PvP wingfights can also be predictable, but only if you know everyone on both teams (how good they are, etc). And even then, people can learn, which means the next fight vs the same people might be different.
The last organized (
4v4...correction 8v8) tournament I took part in (which was back in 2016, just before Engineers dropped), my team handily wiped the opposing team, with barely a ship lost, in both of the first two rounds...
We were disqualified on a technicality, but because it was an honest mistake on part of the organizer (a rule change hadn't made it out to us) we were allowed a rematch. In the rematch--which took place the same day with the same people in almost identical loadouts--we were completely annihilated, because we gave away far more of our tactics in our initial crushing victory (where we gave it our all), than we were able to learn about our opponents, and they countered us perfectly.
I hold that (actual) gankers* are low skilled players, they’re just going through the motions, getting their dopamine kick out of the rage not the combat, rarely ever being challenged in a fight because they choose to pick on those who can’t.
What makes someone an actual ganker if not conducting actual ganks?
Many of the most prolific gankers were expert PvPers first and never stopped maintaining or growing those skills.
In the end for most PvPers you’re just learning a routine/build the works for you.
I've PvPed in almost every ship in this game that doesn't cost Arx, and a variety of builds. While some may simply have rushed to the meta they were told exists, many PvPers have a breadth of experience and don't fall into any particular rut, except when the game forces their hand.
The game does funnel people toward certain loadouts if they want to compete where there are no other restrictions, but the idea that one can be a skilled PvPer across the very large spectrum of activities that constitutes PvP by over specializing strikes me as false.
I think the appeal of PvP, and why people are so passionate about it, is it almost always has a very steep learning curve instead of the gradual build up of difficulty employed by most (all?) games to make it accessible.
One of the big appeals to PvP in Elite: Dangerous and games like it is that the equipment/grid requirements don't outpace organic gameplay/experience requirements. This is less true post Engineering---and a huge swath of the PvP player base did not survive the initial Engineering implementation--but even that has now been expedited to the point that it's not terribly hard to get into something situationally competitive.
I've never considered PvP an end-game activity, nor some advanced subset of the game that one had to opt into after a certain point, or even felt that the learning curve was particularly steep, unless one was trying to summit a particularly difficult hill before one was ready.
When I first logged into this game, I played the tutorials (all of them, until I could kill that Big Mama anaconda with that laser/railgun sidewinder at the end of that tenth wave) before starting my CMDR, and within 45 minutes of that, I was fighting other CMDRs outside Freeport, learning as I went. The game has certainly changed to put more 'content' walls between the CMDR and the tools they need to be competitive, reducing it's accessibility to some degree, but I don't think avoiding PvP until one reaches some arbitrary threshold does one a favor. PvP isn't inaccessible, unless one makes it so.
I think the sheer spread of skill levels on can encounter and the fact that enough gankers are bad enough to allow the impression that they're all bad is pretty clear evidence that it's more accessible than you're implying here.
Although admitting that feels like it’s devaluing the effort in overcoming the steep curve in the first place. So we get the typical self-aggrandising, and putting down of others, we see everywhere there’s a PvP option.
That's not what's going on here.
There have been repeat assertions, mostly from people who have admitted to having marginal experience with PvP in
this game, that ganking is somehow incompatible with, or a contraindication to, skill. This is a completely unfounded assertion, counter both to the experiences of anyone who has engaged in any significant degree of PvP in this game and to the idea that gankers can be the problem many appear to think they are.
It's like wartime propaganda about an enemy that simultaneously downplays their abilities while trying to portray them as some kind of existential threat. The reality is usually closer to the opposite. Fact of the matter is, there is no correlation between competency and the subjective righteousness of one's motives. They are completely separate spectra, and it's easy to find incompetent heroes and highly skilled monsters, or vice versa.
