Crime & Punishment

bot fleets tend to be wise to wars,
you can dec them but they usually drop to npc or just continuously dodge before the decs go live
in my experience anyway.

No-one regularly ganks Skiffs. They are economically immune to ganks. Miner ganking in general has been made unprofitable, but the math makes Skiffs very unappealing. A typical T2-fit exhumer will drop 10M ISK so if you can kill a Hulk or Mackinaw and retreive your own dropped loot, you can turn a profit. A tiny profit of 10-20M ISK/hour, but at least you can break even. On paper an untanked Skiff require a minimum of 4 perfect gank Catalysts, but in the real world, more like 6-8 so you are loosing 50-100M ISK per gank even if you have fleet of sufficient size to even try to attack. A tanked Skiff can go up into freighter territory of 20+ gank destroyers and would cost well more than the value of the Skiff, let alone the loot drop, and require rarely seen fleet sizes.

So no, there is nothing you can do to attack the Skiff fleets other than try to out-compete them at their own game. It's actually a good example of why there should be no safe spaces in a sandbox game as veteran players just abuse the safety to out-compete the new and casual miners who can't or won't multibox 10 accounts. I'm not sure why CCP thinks miners should be treated so special to be able to remove themselves from the sandbox gameplay they are developing, but the safety the highsec miner enjoy is clearly intentional on the part of CCP. They killed any ability to gank profitably during the barge rebalance on purpose, and then made the Skiff/Procurer so economically punitive to gank, it almost never happens: the only Skiff losses in highec are due to wars.

Given there is no reason to be in a corporation to mine, wars are near-useless against Skiff fleets. Sure, you can catch the odd person out if they don't notice a war, but given that wars are consensual and you can avoid them at any time by just dropping corp, I doubt any mercenary group will be able to follow through on such a contract. They would have to resort to ganking, and that would be very costly as outlined above. If they are tanked, you are looking at 200M+ to gank each Skiff in direct expenses alone, not to mention the time of the 20 person fleet, the cost of dealing with security status and killrights.

Ganking an empty freighter is even more expensive. If it isn't tanked, it won't be much more than a Skiff but if they tank it, it will take 1-2 B ISK in Taloses.

So in short, it ain't feasible unless you have a fleet of 100 players willing to shoot industrial ships with you in highsec in T1 destroyers for free. There are no groups of sufficient size to take your contract for any price that you would deem reasonable, and the cost in gank ships would exceed the economic cost you inflict on your enemy by exploding their Skiffs.

Actually, I think a Procurer is less cost-effective to gank.

Take down a Skiff, at least you have a 260 mil killmail on your hands. We all know you don't gank miners for profit anyway-- you didn't really need that Scordite so badly now, did ya?

Procurers have similar tanks, cost only 35 mil and insurance covers around 28.

I took out a war target mining in a Skiff. Does that count?

Let me know if it works out for you. When you see my killboard, I have tried but I think most of them were bots cause they refused to engage me.

https://zkillboard.com/kill/39855159/

That's a link to me and a couple friends killing a skiff in the days before ISBoxer broadcasting was banned.

Skiffs can be ganked, but as you guessed, it's generally poorly fit ones, or ones with expensive modules. As Black Pedro pointed out the manpower required is rather difficult to acquire with any sort of regularity. And if you have that kind of manpower available, Freighters are significantly more profitable and vastly more abundant (than skiffs fit with enough modules to be profitable to gank).

So again as Black Pedro pointed out, Skiffs are financially invulnerable. The only way you'll lose one to a gank is one of the following

1. Fit it exceptionally poorly
2. Fit it exceptionally blingy
3. Annoy someone to the point they don't care about the finances

And even if you do one of those things, skiffs have pretty reasonable align times and agility as well as base movement speed (for a mining ship) so your chances of evading a gank while the gankers are in warp or starting to land is still pretty reasonable.

Tl;Dr You have to try pretty hard to lose a Skiff to a gank and no, killing them en-masse is not viable at all. CCP has rendered them effectively financially invulnerable.

You have some stiff competition in becoming king of skiff warfare: https://zkillboard.com/ship/22546/topalltime/

It actually has pretty comparable stats to any of the Heavy Assault Cruisers....but in my experience people are more scared of the skiff...

The economical reason is one thing why it is rarely done, the other thing is that it is stupid from a gameplay perspective.

I mean try to motivate 15-20 guys for a fleet to kill Skiffs when the same fleet size is perfectly capable of killing much juicier targets like Orcas and Freighters. Keep in mind that a Ganker can only strike every 15min, so if you want to entertain them and keep the people in fleet you have to present them worthy targets and not some simple mining barge.

Don't the bot mining fleets usually have an orca sitting around somewhere?

The Skiff is a Code-compliant vessel, unless fit only for yield. If the carebear attempts to deceive New Order agents in such a way, they will eventually get what's coming to them.

But yes in general, Skiffs and Procurers are uneconomical targets for ganking, and pretty annoying to deal with in general. I capped out a Skiff in lowsec and let my Pilgrim's drones eat away at it for several minutes before a corpmate of the target warped in with a Gila and forced me off the field. Skiff was in deep structure, but unless he was passive resist fit, he only had his native resists to go on. Very frustrating.