I'm not saying it's an obscure tactic, I'm saying frigates following freighters around to web them is weird from both a gameplay and roleplay perspective; imagine trying to explain that mechanic to a new player.

Then you need to base your numbers on the freighter starting with ~85% shields and ~25% hull or at least acknowledge multiple attack runs; can't have it both ways.

You have offered two counters: 1) Don't undock, and 2) Bring friends.

******** argument though. Its a freighter its supposed to be stuffed with goodies.

If webbers were designed to pull. They're designed to hold a target still.

Thus, a very messy mechanic.

Since I am being lenient, in reference to:
I will ask you to cite one example of a computer program achieving 95% confidence in assessing intent from datamining. Key to this will be it's ability to distinguish between identical sets of data which one is the offending article. Remember: to not be able to do this is to fail the condition that you can't change the rules to suit your analysis technique.

Feel free to link to any pay-walled journal article if necessary; I have access to near all of them.

Time and effort are also metrics by which CCP judge balance. You're forgetting the largest parts of the investment.

Even as a bulk hauler carrying trit its cargo value is going to greatly exceed the cost of ganking it. Hell, even an empty freighter looks good on a killboard for the loss of a couple of hundred mil in destroyers.

GǪand pick the road less travelled.
GǪand tweak the stats to something they don't expect.
GǪand learn the aggression mechanics (because these things don't take 60 minutes GÇö in fact, this is where the OP went wrong most spectacularly).

Same job, they help manoeuvre the ship.

You will not be ganked for a load of trit.

I don't have to imagine. It's quite easy, and if they get the weird sly smirk, you know something has clicked GÇö they've finally grasped EVE.

No. I can and will base my numbers just fine on what the gankers plan for: a single run that will be enough to kill a freighter in the 15 seconds allotted.

That's not the design though. Holding isn't pulling. Tractor beams pull.

You promise?

So don't stuff the thing full of goodies then. Its the most simple answer and works every time.

We have only done it once in the past year and that was an accident.

Your plan ("don't stuff the thing full of goodies") doesn't appear to have worked for Saesra Virpio:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=18499970

MDD

GǪand make yourself less of a target.
GǪand pick the road less travelled.
GǪand tweak the stats to something they don't expect.
GǪand learn the aggression mechanics (because these things don't take 60 minutes GÇö in fact, this is where the OP went wrong most spectacularly).

Oh, but Tippia! Those aren't fair!

...

Because they require effort! :P

Don't you know that no effort put in by one person should always trump effort and planning by multiple people?

/sarcasm

That one is a jump-freighter, though, so worth killing for other reasons.

However, the bulk of their kills do seem to be doing exactly the kind of low-value bulk hauling Baltec mentioned. This is a mid-range one: http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=18511541. 1.4bil in modules [edit: and fuel].

But looking at the killboards, you have taken down five bulk haulers in the last 24 hours carrying no more than 2bil of goods each and two of them were carrying less than a bil. The lowest was only carrying 480mil or so worth of goods. So it sounds like this notion that you will be safe so long as you don't haul high value cargoes is ... how shall I put this ... not true?

Having to pay 15 bucks extra per month to follow your freighter around meta-gaming it into warp faster is not a counter. Its a dumb fix to bad game design.

http://youtu.be/0MmIsrAQPM4

Being Bumped for an hour kinda kills a little bit of the like and excitement i have for this game,,,

Fisrt the 2 machariels bumped me for 10 minutes or so before goons ever showed up.

Second i never fly freightors i knew they get ganked but i thought it was only in .5 .6 systems

Third i didnt know it could be done in 30 fuc***** destroyers :(

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=18472599

http://eve-kill.net/?a=pilot_detail&view=kills&plt_id=341330&m=6&y=2013

Now you're just being silly; computers are quite smart, especially when analyzing something already broken down into 1's and 0's. Your inability to come up with a naive solution doesn't indicate much of anything.

In that case, the DEVs of WoW considered it an exploit and acted accordingly. Again... as everyone has been saying... it's what the company deems an exploit that defines an exploit. It is both black and white and yet grey at the same time.

Tomorrow CCP could declare bumping an exploit and it shall be so. Because they get to decide what is and isn't one.

Not to use your post specifically, but to find a place to chime in...

I think the argument here is illfounded. The term exploit is really easy. Using something for other than it's intended use.

Nothing changes that. Not CCP, not you, not me, not anyone.

Punishing someone for it... now THAT's different.

You don't choose what's an exploit. You choose what's a working as intended mechanic, and what's an exploited mechanic.

Bumping is a mechanic.

How the bumper bumps the bumpee determines if it is working as intended, or exploited.

CCP judges that on a case by case basis.

What you guys need to do, is ask CCP if they designed the mechanic of bumping to allow for someone to be bumper for an hour.

If no, that bumper exploited a mechanic.

If yes, that mechanic is working as intended.

Speeding is still breaking the law, regardless of whether the police punish you for it or not. Your car can still exceed the speed limit.

The bumping serves two purposes.

The most important one is that it creates a controlled environment where the gankers can delay and monitor the CONCORD response. You shoot the target once as he exits gate cloak to give him a PvP timer, which ensures that the ship will stay in space for another 15 minutes, no matter what, so logging off no longer saves the victim. This is obviously a criminal act so CONCORD shows up and kills the flagging alt. To counter this, you take advantage of the 15 minute timer to use a neutral alt (or two) to bump the victim at last 150km away from where CONCORD is sitting. The bumping both ensures that the victim can't just warp off willy-nilly, and that the victim is out of reach from immediate CONCORD response.

Being this far away causes the CONCORD mechanics to consider the target (and, more importantly, the awaiting gankers) GÇ£out of rangeGÇ¥ for the purpose of responding to their actions, which in turn yields the same effect as delaying CONCORD by spawning them somewhere else in the system. When responding to a crime that's this far away, the CONCORD ships first have to despawn from the first crime scene before they can show up at a new one, which delays the response by half a dozen seconds or so. You sacrifice the loss of a newbship with civvy guns for being able to execute the gank with maybe 20GÇô50% fewer actual attack ships. You can also keep a close eye on CONCORD while doing all of this, which means you have more control over the timers.

The second benefit is that the gank now happens maybe 200km off the gate, rather than 15km away from it. As a result, loot thieves will not get as much of a chance to get to the goods, and white knights stand less of a chance counter-killing the looting ships (which will go suspect in the process). If it's a freighter gank, you're likely to need a freighter to loot the wreck, and you definitely want to keep those away from the normal traffic lanes when they go blinky.

Yea I have to agree....bumping someone for an hour is not working as intended.

RedFrogFreight.

Look them up.

GǪwhich is how the devs designed the game. They designed bumping. The players took that tool and started hammering away at the nails with it, as intended. Since no unwanted effects or exploits arose, it was all working as intended and as designed.

GǪexcept that they're not exploits, and that they're not Gǣleft in the gameGǥ but part of a concept built around providing a toolset rather than a ruleset. That's the root of your problem: you are stuck in a design frame of mined based around rules. EVE is not that kind of game.

Nope. So sayeth the devs, and they are the only ones who can say whether it is one or not. And their answer is GÇ£notGÇ¥ GÇö explicitly GÇ£notGÇ¥, so not even implicitly by leaving it unmentioned or unregulated.

You can keep repeating your quaint lie to yourself as often as you like, but it doesn't change this simple fact.
You are of course free to reject this reality and substitute your own, but that road only really leads to disappointment and medication.

If by my GÇ£comfort zoneGÇ¥ you mean reality, then yes GÇö I do indeed attack people who spout counter-factual nonsense. That means that until you start accepting reality for what it is, you are very much my target. All you have to do to avoid it is to accept facts as they are and not make up your own.

Well, seeing as you must not have the capabilities to look this up yourself...

http://www.minerbumping.com/

Just over a year of precisely that. The precedent was established by the New Order, in a GM response that cannot be discussed on the forums, but is given in great detail as to the specifics.