A hot topic on the Eve online forums that has raged both figuratively and literally about suicide ganking and its increasing prevalence, ranging from overloaded freighters, expensive mission fit battleships, Incursion runners and even the standard Tech I haulers.
Suicide ganking can be done for a variety of reasons, to cause grief to the player, because of pure boredom and more often than not because of the chance of easy isk making.
While it sounds easy enough to do, it really depends on how much effort you are willing to put in to see the best results.
An example would be a single tornado with a cargo scanner that has to lock an industrial, scan it, quickly check the results to see if its worthwhile to kill, then pull the trigger.
A more effective effort would yield better results more often than not, such as :
One frigate scanner a gate ahead ( eg in urlen) who scans all industrials that have just arrived in system
One tornado waiting on the inbound urlen gate in perimeter
One loot ship capable of quickly grabbing the loot from the wreck and escaping.
The latter setup lets you thoroughly check the target’s worth before ganking and ensures minimal mishaps.
While it can be quite boring and often tedious to sit for hours scanning and hoping for a mail, whenever a really big loss comes along it solidifies a ganker and keeps them coming back. If we want any chance at slowing down the prevalence of suicide ganking we need to discourage kills such as this one.
What immediately stands out it the cargo, all of this loot is sold to NPC’s in nearly all stations, meaning there was no reason to move it towards jita to collect the isk, in fact selling the items in jita would actually incur a loss in isk compared to elsewhere.
Perhaps this is actually where nulli secunda’s 80billion isk went.
Personally I don’t like the thought of empty freighters being ganked, while i believe a freighter carrying over a billion isk in goods is starting to get a bit to the “risky” side. What i don’t like ( as someone who has suicide ganked for several months in the past) is that apart from the ship loss and security status penalty ( both of which are not a strong penalty, sec status doesn’t hurt you as you can continue ganking, and you know you are losing your ship) there is no other penalty and it brings an influx of players towards it. In the most common eve saying there is “Risk vs Reward” So i ask what exactly do suicide gankers risk? They know they are losing their ship if they are hunting and they know they will get a sec status penalty. This does nothing to stop a -10 player from continuing to gank with near impunity.
From a lore point of view suicide ganking makes little sense aswell, would you as a captain engage in an activity that would always make you lose your ship and your crew? While a lore point of view in of itself is not reason to change, i think with the other points mentioned it has a strong case.
Personally a little more risk would be nice to see, such as -10 can’t dock in high security stations.
Faction police and concord doing a little more patrolling looking for the targets as they are not only criminals but repeat criminals ( you can’t get to -10 with a single kill).
Do you think gankers have it a little to easy? What would you change about current game mechanics in regards to suicide ganking? Let me know what you think in the comments and make sure to vote in our poll!
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For anyone who would like a brief view of Suicide ganking and how often it occurs feel free to check this page, it shows kills that are purely from unlawful agression, while some of these may be accidental, the majority are not. As you can see, the amount of suicide ganks are on the rise by quite alot, even events like Burn Jita only add upto 50% more kills in the month despite an entire co-alition of players focusing on the biggest highsec trade hub in the game.
– MR Benoit
