EVE General Discussion

No I'm not advocating making hi sec safer. I am advocating making freighters more able to do the job that they are in the game for. That is to transport high volumes of goods in relative safety (not total safety). They take a lot of skill points and a lot of capital to buy one of these things.

They shouldnt be able to be bumped and killed by a few throwaway alts that are a few days old. That is quite simply a game mechanic not working as intended and I am sure CCPs "current view" will change on this subject

That would entail giving them more cargo space, which can't happen because then they'd be able to bring cap ships into highsec. They are already as good at doing their job as they'll ever be.

Yes they should. Everything should. The day something cannot be bumped and killed by a few day-old characters, that thing needs to be removed form the game because it has just broken one of the core balancing principles. Neither SP nor capital cost is even remotely relevant to that consideration.

Freighters are relatively safe right now. The freighter pilots mostly decide about how relative this safety is. And here's one major problem. Some of them are feeding gankers with large amounts of assets/isk by making questionable decisions.

You have a valid point.

CCP has a long history of changing things that were 'working as intended' once they got tired of the mechanic being abused or hired a coder that could get the job done properly.

In this instance, the bumping mechanic is old code that cannot be easily dealt with. I don't see any changes to this flawed mechanic any time soon as it will require much more resources than they can spare.

But if it starts to affect their bottom line you will see it fixed pretty quick.

Mr Epeen

Bumping is a broken mechanic. The ability to disable key functionality of another person's ship without triggering aggression or even forfeiting police protection is so obviously contrary to a choice-and-consequences based design that it hardly needs to be mentioned. The contrasts to similar disabling methods are stark enough to leave nothing in doubt: allowing the use of ECM on ships without triggering aggression would be less harmful to the target and easier to counter, but this remains a concordable offense.

The issues around countering or fixing bumping are equally transparent. You can't make bumping a criminal act as it's utterly impractal and has endless grief potential; there are presently no good counters to bumping; but they could use existing and established technologies (shields, spatial anchoring, etc.) as a basis for changing the way the physics operate to solve the issue.

The only question that's even slightly unclear is why CCP haven't made a change yet, and the impression I get is that they support the ways bumping being used at the moment. Why wouldn't they? Novelty, innovation and emergent gameplay are big talking points for EVE; Industrials have blurb that make it clear they're not meant to fly alone so that must go tenfold for freighters, which are bigger, more valuable, and even less capable of taking care of themselves; miner bumping is doing at least something to oppose AFKing and botting, which I assume CCP considers undesirable, as well as encouraging people to take a more active role in the game. I could see any developer finding these things attractive.

But that doesn't make it any less broken, and it's senseless to pretend that it does.

Well, it would certainly make ganking easier and would cull the (super)cap numbers right down.

After all, a 68 GJ projectile does ~10k HP damage. So logically, a 50 TJ Cruiser should do just under 10M HP damage.

Freighter bumping is wrong due to:
Being an offensive tactic that does not allow others to respond
Removing the ability of a person to enjoy the game by limiting the usability of their character (Just like ECM)
AND
Makes my stuff take longer to be shipped around.


Ganking is a value faucet not an ISK sink
Each item destroyed requires replacement material, it does not remove the ISK - It in fact increases it through insurance payouts.

Bumping has already been confirmed to be 'Working as intended'. As for the mass argument the use of a MWD increases the mass of the ship being used to bump.

A blue tag locked the other thread, tells me they are aware of the issue both sides have.

I went on test server and bumped a freighter. It didn't work there. My ship bounced off it and it just kept rolling. I don't know what people are doing to make this happen or if TQ just doesn't have the same rules.

Triple webbing is the only thing that seems to work and have no doubts, it works. I tested a neutral web, lost .5 Sec but the freighter was under way immediately.

Just tested it again.

At a gate, hit a Providence with an MWD Phoon from 20 km. The Phoon bounced off, the Provi warped away.
Tried at an undock point with an align, no warp. The Phoon hit it at 2000 M/S. Phoon bumped off, Providence just kept trucking, never changed velocity or direction.

This is deadly in itself if someone went on test, tried that and then showed up in Uedama thinking they couldn't be bumped.

Judging on what I know, you guys don't bump to prevent a warp though. You bump to evade concord and that's a TOS violation.

You scramble with a neutral, it breaks auto pilot, you then bump them beyond sentry range and lengthen Concord reaction times allowing you to reduce the losses you take in killing the freighter. It's why I can't help people in Uedama. They aren't in warp any more when you kill them. If they were I could web them but if I am right, webbing them won't help.

The problem isn't bumping. It's Auto Pilot. It shouldn't be in the game.