Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Not until I start selling start selling these $60m ISK hull energizer modules on the market.

A lot of people don't know about the bumping changes.

Most of the people that don't know are the ones who the change is targeted towards.

Three words for you.

Deep. Space. Transport.

You can literally ferry around a few plex before you start to become a viable gank target, and that's just raw EHP. Factor in some skillful use of MWD's and cloaks, strategic bookmarks, etc, and you become too troublesome to gank for any payload under like 15 bil. And with the decreased time at gates and faster transit time, there's a lot less opportunity to scan you for your cargo in the first place.

Can you still be ganked? Absolutely! But, the more effort you put into keeping yourself alive, the more effort everyone else has to put into getting you dead. For a smaller payload theory piece, let's say you're carrying 2 bil worth of cargo, with rough chances of about 1 bil drop. The gankers will have guaranteed losses, the nature and size of which scale with your ability to fit your ship. The type of ships they use will depend on where you're flying, and where you're most vulnerable. For a likely 1 bil drop, you're not going to get eight pilots in tornadoes scanning down every insta-undock bookmark, your deep safes, identify your forward scouts, stalk your typical trade routes, set up scouts of their own to monitor your coming and going (thank the removal of the watch list for this one), and convince seven of their friends to spend untold hours following you around and hoping to catch a lucky break for a paltry sum to be divided eight ways.

And if they blow it once, they've tipped themselves off to you. Add some colors to their names, and watch local, and now they'll have to find a new set of eight people to line up to gank you and start the process all over again.

All you have to do, is not get lazy or fall into predictable patterns. Once you have the ship, a few variants of routes, and some bookmarks, the rest is a piece of cake. You're virtually untouchable. This is why gankers talk about how hard their game is and how easy haulers have it - because the game so heavily favors the defenders that it is simply ludicrous at times.

Caps get a protection module because they face doomsdays. You do not. If you play the game correctly you get more protection than a cap ever could, you do not need any more special protection. If such a silly module were given for subcaps, it would have to come with two penalties. You get the same treatment as a "polarized" weapon - no resists for your ship. That's the price of temporary invulnerability. And you cannot warp with it on.

"Counterplay" is more than simply fitting a ship a certain way and/or "pushing a button."

It can be tactics: use the MWD-cloak-warp trick

It can be friends: someone webs you into warp, report repair you, follows you around with warfare links to boost your toughness, counter ganks with similar ships, etc.

It can be routes: someplace that does see much traffic


"Counterplay" in EVE begins before you undock, before you warp to a gate, before you even see someone hostile to you... let alone being target locked by them. It starts with a plan and the preparations you make to make sure that the plan won't have to be put into action in the first place.



Finally; if gankers are willing to put in the effort into buying and hauling ganking ships, fit them, wait for opportunities, choose a target, be killed by the NPCs, and scoop loot under threat that the looting ship becomes engagable by anyone... why should haulers not have to put in equal effort to keep themselves safe?