Eve is harsh: you get ganked

Eve is a PvP game. You do not have any safety, like you do in a PvE Warcraft realm. You do not flag on PvP. It's always on.

The impact of this? Here's one example to illustrates it. Industrialists and miners haul expensive cargo around in their ships, in high-security space like 0.9, where there's lots of Concord police.

You're not safe. Every week, dozens of people get ganked in this situation.
Eve is harsh. Players will kill your hauler, knowing they'll in turn get killed by Concord, but it's worth it for their mates to come by and collect your loot.

Don't fool yourself into thinking high-sec is safe. It's not.
Below are some tips for hauling taken from this thread, written in response to a poster who got ganked and lost 600M of goods.

If the below concepts do not make sense yet, skip to other sections of my guide now, and come back to this page if you start to ferry expensive things around.

1: Consider avoiding Jita, the Caldari trade hub. Not all ganks happen in Jita, but avoiding a hub like that can do nothing but improve the chances of avoiding instadeath. There are other trade hubs (Oursaleart, Amarr) you could use.

2: If you're going to ferry 2 billion worth of stuff around in Empire,
do not do it in something weak enough to be easily suicide ganked. Do it in a ship of appropriate value and toughness. A Tech 2 transport ship (with its higher armour) is infinitely more difficult to suicide bomb than an Iteron III (industrial ship), eliminating most smaller suicide gangs all together. [Read more in my ship guide].

3: Fit armour or shield strengthening equipment ("tank") to your ship. Suicide gangs have only a handful of seconds to pop your ship, so they need to bring appropriate force to pop it. Even though an Iteron V with armour plates isn't exactly going to be winning any duels, if it can last 15 seconds instead of 5, its a success. Again, that little bit extra eliminates the threat of most small gangs all together.

4: Bring a friend. If its really valuable, have someone shadow your hauler with an empty hauler. You get popped? Have them loot the can before the gankers do. If you've followed 2: and 3:, the odds of them having enough fire power left over to gank a second hauler is pretty slim.

5: Don't use autopilot. Your cargo makes it worthwhile to fly manually. With warp-to-zero ("WTZ"), fully half of all the opportunities for gankers to scan you disappear, seeing as they can only scan you when you're aligning, not when you're slow-boating to the gate.

6: If you're carrying around physically small valuables (a couple of bits of officer loot, or a blue prints), don't use an industrial. Use a small ship (a tech 1 frigate, of the speedy variety, does fine) to courier it around. Don't use a shuttle. T1 frigs, with resistance or warp core stabilisers fittings, are very difficult to stop in high-sec. With WTZ, you can't be ganked arriving at a gate. And with the ship's speedy aligning, you can't be ganked departing a gate either. (In low-sec to 0.0, a gate camp could get you).

(See also: my Travel section for details on 'gate camps', which are like death traps, and my PvP section too.)

7 comments:

Unknown said...

This is absolutely fantastic! I, too, recently moved from WoW. I am a long time MMO'er and have complained time and time again about the carebear games that are out there. By a fluke, I downloaded eve to see what it was about and I am hooked. It's a game I have been looking for for years. The depth, complexity and freedom is compared to none that I have played and I have played over a half dozen MMO's over the years. This guide is fantastic! MUST-READ for the new Eve player and experienced MMO'er.

Good stuff, Hammer.

Anonymous said...

Same here, long time swg and wow player , tried eve and i'm staying/ cannot believe i have wasted 4 years on those inferior games . wow for example is a game that has gotton worse and worse over time in every respect.pvp pve community all on a rapid decline. sad truth is that wow will be around forvever and still have 8million players because of all the children playing it

Anonymous said...

Yes Eve is harsh but that is what makes Eve, Eve Online. Everything is like a Wild Wild West and anything really goes. The lost of a ship is more valuable than the epics in WoW. I would figure that if all the lvl 70s in WoW lost their precious purples by a simple gank there would be less kiddies in that game. Eve is harsh and thats what makes it more mature and more rewarding when the mission or life on Eve Online. I switch to this game because of all the stress of the endless grind. Eve makes hardcore communities than 8 million indivudual noobs. Also one person can have an impact on Eve rather than Chinese Gold farmers fluxing the marketline in WoW.

Anonymous said...

It is worth to note that in lowsec you can be ganked while arriving on a gate, even with WTZ, if you are in a weakly tanked ship. The way to do this is to take a ship with a strong tank (so that it can tank the sentry turrets on the gate that will attack it) and fit smartbombs (AoE damage). Once you've warped, but before you have a chance to jump, the offender activates his smartbombs, nuking your ship. Smartbombs do not require a target lock.

If you go to lowsec, and you do not know in advance that the route is empty (by using the map statistics), prepare to die.

The map can be activated by pressing F10. Play around with it. Learn to use it. It is a fine intelligence tool.

Anonymous said...

A tech 1 megapulse geddon can gank a Transport ship in 0.5. See http://www.eve-razor.com/killboard/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=75078

Anonymous said...

d=75078

Anonymous said...

These are good tactics to use. I'm a pretty seasoned pilot but even this past weekend, I was hauling fuel from (Empire to 0.0) to one of our posts and I jumped in to trouble a few times along the way. I must say, you have to know how to stay calm even tho you're heart is beating out of your chest. You stay calm, you live!

Anyways, I was bumped by an enemy frig so he could decloak my hauler (was in a Blockade Runner, the best all around ship for hauling expensive gear and hauling thru low to 0 sec, can now fly cloaked), which he suceeded, I hit the MWD and cloaked again. I figured, if they were going to try hard in killing my ship and taking my fuel, I'm going to try hard to stay alive and keep on to my destination. I was able to prevent the frig from hitting me again even tho he was coming close at times but i just kept changing directions. Crazy!

Overall, use common sense when flying anywhere.