You make a good point that someone inclined to do ganks will now outfit purely for ganks and won't stick around for asymmetrical PvP (the irony of gankers not sticking around for an asymmetrical fightThe situation today is that I can gank and pvp with the same ship. I can do regular 1 v 1 or wing fights. So lets say I have someone trying to claim a bounty on me, I wont mind fighting untill death, because:
A: the rebuy is cheap
B: my ship is outfitted to fight back
With the new system, my ship is no longer outfitted to fight back. Running from a fight in a gank outfitted ship is easier than ever. What is accomplished here is my ship is 100% dedicated for ganks, I wont "waiste" my time with fighting off bounty hunters or just doing regular 1 v 1. Right now my ship is only good for one thing, kill weak pray and run away.
The system is not protecting this weak pray, it transformed previously pvp able ships to become gank dedicated ships.
Gankers gonna gank no matter what though so the alternative of not having an ATR response and not having an increased rebuy for murder sprees is not a solution as we would just be back to the status quo of today. ATR was never meant to prevent the killing of other CMDRs, it was devised as a way to put a cap on indiscriminate killing sprees (NPC and CMDR alike) so that they can't continue on forever until the murder/death/killer just gets bored of it and logs out for the day.
What we need to analyse is whether it is doing that job correctly. Is it driving away gankers who have reached a certain threshold of murders or not? Is the threshold too low or too high? Are the ATR too avoidable and thus meaningless?
Judging from the beta I would say the ATR are completely avoidable because you can simply just go to superceruise before the 1 minute ATR arrival timer expires or you can exploit the AI's stupid behaviour and kite them like Harry did until they all wake out. This can be fixed if they made the ATR persistent and able to follow you into supercruise, remember you and interdict you thus essentially hounding you out of that system. Then the thresholds can come into play.
If for example you have already popped up on the ATR's shizz list once already, their response timer for your continued murdering should be shortened and the number of murders you have to do to get their attention again should be less. This will prevent people from just high waking out of a system when the ATR appear and then waking back in and all of a sudden the system pretends like they don't know this criminal and he can just begin killing again from zero as far as the ATR response is concerned.
Right now in the beta the ATR are a largely meaningless addition since if you don't want to encounter them you don't have to and all it costs you is the time it takes to go to supercruise and interdict another victim be it NPC or CMDR.
Last edited: