A matter of long contention between PVE and PVP pilots has
been the matter of highsec suicide ganking. Between justifications and opinions
sit a series of facts. Some of these facts are well known and paid attention to
by many participants in the ongoing discussion; others receive less attention than they
perhaps deserve. The pertinent data is as follows:
- The amount of firepower needed to destroy any vessel can be measured in multiples of Catalysts
- The EHP of a mining ship is hard pressed to exceed 15 Catalyst Equivalent
- The window of time needed for Catalyst Pilots to successfully perform a suicide gank is less than a minute
- Mining is an activity whose rewards do not scale for looking at the screen more than once every 15 to 30 minutes.
The latter point is, I think, the largest source of
problems. Suicide ganking, taken on its own, remains fundamentally sound as, in a majority of cases, it is easily
mitigated by paying attention to one's surroundings.
Conversely, mining is designed in such a way that it is very difficult to hold
the players attention for an extended period of time. However, all players are
vulnerable if they look away for even a brief period of time. It is very easy to look
away from your computer for 5 minutes and find yourself looking at 5 minutes
worth of ore, or to find yourself waking up in a new clone, never
realizing you were in danger until the threat has already come and gone.
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| Never a fun entry for the log book. |
The problem is not one of people who want to fight and
people who don’t, it’s one of rewards for vigilance; it takes much more effort
to be vigilant than it does to pay attention to the task of mining. The easiest
solution to this problem is to create a reward for paying more attention to the ore you're harvesting.
There is no hard and fast rule about which form an increased
reward for mining should take. It could involve a constant set of adjustments
to compensate for yield, or it could be a mini-game where you pick your way
through various rocks to extract the more valuable ores hidden within an
asteroid’s bulk composition. Whatever design might be settled on, it simply
needs to reward players for paying attention without overwhelming them.
If miners are given a good incentive to pay attention to the
contents of their screen, they will be much more likely to see when hostiles
are on the prowl and to make it to safety, bringing a semblance of balance back
to a game whose debates and focus have become centralized on suicide ganks and
ever rising hitpoint buffers.
