EVE General Discussion

1) Sure. It has value. It is integral to making cost-benefit decisions as a highsec pirate among other uses.

2) Sure. More player interaction is desirable.

3) Sure. See 1.

4) No we don't. There are a multitude of systems and tools that provide information of value to players that come with no risk or no cost. They include but are not limited to: local, dscan, api data, map data, scanning probes, locator agents, looking at a ship model (zoom function), zKillboard, contract histories, and the overview. Further, scanning already has a time cost, an in-game asset cost (the scanning ship/character), and a risk comparable to other highsec activities and therefore cannot be characterized as risk-free or cost-free.

What is your point?

1) We agree.

2) We agree.

3) We agree.

4) "There are a multitude of systems and tools that provide information of value to players that come with no risk or no cost. They include but are not limited to: local, dscan, api data, map data, scanning probes, locator agents, looking at a ship model (zoom function), zKillboard, contract histories, and the overview."

These are distinct, separate instances, with distinctt qualities, many of which I have issue with.

But they are not what we are discussing here. Referring to other wrongs, does not make your argument right here, now..

I will be glad to argue/debate those with you, but not as an excuse to ignore the current issue, here, now.

Furthermore, I specifically asked you if value should be met by cost/risk to acquire it.
That was the actual question. You responded "no" and then raised issues beyond the context of this discussion.
I will hold you to that. You said "no" to value being met by cost/risk to acquire it. Sooner or later, you will have to defend that.

5) My point, is that invasively gaining data on a ships fit/cargo, a) which we have agreed is valuable. b) which we have agreed is valuable to suicide ganking so as to acquire it, should be matched with commensurate cost/risk by the player obtaining that data.

A suspect timer fulfills that, without CONCORD intervention, as a purely player pvp interaction system.

6) If I choose to investigate the fit/cargo of a potential targets setup, so as to ascertain them as a target, I am prepared to accept the cost/risk of going suspect for doing so.

Are you not? If not, why so?

They don't want to kill ganking, they just want it to be an extremely rare event that never happens to them.

Mine your butts off code is dead

I read your post 3 times over, but I still cannot ascertain its meaning.
I expect likewise, that you read my posts and did not completely understand them either.

We have a language barrier here.
Lets both try to keep it very simple, and build off that.

My point:
-I collect valuable fit/cargo data off your ship, I should have to pay a cost (suspect timer)

And your point is...?

I said "no" to your preposterous assertion that all sources of intel had to require a cost or a risk. That is clearly not the case from my examples. Further, I asserted that there is a small cost/risk associated with using a scanning alt, comparable to the current cost risk for most other sources of intel, actually quite a lot more than some of the truly free and truly riskless ones that exist in the game. There is no glaring imbalance that needs addressing here, so I again fail to see why the use of this particular source of intel needs to be punished for what seems to be some sort of personal ideological grounds here.

You propose to waste developer time on fixing a non-problem for nebulous reasons based on some personal view of how the game should work you are unable to articulate beyond this is how you think is how it should be. A fix, that in my estimation would do nothing but decrease the ability to find the already rare "profitable" targets in highsec thus reducing player interaction with no benefit for the game.

This game is not built around how Salvos Rhoska thinks intel should work, nor what risks Salvos Rhoska is personally willing to take on. Neither of those are arguments to change the game. The game has been engineered by CCP as a sandbox game where players should interact. Part of that interaction requires intel tools so players can find each other, and find reasons to shoot one another. So we have tools to find each other, and find reasons to shoot each other.

Why should we waste time on "fixing" probably the most niche source of intel in the game in terms of the percentage of players who use it? A source of intel that has the same level of risks and costs as the rest of the on-board scanning and probing systems on a ship? First you said it was because any other way would be "irrational", and now you are changing your tune and going with "every source of intel must have a cost" despite that not being anywhere close to a universal premise of Eve, nor does scanning another ship with a cargo scanner have zero cost or zero risk. Every ship in space is at risk, and every ship and pilot there has an associated cost, while the act of systematically scanning potential targets has a significant time cost.

Ok, let's try to dissect a little better on what is going on in your clouded thought processes here:

1) What is the correct cost for intel? If you were designing the game from scratch how much risk is appropriate for using local? Dscan? Cargo scanner? Combat probes? How much should each method of gathering intel about your opponent cost?

2) How did you determine the value you arrived at in 1?

3) Related to that, should should some types of intel cost more than others? If so, should the cost/risk of that intel be based on the "value" of the intel, or the "invasiveness" of the intel, or someting else entirely? What metrics would you use to measure "value" and "invasiveness"?

I fail to see how cargo scanning is anymore invasive, any more riskless, or without cost as pretty much any other intel gathering tool. This is a non-problem you are fixated on. There are bigger fish to fry.

Ok then
Disregarded..

Haven't we already had the "risk vs. reward" discussion in regards to freighter ganking? Oh yeah, we did. Overall conclusion: If you take on too much risk in this game it is your own damn fault.

As for suicide ganking driving away new players....

CCP's has looked at the effect of suicide ganking on new players. Here is what they did.

They took 80,000 accounts.
They looked to see which of those 80,000 were killed in their first 15 days (old length of a trial).
They then classified the deaths thusly:

--Killed illegally--i.e. there was a CONCORD response.
--Killed legally--i.e. no CONCORD response.
--Not killed at all.

Then CCP looked at retention. How long did players stay with the game in each category?

It went like this:

--Killed illegally stayed the longest.
--Killed legally stayed almost as long.
--Not killed at all stayed the shortest.

Implication: suicide ganking actually helps retention.

Now, here is what we don't know about the study:

1. Was the 80,000 a random sample?
2. Were those retention statistics statistically significant.

What this analysis was not. It was not a mother fecking survey. If you start talking about a survey, STFU. They selected 80,000 accounts without the account holders knowledge. Somebody replying in this thread might have been selected for all we know. Since it was not a survey, nobody was asked any questions.

At the end of the presentation CCP Rise tossed in a "fun fact' from the questionnaire when they leave the game an noted less than 1% of players cite ship loss as a reason for quitting. This was not part of the analysis.

And 80,000 is alot of observations. Where I work we have about 5 million customers and when we do an analysis we often use 50,000 customers and even that is more than we need. We pick a sample that large so we can also answer questions about sub-groups. Yes we could use a stratified sample, but often times the questions come well after the sample is taken, so we go big knowing there will be additional questions later.

Now, even if the differences between those killed and not killed in terms of how long they stayed with the game is not statistically significant, this does not mean suicide ganking is bad for the game. At best it means suicide ganking has little to no effect on retention, at least for new players. Now maybe it is different if you lose 6 billion ISK due to a freighter gank, but there is no evidence for that one way or the other. But again what is the number one rule in EVE: Don't fly what you cannot afford to lose.

You know, as an outside observer it seems pretty clear that some in this thread are incredibly biased. Making scanning ships suspect would of course increase the overall risk involved in ganking, though I'm sure gankers would adapt. It would make obvious sense that scanning ships going suspect would increase the number of them killed. But gankers don't want scanning ships to die, they want gank targets to. So when they say, making scanners suspect would reduce pvp, they actually mean 'making scanners suspect would reduce ganking'.

Actually I said it will have no effect since it has an easy workaround. It is a waste of time and just another 'one more nerf and it will be fixed' bs. Even frekin Infinity Ziona who would jump on every idea which makes ganking harder told him it's a stupid idea. If that isn't a clear sign I don't know what will be.