Player Features and Ideas Discussion

CCP changed them after years of people such as yourself demanding to be able to fit them. Todays freighters are worse than what we had before as you cannot fit the same tank and cargo space we enjoyed before. On top of that you idiots go and fit expanded cargo holds on them which makes then even easier to kill than ever before.

You made freighters worse.

Please stop spewing nonsense.

First of all, scouts are a thing.

A competent freighter pilot is never* going to get bumped, because the first guy he adds to his fleet is a dual-web rapier and the two of them have practiced in an empty highsec system or on Singularity until they're at the point where they don't make mistakes. This level of training takes minutes.

In the event of a server brainfart, the second addition to the freighter pilot's fleet rushes ahead of the now bumped freighter in a MWD interceptor to provide a warp point for the freighter and the rapier. By the time a bump ship burns out to you, you've had time to offer a GF in local and warp away.

If the interceptor pilot can't get it done, bring in your own stabber (fleet issue FTW, but regular will do the job) fitted for bumping.

That gives you four non-aggressive counters against a single act of non-aggression. That's pretty unbalanced against the good guys (bumpers and gankers).

If you manage to screw all that up (and, yes, at this point you really have screwed up and are entirely to blame for the mess you're in), you have the option to asplode the macherial and you should probably take it because it's the practical course of action if you want to save the freighter.

If your gankers are so terrible that they can't kill an un-tanked** machariel then you need to use your last line of defence, which is an ECM-spamming suicide blackbird on the catalysts when they arrive. That'll give you 15 minutes to try the non-aggressive methods.

* Doesn't account for random acts of server burpage or those horrid downtime warnings, etc. 99.9% safety in practice.

** Personally, I bump using a PvP fit fleet stabber (with tank), because you never know when some numpty in an orca is going to go suspect. :) That said, almost all bumpers are un-tanked.

This is not a comment on the state of ganking, it is only an answer to the specific questions quoted above.

Why should CCP change the game so the results of a bump are more inline with the reality of the laws of physics?
Well even considering that this is a game and reality has no real role the amount of movement that can be imparted into the target ships is completely out of line with what would happen given the mass(weight) and speed of the ships involved. Since EvE is a crazy mess of things that react exactly as they do in real life and things that do not both sides in this one can claim game and or real world physics as a reason for the change or not to make the change.

How would changing the physics of a bump to be more inline with the real world make the game better?
Well now that is a question that cannot be answered in any definitive way because "better" is a relative term and is based entirely on which side of this debate you are on.

Taken in a general sense and applied game wide I personally would like to see the physics of this game come more in line with what would occur in the real world. Just an example is equal and opposite reaction the Iowa class battleships of WW2 weight in at more than 58,000 tons and a full broadside from the 16" (406.4mm) guns would drive them about 15 feet sideways in the water. See photo upper right corner of this page and look at the water pattern on the side of the ship for proof of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa-class_battleship
And yet a full broad side of 1400mm (55.118") guns imparts no movement to our battleships.

There's a phenomenon called hatewatching: people watch a season of a show they hate right from the opening just to tear it down in forums.

I feel that we have a similar phenomenon here where solutions that have worked for years for anyone with the ability to read and comprehend are routinely thrown aside so people can harp on about how much they hate their hauling existence. Because gankers.

I've heard that hate and rage feel good, but I've never found it so. When I avoid gankers, no matter how EASY it is I get a good feeling because I did something that apparently others that start these threads apparently cant do. It is why I do actually enjoy these threads: Its funny cause its not me bashing my head against the wall and complaining the wall is too hard and the metal plate in my head is doing nothing.

*Ed nothing wrong with metal plates in the head, but they are not normally there to absorb damage, they're there to fix it. Apologies to anyone I've inadvertently insulted.

But that is just it, it is not CCP’s call to make, in the end. CCP has created what they call a sandbox game. In one video they even reference Sensitivity to Initial Conditions (SIC). Do you know what that means? I mean really know what it means, not the pop-science Bravo Sierra you might have picked up from watching Jurassic Park and listening to Ian Malcom? A system that is SIC and dynamic and nonlinear will be both unpredictable and uncontrollable (in the sense of optimal control theory). If the game is well and truly a chaotic system, which is how CCP has billed the game, then a lot of what goes on inside the game is largely outside of their control. This is a good thing for many of us in that we like a game where the players drive what happens, and yet we are not in control either.

If you don’t like that analogy, think of an evolutionary process. Evolution does things that people cannot foresee. Evolution itself is unpredictable. Change the conditions and what will result? I don’t know. Nobody really does. The last rounds of nerfing to ganking bear this out. Freighters were given the option to fit a tank. Concord times shortened. Insurance payouts when dying to Concord removed. In short all of these things, ceterius paribus should have reduced ganking. But, just as with economics (where the term ceterius paribus is invoked quite often) we do not live in that world, nor do we play in that virtual world. The players who wanted to gank freighters adapted and changed. They noted that catalysts have a high DPS rate for a cheap ship. That a well-organized fleet with a bit of experience can actually still gank freighters and make a profit…in fact, quite a good profit. And so ganking may have actually even increased. This should not, really be surprising IMO. It is not surprising because we see this kind of thing all the time. You improve the fuel efficiency of automobiles and gasoline consumption can actually go UP! Why? Jevons Paradox. You have an efficiency gain and while initially you might use less of whatever it is that efficiency gain applies to the long term effect is to increase the demand.

The bottom line here is that trying to fine tune these sorts of things is very, very difficult. And in this case the last attempt blew up in your face in that it lead to even more/“easier” ganking. Further, there are already methods for players to reduce ganking, possibly even to zero (at least for freighters). Use a scout. In other words, what is broken here is not the game nor the mechanics, but the way you play the game. You play it as if HS were perfectly safe. Then when other players show quite clearly it isn’t you want to claim imbalance to cover for your incompetence.

For exhumers CCP did add a rig to the game which makes you harder to bump, its called a Higgs anchor, it allows you to mine while aligned and greatly increases your mass.

Another option would be to maybe mine in an area where you are allowed to shoot back. Concord is a double edged sword after all.

Bumping should be rewarded with getting webbed by the gate guns for a few seconds but it should also disable autopilot for the bumped.

Imagine ramming other cars at a cross road to prevent them from getting away (and like ramming ships it doesn't do damage for some reason).

The self-driving car that was rammed goes off road and won't find its way back on the road; and the ramming offender will - even in Italy - at least get pulled over by the cops for disrupting the traffic.

Oh posh.

Evolution isn't nearly as unpredictable as you frame it here; mayhaps how the optimum is found has an air of serendipity to it, but the optimums are honestly well defined. The same challenges are more often than not met with the same adaptations - take a look at how land reptiles and land mammals both made the journey back into the sea as Ichthyosaurs and dolphins respectively, with largely the same set of adaptations - long snout, streamlined form, and filippers from the same homologous structures. Likewise, some of the long term experiments in bacteria have demonstrated remarkable convergent evolution of the same novel traits from entirely isolated populations. Mutation is random, selection is not.

Same thing applies here. When insurance was nerfed, the optimum adaptation here was switching to the max dps/isk ship; there was no plasticity or uncertainty here, that is the optimum response. Anyone could have predicted that some people would fit their freighters better than others when they gave them low slots. The problem really is that it doesn't make a difference - if you max tank a freighter, it will still die provided you can keep it bumped. There isn't an optimum fitting response.

Oh don't get me wrong. I agree with you 100%. it is good that reckless capitals and unprepared players are penalized.

I just wish this would be true outside of Hi Sec.

Yes. If you are being bumped for over 10 minutes it's just harassment. As the person doing the bumping is not engaging in piracy, technically the supposed legality of it is absurd. If said person was committing an act of PVP piracy, they would be at the least flagged or dealt with by CONCORD. As they do not receive a security status hit, a negative flag and don't invoke a CONCORD response they aren't part of any piracy attempt. They are just some individual harassing another. How is this any different than if I just decided to hold a player in place for no reason than to impede their enjoyment of the game. CCP can think of no way to stop this type of harassment bumping so they resign to defeat. It's just too much trouble to correct. To save face, of course, they officially allow it. They don't want to look like weak and unable to police their own game world, right?

The only real solution I see is to not allow people with severely low security status into the place that is supposed to be high security. The two should not mix so well. What I mean by "not allow" is that they cannot dock within any high security station that isn't player owned. They should not be able to acquire clones in high security space from any NPC stations. Anything they possess becomes tainted. Any player, while in high/low security space, who exchanges any items with them loses a large amount of security status and becomes suspect. Any player owned high sec station that allows them to dock or use their cloning facilities is fined for a substantial amount or becomes legal target for anyone for 1 week and/or loses their permit to exist in empire space. The exception being that if the items are "unpossesed", and "untainted", via ship destruction. So you'd have the 50% odds of losing items making "suicide trading" inefficient. No trial account would even be allowed to trade in tainted goods unless their security status was equally bad already. No using alts to get around it as their security status would quickly be ruined making them outlaws as well. Pirate players should be able to join or have their corporation fall under a pirate organization like the Guristas or Angels and NOT be attacked by their aligned pirate corp. Give them a wide variety of agents just like law abiding players have.

They need to be outlaws. Currently, you have a system in which the leader of ISIS is free to come and go as he pleases. Law officials give him a warning whenever he enters a country and exists the airport, but all he has to do is make it to any building and they cease their pursuit. As long as he keeps moving from building to building he is allowed to own have a house, a car, buy groceries, and do everything a normal person can while being a known terrorist. I find it ridiculous.