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If it is easy pray then why aren't they dying left and right? CODE, Goonswarm and occationally some other big alliances are already the only people who can do such a gank. There was a time when people solo ganked freighters which was effectively destroyed with the last buff.

(EDIT: just want to add that ganking empty Freighters is a side effect of the large fleet you have to bring. If you want to keep those people in the fleet and entertain them, after all this is a game, you have to hit something and not just letting them sit arround. There is nothing more boring than gank fleets who only go after valuable targets.)

So all they are doing with another buff to the EHP is to make that pray even more exclusive to big alliances with a lot of people. The ONLY thing this does is to limit a playstile so you have to bring more people.

I know, some of you think 'lulz, cry more ganker, you are the bad person here anyway so you deserve it' and I am sure this is also the way some devs are thinking. But being a criminal and ganking is an important part of the game. It is a valid game style and it is a lot of fun.

So for me the essence of this is that CCP is buffing players wich play the boring hauling and mining game and are often not even at their keayboard. At the same time they nerf a playstile which is a lot of fun and make it once again less accessible.

This does not end with Freighters. For example, it will no longer be possible to solo gank an untanked Retriever with a t2 catalyst in 0.7 and probably even 0.6. Now you have to bring a second ganker along. The amount of ships you could kill was already very small with only one gank char and it will be a lot smaller after this change.

Obviously we will adapt, but there is only one way this will happen: you get an additional gank char which will make the gank probably even cheaper since you can now use t1 fits and do more damage than one t2. Do you really want to force all gankers into multiboxing? This may have some unintended consequences for the Freighter as well.

And you think this is good?

You are right, haulers will adapt and start carrying more value because it is safer. The big groups, like Goonswarm, and to a lesser extent CODE, will not be affected as they have the numbers to absorb the increased cost and should be collecting more loot. In the end they will keep on ganking as before, and CODE. will keep on exploding empty freighters just to make a point, subsidized if necessary by their ever-growing SRP.

But who this will hurt any small groups looking to get into the game, although I guess you could argue the bar was already too high for anyone to set up a new ganking operation (which is supported by the fact we haven't seen one appear in years). When you are talking about a 15-20 people minimum to get started, it was already a massive bar to entry which has just been increased another 20+% people. I guess to many players and devs this is just fine, but it is a little strange to me to draw people to your game the ability to be a criminal, spend significant effort to code in a system for them to operate, but then make it near impossible for anyone with less than a 20-to-1 player advantage to be a highwayman in this game. It would be simpler, just to turn off the ability to shoot than to keep ratcheting up the difficulty to the point only one or two groups have the numbers to brute force being a criminal.

But if you hate ganking, then this doesn't matter to you. What should though is the effect this will have on haulers. Red Frog (and their competitors) is going to have to eventually lower their prices or raise their ISK amount carried (which will decrease the number of contracts they get) to pass on this extra safety to their customers. That means less profit for them, and more contracts lost to the increase in AFK hauling. There will also be a decrease in sales of freighters hurting industrialists, but since ganking is already at minuscule levels, you could argue that that small decrease from near zero already won't be noticed by the economy.

So this "one more nerf" will make bad hauling safer hurting professional haulers, while do nothing to large ganking groups other than give them more profitable targets. More haulers, particularly AFK/bad/lazy haulers should be vulnerable (like the entosis changes in sov nullsec which made sovholders vulnerable to small groups) if you want to promote hauling as a profession and make it have meaning. If anyone can load up a freighter and press "Autopilot" why would anyone ever outsource hauling in highsec?

This is a hamfisted change that hurts highsec as a whole more than it helps. But gankers will adapt and ships will keep exploding, and probably be rewarded with more tears and loot from players who think they are safe and haul for months AFK with no problem until they one day put a little too much in their freighter and lose a half-a-year's worth of work in a few minutes. That seems like poor game design to me, even if the lower hauling rates this change will produce are going to benefit me and my industrial/trading operations directly. I already only pay a few hundred thousand per jump to move stuff from Jita to the other trade hubs. I wonder how low prices will go?

Obviously "boring" is your very personal label. Please refrain from judging other peoples' playstyle while at the same time knowing full well that ganking needs haulers, but not vice versa. As for the EHP/resistance buff, I suggest to go ahead with it as planned, and revisit the issue every three months or so when enough data has accumulated to measure the continued effect. When it comes to passive Damage Control I am still ambivalent. For ship hulls with enough lowslots, fitting a passive DCU might become a reflex action.

It does? I honestly cant think of a single one.
oh and in regards to the whole red frog thing, you mention the statisitcs on how few ships they have lost in regards to how many jumps they do, yet you do seem to forget that most freighter ganks takes place in just a couple of systems, one of which you have to go through to get from one trade hub to another (unless of course you wanna go through low sec ).
Hence your way of using statistics is all wrong in this matter.

Would you feel better if we made all of high sec 1.0 sec and then removed the hull res bonus on freighters?

It has 800 base structure, the added 33% resists directly to the hull will not stack with its defense bonus which adds another 33%. This destroyer is going to have roughly the same hull ehp of todays stabber before you fit any mods to it.

I literally just said it will get close to the current stabbers hull. Are you even reading before you act all outraged at me?

Hey everyone.

The actual DCU feedback has been a bit challenging to sift out of the ganking debate, but I want to make it clear that the IFFA fitting requirements in the OP are not a typo. It's intentional that the new compact DCU have a slightly higher CPU cost than the previous best named versions. This will indeed require some fits to change, but the intention here is to create a balance enviroment between the different meta levels of damage control as well as making damage controls as a whole less important for many fits. There are plenty of options for saving the CPU from old IFFA and Pseudo fits, including the new compact damage upgrades and forgoing a DCU entirely for another lowslot module and taking full advantage of the new base hull resistances.

We will of course be keeping an eye on how these changes go as we being SISI testing and if we see evidence that the fittings need to change we have the ability to do so. Thanks!

Now a quick note on suicide ganking and the impact that these changes will have.

We view ganking as one of many normal game systems that needs tweaking and balancing from time to time. Changes to the balance around ganking doesn't mean we have any intentions on removing it (if we wanted to do that, we easily could through direct methods).

In a lot of ways, keeping balance in this system is much like park rangers maintaining balance between wolf and elk populations. We keep an eye on how the whole ecosystem is developing and make tweaks as nessesary. Sometimes we might protect the corpses of dead elk from vultures so the wolves can feed in peace. Sometimes we might put some light body armor on the elk so that the wolves need to pick their targets more carefully. And I think I've officially taken this analogy too far.

You gankers are a clever bunch and we have no doubt that you'll adapt and do just fine. Our previous changes didn't kill ganking, these changes won't kill ganking and our future changes won't kill ganking either.

We're going to keep making changes that we believe benefit the game as a whole, which needs to remain healthy for both sides of this debate to thrive.

Could you restrict the HP buffs to just freighters?
Anshars and arks are already too tanky if fit for it.
Anshars get 1m EHP after this change and that is completely unreasonable.

Not to mention they can always just jump out if they get bumped.

There are more than gankers concerned about this change.