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.
I've discussed this kind of thing with some people. The mail thing I'd say is:
ReplyDelete1: You should still be able to mine in exactly the same way your currently do. Possibly with a slight reduction in yield. mabye a 25% cut.
2: The activity for mining shouldn't be a twitch activity. I'd like something based off tuning your mining lasers output. Multiple levels all of which modify each other, so it's a balancing act. Ideally with some visual cues on what will help. Make it harder to bot.
Wish edits were possible.
Delete*main thing
2: up to a 100% boost on the non-boosted rate.
I'm in general agreement on these points.
DeleteConsider that having to distract a miner with a PI like screen isn't really addressing the problem either, just making everyone feel better about afkers
DeletePeople are going to want to play as casually as possible. If you really want to help keep people from afking, make mining a passive activity, and get rid of ships altogether.
Bejeweled!
ReplyDeleteSimplest motivational solution. Make the ore scanner part of the mining bonus. You need to scan to get access to random spawned alloys. The alloys are rare and small in size, and will only show up when you scan a roid. The types of alloys would be inverted list so MOR yielding would be in VELDSPAR, but very rarely. The roid "scrambles" you when you scan it actively so you need to retarget it. Also this prospect scan would yield a cycle with 1-5% of the ore above type. Mixing things up like this would also mean you would often have stacks you can not refine or have bad skills for, thus needing to "outsource" and trade on markets with other miners or refiner specialists. Oh and ofc Refining needs to be made a time sink process like building.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1cczsm/the_attention_problem_mining_and_ganking/
ReplyDeleteThat's the first time someone's seen fit to post a blog of mine on /r/eve; I'm flattered, actually.
DeleteOr fit a fucking tank.
ReplyDelete1 DC II
Med Shield Ext. Rigs
Anti-gank mid slots.
Stop making yourself a target.
Congratulations; you've increased the threshold for suicide ganking from 3 catalysts to 6.
DeleteThe only thing that will do is increase the value of your smouldering remains for the neutral lootscoop.
DeleteWhat you've done by tanking your ship is made yourself immune to any group of 5 or less Catalysts. Tanking your Hulk gives you at least a chance of surviving IF you're caught AFK. However, you should not be caught mining AFK. Your first line of defense is to pay attention. This is NOT Hello Kitty Online.
DeleteWatch Local and always be aligned to the station.
In my 4 years of mining in EVE I've only been ganked once, when I was a newb in a Retriever. The next day I went gunning for the guys who ganked me. I caught and killed one who was dumb enough to still be hanging around my Constellation. The other guy hid in a wormhole for the next 30 days until my Kill Rights expired.
Don't be a victim. If you can't handle that go play something else.
It really is that simple.
You're an idealist, Evel. My optimism for EVE has long since faded.
ReplyDeleteMatter of fact you need to look at the screen a lot more than once every 15 minutes.
ReplyDeleteAsteroids (at least in highsec) rarely exceed a Mackinaw's ORE Hold so you'll need to switch asteroids regularily or your miners will stop mining. Even worse - they could still be mining although the asteroid is empty.
This doesn't change the situation by a lot, I just wanted put that right.
Anyhow, as I see it the big problem with this suicide ganking is "risk". Suicide gankers use a bunch of 2m-Meta 1-Catalysts, there is no risk for them. If they fail they lose 6-10m per gank while having a decent chance on multiple times that value. If they are low-sec/null-sec inhabitants they don't even need to value their sec-status as they can freely travel high sec, the only things that change with a sec-status of <-5 is the fact that you can't run high-sec missions and that you will be slightly easier to spot for miners, when entering a system.
I think the best fix for suicide ganking would be by making security status a more valueable resource: The speed at which Police reacts to you currently might be balanced for a -5 but not for a <-9 character. Even with a solid -10 you can still warp around like a retard and thus infinitely avoid getting caught.
My suggestion:
Make faction police follow you through warp and tweak the time until they spawn, depending on your security status.
As a -5 you could have ~2 (maybe even more) time until faction police spawns wherever you are or wherever you'll come out of warp. This time would then scale with security status until you have around 10~20 seconds at -10 sec status.
This would not inhibit travel (might need to despawn police when undocking though) but if you keep suicide ganking frequently you won't be able to do it anymore after a while, making it a costly means instead of a cheap self-purpose.