EVE General Discussion

And I personally think that being afk should be a near guaranteed death sentence.



A billion+ isk killmail should never be safe. Ever.

Prove that people can control mutliple clients? Doesn't that follow trivially from Green's theorem?

Something like the reintroduction of ship insurance for suicide ganking? It didn't require the use of battleships but it certainly encouraged it as you invariably profited, it's removal was at least partly responsible for the current choice of ships used in suicide ganking.

I'm not saying bring it back but offering a little bit of carrot to gankers instead of constantly beating them with a stick might encourage them to shift their ship meta in that direction.

You can't honestly expect that it should only be profitable to gank a 150,000 EHP ship if you spend over a billion ISK on the gank, but still claim that you want to have ganking in the game, right? Because people are autopiloting empty, cargo fit freighters through known gank hotspots and they're getting shot down because they're a rather expensive kill that doesn't have a whole lot in the way of hitpoints. If you make it take a billion ISK to kill that much of a ship, you're essentially going to make it impossible to do smaller scale ganking; and if you raise the hitpoints of the freighters too much you also break other things (you do realize that we use them in other places right? The only way you can carry an Infrastructure Hub in to Nullsec is on a freighter - in fact, a cargo fit freighter is required, I believe, as the hub is 700,000m^3; there's supposed to be some risk in deploying them (as they're a critical part of sov infrastructure). Most of the upgrades also require a freighter that's at least partially cargo fit to install them; this is so you can't just use a jump freighter to jump them in there (you can, of course, bridge it in with a Titan, though this is expensive and potentially risky). Give the freighter too much HP and it's a bit harder to kill and stop from deploying an Ihub or an upgrade. Same for deploying outposts - you need a freighter. This is part of the reason they're supposed to be somewhat easy to kill, as far as my understanding goes; so you're either going to be buffing freighter HP to get what you want and breaking other parts of the game, or you're going to be changing how suicide ganking works and effectively nerfing it in to the ground (and thus breaking parts of the game you say you don't want to break).

Again the fact is that if you want to have an empty freighter survive... just don't autopilot it. Bring an escort. Scout ahead. Do *something* other than tell it to warp through a gank hotspot that's been known to be one for months now. Or heck, if you insist on autopiloting it, maybe make it stop a few jumps short of the gank spot so you can judge whether to go through there or not? I mean this stuff isn't hard to do. It just takes the tiniest bit of effort to prevent your freighter from being killed; and yet freighter after freighter autopilots it's way in to the system (and even then, most of them make it through just fine).

I appreciate the idea that you can have some things in Eve done while you're offline; I really do. I love that I don't have to grind skills; I love that I can set up industry jobs and have them run while I'm not playing, or put up market orders and log out, etc. But moving an expensive ship through a hostile system? That's never something I'd leave up to automation. I don't care if they change the autopilot to warp to 0 and it's supposedly an insta-warping ship or something, or it's too tanky to die. I'm not automating that, because I don't want to have someone else figure out how to kill it and I wind up having no way to defend against it because I wasn't there. But you can't insist that people should be allowed to hit the autopilot button on their billion ISK ships and leave the computer, and then expect that 100% of the time - not 90%, not 99%, not 99.9999999%, but straight 100% of the time - they'll be safe, and not expect people to question what your motives here are. You say you want suicide ganking to exist in some form. That's fine. But an expensive hull is *always* going to be a target, no matter what's in it; not unless you effectively remove ganking from the game or start breaking a whole slew of other things.

In any case, this game is not meant to have any activity be 100% safe. That's the point of it; it's meant to be risky in whatever you do, and that risk is primarily going to be the other players. That's what makes it interesting. I'm not pitting my will against an AI who I'll rather quickly figure out the ins and outs of and essentially slaughter once I figure out how to deal with it. I'm dealing with reasoning people that can figure out new ideas and new tactics to counter my own, and that I have to constantly think of how to deal with. I have to fight to keep my stuff safe, and every time I undock, there's no guarantee I'll make it to my destination (in fact, I'll usually put on "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" during my undock prep just to get me ready for the trip). That's fun, because unlike pretty much every other game out there, I have no idea what's going to happen next. Making it completely safe... well that saps the fun out of it, and to be honest there's plenty of games you can play when you want to do something safe. Sometimes I don't want to be in the unsafe world of Eve. That's fine. I do something else, and then when I'm ready to come back, I come back. But Eve isn't supposed to be safe, and I just don't understand why you think any aspect of it should be 100% safe.

And before you say docking up is 100% safe, my industry character is also my trading character. A lot of my funds are tied up in stuff in Jita that got knocked way, way down by people outbiding me by just a few thousand ISK... and I'm too far away to change the orders remotely, only have my Freighter in system, and haven't had the time to fly out enough jumps to get close enough to update my order. Someone effectively cut off part of my funding while I was docked up, and until I have time to deal with it, I've really got no way to handle it aside from sucking it up. That's the sort of game I want to play. One where nothing I do has any sort of a guarantee of success, and I need to put in some thought and effort to deal with it.

No, prove that one person can accomplish the feat that you described, and do it without moving the goalposts.
For an encore, you can demonstrate how it is any way “troubling”.

Because the error is blatant and obvious, and yet presented as something it very clearly is not — a fact that should have been spotted during the writing, but which was left in anyway. The lie is a lie, even if it was just incompetence that created it.

The same thing it meant the first time I wrote it. Read it in context and look at what was described when I said it. You already have the answer to this and the answer does not and will not change just because you try to link it to a completely different statement or move the goalposts.

It's not just garbage – before 2013, it is simply massively incomplete. All killboards are, because the reporting structure and API integration of kills left tons of kills and losses out.

So basically, you don't buy that ganking shifted to cheap catalysts? That one entity does it entirely for profit (in fact, being able to do it for profit is how they got famous and managed to make an industry of it)? That the other entity operates almost entirely on a donation basis? That there is no third entity any more, in an area where there were a large number of them before and in spite of the repeated, unproven, spurious claims that it's so cheap and easy anyone can do it? That jollyjabbing was invented because it improves profitability (per gank, if not over time)? You don't buy that if ganks went back to being, not just free, but inherently profitable regardless of outcome, ganking wouldn't become much more prevalent?

You buy the chest-beating rhetoric on one hand, even though it's highly suspect, but you don't believe it when the same entities actually describe the logistics behind it all, even though it makes sense? Why is that?

This is pretty much already the case.

It also raises the same old question that people fail to answer every time: why should any of that happen? Why do freighters need “real capital fitting”? Why shouldn't jollyjabbing be a thing?

Why? They're not even remotely the same class of ships.

They are second class ships. If you want combat capability, fly a different ship class.

There are no Q ships in EVE, and that's a good thing.

It seems that you have been letting the ganker propaganda get to you. Gankers are not unnatural boogeymen that can ignore the economic forces in New Eden. Even if profit doesn't primarily motivate all gankers (although it certainly does for a lot), gankers need ships and some basic resources to keep operating. Sure, an empty freighter may look quite green on a killboard, but that makes no ISK for the gankers and they have just lost a dozen or two gank ships they have to restock.

This is why there are so few gankers left in the game. Aside from overloaded haulers and extremely bling fit mission/mining ships, there is no profit left in the profession and thus very few ganks. This is a direct result of changing the economic equation through a series of direct nerfs to the gankers including the insurance nerf, which made ganking less profitable by increasing the down side for gankers. The historic low rate of miner ganking was explicitly mentioned in the CSM 2012 minutes (page 104) interestingly by the former CCP economist Dr.EyjoG, who highlighted this relationship between profitability and the frequency of ganking.

If you think that since adding "consequences" does not affect the mechanics of the gank you are not arguing for increased protection for your ships you are wrong. Increasing "consequences" or decreasing profitability for gankers will have the predictable outcome that there will be less of it in the game, thus making haulers and miners safer. Some gankers will either not want to jump through all the NPC-enforced hoops, or be unable to afford enough gank ships, and thus miners and haulers will have less risk.

It's the same with bumping. It may not be the greatest game mechanic ever seen, but if you completely nerf it you will make freighter ganking more difficult, and certainly more costly for the gankers, than it currently is. Making freighters less vulnerable to bumping will have the predictable consequence that even less of them will be exploded each day. Freighters are already extremely safe - Red Frog successfully makes over 99.88% of their trips - do we really need to add more protection to freighters by making them even safer?

If we have both the capability of players to act as a police force and an NPC-driven police force that is absolutely effective, should we not also have the both capability of players to act as the criminal element, and an NPC-driven criminal element that is absolutely effective?

Why do we not have NPC pirates on gates that are perfectly efficient in performing hauler ganks?


Actually, your original point had to do with the "imbalance" of being able to perform ganks in less than 15-minute intervals on a single character.


Except that the intent of such laws was to achieve a direct decrease in drug usage, thereby protecting citizens from drugs and their various negative health and social effects.


And how is that relevant to the validity of his arguments?

Well yes because they wouldn't be allowed in hisec