Assembly Hall

It is still a fairly large coordination problem. Again, you are looking at just the final result which is easily seen and ignoring everything up to that point. You have pretty much hand-waved away everything else involved.

As for deterrent...how about this: don't be a complete moron when loading up your preferred hauling ship?

Works for me.

You are again wrong. Horribly so. The idea of risk is a two way street. Why are you not asking yourself why are freighter pilots taking on so much risk? Why are they acting as if they were risk seeking and not risk averse or at the very least risk neutral.

Everyone acts like risk is a one side deal, it isn't. You are only looking at half the picture and saying something is wrong because the gankers faced such low risk for their payday. Well why is that? Some dummy put way too much cargo into their freighter and flew it stupidly. Why are you not asking, "Why was that player so damn dumb?"

Yes, they already have almost perfect safety compared to low and null and their rewards should be lowered.

Now if we look at the gankers which are at an extreme disadvantage compared to other PvP players in null and low because they face not only the other players defences but an invincible, all knowing, all powerfull police force which will grant them only a few seconds before vaporising their ships. So here the equation is obviously reversed and if you look at the fact that ganking is absolutely not profitable except for the rare Freighters which has too much ISK in his belly, ganking is clearly in need of a buff from a risk/reward point of view.

There are plenty of consequences. Repeatedly gank in highsec and quickly that character can no longer do anything else in highsec. Not only are they free to shoot by anyone, an infallible NPC police force starts following them around to the point they can't even sit in space in a ship unmolested. Literally all they can do is keep moving in small, fast ships to stay one step ahead of the faction police, and shoot for a brief period of time before another infallible NPC destroys them and essentially locks them out of the game for 15 minutes.

But you are missing the point. None of these consequences are suppose to prevent outlaws from acting as criminals. If CCP wanted that, they could lock outlaws out of highsec, or just put everyone's safeties to yellow in highsec. CCP has spent a huge amount of effort designing CrimeWatch to enable criminal and criminal game play to take place in highsec. The fact that criminals can still ply their trade in highsec is completely intentional. The game is designed so that the deck is increasingly shifted in favour of the innocent as a pirate moves from just naughty to a career criminal, but the system is not suppose to prevent criminals from operating. If it was, I would agree with you it fails at that, but it was not.

The game designers wanted the other players to serve as sources of risk in this game, and for nowhere to be 100% safe. They thought it would make the game more engaging and enable the player-driven stories they are trying to nurture. Nothing especially interesting happens if players can hide behind 100% safe NPC protection and still gather stuff. Everyone will just do that, only leaving the safe space to engaging in consensual honour fights or meaningless drunken roams, preventing the non-consensual fighting necessary for a competitive game.

Honestly, highsec has been made increasingly safe over the years to the point that any player can, with a small amount of effort and knowledge, be almost perfectly safe. And over this time highsec has been made much more lucrative, not less, to the point the risk vs. reward balance is seriously tilted away from leaving highsec probably to the detriment of the greater health of the game.

As for "effort" highsec ganking is certainly more risky, far less lucrative, and requires much more organization than almost all of the PvE activities that go on in highsec. Any chance at real profit comes only when another player makes a mistake. Sure, the act of turning your safeties off and shooting someone is easy, but doing it so that you actually kill your target and make a profit is much harder, especially as an outlaw. This is a sandbox though, and if someone wants to pay the cost and accept the consequence to shoot you in highsec, they can, and if you don't like it it is up to you to use all the advantages the game gives you to shoot them right back and enforce some player-driven consequences on them.

How many gank targets are capable of defending themselves? I may have been out of the game for a few years, but Mining Barges/Industrials/Freighters have not suddenly become PVP capable. High Sec ganking is purely to find victims that have as little means as possible to defend themselves, at minimal cost/danger and maximum gain because they determine every aspect of how an encounter will start and end.

Anything that happens as a result of such actions are merely an inconvenience that does nothing to prevent constant abuse of the current system. NPC police retaliation is based on an easily understood formula. Once someone has figured out how it works, moving around High Sec despite -10 security ratings is simple. Gankers complain about High Sec police, while simultaneously avoiding them to score kill after kill. You think it takes a pro to just cruise around High Sec like that? Of course not, any Joe Blow Alpha can do it as much as they like.

It really bugs me that I even have to talk about this, because overall, I think ganking should exist. My only real issue with it currently is the lack on consequences and counters. Freedom of movement despite garbage security status, targets that cannot defend themselves, and the ability to determine the time and place every engagement begins and ends. Downsides being, a lost ship, sec status (lol), and being pigeon holed into one particular occupation in High Sec (until they buy their way out). Sounds rough.

Yes they have. A proper fitted Skiff has the tank, speed and damage capabilities of a HAC and is able to mine at the same time. It takes a seriously large fleet to take one of this out in a suicide gank where you even lose much more ISK on the ganker side than the gankee. We are not even talking about ANY REWARD here except a killmail for which you sacrificed more ISK than it is worth.

The miner got all the tools to protect themselves and more and still people cry for more safety.

And you have now shown multiple times that you have absolutely no clue and just argue with your gut feelings.

Skiffs and procurors are very tough ships now. So tough that it costs more to gank them, alot more, than you'd ever hope to get in loot drops.

But aside from that you keep dodging the question I have been asking, why are you not wondering why freighter, industrial and other pilots are taking on so much risk? Why are you defending people who are risk seeking...and then finding the down side of that risk.

Seriously, if you are seeking some specific outcome....and you get it, you should be happy not upset.

You are completely muddled and wrongheaded in your thinking here. The counter is: don't be imprudent with your stuff. Which goes back to one of the most fundamental rules of Eve you have probably used yourself: Do NOT fly that which you cannot afford to lose. This goes for freighters, industrrials, etc.

And it bugs you because your, quite simply, wrong. Being imprudent in this game has always been punished and always should be. Stop trying to molly coddle the imprudent.

You are still quite confused.

1. This is true for any and all ships in HS. Any ship in HS, with sufficient DPS can be ganked. Most are not because there is no profit in it. Most ships move around HS because people do not like losing more ISK than they generate.

2. The ships that do get ganked, by and large, are ships that are essentially loot pinatas. This is the result of player choice. Let me repeat that, that a ship is a loot pinata is a result of a player's choices.

3. By somehow ramping up the risk on those who would gank you are basically saying that players who are foolish and imprudent, so much so they are risk seeking in their actual behavior, should be protected.

Now please explain why you think 3 is justified when all that needs to happen is for those players to be less imprudent?



No. You have it exactly backwards.

A player can try to kill any other player in the game by:

1. Accepting the consequences.
2. Bringing enough DPS.

If I accept the consequences after sitting down and looking at the situation that is called being risk averse. Risk averse players are not imprudent.

You have it exactly upside down.

And you are just flat out and obstinately wrong that the risk is "front loaded on the victim". The risk was selected by the victim.

The victims are taking on too much risk by choice.

Again let me repeat that:

The victims are taking on too much risk by choice.

Nobody but the victim is putting too much loot onto/into their ship. That is a choice.

Really, you should stop talking about risk because you just do not understand how it works in this context. Risk is NOT imposed/taken on by the game environment but by player choices. One group of players is prudent (the gankers) the other group (the victims) are not. And stop trying to remove player interactions.

As has been said above, Skiffs and Procurers are incredibly powerful (to the point people roam in them to seeking PvP) and completely uneconomical to gank. Simply flying one of them makes you 99.9+% immune to being ganked unless you put a PLEX in your hold or something foolish. That is an easy and accessible means to protect themselves so I don't know who you think can't do that.

And yes, gankers are choosing the engagements that favour them, just like everyone else does in this game. What is the problem with this? No one seeks a fight they cannot possibly win in this game: the smart choice is to evade, or change the equation so that the engagement is in their favour (reship, bring friends, etc.), Why do you think highsec should be any different? CCP doesn't.

You are intended to have to defend your ships in highsec. CCP has given players plenty of tools to do so. I have never been close to being ganked in highsec because I take the simple precautions to keep engagements in my favour. Gankers won't attack if they can't win, and thus I am near impervious in highsec.

When I am a criminal I cannot do anything else in highsec. I cannot mission. I cannot haul. I cannot scout. I cannot participate in a war. I cannot even engage in a consensual duel. I am a persona non grata and can only move about in a pod or fast-aligning ship. I have no protection, and you win any fight by simply scramming me and letting the facpo finish me off. I don't know what more "consequences" you can pile on me without locking me out of highsec and highsec crime completely.

I am all for a complete rethink of how CrimeWatch works. Fights between criminals, victims and law enforcement are one-dimensional and escalation is completely stifled by the current mechanics. If you have a problem with that and want to encourage CCP to think about that, then I am on your side. But if you are complaining that criminals exists, the prepared prey on the unprepared, that players serve as risk for imprudence, or that nowhere is 100% safe, then I have no time for this discussion. CCP intends for highsec to work this way. It has always been that way. CCP is not going to just straight out lock criminals out of highsec because crime offends your sense of honour.

Highsec is incredibly safe. Piracy of normal activities has been nerfed into unprofitability. Aside from undertanked miners, overloaded haulers, and autopiloters there is next to zero chance of being ganked in highsec and these risks can be almost completely mitigate with a few simple steps. This is part of the problem, as each nerf to ganking reduced the need to take these precautions in highsec, to the point that many players get complacent and fail to defend themselves but still get mad when another player calls them on their sloppy play and explodes them.

Some day CCP will get around to looking at criminal mechanics again and hopefully they will come up with something more engaging for all side, and one in which the conflict started by a criminal act can escalate into something more.

I have not caught up yet with the entire thread here, but I am responding to the OP title.

I believe the problem of retention is linked to the existence of anonymous alts allowing players to conduct griefing and hostile operations against other players, without having any drawbacks or risks connected to their asset producing pilots. This also applies to activity like cloaky camping, spying, stealing or scamming.

To that end, I propose in my CSM campaign to provide an economical benefit to those players willing to link their accounts publicly together, so that the griefers and gankers, spies, scammers thieves and afk campers, would suffer an economic loss from choosing to insulate their main accounts from their griefing accounts.

The psychological thought that you can be griefed by someone more powerful than you without having any ways to get back at them or them not losing anything when undertaking this griefing is what imho drives retention down.