EVE General Discussion

Lots of salt in this thread, but not much castration.


/Sets up a lawn chair, and turns on the popcorn machine.

The problem with your thinking here is the same thing with that kind fo thinking in real life. "Fault" doesn't matter. "Reality" matters.

In my IRL job I have had to unfortunately deal with victims of the matter that you mentioned, and have to be careful because those victims are really concerned with the idea of 'fault'. We try to (delicately) inform people that they should be careful,that they should be aware of their surroundings, that they should be careful in social situations and in private situations (because most of the time it's not some evil looking dude snatching someone into some bushes late at night, it's someone the victim knows and even has some kind of relationship with),

And EVEN THEN, when trying to explain the reality of the situation to people (the reality being that you can take precautions and lower your chances of victimization, or not take precautions and actually heighten your chances of having this horror visited upon you) we still get that illogical and nonsensical accusation of "BUT YOU ARE BLAMING THE VICTIM!!!!!".

I try to tell folks (before these things happen) that it is NEVER the victims "fault" that something bad happens, it's always the offender's "fault". We aren't talking about fault. We are talking about choice. The reality is that if people take the precautions we suggest the likely hood of bad things happening becomes remote. If they don't take them, and something bad happens, the BEST we can do for them is find the person responsible and throw them into a small locked room (hopefully forever), but we can't turn back time to make them un-victimized. Personally, I'd rather they be mad at me for telling them not to get drunk at some house party as long as they don't end up facing the evil I'm trying to prevent.


While a million times less serious in game than out, it's the same. You can choose to scream 'victim blaming!" when someone pops your spaceship because you didn't take enough precautions (not being hin high sec is a great precaution btw). Or you can choose to not explode in the 1st place....like I have for 9 years of high sec mission running and others have done for way longer.

You can't seriously compare some guy sitting at his computer, playing a video game for fun, with attitudes toward **** victims IRL.

Eve is not RL. Such comparisons of victim blaming in **** (which is a disgusting thing to do) have no place here.


If it's just PVE, then the gank targets must be just NPCs, so ganking is no different to running missions or ratting.

Then we should get rid of CONCORD then? After all, why have CONCORD if it's just rats?

Eve is a proper role playing game, not a "class playing game" like WoW, IMO code, which is more or less roleplaying fundamentalists is a completely natural outgrowth of that.

All that is ever being pointed out to you, is that most of us joined the game to play either pirate, megalomaniac or heroic space commander, and somewhere along the line people corrupt their own vision of what they are in this game and manage to become "helpless victim". You can however avail yourself of the tools of the game and not be that person.



thats the real world, not your heroic space pixel champion striding across the universe at warp 10.



I've mined with a skiff on an alt (in the CASMA fleet). basically when I was tired of ratting. We used to set known gankers to -10 so we could see them and since i didn't give much of a crap about actually mining, was mostly chat, boosting and mining if the regular booster was there, then I could chase the gankers around with the skiff. If they were outlaw they would not commit to a belt if I was still close on scan because I knew which belts the retrievers were in and when they were about, I'd just patrol about, warping to the retrievers in the gang, keeping close to the ganker on scan, getting reports from the gang when I'd lost track of them. I never actually had a kill on a CASMA pilot when I was playing bull-miner because its uncomfortable to attempt a gank in the face of active miners.

IMO the main issue was in fact that the gankers were far too rare an occurance, and that active miner defense seriously discouraged them so in a couple of months play I only got to do this a couple of times. I would seriously have enjoyed -10 codes because at 15km a fast moving skiff applies full damage to a low hp catalyst that fails to warp and at 15km a catalyst gang can't kill a skiff - they do not have very long to fix a range gap before they start popping, and -10s I can just lock and set the drones on with a green safety.

I'd expect them to be good enough about their business to warp, but gankers are also occasionally the lazy farming dumbasses you portray them to be, and if they are, then they are killable.

The reason the skiff is so much better than a battlecruiser at this task is because there is something to do for the 3 weeks whilst you wait for the gankers to show up.

if you intend on mining solo sitting in a passive skiff, not having a local that allows you to identify gankers, not having code set to -10 so they pop out on local, allowing a gang to arrive because you can't see the local spike, set their desired range, scram your stationary ship and blast it at optimal for small blasters then you get what you deserve for disrespecting such a great ship.

This is a role playing game. People join this game to be their very own brand of ***hole, and it is very definitely part of this game. What you are asking for is opposed to both the nature of this game, and the nature of those players. I am not such a player, and I enjoy defeating such players if the opportunity surfaces(I don't personally seek the opportunities much), who suprisingly, do frequently acknowledge with good graces when they are beaten.

here yet again, by not victim blaming, you move completely away from resolving peoples issues with playing this game, and instead keep trying to impose real life morals on a game where someone has played space goebbels for years, and then elevated himself to literal space hitler - only to find his reich burned down around his ears, and his people now all fled to space argentina, a stunning victory for the people concerned, who could not have done it if we didn't allow space hitlers in the first place.

The wrong side of the line for this game is when you attack people for what they are in real life.

Except that ganking miners or anyone else for that matter is not against the ToS. Roleplaying is a perfectly acceptable reason for attacking a miner, as would be financial gain, entertainment or someone mouthed off. It is not abusive to shoot a miner, nor is it abusive to point out that they could have prevented such a loss by doing something different. It is also not abusive to celebrate a victory over another player even if a large number of players seem to be incredibly thin-skinned over losing to another player

Eve is a game where we are all content for each other by design. There are many things one can do to avoid making oneself a desirable target and if you choose not to do them for whatever reason, you should take responsibility for any losses.

I gank for many reasons, but ultimately I do it because I can and I think it is good for the game. Perhaps because I have been thwarted so many times, I am very aware of the multitude of things players can do to make themselves effectively immune to my attacks. If they choose to not do those things, they are ultimately responsible for their losses by making themselves vulnerable to their opponents. Eve is a competitive game where you are intentionally put at risk to the other players. Everyone knows this. So if you lose as ship, it is almost always as a result of something you did, or often didn't do.

That reality is not "victim blaming". In fact there are no "victims" at all in a PvP game. It is a rational assessment of how the game works. Eve is like... well let's go with baseball for this sports analogy. When you are mining you are on defense just like when your team takes the field in baseball. Your job, just like the fielder's in baseball, is to prevent your opponent from scoring on you(i.e. exploding you). If you choose to take the field and leave your glove at home (equivalent to not fitting tank), or you stop paying attention to the batter and check your smartphone (not watching local), or hang a hammock and have a nap (mining AFK), then you are responsible if your opponent scores on you. You know the rules of the game and you made a choice to play a certain way that resulted in your opponent scoring on you.

Losing a ship is not the end of the world though just like getting scored on in baseball isn't some grave personal insult perpetrated by the opposing team - it is part of the game. In fact, ganking is so rare now there is a very rational case to be made to just mine AFK in an out-of-the-way place and absorb the rare loss as the cost of doing business and ignore the risk entirely. But given that for mining certainly, you can be near perfectly safe by just choosing a specific ship and fit, it is ultimately the miner's responsibility if they go for extra reward with a less robust ship, or engaging in other risky behaviour to save effort, then they have to accept that sometimes those risks will catch up with them.

The consequences that flow from all of our risk vs. reward choices is what makes Eve an interesting game and keeping Eve interesting is why I spend my time calling other players on those risks and exploding them.

The joy of the sandbox, you can choose to play as a victim, and somebody will come along and enrich that experience for you.

You did not realize that when you try to bait an AFK cloaker and he does not respond that is telling you something. Hell you don't even have to bait him in the sense of killing him. Just present a soft target that is not that costly to you. For example getting in a hauler and jumping through a gate several times and warping to station and/or a POS. If he is ATK and using D-scan or set up on grid with the station/POS he'll see you. Since you are in a soft target he'll be inclined to engage. If you do this for awhile and he does not respond there are two explanations.

1. He is super paranoid.
2. He is not actually ATK.

In either case, go rat, or whatever.

Combine this with information off killboards and/or forums and you can get an idea of when the guy is at work, getting kills, etc. You'll learn when it is safer to rat and when it is not.

But instead this is always dismissed by just about everyone who complains about AFK cloaking. Probably because of the effort. And hey, I get it....less effort is always preferred to more on an individual basis.

The biggest problem with AFK cloaking is that it is sub-optimal game play. This is why I'm hopeful about the Observatory Array (OA). I'm hoping it will mean the end of local (in NS at least) and also provide a way to find cloaking ships that are cloaked. I'm also hoping for a way to subvert/hack the OA and turn it against its owner, or at least make it less reliable under certain circumstances.

Right now gathering intel is very easy. Look at local, look at alliance/coalition intel channels (that also rely on local) and there your done. Now you know if you are safe to undock or not.

Or you could have the scout look for the blackbird, and tell you and you go dock up and don't jump into the system. Wait until the blackbird leaves or engages someone else. Or get a JF and jump over the choke point the gankers are using. If you aren't hauling large stuff use a blockade runner.

I did realise, that is why I am on a Tengu kill with a Badger, tha is why I have setup with covert ops set for killing SB's around a single ratter in an Apoc, I could go on you know....

As I said I have an issue wasting time setting up baits and what not when the guy is either asleep or at work, in other words when he is not playing. This is a major issue for me, why do I have to waste my time doing this, it is poor gameplay and easily solved with an AFK flag after one hour of inaction. Lets look at recent changes, well skill injectors and the like means that they can setup the required skills on a new character, so how do you do that, apart from the DT logoff. No more watchlist to assess their risk on the known droppers in the area. So the balance has moved a bit more in favour of AFK cloaky camping.

However if the observatory structure works as I hope and they do one which gives an AFK flag then that works for me, if they do one that removes the cloak or makes it scannable by probes for a period that works for me too. So we agree on Observatory structures. Personally I am not on for hacking, I think they should be blown up...