EVE General Discussion

Because applying realism to a single concept in the game when the others are as unrealistic as possible isn't good game design.

Why would it make sense that a miner can mine out the same asteroid belt every day?

If this were true, everyone would be killing freighters. Considering that the killboards show the vast majority of suicide attacks are commited by CODE and goons (as in, almost exclusively so), that really doesn't appear to be the case.

Sounds like the repurcussions for criminal activity are a sufficient deterrent to me.

As long as FacPo and CONCORD exist in their current form, you'll never have the justice you're looking for. Consider moving your operations outside HiSec where you're empowered to dispense your own version of justice.

The issue is balanced around making players choose whether or not they want to engage in ganking activity at all. The vast majority of players aren't willign to accept those consequences because they would have too great an impact on their game. You can't balance a game around a single minute long event, followed by hours of "time out". It's unfun to the point that career gankers would start dedicating multiple alts to ganking to evade the timers - only to have people complain, once again, that gankers are allowed to gank too frequenetly.

Ever heard of the Horn of Africa? It makes plenty sense.

It would actually make even more sense then, since it would be trivially easy to never get caught in the first place. With time, the haulers would get fed up with the slow and inefficient police and start hiring security contractors who'd do some law-breaking on their own…

When you say "logical", what do you mean by that? You've said you're not looking for a lore-based reason - of which there are many that would explain why a .5 or .6 system wouldn't have a huge amount of protection against ganks from the various forces in system (quite frankly they just don't have the resources to effectively combat ganking which is why those systems have been assigned a lower security status; and these ganking groups are being funded by capsuleer alliances and the empires are supposed to be losing their grip on power... so this fits perfectly in to the story). Throwing out the roleplaying elements, then it becomes a matter of game design choice. The game design choice that has been made is to allow groups of players to conduct repeated gankings in these chokepoint systems - because seriously, if CCP didn't want these systems to be the chokepoints they are, they could just change the routes (which they've done before) or simply raise the security status of the systems or both; or even just let the sec status determine only the type of pirate NPCs and other aspects of a system, and just make CONCORD response time the same as a 1.0 across the board. All of these would only require modifications to the game's database and not require a major mechanics change. CCP has elected not to do that, because they feel that this sort of gameplay does have a place in this game.

You might not have to like that gameplay style - and, having tried suicide ganking myself (even have an alt with a 10 billion ISK freighter kill) I can't really say that I find it enjoyable - but that doesn't mean that it's an invalid playstyle. I *also* don't enjoy mission running, or mining, or station trading, or faction warfare, or any of that. I'm not going to campaign that the playstyles are dramatically nerfed, however.

You can argue that CCP is in the wrong for allowing people to gank at these chokepoints - and you do have a right to do so - but that's not the argument you've presented thus far (and if you've intended to present that sort of an argument, you've failed to do so well). However at the end of the day much of the community disagrees with you, and simply because you have an opinion on the way the game should be changed doesn't necessarily mean that it's the way the game will or should be changed. This is meant to be a difficult game, and CCP has stated many times that they'd rather have it continue to be a difficult game rather than be just another hand-holding MMO like all the others out there. They want more subscribers, sure - but they want the game to also be something difficult, where when you play it, you have to think about what you're doing. The suicide gank groups have gotten what they're doing down to a pattern because they've figured out what the mechanics are and how to best make use of the ones that are in their favor and avoid or diminish the impact of the ones which are not. That's something that CCP wants it's players to do, and that's the sort of thing that makes the game fun. I personally like to have to think about what other players are doing and how that might impact what I want to do in the game today. I like coming up with strategies and examining the types of ships that I can or could fly, and determining what the best course of action is to ensure that I can do what I want to do. It's fun. It's a great change from other games, and although there are days where I don't always want to have other players actions color what I do, it's simple enough to just play another game until I feel like playing Eve again. The magic of Eve is that I often get to think creatively in ways that other games simply won't let you or aren't capable of allowing you to do. So I'll agree that you're allowed to disagree with me on that; but I will also disagree with any sort of change which makes the game less of a thinking game, and I'll agree with any change that I feel follows in that vein (so while I'm not for "Highsec should be safe", there are many aspects of highsec PvP which I think need an overhaul; suicide ganking just isn't one of them)

The fact that people are blowing up empty freighters shows how broken the system is. If punishments were raised to a meaningful level, only high value targets would get hit.

You do realize that the archon kill was in lowsec, right? Meaning no CONCORD and no loss of ships. As opposed to ganking a freighter in highsec, where all the gank ships die.

Which points out that there is infact a rather big drawback to killing these things in highsec.

So in essence, you want to raise the cost to aggress a freighter to the point where no one wants to.