EVE General Discussion

It's quite simple: irrespective of what other merits or flaws one might assign to them, one skill CODE certainly can't be said to lack is PR. Now combine this with the unfailing willingness of the less competent to keep jamming shop ship after ship into the system and to be shocked and surprised when CODE turns out to be there. When they then, without a hint of irony or awareness, attempt to inflate this one group in one system into a universe-spanning problem to cover up their failure, further stroking CODE's ego and giving them even more free PR in the process, you have the makings of an infinite attention engine.

True story. We're a one-system wonder.

nah

That was an exploit and CCP took appropriate action against those that used it. It was no real different from what those goons members did with FW.

As you stated code will re-imburse your ship costs. All you've done is prove my point that it's never been cheaper to gank (0 isk per gank). I've already proved it's never been easier or more accessible between tags and the buffs to destroyers and the addition of new gank options.

As to why "less people are doing it". Well you have no data from CCP to back such an assertion. YOu have only your "gut" and what you "feel" is going on and the severely limited dataset provided by killboards (none of my characters have a KB API). As the game has been out for 12 years now the only true way to know for sure is to have ccp provide us with the complete details by year.

The reason why more people aren't ganking is rather simple. There are downsides to ganking people if you care about the character being used for other activities in highsec. Killrights sec status and all that dis-incentivizes ganking on your main. Those downsides have no effect on me or most of code as we use alts for the ganking. The only thing I do is keep my gank alts above -5 which is really easy these days. There's also perception issues as some people think it's hard or expensive or that they don't want the negative association of being a ganker. There's probably 10 or more other reasons I'm not even thinking of.

I already pointed out the criminal timer so you're not even making a point.

Code will re-imburse you for any gank "loss" so there's absolutely no cost if you can be bothered to send an evemail with KMs at the end of the day.

Like I said before I have friends who spend days sitting on gates ganking random industrials and sometimes non industrials. My last friend to do so ended up making just under 1 billion isk in a matter of days. He didn't even bother sending an evemail to get his gank ships re-imbursed.

I've done it on one of my gank alts just to see what the big deal was about. I have never stated that it's impossible to avoid or to counter. You're just building up a strawman and trying to fight it instead of responding to what I am actually typing.

What confuses me is you start this quote block saying that hyperdunking is hard then at the end you say hyperdunking is no more difficult to pull off than a regular gank. Could you get some consistency in your posts?

I personally think hyperdunking is harder to pull off then regular ganking.

Where as 4 years ago you had to take the isk hit that insurance and modules cost today you can just send an evemail to CODE and get 100% re-imbursement for NO COST.

You seem to be missing the point that in the old days you could buy your gank ship on the market and make a profit off a gank just by blowing them up. That's before any loot, and the money was magically produced. Now, 100% of the money has to be generated by players playing the game.

I'd also like to pick up on something you said in reply to Tippia - there's a minimum of 15 minutes between gank per player but that wouldn't stop multiple ganking fleets operating in the same system. Like he said, you'd be able to prove it if ganks were commonplace.

No, he's simply asking you to not ignore the realities that you find inconvenient.

Such as the fact that you could gank at a profite in the old days without any external input — no relying on CODE-like benefactors, or on the target dropping sellable goods. It was just ship loss → profit. There was no “secret formula” — it was well-known, well-publicisd, completely transparent and predictable and known by all. People made a business out of having their ships blown up, with or without anything else blowing up at the same time. I have no idea where you got the absurd idea from that it was ever not understood by everyone involved.

If you aren't ignoring this reality, as such, and instead are just ignorant of it, then you should at least try to learn what they were before trying (and failing) to make a cased based on how the old mechanics worked. As it is, you're only exposing a pretty huge knowledge hole, which unfortunately then blows an even larger hole in your argumentation.

You're posting from a position of ignorance, allow me to enlighten you.

It was possible to profit from the destruction of your ship because the insurance payout was based upon a fixed and arbitrary price for the minerals that go into making a ship, otherwise known as the mineral basket. That price was set in 2003 when there were very few players, being a fixed value it failed to take into account changes in both the supply and demand, and hence prices, for the contents of the mineral basket and set a fixed price floor on the value of a ship. (Relevant Dev Blog)

When the price of building a ship fell to below 70% of the insurance payout (the price floor), due to additional sources of minerals being introduced (drone poo) and a glut of minerals producing a downward pressure on price, it became profitable to build a ship, insure it and then make sure that it exploded. It didn't matter how it exploded, whether it be via self destruction, at the hands of another player, at the hands of an NPC or at the hands of Concord, you got paid more than it cost to build.

While, and perhaps because, it was an oversight on the part of CCP, it was never deemed to be an exploit. Nowadays the insurance value of a ship is based upon a periodic average of a ship's manufacturing cost, being an average it takes into account changes in mineral prices.

It's not 0 isk per gank, the reimbursement comes from other players not from an outdated mechanic that magics isk out of thin air. It costs isk to gank, somebody is paying for those ships, somebody else is getting paid for those ships. They are not arbitrarily produced from the ether at the wave of a hand.

The only thing you've proved is your ignorance. If ganking is now easier and far more accessible than ever, why are there so few people doing it, and why are the people who are doing it mostly members of groups that are reliant upon player sourced reimbursement and ship replacement programs in order to play in the way that they do?

You also neglect to mention that mining ships and haulers have also received significant buffs in the form of more options and in the case of some of those options significantly increased EHP. CCP have kept the playing field fairly level in terms of balancing those changes and options against each other.

You are aware that there are only a few groups that regularly indulge in ganking aren't you, and that those groups have had to become extremely organised to make ganking a viable playstyle?

Addressing your comment about KB API, your decision to not share your API is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. The way that the KB system works doesn't require you to have submitted your API for it to record your wins and losses if somebody else involved has submitted theirs.

Some of what you say here is correct, there are disincentives to ganking and yes some people do use alts for ganking; conversely a large percentage of hisec gankers consider ganking to be their main profession and their gank characters to be their mains, main being the character that they use the most. They partake of other activities on their alts.

However, your reasoning is subjective. IMHO more people aren't ganking because it requires effort, coordination, planning, a decent knowledge of certain game mechanics and a sizable player funded SRP to make it a viable playstyle.

Zero cost means that the ships are free, this is not the case, isk changes hands, somebody pays for them with isk, somebody gets paid for them in isk. If the cost was truly zero then CCP would do something about it in the interests of balance, just as they did with the insurance changes I described in my previous post.

On the contrary it's got everything to do with what you said, for it to be a strawman he has to be refuting an argument that you didn't make.

You specifically stated "By definition if they are out there in force it's far more then one an hour. When they are serious it's one every 15 minutes or so due to limits imposed by the criminal mechanics.".

While true for 1 or more players who gank as a single group it in no way prevents multiple groups working together to stagger their ganks over that time period, ergo if gankers were out in force they could kill as many people as they want by keeping a constant stream of gankers substituting for each other to bypass the restriction that a GCC timer places on them. That they don't, and can't, do this is due to the fact that they don't have the numbers or the finances to do so, despite you claiming that ganking is cheaper and easier than ever.

Bollocks, I get to within 50-100 (depending on whether or not I use my Gecko) DPS of an overheated gank T2 fit Catalyst using void, out of a T1 PvE cruiser fitted with T1 guns using faction ammo and drones.

As for your claim of Attack BC's being a fraction of the cost in skills you're wrong, the only difference between an attack BC and a BS is the BS skills, you still have to have the same skills for the weapons as you need for a BS, and unless we're talking level 4 or 5 skills , taking into account that you need BC at level 3 to train a BS, we're looking a 64k SP (20-25 days hours) difference between BC level 3 and BS level 3.

Regarding the cost, a gank BS was usually platinum insured and the insurance often more than covered your ship and modules if you built the ship yourself or bought it at less than the price floor, hence profitable. An Attack BC when used for ganking is uninsurable and the SRP schemes pay for your loss, not a fixed and inflated price based on an arbitrary and out of date mechanic. That's before we get into how the isk is produced that pays for the SRP.

A technique which doesn't allow you to gank multiple targets before Concord leave the doughnut shop, unlike the boomerang exploit which you previously compared it to, and is hilariously easy to counter or disrupt; which is why CCP are ok with it

m0o would like a word with you, so would Helicity Boson the creator of Hulkageddon.

If you are going to make completely false claims like "ganking is way down" then at least try and be creative about it. Ganking is way up, several times over.

Proof? zkillboard the Concord Corp stats. Look at their kills. Specifically look at Police Captain kills.

But just some numbers for you, while we digest this info.

July 2015 = 28,345
July 2014 = 22,667
July 2013 = 17,325
July 2012 = 7,859

See how fun maths are

January 2015 = 35,248
January 2014 = 24,291
January 2013 = 13,948
January 2012 = 6,990

Oh boy... not looking good for your theory

And before you come here and say "this just means there are more ships involved in the ganking" or some such nonsense, remember that it takes less ships than it did in 2009 to pull off a gank because of high alpha damage BCs and high dps destroyers... and it doesn't matter if one guy died 500 times a day or 500 guys died 1 time a day, the end result is more ganking by more ships.

Now... couple the drastic increase in gank numbers, with the falling average online population, and I would have to say ganking is 5x more likely now than it was 4 years ago. At least


Edit: One more thing. Before any of you say "This doesn't prove ganking is up, only that Concord killed more ships" I say to you that is true.

But if you check Code. stats, you will see that this year each month they have killed more ships than Concord did in 2012. They are on par with 2013 concord stats. They actually killed more ships last month and a half alone than Concord did in the years 2007-2010 combined for all 4 years of available data.

So don't tell me Ganking is down.