EVE General Discussion

Bumping change is bad, CCP is again boosting big ganking groups.
Let analyze how boosting ehp of freighters affected ganking :
Before
- most of freighters dying in 0.5-0.7
- rare jf kills, most of them auto piloting
After
- bigger part of freighters dying in 0.7-0.9
- constant jf kills, including empty ones
- JF dying in 1.0

Most of you ask why.
People needed to join bigger groups to continue having fun in this game.
More bodies allowed to do stuff that, was hard before freighter buff.

How the game will look like after this bumping changes?
- every day burn jita or amarr
- jf dying on station undock
- t1 indy ships massacred by t1 destroyers carrying 40 mil

Why? People will need to consolidate even more, and move to a places where they can kill a target under 6min, so maximum 1 jump from the staging system.

Just like sov or citadels, a small group of players (whatever CCP decides is best for balance 5-10 or so like as for Citadels) should be able to kill an undefended freighter. If it defended, it should take much more. Making attacking easy but defending even easier is how you get things to happen in the game, not cranking up arbitrary EHP walls that lock small groups out of being the aggressor.

Making it so that you do not require massive fleets to even be able to attack is exactly what CCP has spend the last few years trying to solve for other game systems. I have no doubt that somewhere down the line the whole thing will be rethought, and much like Citadels, players will be forced to actually defend their stuff, instead of relying on the huge bar to attack as protection and AFKing their capital ship across New Eden while they go make a sandwich or watch Netflix.

5-10 accounts, so as low as 2 players. Your bar is extremely low.

It's only 30 people in highsec, it's one person anywhere else, and why is that too much? A capital ship in highsec will be naturally difficult to attack. Whether you like it or not, highsec is supposed to be safer than elsewhere and that means that criminal activity is harder. If that's not something you can get on board with there are 3 other sections of space to live in.

And let's be real here, you're talking about 30 low SP characters in cheap disposable ships. If it took 30 pirate faction battleships and months of training you might have a point.

Citadels they changed and in fact are going with a mechanic that mitigates damage, forcing a minimum number of players. Sov is almost universally (by which I mean everyone who isn;t gaining massively from it's current broken state) in agreement that sov is broken right now. Even CCP have suggested that sov mechanics may move into citadels in the long run, which would put them under the same damage mitigation mechanics. What CCP started to move towards which thankfully they are backing off of was making pretty much all mechanics soloable. In reality some things should be able to be done alone, other should require a minimum group size, and if people can't get that group then too bad, that's just how MMOs work.

I agree the system needs to be more active, but realise that what you are saying here is that haulers would then have a minimum group size for entry into the mechanics, defined by whatever group were actively attacking freighters. You have a 50 man gank group and all of a sudden freighters require a similar sized force just to escort them through highsec. When you consider that hauling is already so slow and low reward that flying AFK is pretty much a requirement to haul without shooting yourself, the prospect of splitting that between an escort party seems unrealistic.

Personally I had no problem with bump tackling to an extent. The problem I had with it was people would bump for hours with little to no intent of ever ganking the freighter, just because they can. I actually preferred the old logoff mechanics, so if you started bumping a pilot he could choose to log off and not play, giving gankers a 15 minute window to destroy them before they vanished. When they changed that to allow you to keep someone in space forever, it broke it a bit.

There are a lot of reasons this wouldn't work. In practice, the most organised and co-ordinated groups are not HiSec players which means the co-ordinated ganking groups have a huge advantage. On top of that with the alpha available through certain ships there is no way a group could actually prevent the destruction of a targeted ship even with co-ordinated logistics to try and protect it. The alpha will overcome any repping and kill the ship regardless. Have a look at the history of N+1 Nullsec doctrines to see this in action as fleets moved through Maelstrom, Slowcat and Dreadnaught blobs to overcome grouped up triage logistics with massive alphas. Even if groups did co-ordinate to protect the freighters, pirate groups could just sit on the Jita undock and smartbomb hundreds of frigates to help drop the sec status with no way to stop it other than counter ganking (which would also drop the sec status). It would definitely be worth suiciding a bunch of battleship fleets just to drop the sec status of trade hubs and even if you don't want to go that far it is easy enough to burn through a few thousand cheap thrashers.

Worse, you are essentially forcing thousands of HiSec players who only want to mine, mission run, rat, or do indy/PI to abandon their chosen activities for a period of time each day and co-ordinate to defend the sec status of their system. To prevent that you would have to allow all those activities to help raise the sec status of the system at which point you have nearly recreated Sov Null.

Finally, the sec status represents the Concord response time for the system. Logically, why would Concord respond less quickly to known trouble spots. Realistically, heavy ganking should raise the sec status temporarily as Concord are going be watching the area more closely and be more ready to respond.

In my mind this is not a serious nerf to ganking at all.

Most ganks are completed within three minutes. In addittion a ship with the cost of a freighter should provide a distinct advantage against attackers in much cheaper ships. If you cannot gank it within three minutes you need more people or more expensive tools.

Gankers flooded the area with loads of bumpers and stacked up targets who they kept in place then they hyperdunked or ganked as required, thankfully hyperdunking was removed so that option went, but still it was very difficult . It was impossible to get in place to defend, there was so many people being bumped The changes will mean that the ganker fleet will have to be close to the selected target so the AG players can ignore the multiple bumpers and focus on the ganker fleet, location and what is being bumped which now does not have the time to run around to confuse them but has to head there, meaning that its going to be slightly easier for the AG players to have an effect.

So it will be note bumpers, get scouts near it for warp ins, keep tabs on the gank fleet, and narrow down the likely target if the warp timer does not get re-set by a point. If it does re-set the timer then there is no change.

The question whether the timer gets reset by being pointed is critical, because they have so many alts that they can suicide point multiple targets and stack up what is required for the real target no sweat and some poor casual hisec player is still going to be sat there for perhaps hours, ransoming will not change because they will just have to have a suicide alt in system to scare the freighter pilot that they are serious. They will need six suicide point pilots to keep that person held, not an issue for them at all imo, that is two accounts, thats all, yeah it adds to their costs in terms of two plexes, but that is not a lot.

Lets see what CCP means by the three minute timer... EDIT Perhaps I changed my sig too soon in terms of that question?

N+1 will always be a viable and important tactic for all aspects of the game, but i also mentioned more effective tools. If a good number of taloses cannot do the job i would be more woried. As is stands now the backlash from this seems to be mostly gankers complaining that you cannot maintain the awsome profit freighter ganking with catalysts provide.

I think you are mistaking perfect skilled flying with 'perfectly safe'. If a hauler is doing the right things and flying "perfectly", then yes, they should be "perfectly" safe. You're the lion complaining that those darned Gazelles, even the fastest of them, or the massive Pacaderms, even the strongest and most powerful, should be able to be caught and killed by you. That's ludicrous. You need to play within limits as well.

If you can't make your kill in a certain period of time because a hauler is doing all the right things, then the hauler has earned the right to get away. Your "30" people is irrelevant because it's just 30 ships playing Hyena waiting take part in the spoils. It's not like the target could fight back anyway.

No, you need a time clock to do your kill just like every other combat task in EVE. Nobody gets unlimited time to do combat why should bump gankers? Besides, using a tiny rookie ship to scram, bump and then gank a Billion ISK Freighter with a Billion ISK cargo is something that should not be possible... by mass physics alone. 1 or 30 is meaningless. Be happy that CCP is giving you 3 minutes to do the impossible. You can debate the 3 minutes, I'm sure CCP didn't arrive at that arbitrarily though.

HiSec is not 100% safe, but if you fly perfectly, you should be rewarded for that. Bump ganking should not be a 100% perfect thing either. Accept the challenge, change your tactics or find some other way to make it happen. That big, juicy Loot Piñata should not be 100% bump killable just because you want the goodies inside of it. Each side needs their challenge. The hauler has to hold out against bumpers for 3 minutes. The bumpers need to do their thing fast enough to take care of business in 3 minutes. Seems fair to me. 3...2...1... go!

Instead destroying a freighter with a couple of players in high sec and without a wardec is fun and immersive ....