Practice & experience.
Popular Ganking discussion in r/EliteDangerous
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Once I spot anyone, I usually lock them on my sensors to watch their bearing and progress; if its a group there’s not much you can do at all.
Max throttle is to keep the distance at a maximum while you’re in SC
Everything about that has worked for me, but silent running won’t do you much good, especially when boosting and charging your FSD.
It’s funny how we have a whole other thread about that subject right now as well. And OP adamantly insists their absolute paper Anaconda for a grind method that doesn’t require jump range is “the perfect build” for it*.
I do wonder how many people actually get “ganked”(quotation marks because it’s a bit of an odd term for me) in those popular hotspot vs those who are not because the gankers are busy with the other plentiful targets (likely) available.
My own way of dealing with them? Don’t visit those hotspots in open, I either do that in solo or a PG which has explicit ‘No/Consensual PvP only’ rules(mostly in solo as I find the PGs I have access to to usually not be particularly active anyway). With exception to Thargoid War invasions, where I have not yet encountered a single bad actor(and they might quickly be discouraged if a bunch of AX ships start slapping them with modshards and plasmas).
*My explorer Phantom with 67ly range is certainly stripped to a degree, but it can still boost semi-frequently(some pip juggling required) to 561 and has a 5D shield with a bit of engineering to it so it is not a robust build but a few seconds of beam laser fire(or lightly bumping a planet) won’t kill it immediately either. Still, were I to visit a hotspot in Open, I’d more likely do it in this. Which I partly made for that purpose and then still stayed in solo/PG.
Phantoms are the best tbh. Mine has a 1kMj biweave, 800ish hull, 4 OC frags, boosts 591 (with just enough distro to perma boost with 4 pips) and still jumps 52 ly even with all the exploration goodies. You can definitely jump farther with that amount of shields and hull if you change it up, but the sacrifices I made were to accommodate cold blooded murder so it is what it is.
This has been mentioned, but I'm going to emphasise it- always submit if you get caught in an interdiction.
The cooldown is reduced from around a minute to 10 seconds and that's a huge difference to your survival chances. Unless of course you're in a Courier that boosts to 750m/s in which case they're just playing chase with you anyway (spoiler- they'll lose that game).
The cooldown is reduced from around a minute to 10 seconds and that's a huge difference to your survival chances. Unless of course you're in a Courier that boosts to 750m/s in which case they're just playing chase with you anyway (spoiler- they'll lose that game).
Yeah I thought this was funny, too.
This echoes my experience. I don't visit Deciat, Sol or ShinDez much anymore anyway, but if I do, I don't do it in open. With war activities, I do a lot of it in open, and I haven't really met anyone disturbing the peace there.
Having some decent protection is key. I can share a story to emphasize this: My daily driver is a Viper 4, and it got "ganked" once. I was in a streamers stream and team, and we were on foot screwing around at a settlement. After threatening to do it for quite a while, a known ganker finallly descended to blow up our ships, which were parked on the surface. I was on the other side the settlement when I got the "ship under attack" message, but it took quite a while and apparently some effort to blow up my parked, not moving Viper. I don't remember the actual time frame, but had time to rush across the settlement to see what was happening just to see my ship blow up. It probably would have survived if I had dismissed it at the first sign of danger, but I was a bit stunned and didn't react. Also, it was pretty funny, because everyone involved knew each other at least in some capacity.
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Mine was made for Bubble stuff really, so the range isn’t quite 52 - I’d probably also swap the booster for a 3H and put a C5 fuel scoop on if I took it for some out-of-Bubble exploring(not that I’d strictly need to, given the lack of threats out there… but who knows, I might anyway, at some point soon). I’d probably save more downtime by sacrificing 1-2 ly for not needing to wait ages next to a star, to fill a C5 fuel tank with a C3 scoop.
I will add that some of us have our own Couriers and other "flyswatter" ships meant to chase and kill the fast speedy ships. That being said this is good gank evasion advice.
If you don't have it already get you a V1 pre engineered FSD from a tech broker. It gets better range than a G5 engineered standard FSD when you put Mass Manager on it, plus it has fast boot which is great if you run into someone with FSD reboot missiles. I run that on my Phantom
Seal Clubbing at Deciat was a thing before I started and the YouTube guides back then for engineering prefaced everything with 'Visit Engineering Systems in Solo'.
I guess they dropped that somewhere but the game as whole isn't riddled with gankers and it's perfectly possible to amble about the Bubble without seeing anyone in a week.
I do. Probably just didn’t import from inara like that.
This IMO is a confluence of design issues as well as misaligned player expectations.
For example, FD seem to have both the problem and the answer to bottlenecks in game right now- restrictive engineer systems like Deciat as well as massively decentralised tech brokers. If engineering was focussed in the latter you'd not have such problems for the rank and file.
Also I'd say that FD missed a beat with Powerplay, considering that conceptually could (and sometimes does) behave as a more granular combative experience where hunting people down would make sense.
FD should have thought more about how the BGS and economy could have limited ganking- in that playing this way forces you away from 'civilized' space towards anarchies, and that it also forces gankers to use lower tier ships and tech because they are not available to them (and that in doing so allows C+P to have more teeth, at least conceptually if engineering was not so OP).
For example, FD seem to have both the problem and the answer to bottlenecks in game right now- restrictive engineer systems like Deciat as well as massively decentralised tech brokers. If engineering was focussed in the latter you'd not have such problems for the rank and file.
Also I'd say that FD missed a beat with Powerplay, considering that conceptually could (and sometimes does) behave as a more granular combative experience where hunting people down would make sense.
FD should have thought more about how the BGS and economy could have limited ganking- in that playing this way forces you away from 'civilized' space towards anarchies, and that it also forces gankers to use lower tier ships and tech because they are not available to them (and that in doing so allows C+P to have more teeth, at least conceptually if engineering was not so OP).
the times I dealt with gankers I didn't meet any in iCouriers or other really purposely fast built ships though. Pretty much everyone was either in a Mamba or FDL. The most exotic ganker I met was a player parked at the star in a random system near a Titan, where I had parked my carrier to do AX. They were in a Chieftain of all things, and tried to prevent me and my armored-to-the-teeth Krait from flying to my carrier after my AX activities. They didn't succeed, but I thought both the ship and the location (an unpopulated system, and there were maybe two or three carriers including mine there) were.... odd.
Yeah, I should've pointed out there's a difference between gank evasion and messing about.
It's not that common since it's so specialized and really only good for chasing other fast ships. My Courier isn't even engineered yet I just cba with engineering it yet lol
Nothing wrong with messing about
I also think that you can roughly divide the "gankers" into two camps. There's those who actually know what they do in terms of ship builds, weapons layout, tactics and all that, who just attack everything that moves (which is a valid gameplay style, even if might not like it) and accept the risk that they might get themselves a bloody nose. I would guess those are the kind of ganker who are usually described by their kin as "actually nice and helpful when you talk to them", and who seem to give out build advice and all that to their "victims" if they bother to talk to them. Or so the legend is told .
And then there's you classic seal clubber who specifically seeks out harmless players on their first trip to Felicity, who run at the first sign of real opposition and are really only out to... well club seals. I would argue that those kinds of gankers are the real problem, because they can cause serious harm to the perception of the game by players.
The difficulty, especially for newer players, is to tell those two groups apart.
.And then there's you classic seal clubber who specifically seeks out harmless players on their first trip to Felicity, who run at the first sign of real opposition and are really only out to... well club seals. I would argue that those kinds of gankers are the real problem, because they can cause serious harm to the perception of the game by players.
The difficulty, especially for newer players, is to tell those two groups apart.
Honestly half the fun is pulling someone to kill them and having a great fight as a result. Not everyone who ganks shares this opinion, but I have just as much fun with a "fair" fight as I do a one sided battle.I also think that you can roughly divide the "gankers" into two camps. There's those who actually know what they do in terms of ship builds, weapons layout, tactics and all that, who just attack everything that moves (which is a valid gameplay style, even if might not like it) and accept the risk that they might get themselves a bloody nose. I would guess those are the kind of ganker who are usually described by their kin as "actually nice and helpful when you talk to them", and who seem to give out build advice and all that to their "victims" if they bother to talk to them. Or so the legend is told
And then there's you classic seal clubber who specifically seeks out harmless players on their first trip to Felicity, who run at the first sign of real opposition and are really only out to... well club seals. I would argue that those kinds of gankers are the real problem, because they can cause serious harm to the perception of the game by players.
The difficulty, especially for newer players, is to tell those two groups apart.
Addendum: That doesn't mean I've gone soft on the topic of ganking. Personally, I still dislike that play style and think it's a waste of the "victim's" time. But that's part of "blaze your own trail", and it's on me to deal with that issue; either by arming up, learning how to evade, or switching modes, or stopping to care.
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I get what you're saying, sadly I suspect there are quite a lot who only enjoy a one sided battle, and those are the ones who do the real harm, as I suspect most of those either don't react to comms and FRs at all, or don't have any real knowledge to share anyway
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