Crime & Punishment

You did made me check though if it might possible to tank or fight your way the through faction police while waiting to ambush a target. My conclusion is that is not. Remote repping an outlaw does indeed make you go suspect (I couldn't remember if this was implemented but that is what the defunct Eve wiki says) and even if you did risk your logi and managed to stay alive they web and scram you so would likely be unable to get into range of your target.

I think at that point I would just give up on criminal ganking and tag up to neutral each time and use Tornados to gank a ship I couldn't tackle. It would be a shame to have to completely circumvent the CrimeWatch mechanics, but it would be the only feasible way left, which while doable, would increase the cost of the gank significantly.

How odd, since my cousin, Armand Patrouette, is a dedicated High Sec Militia pilot who does just that: pursues solo and small gang gankers and flies miner escort in those systems that those particular pilots frequent. So I can say with absolute certainty that your "I can say with certainty" is a major crock.

Yes, the Patrouette clan gets involved with protecting freighters, but that's not the sum total of our anti-piracy/anti-ganking activities. Should your doomsday prediction come true and freighter ganking cease to exist (seriously, do you really believe that?) we'll still have plently to do with patrolling HighSec.

It's basic combat triage:
Save the living, and leave the dying to die.

By living, I talk about players at their keyboard.
And the dying... afk peasants and botters

It's a beautiful saying don't you think?

To be honest, I see of lot of chiding about industrials being "fit for production and no tank" as if that was some kind of sin around here.

So fitting a ship just "for one thing" might be passé.


But I mission with tackle so don't go on what I say.

Another classic pot and kettle moment from everyone's favorite forum snitch Dom Arkaral.

It's a good sign when they have to resort to running to the hall monitors. It's just more salt, only that reddish kind that's full of minerals and more healthy.

But I would have to insist that it's on topic because ganks are mostly linked with bumping. As I stated in another thread, whereby ganks may include bumping, bumping itself is a mechanic, a poor one, that stands by itself. You can bump ships just because you feel like it, all day even.

Now the OP is a codie calling for an extension of 2 minutes to the auto-warp - which is odd. How does 2 minutes make any difference? Are they not able to get to the gank site in 3? Or is 5 minutes of bumping required to get the target clear of the gate guns? Is the range of gate guns that good? Most of the freighter ganks I have seen varied from 300KM to 700KM from the gate. Does this vary by security status of the system or is the objective to remove the crime scene entirely out of gate gun range?

(These are actual questions, not snark)


But a codie distributing salt over bumping seems almost too good, like we are being trolled. I would expect one of those nameless fail gankers we occasionally run across to do that.

Code tears are especially salty this week

All this discussion kind of makes my point. There are penalties put on ganking characters (-10 sec status) and ganking fleets (global timers) that are in place so that a red flashy dude (by whatever means) can't willy nilly around HS and pop things at his leisure. I'm not debating the morality or merits of these rules, just saying that they are there.

My opinion: In the bigger view, bumping was a mechanic that allowed red flashy dudes the time necessary to:

1. Reship - In cases such as Niarja with no stations (sure now there is bowhead but that's recent) it takes time to reship. Even w/ bowhead, it takes time to warp to bowhead, get ship and get back. With out bumping you'd only get one freighter as reship times are greater than CONCORD response times no matter how you reship.
2. It allows the gank fleet to lull about either in station or in space in a pod just waiting for the fleet to assemble. You could even be afk doing other things, get a ping, log in and assemble.

I think the spirit of CONCORD is that if you're red flashy (again by sec status of 15min timer) in empire then you're either moving constantly to evade the facpo (who will scram and kill you as you don't have time to fight them off and escape) or in a pod. It allows for a fleet to assemble and gank or whatever, but you have to be quick about it.

Here's the rub - bumping bypassed the whole spirit of CONCORD and allowed gankers to take their time and gank at their leisure. THAT is what overall pissed off the non gankers. Sure there are all sorts of counters -heck my corp even rescued one of my guys being bumped in an orca after the bumping started. It's not about the ability of freighters to evade a gank, the anger was at the ability of the gankers to evade the spirit of CONCORD in HS. Multiple ships stacked for the slaughter and the 20+ minute game of beach ball as the gankers logged in and assembled are what did it in.

Overall assessment: Ganking really is good for the game. Bumping had what can only be described as an EPIC run (hats off to all the lads who lobbied to keep a doomed mechanic afloat for so long - seriously - you guys did some nice work on several fronts - and it was work). Ganking isn't dead by any means. It's just going to adapt. Ganking will go way down in the short term, but it will have a lot less to do with the 3 min thing and more to do w/ other stuff going on in eve atm.

You guys had a great run and to be fair you earned it - you did a lot of work to keep bumping alive. All good things come to an end (I sure we're all thinking about 8tracs right now). This is just an end to an era, not an end to ganking.

CCP probably got this one right. 3 min on the out gate for players at the keyboard prevents stacking and requires gankers to be assembled and ready - You have to be actively playing the game to gank a freighter pilot that is actively playing the game. On the in gate for the afk freighter pilot not actively playing the game - nothing changes really. W/ no warp in progress (the slow approach for 15km) it's bump, bump, bump (repeat forever) and the afk pilot is now susceptible to the afk gank fleet OR can be stacked multiple freighters high. Morale of the change - actively play the game.

So you're good with the new paradigm which will likely still involve bumping by a Machariel interspersed with a suicide point from a noobship to tackle the freighter for a bit? I mean it does fulfill "the spirit of CONCORD" by offering up a sacrifice to the NPCs every three minutes or so, and will stop perma-bumping. Somehow though, I foresee the same complaints from the usual quarters that there is not enough risk for gankers and the calls for yet another nerf to bumping and/or ganking.

Even if CCP rewrites the entering warp mechanic to enforce a hard 3 minute limit and prevent using a suicide scram, I still see the carebear crowd complaining that during those three minutes of bumping the bumper is still evading the "spirit of CONCORD". I guess it doesn't matter much what they think, but I do wonder where they will turn next for the "one more nerf" in their continual effort to bring balance to what is an inherently (and intentionally) unbalanced mechanic.

You're comparing apples to peaches.
Your whole argument is as bs as ours