How Frontier Empowered Gankers, and How to Fix It

[CMDR Carbo]

I don't understand how the new engineering is unbalanced.

There is a tangible maximum level of engineering that everyone is guaranteed to achieve by going all the way to the end of G5. This is in contrast to the old engineering where everything was random -- where getting a module worthy of being called godly which could be considered "the best you can get" could take days, months, or be unattainable (depending on your luck).

I reiterate: With the new engineering, everyone can build the exact same ship as anyone else. There is no greater balance than that.

I'm talking about game balance, not PvP balance.

e.g. you could introduce a weapon that would one-shot every ship in the game. Everybody could easily get this weapons. So according to you, the game would be balanced (PvP), since everybody has access to this weapon.
But it would completely break the game.

This is just an exaggerated example for illustration.

 

[NecasekO]

I agree, and I think it's fine. Engineering is the price of doing business. In any game there is an amount of progression that must be done to survive.

Refusing to engineer your ships in this game is akin to playing Ark and leaving your character naked because you refuse to craft armor. You're going to get killed easier, but you've got no one to blame but yourself. The tools are there, it's up to you to take advantage of them. If you can't put forth the effort to help yourself then don't blame others for your handicap.

So you're basically saying screw new players, it's fine if they die in 2 shots?

Also, this is not only an issue between stock and engineered ships, it is also an issue between fully optimized PvP ships and basically anything else. Many G5 engineered ships that are not optimized for combat (traders, explorers, miners, racers etc.) simply can't have sufficient defences to survive a random attack without seriously compromising their intended function.

 

[Unknown Zombie]

So you're basically saying screw new players, it's fine if they die in 2 shots?

New players dying in 2 shots isn't all right, but that's seal clubbing and won't even be solved by completely removing engineering. A brand new player in a stock E-rated Sidewinder is still going to pop pretty much instantly to any non-engineered A-rated large ship piloted by a competent commander.

Also, this is not only an issue between stock and engineered ships, it is also an issue between fully optimized PvP ships and basically anything else. Many G5 engineered ships that are not optimized for combat (traders, explorers, miners, racers etc.) simply can't have sufficient defences to survive a random attack without seriously compromising their intended function.

A G5 shield in at least your 2nd largest slot of any ship is going to keep you alive for most random encounters. Removing engineering wouldn't save people who refuse to equip a shield to maximize their trading/exploring potential, because that armor your ship comes equipped with is still has -40% resistance to missiles and torpedoes.

 

[Pville_Piper]

I don't understand how the new engineering is unbalanced.

There is a tangible maximum level of engineering that everyone is guaranteed to achieve by going all the way to the end of G5. This is in contrast to the old engineering where everything was random -- where getting a module worthy of being called godly which could be considered "the best you can get" could take days, months, or be unattainable (depending on your luck).

I reiterate: With the new engineering, everyone can build the exact same ship as anyone else. There is no greater balance than that.

Except that not everyone has a fully G5 balanced ship for combat... I know this is hard to believe, but there are other things to do in this game and they are not compatible with a fully engineered and outfitted combat ship.

There seems to be a thinking by some people around here that an unengineered ship should be able to resist a fully G5d ship long enough to survive.
That will propably never be the case, to compete in open you have to engineer your ship to a certain standard, otherwise you'll stand no chance.

This is a big imbalance, which is imho intended and ok for me.


Among G5'd ships the balance is a lot better then pre-3.0
There are imbalances (PAs with thermal secondaries, c5 Prismatic for Cutter) though that still need to be adressed.

Again, not everyone has access to all engineers and not everyone does combat. You fill a ship full of SCB's and HRPs and MRPs and try to explore or do trade. Take someone new to the game and they have no engineers and aren't likely to even have "A" rated modules. Even with a decently loaded out trader with engineered shields you won't likely be able to high wake with some of the weapons available, especially if you're facing a wing.

The issue is the game has so many modules and weapons that it takes a fair amount of knowledge to understand and it's impossible to properly balance. Even worse, when it comes to engineering, you can spend a lot of time and resources to build a ship and modify it, only to find out that the mods are ineffective to do the job that you want.

I keep seeing the suggestions about leveling the playing field in one way or another and it ain't gonna happen. It would require basically redoing a major part of the game and the genie is out of the bottle. Any attempt to modify will bring on mountains of salt from the non-combat player or wails about all the wasted effort.

 

[Wolf Starslayer]

I don't understand how the new engineering is unbalanced.

There is a tangible maximum level of engineering that everyone is guaranteed to achieve by going all the way to the end of G5. This is in contrast to the old engineering where everything was random -- where getting a module worthy of being called godly which could be considered "the best you can get" could take days, months, or be unattainable (depending on your luck).

I reiterate: With the new engineering, everyone can build the exact same ship as anyone else. There is no greater balance than that.

I'd agree with this if only we didn't have grandfathering; that should never have been allowed and has resulted in many unobtainable god-mods still being in game .If FD were serious about balance these would have been auto-converted, no excuses.

 

[Bigmaec]

Again, not everyone has access to all engineers and not everyone does combat. You fill a ship full of SCB's and HRPs and MRPs and try to explore or do trade. Take someone new to the game and they have no engineers and aren't likely to even have "A" rated modules. Even with a decently loaded out trader with engineered shields you won't likely be able to high wake with some of the weapons available, especially if you're facing a wing.

The issue is the game has so many modules and weapons that it takes a fair amount of knowledge to understand and it's impossible to properly balance. Even worse, when it comes to engineering, you can spend a lot of time and resources to build a ship and modify it, only to find out that the mods are ineffective to do the job that you want.

I keep seeing the suggestions about leveling the playing field in one way or another and it ain't gonna happen. It would require basically redoing a major part of the game and the genie is out of the bottle. Any attempt to modify will bring on mountains of salt from the non-combat player or wails about all the wasted effort.

It's your choice if you don't want to unlock all engineers, and we're talking mostly about Lei Cheung and Didi Vaterman, both of which I would unlock (and did unlock) for explorers too. Or are you telling me you're not using that sweet sweet enhanced low power mod for your explorer? Or Res Aug Boosters for PvE? Your bad luck then. And don't ask for balance that. I repeat, it's your choice to not fully unlock engineers.

And if you're ganked by a wing, you're usually dead, anyways. Bad things happen. But they don't happen that often.

 

[Unknown Zombie]

Except that not everyone has a fully G5 balanced ship for combat... I know this is hard to believe, but there are other things to do in this game and they are not compatible with a fully engineered and outfitted combat ship.

I know this is hard to believe, but equipping defenses to survive an encounter doesn't prevent you from doing any of those non-combat things. You don't need to stuff every slot with HRP to survive long enough to escape.

I've explored and done trading in my Cobra with weapons and a shield equipped. I've explored and done trading in my T-10 with weapons, a shield, and the two military slots equipped. I've flown to Colonia and back in both of them equipped as described. Combat is one of my least favorite things to do in the game, but regardless I've never flown a ship without weapons and a shield -- because I like to live and want to survive.

 

[Ving]

Still waiting for FD to realise Engineers was a bad idea and remove them from the game ^^

 

[DaveB]

It's a well known UK saying - tight as a camels a..e in a sandstorm

Tight as a nun would be the go to expression in my region of the US, but I like the camel bit too.

Another very British one that my friends in the midwest found amusing was "Tight as a gnat's chuff"

 

[Sylveria]

The introduction of Engineers as "Horizons-only" content in a multiplayer setting where both base and Horizons players interacted was pure folly in itself.

The effects of Engineers upon game play only compounded this imbalance. Although this thread isn't specifically about "Engineers", I do agree that it has a lot to do with complications of balancing.

 

[eza]

If they made these changes I'd start playing again.

 

[Pville_Piper]

It's your choice if you don't want to unlock all engineers, and we're talking mostly about Lei Cheung and Didi Vaterman, both of which I would unlock (and did unlock) for explorers too. Or are you telling me you're not using that sweet sweet enhanced low power mod for your explorer? Or Res Aug Boosters for PvE? Your bad luck then. And don't ask for balance that. I repeat, it's your choice to not fully unlock engineers.

And if you're ganked by a wing, you're usually dead, anyways. Bad things happen. But they don't happen that often.

I don't do jumping for screenshots exploration. I do mainly trading and I do have HRPs, MRPs and shields as well point defense and chaff. I haven't been ganked since I was stupid enough to show up at the community gang r@pe goals in open. BTW, don't worry, I'm not trying to subvert you system by flying in solo/pg mode as I rarely ever do community goals and mostly play in open.

It's not that I mind combat, PvP or the community goals, it's just that the I don't have time to keep up with all of these changes to combat modules and defensive measures. Plus, I have no use wings of players who think murder hoboing or suicide winders are just the coolest thing.

In short, if I have to go to a third part site to research everything, I'm not interested. And with Elite, that pretty much is required.

 

[Sylveria]

I don't do jumping for screenshots exploration. I do mainly trading and I do have HRPs, MRPs and shields as well point defense and chaff. I haven't been ganked since I was stupid enough to show up at the community gang r@pe goals in open. BTW, don't worry, I'm not trying to subvert you system by flying in solo/pg mode as I rarely ever do community goals and mostly play in open.

It's not that I mind combat, PvP or the community goals, it's just that the I don't have time to keep up with all of these changes to combat modules and defensive measures. Plus, I have no use wings of players who think murder hoboing or suicide winders are just the coolest thing.

In short, if I have to go to a third part site to research everything, I'm not interested. And with Elite, that pretty much is required.

META only leads to cookie cutter builds with very little excitement, anyhow. If you've seen one ship explode, you've seen them all.

What matters more is if you're having fun with your chosen activity- not whether or not wannabe accountants think its viable on a spreadsheet.

 

[Sylow]

From all you wrote, there is exactly one point where i disagree. This one:
.

[*]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.

.
I see what you are aiming at, but it would basically make defensive modules pointless. If a type of ship has predefined slots for defensive modules, then all they do is adding a flat amount of HP to the ship. It'd be just a small addition to the pricetag and one more slot to engineer for more resists. So this suggestion would reduce options, without really adding anything to the game. At the same time i think that adjusting the relationship of base defence to additional defence options and cutting engineering to size would be enough.
.
That all being said, i am actually pessimistic. This would be a massive change. Even if FD would dare to invest resources into this, the forum would explode in tears. FD has shown several times that baby tears can stop them from making necessary and beneficial changes to the game. I have no confidence, that FD would even stand the storm of tears here for just half a week.
.

 

[WR3ND]

Forum friend request sent, OP. Anyone willing to put this much thought into things, regardless of whether I always agree with them on the minutia and perspective or not, is worth listening to.

 

[Frenotx]

From all you wrote, there is exactly one point where i disagree. This one:
.

.
I see what you are aiming at, but it would basically make defensive modules pointless. If a type of ship has predefined slots for defensive modules, then all they do is adding a flat amount of HP to the ship. It'd be just a small addition to the pricetag and one more slot to engineer for more resists. So this suggestion would reduce options, without really adding anything to the game. At the same time i think that adjusting the relationship of base defence to additional defence options and cutting engineering to size would be enough.
.
That all being said, i am actually pessimistic. This would be a massive change. Even if FD would dare to invest resources into this, the forum would explode in tears. FD has shown several times that baby tears can stop them from making necessary and beneficial changes to the game. I have no confidence, that FD would even stand the storm of tears here for just half a week.
.

There is still plenty of room for variability. With armour for instance it's your choice how to distribute your slots between hull and module reinforcement. Furthermore, with engineering, it's your choice how to engineer the HRPs you decided to have. And other non-shield defensive modules that FDev decides to add could use those slots, too.

I've seen the "This would reduce variety" argument a few times, but people need to realize that the current system only has the ILLUSION of variety. Currently, using any internals for anything other than defensive modules puts you at a serious numbers disadvantage. This splits ships into two categories: ships that aren't defense stacked, and ships that are. Ships from the former category have little chase of victory vs. a similar-sized ship of the latter category, so their only real option is to run. Ships looking to fight have no other viable option other than to fill all their internals with defense modules, so in essence, it's as though they have NO optional internal slots, and instead only have military slots.

By making defensive modules have their own slot type, the outfitting question of, "which defensive modules so I want specifically" remains, but is now accompanied with the question of, "And what utility stuff do I want in my optional slots, too?"

 

[V'larr]

Wow. So, yeah, I am 100% on board with 'Frenotx's Elite Dangerous'. Your vision here is *exactly* what I want.

Frontier would do themselves a big favor by including you on their design team, because I sure as heck do not want what we currently have right now.

Accurate analysis, valid critique, clever and rational suggestions with solutions I wish I could see implemented tomorrow.

@Edward Lewis - If there is any one request I could make, it's that this thread be pushed to the tippy-top of the feedback pile that the Fdev team reads and uses.

(And right underneath that, is the sticky-note saying "Please, for the love of Braben, remove combat XP division")

 

[Rafe Zetter]

For once, I don't have anything to really disagree with here.. though I might build on #10...

I like the idea of people having different starter systems, perhaps a short Q&A at the start of the game to determine if this new player should be starting off in Federation Space, Empire Space, Alliance Space or Independent Space - but with just one, small twist: start them out at a station or installation instance that is only accessible to newbies. It can and should, be an exact duplicate of whichever station or installation they would otherwise start out from, but for their first 24 hours, when they drop into this location, they simply cannot be followed, as anyone without the "newer than 24 hours" flag on themselves, will simply drop into the actual "real" instance of this station or installation.

I'll clarify with an example: Let's say, your starting location is Aziban City - as a newbie, you start in a duplicate of Aziban City. When you drop in to that location, with a 6000 hour commander in a Warvette hot on your tail you turn up in the newbie-duplicate instance. Your pursuer winds up in "real" Aziban City, without you anywhere to be found.

Personally I just recommend new players spend their first couple days in either Solo or Private groups until they're comfortable with what they're doing, then play in whatever mode they like, but you know how simple solutions go....

A shadowban, but in reverse. 24 hours is a bit short though, have to take into account some players are less adept than others, I'd make it 72 hours at least.

10. Or, players could use the tools suggested in #8 and hang around starter systems, protecting noobs

Won't work - all you'll have is an arms race; protectors come, more idiot gankers, more protectors, more idiot gankers (or those doing it to prove a point) now with added PvPers because they know there are guarenteed targets.

And seeing as there is a finite amount of each, there's still plenty of instances with almost no protectors, but still with gankers that have been instance hopping to find a "non protected" station zone, leaving newbro's still vulnerable.

The speed improvements has been shown by CCP to be effective, as someone else pointed out, and to my knowledge has never been seriously questioned by the Eve community as a "bad design" - it's clear each ship has a role, and you choose accordingly.

But I won't hold my breath because it's been said before plenty of times in the last four years about making the ships in ED be balanced to a "role" - hasn't happened yet; doubt it will.

"big ships slow, small ships fast" with commensurate damage output, has been one of the founding principles for pretty much every spacesim game - but FDev for reasons known (and understood) only to them, have pretty much decided to ignore it.

The analysis is basically correct but there is nothing new. Nothing. The corrective actions suggested while well thought out have mostly been suggested in one form or other and nothing will be accomplished by the discussion because FDev will never grow the cojones to implement the corrective actions. My opinion of the game in general is that so many compromises have been made that it will be impossible to balance. PvP is the must futile element of this and this has been exacerbated (as you so correctly stated) by un-restrained engineering, over dependence of modules, and no attempt to balance weapons.

Combat is very competitive and must be carefully planned and implemented to ensure proper balance between opposing sides. The tons of salt that would emanate from the players if NPC ships were made much more powerful is already known. Large scale nerfing of engineered weapons and defenses, although is much needed, will make the mountains of salt on the forums associated with buffing of the NPCs look small by comparison. In short, it will never happen.

The genie is out of the bottle and it will never be put back in.

(Corrected spelling, sorry mate, had to )

Much as I hate to say it, he's 100% right and I have to agree - FDev have set themselves on a path they can't come back from without significant content rewrites, and after the engineer changes and Guardian implementations, I'm doubtful they would get it right even then.

For those who have constantly hated on Star Citizen and why it's taking so long, this situation is a clear message as to why - because you can absolutely bet your hairy (or not) danglies that they have been paying attention to FDev's design choices, the playerbases reactions; and then making thier own design choices accordingly.

 

[Rafe Zetter]

Forum friend request sent, OP. Anyone willing to put this much thought into things, regardless of whether I always agree with them on the minutia and perspective or not, is worth listening to.

Well said - have some rep, were I wearing a hat (or anything) I'd doff my hat in respect.

 

[Ozram]

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.

• 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?

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. [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?

Really well thought out and written, Frenotx. Worth the read.