EVE General Discussion

It fixes a 100% safe/not safe thing where bumping a ship was possible infinitely with no risk to the bumper. This assumes 1v1 and if you work as a team then using scrams as such is a valid tactic, but still requires more work than what it does currently.

As it should be if if 30-times the number of people target you.

You would not expect to win a 1 vs. 30 battle in lowsec, no matter what you are flying. Why do you expect you win a 1 vs 30 PvP encounter while flying an unarmed hauler solo in highsec?

That doesn't mean there isn't a plethora of things you can do to keep you freighter almost perfectly safe in highsec. Red Frog Freight and other professional haulers do these simple things on daily basis and lose only a couple freighters ever thousand trips. But if you have not taken precautions, and do not have friends with you, and 30 other players set their sights on you, you are going to die.

As it should be. Anything else would be broken.

Regardless of what the people who are enjoying taking advantage of a situation might say (especially should this situation be altered against their WILLS) how the creators want the creation to look will prevail. The ones who like to take advantage of situations will just have to find something else to take advantage of . QQ waaah waaah QQ. I'm sure the entitled among us (who insist people design things to their own preferences and definitions of reality, rather than get in there and build their OWN creations [hardy har har to that]) will squeal like the stuck pigs they must be (for all the squealing they do) if some low hanging fruit they're thriving upon is shifted to where they'd have to actually make an effort to get it. And, this is how it's always been. This is how it will always be. Those of us who don't mind some work, and effort with a certain amount of determination involved have always known these people are there, and seemingly will never go away. So be it. QQ some more for us baby QQ.

The bump the freighter interminably while we take our first-grader ships and whittle it down for an hour and a half "dynamic" sort of makes a lot of the ship design, and attributes a laughing stock. That it can be done at all demonstrates a loophole in design any true engineer would lose sleep over until it was plugged. It also points up what could be a deeper set of flaws in a process. Once again appears the Gordian Knot. No designer worth spit would allow the unwashed masses, the roaring minions, who have no appreciation of sound and cogent design, but are just lapping up crumbs from a gaping hole in what should be a fabulous design, influence any decision he or she makes - (emphasize: worth spit.)

Knowing the obnoxiously loud minority of players in the gaming world who just love that low hanging fruit and will squall like a Vogon poet to keep it (insisting it's how reality itself desires it) like I do, I can see how freighter bumping will bring out the earplugs for those of us who just have to live with these people...as long as there's this civilization thing working here.

It's heartening to see something, however convoluted, being done about this. For, as we all know to actually hyperwarp a space ship it doesn't need to be moving at all. All it needs is coordinates and the hyperdrive. The fictional fysixs does the rest.

+1 for intelligence
-1 for the ganker mentality

Not to be rude, but that does seem a little bit naive IMO. With all the changes they have done lately it does not seem likely that their end goal is that everyone can play as a criminal.

And btw. Aegis sov was meant to make it harder to keep unused sov, nothing about being able to play as a criminal.

You argument makes no sense. I could have a cloak/mwd or tank/cyno or battle hauler or be a decoy to agro to either clear gate or prevent jumping after my main cargo ship. A freighter carries stuff a to b, that's it.

My point still stands, this change is pointless, just need to scram every 3 mins and can still bump to hearts content.

Also can follow all the above and freighters still get killed for giggles, Just think they need a little valid love.

Correct. Though I'd add the addendum that the many more that get ignored or, by their own doing, avoid death are alive 100% after the fact. How do you think the far greater quantity of unmolested freighters indeed go unmolested? And, before you answer with the word "luck", that's not even a big part of it. Maybe it is for XCOM, that isn't quite how it works here.

You also earlier stated something to the neighborhood of, "ganking is indefensible," which is incorrect; according to the term's definition, you're either incorrectly assuming ganking is illegitimate or unjustified, which you have indicated is not the case, or incorrectly assume one cannot defend against ganking. You can in fact, just not with simple align time or tank...proper preparatory intel gathering, smart decision making when plotting a time and path for navigation, and using various means to gain clairvoyance of your chosen path ahead of your freighter are your main means of defense.

Yes, a freighter may as well just pop the moment a ganker fires off the first round, but you miss the point of how you go about in Eve answering the question, "How do I get from point A to point B safely in a ship that cannot nor is built to fight back?" Eve sometimes does that; sometimes, it simply rewards unconventional thinking and tactics, sometimes Eve requires it to even succeed at all. This is one of the later moments. If you land where a ganker/gankers have set-up shop, just as they have planned for you to, you have already failed your mission. Your mission is to survive, and in this case, by not letting the situation get to that point in the first place.

How many characters does it take to gank a Freighter?

If the freighter pilot has that much support also, the gank isn't going to happen.

Solo freighter pilots put themselves at risk and a fleet of 20-30 trying to kill them, should succeed.

So no, a Freighter isn't safe against a fleet of gank ships that have prepared themselves adequately to kill it. Maybe the freighter should have prepared adequately to not be killed.

I never said Aegis sov had anything to do with criminal mechanics in highsec as it clearly did not. I did say that one of the main goals of Aegis sov was to lower the artificial and arbitrary bar for number of players need to attack sov under the Dominion system (goal #3 in the devbog). Freighter ganking mechanics suffer from the same issue as Dominion sov that systemic pressure requires a massive number of players to even try to attack so, in fact, most groups cannot even try. The mechanic is only usable to a few groups in the game that have the numbers to meet this NPC-enforced bar, and that is bad for player-driven content.

I think you are wrong: CCP clearly wants players to have the option of playing as a criminal. CrimeWatch 2.0 was a significant effort taken only a few years ago to allow criminal gameplay to take place in Empire. It would have been much easier to just turn off weapons in highsec, or lock criminals out of highsec if they did not want to facilitate criminal gameplay. I take Fozzie at his word when he said they have no intention of removing ganking and that CCP views it as a normal and intended game mechanic.

The problem, which is just not limited to ganking, is balancing the mechanic for all group sizes and ship types. For years, CCP has tried to balance criminal vs. CONCORD by just making it harder to shoot something but they are rapidly running out of room for nerfs. Already, it is near impossible for typically sized group in this game to gank a freighter, leaving the mechanic only in the hands of specialized groups, and large nullsec alliances. And if they are serious at all with their stated intention to allow the other capitals back into highsec, something significant would have to happen as they would be completely invulnerable under the current CrimeWatch system.

The whole thing needs a complete rethink, like Aegis sov was for sov mechanics, where criminal gameplay can be supported by all groups sizes. Add in the underdeveloped bounty hunting and contraband systems, and even a revamp to the problematic war declaration mechanic, and there is enough meat there for a whole Empire-focused expansion.

I think almost every Eve player will agree a safe highsec is a boring highsec even if they have different ideas of what form that danger should take. CCP has to find a system where conflict can take place, and players can develop their own content, whether that is through criminal ganking or some other mechanic. Just making it harder/costlier to attack means less people will attack, and when they do, the conflict will be so imbalanced that there is little chance of unexpected things happening - in other words it just makes highsec more boring.

They are not at all the same. In one case, players are fighting an arbitrary and infallible NPC-enforced mechanic. In the other, the group is fighting other players.

If you are going to give players 100% reliable protection provided by NPCs, there has to be a game mechanic whereby the players can get around it. In this case, if the faction police are going to make it impossible for a criminal fleet to loiter in space, there needs to be a way for that criminal fleet to tackle a target long enough to get there, or it is literally impossible for them to gank the target. Without the bumping/scram mechanic, criminals could not operate at all and only neutrals could gank a moving target.

That isn't 'hand-holding', that is just enabling player-driven content from happening at all. Anti-gankers are fighting other players and have all the tools every player has at their disposal to force a fight. Criminals are free-to-shoot and can be scrammed.

But I would be open to some mechanic that slows down a gank and allows more time for anti-ganking to respond. As long of course the criminals are actually given the ability to participate in a fair fight by removing the faction police. Maybe freighters should have something like the Rorqual is going to get that provides a few minutes of absolute protection for a freighter to give time for friends to arrive, but activating it then forfeits CONCORD and facpo protection. I am not sure that is the best option, but some general rethink of the interdiction mechanics like this is what I am saying is necessary to get criminal gameplay out of the corner CCP has painted it into by just raising the bar required for a criminal to attack in highsec.

I think that's just your wrong interpretation of what he wrote.

Black has never said anything like that.

As to activities that aren't meant for a single player or even a small group - flying capital sized ships fits into that category.

So you would argue then that flying freighters should be more difficult than it currently is?

Not really this. Suicide ganking is 100% NPC-enforced mechanics. All its conditions are controlled by CONCORD and game mechanics. In simple words it is your DPS (ship, fit, skills, ammo - all provided by the game) against EHP of target (again - totally game mechanics) + CONCORD response time.

Black Pedro: If you are going to give players 100% reliable protection provided by NPCs
It is not protection. It is punishing of attacker AFTER attack happened. Tell about protection to one-shotted capsule.

Black Pedro: there has to be a game mechanic whereby the players can get around it.
It is already present. Neutral eyes, neutral OGBs, more people attacking at once, etc...

Black Pedro: In this case, if the faction police are going to make it impossible for a criminal fleet to loiter in space, there needs to be a way for that criminal fleet to tackle a target long enough to get there, or it is literally impossible for them to gank the target. Without the bumping/scram mechanic, criminals could not operate at all and only neutrals could gank a moving target.

You only 'criminal' for 15 minutes after initial attack. After it you are free.
And thanks to security tags you can buy yourself legal status easily.

So again: all you need is already there.

Black Pedro:
That isn't 'hand-holding', that is just enabling player-driven content from happening at all. Anti-gankers are fighting other players and have all the tools every player has at their disposal to force a fight. Criminals are free-to-shoot and can be scrammed.

Anti-gankers play the same game. They cannot attack gankers unless they -10 or already started attack. AG cannot 'force' anything. If you don't attack you cannot be countered. Gankers always do first turn.

Black Pedro:
But I would be open to some mechanic that slows down a gank and allows more time for anti-ganking to respond. As long of course the criminals are actually given the ability to participate in a fair fight by removing the faction police. Maybe freighters should have something like the Rorqual is going to get that provides a few minutes of absolute protection for a freighter to give time for friends to arrive, but activating it then forfeits CONCORD and facpo protection.

And here i completely agree. More freedom for players and less hardcoded mechanics is always welcome.