EVE General Discussion

It's the very reason your supposition points out. Your comment demonstrates you have a negative bias against AFK miners. There's no way I can convince you to change that. As long as you have a negative bias toward ANY play style, you are in jeopardy of hypocrisy.

Clearly CCP allows this play style. That should be good enough of an endorsement for every player of EVE.

Your play style may be attacking AFK miners. That's allowed as well. Good enough of an endorsement for me.

I'm saying, we need to advocate change that respects everyone's play style, even if we don't like it.

So what? Is ratting in Null Sov such a dangerous activity? Or missioning? Everyone NEEDs a source of easy income or else all PvP, which doesn't mostly create money, would come to a stop. Everyone who is complaining over these afk Miners should tell his method of isk generation and the involved risk. Even the risk of freighter gankers is very limited to the 20M ISK throw-away-ship.
Every method I know except exploration is an (almost) foolproof low risk method. You need to have the money in the first place to put it at risk for fun. I admit that my actual method of money generation is PI. Risk free, decent income for low time investment which leaves me free time and money to explore Eve.

There are fewer of them but in each crop the players seem to slightly larger, plumper and juicier.....

I don't bother the call it scientific or not, to me its just data.

Finally! Baltec said something I can agree with: it's massively blown out of proportion and I don't think it's why players are leaving.

Highsec lawyering could go on for decades with more and more amendments, exceptions and bugfixes in each patch; and it'd still just feel like "highsec". Unlike in the real world, the additional regulations are intentionally kept simple and mostly just, leading to an on-overall better experience... but it's simply not even close to being a major factor in player retention.

In fact I think it is the danger, not the safety that keeps people hooked; and the safer EvE gets, the less exciting it becomes. Safety comes from things such as travelceptors, jumpfreighters, nullified cloaky T3s, pre-aligned bears, POSsed Orcas, unprobably boosters, acceleration grid regulations (no cyno, no warp-ins), instawarp T3 destroyers, ... and the harder it becomes to actually get a fight or at the very least a kill?- the more time we spend doing uneventful, boring stuff.

Like roaming 68 jumps before FINALLY running into a living soul that is not an interceptor. Like camping for hours knowing full well that anything worthwhile will either jumpfreighter through or take a jump bridge.

The better part of this thread was wasted -as usual- on highsec shennanigans but when will someone address the LACK OF TARGETS?

The latter has several culprits, one being nowadays better PCs allows everyone and their uncle (except ole' Brokkies rustbucket) to multibox with dual or triple screens. Meaning there are eyes everywhere- and whenever something *might* happen, nope: they be long gone. Add to this the aforementioned mechanics standing between you and catching your prey, and it becomes indeed hard to find that 'good fight'. It practically requires one of the fleet commanders to get a scan on the hostile fleet, and to go for it anyway knowing full well they're probably heading home in an egg.

Was it always like this? I don't know. All I know, is that we have to put in real and prolonged effort to get a couple of minutes of excitement, and that I've seen several good pilots slip into inactivity because of that.

Don't forget the opportunity cost associated with ganking. Brokk pointed that out and it is indeed valid as it is the main objection of many who refuse to gank the bumping ship. You are taking an alt slot that you could be using to do something else, that is indeed a cost.

No, not really.

CCP looked at this too, there is a fanfest video about it on youtube (I can't find it while at work do to filters but you can find it if you do a google search or somebody may be kind and provide the link).

The gist of it was they looked at new players (less than 90 days old IIRC) and in terms of ganks (being killed illegally) it was about 1% of those sampled. Further, they found that those ganked stuck with the game longer than those who were not ganked. Those killed illegally also stuck with the game longer than those who were not killed at all.

Edit: Further, if it were such a big deal how come so many people are still so insistent on playing so damn imprudently?

FYI that is not data, those are anecdotes.

Well, as much as I hate to do anything to support Dracvlad, Red Frog freight IS an organization that plays prudently. So it is not representative of ganking in general, it is representative of ganking IF you play prudently.

Now before Dracvlad says something stupid....

This shows that ganking is not a CCP problem, it is a player problem. Fly like Red Frog and you too can be ganked with a probability of 0.01% (or more accurately a probability of 0.0001). That is you'll get ganked once every 10,000 gate jumps.

Stop being stupid and you'll be fine.

You could come up with a first order approximation to the RFF gank rate, IMO, by dividing by the average number of gate jumps an RFF freighter takes. So, lets say it is 25 jumps. And a RFF freighter gets ganked, on average, on its 10,000 jump. So dividing 10,000 by 25 means the are ganked every 400th contract. If they also get ganked when moving while empty, then we could divide that by 2 and get the 200th contract. This would put the gank rate at about 0.005 or 0.5%.

Not too far off your estimate.

Again, this shows how prudence can be a factor in ganking.

Dracvlad is literally arguing for imprudence. Literally. It's stupid.