Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The Bowhead is imbalanced tanky for Highsec, considering its insignificant cost, even in a very cheap T2 fit he has 500k+ EHP. And it can be 750k+ In practice, if you try hard.
(Which is Tank-Fit-JF-EHP who costs 8kkk in contrast to 1,3kkk of Bow, and yes JF in this fit has serious penalties to its load capacity)

Bowhead does not have penalties for his effectiveness in a full tank fit (Ship maintenance bay is not cut, agility penalty compensated by using MWD).
And in case you "can't scan" his cargo correctly.

He is imbalanced for Highsec. He needs nerf at least one thing:

1) Either add efficiency penalties in Full-Tank-Fit.
2) Either reduce its ability to tank (for example, remove rig slots).
3) Either add ability to scan ships fits which are in Bow.
4) Either make Price of Bow comparable to its effectiveness.

P.S. Hope I wrote it understandably, cuz English is not my native language.

Tank too much? A ship without any defensive capability that can be ganked wiht 6 Taloses or 12 Bombers tanks too much? I scout my freighters, web my freighters, take detours with my freighters to minimize gank ability and yet I get threatened and bumped by gankers still. I wonder, which stupidity you are talking about that should be punished.

Not to mention that this person complains about a failed gank, I presume, where they selected a target that was actually prepared for the dangers in space, and now the ganker complains that people in otherwise defenseless ships can tank more than 10 Taloses. Seriously, I wonder which stupidity you are talking about...

On the killboard, I see Bowheads dying against 10 Taloses/Nagas/Bombers if they are not fitted correctly or against 26 people (which is too many people as the killmail shows no capsule of any ganker ship) if they are fitted correctly. I don't see a problem having to use at least 10 characters to engage in a criminal activity against an otherwise defenseless targets, especially since all competent ganker groups, the OP's included, have more than enough characters ready every time they gank.

Trolls, a ship is what a play fits it out to be, not every bowhead is fit, not every freighter has its lows full with bulkheads, but while we at it, lets just take slots from every ship and give them 100hp to s/a/h

Couple of problems with this.

First off, you actually are trading efficiency for tank. You have the option of fitting for faster warp vs tank, most smart players go for the tank. The not-smart ones make up the vast majority of Bowhead losses on zKill.

Second, you can't tell what's actually in a Bowhead by scanning it. You can see the ships but you can't tell how they're fitted, and for what Bowheads are often used for that's *very* often the majority of their cargo. So a player can't mitigate their risk of getting ganked by carrying less in value, the majority of the value is hidden.

Lastly it's still, even with all of that EHP, possible and even probable that the Bowhead you gank will still be profitable, you just need a lot of ships to pull off the gank. Even with the current EHP it's basically impossible to make a Bowhead not profitable to gank when it's fully loaded with anything other than T1 hulls.

For example lets take the current price of a Pirate Battleship hull, which is about 800m conservatively. You can *just barely* fit three Pirate Battleships and a few smaller ships into a Bowhead. That's almost 3b just in hulls. It takes a little more than 1b in bombers to gank a Bowhead. That's ISK efficient even if the *only* thing in the Bowhead is the hulls. No rigs, no modules, nothing. If you bother to do A-type Invulns, faction DCU, and faction Bulkheads you've increased your EHP but you've actually made it easier to gank you efficiently because the EHP added doesn't offset the cost of the modules. The only thing saving the Bowhead from being nothing but gank bait is the fact that it can tank as much as it can, which makes it impractical to gank for most groups and players.

Any freighter that gets ganked ****** up somewhere somehow. When cargo fit freighters can auto pilot through choke points without being ganked, that is stupidity going un punished. And players like you and i miss out because of it. Miners are missing out becuase of it. Industrialists are missing out because of it. Traders and so on...

10 talos is A LOT. And where you say 'any competent ganker group can get 10 peeps together' what you're really saying is 'the only gankers left are the ones who can get 10 talos for dps, a bumper, scanners and a hauler'

Which is the problem i have with ultra-safe hisec. You have to have a mid size gang to gank even the thinnest of freighters piloted by the dumbest of carebears who is working ALONE. Not good enough.

Preying on the weak doesn't make you smart, even dumb animals can prey on the weak. This just makes you opportunistic.

I do. Sounds like you're confusing effort with results. Saying, "Well, we made a big effort and still failed," doesn't really tell us much about level of competence exercised in executing those efforts.

I think this is the core problem. CCP messed up the balance at one point, and in that window, certain people became accustomed to being able to make a profit off ganking on a day to day basis. The bar of what was balanced and what was not was moved. Now, certain groups view it as their day to day income. In the game world, sure, they can be pirates. But when there is a crime problem (ganking is a crime), police or military responds by upping their presence. CCP can't really do that, so we have this artificially altered bar of what is 'balance.'

Ganking in the past wasn't about day in day out profit. Sure there were profitable ganks, but ganking in the past was about the gank, whether it was just because it was a hulk, or because it was fun, or just to make a statement. It's lost that in this artificial environment where the increase in crime can't really be balanced by an increase in police presence.


Ganking should NOT be a day to day source of income, because the game can't really respond to that at the moment with police mechanics. IF CCP is able to apply the BR Sotiyo test run to Concord, then sure. But as it stands, the goal posts for ganking have been shifted, and need shifted back. Choosing to gank should be about that one guy carrying 30b in a freighter, or that one person smacking in local for hours every day, or that group of miners/missioners who do nothing to protect themselves.... not just because it's profitable.

Donna, all you need is a webber. Thats it. One escort.

What i want? Lower ehp and/or increased response time of concord. The latter is my favourite as that allows defenders more time as well. What does the freighter get? More money for hauling successfully.



Ken, saying it shouldn't be profitable to gank fails to understand that it is neither ccp nor the ganker that sets the reward for the gank. The ONLY person in direct control of how profitable anything is to gank is the hauler. Freighters could have their ehp multiplied by ten tomorrow and i could fill mine with dead space mods and still be profitable to gank. The idea is to put the ehp of haulers in an area that encourages players to make meaningful choices in what they haul, where they haul it and how they haul it.

They can haul more expensive stuff through dangerous areas, but have to do it with a bit of thought.
They can haul expensive stuff afk but have to take it somewhere less profitable.
They can haul stuff afk through dangerous areas but have to sacrifice capacity.

And so on...

But that doesn't really happen. The vast majority of freighters are afk. The vast majority go to the same few systems. And i seriously doubt they make compromises on their haulage. They don't have to put much thought into anything and can afk through uedama and niarja with only a slight chance of being even noticed. Ganking has been nerfed so much that few ganking groups remain. They were all listed previously in the thread and even half of them are part timers. Ganking added value to hauling and mining, it is quite simply a very good thing for industrialists.


Cade, this threshold you speak of, we're not even close. Think of all the times ganking has been nerfed. Then think of how many players still hauled their stuff ten years ago when ganking was easier and cheaper to do. But now we have a big production/destruction gap, margins are low, mining + hauling has little to no value.

Stuff needs to die more.

Yet another who assumes we do not know what or how to do these things.
Between low, nul and high sec runs we move more than a dozen freighter loads of stuff around every month and we have done so for years, never lost a freighter until this one specific incident. Are we lucky / unlucky? No doubt that has some part to play but the volume of movements and the number of years we have been doing this tells a different story.


So typically arrogant, because you have only every needed one webbing alt does not mean that everyone only needs a single webbing alt for all possible situations.
We travel systems that have very little traffic and very few characters in them because it makes tracking characters easier and it is quicker to see when / if any significant change in the number of characters in the system has occurred. Less than perfect but over the years this has proven to be the most effective way to deal with the situation. The unfortunate aspect of this is that webbing alts are easy to spot since there are so few ships sitting at the gate to counter this we try to time it so the webbing alt arrives shortly before the freighter pilot breaks gate cloak. In this specific case there was a communication breakdown and the webbing alt arrived at the gate way to early, they were spotted and no doubt ID as a webbing alt and died as a result of it. Over the years, and based on the fact that we had never needed that back up webbing alt we got complacent and to be honest stupid and committed to the move without one, lesson learned.


The usual if they had more time the defenders would come to the aid of their freighters line of crap.
Even when there are combat capable ships at the gate during a gank no one wants to get involved they simply go on about whatever they were doing glad that they were not the target of the gank.
Responding a fleet to aid the freighter from anywhere, even somewhere inside the system would still give the gankers enough time to kill the freighter before the defense force could stop them.
All of this means that to do any good the defense force would have to fly in a fleet with the freighter. And yet if that was to happen the gankers would ignore that freighter and look for an easier target. And given the crushingly boring nature of escorting a freighter and the notoriously low patience level for boring things that most PvP pilots have one wonders if these defense fleet would actually happen.



If there are all these AFK freighters for you to gank what is the problem?
An AFK freighter means you have more than enough time to cargo scan as they slow boat to the inbound side of the gate.
An AFK freighter means no webbing alts or warping out to deal with since you can catch them on the inbound side of the gate.
Even if you cannot catch them on the inbound side of the gate AFK means there will be no webbing alts to aide them into warp so a single bumping alt should be all that is needed.
Time for Concord to arrive on scene is a well documented thing.
So in the end this all comes down to the simple elementary level math needed to calculate damage over time needed to kill the target.
Also one wonders, with all of these easy target AFK freighters running amok in EvE why do the few of us that actively pilot our ships have to suffer with lower EHP and / or longer Concord response times simply because it is hard for you to kill those AFK ships?


Let us look at this in simple form.
CCP has stated that they are OK with ganking even though it was an un-intended game play style.
Even though ganking is supported they have in fact repeatedly nerfed that game play style over the years.
Simple elementary level logic applied here gives us an answer.
CCP has nerfed the ganking game play style to control how much of it is going on.
And they have nerfed it for balance, no silly not game balance I am referring to something far more important, I am referring to the cash flow balance needed for CCP to stay in business.

Yes I am aware of that fan fest presentation, I am also aware that despite that presentation and the way you and others choose to interpret what little information they presented the simple fact remains that CCP continues to nerf all of the non-consensual PvP aspects of this game why? And faced with this evidence what makes you think CCP would even consider reversing past nerfs?