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I don't think it's been said here yet, and I've been waiting for it, but it still hasn't come up. So I'll say it.

I don't want to throw anyone under the bus, because I think it's bad form. But good god, someone actually said this.



This is what I hear when he says that:
RFF are only able to have high survival rates by knowing how the game is played, being aware of their surroundings, using the in-game tools at their disposal, and flying smart. So of course, their survival rates can't be taken into account.

I have never in my time on these forums, seen a posting that so radically demonstrates that a person has no idea what game they're playing. This is EvE. We have forum signatures like "Delete the Weak", and "Beware the Falcon Punch". The entire idea is that you're supposed to play smart.

Lucas, the problem isn't that RFF has great survival rates, the problem is that everyone is careless, lazy, ignorant, or stupid.

There are instances where you can say an outlier doesn't matter statistically. Like say, if RFF were actually in Cahoots with the entire Blue Doughnut of Nullsec, and each freighter had a full escort service to and from it's destinations. Then you can point to two things which would invalidate their numbers. 1: They're radically outside the norm. And 2: They have tools or resources most people can't feasibly manage.

For the purposes of attempting to ignore their data, both conditions have to be met. If it's inside the norm, it doesn't matter because it's not an outlier. If they have and use the same resources everyone else has, then it's still an even playing field.

And that's the problem with Lucas trying to dismiss the data. There is no space wizardry at work at RFF, there is no CCP oversight of their ships, their ships do not fly with an Concord escort. They simply fly smart. That's it. They don't even do it as a group; as it's been pointed out that many are just individual pilots in NPC groups with a couple friends (or no friends at all, and they still manage).

Lucas' post is, by far, the clearest call for EvE to be the oft-mocked "Hello Kitty Online". In one simple post, he outright dismissed the foundational principles of EvE, of flying smart, and advocated that the standards should be lowered to meet the lowest common denominator. That game mechanics should revolve around protecting the weak, instead of letting them learn from their mistakes.

I jokingly said earlier in a post that "Lucas finally understands EvE!" Contrary to how it looked, it wasn't a personal attack against him, since at that point I held no personal views towards him. He just teed up a nice shot at himself with a statement about "100% safety", and I took the opportunity. But since he made that above statement I'm convinced he's playing the wrong game.

He stated that people playing the game well should be dismissed.

Any time he speaks up again and tries to make a case for anything in this game, that quote of his must be presented. Not by one person, not by a group of people, but every single person reading his post should remind him of the foul he committed in his post.

Lucas, word to the wise. If you want to debate the merits of freighter EHP by virtue of their relation to other similarly-sized ships, that's reasonable and I'm not harping on you for that. But if you want to debate on the rarity of their ganking, you cannot dismiss RFF data under these terms. If flying dumb and getting killed is a factor in nerfing something, then tomorrow morning everything is nerfed and all you have left is festival launchers. That's it.

And as I say, I don't think so. Ganking empty freighters already has a highly negative ISK outcome. FC's who do it today do so because they think the benefits of that action outweigh the loss in ISK either immediately, or in the long run. Gankers are not morons, blindly suiciding their ships into the first freighter they see. Each and every empty freighter was ganked for a reason. Sometimes that reason is as trivial as an FC having a couple dozen people waiting for something to kill, but the pressure to shoot something and keep the troops entertained will remain after this change.

Sure, increasing that cost slightly changes the calculation a little, but the reasons why they do it today will still be there after the March patch and FCs are still going to make empty freighters explode on occasion when they think it is in their interest.

Empty freighters are not going to be any safer from a desperate CODE. FC looking for something, anything to shoot, or from Miniluv or PL looking to harass haulers working for their enemies. The sandbox is still going to provide a reason beyond ISK to shoot them. All this does is lock small groups out of attempting to attack, and increases the limit of what you can carry safely by raising the costs for those who attack for profit. That will make freighters who were on the margin of profitability less likely to be attacked by a pure pirate and thus safer, but it will do nothing for the empty freighters that are attacked for reasons unrelated to direct profit.

I fully expect people to be whining here in three months about how it is "griefing" that empty freighters are still being killed, oblivious to the fact that Miniluv exploded some of them because they were hauling for an enemy of the Imperium, or that the CODE. protection racket model requires them to occasionally back up their extortion threats with an act of pure violence. Or perhaps it was completely personal and someone just mouthed off a little too much.

This is a sandbox people, and that means there are reasons to do things (including exploding empty freighters) that are not obvious on the surface or motivated strictly by ISK/h. While with changes like this CCP seems hellbent on cranking up safety to the point nothing interesting or emergent can happen, at least for now we are suppose to invent the reasons to do stuff, including shooting each other's freighters.

TL;DR: It's not always about the ISK.

Hardly, it was just a guy going "you're stupid!" in a very verbose manner. Pretty much everything he said was opinion based on misinterpretation of a post with a healthy dose of hypocrisy.

Ed: And let's face it, the change is still going ahead because CCP also know that an increase to EHP is a minor factor in ganking and that players with even an average skill level will adapt. Hell, if you don't believe CCP and you don't believe me, Pedro has pretty much stated the same.

Golly gosh, well clearly with you guys being in support of him, he must be right! It's not like you guys band together to attack people who's opinions oppose yours right?

...Right?



(glad I can keep you entertained)

I don;t want RFF stats to go away, I just don't want them treated as stats that say something they don't. They don't represent hauler safety, the represent gankers choices. If they were the only choices they would lose vastly more ships, and you know it.

Again though this is just you guys trying to derail the thread because you don't want to adapt to change.

You got me, I don't have buckets of stats for a hypothetical situation. I guess that means you are right, RFF pilots are impossible to kill and even if gankers had only them as targets they wouldn't lose any more ships than they currently do, because they are such uber ninjas. It's not at all that a guy in a cargo expanded freighter with 5b in cargo is more appealing than a triple bulkhead 1b cargo pilot.



Shame that's still irrelevant to this change, and you'll still have to get over it and adapt.

Except it's not though. You've got partial stats, which you are extrapolating to cover players it does not cover, then you're ignoring things we know are facts and we don't need statistics to prove, such as there being no way to make a freighter ungankable.

The only reason you're even demanding stats and claiming stats trump facts is becuase you know they can't be provided. I mean you're not a dumb guy, so yuo know full well that RFF would be killed much more frequently if they were the only targets, and you know that their survival almost never comes down to their EHP, it comes down to evasion, yet still you put those stats forward as a reason to not touch EHP.

And again, it really doesn't matter, because you can scream until you are red in the face, but CCP do in fact know that this change is a minor impact to gankers and that they will adapt, they've even said as much, so flailing about pretending that a boost to EHP is the end of ganking isn't going to get anywhere, except perhaps half the posts in this thread binned again.

tl;dr, change is coming, adapt or die.

It covers some of the use of freighters. Their stats are no more representative of freighters as a whole as my codes stats are of ganking as a whole.

And there isn't, and hopefully never will be, and this change won't change that.

No you don't, you demand evidence when you think it will benefit you to demand it, then when it swings the other way you are happy to rely on your experience and opinion alone, demanding that others then still provide evidence to disprove you.

At the end of the day, the question is simple. Do you believe that if the only remaining freighter pilots were RFF pilots that the losses they sustain would increase, decrease or remain the same? I'd wager quite heavily that their losses would increase as I don't believe gankers would just cease ganking.

The existence of dumb pilots as a meat shield. If everyone were playing the the same way RFF were playing, they would get ganked at a higher rate than RFF currently enjoy. I don't believe RFFs stats are representative of hauler gank risk, I believe it's representative of what hauler gank risk would be if you were almost never selected as a target in the first place.

Again though, only if other players are being ganked instead. Your applying a limited dataset to a wider group of players which simply doesn't work. You know full well that their level of safety is not solely based on their actions, but their relative level of difficulty and value vs other freighters.