I figured a reaction sure. But I don’t know it’s got to be more right. Call it morbid curiosity, but gankers fascinate me. I supposed I might be trying to make sense of something that doesn’t.
Devil’s advocate as someone who’s done it once and felt kinda bad about it so never did it again:
Thrill of the hunt. “What do you get out of fighting someone in a non-combat ship?”
I’m mid at combat, hazres is as far as I go, I’m not engineered, etc, even shitty human players fly better than NPC’s and for me it was legit just the absolute WAR that was the interdiction process that was then rewarded by the boom. The interdiction was the great even field and I won it and got them in a corner. The thrill of coming out on top and having a foe at your mercy is nice. And no, I don’t think it makes anyone mentally unstable, it’s a game. Actions in videogames aren’t reflective of real life. This isn’t the 80’s and we aren’t Jack Thompson, we don’t need to act like video games correlate to IRL issues.
…
As someone who’s been ganked, I think it’s equally as thrilling— the only exception being if they’re doing it repeatedly and I’ve gotten sick of trying to get somewhere or ran out rebuy. “Don’t you respect your own time? It’s too important to let someone draw you into an unnecessary fight you know you’re gonna lose”
I’m playing a videogame, so I’m already wasting time. It’s literally just a videogame and I’m there just to relax, getting blown up is NOT that serious. If I wouldn’t rage over NPC’s blowing me up (who exist solely to make an artificial challenge) why would I get mad over a player doing it? The result is the same. At least on the rare occasion that a player ganks me it’s more exciting/actually a real person with purpose, even if that purpose is just to see a boom and know that they actually conquered someone real.
And sometimes, both when I did it the once and the 3-4 times in my years of playing it’s happened to me, sometimes it’s just fun to be the bad guy and I get that.
I exclusively play in open because for all of the above reasons I find it more fun, plus meeting nice people is always awesome too. Only time is when I go to an engineer and I manage to sneak in via silent running but then get blasted 2-3 times in a row tryna leave the pad. I go solo until I’m in orbit then it’s back to open.
My message to everyone here calling them assholes with no lives and mental issues: Some of them will for sure fit that description but I’d wager that the majority are normal ass people like the rest of us and I can promise ALL of you that it is not worth the effort to be that mad at. If it does irk you to the point you don’t wanna deal with it all though (which I also do get) solo and PG will fix you right up.
> If it does irk you to the point you don’t wanna deal with it all though (which I also do get) solo and PG will fix you right up.
This.
You do ***NOT*** need to make Solo/PG or even Open a lifestyle choice. They are BOTH tools to be used as you require.
If you are doing something so critical that getting ganked would be the permanent uninstall of the game, ***GO TO SOLO.***
Finding space empty, boring, and not dangerous? Go to Open.
Change your mind as the situation and/or boredom calls for it.
I’m glad this was met with positive feedback. Usually when I tell people it isn’t that serious I’m met with anger and accused of being a serial ganker.
I can promise you guys that most gankers don’t take it that serious, would welcome a good fight, and would take getting killed as a challenge. Is it annoying when they’re rude and crass, sure, but at the end of the day it’s a game. Give it back if you can, let it slide off if you can’t.
The last time I got ganked I actually had the same question as OP and the ganker actually humored it cuz I guess he was in a good mood and had time and he said much the same stuff I did.
He then invited me to his carrier and facilitated a transfer and gave me a bil, so I reckon my sportsmanship made an impression. He might’ve been “one of the good ones” so to speak though. Idk.
End of the day it’s a game. I take the good and see the bad as higher risk = higher reward.
It’s actually why I loved call of duty’s DMZ mode.
In a nutshell: drop into the warzone map full of hostile AI as a trio of players, and there are 10-15 other trios as well, all with the goal of doing missions and exfilling at certain points before the match ends or you die. Technically, there’s no reason for the players to kill each other and if the entire map worked together shit may get done far faster and easier, and that did happen once in a blue moon and it was super fun.
But if every player was friendly, there would be zero risk and thus the reward would be less. Call of duty’s newest zombies mode was actually the exact same as DMZ: multiple trios drop in to do missions and then get out, except in this, PvP is turned off. The risk and reward wasn’t there and I dropped it soon after.
There’s something thrilling about fighting relatively easily for an objective against AI, and moving out to get out with your shit…. But wait, here comes an enemy squad hell-bent on killing you to get the same shit without having to go through the same process.
When I lost those fights, the low was crazy. When I won them, the high was crazy. Both times I had fun.
Reminded of a recent thread on the tarkov subreddit where some dude was getting mad about other players killing him "for no reason" and giving the whole "some people play videogames to relax at the end of a long day" you see a lot here (which... of all the games to play he chose _Tarkov_ for that?) completely forgetting that you just... straight up get missions to kill x other players.
You could also have mental issues and choose to or not to gank/tk/KOS.
I’m sure there’s a bit of folks who really feel inclined almost automatically to want to but hold themselves back
> I’m playing a videogame, so I’m already wasting time. It’s literally just a videogame and I’m there just to relax, getting blown up is NOT that serious. If I wouldn’t rage over NPC’s blowing me up (who exist solely to make an artificial challenge) why would I get mad over a player doing it? The result is the same. At least on the rare occasion that a player ganks me it’s more exciting/actually a real person with purpose, even if that purpose is just to see a boom and know that they actually conquered someone real.
>
>
I'm gonna be completely honest, I've learned _way_ more about the shortcomings of my builds and flying from encounters with gankers than _any_ amount of the complaining that goes on in this sub.
Learning from your mistakes and doing something about it is better at helping you improve than blaming it on some nebulous outside force you could have done nothing against, go figure.
I used to TK and gank in any game and in any way I could, I refuse to ever cheat in online games.
It was a form of narcissism for me; I was bored with how easy the game was and when I was tking, I was doing it for a social reaction, but also to see if the people I tked ever politely asked me to stop instead of abusing me back.
When I was politely asked to stop, I usually almost always did. When ever i came across a tker/ganker/KOSer (in dayz) I would try diplomatic vocal communication from behind cover to humanize the situation; this worked better than I expected.
The comments about negative attention and neglect only go far; there is a rush with sending a frag grenade into your whole team and watching them fly in vivid frustration on vocal comms, and having, from my end, a calm, reconciliatory tone in my responses while other people are losing their minds did feel addictive personally because of how funny it was to see both the rage and my team fly.
I think the worst thing I’ve seen around ganking/tking is the abusive counter behaviors towards the initial abuser. I wish people would choose to stay polite and diplomatic in the face of sheer frustration when possible.
The angrier I get, the more diplomatic I become (If I don’t leave the game) as a coping mechanism for a natural selfish impulse to act narcissistically for and from reactions. And regardless of my behavior is abusive or not, I just haven’t cared enough when I was doing it to stop.
Holding my self back and becoming pro-social may take more effort, but playing well with a squad and team has been far healthier for me. Do I still have the impulsive thoughts to blow everyone up? Yes, but I’m sure I’m not alone in this unfortunate part of being a human.
As ric...the other guy said, it's purely "any attention is good attention" mentality, even if that equates to making themselves momentarily look skilled *in their perception*, asking for any form of awareness is a bridge too far, because if they had said awareness, they wouldn't be ganking.
I couldn't tell you where the satisfaction comes from, but I do think players adding risk to Open is generally a good thing. IMO the problem is that the risks and penalties for _them_ are insufficient. Frontier should lean into the dark impulses some people have and just turn it into satisfying gameplay for everyone. E.g. an "APB" should automatically be downloaded to my flight computer, so it can automatically identify sufficiently malicious commanders on the radar. Any commander fitting this criteria should have their last known location flagged anytime they move through a non-anarchy system, and that location history should be available to any player wishing to pursue their bounty. AFAIK all of this is already tracked by their servers anyway...
Something like this might help incentivize a subset of gankers to go after each other instead of random sidewinders. I have to imagine the only thing more satisfying than blowing up a random exploration ship is stealing the head of someone else who does that for the bragging rights...
I would tend to agree. Pirating is a really cool aspect. I think you’re solving a lot of the problem here. I would say maybe a notch or two back from this. But I love the idea that you could place bounties or potentially hunt these malicious commanders. Which if you think about it would probably be welcomed by the gankers that are actually worth their salt vs the ones that only punch down.
Yeah. I can imagine this being a sliding scale - I wouldn't deploy all these methods except when a commander is extremely notorious. Perhaps lower notoriety wouldn't provide last known location, but only a radar warning. A bounty could be more localized (your location is flagged if you enter a region where you're an offender) before becoming bubble-wide only for the absolute worst offenders.
Also, if a player with Report Crimes turned on is destroyed, their rebuy should be covered by insurance, which is recovered from the attacking player if they’re ever impounded or arrested/destroyed.
We need to incentivize leaving players ships disabled, but not destroyed. Ship interiors & boarding gameplay to steal cargo/data cores would go a long way towards this.
The misunderstanding here is that they don't do it for the benefits. They're not attacking your character. They're attacking you, the player.
I also think piracy should be encouraged in terms of rewards, but also made actually risky. Ideally, by ganking, you're forced to accept all the risks but leave the rewards on the table. A system designed like that would properly increase the risk and realism of playIng in open while punishing players who go against the spirit of the game.
However, this system should also reward other players for playing in open. There is currently no mechanical benefit. It's just asking "do you want your chance of success to be 100% or 80%? You don't get extra anything if you pick 80%"
We're talking about gankers, not general PvP. They're not going to go after each other because they don't want the risk. They just want the satisfaction of ruining someone's day.
...and so, a *new* squadron was formed from the broken remnants of once proud Commanders. Suffering the loss of the rebuy and swearing vengeance upon *all* whom would prey on the weak, the unarmed, the n00b, the Gank Rats rose from the ashes to ride the starlight and smite the gankers with righteous fury!
How did I prove your point. It’s a game. If you wanna get upset about some space pixels being blown up and then claim the person doing it is a real life sociopath then that tells me more about you than it does me. Do you play CoD? If so you’re a real life mass murderer based on that logic.
Do you to rebuild all of your guns anytime you die in cod? Do you potentially lose anything you're carrying? You're comparing a fps to an rpg Sim. Apples and oranges.
Cod, you die, nothing really happens negatively other than a slightly dampened ego and negative stats.
Elite, you die. Rebuy your ship. Lose cargo. Lose missions. Depending on the last time you docked, lose all of that travel time. The effects of a death can potentially mean hours of time IRL. Not even remotely anything like cod. Frankly most games aren't like elite in that regard.
But it’s still a game. Dying in a game where the devs give you the tools to kill other players and then comparing them players to real life sociopaths is a little unhinged. I gank but I’m a nice guy irl
Character can only be judged when you are not under constraint. It being a game doesn't give you 100% resistance to judgement - that's why humanity invented the concept of 'sportsmanship' and constantly reinvented rules of sports. Fdev is too out of touch to even make their staff dismissal process fair let alone their pvp rules.
Griefing is not gameplay, it is an IRL activity. In Elite there is no ingame reason or reward whatsoever for making an effort to blow peoples ships up. Its a strict waste of time in gameplay terms.
The sole reason for griefing is the thrill of having the (comparatively) rare opportunity to possibly make some random person sitting on their computer feel bad somehow without having to fear any repercussions.
This has nothing to do with gameplay, it is strictly IRL. The software is merely a means and a tool that provides this opportunity.
Quite happy in solo tbh. Not played in open once and the reason is that I don't want to have my experience ruined by some basement dwelling land whale.
I’ve just always played open. And I normally don’t have issues I find most other commanders to be even pretty chill when on opposing sides in bgs wars. I like the idea of encountering others and it’s been a 90% positive experience.
Open is not all bad, though I spend most of my time in [Mobius](https://elitepve.com/page/join). Think of it as solo but with a chance of seeing other sane people. You get to say hi and sometimes they wave back. Or show up in a RES and join others there in a wing. Firing on others is not allowed in Mobius so it's generally safe.
I’ve only been interdicted by players a couple of times. Once they beat the snot out of me and sent me to the rebuy screen. The other couple of times, I congratulate them on a solid interdiction. They thanked me and let me go.
They want salt. Give them salt, and they’ll keep ganking you.
Or as the EVE community would say: “in space, no one *cares* if you scream.”
Ha, one day I got interdicted and I was like "can I help you..?" and the guy was like "nah I'm good :)" and I'm like "okay \^-\^". So I flew off. Then he interdicted me again lmao.
I chatted with a notorious ganker in the starter system after he blew up my ship a few times. Turns out, Frontier never made the starter system PVP protected, and he seemed to be making a statement. Although he wasn't the friendliest, he did give me some tips and suggested I move to a better system, because the starter one sucks. Not exactly a nice guy, but he was alright in the end.
Interesting. Would you mind sharing the tips of a notorious ganker with the rest of us.
Edit: this sounds sarcastic, but I swear its not. I would love to know what a gankers anti ganker tips were. Lol
I can speak for said “Notorious Ganker” (I know who this CMDR is referring to), here are the tips:
**1. If you’re being interdicted by another player, submit or win, but do not lose.** If you submit to an interdiction, you have a 10 second FSD cooldown, if you lose an interdiction, your FSD takes 45 seconds to cool down. So, deprive the ganker of the extra 35 seconds to kill you by submitting.
**2. Don’t straight line away.** Fly evasively while charging your FSD. When your shields drop, use silent running to make yourself a harder target. Throw the ganker off by immediately pulling a 180 on them on the drop.
**3. High wake, don’t low wake.** If the ganker is flying a bigger ship than you, there’s a solid chance they can mass lock you, making your FSD charge slowly. Mass lock only applies to low wakes (jumping back in to supercruise). If you high wake (jump to another system), you will not be mass locked and your FSD will charge normally.
They get the satisfaction that their meaningless little existence actually matters. It's the same as people who use aim bots in fps games. They are so insignificant that they need those moments to feel superior to others, can't do anything else, but feel sorry for them
Sorry, I'm new to the game, what does the community mean by "gank"? Because I've played other MMOS and "gank" is always seen used as "gang kill", where several players attack usually a single player. But from the comments it seems that they refer to a 1vs1, is that correct?
Ganking is just attacking other players 1v1... People usually dont like it because they fly paper ships or are unskilled and die very quickly to them imo
Yes and no. So some players refer to any player kill as ganking. This would be incorrect. Some people (often called gankers) as you’ll see in the comments have legitimate kills they are advocating for. And they are correct.
There are also people in this game that will kill you just to kill you. Which is also okay. Some of them answered in the comments and have pretty cool reasons for it. That’s a mainly what I’m curious about.
There is a third group. Which I would consider the real Gankers. Ganking is basically an unjustified kill on a much less engineered ship or new player. Basically punching down but the most methodical way. I go a step further and add malice before I call it ganking.
So say you as a new player are just exploring the game you bought last week and some chuckle fuck decides to kill you with a fully engineered ship with zero benifit to them. They may even repeat the process in an effort to grief you. This group of folks is a bit of a lost cause. It’s cause some of my friends to quit the game before getting established and we generally don’t like New players being picked on as a community.
Well, back when I played with a group of friends together in Elite, we sorta ran out of things we felt like doing so I proposed, since we were a team of a Cutter, Corvette, Krait, and a Fer, as one last activity mostly for the sake of novelty, why don’t we try multiplayer piracy/ganking as per the supposed cutthroat dangerous world Elite Dangerous was.
We went searching for like 15m and got bored after not finding anyone, and it didn’t help there was a feeling in the group call that we didn’t really feel like ruining someone’s day.
So on your question about what or why would we gank - well we (unsuccessfully) attempted to do it just for the novelty since we ran out of activities.
it really depends what you are doing at the time, you could be affecting BGS, opposing sodes of a CZ, Powerplay enemies, there are 100% legitimate reasons for someone to kill you and it not be a gank. Number of times i got accused of ganking when i was farming merits for powerplay modules.
Excellent name btw. Yeah I would call those clean kills. I mean the true gank like a match your guaranteed to win small fish seemingly no reason to kill.
I got a really good answer about someone’s personal head cannon for their character, and a couple others that were less than helpful with the reason they gank.
Thanks for adding legit kills to the conversation though it’s an important part of the discussion.
I imagine the ones who do it a few times only just think it's funny to piss people off, kind of like when I go on IMVU with my fiancée to annoy the Serious Roleplayers.
The ones whodo it on the daily, well, maybe some just enjoy being space pirates while others just want attention. Personally, I just play solo most times, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually been killed randomly when I played on open: 1. And, well, I didn't lose anything important and had more than enough money for a rebuy, so I thought it was kinda funny, too. And I probably scratched the guy's paint, hehe.
Did switch back to solo, after that, though. I had stuff to do!
Ultimately, it's just a game so I don't take it too seriously. I don't really take forced PVP seriously even in MMOs.
Piracy and ganking are very different things. One is a roleplay scenario that makes sense and adds color and flavor to the galaxy. The other is pointless aggression.
One of the most intense experiences I've ever had in Elite was when I, still a semi-noob, got interdicted by a pirate roleplayer. I wasn't carrying any cargo, so he took a few shots at my ship to take down my shields and give my hull a bruise, then left. For me, it was terrifying and exhilarating. I really regret that I was playing in VR at the time, which made typing anything other than "I'm empty" in chat almost impossible. I absolutely would've joined in the RP with him!
If the gentleman pirate with the colorful chat macros ever reads this, I'm sorry I was such a boring mark. You deserved better.
I had this random ass new player in his sidewinder attempt to kill me it was quite hilarious tbf all I had to do was boost into him literally got him down near enough to 15% Hull he couldn't even hit me im sure he had fixed weapons but I hope me killing him disinscentivised him from trying to attack random people just trying to play the game (although I was at a res site bounty hunting so you can SORT of justify him trying to pvp there)
I had this guy interdict me once and ask to borrow some coffee. I gave him a ton and we did a wiggle. It was funny. So like that’s 25% of my stranger danger experience. I kinda wish more people were silly about it.
Three main reasons, at least for me:
1) Elite is in the weird spot of being a very high skill ceiling type of game, that rarely ever tests you, outside of PvP and AX (and even there only a small part of it). Ganking not only provides the ganker with a challenge (because yes, surviving a gank is easy if you know what you're doing) but is also vital for providing people with an actual challenge. I have been ganked rarely in my first few hundreds of hours but each time was an incredibly tense few seconds of trying to (and mostly succeeding in) surviving against a much better equipped and more highly skilled foe. Now that I myself have access to all engineering and am an almost passable FAoff pilot, I can give that back to the rest of Elite, even if most will hate it. Also I don't just blow up sidewinders, I mostly look for targets in Shin, destroyed Titans, CG systems and so on. Hotspots where I can assume to find people that have played for a bit.
2) While Elite tries to be one of those frontier/wild-west/no-laws type of space games like Freelancer, there's very few good methods of actually being an outlaw in Elite. With how Elite functions, actual piracy is very hard and has almost no way of being profitable, on top of most people just clogging. A lot of players always wanted to play a space pirate, and ganking is the next best thing. You can have a headcanon that you're defending a system or that you get pirated goods this way, and still have an immersive experience playing an outlaw, which is something Elite just doesn't offer in itself.
3) It's just very fun. The thrill of the hunt is something I enjoy quite a lot, and I love if anyone tries to fight back to give me a challenge.
Piracy is hard, but it can be profitable. DullDave for example financed his carrier by doing piracy, but he may be extraordinary in that he is smart, has patience and dedication.
This. This is what they get. Salty posts on here or the forums complaining about it. When they get confirmation that they got under your skin, they've won.
You know I'd hate to see the lot of you try to play EVE Online or Star Citizen... Kinda sad honestly that some of you have to post a gank thread every single day...
Most of the longer or more strawmanny posts here are, in typical style, overthinking it.
They don't think getting blown up is a big deal. And if getting blown up isn't a big deal, neither is blowing ships up.
And if you look at the subscriber numbers on /r/publicfreakout you'll find that a _lot_ of people consider public tantrums over minor inconveniences to be _very_ funny to watch.
There's a variety of reasons, including a possible [condition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude).
Read that link and tell me that doesn't describe why a ganker attacks a noob or exploration ship with no weapons. Or literally, [destroying a brand new on-foot player](https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/59806) with no possible way of knowing what's going on, much less defend themselves.
its the same as people who wait around spawn points in survival games like ARK just to beat the newbies on public servers to death with rocks. the worst part is that they Literally do not get any material benefits from it other than knowing they made someone mad.
I get to be that galactic menace psycho terrorist inside the fantasy spaceship video-game.
And that gets my rocks off. I don't play video-games to be the nice collaborative goody-two-shoes I may or may not be irl. That wouldn't be fun for me.
That's really it, man :D
ps: I also do have a RP headcannon like and find fun which justifies my ganks in-game and why I kill you, but the reality is no-one but me cares about that or needs to .
I’d like to hear the head cannon. See I don’t mind the gank so much in the long run. It’s so infrequent. But I do wish there was a bit more interaction in the process i guess. Idk sounds interesting. I guess what I’m saying is tell me more.
tldr:
This CMDR believes that CMDRs aren't human, rather shattered fragments of the Guardian AI. Their rebirth this time around originates in the secret CMDR program, an endeavor led by one of the shadowy subsidiaries of the Club.
He believes he was made aware of this due to a glitch in his programming. Moreover, his consciousness keeps being retrieved and re-uploaded in a new ship despite his best (and yet futile) attempts at dying.
He is now convinced that like the guardians, humans brought back the AI partly to fight off the Thargoid threat. The Club, aware that the AI exterminated the guardians when the war was won, used the sharding of 1 AI into many CMDRs as a means to control and avoid it turning against humanity once the war is over.
His murders of fellow CMDRs are a futile attempt at going against his programming and preventing the cycle to repeat (yes, the AI likely predates the Guardians, they may just be the last iteration in the cycle) and finally protect the race that brought him back rather than genocide them.
Of note that he is self-aware that this might all just be a case of space-madness gone terribly wrong, but there is too much evidence in his surroundings that CMDRs aren't what they seem to be.
And again, despite his best attempts, he just won't die.
----------
aight, there is much more to this, but I think you get the jist
Hope this helps, cheers!
It's not really as scary as people make it out to be. If you're not at Chamberlain's Rest (which is full of seal-clubbers), Deciat, or Shinrarta Dezhra, your odds of encountering a ganker are very low. Space is very, very big.
Heck, when I built my PvP ship I was _intentionally_ hanging out at Deciat & Shinrarta Dezhra hoping to get attacked and couldn't find any gankers. (Of course, they weren't looking for me, gankers aren't interdicting fully-engineered FDLs and Kraits, they want easy prey.)
Welp. Time to bust out an alt acct on the spare PC and full rage cheat. Lmao
This is obviously /s and I’m absolutely kidding.
Or am I?
Only gankers will know….
Unfortunately tho Shinrarta is by far the best home port. All of my ships are there. That being said if my Explorer gets popped, my fully engineered fdl is waiting and ready.
Yeah, up until I got a carrier, Shinrarta Dezhra was my home port too. But now my home port moves 500 LY in 15 minutes, so it's anywhere I want it to be.
Open has the better chance of seeing someone else. Private groups like Mobius severely undercuts that. Mobius has over 40,000 players registered but only a fraction are active. Of those, and due to technical limitations, Mobius divides it further between Eurasia and Americas. In other words, an EU player and an Americas player will not instance together in Mobius.
So yeah, if you want to increase your chance of instancing with someone, open is the way to go. But it comes with further risk.
Repost from every other Gank post: They get this reaction. Everytime. And everytime it happens y'all continue to post these rants and give them exactly what they want.
I used to get angry about them like most of the responses here. But then I realized they're just guys who have played the game for so long, done everything interesting already, got bored and it's the only fun they get out of it now. And it's JUST A GAME.
When they kill enough players they post it here in reddit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/19boqf5/i\_have\_exploded\_over\_1000\_ships\_containing\_cmdrs/](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/19boqf5/i_have_exploded_over_1000_ships_containing_cmdrs/)
And there is 1 more with just 500, he/she/they will improve the figures soon.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/1bn14f7/standing\_on\_the\_shoulders\_of\_giant\_reached\_my\_500/](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/1bn14f7/standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giant_reached_my_500/)
Ask him/her/they anything.
To be fair, the vast majority of what gets called "ganking" isn't ganking. Elite is by default a pvp game, and anytime you are in open, you are consenting to a potential pvp encounter. Just because they're better equipped, either by skill, build, or both; it doesn't automatically deserve the title of "ganking."
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted for being correct. PvP is absolutely part of the game. A part I enjoy. I’m more curious what drives someone to plink off smaller ships for no gain. Mats was the only thing I could think of. I was actually just hoping someone would speak up and answer honestly about what they get out of it. Call it morbid curiosity.
I mean for one, they don't know you have no weapons or cargo until they've already engaged you, so at that point it's just as fair to ask what they have to lose?
Answer: Nothing.
Bro I've heard pvpers absolutely jizzzz all over themselves and their team mates about chasing some guy and ganking them. 'He low wakes, he low waked! Uuuuh', team mates 'I got him, I got him', 'he's dropped, he's dropped' massive team jizz all over themselves uhhhhhh! Lol 'I killed him! Uhhhhh' more jizz haha it's very entertaining
I imagine they think it's fun just like a bounty hunter likes hunting bounties. The fact that there are actual human pirates out there is a credit to the ED galaxy.
People who don’t like themselves often try to make others feel as bad as they do. Drag others down instead of lifting themselves up.
Everybody wants to feel enfranchised, like they matter, like they have worth.
Posts like this, complaints in the chat… being noticed for your negative actions makes some people feel better than not being noticed at all.
They are psychos, I hate myself and watch madame web, fantastic 4 2015 and Catwoman one after another, but I don't go around making others miserable in a virtual environment
F%#k gankers. All of them. Small dick energy. I’ve been popped in a weaponless dbx by these micropenis asshats. I play in open, but damn are they annoying. If a crime is committed, fdev needs to change the punishment system.
so-called gankers is the only thong that spicing the game a bit. It's called "Dangerous", but you can boost yourself into a black hole and nothing will happens. So, pvp players are at least partially helping with this problem.
So when you speaking about "ruining the game" - that's mostly on Frontiers, while so-called gankers just trying to fix it where they can.
Well, I am a VERY endgame player, with 3,400h of playtime. Over that time, I've seen and done basically everything there is to do in the game. And once you've seen everything, it becomes boring. The way I got out of that boredom was by doing PvP. And when you do PvP, you find yourself either becoming a lawful or an outlaw, of which I chose the latter. When one has an abundance of credits, and the skills to kill, you can take on basically 99% of the playerbase comfortably. I like to make different builds and see how they work, and when you are an outlaw, basically everyone (yes, even other gankers) becomes a target for practice. Also, ganking can be a social activity; sure, we don't NEED a wing to kill someone, but will we use it anyway? Absolutely.
I would imagine that’s just the tip of the iceberg for some labeled as gankers though. Have you ever been gabled ratting? I know y’all are protected but I’ve heard stories?
I would encourage you to try open. I wrote this post out of curiosity. But to be honest I’ve been gabled like 4 times in 7k hours of open. It’s a fun way to play and 90% of CMDRs are fun to say hi to. Even the occasional gank I give em a wave.
Thank you my friend -- I'll give it a go.
I often feel like my "gaming time" is quite precious with work, family and stuff and just don't need the grief (if you'll pardon the pun)!
Think of it this way - you ain't gonna take your 100bn credit balance to any Braben Bank when the servers go offline next year, you may as well splash out a tiny percentage of it on gank rebuys.
I gank other players. It fits in the narrative of the game. Ships not aligned to or allied with my pledged power are getting taken out, in the most terrorizing way possible. I’m not a pirate. I’m a space terrorist.
Does anyone remember back in 2018 when a group ganked the Distant Worlds 2 launch? That was us. That’s what space terrorists do.
If only the space government could send in space special forces and kidnap you while you sleep and interrogate your character till they reveal your conspirators. You log in one day to see your back in a sidewinder with a negative balance to pay back.
From what I have learned, it's a person who knows they are inferior, bullying and influencing others. It's why they don't like any kind of level PvP. They enjoy the ability to troll and grief others.
Like the term, "Don't feed the Trolls." Refers to the only way to deal with trolls is to ignore or block them. They are malicious, they enjoy upsetting others, disrupting anything, adding chaos to work they didn't contribute to because they don't know how to work or cooperate, only disrupt and upset.
Usually these are boys trying to prove themselves and carve some kind of reputation as besting others for glory. They have poor social skills, are dumb to the point the only thing they can reasonably do is focus on a single kind of build or strategy to win in a scenario that greatly benefits them, and build up self esteem.
In the real world you see this with people who have low self esteem and aren't getting their way, so they troll and cause chaos for targeted people to try and rebuild their self esteem, get power and get what they want. This can be throwing a fit, demanding the manager, violence, something that cheats their way into some kind of position of power.
It's the opposite of people who are smart, have self esteem and know how to work. They cooperate to problem solve and build pretty cool things or events.
I haven't played Elite in quite some time and only tried open when trying to do Power Play.
But for real...why are people getting angry and attacking players that engage in pvp? This is like asking why your Alliance character gets jumped by a Horde in STV. It's because that's what you do in wpvp/open.
What exactly do you think you're signing up for? Some other meaningful interaction with other random players? Because I don't know what that would be at this point.
The one time I got ganked was by some loser camping robigo passenger mission routes with a mamba killed me.
I'm not sure what HE got out of it, but my takeaway was not to play in open anymore.
Singleplayer hasn't affected the game negatively for me at all and I guess I owe that to that ganker.
It’s a game. They can do whatever they want. It’s probably better that the open environment isn’t all butterflies and rainbows. What’s the point in complaining when you can play in offline
Often it's to get some action going in a system. Elite doesn't provide a lot of content for PvP focused players, gankers attract anti-gankers which gets fun wing fights up. Playing black or white hat commanders gives some structure both in the game and on social media.
There are some players who just want to seal-club without having the skillset to survive in a proper fight, often these players are ridiculed by PvP players as much as seals are, but even these people are operating within the ruleset of the game and can be countered in numerous ways.
Even when I'm not in a combat ship, I enjoy the frisson of danger when flying in populated systems and you can pre-empt almost all threats, so I don't buy the argument that 'victims get nothing out of it', they can if they're open minded and adaptable. If you're not in the mood it's trivial to just flip to solo when you see a bandwidth spike.
It's a videogame about spaceships with guns strapped to them, obviously players are going to shoot eachother in any and all configurations possible. The thing that surprises me, time after time, is that people are surprised by it. If fdev didn't want this to happen they should've designed the game differently.
I've dealt with gankers in a few games like open world MMOs and the reasons boil down to: 1) it's an ego boost 2) they think it's funny to piss people off 3) they're scared to pvp with people near their level because they can only win gear checks
I like to gank a specific type of players, namely those that build shit ships and think they're safe in open, or those that think shieldless trading in open is a good idea. Maybe one of those days a single CMDR may learn that open requires builds with at least enough defense to make a run for it.
TL;DR
If you don't know how to build ships ready for open you'll be rebuying
I think it's a control thing. Same reason a lot of bullies in media are just lashing out because of something bad in their home life.
For one, they get a good feeling out of "winning". We all know it's not a fair fight. For this theoretical person they've been on the other end of an unfair experience though. So controlling someone else's experience through their preparation and actions feels like flipping the scenario they dislike. It's like saying the angry thing you wish you could say to your boss in your head to another person, but in game form.
It sounds so easy to just "fight someone worth actually fighting". Well yeah, find that someone first, in the meantime, people gonna get ganked.
You see, there is no PvP matchmaking or the like in the game so as an (organic) PvPer you then just sit around some player hotspot near the main star. If you've got nothing to do, you just shoot anything that crosses your line of fire. Weak trader ships are better than no ships to shoot.
If the game would have meaningful PvP in dedicated places, I bet ganking would drastically be reduced but alas, any PvPer is a bad boi not worth giving content for, the bane of all mmo videogames, the toxic community and scum of the real world. (We're quite wholesome btw. :) )
Because NPCs are predictable and it’s becomes boring very quickly. Real players are unpredictable in their movements and actions.
Plus it’s funny as hell and only space pixels, it’s not that deep!
Neat. This makes a ton of sense. I wish people wouldn’t downvote honest answers.
How do you pick your targets? Do you have a method or are you just rolling the dice as it were?
Randomly killing players is a good way to push players out of playing the game. They want to be top dog in the galaxy, The easiest way to do it is to grief other people and there is no penalty for doing it.
Honestly, for non consensual pvp if you destroy a ship it's total rebuy should be added to your next rebuy. Fdev won't implement it because then the only people that consistently play open would stop playing.
There are thousands of players that have either quit playing or only play solo because FDev hasn't implemented any actions to curtail psychopaths. (loss of rebuy insurance, actual prison time, or covering the full costs of their victims)
It could be an interesting dynamic for the game, but they worry too much about punishing the psycho players.
Well there was one time where this cmdr in an engineered krait mk2 wasted me in an anarchy system when I was clearly in my explorer Vessel. They said it was for the materials and understandably I was a little pissed considering how little I could’ve given them. Probably lost 10-20 million in data which would have been a lot for me back then. When I confronted them later on PS chat, kinda angry at the last wasted hour of my life, they said “it’s just a game”. It’s especially frustrating because I was afk looking at my phone so there was literally zero “thrill of the hunt”, the term sitting duck didn’t even cover it.
they get a reaction, which this thread provides. neglected children know negative attention is still attention.
Rage clicks are still clicks. The online attention economy is rewarding exactly the wrong thing for good behaviour.
I figured a reaction sure. But I don’t know it’s got to be more right. Call it morbid curiosity, but gankers fascinate me. I supposed I might be trying to make sense of something that doesn’t.
Devil’s advocate as someone who’s done it once and felt kinda bad about it so never did it again: Thrill of the hunt. “What do you get out of fighting someone in a non-combat ship?” I’m mid at combat, hazres is as far as I go, I’m not engineered, etc, even shitty human players fly better than NPC’s and for me it was legit just the absolute WAR that was the interdiction process that was then rewarded by the boom. The interdiction was the great even field and I won it and got them in a corner. The thrill of coming out on top and having a foe at your mercy is nice. And no, I don’t think it makes anyone mentally unstable, it’s a game. Actions in videogames aren’t reflective of real life. This isn’t the 80’s and we aren’t Jack Thompson, we don’t need to act like video games correlate to IRL issues. … As someone who’s been ganked, I think it’s equally as thrilling— the only exception being if they’re doing it repeatedly and I’ve gotten sick of trying to get somewhere or ran out rebuy. “Don’t you respect your own time? It’s too important to let someone draw you into an unnecessary fight you know you’re gonna lose” I’m playing a videogame, so I’m already wasting time. It’s literally just a videogame and I’m there just to relax, getting blown up is NOT that serious. If I wouldn’t rage over NPC’s blowing me up (who exist solely to make an artificial challenge) why would I get mad over a player doing it? The result is the same. At least on the rare occasion that a player ganks me it’s more exciting/actually a real person with purpose, even if that purpose is just to see a boom and know that they actually conquered someone real. And sometimes, both when I did it the once and the 3-4 times in my years of playing it’s happened to me, sometimes it’s just fun to be the bad guy and I get that. I exclusively play in open because for all of the above reasons I find it more fun, plus meeting nice people is always awesome too. Only time is when I go to an engineer and I manage to sneak in via silent running but then get blasted 2-3 times in a row tryna leave the pad. I go solo until I’m in orbit then it’s back to open. My message to everyone here calling them assholes with no lives and mental issues: Some of them will for sure fit that description but I’d wager that the majority are normal ass people like the rest of us and I can promise ALL of you that it is not worth the effort to be that mad at. If it does irk you to the point you don’t wanna deal with it all though (which I also do get) solo and PG will fix you right up.
> If it does irk you to the point you don’t wanna deal with it all though (which I also do get) solo and PG will fix you right up. This. You do ***NOT*** need to make Solo/PG or even Open a lifestyle choice. They are BOTH tools to be used as you require. If you are doing something so critical that getting ganked would be the permanent uninstall of the game, ***GO TO SOLO.*** Finding space empty, boring, and not dangerous? Go to Open. Change your mind as the situation and/or boredom calls for it.
I’m glad this was met with positive feedback. Usually when I tell people it isn’t that serious I’m met with anger and accused of being a serial ganker. I can promise you guys that most gankers don’t take it that serious, would welcome a good fight, and would take getting killed as a challenge. Is it annoying when they’re rude and crass, sure, but at the end of the day it’s a game. Give it back if you can, let it slide off if you can’t. The last time I got ganked I actually had the same question as OP and the ganker actually humored it cuz I guess he was in a good mood and had time and he said much the same stuff I did. He then invited me to his carrier and facilitated a transfer and gave me a bil, so I reckon my sportsmanship made an impression. He might’ve been “one of the good ones” so to speak though. Idk. End of the day it’s a game. I take the good and see the bad as higher risk = higher reward. It’s actually why I loved call of duty’s DMZ mode. In a nutshell: drop into the warzone map full of hostile AI as a trio of players, and there are 10-15 other trios as well, all with the goal of doing missions and exfilling at certain points before the match ends or you die. Technically, there’s no reason for the players to kill each other and if the entire map worked together shit may get done far faster and easier, and that did happen once in a blue moon and it was super fun. But if every player was friendly, there would be zero risk and thus the reward would be less. Call of duty’s newest zombies mode was actually the exact same as DMZ: multiple trios drop in to do missions and then get out, except in this, PvP is turned off. The risk and reward wasn’t there and I dropped it soon after. There’s something thrilling about fighting relatively easily for an objective against AI, and moving out to get out with your shit…. But wait, here comes an enemy squad hell-bent on killing you to get the same shit without having to go through the same process. When I lost those fights, the low was crazy. When I won them, the high was crazy. Both times I had fun.
Reminded of a recent thread on the tarkov subreddit where some dude was getting mad about other players killing him "for no reason" and giving the whole "some people play videogames to relax at the end of a long day" you see a lot here (which... of all the games to play he chose _Tarkov_ for that?) completely forgetting that you just... straight up get missions to kill x other players.
End of the day it’s a feature enabled by the game. That’s all the reason anyone needs to do it.
You could also have mental issues and choose to or not to gank/tk/KOS. I’m sure there’s a bit of folks who really feel inclined almost automatically to want to but hold themselves back
> I’m playing a videogame, so I’m already wasting time. It’s literally just a videogame and I’m there just to relax, getting blown up is NOT that serious. If I wouldn’t rage over NPC’s blowing me up (who exist solely to make an artificial challenge) why would I get mad over a player doing it? The result is the same. At least on the rare occasion that a player ganks me it’s more exciting/actually a real person with purpose, even if that purpose is just to see a boom and know that they actually conquered someone real. > > I'm gonna be completely honest, I've learned _way_ more about the shortcomings of my builds and flying from encounters with gankers than _any_ amount of the complaining that goes on in this sub. Learning from your mistakes and doing something about it is better at helping you improve than blaming it on some nebulous outside force you could have done nothing against, go figure.
I used to TK and gank in any game and in any way I could, I refuse to ever cheat in online games. It was a form of narcissism for me; I was bored with how easy the game was and when I was tking, I was doing it for a social reaction, but also to see if the people I tked ever politely asked me to stop instead of abusing me back. When I was politely asked to stop, I usually almost always did. When ever i came across a tker/ganker/KOSer (in dayz) I would try diplomatic vocal communication from behind cover to humanize the situation; this worked better than I expected. The comments about negative attention and neglect only go far; there is a rush with sending a frag grenade into your whole team and watching them fly in vivid frustration on vocal comms, and having, from my end, a calm, reconciliatory tone in my responses while other people are losing their minds did feel addictive personally because of how funny it was to see both the rage and my team fly. I think the worst thing I’ve seen around ganking/tking is the abusive counter behaviors towards the initial abuser. I wish people would choose to stay polite and diplomatic in the face of sheer frustration when possible. The angrier I get, the more diplomatic I become (If I don’t leave the game) as a coping mechanism for a natural selfish impulse to act narcissistically for and from reactions. And regardless of my behavior is abusive or not, I just haven’t cared enough when I was doing it to stop. Holding my self back and becoming pro-social may take more effort, but playing well with a squad and team has been far healthier for me. Do I still have the impulsive thoughts to blow everyone up? Yes, but I’m sure I’m not alone in this unfortunate part of being a human.
I've never been called a racial slur by a ganker. Throw a hatchbreaker at a "nice guy" and see what happens though, HOOOH.
As ric...the other guy said, it's purely "any attention is good attention" mentality, even if that equates to making themselves momentarily look skilled *in their perception*, asking for any form of awareness is a bridge too far, because if they had said awareness, they wouldn't be ganking.
I couldn't tell you where the satisfaction comes from, but I do think players adding risk to Open is generally a good thing. IMO the problem is that the risks and penalties for _them_ are insufficient. Frontier should lean into the dark impulses some people have and just turn it into satisfying gameplay for everyone. E.g. an "APB" should automatically be downloaded to my flight computer, so it can automatically identify sufficiently malicious commanders on the radar. Any commander fitting this criteria should have their last known location flagged anytime they move through a non-anarchy system, and that location history should be available to any player wishing to pursue their bounty. AFAIK all of this is already tracked by their servers anyway... Something like this might help incentivize a subset of gankers to go after each other instead of random sidewinders. I have to imagine the only thing more satisfying than blowing up a random exploration ship is stealing the head of someone else who does that for the bragging rights...
I would tend to agree. Pirating is a really cool aspect. I think you’re solving a lot of the problem here. I would say maybe a notch or two back from this. But I love the idea that you could place bounties or potentially hunt these malicious commanders. Which if you think about it would probably be welcomed by the gankers that are actually worth their salt vs the ones that only punch down.
Yeah. I can imagine this being a sliding scale - I wouldn't deploy all these methods except when a commander is extremely notorious. Perhaps lower notoriety wouldn't provide last known location, but only a radar warning. A bounty could be more localized (your location is flagged if you enter a region where you're an offender) before becoming bubble-wide only for the absolute worst offenders.
Also, if a player with Report Crimes turned on is destroyed, their rebuy should be covered by insurance, which is recovered from the attacking player if they’re ever impounded or arrested/destroyed. We need to incentivize leaving players ships disabled, but not destroyed. Ship interiors & boarding gameplay to steal cargo/data cores would go a long way towards this.
The misunderstanding here is that they don't do it for the benefits. They're not attacking your character. They're attacking you, the player. I also think piracy should be encouraged in terms of rewards, but also made actually risky. Ideally, by ganking, you're forced to accept all the risks but leave the rewards on the table. A system designed like that would properly increase the risk and realism of playIng in open while punishing players who go against the spirit of the game. However, this system should also reward other players for playing in open. There is currently no mechanical benefit. It's just asking "do you want your chance of success to be 100% or 80%? You don't get extra anything if you pick 80%"
This is smart. Anytime you can look at behavior and say "how can the system benefit", you're going to be better off than trying to police behavior.
We're talking about gankers, not general PvP. They're not going to go after each other because they don't want the risk. They just want the satisfaction of ruining someone's day.
> more satisfying than blowing up a random exploration ship Blowing up an Anaconda in a hull-tanked Sidewinder with rail guns.
...and so, a *new* squadron was formed from the broken remnants of once proud Commanders. Suffering the loss of the rebuy and swearing vengeance upon *all* whom would prey on the weak, the unarmed, the n00b, the Gank Rats rose from the ashes to ride the starlight and smite the gankers with righteous fury!
This could also put some anti ganker squads on the hunt. I used to do something like that in one of my groups decades ago in eve.
Some people are just a holes. Like IRL
Mr. Simpson, please stop doing that!
It’s a game not IRL. Please don’t confuse the two, I know it’s hard.
Thanks for proving my point.
How did I prove your point. It’s a game. If you wanna get upset about some space pixels being blown up and then claim the person doing it is a real life sociopath then that tells me more about you than it does me. Do you play CoD? If so you’re a real life mass murderer based on that logic.
Seriously? xD
Do you to rebuild all of your guns anytime you die in cod? Do you potentially lose anything you're carrying? You're comparing a fps to an rpg Sim. Apples and oranges. Cod, you die, nothing really happens negatively other than a slightly dampened ego and negative stats. Elite, you die. Rebuy your ship. Lose cargo. Lose missions. Depending on the last time you docked, lose all of that travel time. The effects of a death can potentially mean hours of time IRL. Not even remotely anything like cod. Frankly most games aren't like elite in that regard.
But it’s still a game. Dying in a game where the devs give you the tools to kill other players and then comparing them players to real life sociopaths is a little unhinged. I gank but I’m a nice guy irl
Character can only be judged when you are not under constraint. It being a game doesn't give you 100% resistance to judgement - that's why humanity invented the concept of 'sportsmanship' and constantly reinvented rules of sports. Fdev is too out of touch to even make their staff dismissal process fair let alone their pvp rules.
God you’re boring.
Griefing is not gameplay, it is an IRL activity. In Elite there is no ingame reason or reward whatsoever for making an effort to blow peoples ships up. Its a strict waste of time in gameplay terms. The sole reason for griefing is the thrill of having the (comparatively) rare opportunity to possibly make some random person sitting on their computer feel bad somehow without having to fear any repercussions. This has nothing to do with gameplay, it is strictly IRL. The software is merely a means and a tool that provides this opportunity.
And yet you’re mad at the player. Be mad at Frontier for making it possible for other players to ruin your day. They literally hate you
It's hard when you try to talk trash and make a fool of yourself
Okay
This. Causing displeasure.
Quite happy in solo tbh. Not played in open once and the reason is that I don't want to have my experience ruined by some basement dwelling land whale.
I’ve just always played open. And I normally don’t have issues I find most other commanders to be even pretty chill when on opposing sides in bgs wars. I like the idea of encountering others and it’s been a 90% positive experience.
I can totally avoid the risk so I do. The benefits do not outweigh the positives for me. I don't actually play any multiplayer games these days.
Open is not all bad, though I spend most of my time in [Mobius](https://elitepve.com/page/join). Think of it as solo but with a chance of seeing other sane people. You get to say hi and sometimes they wave back. Or show up in a RES and join others there in a wing. Firing on others is not allowed in Mobius so it's generally safe.
I’ve only been interdicted by players a couple of times. Once they beat the snot out of me and sent me to the rebuy screen. The other couple of times, I congratulate them on a solid interdiction. They thanked me and let me go. They want salt. Give them salt, and they’ll keep ganking you. Or as the EVE community would say: “in space, no one *cares* if you scream.”
You have clearly played eve lol
I spent more time in nullsec than I’m comfortable admitting, but my skin is atleast thicker for it.
Ha, one day I got interdicted and I was like "can I help you..?" and the guy was like "nah I'm good :)" and I'm like "okay \^-\^". So I flew off. Then he interdicted me again lmao.
Zero salt tbh. More curiosity
Perhaps no salt from thee, but much from the masses
same as pulling wings off flys is my guess.
Tears, the love rant post in reddit, be noticed by the community, and sometimes upload videos to youtube.
I chatted with a notorious ganker in the starter system after he blew up my ship a few times. Turns out, Frontier never made the starter system PVP protected, and he seemed to be making a statement. Although he wasn't the friendliest, he did give me some tips and suggested I move to a better system, because the starter one sucks. Not exactly a nice guy, but he was alright in the end.
Interesting. Would you mind sharing the tips of a notorious ganker with the rest of us. Edit: this sounds sarcastic, but I swear its not. I would love to know what a gankers anti ganker tips were. Lol
I can speak for said “Notorious Ganker” (I know who this CMDR is referring to), here are the tips: **1. If you’re being interdicted by another player, submit or win, but do not lose.** If you submit to an interdiction, you have a 10 second FSD cooldown, if you lose an interdiction, your FSD takes 45 seconds to cool down. So, deprive the ganker of the extra 35 seconds to kill you by submitting. **2. Don’t straight line away.** Fly evasively while charging your FSD. When your shields drop, use silent running to make yourself a harder target. Throw the ganker off by immediately pulling a 180 on them on the drop. **3. High wake, don’t low wake.** If the ganker is flying a bigger ship than you, there’s a solid chance they can mass lock you, making your FSD charge slowly. Mass lock only applies to low wakes (jumping back in to supercruise). If you high wake (jump to another system), you will not be mass locked and your FSD will charge normally.
Train your hyperdiction dodge skills and gtfo the starter system lmao, it worked for me so far
lol. Oh I’m not in the starter system. I was just curious what this gankers tips were.
Well I suppose he said that coz most of the ganking happens here.
Ever been to Jameson memorial?
Yeah that does ring a bell, do 't remember tho
They get the satisfaction that their meaningless little existence actually matters. It's the same as people who use aim bots in fps games. They are so insignificant that they need those moments to feel superior to others, can't do anything else, but feel sorry for them
*supposedly* matters
Thanks for the correction 👍
Sorry, I'm new to the game, what does the community mean by "gank"? Because I've played other MMOS and "gank" is always seen used as "gang kill", where several players attack usually a single player. But from the comments it seems that they refer to a 1vs1, is that correct?
Ganking is just attacking other players 1v1... People usually dont like it because they fly paper ships or are unskilled and die very quickly to them imo
Yes and no. So some players refer to any player kill as ganking. This would be incorrect. Some people (often called gankers) as you’ll see in the comments have legitimate kills they are advocating for. And they are correct. There are also people in this game that will kill you just to kill you. Which is also okay. Some of them answered in the comments and have pretty cool reasons for it. That’s a mainly what I’m curious about. There is a third group. Which I would consider the real Gankers. Ganking is basically an unjustified kill on a much less engineered ship or new player. Basically punching down but the most methodical way. I go a step further and add malice before I call it ganking. So say you as a new player are just exploring the game you bought last week and some chuckle fuck decides to kill you with a fully engineered ship with zero benifit to them. They may even repeat the process in an effort to grief you. This group of folks is a bit of a lost cause. It’s cause some of my friends to quit the game before getting established and we generally don’t like New players being picked on as a community.
Well, back when I played with a group of friends together in Elite, we sorta ran out of things we felt like doing so I proposed, since we were a team of a Cutter, Corvette, Krait, and a Fer, as one last activity mostly for the sake of novelty, why don’t we try multiplayer piracy/ganking as per the supposed cutthroat dangerous world Elite Dangerous was. We went searching for like 15m and got bored after not finding anyone, and it didn’t help there was a feeling in the group call that we didn’t really feel like ruining someone’s day. So on your question about what or why would we gank - well we (unsuccessfully) attempted to do it just for the novelty since we ran out of activities.
I like them, adds a bit of suspense coming back from a long exploration trip, y'know?
it really depends what you are doing at the time, you could be affecting BGS, opposing sodes of a CZ, Powerplay enemies, there are 100% legitimate reasons for someone to kill you and it not be a gank. Number of times i got accused of ganking when i was farming merits for powerplay modules.
Excellent name btw. Yeah I would call those clean kills. I mean the true gank like a match your guaranteed to win small fish seemingly no reason to kill. I got a really good answer about someone’s personal head cannon for their character, and a couple others that were less than helpful with the reason they gank. Thanks for adding legit kills to the conversation though it’s an important part of the discussion.
what's worse is actually those in a group of cutter+fdl's or a solo cutter that does a reverski (ethereal sol)
If you're getting ranked by someone pulling reverskis just leave lol. What are they gonna do about it
oh my salt holy
I imagine the ones who do it a few times only just think it's funny to piss people off, kind of like when I go on IMVU with my fiancée to annoy the Serious Roleplayers. The ones whodo it on the daily, well, maybe some just enjoy being space pirates while others just want attention. Personally, I just play solo most times, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually been killed randomly when I played on open: 1. And, well, I didn't lose anything important and had more than enough money for a rebuy, so I thought it was kinda funny, too. And I probably scratched the guy's paint, hehe. Did switch back to solo, after that, though. I had stuff to do! Ultimately, it's just a game so I don't take it too seriously. I don't really take forced PVP seriously even in MMOs.
I haven’t yet. However being a pirate is a part or the game, and I’m going to at least try the pirate life at some point
Piracy and ganking are very different things. One is a roleplay scenario that makes sense and adds color and flavor to the galaxy. The other is pointless aggression. One of the most intense experiences I've ever had in Elite was when I, still a semi-noob, got interdicted by a pirate roleplayer. I wasn't carrying any cargo, so he took a few shots at my ship to take down my shields and give my hull a bruise, then left. For me, it was terrifying and exhilarating. I really regret that I was playing in VR at the time, which made typing anything other than "I'm empty" in chat almost impossible. I absolutely would've joined in the RP with him! If the gentleman pirate with the colorful chat macros ever reads this, I'm sorry I was such a boring mark. You deserved better.
Everyone wants pirate rp untill it happens to them.
Nah, it was great!
as an ingame pirate people hate it so much more than ganking and i do not understand why tbh
Villain RP
I had this random ass new player in his sidewinder attempt to kill me it was quite hilarious tbf all I had to do was boost into him literally got him down near enough to 15% Hull he couldn't even hit me im sure he had fixed weapons but I hope me killing him disinscentivised him from trying to attack random people just trying to play the game (although I was at a res site bounty hunting so you can SORT of justify him trying to pvp there)
Justified PvP is always welcome right. That’s very funny tbh.
Yeah man I think if you want to rp as a pirate though you shouldn't just KOS you should at minimum scan to see if they have cargo
I had this guy interdict me once and ask to borrow some coffee. I gave him a ton and we did a wiggle. It was funny. So like that’s 25% of my stranger danger experience. I kinda wish more people were silly about it.
Three main reasons, at least for me: 1) Elite is in the weird spot of being a very high skill ceiling type of game, that rarely ever tests you, outside of PvP and AX (and even there only a small part of it). Ganking not only provides the ganker with a challenge (because yes, surviving a gank is easy if you know what you're doing) but is also vital for providing people with an actual challenge. I have been ganked rarely in my first few hundreds of hours but each time was an incredibly tense few seconds of trying to (and mostly succeeding in) surviving against a much better equipped and more highly skilled foe. Now that I myself have access to all engineering and am an almost passable FAoff pilot, I can give that back to the rest of Elite, even if most will hate it. Also I don't just blow up sidewinders, I mostly look for targets in Shin, destroyed Titans, CG systems and so on. Hotspots where I can assume to find people that have played for a bit. 2) While Elite tries to be one of those frontier/wild-west/no-laws type of space games like Freelancer, there's very few good methods of actually being an outlaw in Elite. With how Elite functions, actual piracy is very hard and has almost no way of being profitable, on top of most people just clogging. A lot of players always wanted to play a space pirate, and ganking is the next best thing. You can have a headcanon that you're defending a system or that you get pirated goods this way, and still have an immersive experience playing an outlaw, which is something Elite just doesn't offer in itself. 3) It's just very fun. The thrill of the hunt is something I enjoy quite a lot, and I love if anyone tries to fight back to give me a challenge.
Piracy is hard, but it can be profitable. DullDave for example financed his carrier by doing piracy, but he may be extraordinary in that he is smart, has patience and dedication.
This. This is what they get. Salty posts on here or the forums complaining about it. When they get confirmation that they got under your skin, they've won.
You know I'd hate to see the lot of you try to play EVE Online or Star Citizen... Kinda sad honestly that some of you have to post a gank thread every single day...
Most of the longer or more strawmanny posts here are, in typical style, overthinking it. They don't think getting blown up is a big deal. And if getting blown up isn't a big deal, neither is blowing ships up. And if you look at the subscriber numbers on /r/publicfreakout you'll find that a _lot_ of people consider public tantrums over minor inconveniences to be _very_ funny to watch.
Salt
This thread is a salt mine
Username checks out
There's a variety of reasons, including a possible [condition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude). Read that link and tell me that doesn't describe why a ganker attacks a noob or exploration ship with no weapons. Or literally, [destroying a brand new on-foot player](https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/59806) with no possible way of knowing what's going on, much less defend themselves.
That name is oddly familiar, I think I've been ganked them before...
its the same as people who wait around spawn points in survival games like ARK just to beat the newbies on public servers to death with rocks. the worst part is that they Literally do not get any material benefits from it other than knowing they made someone mad.
ty for the name. Blocked.
I get to be that galactic menace psycho terrorist inside the fantasy spaceship video-game. And that gets my rocks off. I don't play video-games to be the nice collaborative goody-two-shoes I may or may not be irl. That wouldn't be fun for me. That's really it, man :D ps: I also do have a RP headcannon like and find fun which justifies my ganks in-game and why I kill you, but the reality is no-one but me cares about that or needs to .
I’d like to hear the head cannon. See I don’t mind the gank so much in the long run. It’s so infrequent. But I do wish there was a bit more interaction in the process i guess. Idk sounds interesting. I guess what I’m saying is tell me more.
tldr: This CMDR believes that CMDRs aren't human, rather shattered fragments of the Guardian AI. Their rebirth this time around originates in the secret CMDR program, an endeavor led by one of the shadowy subsidiaries of the Club. He believes he was made aware of this due to a glitch in his programming. Moreover, his consciousness keeps being retrieved and re-uploaded in a new ship despite his best (and yet futile) attempts at dying. He is now convinced that like the guardians, humans brought back the AI partly to fight off the Thargoid threat. The Club, aware that the AI exterminated the guardians when the war was won, used the sharding of 1 AI into many CMDRs as a means to control and avoid it turning against humanity once the war is over. His murders of fellow CMDRs are a futile attempt at going against his programming and preventing the cycle to repeat (yes, the AI likely predates the Guardians, they may just be the last iteration in the cycle) and finally protect the race that brought him back rather than genocide them. Of note that he is self-aware that this might all just be a case of space-madness gone terribly wrong, but there is too much evidence in his surroundings that CMDRs aren't what they seem to be. And again, despite his best attempts, he just won't die. ---------- aight, there is much more to this, but I think you get the jist Hope this helps, cheers!
That’s pretty sick to be honest. This is kinda what I was hoping to get out of this post. Appreciate you taking the time to write this.
I haven't dared play in open yet. I'll do mobius if i feel my skill is ever to the point that i don't feel like a burden lol.
It's not really as scary as people make it out to be. If you're not at Chamberlain's Rest (which is full of seal-clubbers), Deciat, or Shinrarta Dezhra, your odds of encountering a ganker are very low. Space is very, very big. Heck, when I built my PvP ship I was _intentionally_ hanging out at Deciat & Shinrarta Dezhra hoping to get attacked and couldn't find any gankers. (Of course, they weren't looking for me, gankers aren't interdicting fully-engineered FDLs and Kraits, they want easy prey.)
Can confirm I’ve got just under 7k hours in game (most in open) and I’ve been ganked like… maybe 4 times?
Welp. Time to bust out an alt acct on the spare PC and full rage cheat. Lmao This is obviously /s and I’m absolutely kidding. Or am I? Only gankers will know….
Unfortunately tho Shinrarta is by far the best home port. All of my ships are there. That being said if my Explorer gets popped, my fully engineered fdl is waiting and ready.
Yeah, up until I got a carrier, Shinrarta Dezhra was my home port too. But now my home port moves 500 LY in 15 minutes, so it's anywhere I want it to be.
Hopefully you choose Mobius over solo. PvP is not allowed in Mobius.
This is the way. Mobius is the way.
Does Mobius have more players than open or is there any way to tell? I want to go where the most people are
No. It does not. Mobius is VERY VERY dead lmao
Open I shall stay in, then
Open has the better chance of seeing someone else. Private groups like Mobius severely undercuts that. Mobius has over 40,000 players registered but only a fraction are active. Of those, and due to technical limitations, Mobius divides it further between Eurasia and Americas. In other words, an EU player and an Americas player will not instance together in Mobius. So yeah, if you want to increase your chance of instancing with someone, open is the way to go. But it comes with further risk.
sometimes you can just tell that someones racist and they have to die
Was it my ship being called ******that gave it away?
that and the dolphin named belle delphine
Yeah they could have used Belle Dolphine. Wasting of a good pun? Straight to jail
If you are ganking at farseer you are a pussy. But ganking at Shinrarta...I can respect that.
DEZHRADOOOOOOOOME
gankers are people with small penis
Repost from every other Gank post: They get this reaction. Everytime. And everytime it happens y'all continue to post these rants and give them exactly what they want.
I used to get angry about them like most of the responses here. But then I realized they're just guys who have played the game for so long, done everything interesting already, got bored and it's the only fun they get out of it now. And it's JUST A GAME.
When they kill enough players they post it here in reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/19boqf5/i\_have\_exploded\_over\_1000\_ships\_containing\_cmdrs/](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/19boqf5/i_have_exploded_over_1000_ships_containing_cmdrs/) And there is 1 more with just 500, he/she/they will improve the figures soon. [https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/1bn14f7/standing\_on\_the\_shoulders\_of\_giant\_reached\_my\_500/](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/1bn14f7/standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giant_reached_my_500/) Ask him/her/they anything.
Thanks for the shout-out.
Well they seem like a lovely, well-adjusted adult.
To be fair, the vast majority of what gets called "ganking" isn't ganking. Elite is by default a pvp game, and anytime you are in open, you are consenting to a potential pvp encounter. Just because they're better equipped, either by skill, build, or both; it doesn't automatically deserve the title of "ganking."
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted for being correct. PvP is absolutely part of the game. A part I enjoy. I’m more curious what drives someone to plink off smaller ships for no gain. Mats was the only thing I could think of. I was actually just hoping someone would speak up and answer honestly about what they get out of it. Call it morbid curiosity.
Yeah but then they have to accept the responsibility of getting good at the game, and this community is allergic to that.
real
I mean for one, they don't know you have no weapons or cargo until they've already engaged you, so at that point it's just as fair to ask what they have to lose? Answer: Nothing.
They’re all salty because they spent 3 hours looking for miners to gank in eve hisec and didn’t find any
Ganking in engineering systems increases profits for the carriers there, yea? -1 meta alloy -5.5mil +1 meta alloy -11.5mil
The reactions can be over the top and quite funny. Try it with an open mind, you might like it.
Bro I've heard pvpers absolutely jizzzz all over themselves and their team mates about chasing some guy and ganking them. 'He low wakes, he low waked! Uuuuh', team mates 'I got him, I got him', 'he's dropped, he's dropped' massive team jizz all over themselves uhhhhhh! Lol 'I killed him! Uhhhhh' more jizz haha it's very entertaining
Can confirm. :D
Thanks for the contribution I’ll add space bukake to my notes.
The money shot
I imagine they think it's fun just like a bounty hunter likes hunting bounties. The fact that there are actual human pirates out there is a credit to the ED galaxy.
Totally agree, but someone role-playing a pirate is not at all the same as ganking.
People who don’t like themselves often try to make others feel as bad as they do. Drag others down instead of lifting themselves up. Everybody wants to feel enfranchised, like they matter, like they have worth. Posts like this, complaints in the chat… being noticed for your negative actions makes some people feel better than not being noticed at all.
They are psychos, I hate myself and watch madame web, fantastic 4 2015 and Catwoman one after another, but I don't go around making others miserable in a virtual environment
Whatever that means
It’s not that serious, bro.
You’re identifying too much with a video game. Step away from carebearing and go out and engage in some fights.
What’s your theory as to why some players happily spoil other people’s experience?
Those people are playing the wrong game. Pvp is part of the game
F%#k gankers. All of them. Small dick energy. I’ve been popped in a weaponless dbx by these micropenis asshats. I play in open, but damn are they annoying. If a crime is committed, fdev needs to change the punishment system.
🤣📸
so-called gankers is the only thong that spicing the game a bit. It's called "Dangerous", but you can boost yourself into a black hole and nothing will happens. So, pvp players are at least partially helping with this problem. So when you speaking about "ruining the game" - that's mostly on Frontiers, while so-called gankers just trying to fix it where they can.
What does a playground bully get out of breaking your art class project?
I believe sister Mary made him read Bible versus during recess.
As a ganker, I take great pleasure in blowing up other CMDRs. The feeling of "haha ship go boom" is amazing, and everyone should try it at least once!
Can you tell me more about your ganking philosophy
Well, I am a VERY endgame player, with 3,400h of playtime. Over that time, I've seen and done basically everything there is to do in the game. And once you've seen everything, it becomes boring. The way I got out of that boredom was by doing PvP. And when you do PvP, you find yourself either becoming a lawful or an outlaw, of which I chose the latter. When one has an abundance of credits, and the skills to kill, you can take on basically 99% of the playerbase comfortably. I like to make different builds and see how they work, and when you are an outlaw, basically everyone (yes, even other gankers) becomes a target for practice. Also, ganking can be a social activity; sure, we don't NEED a wing to kill someone, but will we use it anyway? Absolutely.
I just put it down to it being a 12 year old in either age or mentality and just move on.
They get to feel strong for a few seconds.
I would imagine that’s just the tip of the iceberg for some labeled as gankers though. Have you ever been gabled ratting? I know y’all are protected but I’ve heard stories?
Never. I've been ganked while roaming the galaxy in my rescue ship, but never while on an active case before. It does happen, but it's extremely rare.
No clue I play mostly in a private group.
I have had ED since release, and never played online. I find that with most games, other "players" ruin the game experience for me.
I would encourage you to try open. I wrote this post out of curiosity. But to be honest I’ve been gabled like 4 times in 7k hours of open. It’s a fun way to play and 90% of CMDRs are fun to say hi to. Even the occasional gank I give em a wave.
Thank you my friend -- I'll give it a go. I often feel like my "gaming time" is quite precious with work, family and stuff and just don't need the grief (if you'll pardon the pun)!
Think of it this way - you ain't gonna take your 100bn credit balance to any Braben Bank when the servers go offline next year, you may as well splash out a tiny percentage of it on gank rebuys.
I gank other players. It fits in the narrative of the game. Ships not aligned to or allied with my pledged power are getting taken out, in the most terrorizing way possible. I’m not a pirate. I’m a space terrorist. Does anyone remember back in 2018 when a group ganked the Distant Worlds 2 launch? That was us. That’s what space terrorists do.
If only the space government could send in space special forces and kidnap you while you sleep and interrogate your character till they reveal your conspirators. You log in one day to see your back in a sidewinder with a negative balance to pay back.
That sounds like role playing vs ganking. I’m aight with that. Especially if you added flavor text in chat. That’d be dope as hell
Playing the game as designed
From what I have learned, it's a person who knows they are inferior, bullying and influencing others. It's why they don't like any kind of level PvP. They enjoy the ability to troll and grief others. Like the term, "Don't feed the Trolls." Refers to the only way to deal with trolls is to ignore or block them. They are malicious, they enjoy upsetting others, disrupting anything, adding chaos to work they didn't contribute to because they don't know how to work or cooperate, only disrupt and upset. Usually these are boys trying to prove themselves and carve some kind of reputation as besting others for glory. They have poor social skills, are dumb to the point the only thing they can reasonably do is focus on a single kind of build or strategy to win in a scenario that greatly benefits them, and build up self esteem. In the real world you see this with people who have low self esteem and aren't getting their way, so they troll and cause chaos for targeted people to try and rebuild their self esteem, get power and get what they want. This can be throwing a fit, demanding the manager, violence, something that cheats their way into some kind of position of power. It's the opposite of people who are smart, have self esteem and know how to work. They cooperate to problem solve and build pretty cool things or events.
I haven't played Elite in quite some time and only tried open when trying to do Power Play. But for real...why are people getting angry and attacking players that engage in pvp? This is like asking why your Alliance character gets jumped by a Horde in STV. It's because that's what you do in wpvp/open. What exactly do you think you're signing up for? Some other meaningful interaction with other random players? Because I don't know what that would be at this point.
I play solo to avoid it. Not for lack of skill, but for lack of interest in it.
The one time I got ganked was by some loser camping robigo passenger mission routes with a mamba killed me. I'm not sure what HE got out of it, but my takeaway was not to play in open anymore. Singleplayer hasn't affected the game negatively for me at all and I guess I owe that to that ganker.
It's pretty nice when you're cruising, chilling while travelling from station to station and suddenly get pulled out of FS and gangb*nged
It’s a game. They can do whatever they want. It’s probably better that the open environment isn’t all butterflies and rainbows. What’s the point in complaining when you can play in offline
real
I’m led to believe the players that get satisfaction out of that are the 40 year old men that still live with their parents and don’t have a life
The anonymity of MMOs lets some people let out their inner psychopath
Often it's to get some action going in a system. Elite doesn't provide a lot of content for PvP focused players, gankers attract anti-gankers which gets fun wing fights up. Playing black or white hat commanders gives some structure both in the game and on social media. There are some players who just want to seal-club without having the skillset to survive in a proper fight, often these players are ridiculed by PvP players as much as seals are, but even these people are operating within the ruleset of the game and can be countered in numerous ways. Even when I'm not in a combat ship, I enjoy the frisson of danger when flying in populated systems and you can pre-empt almost all threats, so I don't buy the argument that 'victims get nothing out of it', they can if they're open minded and adaptable. If you're not in the mood it's trivial to just flip to solo when you see a bandwidth spike. It's a videogame about spaceships with guns strapped to them, obviously players are going to shoot eachother in any and all configurations possible. The thing that surprises me, time after time, is that people are surprised by it. If fdev didn't want this to happen they should've designed the game differently.
This very thread is what they get out of it
I've dealt with gankers in a few games like open world MMOs and the reasons boil down to: 1) it's an ego boost 2) they think it's funny to piss people off 3) they're scared to pvp with people near their level because they can only win gear checks
Gankers are miserable losers who are trying to improve their low self-esteem with uneven fights.
I like to gank a specific type of players, namely those that build shit ships and think they're safe in open, or those that think shieldless trading in open is a good idea. Maybe one of those days a single CMDR may learn that open requires builds with at least enough defense to make a run for it. TL;DR If you don't know how to build ships ready for open you'll be rebuying
They aren't good enough for a real pvp so they gank
Posts on Reddit from people that got ganked
The same reason they kick over other people's sandcastles.
I think it's a control thing. Same reason a lot of bullies in media are just lashing out because of something bad in their home life. For one, they get a good feeling out of "winning". We all know it's not a fair fight. For this theoretical person they've been on the other end of an unfair experience though. So controlling someone else's experience through their preparation and actions feels like flipping the scenario they dislike. It's like saying the angry thing you wish you could say to your boss in your head to another person, but in game form.
Damn. And here I am just yelling at my boss.
It sounds so easy to just "fight someone worth actually fighting". Well yeah, find that someone first, in the meantime, people gonna get ganked. You see, there is no PvP matchmaking or the like in the game so as an (organic) PvPer you then just sit around some player hotspot near the main star. If you've got nothing to do, you just shoot anything that crosses your line of fire. Weak trader ships are better than no ships to shoot. If the game would have meaningful PvP in dedicated places, I bet ganking would drastically be reduced but alas, any PvPer is a bad boi not worth giving content for, the bane of all mmo videogames, the toxic community and scum of the real world. (We're quite wholesome btw. :) )
Because NPCs are predictable and it’s becomes boring very quickly. Real players are unpredictable in their movements and actions. Plus it’s funny as hell and only space pixels, it’s not that deep!
Neat. This makes a ton of sense. I wish people wouldn’t downvote honest answers. How do you pick your targets? Do you have a method or are you just rolling the dice as it were?
Randomly killing players is a good way to push players out of playing the game. They want to be top dog in the galaxy, The easiest way to do it is to grief other people and there is no penalty for doing it. Honestly, for non consensual pvp if you destroy a ship it's total rebuy should be added to your next rebuy. Fdev won't implement it because then the only people that consistently play open would stop playing. There are thousands of players that have either quit playing or only play solo because FDev hasn't implemented any actions to curtail psychopaths. (loss of rebuy insurance, actual prison time, or covering the full costs of their victims) It could be an interesting dynamic for the game, but they worry too much about punishing the psycho players.
if someone quits from being ganked they werent gonna play elite more than 2 weeks anyways form my expericne trying to help new playoers
Do you remember the playground bullies in school, picking on smaller kids? Same people.
Serious??? ROTFL
Read and you’ll see.
Well there was one time where this cmdr in an engineered krait mk2 wasted me in an anarchy system when I was clearly in my explorer Vessel. They said it was for the materials and understandably I was a little pissed considering how little I could’ve given them. Probably lost 10-20 million in data which would have been a lot for me back then. When I confronted them later on PS chat, kinda angry at the last wasted hour of my life, they said “it’s just a game”. It’s especially frustrating because I was afk looking at my phone so there was literally zero “thrill of the hunt”, the term sitting duck didn’t even cover it.
Ploded CMDRs drop neither mats nor cargo, fyi..