First off, Jester’s Trek is a great blog. Easily in my top 5 blogs now (congrats…?)
His post today, commenting on yet another scam in EVE, brings up a topic I’ve been meaning to talk about since returning to EVE; when is it not OK to gank?
EVE is famous for its brutal scams and deception, and for the fact that CCP stays out of the players business and does not coddle them like most other MMO devs. Like most EVE players, I love this and truly believe it’s a major part of why EVE is so successful. And the incident Jester talks about today is one that I’m perfectly fine with. If you have 20 BILLION isk to spend on one ship, you are not new to EVE. Sure, you’re a moron for trusting someone from the Goons, but that is the beauty of EVE. Not only is it the greatest version of Excel ever, it also teaches you valuable life lessons. Mr. Thrawn is now a wiser person IRL, and he only had to pay 20b isk for the lesson. Imagine if he had fallen for that Nigerian bank email? Now that would have been real serious!
Where I differ with Jester is to what extend EVE should allow such things. I don’t think putting in certain protections, such as baring scams from newbie chat, is a bad thing. It’s one thing to scam an idiot out of 20b isk, it’s another to attack the online equivalent of a small child. High-sec ganking afk miners or fools flying a fully loaded cargo ship? Yup, all day every day. Ganking a newbie frigate for the lulz? Nope. Such activities bring no real value to the game, other than increasing an already steep learning curve and helping spread the negative connotations about the game.
And more importantly, why exactly does allowing someone to suicide gank a newbie frig add to the game? What lesson are you teaching them? What benefit to game balance are you supporting?
I fully agree however that there is a fine line, and that newbie protection must be handled carefully. The only thing worse than allowing people to prey on newbies would be to allow vets to abuse newbie status. I’m fairly confident that CCP will handle things correctly, and I’m certain that the community will let them know if they don’t.
Hardcore Casual 
I’ve always felt that CCP should not do anything directly but should give the players more tools for punishing newbie gankers and scammers. I don’t know what that means, exactly, but as it stands, I could create a newbie with one of my extra slots, focus on that toon to pull off a scam, then switch back to my main and no one, not even Concord, can touch me.
That shouldn’t be, but it also shouldn’t be CCP’s job to change it. They just need to create the tools.
It’s this lack of player enforcement that prevents me from really thinking of EVE (or the vast majority of “sandboxes” for that matter) as truly player-driven and absolute sandboxes.
Concord shouldn’t exist. Concord should be a massive player-run corp that takes its directives from CCP but the actual day-to-day execution is up to the players. It means they can be corrupt, yes, but it also means they can be proactive and respond to crime in a way the AI can’t.
Concord needs to exist for the simple fact that most players would not want to hang out at a gate 24/7 just watching players. If the role is important but tedious/simple, get an NPC to do it. Plus the fact that Concord is a punishment, not a preventative force, works very well.
The 0rphanage indicates otherwise. That’s literally all they do: wait on gates and kill war targets.
While CONCORD is responsible for high-sec security, I understand (but haven’t yet experienced) that in sovereignty space, player based enforcement is very effective.
I think of much of the Eve universe as the equivalent of a frontier society. In the frontier, there’s often as more lawless behavior than there is law to enforce it. But crimes are still considered crimes, and the law would still try to bring consequences.
Eve has little to no consequences for what are clearly crimes. I would never want to eliminate the option to commit those crimes — they flavor the universe and make Eve stand out, yet I would like to see more significant consequences. I’ll have to spend some time thinking about what I mean by “creating the tools” for the players to drive those consequences. If I come up with anything, I’ll write it up and link it here.
I have no problem with coddling new pilots a bit. Ganking and scamming newbies hurts the game overall, and adds nothing to the experience. Sure, a decent percentage of “new” pilots are alts created for scams or to avoid wardecs, but those alts keep people playing, too.
I’d definitely have a problem with changing game mechanics to discourage scamming, suicide ganking and piracy in general. Eve would not be the absorbing game it is without those things being constant risks.
And seriously, how clueless do you have to be to hand any goon (even – or perhaps especially – The Mittani) 20 billion ISK?
The only thing that irks me a bit abut ganking in EVE is the ship insurance system. The fact that it essentially subsidizes suicide ganking makes a farce of the whole system.
And yet it seems to be one of the aspects of the game that CCP is loathe to even consider changing.
Winter Expansion is changing that according to Jester.
Removing insurance isn’t going to stop suicide ganking. It will slightly mitigate the amount of ganking done for purely economic purposes, but the only impact there will be to raise the “go/no go” threshold of “how much do we need ot see that freighter hauling before we decide to gank it”.
The economic ganks will be aided significantly by the arrival of the tier 3 battlecruisers. They’re about ⅓ the price of a battleship, with the same firepower.
The ganking done for pure giggles, the ganking done as part of a market manipulation, and the ganking done as part of a programme of tear extraction, will all continue. In fact, those gankers will be even more motivated by the outrage from players who assumed that the removal of insurance payouts for CONCORD kills was supposed to stop ganking altogether.
The only impact of the removal of insurance payouts will be to close down one small ISK faucet.
It’s a fair question. In general, newbies in EVE are protected intrinsically – at least in highsec – they just don’t have anything worth taking. No one ganks the ‘real’ newbies because its not worth the time, sec status loss (more time), effort, cost, etc to do. Sure, they occasionally lose their new mining barge to can flippers – but that’s by shooting first or ignoring the big ‘IF YOU TAKE THIS BACK, YOU CAN BE GANKED – OK?’ message – or some such but the loss isn’t exactly crippling and it’s a lesson reasonable people only need to learn once.
Really, the only newbies who get scammed/ganked/etc are those who either buy enough isk to make it worth a vet’s time or those who manage to grind isk mining or something for months while they watch tv and never learn anything about the game – and I just don’t have any real sympathy for either.
I’m not entirely without sympathy though. I’m fine with simply things like ‘no scamming in the official recruitment channel’, no leaving cans of valuables outside rookie starting stations so they’ll steal them and you can kill them, etc. Hand holding is not bad, just don’t break my sandbox!
Personally, I think the best thing CCP could do is encourage a culture which is newbie friendly. And for the most part, it has. Almost everyone who’s ever ganked me when I was new was nice about it at least, and offered advice when I asked. And people all over seem to have limitless patience for explaining things to people who ask questions – even when they’d shoot the asker if they got the chance.
It’s one of EVE’s stranger but charming qualities – for the most part those who would happily gank you if given the chance will explain in great detail how to avoid being ganked by people like themselves.
As a low-sec pirate, when I catch obvious newbies I generally ask for them to write an original haiku as a ransom – or in some extreme cases (ie, very high value ship or very desperate victim) – sing a song on our vent server. These go up on our forums for a laugh, and usually everyone leaves happy. I also generally let newbies I kill or ransom know that I’m available if they have any questions about EVE in general or not getting killed in the future specifically.
Ah, a gentleman pirate! In the finest tradition of the high seas. And in the other perspective, in my few losses (market trader carebear) I’ll give Local a “well done” as I head to the gate in my pod.
As you say, that’s a very unusual thing about EVE – in any other game I can think of, multi-player or MMO, your death would be accompanied with “LRN2PLAY FAG” and whatever the games equivalent is to tea-bagging. Hmm, pick-up battle games like LoL weren’t too bad either, at the earlier levels, but I understand it’s much worse at higher levels.
I think EVE has a higher average player age. This might be a factor.
Nice work, but EVE teaches real life lessons? Hilarious…
This is why I read you Sync.
Because underneath the HC PVP is someone who cares about the games he plays – and wants more people to play them.
From Darkfall to LoL to Eve, you’re an excellent advocate for these games, and your playstyle.