Missions & Complexes

This is probably one of the best pieces of information if you are going to get the pimp mods. Use another character to buy them.

No one actually got ganked, it's the people behind eve-kill falsifying kill reports to manipulate the market...

Chainsaw Plankton,

I have to say I have much respect for you even though sometimes I don't agree with you. Seems this is one of those times. However, I gotta admit within all my years of being active here in the forums, you're definitely the most well mannered Pirate character I know.

As for Concord - I don't remember anything about decreased response time but it makes sense due to player ships getting buffed. However I do know Concord was buffed due to players exploiting with RR. Nobody should be able to withstand, let alone escape, the long arm of the law.

Insurance payout removed - that's nothing more than a little slap on the hand, a trivial gesture by CCP trying to placate the playerbase raging about suicide gankers. Hell that didn't make a difference one way or the other since the amount of payout was practically nothing anyway.

Suspect timer - In the past looting somebody's stuff has always caused a Flag. As for Crimewatch, I gotta say that whole game mechanic is a joke which can be easily manipulated.

Increased Security status loss - I don't remember that being implemented but I do remember reading something about it possibly being applied for podding characters with high security status.

Buffed Mining Barge EHP's - that's just another symbolic gesture by CCP due to rage about Suicide Ganking. That re-balance was a joke, making the biggest ship (Hulk) have the worst defense capability.

There's been a lot of changes in the past couple of years to encourage and even help suicide ganking in high security. Security Tags will quickly bring a player up to neutral status just with a couple of mouse clicks and ISK. Also the ratting timer for security status has been reduced from 20 minutes to 5 minutes. Instead of spending days to regain positive security status, gankers can now do it within an hour.

Let's look at Mining ships. Miners were constantly being ganked in regular asteroid belts (Hulkageddon). Since CCP turned a blind eye towards the situation a majority of miners turned to other safer areas such as Mission sites and Cosmic Signatures, mainly Gravimetric sites. The Miners could easily see if someone was scanning with probes which gave them a small measure of safety with a little bit of advanced warning. After that the next easy gank targets were the Ice Belts. After the Ice Mining rage CCP moves all Grav and Ice sites to Anomalies and with the System Sensor Sweep, cuts out the need for scanning and makes ganking overall easier to do once again.

While on this subject, due to the removal of Drone loot and Meta 0 items along with the reduction of loot drops, CCP also removed the racial mining frigates and cruisers making everyone use Mining ships now, creating even more targets. Basically if players want to get Minerals now they have to jump into a Mining ship which is nothing more than a giant red bulls-eye target for gankers.

Destroyer buff definitely helped a lot, T3 BC's as well but not as much as Desy's. Let's not forget about the recent new warp / align changes too.

I could go on but I don't like dwelling on this subject. Bottom line, there's been a very large increase of Suicide Ganking and Mission Invading within the past couple of years. Obviously the game mechanics are skewed towards those activities. If it wasn't so easy and profitable, those activities wouldn't be as prevalent in high sec like they are now.


DMC

If your fit is worth 100m for each 10k EHP you have you dont have to be afraid of gankers even while AFK. Rather if you leave to w-space or nullsec you dont have to worry about suicuide gankers at all.

Depends on what kind of gankers they are. in .5 space with no concord around 1 catalyst does over 10k damage till they arrive.

I've flip floped between pirate and carebear a number of times I would like to think I know a good deal about each. I've wanted to get into WHs for a while but just haven't had the time.

I think the insurance payout was probably one of the biggest things that has happened. at one point players could make money just on the insurance from the gank (I think this may have required using buy orders, and/or building the ship yourself), any loot was profit. I think the 100m per 10k ehp rule came from this, as if you were under this they would clearly make more money doing something that wasn't ganking (well maybe not highsec mining). I think this assumed something like one gank every 20m.

5 alpha apocs that make money when they go boom (worst case you spend a few mil on guns/gyros), is way better than 15 catalysts that cost 10m each when it comes to profits (especially profit per person). that said with organizations like RvB it is probably way easier to get 15 dessy pilots to go for a teh luzl op these days.

looting flagged you to the opponents corp, for most misison runners this meant you effectively weren't flagged. a global flag is far more dangerous, however since you are probably looting from a wreck in a mission this probably doesn't do much, but is probably a bigger consequence for suicide ganking haulers on trade routes.

sec loss used to be based on system sec only, now it is based on both players sec status as well as system sec. although I guess either way it isn't a large change.

concord has had a number of changes, the RR change I think was before I started playing. I remember somewhat early on their response time got buffed. although I guess the change to how it handles remote assist buffed gankers as now you can remote sensor boost without getting concorded as your target goes criminal (this change was largely to inspire trust between players for incursions, else one person would go criminal and get the logis blown up as previously they had no chance to stop assisting the criminal, and thus likely kill most of the group.) the other changes I remember was concord got neuts, and concord can now stop players from controling drones. previously domis were awesome gank boats as the drones would keep shooting as concord slowly killed you

sec increases used to be every 15mins per system, so by switching systems constantly you could get far faster sec increases. tags4sec probably helps too, but I'm not sure how much the cost is worth.

also with mining ships most agressors would know the various racial hulls, and I'm pretty sure the venture is better than any of the old mining frigs. probably even most of the old cruisers with that ore bay. I think all the barges are better off than they were unless you are trying to afk mine with a hulk.

I have no data but I would guess ganking peaked a few years ago. Also with mission invasions I know of like one guy in my area that does them, and every time I go and abandon wrecks he usually buggs off. hell I haven't seen him in one of my missions in ages, that said I've barely been playing lately. Also I usually blitz so I'm not sitting around much.

I just don't see it as unbalanced now.

Yeah, I'm not gonna argue. Everyone was affected differently by those changes. Of course we're talking about high sec.

When I first started playing this game almost 6 years ago, it was very easy to find players you didn't know who would help out with missions, mine ores for minerals, offer important info, etc.

In fact within my first year of playing this game the materials for my very first Hurricane were gained in a couple hours by half dozen Hulks and one Orca (new ship in-game). I only knew one of the players in the mining op, the rest were more than happy to help a stranger for free. One of the members in the Mining Op even refined the Ore for me. Gotta say I will never forget that experience, it was an awe inspiring site to behold. Of course I didn't get much time to site-see, they kept me very busy in my Hoarder emptying cans and hauling Ore to station.

Also Exploration wasn't cutthroat like it is now since there wasn't a lot of players doing it either. The old DNightmare Exploration vids were my inspiration for actually joining this game. Back then it was a specialized career requiring high skill level. I had already trained the skills and was working on getting my Cheetah when CCP redid the whole exploration mechanic with the Apocrypha expansion, lowering the skill requirements and making it easier to probe. Talk about feeling ripped off. Anyway, sites were plentiful and competition was almost non existent. Back then when meeting another explorer in a site, usually an offer of help and a good luck salute was the norm. Hell, I'd even recruit players from NPC corp chat to help run sites and expeditions.

Back then players running Cosmos Missions would also offer help to each other. At various times someone would link a special weird item in local chat asking if anyone had them or wanted them. Most of the abundant items were given away for free, the harder to find items were sold or traded. Of course this was years and years ago.

Those days of sweet Eve are long gone now. Maybe I just happened to meet some cool people during those times. All I know is I have some very good memories of how Eve use to be compared to how it is now. As I said before, it's getting very tough to find positive things to say about this game now.

Like you, I rarely log into the game anymore and when I do, I'm usually moving round quite a bit as well.


DMC

This is a Dinsdale-worthy post.



Well, we've all gotten a lot better at Eve since then. People are richer and have more SP, the economy is more mature. Hell we have month old characters sailing through level 4s.

It seems to me that CCP has a definite interest in having hi-sec be a region of at least marginal safety. If this were not the case, there would be no CONCORD. The notion that a group of suicide gankers can simply destroy a blingy ship in a place of relative safety seems to imply that there is a flaw in CCP design which should be looked at. This is not to say that hi-sec should be a zone of purely "safe space" but the game already provides players ample opportunity to engage in hi-sec pvp through war decs and the like. Frankly, I say that in hi-sec, wrecks should not be "lootable" by an aggressor. If they want to blow you up in hi-sec, fine, but they should not be able to profit from it.