Crime & Punishment

Drac hits the nail on the head on this one.
How many times did we convo a gank victim and find that they did not care?

Even I hoped they'd be a little angry, ready to roll and alt and join anti-ganking forces for some sh!ts and giggles. And would find that they were so space rich, and factoring in freighter loss, that they just shrugged it off.

Now, from my perspective, I'm not space rich enough to absorb such losses, so I have trouble comprehending other players who can lose a billion or two and not care.

This is why anti-ganking became a little boring. Though my absence of late is due to RL demands on my time and I'm itching to get back into the game and get into nullsec for the new emerging fun that appears to be happening out there. Hopefully this month but RL seems to have it in for "fun time" these days so who knows but thanks to the super long skill que I'm good with it and back in 2009 - 2010 I had to go for months at a time only logging in for skills.

Happy problems - some people don't have such interesting stuff going on in RL that I do. All is well.

So while CODE. is very good at self-aggrandizement, experienced anti-gankers have observed that indeed many freighters - and a good lot of them on autopilot - still get through. Even I wonder why but as time wore on, real observation started to wear away at "OMG CODE killing everything!! They PWN Eve!!!!" and it's one group picking off low-hanging fruit that, if they do cause a rage-quit, the game is not going to miss. Everybody else appears to be on the ball and enjoying the game. While it's fun to shoot CODE's wrecks and deny them phat loot, it's boring waiting for their aggression timers.

Eve will survive CODE as has many good players already have. TEARS had more hands-on grief to deal and they could not kill it. CCP may have finally figured out that to cure is not nerfs to highsec, but reasons to leave it and seek more challenging play outside of highsec where CODE and their ilk fear to tread.

Edit:
I must also add that when I started out countering gankers I was under the impression that it was a highsec interdiction goal. A "market strategy at gunpoint" objective where you kill off industry to increase the value of your own.
What I found was that the loot in the ganked freighters, what survived, ended up back on the market. So much for total destruction,. But when I read the post boasting about "trillion of ISK destroyed each month", that made me realize something else just now.
Look at PLEX prices. Now look at prices of everything else. Is the inflation on equal tracks?
There was a time when there were plenty of minerals out there and plenty of bots too. CCP came up with "Unholy Rage" to basically hunt down and ban bots. (Funny that CODE. is all about destroying "bot aspirant" behavior). This made minerals cheap. I remember seeing Cyclone hulls selling under 30 million. Once as cheap as 20. But when the bots were banned, the price of minerals increased and so did the price of everything else. At roughly the same time period, incursions were spewing ISK into the system. The result: inflation.
Then came CODE. and I recall from a convo with one of their bumpers that there have been better days for Uedama. At this time it's not what it used to be. I don't know if that's entirely true or not (to me it does seem to have come down a bit) but as CODE. increased in their destructive activity, prices have some down.
Destroying "trillions of ISK" is apt to do what? Reduce inflation. If someone runs incursions till they turn blue and then buys some expensive stuff and puts that in a freighter, and the freighter gets ganked and half of that stuff is destroyed, they have removed the very thing from the game (endless "easy ISK" ) that they claim is killing the game.
Tech 2 modules, for example, are at the cheapest I have ever seen them and ships are almost as cheap as they were when bots were in heavy use. Is that a result of carebear industrialists "going back to WoW"? Is that a result of people afraid to mine ore? They are ganking freighters and miners yet inflation is curbed while availability of hulls and modules is as good as ever and at good prices.
If the goal of CODE. was something more nefarious, I'd say they are a failure. But now I'm starting to wonder if some genius figured out how to save the game from inflation and boredom by getting the very players who were part of the problem to do the ganking. Turn who you ganked into a member of CODE.? You went from someone who was grinding in safety by several means and increasing inflation to someone destroying ISK, with the bravado of being CODE. (read: not a pleb or a pubbie) but ultimately the joke is on those members of CODE. who, in enticed to be all about victimizing other players and then enjoy "turning" them, may well have done the bidding of good.

Hello Ms Longtime,

I read your post with interest.

Only James 315 would be able to answer directly the comments contained in your first paragraph. My recollection is that he acknowledged the success of Hulkageddon, but pointed out that its effect was limited by being of relatively short duration, despite its original intention to be 'Hulkageddon Infinity' (my italics). I wasn't around at that time, so am unable to comment further.

I often come across the claim that 'CODE ganks noobs' - or some variation thereof. It won't surprise you that I'm acquainted with many members of the New Order, but I must state here that I have yet to come across a single one who targets very new players specifically, knowingly.

Given your standing within the Community, I'm inclined to believe that you have seen what you describe, but I do believe that it by no means represents the behaviour of the generality of Code enforcers.

The New Halaima Code of Conduct embraces the whole of Highsec; no exceptions. But enforcement itself is elective. I confess that I have ganked very new players - always by mistake (I neglected to check their Employment History first). In each case I've more than reimbursed the player and explained both his/her error and my own. I can't speak for other players, but I'd be very surprised if the practise you highlight were wide-spread. Perhaps your view is skewed by your tendency to haunt the trade hubs almost exclusively?

The change in use of the adjective 'cool' - used in the sense which you indicate - is interesting. The Googled definition sees a marked upswing of use from about the 1970s onwards (LINK: Cool - you have to expand the box downwards).

However, in conversations I've seen on MinerBumping.com, there's a growing trend to invest the word with heavy irony. An example:

THICK CEO: Yeah, I do Orca boosts, that's why I'm CEO!

AWOXER: Cool!

Thank you Ms Longtime for granting me the opportunity to explore these matters with you. I'm obliged to you.

I don't think you understand what inflation is or how it works.