EVE General Discussion

This.

The volume of traffic is so high, whilst the risk so low, that its like engaging a school of sardines.
Couple unlucky slackers get picked off, but the massive remainder continue on their merry way, laughing.

Freighter ganking, as it is now, is barely scratching the transit of material.

Yes, 100% agreed.

We have got to start working together and brainstorming and executing ideas for how to get a freight from A to B unharmed.

Too many of us want to go at it alone because we think that working with others somehow makes us weak. Teamwork is what builds things and keeps people safe.

Myself and another guy are working on a blue community within hisec that will focus on the matters you mention. We hope for it to be cool and relaxed and we want to address the many issues that affect the little guy. We are hoping to attract cool dudes like yourself that have a good understanding of whats going on so we can effectively counter this.

Fixed. Because there's no greater risk than being perma-KOS to both players and NPC's. But we manage that risk.

Yeah, nobody can ever gank the bumping ship...nope never happens.

That's because it's not a kill-right scam... it's a kill-board padding service! Semantics matter....

Have you ever flown a JF.? I have lost three since they was introduced, land too far away from a station and get bumped away until I die, I don't always fly a JF with support so sometimes pay the price.

The formula I use is just,

2*(EHP/DPS)/[CONCROD Response Time]*(ISK value of the ganking ships)

Assuming uniform ships makes it easier.

So for example if you have 200,000 EHP and DPS is 700/second and CONCORD will take 25 seconds to respond, and the ganking ships cost 10 million ISK each we have

400,000/700 = 571.43, but call it 572

Now divide that by 25 to get, 22.88 so 23 ships (note the gank will require half of this number of ships).

And since the ships cost 10 million the upper limit is 230,000,000 ISK. Which is not alot.

But, 200,000 EHP is not very high considering you can tank your freighter. So we can double the above result if you can double your tank. And the above is assuming pretty good skills for a catalyst pilot. In fact perfect skills and even some sort of implant. If DPS is dropped down to say 570/second and doubling the tank means you can carry 561 million ISK worth of cargo. Still not alot, but this is the bare minimum to be gank worthy--i.e. if a group of gankers were to gank freighters with this much loot many, many times, they'd get enough loot to cover just the cost of replacing ships. So if they are going to gank for profit you'd need to add in a profit margin too. So if they want say a 20% profit margin then you can carry 673 million in ISK value for your cargo.

And all of that is using just the bare minimum in terms of ganking ships. So if the gankers build in a margin of error on this say +5 pilots/ships then can carry even more.

Typically, I'd say .75 billion ISK is limit I use. Yes, it is annoying if you are looking at a pile of 40 billion in ISK value for cargo and thinking...53 trips! Damn. But pushing it above that and you become more gankable. If you look at Kusion his lower limit appears to be 1 billion ISK.

A fringe thing you can do is use containers. Put lots of stuff in one container. That may not sound like an obvious thing, but what is the probability of that container dropping? 0.5 right? Well if it drops they get it all...or they get nothing. A priori their expected payout is the same, but their ex post payout is going to be...."lumpy". Whereas if you have lots of stuff, the probability that nothing drops is 0.5^N. And the more stuff you have the more likely about half of it will drop. In other words you make the gank more risky. Same thing with making it a courier package. In a situation where the gankers could pick between two targets (and only 1) each of equal value but one with all the cargo in one container vs. the other with N items....they should pick the one with N items since they are more likely to end up with half of the cargo. Granted, not all items are of equal value, but this general result still holds.

Another thing is to use a JF even if you are not going to use the jump drives. That hull comes with quite a bit more EHP. In that case my upper limit goes to 1 billion. After all with maxed out skills you can get the EHP on something like the Anshar to 899,753. And against something like catalysts the EHP will be even higher.

And when you look through freighters that have been ganked you usually see freighters with cargo expanders which actually reduces EHP. So not only are they over loading their freighter in terms of ISK value they are reducing EHP to be even easier to gank. About the only thing they could do to make it even worse in terms of risk at this point is to use auto-pilot which I would not be surprised if that were the case.

Stupidity wins over game mechanics every time, short of giving freighters Polaris resist profiles, any changes to mechanics won't stop greed and stupidity getting a freighter killed.

On a side note this thread allowed me to capture this glorious image

>Ignores posters
>Posts about ignored posters

Fail.

I am suddenly tempted to fit a freighter and fill it with cargo containers full of...carbon. And then park it just outside Jita stargate for the lulz.