EVE General Discussion

Ahhh yes, but you admit to a theoretical possibility and therefore there is an epistemic possibility which clearly demonstrates your bourgeois semantic nihilism within this dematerialistic conciousness we call EVE Online.

So take that Scipio!

If you pay attention to what he actually says during the presentation then you notice that they did look at older players too. There are two parts.

The main reason for the study was to find out if suicide ganking has a detrimental effect on the new players. The questions they asked themselves where "how wide spread is ganking for new players" and "what is the retention rate for never, legally and illegally killed new players". The answers where basically that it is a non issue despite the sentiment of the community and that it almost seams to have the complete opposite effect of what they expected.

The reason for this may be (and this is my opinion) that it suddenly introduces a mortal enemy into the world of the new player which gives it meaning and a goal to reach for revenge in an otherwise rather bleak surrounding of missions which get repetitive after two hours and staring at rocks while shooting them with lasers. There may be other factors which play a part in the outcome. But no matter what the reason is, the finding was that ganking new players makes it more likely they subscribe at the end of the 15 day trial period.

The second part got only mentioned in one sentence. They looked at all the reasons ALL the players state when they unsubscribe (trial members can not unsubscribe). And the result was that only ~1% state ship loss and harassment as a reason.

So, there may be a few people who actually quit because of ganking. But the study shows that they could not find any shred of evidence for that and that at least in the first 15 days the effect of ganking was more in the direction of retaining the players instead of driving them away.

They started from the very same position you are at, they expected that ganking is detrimental to retention. This "carebear hypothesis" was proven wrong when they actually looked at the evidence. This is how science works.

Now you come along and start all over with the very same wrong assumptions and completely ignore that people actually looked at this with more than just a whim and a gut feeling and proved those assumptions wrong. Also you don't even bring any evidence with you, just your personal feelings and an uninformed opinion.

What you did is point out that EVE is declining, and then construct a correlation with ganking out of thin air. A correlation which has shown to be absent already in the cited study.

There are a ton of reasons why EVE was declining and we can speculate all day what the reason was. But one thig is sure, because CCP actually checked: It ain't ganking

Operative term there, is "if".
But your premise is false.

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It is not theoretically possible.

It is actually possible, in practice.

When CCP introduced Alphas, they changed the systems of EVE.

It is now actually possible (not theoretically possible) to create 10/100/1000 throwaway alts, incubate them to 5mil SP, for purposes of avoiding the CCP recycling policy regarding avoiding sec loss repercussions.

It is furthermore a practical reality, not a theoretical possibility, that not all HS suicide ganking is conducted by CODE corp tagged members. (For purposes of which, incidentally, indefinite and anonymous Alphas can also be created as neutral hauling alts to carry off the loot)

It is furthermore a practical, demonstrable, reality, not a theoretical possibility, that when you throw an apple up on Earth, it will drop downwards after its kinetic energy is expended, as a result of gravity (unless you claim to be strong enough to throw that apple out Earth's gravity well, in which case anyways the apple would disintegrate from the forces exerted on it, and cease to be an apple long before it reaches that distance).

Checkmate.

Reason why Eve is declining at this point, no real goal for casuals, when CCP decided to give destroyers heavy DPS and did not increase mining ship tank so all had the tank of a wet paper back and left it like that for two and a half years, massive decline in subs. The gankers cannot prove that wrong. CCP Falcons decision on hyperdunking resulting in a wave of bumping of freighters for hours also had an impact, and of course we should not forget the choice to shift manufacturing advantage to null sec. which was another impact on casual play.


Now back to the matter in hand, Salvos you make some interesting points, a ganker can set up multiple Alpha accounts, then all he does is train them up to max gank related skills within the Alpha range then when they are there he just subs them for a month train up T2 small blasters or Vexor and T2 sentry skills or use injectors and there you go, one up to speed gank toon. If they do that systematically and if one looks at the way they mine (gank) freighters which is systematic they will they can roll them over no issue.

So it will speed up the availability of gank toons, however most freighter and miner gankers such as CODE use -10 toons, at the moment with bumping they have no issues with being -10 because they bump the freighter until the pilot logs in disgust or is not trying to warp then they hold it in position to warp in on. All they have to do is keep moving to keep away from the faction police and they largely use SB's now so the range is not an issue, mainly because AG was bumping the freighter out of Catalyst optimal.

CODE also use -10's for miner ganking because the preferred ship a Catalyst is fast and has high DPS so they warp to a scout next to the miner and blap, so using a long established toon is not an issue.

Should the bumping mechanism change then they will use those Alpha accounts more because they might have to play gate games with a freighter who holds his cloak, this is why the bumping mechanism is such a huge advantage to them, from my point of view I would trade the ease of bumping for gankers using Alpha accounts like this, but that will only be an issue should CCP ever do anything about bumping and due to the vested interests of certain players and their closeness to certain devs it is not going to happen, look how they got freighter EHP changed so quickly when AG started ganking freighter wrecks and compare that to how slow they are implementing this naff fix to bumping to see a certain amount of corruption there..

What it does affect is the run of the mill gankers sitting on gates in Vexors or around hubs in Tornados, they had an impact in terms of training the right skills, Vexor's T2 Sentries and T2 blasters for the gate gankers and had to keep getting security status sorted, this will be come easier because they can just roll them over, so it will make ganking easier, but I don't see a major issue from that as most of them roll over toons with ratting and buying those tags, it will just make that part easier.

I am likely missing something, but that is about how I see it which is why I said I don't think the impact is major at this moment, if you can pick holes in that or see anything I have not thought about I would appreciate it.

Nothing you have said refutes the fact that what I have said, is a practical reality, not theoretical.
You have merely corroborated those as a practical reality.

I dont dispute your points on the specifics of how that practical reality impacts the game as you see it.
My point was just to show that they are real, not theoretical.

As to the apple, you conveniently omitted the parts where I pointed out:
-Scipio does not have the strength to accelerate an apple to those velocities by throwing it.
-Even if he did, the apple would almost instantly disintegrate from that much force exerted on it, thus ceasing to be "an apple" and would get nowhere near the distance required to escape Earth's gravity well, and the pieces of that apple would fall down due to gravity.

Its still checkmate.

PS: I appreciate your civil approach this time around. Lets both try to keep it that way.

I did not say it can't be done. I just said your assertion that this is something new which came with alpha clones is wrong since it was possible long before that.

I did not say it is not actually happening, it may. I can just say from my experience as a suicide ganker that it is unnecessary since we worked around the sec status issue by using small agile ships and bookmarks and that it is far more cost effective to play a ganker as an omega account.


Are you serious? You edited your answer to patch your futile argument which has nothing to do with the discussion anyway?

Other practical realities include spawning an infinite amount of tritanium via Rookie ship.

Alt recycling has pretty much always been an AG bogeyman.

Anyone with an IQ over room temperature who has actually considered it pretty rapidly realizes it's pointless. Sec status as a penalty is of no consequence to a gank alt, so there's ****-all reason to reset it.

Nope. A theoretical possibility is something that can happen. You are correct. A player could set up a large number of Alpha alts and use them in ganking. However, such characters are of limited use relative to an Omega alt. As has been pointed out the notion of making throw away alts has been around quite awhile and most gankers have developed ways to deal with the sec status issue. So the question remaining is it happening and if so is it something that is happening enough to be a problem. That you have not shown. Not at all. All we have is speculation and conjecture.

May I also point out that one of the reasons that alpha clones can't be multiboxed was the fear of the community of people creating free gank alts, no matter how many times we pointed out that:

- sec status is no issue because we worked around that for a long time by limiting our gank alts to small agile ships and using bookmarks
- omega gank clones are practically free since the introduction of SP extractors which was pointed out back then in the thread where they announced them (no body listened)

The only thing that changed related to suicide gank alts is the following:

You can now grow a Catalyst alt with less PLEX as before since you can just alpha train him and he will be ready for omega upgrade and the SP extraction cycle by the time he has finished all the skills an alpha is capable of learning.

Thank you for acknowledging that.

As to the rest of your post, they apply only to your own implications and conjecture.
Not what I have actually said or argued.