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Player Features and Ideas Discussion

 
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Freight / mining fleets
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Gajin Sensei
Poliisin Vanha Tuttu
#1 - 2014-03-15 11:08:46 UTC
I thought up this idea of a special version of fleets which could make highsec freighting a little bit more fun and not so much a solo effort. Seeing as a lot of people dislike the idea of suicide ganking, how about offering another form of freighting in hs that would still have similar risk / reward ratio.

So what if freighters/jump freighters could form up a special trade fleet, where everyone in fleet would be free game in hs, but when you attack any one of the fleet members, you get a limited engagement with the whole fleet. Also while in fleet, freighters and jump freighters got a bonus to their armor/shield amount for each fleet member withing 50-200km or something of them. You couldn't join/drop this fleet unless you are docked.

This way you could actually escort freighters in hs, so you could have enough fleet members to make just oneshotting a freighter with tornadoes pretty impractical or require like 100 of them, but in exchange risk having a bigger fleet engage and wipe out your whole fleet or just pick off some of the defending ships. What this would do is make it feasible to transport high value cargo in hs provided that you have enough people in fleet to safeguard it and I think it would make for some interesting content. Maybe develop a similar concept for mining fleets as well, then maybe finally anti-suicidegankers could shut up when they have a viable option for risking their ships to suicide ganks, and proper baddies could make a living from engaging these special form of free-to-shoot-in-hs fleets.

Of course this kind of a thing would need a lot of additional planning before it could implemented, but atleast this would bring hs corporations something to do together. I would love to see freighter ganking turn from a turkey shoot to an actual fleet effort, where you'd need a proper fc and tactics etc. to bring down a freighter fleet. It sounds way more fun to me than warp in 10 tornadoes, press f1 and loot.

This would need a lot of restrictions, tweaking etc. but I don't see why the basic format couldn't be developed into something. Give freighters and miners the tools to fight back but also make them take some additional risks by doing so. Whaddayathink ?
Dave Stark
#2 - 2014-03-15 11:17:03 UTC
half of this is already possible anyway, people just don't bother.
Emizeko Chai
Freight Club
#3 - 2014-03-15 16:22:45 UTC
Gajin Sensei wrote:

I would love to see freighter ganking turn from a turkey shoot to an actual fleet effort, where you'd need a proper fc and tactics etc. to bring down a freighter fleet. It sounds way more fun to me than warp in 10 tornadoes, press f1 and loot.


If you think that's all that's involved, I encourage you to try it. You've left out so much of what actually needs to happen that you will fail.
Gajin Sensei
Poliisin Vanha Tuttu
#4 - 2014-03-15 16:42:44 UTC
Emizeko Chai wrote:
Gajin Sensei wrote:

I would love to see freighter ganking turn from a turkey shoot to an actual fleet effort, where you'd need a proper fc and tactics etc. to bring down a freighter fleet. It sounds way more fun to me than warp in 10 tornadoes, press f1 and loot.


If you think that's all that's involved, I encourage you to try it. You've left out so much of what actually needs to happen that you will fail.



Sure it's not that simple if you want to actually find a good target and actually loot it afterwards, but it's not rocket science either tornadoganking freighters in hs. And I don't think the current system is somehow broken per se, but so much of this game is already played on scouting alts and googling killboards / evewho etc. I would just like to see another more straightforward way of transporting valuable cargo in hs that would have it's own risks.
Emizeko Chai
Freight Club
#5 - 2014-03-15 16:48:06 UTC
Gajin Sensei wrote:

Sure it's not that simple if you want to actually find a good target and actually loot it afterwards, but it's not rocket science either tornadoganking freighters in hs.


Look, you're not even choosing the right ship to do this with. The Tornado is not the optimal choice.

You don't know the actual tactics involved in a freighter gank and yet you are denigrating those tactics as simple. Doing it properly so that you get paid is more difficult than you appear to be aware.
Anhenka
The New Federation
Sigma Grindset
#6 - 2014-03-15 17:37:04 UTC  |  Edited by: Anhenka
So this is an idea that let's me kill stuff, without concord intervention?

Oh Cthulu yes.

Because I'm betting I can take 20 people in Talos's, and throw then at a freighter fleet with 80 defenders, and kill 3ish Freighters easy before all the talos's get taken down. Probably more like 5-6.

And since I scanned them with a nuetral frig first, I'll be sure to hit the biggest, most expensive ships in the fleet first.

TLDR: Lol.....no. The chance of a freight trucker voluntarily entering suspect mode in highsec for nay reason while carrying valable cargo is slightly less than pigs developing calculus.
Gajin Sensei
Poliisin Vanha Tuttu
#7 - 2014-03-15 17:54:47 UTC
Anhenka wrote:
So this is an idea that let's me kill stuff, without concord intervention?

Oh Cthulu yes.

Because I'm betting I can take 20 people in Talos's, and throw then at a freighter fleet with 80 defenders, and kill 3ish Freighters easy before all the talos's get taken down. Probably more like 5-6.

And since I scanned them with a nuetral frig first, I'll be sure to hit the biggest, most expensive ships in the fleet first.

TLDR: Lol.....no. The chance of a freight trucker voluntarily entering suspect mode in highsec for nay reason while carrying valable cargo is slightly less than pigs developing calculus.



well the idea would be that the freighters get a significant enough buff from the defence fleet to their armor/shield that you'd need to destroy the defending fleet first and not be able to just burst out the freighters.
Anhenka
The New Federation
Sigma Grindset
#8 - 2014-03-15 18:10:35 UTC  |  Edited by: Anhenka
Gajin Sensei wrote:

well the idea would be that the freighters get a significant enough buff from the defence fleet to their armor/shield that you'd need to destroy the defending fleet first and not be able to just burst out the freighters.

Lot of issues with this.

A: Say having 80-100 people buffs the EHP of the Shield/Armor on the freighters by like 1,000+%, it's not going to matter, because:
B: Even if they are buffed by 1,000%, it won't matter because the cargo they are carrying in order to justify an 80 man escort fleet will still be worth throwing 20 Talos's at a single freighter.
C: 75% of a freighters EHP is in structure. Buffing armor/shield is going to have a token effect per % compared to a structure buff.

And the big two.

D: There are no organizations that would bother with this. Haulers are always solo operations for the most part. And they won't be trusting their stuff to people they don't know in order to risk a bigger amount of money, not to mention they will be needing to pay for escort services for probably 5-10 people for every freighter minimum. No profit. Cheaper, easier, and more convenient to split it into 1 Bil isk chunks and Redfrog it, or 5 Bil and Bluefrog it, than pay 5+ people per freighter to guard it at every step of the way.

E: Time. Getting a ton of people together to do something at a specific time is hard enough in nulllsec where you are part of an alliance. In highsec? Getting a large fleet together at the same time, and trusting it to hold together long enough to escort a bunch of freighters?

Impossible. About the only people with that level of coordination and pull are major PvP groups, and they certainly wont be escorting freighters for peanuts pay.
Sipphakta en Gravonere
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#9 - 2014-03-15 20:58:36 UTC
Gajin Sensei wrote:

Sure it's not that simple if you want to actually find a good target and actually loot it afterwards, but it's not rocket science either tornadoganking freighters in hs.


When was the last time someone used tornadoes to gank freighters?
Tear Harvesters HaveNoLives
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#10 - 2014-03-15 23:22:25 UTC  |  Edited by: Tear Harvesters HaveNoLives
Emizeko Chai wrote:
Gajin Sensei wrote:

Sure it's not that simple if you want to actually find a good target and actually loot it afterwards, but it's not rocket science either tornadoganking freighters in hs.


Look, you're not even choosing the right ship to do this with. The Tornado is not the optimal choice.

You don't know the actual tactics involved in a freighter gank and yet you are denigrating those tactics as simple. Doing it properly so that you get paid is more difficult than you appear to be aware.

I'll expand on this:
- Buy, haul and setup fitting for a dozen ships
- Sit on a gate for 15-60 minutes, scanning incoming freighters.
- Find a nice target, start bumping him off the gate (or the next gate) with a speedy battleship.
- Get your gank crew and their ships into the proper system. At -10, this is very difficult.
- After 30-45 minutes of bumping this freighter off gate, find a way to slow him down without giving him enough space to warp off.
- Warp the gank crew in. Wait for them to land, including the friendly freighter, and pray a single Griffin has not arrived to ruin the entire hour long operation.
- Lock the target and blow him up.
- Immediately grab the loot with the friendly freighter.
- Immediately eject from the freighter and have a second pilot enter the freighter.
- Get a dozen pods out of harms way before white knights pod you, all while managing said freighter above.

If you screw up even one of these steps, you risk losing your entire 1billion ISK ganking fleet. So hopefully people can see now why it's really annoying hearing people say gankers have it easy... YEAH RIGHT.