I'll be going in roughly chronological order, detailing the design decisions and changes that have given gankers more power. Obviously completely eliminating the problem is no easy task, but these issues have made ganking far easier and more practical.
There are probably plenty of other issues out there that are just slipping my mind, but these are the most glaring ones. So, how can these be fixed?
Would these changes completely eliminate ganking? No. Players are generally pretty good at figuring out new tactics, and pushing the limited of any systems put in place. I do think these changes would seriously mitigate the issue however, and substantially increase the risk in committing such behavior. What do you guys think? Did I miss any game mechanics that are currently empowering gankers? Do you spot any obvious flaws in my suggestions? What other changes do you think could be made to make ganking less of a thing, without completely eliminating the possibility of player-on-player crime?
- At launch:
- Base defenses (basic shields, and default lightweight bulkheads) of ships are generally extremely flimsy. Players in recently-purchased ships, or that haven't gathered up the resources to upgrade their defenses could be killed extremely quickly.
- Small, cheap ships (sidewinder, eagle, adder, etc.) aren't generally terribly fast, and thus can be easily caught by bigger, more expensive, ships with far more firepower. This allows players in said bigger ships to more easily attack and very quickly destroy smaller, weaker prey, especially when said prey tries to run away (a common mistake less experienced players make).
- PvE combat was largely made about killing several ships in one sortie, instead of fighting 1 or 2 hard-but-valuable targets. This meant that a ship designed for PvE combat would generally favor efficient weapons with large (or infinite) ammunition pools. At the same time, certain very powerful weapons (missiles, torpedoes, and rails) were balanced out by having very limited, and expensive, ammunition. This meant that a ganker could field these stronger weapons without hesitation since they only need to operate for one fight and don't care about credit efficiency, but a PvE ship couldn't because the limited and expensive ammo would make the weapon impractical for the longer sorties required. This was the first step in creating the PvE <-> PvP build rift.
- Police response to murderhobos was generally lacking, and police generally made very little effort to drive criminals from their jurisdiction / bring them to justice. The bounty for murdering other players was quite low, leaving player-bounty-hunters not terribly incentivized to take care of the problem themselves. Furthermore, the location of murderhobos was not well advertised, so even if someone WANTED to hunt down wanted players, it was impractical to do so.
- A bit later on:
- Shield cell banks, shield boosters, and hull reinforcement packages were added to the game. This was the second, very large, step that drove a greater wedge between PvE and PvP builds. A ship built for PvE generally wants to have a variety of modules onboard: fuel scoop for traveling, SRV for engaging with the variety of activities that require one, KWS for increasing bounty yield, etc. Meanwhile, a ship being build exclusively to kill a single other ship doesn't need NEARLY as many modules to do its job. As such, all free space can be stuffed with more defensive modules. This meant that for every module a PvE ship had that wasn't a defensive module, they were at that much more of a raw health disadvantage to a gank ship that only cares about getting in one fight. Even if the PvE pilot was very skilled at flying, using the same type of ship their attacker is using, and doing damage to them at a higher rate, the PvE pilot is likely to lose just because their ship has less total health. This didn't really affect consensual PvP duels much (beyond putting a greater importance on high module slot counts) since both parties are already fitting to do a single fight, but it did mean that a PvP-fit ship was less capable of engaging in the rest of the game's content, and it did further separate PvP and PvE builds (thus giving PvP-fit gankers attacking PvE-fit victims more power).
- Several low-ammo weapons had their ammo pools buffed, and ammunition generally became cheaper. This helped close the gap in a small way, but relatively low ammo pools were still generally used to counter-balance strong weapons, thus not really solving the problem.
- Premium ammo synthesis was added. This gave a 30% damage bonus to anyone who could be bothered to hunt down the materials. It can be argues that the defender could synthesize premium ammo on the spot if they got attacked, but that still puts them at the disadvantage of needing to fiddle with their menu for a bit after they've already been jumped. The grind of gathering the materials for premium ammo made it highly inefficient for a PvE ship to maintain the damage bonus at all times, so it's unlikely they'd have it ready when attacked. A ship with the sole purpose of killing a single ship and harvesting its salt, with no care for time or credit efficiency, is not nearly as restricted.
- Engineers:
- The rift between well-engineered, and either vanilla or poorly engineered ships was born. Since good engineering leads to an EXTREME increase in power, a vanilla or poorly engineered ship is at an equally extreme disadvantage. Even if flown well, the raw health and damage output difference is generally just too much to overcome. A ganker attacking an unengineered or even a sub-optimally engineered ship has basically 0 risk of losing that fight.
- Even just in the instance of fully-engineered-PvE-ship vs. fully-engineered-PvP-ship, the fight is very very much in the favor of the latter. Engineering took the power difference caused by the introduction of defensive modules, and amplified it by a huge amount. The ability to engineer high resistances and / or high capacities onto defensive modules made the effective marginal increase of each additional defensive module HUGE.
- NPCs remaining vanilla further exasperated the issue of PvE being about farming massive numbers of enemies, as now engineered player ships are vastly superior to the NPCs they're farming. On top of the enormous problems caused by engineered defense stacking, certain weapon engineering and special effects further amplified the rift caused by PvE being about killing several weaker ships, and ganking being about killing a single target. Weapons like reverb torpedoes continued to be useless for most PvE activities, while giving gankers a devastating sucker punch.
- Beyond:
- "God-level" engineering was made more accessible, but at the expense of ALL engineering being made significantly more powerful. This only served to exacerbate all of the issues laid out in the "Engineers" section, above.
- New C&P was introduced. This made player-killing bounties go up considerably, along with the cost of getting destroyed while in a jurisdiction you're wanted in. It also introduced the ATR, since normal cops (all still in vanilla ships) had become basically completely harmless to well-engineered criminals.
- Unfortunately, the ATR was made to be largely reactive instead of proactive. Even if you've accumulated a massive bounty in a given system, they ATR doesn't really try to drive you from the system or actively hunt you down. This led to the ATR being a occasional minor nuisance to gankers, despite the ATR's considerable firepower.
- Unfortunately, the amount of bounty money you can claim from a player is capped at 2mil, thus continuing to leave player bounty hunting poorly incentivized. Furthermore, the ability to actually track wanted players down remain extremely limited.
- Gold rush after gold rush continues to severely undermine the impact of criminals needing to pay large rebuys if / when they finally get caught.
There are probably plenty of other issues out there that are just slipping my mind, but these are the most glaring ones. So, how can these be fixed?
- Significantly increase the speed of ships, based on how big they are. The largest ships can remain as they are, the medium sized ships should get a moderate speed increase, and the smaller ones should receive a substantial speed increase. This will mean that in order to seriously threaten a fleeing target, you'll need to be in a similar-sized craft to stick with them. This means you'll have an amount of firepower more commensurate with the defensive capabilities of the ship you're chasing. Bigger ships with significantly more firepower will struggle to apply said firepower for more than a short time vs. a smaller fleeing opponent.
- Seriously amp up the threat of, and effort required to kill, individual NPCs. Increase the reward for doing so by a similar amount, such that average credits/hr remains similar to how it is now. This will make PvE combat more about taking down a small number of hard enemies, rather than farming endless waves of weaklings. This will more closely align the build pressures and objectives of PvE ships and ganker ships, and thus leave them with more similar (practical) access to weapons, special effects, tactics, etc.
- Stop trying to use ammo reserves as a counter-balance to high power weapons. This will be less of an issue with #2 taken care of, but it should still be addressed. For high-power weapons, give the players plenty of ammo reserves, but make the magazine and / or rate of fire more limited, with a long reload time. This serves to make the amount of ammo available in a given fight feel limited, without making the weapon impractical to use on longer sorties
- Increase the base defenses of ships. It's ok for ships to be more durable when they're upgraded, but it's important for their stock durability to be at least somewhat respectable. If the stock durability of a ship was at least enough to give the ship an ok chance to escape when being attacked by a similar-sized ship, having a new ship wouldn't be such a massive liability.
- Make defensive modules no-longer compete for space with functional modules. MRPs and HRPs could be moved to dedicated slots (similar to the military slots we have now, but with at least one or two being available on all ships). SCBs and SBs could be moved into sub-slots of the shield generator, similar to how the SRV bay works. This would allow a ship fit to engage with various PvE content to fit the modules they need to do so, without massively compromising the defensive capabilities of the ship. This alone would go a LOOONG way to combating ganking. A PvP-fit ship would no longer have an obscene raw defensive advantage over their PvE-fit prey, making the fight far far less of a sure thing. At the very least, the target would have a significantly higher chance of getting away, since it would no longer be effectively made of tissue paper. This also has the added advantage of making slot count (both internal, and utility) a less-relevant stat when it comes to combat ability, and allows FDev to give individual ships a lot more "personality" by having more control over how defensively capable it can be. Lots of wins here.
- Just scrap the idea of premium ammo, honestly. It made some amount of sense when it was first released, as there wasn't really anything to do with the materials you could gather from the newly-introduced planetary landings. Now that engineering exists though, there is plenty to do with gathered materials. The ability to reload your guns in the field is fine, but the damage-bonus versions need to go. The whole concept of premium ammo that can't be purchased in stores never made much sense from a lore perspective, anyway.
- BALANCE ENGINEERING. Several of the issues caused or exacerbated by engineering would be mitigated by points #2 and #5, but the glaring issue of vanilla (or not-fully-engineered) ship vs. engineered ship remains. Engineering should be about specialization and side grades, not raw stat increases. If engineering were balanced this way, vanilla ships would remain a reasonably-viable, "generalist" option. They'd still likely be at a disadvantage vs. an engineered ship that is build / flown to fully capitalize on the specialization / side-grade direction they've engineered for, but the delta would be far far smaller. Ideally, a well-flown vanilla ship would still be a completely credible threat to a fully-engineered ship.
- Making hunting down wanted players both profitable by getting rid of the bounty cap, and practical by introducing new tools and methods for tracking down wanted CMDRs.
- The bounty collected by the hunter could be made to only ever be as much as the criminal had to pay upon rebuy, thus preventing bounties from being used to create tons of "new" credits. Bounties could still be effectively used as a way to transfer money to another CMDR, but that's already possible via cargo so I don't see this as an issue.
- New tools could be a variety of things. Galnet could have a standing "most wanted" article, with a constantly-updated "last seen in system X" section. Factions could give out "missions" to hunt down players wanted by them, allowing bounty hunters to get constant updates on the whereabouts of the target. A lot of interesting gameplay and mechanics could be built around this.
- Make cops (and ATR) actively try to hunt down criminals. The bigger the bounty is on a criminal, the harder it should be for them to even remain in the system, much less continue their killing spree. When interdicting a clean ship in high-sec, the cops could drop in as soon as you do. As soon as a crime is committed, they'd be there and ready to respond. A delay could be added for medium and low sec, with obviously no cops at all in anarchy. In general, the cops should provide a reasonable amount of safety in the higher security systems.
- [Brought up by Andovar] Make each new CMDR start in a random system, instead of newbies all being concentrated in one, easily-gankable location. The game could have a certain set of criteria to follow when selecting a starter system, to stop people from getting screwed over at the get-go. For instance, [Less than or equal to X Ly from sol, to make sure it's still in the bubble], [At least X population, to make sure there are missions to be had], [At least X Ly from an active CG, to keep players from immediately getting overwhelmed], [Less than or equal to X Ls from the primary star, to keep players from starting out in places like hutton orbital], etc. This has the added benefit of giving each CMDR a bit more personal lore, by having a potentially unique starting system.
Would these changes completely eliminate ganking? No. Players are generally pretty good at figuring out new tactics, and pushing the limited of any systems put in place. I do think these changes would seriously mitigate the issue however, and substantially increase the risk in committing such behavior. What do you guys think? Did I miss any game mechanics that are currently empowering gankers? Do you spot any obvious flaws in my suggestions? What other changes do you think could be made to make ganking less of a thing, without completely eliminating the possibility of player-on-player crime?
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