EVE General Discussion

some are forgetting their place in all of this, if you are a client (us) you take part, if you are the producer (CCP) you provide the area for the clients (us) to take part.

when you feel you want to take more a dev role and feel you have what it takes to be a part of the team that brings us EVE then hey, stick an application into CCP and i'm sure they'll interview you and then it's all up to you.

until then stfu and play.

While you're correct in that it's a very visible activity, the visibility isn't necessarily due to its frequency. We live in an age of social media, every organisation is pushing their agenda including those in virtual worlds, which increases visibility. The long and the short of it is that a decent chunk of the visibility is down to the people doing it being media savvy.

You're also right in that it's a somewhat controversial activity, especially if you've come from other MMOs where such activities are verboten; CCP could certainly do more to warn players that it is explicitly allowed here, along with a lot of the other things that get you banned elsewhere.

This is where the assumptions starts, as such they are open to debate.

Using one of Chribba's wonderful graphs over at Eveoffline, roughly 50-60 new characters were created every hour over the last week, that's circa 8400 new characters in a week, using 50 an hour as a baseline; admittedly a goodly chunk of those will be alts so for arguments sake we'll cut that number by 2/3 giving us 2800 potential new players.

I'll also assume that the most likely ship for a newbie to be mining with is a Venture, because they get one from the tutorial, and that all Ventures are flown by newbies.

A total of 146 Ventures exploded in hisec in the period 24/07-31/07 (inclusive). 21 of those Ventures died to NPC's; CODE.'s performance was pitiful, they only managed 24. Death by merc accounts for at least another 29 and at least 1 died to Concord, leaving us with 71 that are open for debate. Even so, 146 is just over 5% of potential newbies (2800) exploding while they're flying a Venture during the period looked at.

The data used is from zkillboard and as such quite limited, my spreadsheet needs some work, with reference to pulling related kills where Concord pwn the attackers and other criteria such as wardecs, in order to further refine the data.

TL;DR It would appear that suicide ganking is more propaganda than action.

Discuss away.

To be fair - new account data is also skewed since the release of skill injectors as people are making a lot of farming alts. Since they are self-sustaining in terms of PLEX/etc, people are making quite a LOT of them, and adding to their farming armies as we go here.

No way to calculate it accurately - just something to be aware of.

If red frog did all the hauling in the game then yes, but they don't:...

Ah fair enough and agreed, my bad. While newbies are the lifeblood of the game, they need to be the kind of newbie that can adapt their gameplay to a harsher environment than they're used to.

Only one of the people I've buddied into Eve has stayed, the rest found it too much of a culture shock despite loving the stuff they'd read and being forewarned by myself about what they would face in detail.

Pedant Mode Activated:

That would be Statistical Analysis, not the Scientific Method.

edit: Also statistics don't *prove* anything. Ever. It is not possible. Statistics merely *indicate* things - and when applied unscrupulously they can be used to *indicate* pretty much anything you want them to.... People who consider statistics to be "scientific" or even entirely trustworthy are, on the whole, idiots.

This is not a comment on your statistics in particular - just on statistics in general, as it is something of a pet peeve of mine.

Pedant away all you like. Statistical analysis being a tool used extensively in science, both terms can be used here depending on your level of abstraction. Analysis of the data itself, statistical. Answering questions, just as relevant an application of scientific method.

Not the only 2 relevant terms either.

But, distract from the concept all you like, the theory remains unchanged and in this case, unchallenged by Dracvlad's dismissiveness of the data.

In terms of ganking - I actually agree that it doesn't have a particularly significant impact on the game as a whole. The vast majority of shipping does go through unmolested, and even most miners don't have significant issues with ganking.

There are individual cases who are very heavily impacted by ganking - but they are the exception rather than the rule I am sure.

However, due to the nature of the game and the extremely variable nature of ganking (since it involves so many players with lives *outside* of the game/etc)...true scientific testing of a theory regarding the impact of ganking is virtually impossible. You can't *prove* anything one way or another.

So yes, statistics are probably the best you are going to get....But as previously mentioned statistics can also be manipulated to show anything you ****ing well want them to show...so both sides are going to show the statistics that favour their viewpoint, and you guys can keep on arguing until the end of time.

Dirty Forum Alt totally nailed it

My focus is on what I would call casual hisec players, what was once a large subset of the Eve population.

Except that the number of 3+ month players (heck even way older) earning their PLEX in HS mining is huge. This issue isn't just about one group or another group but rather the over abundance of easy to get ISK in HS that attracts ALL types of players.

Go to CODE's kill lists and just thumb through some random miner kills in barges and you will quickly see that this isn't just a rookie issue. Ice fields are a great place to see vets mining away...usually AFK.

In general, a large segment of the playebase wants as much easy ISK as possible and HS for most fits that bill. CCP would have to fundamentally change the game if it both wanted to help new players more and drive out the "greedy" vets.