Crime & Punishment

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There is no legitimate use for the bounty system. All of those ships were going to die no matter what. The bounty did nothing to encourage the loss. The bounty also did nothing to stop the gank. OP admits that nothing he did stopped the freighters from being ganked. If OP wanted to collect the bounties, knowing the can't stop the gank anyway, he'd be better off in a T1 Cruiser, armor tanked, with the mids full of target painters. Light up the gankers, especially the Taloses since they cost more. Collect the bounty and the gankers won't mess with you because you aren't actually interfering with them.

So the person placing the bounty gets nothing for their isk. Bounties are only useful to make carebears cry when they receive them and think they mean anything. Hardly a compelling game mechanic.

As the official CODE. diplomat, let me ask you: if a third party such as myself were to take advantage of this ISK-making opportunity in a manner that does not interfere with CODE. content creation, could they expect reprisals? A cheap destroyer (ironically, a Catalyst would work wonderfully) with a full tack of guns, each set to not auto-repeat so as to minimize damage caused, could likely harvest bounties at a goodly rate with little personal risk.

Being a fan of Gonzo Journalism, and seeing as how I have recently been curious about what CODE. is all about and why nobody seems to be stopping them, I decided to travel to Aufay and find out for myself.

First, I needed a ship. I did a little bit of planning and tried to figure out what would be the most effective platform to interfere with a suicide gank. Obviously I wasn't going to out-gank them single-handedly, so I turned to the only game mechanic broken enough to allow one ship to completely shut down several ships for the length of time that it takes CONCORD to kill someone: ECM.

I wasn't about to risk a Falcon on my first outing; the ability to move around while cloaked is nice, but the pricetag wasn't warranted in my book. Plus, there was the little bit about the targeting delay after de-coaking. Speed is of the essence to someone who only has 30 seconds to engage, and a 12 second delay would all but negate my ability to jam. I contemplated using a Blackbird or a Kitsune, but the inability to cloak meant that I was just as much a target as the poor hapless freighters CODE. was targeting.

So, as I often do, I tried something...different. I wanted stealth without a targeting delay, and I knew that my primary jamming target (Catalyst) had low sensor strength, so I decided to forgo the ECM-bonused hull and went with a Manticore: I had stealth, I had midslots, I had CPU, and I could get passable jam strength for a destroyer while still fitting a cloak and a full rack of launchers. I was quite proud of myself.

Last night (US EST), I traveled to Aufay. I didn't have much time to look around, but I can see now why it's such a good system for ganking freighters. Small, along a trade route, only two gates, and it's a 0.5 system to boot. I decided to join the channel "Anti-Ganking" to see if there was any activity, and there wasn't. (There were, however, a few suggested anti-ganking fits, and one of them was an ECM Stealth Bomber. This bumped the pride in my creativity down a few notches.)

So fast forward to this morning, right before downtime. I warp to one of the gates and see a Macharial bumping an Anshar. Two things immediately jump out at me. First, a gank must be imminent. Second, who the heck flies a jump freighter through gates in a system known to have a heavy CODE. presence? I put away my disbelief and watch my DScan and sure enough, a fleet materializes. They appear on grid and go flashy and I start locking them up without paying any mind to what it is I'm targeting; this was my first time in non-trivial combat since being out of game for a number of years and I didn't want to screw it up.

Fast forward 30 seconds and the Anshar is a wreck surrounded by a bunch of other wrecks and a swarm of CONCORD ships. I check my kill log and it turns out I did, indeed, make it on 4 killmails. However, they were mostly Taloses, so it's very doubtful that I actually jammed any of them. Oh well, lesson learned: next time, don't just go for the flashies, go for the flashy catalysts.

As fate would have it, my next time was only minutes away. A Fenrir end up on the same gate being bumped by the same Macharial. Another fleet materializes and I engage this one as well. I do a better job picking my targets and actually direct my jammers at Catalysts and my launchers at other targets. As did the Anshar, the Fenrir was soon destroyed.

Shortly before the Fenrir met it's fate, the Anshar pilot speaks up in Anti-Ganking. Here is a snippet of what followed:



Any desire I may have had to help freighter pilots not get ganked by CODE. and their allies pretty much vanished in that moment. I mean, seriously, I try to help someone in an anti-ganking channel not get ganked, and I get blocked (and later reported to a channel admin) for it?

Sigh. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Just before downtime, I noticed that my notifications button was flashing, so I clicked it. I had received a number of notifications from CONCORD regarding the collection of bounties from the gankers I had targeted. To my surprise, I had earned enough in bounties from 15 minutes of work to mostly pay off the cost of the Manticore I was flying. This was something that I could get behind!



So what's the moral of my story? Screw the freighter pilots and miners. They don't want my help. I'm going to try my hand at White Knighting for a while purely for the ISK. I guess that makes me a "content creator" too.