pinching loot into a can, then the hauler grabs it)