Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The current meta is working fine in my view, but it still can be tweaked. A relatively easy-to-implement solution would be to give corporations some of the priviliges taken away from them by Crimewatch. The idea is to keep suspect timers global, but if the suspect is a member of a player corp, you become a legal target for his entire corporation if you shoot him.

The rationale here is that looting haulers are defenseless by themselves. Gankers currently rely on mechanics like DST scooping because putting a looting hauler at risk equals gang **** in a busy solar system under the current mechanics. If they are able to keep a support fleet nearby to assist the looter if he gets attacked, they will be more eager to put their indies or even freighters under suspect timers. After that, something can be done with DST scooping - which is, after all, a controversial mechanic - without castrating the entire looting process.

Pros (the way I see them):
- increased functionality for highsec player corps (which is always good);
- more meaningful wardecs (corresponds with point 1);
- more escalation opportunities for the opposing side.

Side effects:
- With the suspect being able to bring in corp members for assistance, it will become easier to suspect bait. Yet, again, since the baiter must be in a player corp to get assistance from corp mates, he'll be vulnerable to wardecs. In case something is done with corp flipping later on, this effect will be further compensated.

Now, roast it, folks.

How would any of this actually impact bumping?

Honestly, this looks more like something to get free points on freighters in highsec. Points are a much more reliable method than bumping to keep your freighter from warping off. The downside is that my single webbing escort keeps my freighter alt safely traversing highsec, and it would no longer be sufficient if being pointed didn't get the pointer Concorded.

Determining whether a freighter gets off a gate shouldn't be a matter of who has the lowest latency.

While I think highsec PvP needs a buff, this isn't the buff it needs. Retracting that idiotic watchlist change would help more than being able to point freighters.

I will not debate the whole watch list change thing here as this is not the appropriate topic for it.
I will on the other hand note that undoing the watch list changes will have ZERO impact on bumping.

Bumping remains a very touchy and difficult topic to deal with, while there are some valid reasons to keep it there are as many valid reasons to remove it or change it significantly. One part of me wants it removed from the game entirely, the other says wait not so fast bumping is a tactic employed in my low sec life to keep a target from docking. One thought is to give the bumper a suspect timer, that would have virtually no effect on life in low, nul or worm holes but it would allow for your corp mates and the white knights in the game to actually come to your aide instead of flying off in hopes that they do no get caught. I know the gankers are not gong to like this because it actually puts their bumping characters at risk, but hey they are the ones telling us to bring friends to protect you and this idea makes that possible. The only problem we would need to work out with this is how to handle the unintentional bumps that occur when un-docking from a station.

Yeah, sorry about that. I meant it to be an example, but I get carried away cause I really hate losing it. I won't bring it up again.

Ok I'll put a pin in this no counters myth.

First counter is to web the freighter into warp. All you need is a friend in any ship with a few webs fitted but something with a Web range bonus is best. Your freighter now warps so fast that not only is it impossible to bump but also goes into warp backwards.

Second is if you get bumped. Fly a fast frigate out in the direction the freighter is being bumped and at 150 km warp the freighter to the frigate. You can the Web it into warp.

Third is to simply bump the bumpers. This takes some degree of manual piloting but can be done with a few cheap cruisers.

Fourth option is to gank the bumping ship. These bumping ships don't tend to have any tank so are fairly easy to kill.

Fish is to suicide web the bumper. Done right the freighter will get away.

Let me flip this concept to help get to the bottom of this:

Is the contention of the White Knight/AG community that once a freighter is getting bumped it is as good as dead--i.e. they have never ever saved a freighter in this situation? Ever?

Now, second question, if the answer is yes, why do you guys persist with this activity in game?

I'd also like to clarify here, I'm not "AG" or whatever. I'm pro-good game mechanics, and I don't think bumping currently is one.

It's also not really accurate IMO to say that there really is much of an "AG" community. There are people who post on the forums and are against ganking, but generally speaking there's no more a cohesive group of "anti-gank" players than you could say that all the various ganking groups are a cohesive whole.

Well here is the thing, I bet if 10 catalysts suddenly land on the freighter and they are not purple to the bumping ship and he doesn't know who the Hell they are my guess he'd strongly consider warping off, especially when they start closing on him....in which case, congratulations; mission accomplished--you saved the freighter...and still have your catalysts. If not and he stays, 10 catalysts with target painters would definitely present a problem. Their DPS is probably going to be in the range of 5,000 plus (combined--i.e. each cat doing at least 500 DPS on average). And I'm sure in 19 or so seconds there would be a wreck, an expensive wreck, where the bumper was.

Yes, he'd get kill rights, but interestingly that is almost always dismissed by those arguing against ganking...and the idea here is that if you are imposing 3x or more in losses on your opponent relative to your losses...that is eventually going to be a problem. Do this enough and it will raise the bar in terms of cargo value at risk.

As for risk, I don't see the problem here. Sure there is asymmetry in the risk, but that is only because one player was a serial screw-up when comes to evaluating his own risk vs. reward. He decided to take on substantial risk for very little to no reward.

And same thing with the counter-play. Yes, the freighter pilot has far fewer options when he is getting bumped. The suggested solution is not to provide counter play to somebody who screwed up multiple times maybe even many, many times. The solution is to not make yourself so vulnerable.

Lets consider another aspect of the game: corp thefts. There isn't much in the way of counter play there once the thief decides to act. He is going to pick his time when there is minimal chance of discovery and strike. The risk v. reward is again highly skewed. Why isn't anyone asking for a solution to this issue? Everyone seems fine with: Well, do what you can ex ante to prevent the theft. Same thing withe freighter bumping....do what you can to prevent it.

That cohesive part might be part of the problem as I already noted. One side is much more cohesive than the other....hence the imbalance. But that imbalance is not something CCP should be trying to fix at all. That is what it means to have a sandbox game. The side that is more cohesive will have an advantage over the side that is not. Punishing players for building a cohesive "community" within the game is just bad game management and will drive players away.

Killrights are dismissed as ineffective because for most of the players likely to accumulate them they are. Someone who flies a freighter around may not even have PvP skills, and most of those with any investment in shutting down gankers have other things they tend to prefer to do with their time than chasing people around high sec.

On top of that players can quite easily get dedicated ganker characters that will never fly an expensive ship and are unlikely to spend much time in space. The average well rounded High Sec character on the other hand likely at least missions or hauls, making them a far more lucrative target if you can get a Killright on them.

On top of that, sort of getting back to the organization aspect of things, the gankers will likely have a corp of likeminded individuals they can assign the killrights to, making it far more likely that they'll be acted on before they expire.

I'm not saying any of this needs fixing, but it does mean that the reality of ganking a bumper is that it's still a win for the bumper.

Also it's extremely unlikely for anyone looking to stop a gank to be able to bring together enough pilots to even gank him in the first place, at least in any kind of cost effective manner, and even more unlikely that they'll be able to or interested in keeping up the practice, because while you might be able to skew the value of the ship in favor of the people ganking the bumper those players would likely rather be doing other things with their time.

For more or less the same reason you'll rarely find forum trolls trolling each other. There's far more entertainment and easier targets to be had going after others, so while players may get pissed and go after gankers for short periods the gankers have made a lifestyle out of this and will return as soon as the coast is clear and the "AGs" get bored.



I'm curious where you think the screw-up occurred here, because just looking at bumping (independent of the ganks it often leads to) the only screw-up I can find is "flying a Freighter". Once you're in a Freighter there's nothing you can do to prevent being bumped without at least one alt, and if by bad luck or something else you are bumped there's nothing you can do against any sort of reasonably competent player.

Corp thefts are something completely different and don't even bear comparison here. For a start, they're completely independent of High Sec space or any of its punishment or reward mechanics where as bumping is an almost entirely High Sec activity. It's also pure PvP and there are countermeasures that can be taken against it, such as proper use of roles, vetting players, and compartmentalizing assets.

None of this may stop a truly determined corp thief, but in general it's pretty effective and the level of work required to be a successful thief far outweighs the amount of effort required to stop the vast majority of lazy or bad corp thieves. Trust me, I spent enough time in Eve Uni to have an idea of how many people are just really *really* bad at being a corp thief.

If you can come up with some kind of similar counter-play to Freighter bumping then by all means, that would be fantastic. More mechanics in Eve need the sort of complicated interactions corp theft requires, both on a mechanical and meta-game level.