Question for Open players who don't like PVP/ganking... help me understand

Now that I am on my moral high horse I beg to differ: clogging is the laziest out there, and is also against the rules of the game.
My point is that players should not justify the easy choice by assuming cynical behavior on the part of the opponent. It creates a negative cycle.
I was joking, what I said makes no sense. Can't really combat log if theres nobody to be in combat with.
 
Ok, so the “challenge” is to kill them before the menu log timer runs down?
Really, the challenge is to kill them regardless. Defense is extremely heavily biased in this game. Most ships without engineering and all ships with engineering are unkillable by a single player if flown competently by someone who doesn't want to die. They only have to survive about 10-15 seconds of fire to high wake.

There are two sides to this: they wouldn’t clog if they weren’t ganked. I don’t condone clogging of course.
They clog before they know if it's a gank. That's the point. "You are being pirated. Throttle down and submit to a cargo scan and you will not be-- oh, they clogged."
 
Really, the challenge is to kill them regardless. Defense is extremely heavily biased in this game. Most ships without engineering and all ships with engineering are unkillable by a single player if flown competently by someone who doesn't want to die. They only have to survive about 10-15 seconds of fire to high wake.


They clog before they know if it's a gank. That's the point. "You are being pirated. Throttle down and submit to a cargo scan and you will not be-- oh, they clogged."
That’s why I’m criticizing the lazy gankers, they’re bad for business and are probably the main reason why a trader will assume the worst. It’s not that the game doesn’t need gankers, I think it does, but the high population of gankers in one or two systems such as deciat (where the dead end engineer lives ironically) make it so that people don’t even believe they are being pirated half the time.
 
That’s why I’m criticizing the lazy gankers, they’re bad for business and are probably the main reason why a trader will assume the worst. It’s not that the game doesn’t need gankers, I think it does, but the high population of gankers in one or two systems such as deciat (where the dead end engineer lives ironically) make it so that people don’t even believe they are being pirated half the time.
Gankers ruined piracy for me back in Boraan, not because they were able to gank me (I was ganked only once), but because they pushed so many other players into Solo. I probably spent hours in system chat trying to convince all the players hiding in Solo that not everyone is a ganker. I actually got a few to come over into Open just to experience real piracy. My advice to them was to supercruise in Solo but mine in Open, since most gankers are harmless without their precious interdictors. Normal space was where the real (very few) pirates were to be found.
 
regardless of the roleplay

This is one of those things that creates some problems I think. Lets say a person role-plays a murdering psychopath, kills anything and everything in their view. Well, fair enough but that 'rule' is known only to them at that point. So I hop into a system with this type of player, I have no idea who I am sharing my space with. There's me, busily waving o7's like Tom Hanks waving as Forrest Gump, blissfully unaware of my impending doom. I could just as well hop into a system with a player who is roleplaying a peaceful hippie who just wants to give me flowers and love (equally terrifying but not as dangerous), I just have no idea. I know part of the 'thrill' of being in OPEN is the unexpected. But I can never escape the idea that one person's role-play is really only known to them.

I'm not sure anything can be done about it or even should, just mentioning it.
 
Gankers ruined piracy for me back in Boraan, not because they were able to gank me (I was ganked only once), but because they pushed so many other players into Solo. I probably spent hours in system chat trying to convince all the players hiding in Solo that not everyone is a ganker. I actually got a few to come over into Open just to experience real piracy. My advice to them was to supercruise in Solo but mine in Open, since most gankers are harmless without their precious interdictors. Normal space was where the real (very few) pirates were to be found.
Apparently Borann is still buzzing even if in solo mode: could be worth trying again. What irritates me is a) being outnumbered by gankers 3 to 1, and b) they think they are pirates, hence the “pirates are all gankers anyway” line you see in the forums.
 
That’s why I’m criticizing the lazy gankers, they’re bad for business and are probably the main reason why a trader will assume the worst. It’s not that the game doesn’t need gankers, I think it does, but the high population of gankers in one or two systems such as deciat (where the dead end engineer lives ironically) make it so that people don’t even believe they are being pirated half the time.
Game needs gankers as much as healthy human needs cancer. And by gankers I do not mean people using ganking as tactic, but certain type of "for the lulz killah's".
 
I'm not sure anything can be done about it or even should, just mentioning it.

.... they think they are pirates, hence the “pirates are all gankers anyway” line you see in the forums.

Players with notoriety should automatically show up as red on the radar IMO. As a PvP pirate, my notoriety was / is always zero, because I never "murdered" anyone (bad for business).
 
Which brings us back to that negative cycle: some victims would rather menu log than be killed so the ganker kils even faster to avoid the menu log so the ganker, so even more victims will either menu log or start to combat log to cheat the timer. Frontier should I think take more responsibility for having designed a game feature that is so susceptable to a negative cycle, but I think gankers could and should leave harmless/mostly harmless pilots or very weak ships alone, in the interests of more positive gameplay. The loggers should also stop logging .. :D

I was going to get off my moral high horse but I'll do that later .. :D
 
Players with notoriety should automatically show up as red on the radar IMO. As a PvP pirate, my notoriety was / is always zero, because I never "murdered" anyone (bad for business).

This isn't a serious suggestion but a thinking aloud thing, I did wonder if something like choosing a role for yourself that would be displayed amongst the other info you get when highlighting a ship, the roles could be pirate, explorer, trader, bum, whatever. I know psychopath is unlikely to be chosen but I feel sure, as in the case with you Old Duck, (your idea is a good one by the way), if I saw you were self-labelled as a pirate with no notoriety, I might be more inclined to 'play the game with you' and be robbed.
 
Which brings us back to that negative cycle: some victims would rather menu log than be killed so the ganker kils even faster to avoid the menu log so the ganker, so even more victims will either menu log or start to combat log to cheat the timer. Frontier should I think take more responsibility for having designed a game feature that is so susceptable to a negative cycle, but I think gankers could and should leave harmless/mostly harmless pilots or very weak ships alone, in the interests of more positive gameplay. The loggers should also stop logging .. :D

I was going to get off my moral high horse but I'll do that later .. :D
I agree with your high horse :LOL:
 
To add one more perspective here. I just prefer playing in Mobius. Mind you, when the game was young I did some stuff in open, later I sometimes by accident ended up there. (E.g. when you had to leave the game session and start again. Some steps of engineers as well as community goals often required you to do that to update something. )

Several times I was attacked in such situations, but the only ship I ever lost was my Imperial Courier. And in those situations I also could have run. Only due to my ship being so cheap, i decided to take on the fight despite being in a small ship and outnumbered. Next to loosing the Courier a few times, I could tell stories like of the guy who tried to take down my cargo Python over an engineers outpost and ran away or of the three guys who took my Krait down to 72% hull when leaving from a station where the community goal ended three days ago and who apparently just were hoping to gank unaware late leavers.(Would they have been any good shots, they could have taken me down before i was outside of the stations mass lock. But hey, if they would be any good, why would they gank? )

A certain part of the forums would have made huge stories out of that, would praise these things to the heavens on how much fun they had there and things like that. For me, these events were all "meh". People whose ability to communicate start and end on the fire button just bore me. We have NPCs which do better than them.

Would open be the only way of playing the game, I'd be long gone. Not due to it being too challenging. (As mentioned, the only ships i ever lost to players were in situations where i knew the risk, would have had the choice to escape but due to my ship being so cheap i decided to rather fight. ) But due to this part of the community being way too boring for me.

So short of FD implementing some kind of "PvP toggle" or anything like that, Mobius for me is the way to go. Unfortunately meeting people there by now is quite rare. But when it was still active i met people there who actually knew how to communicate. They did not behave like dumbed down versions of NPCs, and understood other means of communication than the fire button.

Thus in contrast to all the "but gankers make the game more interesting" statements, I actually dare to say that they make the game more boring. Interesting people would actually make the game more interesting, the normal ganker goes in the very opposite direction. I just shrug and move on, there's simply nothing interesting they ever manage to contribute to the game.

Edit: As a sidenote I like to add that gankers are just a very small subset of PvP players, basically the lowest form of them. Before engineers were introduced, I actually did participate in PvP and interesting people were to be found there. I believe that the same is still true, only engineers and the grind resulted in my falling too far behind and I rather moved out than to rush into the grind. So really, there are interesting PvP people, be it in organized fights, BGS activities or perhaps even PP. Although I am not sure on the last part, considering the state of PP. But the "now I gank random people" player, while he actually might really need some help and might have some interesting problems, is the most boring encounter possible in the game.
 
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Gankers ruined piracy for me back in Boraan, not because they were able to gank me (I was ganked only once), but because they pushed so many other players into Solo. I probably spent hours in system chat trying to convince all the players hiding in Solo that not everyone is a ganker. I actually got a few to come over into Open just to experience real piracy. My advice to them was to supercruise in Solo but mine in Open, since most gankers are harmless without their precious interdictors. Normal space was where the real (very few) pirates were to be found.

I witnessed a lot of what i call "desperate ganking attempts" in Borann.
Most of them were slight variations of: "please send me a wing invite, i forgot my DSS and i cannot see the hotspot"
 
To add one more perspective here. I just prefer playing in Mobius. Mind you, when the game was young I did some stuff in open, later I sometimes by accident ended up there. (E.g. when you had to leave the game session and start again. Some steps of engineers as well as community goals often required you to do that to update something. )

Several times I was attacked in such situations, but the only ship I ever lost was my Imperial Courier. And in those situations I also could have run. Only due to my ship being so cheap, i decided to take on the fight despite being in a small ship and outnumbered. Next to loosing the Courier a few times, I could tell stories like of the guy who tried to take down my cargo Python over an engineers outpost and ran away or of the three guys who took my Krait down to 72% hull when leaving from a station where the community goal ended three days ago and who apparently just were hoping to gank unaware late leavers.(Would they have been any good shots, they could have taken me down before i was outside of the stations mass lock. But hey, if they would be any good, why would they gank? )

A certain part of the forums would have made huge stories out of that, would praise these things to the heavens on how much fun they had there and things like that. For me, these events were all "meh". People whose ability to communicate start and end on the fire button just bore me. We have NPCs which do better than them.

Would open be the only way of playing the game, I'd be long gone. Not due to it being too challenging. (As mentioned, the only ships i ever lost to players were in situations where i knew the risk, would have had the choice to escape but due to my ship being so cheap i decided to rather fight. ) But due to this part of the community being way too boring for me.

So short of FD implementing some kind of "PvP toggle" or anything like that, Mobius for me is the way to go. Unfortunately meeting people there by now is quite rare. But when it was still active i met people there who actually knew how to communicate. They did not behave like dumbed down versions of NPCs, and understood other means of communication than the fire button.

Thus in contrast to all the "but gankers make the game more interesting" statements, I actually dare to say that they make the game more boring. Interesting people would actually make the game more interesting, the normal ganker goes in the very opposite direction. I just shrug and move on, there's simply nothing interesting they ever manage to contribute to the game.

Edit: As a sidenote I like to add that gankers are just a very small subset of PvP players, basically the lowest form of them. Before engineers were introduced, I actually did participate in PvP and interesting people were to be found there. I believe that the same is still true, only engineers and the grind resulted in my falling too far behind and I rather moved out than to rush into the grind. So really, there are interesting PvP people, be it in organized fights, BGS activities or perhaps even PP. Although I am not sure on the last part, considering the state of PP. But the "now I gank random people" player, while he actually might really need some help and might have some interesting problems, is the most boring encounter possible in the game.
I sometimes wonder what kind of moral bubble Frontier live in: they appear to have just assumed that open would be used for 'cooperative' gameplay and CQC is where people will actually kill each other. They now know it's not the case of course ..
 
I think perhaps they thought the community would sort it out themselves. And to a large extent I think it has.

Their idea was that we'd have something like in an old game MUD, UO, Tibia or to some degree EvE: while some people would try to create a mess, others would protect the area and take down the bad guys. Players policing their area of space can be interesting gameplay.

What FD were utterly unaware of were just a few small details: how big the galaxy of ED actually is, that somebody implemented a P2P system and that the game would use instances. These limitations mean that policing an area is basically impossible, while creating trouble is incredibly easy. (The ones policing have to find exactly the one person creating trouble, which can be really hard when the game just puts them in different instances. In contrast the troublemaker is not limited in that way. Any person who's placed in the same instance as him can be a target. )

But hey, I guess FD really had no chance to know that FD would decide to implement things this way... :D ;)
 
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