EVE General Discussion

ah.. you do know the forum has a draft feature right? click, copy, pasty, and we're all good. Bit late now though maybe.

I've actually done that. Not my freighter, but someone elses. Wasn't much fun.

@previous poster: It was deeply entrenched sarcasm. Freighters don't have modules.

My point was the Freighter can't really do anything and aside from that little trick, (which doesn't help much), is essentially a large beach ball that you pop in the air and wait for it to land. Hopefully nobody pops it with a fork along the way.

Sure, you can bring a big fleet to escort it, but how does that help against the gang of 30 Tornados come to one shot gank it, and the Neutral ship to scoop the loot?Sure, you could also be present and accounted for and warp to zero, but it doesn't stop somebody from bumping you off course when you are trying to align from a gate and preventing you warping.

Now all they need is the fork and the bumper is a neutral party.

You could get a Fleet member to gank the Neutral party, (bumper or grinder), but what if they have more than one? Industrials are cheap; they could have a dozen, or a couple dozen.

Beachball < Fork

..or spork if you like.

So all the tricks in the book will net you one thing: The gankers will counter them with the appropriate measure. It's not even challenging for them; just spend ISK and receive cookies.

So, why not autopilot?

Because it's so much more fun ganking a Freighter with an active pilot than the one where the autopilot is on and the guy isn't going to know until he gets back from watching 4 hours of that Red Dwarf marathon.

No juicy tears to savor until he posts a whine thread in C&P or comments on the killboards, no screams in local until he comes back and sees his pod floating in space next to a can labelled "We pwned you and has your stuffz," long after you're gone, etc...

So really, no reason.

You are literally what is wrong with empire dwellers.

Have you ever piloted a freighter over more than 5-6 jumps? I did once. That was the first and last time, and I sold it shortly after. It was Hek to Jita iirc and it was the slowest space transit of my life.

It's not bad enough that they take forever to align, but once you're in warp you stay there, literally. Sit back, twiddle your thumbs, read a book, because you're not getting there anytime soon, and when you do, you just end up hopping gate and repeating the whole process over again, for every system.

gah..

I think once you know you are fubar, you just walk away, watch tv, and wait for it to be over.

As usual the mechanics around killing freighters in high-sec are crap.

Those doing the bumping and those that pick up the loot remain neutral. It's like a gang of bank robbers that get caught and the get away drivers are not considered part of the crime.

The mechanics around suicide ganking in high-sec were crap and still are crap.


As for t3 BCs what was CCP thinking, oh that's right they weren't as usual.

What was this about gankers shooting the webber. The problem with people like you is that you misquote in an attempt to summarize while missing the whole point of the post.

Let me point it out carefully for you:

Neutral ship in league with the 30 Tornados sitting off gate, (most likely an Inty or fast Frigate), bumps the Freighter as it goes to align off gate and warp to the next gate on route, (autopilot or no autopilot), and the bumped freighter does the typical bob and try to align and so on until the pilot cancels warp, (if he's there), and tries to realign to another point or head back to gate.

Bumper, (in League with Pirates/Gankers), simply bumps him off course again or otherwise keeps him from aligning to any celestials or returning to the gate.

Pretty simple tactics here; I think I learned them when I was 3.

So, the Freighter pilot, (That's the victim btw), has a fleet. He gets a Fleet member to pop the Neutral Frigate and that member is subsequently Concorded.

Poof, we have Concord. We've also lost a Destroyer or something, but that's not particularly important.

Okay, the Freighter could bring Neutral Logis. Look, we have Crimewatch - not sure how this works, but irrelevent.

Logis are an active Rep and not a buffer. Alpha beats active Rep. Simple; maybe need one more Nado.

Concord is going to kill the Nados anyway, so they are here but who cares unless the Nados, (just an example), need to fire 2 shots each right?

Wait, so now we need 3 more Nados? Better be worth it.

How many ships can Concord kill at once anyway? ..never bothered to figure that out.

All that can be solved easily enough I assume; just start firing before Concord gets there. All you really need to do is bump the Freighter off course long enough to lock him up in range of good dps. Given he's leaving a gate and within 12km of it, that means you're likely no more than 25 km away.

You figure it out.

So.. big guns, SEBOs and Damage Mods/Rigs, Neutral MWD frigate for bumping, ignore the webber and logis because they aren't going to do any good anyway, kill it before Concord gets there, ganglink and off-grid boosting for effect, and bring a Freighter to pick everything up with because surely they won't have the ships to counter gank that, and if they do, maybe you should wait for a better target.

Have I got it about right?

edit: actually forgot about ECM. You could bring in a load of Blackbirds and lock up every Fleet of Nados and gankboats you see on jumping gate while the Freighter is in transit, (takes forever; shouldn't be hard), to gate, but that still has an obvious and easy counter.

The gank fleet just needs to have enough smaller ships to smash, (gank), into the Freighter to offset your ability to prevent the kill. So whatever Nados don't get to fire off their kill shots get backed up by some high dps cheap gankboats that move in and take their place.

Even if the blackbird has a lock, he's going to have to wait until the ship actually aggresses and goes red before trying to jam it and the main issue is the fleet of Blackbirds coordinating locks and jams in the short period they have to determine threats and lock them up.

Even then Blackbirds are paper thin, so the gank fleet could just squash them without mercy if they had the spare gank to do it. Also, if they wait till the Blackbirds are red with a third party with high dps, they could just indiscriminately destroy them without sacrificing a ship.

Depends what the cargo is worth to them ultimately.

HERE is your solution: do not autpilot in highsec! Warp to zero. Got aggressed by someone? Jump/Dock. AMAZING

that is part of the solution
Problem is that a few freighter pilots were carrying way to much in value wise in their ships,


it is not the game mechanic that is at fault it is the pilots and their corp that is for allowing this to happen , also pretty much sounds and looks like a inside job to me
Ganking exhumers has been rebalanced , but there never was and there isn't a need to nerf the ganking of haulers and freighters in my opinion
it takes much more team work to set up and has more risks involved than ganking exhumers ( still remember how i witnessed the ganking of a freighter in Niarja and the rage when a third party ran off with the loot that was hiilarious)
my opinion and reading thru this thread that most people think the same way about this

I'm going to try and retype a brief version what I said before the forum ate it.

Mara's dissatisfaction with freighter gameplay is not related to any flaw with the freighters themselves (most would just fit unexciting i-stabs on the thing anyway) , they're merely relics of a bygone era when highseccers were expected to work together as part of teams to achieve goals. The problems are centered around the fact that the freighter in highsec has little recourse to all those blobs of blaster BCs hanging around the gates, with no means of clearing them out. In nullsec, my home, these are simple matters - you shoot all the people in your way then keep moving the freighter through. Or you don't and the freighter dies. Any solutions provided to highsec players to resolve this problem would necessarily involve increasing the scope and effectiveness of war declarations/initiatiing PVP over a contested resource (use of a stargate). But carebears reject those sort of personal responsibility-based solutions out of hand, even if it'll benefit them in the long run.

So the other option is making suicide ganking of freighters less effective somehow. However, keep in mind that if freighter hauling becomes even safer and easier then it is now, then it follows that more people will do it, and will do it more often. Given that EVE is a player-driven economy, a large increase in supply (of 'freighter hauling service') would mean prices for those services would lower and freighter pilots would as individuals make less ISK.

Considering the nature of cumulative wealth and profit in EVE Online (people using their wealth to invest in making even more wealth), one asks, in a game where some veteran is multiboxing 32 freighters to autopilot 20 bil each in goods in total safety because he'll get a 0.15% return at the end of the journey and make fat stacks, where does this leave the newbie hauler with a bestower trying to eke out an income where 0.15% returns (of in his case very little) are the norm? Is he expected to get tiny percentages on his bestower hauls until he too can afford a freighter?

Suicide ganking helps newbies because, in the lack of effective wardecs and resource contention, it prevents rich veterans from boating around in utterly ultra-pimp fit PVE machines in a feedback loop of ISK accumulation, trouncing poorer, newer players. The axiom of "Don't fly what you can't afford to lose" gives less wealthy characters a fighting chance in the EVE economy in terms of resources.

So, with that in mind, is someone losing a 21 bil unescorted, unscouted freighter to a suicide gank a problem? I don't think so.