How do you feel about ganckers?
- Thread starter husky of snow
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Humans give a better fight ? Gankers only do it to prove a point ?
Seriously ?? A fully engineered ship sitting at the first engineer?
No their only point is to screw with other players.
It's funny that as my combat rank went up my being ganked disappeared and people were more talkative on chat.
Seriously ?? A fully engineered ship sitting at the first engineer?
No their only point is to screw with other players.
It's funny that as my combat rank went up my being ganked disappeared and people were more talkative on chat.
So slight misunderstanding there. I wasn't saying I was going to do that. I was saying if blaze your own trail is the defense, then that situation would be okI don't gank (well...except gankers!)
But regardless of how you define it - I love 'em!
I'm experienced enough to avoid them entirely if I choose - but sometimes, knowing they're around, keeps the game interesting (Dare I say exciting?)
I suppose my perspective is slightly different from a new CMDR (Hey, I got ganked plenty when I was new - but that's what motivated me to get better and fight back) o7
For the most part - this is what you'll find!
Please don't CMDR.
I can understand the frustration...But cheating would make you worse than the gankers (And get you banned too)
Gankers are a symptom of a game with a nonfunctional crime system. If there was a better crime system, they wouldn't exist, or at least not in the same form.
I remember Runescape and the Wilderness. I loved the 'gankers' that roamed there. They were a fun danger. Elite should be more like that.
I remember Runescape and the Wilderness. I loved the 'gankers' that roamed there. They were a fun danger. Elite should be more like that.
Gankers don't exist, if you don't want to encounter them...
Grind only exists in the mind of the player - if playing is a grind, why are you doing it?
Just another Hotel California thread dressed up in it's Sunday best, it seems...
Grind only exists in the mind of the player - if playing is a grind, why are you doing it?
Just another Hotel California thread dressed up in it's Sunday best, it seems...
If i described how i really felt about them i would be hit with a mod bat, they are just low life really.
Luckily i don't have to put up with their sad little antics as i now play in Solo.
O7
So one thing is, there is a balance here that needs to be found. Ganker bought game, and has the right to play the way they want. Ganking is a way to play, and is allowed by the developers. The other person also got the game and has the right to ply the way they want, like finding random people and try to meet others.
So how do you strike that balance?
I have a story as an example.
I love to play a vr game called after the fall. Frozen end of the world zombie game. You and up to three other people go through runs. At one point, there was a bug that made a particular gun set up totally over powered, no effort, infinite ammo kind of thing (it has since been fixed) so we come to the same problem. One person got the game, has the right to play it the way they want, vertigo, the makers, never said it wasn't approved, so it was OK to use, in the eyes of the comunity. So they have the right to blast through the levels, if they so chose. Other people hated the bug, made the game boring, if you weren't using that loadout and someone was, you were lucky to get five kills. They have a right to play the way they want without the game being over simplified.
So from this came two schools of thought.
One was, I got the game, I'll do what I want, screw you
This can have negative affects on the player not using the load out, such as lack of fun, and even breaking streaks needed for achievements
Others will have a conversation at the beginning of the round. Hey, I use this loadout, is this OK? No? OK, I have another load out i can use
So everyone is happy and gets what they want
So how could elite perhaps find that balance, does one exist?
So how do you strike that balance?
I have a story as an example.
I love to play a vr game called after the fall. Frozen end of the world zombie game. You and up to three other people go through runs. At one point, there was a bug that made a particular gun set up totally over powered, no effort, infinite ammo kind of thing (it has since been fixed) so we come to the same problem. One person got the game, has the right to play it the way they want, vertigo, the makers, never said it wasn't approved, so it was OK to use, in the eyes of the comunity. So they have the right to blast through the levels, if they so chose. Other people hated the bug, made the game boring, if you weren't using that loadout and someone was, you were lucky to get five kills. They have a right to play the way they want without the game being over simplified.
So from this came two schools of thought.
One was, I got the game, I'll do what I want, screw you
This can have negative affects on the player not using the load out, such as lack of fun, and even breaking streaks needed for achievements
Others will have a conversation at the beginning of the round. Hey, I use this loadout, is this OK? No? OK, I have another load out i can use
So everyone is happy and gets what they want
So how could elite perhaps find that balance, does one exist?
On PS4 there was a gamker who showed up at most CGs. This particular individual tended to give a running commentary on what they and other gankers were doing in the system and to who, along with copius other stuff in the syschat.
I got into the CG system at one point to find syschat filled with this individual complaining that they'd had their ship destroyed by another Cmdr, and how they must have cheated, (apparently using torpedoes and an SLF)
This rant continued for 2 days and included such jems as; "It's not fun when I get killed!"
At some point on the second day he got fed up of being ridiculed by CG participants and the syschat was quiet for the rest of the CG.
With Mats:
Raw I pick up from geological sites in the Bubble, check the innermost moon of gas giants and get the SRV out.
Manufactured I visit a number of systems where HGEs spawn constantly and fly from signal to signal (no relog).
Encoded a fast ship with a wake scanner at an orbital installation scanning the ships jumping in and out.
I got into the CG system at one point to find syschat filled with this individual complaining that they'd had their ship destroyed by another Cmdr, and how they must have cheated, (apparently using torpedoes and an SLF)
This rant continued for 2 days and included such jems as; "It's not fun when I get killed!"
At some point on the second day he got fed up of being ridiculed by CG participants and the syschat was quiet for the rest of the CG.
With Mats:
Raw I pick up from geological sites in the Bubble, check the innermost moon of gas giants and get the SRV out.
Manufactured I visit a number of systems where HGEs spawn constantly and fly from signal to signal (no relog).
Encoded a fast ship with a wake scanner at an orbital installation scanning the ships jumping in and out.
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Arena is balanced, without any risk. You won't get interdicted by a bounty hunter after picking targets because you appeared on Inara and they came for you. Arena has its uses, but since it's balanced and fair, it's not really popular (as far as I know). Fighting in Open has the "anything can happen" flair. The target brings extra friends out of nowhere? A bounty hunter in the system saw you interdicting and is coming for help? You interdicted someone you thought was an easy target and it wasn't?
It's not a fun gameplay loop for me, but it takes but a bit of time thinking on reasons why to do it that way (aside from the classic "I want to be a jerk because I'm perpetuating the violence I suffered and I need to see it as normal and everyone to see the same").
Hacking, again, is against the ToS. Either everyone plays on equal field, or those who can't will leave the play field so the rest can.
What you're saying is similar to what some hackers did on Shinrata during December last year. They kept summoning Thargoids inside the station and locking players inside the station, unable to undock, disembark, anything. Took a while, but Frontier reversed all of the hacker's , and eventually patched the vulnerability they were exploiting. And now the hackers are searching for the next one to keep the cat and mouse game with Frontier (unless Frontier managed to also identify, target and completely ban the responsible party). Sadly, some people are poopfaces, and we can't do much about that.
Yes, you can try that. Some people will try to help you. Others will try to fight you. That's the whole point. Frontier gives us freedom, and we do with it whatever we want, whatever reason it may be. Just keep in mind that you alone won't burn down the whole game. You'll make one system popular with bounty hunters for a while, and that's it. It's a self-correcting system: do crime, get bounty, either run away like a coward and clear it immediately, or be notorious doing more crime and fly with a target on your head for people to claim. The galaxy is huge, and the bubble has how many populated systems? Tens of thousands systems? And you think you're "burning down the galaxy" with maybe locking down one system? Elite Dangerous scope is huge, and we often forget that.
One person interpretation of the C&P system doesn't make what the system actually is. Every player will say that the system is meant for this or that, and nearly everyone will disagree.
C&P is not meant to completely impede crime. If it did that, no one would play criminal, since risk/counter is too high of a hurdle. If being a criminal doesn't pay, why be then? Result would be no conflicts, no gankers, no criminals, and bounty hunters would be left with no targets to seek. In one "balance" of C&P you killed two careers at once: criminal and bounty hunting. If criminal activity, besides not paying at all and just painting a target on you, also incurs high risk, less and less criminals would act. Since this is not real world, having a brand C&P system allows criminal to appear, and people to hunt those criminals.
Currently, the intent of C&P serves more to prevent abuse of how criminal activities impact mainly the BGS than throttling gankers (they are too self important if they think C&P exist for them). Clean killing on systems heavily impact the BGS against the controller, boosting everyone else equally. For players to take over a system with clean killing, doing it enough to take over the system will either require them getting high notoriety, or having such high numbers that the crimes will be spread over way too many attackers. Notoriety doesn't affect only the player on the system where they got the bounties, it causes any infraction at all to turn several stations into a no-go zone (notorious CMDRs can't even pay a fine). Sure, you can clear a bounty with throwing yourself to the system security, and pay the rebuy of the involved ships plus the bounty. But any other infraction while notorious means having to suicide and pay rebuys, travels back from prison, etc. And 10 Notoriety takes a long time of actively playing the game to clear. This means that after a session of crime, a criminal will end up needing to spend some time not doing crime (or accepting the bothersome trouble of clearing minor infractions with suicides and travels). I've done by bit of counter BGS, flying around with 600 million in bounties from NPCs in my head for days while waiting the notoriety to die down, and it's fun stuff. Even smuggled someone into a station from that faction (while having the 600kk on my head) because they needed to get combat bonds paid from the takeover war, but they were hostile to them (so their docking clearance was of the "shoot on sight" kind).
If C&P is too brand, galaxy is set on fire (mostly from NPCs burning). If it's too strong, galaxy is boring (no crimes, no one to hunt criminals). Current execution strikes a balance between being a really inconvenient pebble that forces criminals into a timeout if they want the pebble gone and not being an insurmountable wall. Talking about this balance is fine, but ignoring the consequences of balancing too hard either way is ignorant. I doubt that gankers would be happy if Frontier announced tomorrow that anyone with Notoriety 10 gets their bounty announced to the whole galaxy, precise location tracked in real time on the galaxy map, and are free to be killed even without bounties. Maybe the announcement part would make it interesting (they gain a spotlight, bounty hunting becomes more dynamic without requiring Inara to track targets), but I don't know. I like game design, but I'm not a senior game designer, nor am a designer from Frontier to have access to tools and playtesters to test the effects of that. I don't know whether the current balance is perfect, but I've brushed a lot with it while dealing with NPCs, and it works fine from my side.
EDIT: Also, don't forget. At any point, if player interaction isn't working for you, you can play on Solo or find squads to fly with to have more people. Solo shaming is popular and a pain, but anyone is free to enjoy the game however they want. That's another aspect of the self correcting that PvP criminal activity can have: making people go Solo, reducing the amount of player to player interaction, making it more boring for everyone, until player count decreases to the point there is less ganking, making people come back and new players to pour in, bringing back gankers, rinse and repeat.
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Thank you for your thoughts, very well put and thought out. I mentioned the fleet of 17 as an exaggeration of the blaze your own trail defense
Forgive my ignorance, but can someone explain the hotel California stuff? Do you mean the song? It's the only thing by that name I know
To the OP: gotta be careful with that, it only works if you do a fast (FA-off) boost turn, better yet if you drop your cargo hatch or landing gear after boosting to cancel the forward momentum. Only time I got destroyed was trying to do the turn around trick as a beginner; 5 frags on a Krait MKII are no joke. Now I just boost away and random walk; only a Mamba can catch a Phantom.
Went to Shinrarta Dezhra in open for lulz. Orca loaded with HRP-s, a few MRP-s, fairly strong shield, two fletchette launchers and a phasing pulse laser. Not exactly a battleship, but survivable. 5A thrusters so not even maxed out speed.
Sure enough, a hollow triangle of a Krait MKII camping the star. Raider shipkit with corroded paintjob and all, the guy had style, gotta give him that. Doled it out with him for a good 10 minutes, shield down, but that one wasn't really an ace pilot so I managed to avoid half of his attacks. I mean, I'm no ace, but I've seen videos of how real PvP-rs can fly and his was nothing like. Ne'rtheless, I ran out of ammo and got my modules shot up pretty good, so decided to give him the win and jump back to supercruise to head to Jameson. Sure thing the ganker was not going to let it up, even if it's clear to anyone moderately familiar with the materiel we have that a MKII can never catch an Orca. He tried a good half a dozen times to no avail and I made to the Jameson in one piece, good 30% hull left.
What I missed at the moment, being busy landing fletchettes on the ganker and evading his attacks, was the "eee"-ing stream of accusations about me cheating--in local chat, system chat and direct messages, no doubt part of the reason why his flying seemed so sloppy
Apparently his mind couldn't comprehend that a well-fitted Orca is a perfectly survivable ship in even slightly skilled hands and wouldn't die instantly as he'd surely hoped...Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
It's a reference to the seemingly interminable and circular nature of discussions on PvP, PvE, player choice, the game modes, and mode shared game features, where many participants return to the discussion in each thread on the topic. From the lyrics of the song:
The term was coined, for this application, some time in 2015, when the first Megathread on the topic was created (a Megathread being the merge /. redirection target when other later threads on the topic were inevitably created and subsequently merged / closed).The Eagles; Hotel California said:
Here are links to the five Megathreads, the last one is still ongoing (the first four were closed due to post count and the limitations of old forum software):
Modes - The Solo vs Open vs Groups Thread [See new thread]
There have been several threads on the topic of switching between solo/private groups/open. This thread is going to be the merge target for all other threads on the topic, no matter how 'unique' the thread creator may think their thread is. Creating a poll is not unique. Posting in here has...
Modes - The Solo vs Open vs Groups Thread - Part the Second [Now With Added Platforms].
Elite Dangerous is an online game that allows players to play in three potential 'modes': Online ALL group (called open play) where the player is in the same universe as all other players and can see and be seen by all others in open play Online PRIVATE GROUP play where the player is online in...
Modes - The Solo vs Open vs Groups Thread - Mk III
Elite Dangerous is an online game that allows players to play in three potential 'modes': Online ALL group (called open play) where the player is in the same universe as all other players and can see and be seen by all others in open play Online PRIVATE GROUP play where the player is online in...
Modes - The Open v Solo v Groups thread IV - Hotel California
Elite Dangerous is an online game that allows players to play in three potential 'modes': Online ALL group (called open play) where the player is in the same universe as all other players and can see and be seen by all others in open play Online PRIVATE GROUP play where the player is online in...
The Open v Solo v Groups thread
I guess they were right, it seems you can never leave. The topic of open vs solo vs groups continues to be a popular discussion. Rather than see new threads being created and closed when duplicate topics alreadys exist, we have chosen to combine these into one easily affordable single...
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fun fact dropping your landing gear after a boost makes you go half speed and 10x easier to hit just boost turn normally, also most people in kraits are bad since the ship is bad and caters to them good chance you'll stomp themTo the OP: gotta be careful with that, it only works if you do a fast (FA-off) boost turn, better yet if you drop your cargo hatch or landing gear after boosting to cancel the forward momentum. Only time I got destroyed was trying to do the turn around trick as a beginner; 5 frags on a Krait MKII are no joke. Now I just boost away and random walk; only a Mamba can catch a Phantom.
Went to Shinrarta Dezhra in open for lulz. Orca loaded with HRP-s, a few MRP-s, fairly strong shield, two fletchette launchers and a phasing pulse laser. Not exactly a battleship, but survivable. 5A thrusters so not even maxed out speed.
Sure enough, a hollow triangle of a Krait MKII camping the star. Raider shipkit with corroded paintjob and all, the guy had style, gotta give him that. Doled it out with him for a good 10 minutes, shield down, but that one wasn't really an ace pilot so I managed to avoid half of his attacks. I mean, I'm no ace, but I've seen videos of how real PvP-rs can fly and his was nothing like. Ne'rtheless, I ran out of ammo and got my modules shot up pretty good, so decided to give him the win and jump back to supercruise to head to Jameson. Sure thing the ganker was not going to let it up, even if it's clear to anyone moderately familiar with the materiel we have that a MKII can never catch an Orca. He tried a good half a dozen times to no avail and I made to the Jameson in one piece, good 30% hull left.
What I missed at the moment, being busy landing fletchettes on the ganker and evading his attacks, was the "eee"-ing stream of accusations about me cheating--in local chat, system chat and direct messages, no doubt part of the reason why his flying seemed so sloppy
From a different perspective: an NPC can start shooting you for a variety of reasons, some of which do come down to "it didn't like your face", and that can lead to you losing your ship and/or other assets.
The NPCs have the big advantage too that they can show up wherever you are, whenever you are, on some occasions specifically to attack you personally. I've been attacked by another player roughly once a year. Unless I'm out in deep uninhabited space (where there aren't going to be other players either) I'm going to need to deal with multiple NPCs a day.
What specifically is it about being killed by another player that concerns you more than being killed by an NPC?
As you mentioned upthread, you've met two players and they were both neutral-to-friendly. I think I get attacked by about 1-in-1000 of the players I meet - admittedly, I'm not going to the obvious hotspot systems - so even though they're not very good in a fight individually, the NPCs do far more damage to my ship added up over an entire year. Player attacks get a lot of concern but on a scale of the whole game are really rare.
The C&P system is essentially the wrong tool entirely to deal with inter-player aggression, for multiple reasons. I've not heard of anyone ganking with that motivation - it's usually their victims who have the (in my opinion wrong) belief that the C&P system has anything to do with it:
1) At the very least the majority of crimes in the game are ones that Frontier wants people to commit. Frontier doesn't want people to commit space tax fraud, so there isn't an in-game option to commit space tax fraud. Frontier does want people to commit space piracy, so hatchbreaker limpets are available at all good retailers. Frontier does want people to commit space murder, so missions to murder innocent (or at least "not been caught yet") people are available at your local station. If Frontier didn't want people to smuggle, they wouldn't have implemented illegal goods in the first place, etc.
So the "punishment" bit of the "crime and punishment" is - or at least should be - targeted at the CMDR, not the player on the other side of the screen. Being chased down by police Vipers is supposed to be part of the fun of the crime for the player, not a reason to prevent you doing it. The game isn't always consistent on this, of course.
If you do something that Frontier doesn't actually want you to do in game, they won't give you a 100 million bounty in some system for it. They'll give you an account ban (or a warning, if they're feeling generous). Hacking, cheating, racist slurs in system chat, the occasional perfectly legal in-game scam, whatever ... all out of scope of C&P.
(Obviously, "shooting at another player" is not generally included in this set of actions)
2) It's really difficult to come up with a consistent system for what counts as an unjustified kill - and intuitive definitions really don't line up with the things the game considers crimes. As a result, you end up with all sorts of loopholes and inconsistencies in all sorts of directions, to the extent that if the C&P system did give out deterrent-level punishments to players, it wouldn't be the gankers suffering the most.
An example: you've been doing one of the illegal missions in point 1. As a result, you have a few thousand credits of bounty on your ship. Another player, seeing this, decides to interdict you and open fire. The other player does not have any bounties. If you fire back you are definitely committing the in-game crime of "assault". If you fire back successfully you are definitely committing the in-game crime of "murder" (and "player murder" if you call that a separate crime). Do you think you deserve to be given the exact same treatment as Joe Ganker for defending yourself from someone trying to destroy your ship?
Take another example in the other direction: you're out in your exploration ship and returning to the bubble with hundreds of million of exploration data on board. Five systems out from safety - still deep in uninhabited space - another player somehow finds you and intercepts you (virtually impossible in practice, of course, but possible in theory). They interdict and destroy your poorly-defended ship. I'm sure you'd be very unhappy about this turn of events ... but it's uninhabited space, so no in-game crime has been committed.
A third example: you've got yourself a big combat ship and learned how to fly it really well. You see Joe Ganker bearing down on an unarmed trade ship. Joe has no bounties in this system; they're obviously lining up for the first kill of the day. Do you try to interdict Joe first (illegal) or wait until after the trader is destroyed (legal, but silly)
A fourth example: you're piloting your trade freighter into a station with valuable cargo on board, going a little too fast, and hit a silent running player in a Sidewinder with 1% hull who you hadn't noticed was there. The other player of course explodes ... and the station guns destroy you and your cargo in seconds. In-game, there's no law against flying a damaged Sidewinder. In-game, there is a law about reckless flying in the station vicinity. In-game, you were definitely in the wrong and deserved to be punished. Out-of-game it's generally the people in the Sidewinders who get complained about, for obvious reasons.
We've seen this happen once already: the level of strictness and punishment from the C&P system was increased quite a bit in release 3.0 several years ago. This has - very marginally - made things harder for gankers. But the gankers know what the system is and can plan around it, and even - in the fourth example - use it to attack other players. The main effect has been to make things much more punishing on players who one might call "unintentional criminals", whose crimes might not even directly involve another player.
(Broadly, what people actually want from the C&P system is one which is lenient on their own crimes and tough on everyone else's, and that's not possible)
3) There are lots of ways to inconvenience other players, some of which don't even require you to be in the same instance. Some of them you may even have done accidentally yourself. Obviously they're all perfectly legal in terms of in-game C&P.
- if you can lure them into docking on your fleet carrier, you can make a hyperspace jump and leave them stuck hundreds of LY from inhabited space without a fuel scoop
- if you dock on an outpost medium pad and forget to log out when you go for lunch, the next player with a medium ship will hate your guts
- pretty much anything you do in-game will affect the relative states of NPC factions. This can shut down profitable trade routes, change the mission board selection to something less useful, remove a good bounty-hunting spot, increase the danger NPCs present in a system, or even in certain cases make unlocking particular engineers much harder or near-impossible.
Going round shooting at people (being a glorified NPC) is flashy and prominent but actually gets fewer forum complaints than some of the above have - perhaps because there are so many in-game ways to avoid it, whereas you can't do as much or as obviously about Lave being in lockdown when you need the brandy for Didi Vatermann.
That’s a myth. Only a small percentage of humans (PvPers) fight back better than NPCs, but most humans (PvEers) struggle to defeat even basic NPCs, let alone top tier ones. Which is why you see advice such as “To increase your combat rank and earn easy credits, kill steal from the system authorities.” Which is short sighted, because the difficulty of many enemies’ AI scale to your combat rank, rather than, say, the security rating of the system your in.
Player Killers attack PvEers, rather than PvPers, because they are looking for easy kills and salt, neither of which NPCs will provide.
Quaero
Banned
Apparently, in the beginning, there was a thread that must have complained about literally anything possible ED related. I assume this because it's inevitable that some of the oldest accounts will come on to every thread and declare it Hotel California, I'm guessing referring to not being able to leave the topic alone.
Ironically if they just stayed out of the topics they think are hotel California, they wouldn't be hotel California topics. So really they're just perpetuating a self fulfilling prophecy. This is merely speculation
pvp is the only thing i do in this game and playing cqc is actually somewhat unbearable compared to using a g5 fdl . boosts important and cqc lets you boost every decade + powerups bad mechanic + ships handle and fly like trash + PAs and rails are much more fun to use than the weapons in cqc esp alongside with the FDL's flight model + you arent actually improving at actually flying/shooting that much (p sure it uses an altered flight model too) + matchmaking trash even with players + buggy + bad/little maps + dead gamemode for reasons listed before .. i'd heavily reccomend trying pvp in g5 fdl in a wingfight or such (ofc it'll be hard and maybe unfun when you first start out if you haven't done it before) bit then trying cqc again (side note the FDL even if it was nerfed internals wise it would still be fun af to fly, imo its the ship with the best flight model in the game like latverts boost thrusters whatever etc that makes it incredibly fun to fly)
most career gankers don't want/do like proper 1v1s or wingfights or organic etc etc they want to make people angry and get people to post stuff like this thread here or on reddit or clip whatever salt they get in game, many of them don't hack though they can just one shot you anyways .. they don't really care it's 'burning down the game'
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