Suicide Ganking

Now it has been a bit since I've done an Eve related post here due to real-life intruding. That being said, today's topic will be suicide ganking.

I'm not into the suicide ganking scene in Eve. To me it just smacks of rich, holier than thou idiots killing people for a double profit, and therein lies the problem. There's no true downside to criminal activity in Eve, unlike the written chronicles. Most of the SG's try to justify it by claiming to, mainly, target macro miners. What a load of bollocks.

These little actions will not affect macroers in any significant fashion because ( in most cases ) it's their job. They don't care if they lose 5, 10, 25, or even 50 or more ships. You can't kill them all the time and they'll make the Isk in the long haul. What you do get is a bunch of people pissed that their shiny was killed in "secure" space AND the people that just commited the act lost nothing in most cases. Due to a combination of insurance and loot / salvaging, suicide ganking is very lucrative.

This flies in the face of all common sense. Therefore I propose the following changes to the aggro / loot / insurance / flagging systems. A rough sketch of this is below.

1) Insurance no longer covers criminal acts. This isn't much, but at least it means no more "free" T1 hulls for SG's

2) Insurance is scaled by security of the system. 1.0 = 100%, .6 = 60%, 0.0 = 0%. Now I know that a LOT of people will cry about this, but in the words of a pirate blogger, harden the f*ck up. This will get people used to, slowly, recognizing that their ships might get blown up at any moment. This will teach them that if they can't afford to lose it, don't buy it. One thing, this will have a drastic affect on the market for tier 2 gear.

3) Once your sec status is low enough, you'd better hope your clone is in a low-sec system. As your security rating goes down, legal jumpgates don't give you a warning, sentry guns just open fire on you as soon as you "decloak" after a jump. Now to be fair, a pirate jump-gate network will need to be put in place to even things out a bit, but using them will require rep with the appropriate faction and there will be "fees" for use. The advantage is no flagging or sentry guns plus the good guys can't follow you directly (no rep). The bad? The gates aren't always operational (limited resources), they can be knocked "out of order" by jamming gear (limited duration) and that fee takes an extra bit of time to transact. Not only that but if Concorde "finds" the gate, say because of a stupid pirate, it's closed for the day. Hey, you wanted to be a big, rough and tumble criminal, right?

4) Criminals (sec status -1 and lower) are always open targets for players and Concord. The lower the rating, the more vehemently Concorde hunts you in high-sec space. You also are flashy to every positive (.5+) sec status player in the game. Cloning a crook is illegal, you don't see the Guristas launching from pos sec stations, so you'll have to have a low-sec clone point.

5) Aggro changes will make can-flipping more dangerous, but still doable. Joe takes ore from Jim. Jim can take his ore back free of a flag, and keep mining away. After all Jim merely took his own property back. Jim can also shoot Joe, but then he is agression flagged to Joe, and Joe can shoot back. However let's say Joe decides to be crafty and brings Jane along in a hauler, well Jane earns a criminal flag to Jim too, if she takes the ore from the Joe's can. Not only that, but she can have a bounty added to her too. That necessitates another change.

6) Heaven only knows why devs think an Old West justice model works, because it never has. Placing ANY bounty on another player is just free money to that player and his friend in most cases. Player bounties should be removed from players collecting them. A new bounty service, NPC, will take it's place. The more money on a player's head, the more hunters will come a calling. Not only that but, the higher the bounty, the tougher the hunters. Still, unlike Concorde, they can be defeated and looted. Oh, to prevent abuse the player must have a criminal aggresion flag against you to place a bounty on them, Not just an aggression flag, but a criminal aggression flag. Limited to .5+ sec space.

7) Loot / salvage rights below to the killer / victim (for player wrecks) for 15 min. Any attempt to loot or salvage another player wreck gives you an aggression flag. Not a criminal flag however...

8) You're in a fleet with a player committing a criminal act, you get a warning to leave their fleet or become flagged yourself. That means if you're mate decides to get Concorded, you will be to if you hang in his fleet.

You'll note that I use aggression flag and criminal aggression flag. That's because they are two different things. I'll also note this is a rough draft being written on an iPhone. I'll add another post in a couple of days clarifying things better, but I'm done for tonight.

Fly reckless, as the saying goes...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone