If you undock in a ship fit with standard modules (say T2 everything) it should not rise to a level to be profitable to kill it in hi sec. If that ship is sporting Faction/Officer mods then sure, it crosses a line and becomes a target. But to make a ship with a generic setup be a profit source by default then the balance is messed up.
I am not advocating 100% defense or safety. I am advocating what I just wrote above. We do not want to make suicide ganks impossible. So to affect this the economics of it should be changed.
Remember hi sec is NOT low sec. You take a sec hit in low sec for attacking as well as in hi sec. CONCORD is the difference but if it is always more profitable to kill someone then there really is no reason not to do it.
So buffing the tank on a Hulk would make it more difficult to gank (i.e. the ganker needs a more expensive ship to pull it off). Remember the economic coasts to the Hulk are FAR higher than to the ganker. Insuring T2 ships is laughable…pretty much a total loss. The ganker gets an insurance payout plus loot plus salvage. It makes sense to you that someone breaking the law (in game terms) is rewarded in this fashion while the victim is screwed in every way?
Personally rather than buffing the Hulk tank I would rather see actual means for defense with a group implemented that could reliably fend off a suicide gank.
I’ve said that of course you can always overdps and gank anything, but thats not what was actually happening. People were undocking in basically untanked hulks and paying the price for it by being killed by dps cruisers, not squads of gank ravens. If they fit a few tanking bits and pieces, the effort required to kill them escalates rapidly and people will look elsewhere. I’ve seen people fail to gank hulks because they were adequately tanked, with my own two eyes.
I refined that suggestion to tracking known ganking corps via personal standings. seriously if you won’t take any responsibility for your own security, eve is going to be a very unfriendly place.
And what I am saying is that cruiser should not be able to suicide gank that Hulk as a matter of course. Remember we are talking about a special case here…that same cruiser may well (and should) eat the Hulk in low/no sec no problem.
Consider that the Hulk costs ~120 million just for the hull (I think…been awhile since I priced one). Now consider it is a T2 hull so insurance is pathetic to the point of being worthless. Compare that to the T1 cruiser. After insurance payout that gank cruiser may weigh in around 5 million ISK lost to CONCORD. While not something most people would just toss away willingly it is not that substantial (a single L4 mission will recoup that and more). Add the Hulk’s salvage value and that is mitigated even more. If the Hulk has T2 Strips on (likely) chances are excellent you are ahead of the game cost-wise now.
To me that is unbalanced. Even an untanked Hulk should not be of enough value to be worth ganking. If you just hate the guy and want to kill him and do not mind the whack to your wallet then knock yourself out. But it should never be a choice of, “Hmm…I could mine or make twice as much ganking Hulks…what to do, what to do?”
As I said before some ways to change the economics of the suicide gank would be to buff the Hulk (such that you must expend more to suicide it than the Hulk costs) or make some ability to provide decent cover from gang mates. And by decent I mean practical. Then people have the option to provide meaningful defense if they want and if they don;t we are back to it being their own problem if they don’t.
And they can’t, if the hulk pilot fits it correctly. If the hulk pilot fits it assuming he’s perfectly safe and omits to tank his hulk, he will die, I see no problem with the current situation.
You evaded the bulk of the argument but fine. Now you need a battleship which after insurance payouts and what not will probably cost you 30 million to gank that 120 million (actually more like 200 million with usual fittings to be tanked and mine). When the battleship salvages and scoops loot they may well turn a profit. Against a properly tanked Hulk.
Anyway, CCP also see this as a problem and have said they will be tweaking the economics of it some.
Or if you do not see it then we can test it. You fit and tank a Hulk as best you can and then see if I and my mates can gank you. Let’s give it best out of ten tries. If your Hulk is safe when tanked I will burn a fortune by trying and failing and you will not be out a dime so this should be no problem for you.
Well, the thing about it is a lot of Hulk Pilots AFK mine. I know people who take the cost-benefit analysis into account, and value the free time over the value of the ship.
Most people who tell others that ganks are fine as is, that others need to learn how to fit and fly their ships, stop doing so when asked to try on the other side’s shoes and put their own billions on the line.
How do you keep them from the loot? If you have a mate there able to nab it then sure but of course they are prepared to swoop in and nab the loot too. You might get your loot back (what’s left of it) with a bit of luck.
If you’re AFK you deserve any gank that comes your way.
Whereas i stopped arguing when you obviously didn’t read my posts.
I said that what was actually happening was that people were being ganked by single cruisers cos they wouldn’t fit a minimalistic tank. You then talked about turning up with your mates in battleships. If you want to bring a single cruiser to 0.6 spec space and try blow up a hulk of mine, I’ll consider taking up the offer.
Disclaimer: I can’t fly a Procurer, let alone a Hulk.
Disclaimer: I’ve never been suicide ganked, use a blockade runner to move small valuable cargo in high sec, don’t load over about 500M into my freighter, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Hulk with a standard high sec fit (T2 strips and MLUs, small C5-L, named EM & thermal resistance amps, named cap charger) has ~12k effective hp and tanks a further ~75hp/sec, assuming near max skills. The only way to do substantially better is to use a Gistii A-type small booster and faction hardeners, but that doesn’t qualify as a minimalistic tank. Or I guess we could drop the MLUs, but why the hell are we mining in high sec if we’re going to give away 20% of our yield?
If we give CONCORD 20 seconds to show up, that’s 13500hp meaning we need about 675dps to kill it, or 475dps if CONCORD takes 30s. A gank 'rax puts out about 600dps with realistic skills (T2 guns, faction ammo). Rupture is similar, Omen comes in around 500, and let’s not talk about Caldari dps. Note that this damage comes in a full spread of types, so we can’t reasonably load up on specific resistances. Seems to me that a well-piloted suicide gank T1 cruiser has pretty close to even shot at blowing up a tanked Hulk before CONCORD shows. Make it two cruisers and the Hulk doesn’t have a chance. Heck toss in a destroyer, or switch to 3 destroyers and no cruiser, and the Hulk is toast.
If you don’t like the T2 guns, we just need two cruisers or four destroyers, and maybe not even that if CONCORD is a bit slow - which they often are in .6 belts. Any which way you slice it, it is trivial to gank a Hulk in high sec at minimal expense, even if the Hulk pilot does everything right short of warping out the instant he sees anyone on the overview - which in high sec means he won’t get any mining done, so isn’t a viable option.
Note well, I’m not complaining. I would like it if CCP would institute some way of defending against suicide ganks that would actually be feasible, but I don’t see any such way without either seriously changing mechanics or dramatically buffing CONCORD response time, neither of which I’d really like to see. So I’m really not bitching about the current situation. But it is just incredibly naive to say that it’s easy to counter suicide ganking. It isn’t. It’s pretty much impossible. The only good way is to get out of crowded core systems and find some reasonably quiet backwater, get to know the locals, and become very twitchy when strangers are in local. Thing is, even in relatively remote high sec systems there’s most often strangers in local. Remember that the guy mining with a Hulk in high sec is wanting to kick back and relax after work. If he wanted to be on the edge of his seat, he wouldn’t be bloody high sec mining. So he’s not going to be twitchy, and if someone does come along looking for a gank he’s not likely to warp out before being tackled. So this isn’t even a counter to high sec ganking, it’s just using best odds to avoid it.
So yeah, maybe some of those guys in the video might not have died to that Catalyst if they’d had a bit of tank on (though a Catalyst puts out pretty serious damage, and it was probably mostly Retrievers and Covetors it was attacking, so probably not much chance at survival). But if the ganking was the least bit organized, they had someone doing passive target/scan and knew exactly which of the barges had tanks, and used the appropriate dps level for the specific job - which makes it likely that the miners would have died anyways, the gankers would have just lost an extra ship to do it.
Go ahead and blame the victim when someone AFK autopilots a T1 hauler with 500 mill in cargo aboard from Oursulaert to Jita, but there just isn’t any practicable defense against an organized group suicide ganking.
Good job it was only the goons then and not anyone organised
This is going to be my last reply on this topic, I think it’s getting a little bit beyond the scope of a friendly thread for helping out new players in EvE. I don’t think it’s going to be possible to change people’s minds on this really.
My only real point was that fitting a minimalistic tank to your hulk raises the bar of what’s required to kill you above the simple opportunistic level, even weeks into Jihad people were getting killed by single t1 equipped Vexors (admittedly overheated ones with a full rack of damage mods). These people were the exact same people who were crying about it the loudest instead of making a small alteration to their setup. These people annoy me.
The absolute best counter for mining corporation operations with multiple hulks on the line was a basilisk, good luck getting through the tank of someone being space priested by a basilisk before concord arrives.
What…I’m supposed to restrict myself to some ship and in a 0.6 (not 0.5) system to get your Hulk? It is about whether I can kill you profitably…not whether I can kill you at all. If I want to bring 50 battleships to gank your Hulk then I fully expect it to go down but would be insane of me to do. I want to do it in a way that is sustainable for me or near enough that it is worth doing.
Gorsnak did the combat numbers thankfully. Now consider the cost necessary to pull that off (which I mentioned before). A gank fitted T1 Rax will lose you about 4 million ISK after the insurance payout. So bring three of them. Bye-bye to 100 million ISK Hulk (insurance is no help on T2 ships).
I do not buy into a notion that more expensive ships somehow must survive less expensive ships. But in a gank where the more expensive ship has pretty much zero hope and a more than 8:1 price differential between the gank squad and the more expensive ship is out-of-whack. I think in some way, shape or fashion I should have a reasonable shot at fending those ships off…at least in hi sec where all I am supposed to need to do is survive for maybe 30 seconds.
So there is no bar on this that is absurd to you on what should kill what in 30 seconds or less?
4 mil combat ship versus 1 billion freighter?
4 mil combat ship versus 1.75 billion Rorqual?
4 mil combat ship versus a 5 billion jump freighter?
And it is not as if the Hulk is defenseless or even meant to be defenseless (I killed a Caracal ore thief with my Hulk once…yeah he was an idiot barely into one but still…). Sure it is not a combat ship but it is not meant to just roll over and die anytime something with guns gets within 100km.
I am not suggesting you are saying that should be the case. I guess I am asking where you think the line should be drawn? If combat ships should be able to gank non-combat ships such that they can succeed before CONCORD shows up what makes sense to you?
Haven’t really thought about it, to be honest.
I can say that a Hulk popping to a decently fit gank cruiser strikes me as eminently sensible, however. Whether or not it can do it in 30 seconds I’m not even sure I have an opinion on, but that doesn’t seem unreasonable.
As I see it, the Hulk is designed to mine better than any other Exhumer, and it does. And it’s designed to be able to tank a tripple battleship spawn in 0.0, and it does. I don’t think it should be able to stand a chance against a well fit and determined human opponent.
Once you get into talking about ganking cap ships, that’s another matter entirely. Cap ships are supposed to have hundreds of thousands of HP’s. But the Hulk is not, and its main defenses are its resists, its small sig radius and its ability to be aligned and ready to warp out. The Hulk has stats that make it vulnerable to any true combat craft. I think that’s pretty sensible, and I see no reason for a mining ship to have a prayer against anything heavier than a frigate.
No, it doesn’t. A basic tank on a hulk moves you from ~10k effective hp to ~13k effective hp (assuming max skills, but very few people have shield compensation skills trained so actually probably less gain) over a 20s timeframe. That doesn’t really change the equation appreciably. It might tip the balance against a single T1 cruiser, but absolutely no more than that. Two cruisers or three destroyers is still well within the realm of opportunistic.
