ACTUAL EVENT: You load your Charon with 923,000 M3 of material to transport to Hek. Along the way You exit a gate and are singled out by a bumper. For the next 45 minutes (while you are trying to escape) the bumper continues to hold you from going to warp. Since a Charon can not be fit, and has such a great top speed it is easy to see where this is going. The bumper receives no damage to his ship and is not flagged for this activity. When the gank crew arrives you die. You can not get away, go to another location etc. You would like to do that very thing. So in the end you loose the 1.6 billion isk ship and the 4.5 billion isk collateral for the load.

45 minutes. That's a long time. If this is such a widespread problem, you'd think that freighter pilots would start hiring escorts to protect them. Or, alternately, that they'd have guys on-call in their corp/alliance to come bail them out when they get caught. Heck, if you're 'actively trying to escape' during that time, you'd probably have time to hire in-game mercenaries to come save you. But any of that would require you to interact with other players, so I can see where it holds a difficulty for you.

Given that, as a freighter pilot, you probably could use someone to web you anyways, it's really not much of a stretch to have that same guy fit for suicide ganking, so that in an emergency, he can trade himself for a bumper to let you escape a trap.

So in the end you loose the 1.6 billion isk ship and the 4.5 billion isk collateral for the load.

Sure, because it's completely possible to 'bail someone out' when you have 20+ ships throwing a one-shot alpha at a freighter.

We'll ignore your stupid post for today.

45 minutes. That's a long time.

45 minutes. That's a long time. If this is such a widespread problem, you'd think that freighter pilots would start hiring escorts to protect them. Or, alternately, that they'd have guys on-call in their corp/alliance to come bail them out when they get caught. Heck, if you're 'actively trying to escape' during that time, you'd probably have time to hire in-game mercenaries to come save you. But any of that would require you to interact with other players, so I can see where it holds a difficulty for you.

Given that, as a freighter pilot, you probably could use someone to web you anyways, it's really not much of a stretch to have that same guy fit for suicide ganking, so that in an emergency, he can trade himself for a bumper to let you escape a trap.

Yes. And it's actually THE case where abnormalilty of bumping ship owner's behaviour SHOULD be obvious to law enforcing authorities. In fact, it SHOULD be much less span of a time. Like, repeating bumping for 5 to 10 minutes. And if its too quick for you, that amateurish bunch of gangsters you are running obviously needs a proper training program prescribed to them. At least put some effort and soul in the "job" you enlisted for, okaaaay?
But prosecution by deadly force is too much, indeed Just webifiying to zero all those who were bumping and will be trying to bump after for some period of time will be enough. All timers can be tied to the actual sec level of the solar system.

Thoot him, offither! Thoot him at onthe! HE PUTHED ME!

How exactly will Eve determine which ship bumped the other ?

Because people will attempt to exploit whatever algorithm CCP uses.

What happens when someone tries to play docking games at Jita 4-4 ?
Won't they keep hitting ships every time they undock ?

How exactly will Eve determine which ship bumped the other ?

I will state right here and now that I believe the bumping of a freighter with the intent of holding it in place while your fiends arrive to perform the gank is an exploit. Here are the reasons why.

And here's the reason why it is not.

So it matters not what you believe, we have the facts.

An appeal to authority is an argument from the fact that a person judged to be an authority affirms a proposition to the claim that the proposition is true.

Appeals to authority are always deductively fallacious; even a legitimate authority speaking on his area of expertise may affirm a falsehood, so no testimony of any authority is guaranteed to be true.

So, webbing the freighter as a corp-mate doesn't activate criminal/suspect status? or do you have to be in a particular state (same fleet, in a duel...?)

Seems a bit close to being an exploit to me.

would be interesting to have specific 'navigation assist' modules or something (like Tugboats!) that are designed to have positive effects.

Seems a bit close to being an exploit to me.

Reason: bumping heavily abused mainly to devoid ship targeted for suicide ganking of warping ability through interfering with its allining while its being pushed away from gate to ease the looting process afterwards. Its also being used by well known group of extorters to disrupt mining activities by bumbping miners out of mining laser's range from asteroids.
Proposal: after serveral bumping incidents repeatedly happened in a short intervail of time, concord should warp to the perpetrator and issue him a warning to stop his activity immideately, otherwise he will get criminal flag and will be fired upon. Probably will be better if after warning they would use a stasis webifer on him, to make him unable to move for some time, to exclude accidental loss of ship in case some glitch happened and player indeed didn't mean no harm; if after receiving a warning and being stasised for 5-10 second he continues with his attempts, it's enough of a reason to apply deadly force.