When I'm ganking barges and exhumers, I scan the ships first looking for tanking modules. I'd say less than 10% of the barges has any form of tanking (even dumb ones like armor plates) and less then 20% of the exhumers, and even these are mostly some random tanking module thrown to the empty med slots. I've yet to see a single Orca with shield or armor gang link and saw only one with shield transporter.
It's surprising if we consider the ego of EVE players who are sooooo much better than WoW players. Well, the infamous cloth gear warriors are rare examples in the magnitude of 0.1-1% while in EVE the majority of the miners are complete failures. But it's not about re-iterating my opinion of the average IQ of EVE players (which I believe to be lower than of WoW players). It's about the miracle that they are still living/playing. I mean with their complete ignorance of ship fitting they should die more often than they could mine enough to replace their ships. Yet they are living and progressing enough to enjoy the game and keep playing.
The cheap answer would be "dumb people can progress in EVE because their competitors are equally dumb, an untanked mining barge is safe from equally badly fitted gankers". But I've seen a weird, greatly sub-optimal, yet fun functioning response to threat. While they don't even try to address the problem (their barge can be ganked by a single 10M destroyer) but they put great effort into resisting me, the player behind the destroyer.
I've yet to see a single advice (beside my own) in local to fit tank. But if I enter a system I've done some ganking before, I quickly see "beware, ganker in local, dock up". Some of them even camp the station or the belts with (usually horribly fitted) combat ships to stop me. Others try to locate my scout and convo the targeted miners. It doesn't really help, because they can't respond to warnings when they are AFK. However they are clearly trying to save themselves and their fellow miners from danger.
This behavior is too persistent and repeated by too many people to be random acts. This comes from the core of the social thinking: "people matter" as opposed to "things matter". They believe that the key to safety isn't being able to defeat a Catalyst destroyer but to defeat a "bad person". If people wouldn't be evil, there wouldn't be bad things! Their refusal to fit tank comes not from ignorance of EVE ship fitting, but refusal to accept the existence of the ganker. Fitting tank means "ganking happens, I'm prepared". They don't want it to happen, since it's evil. So they focus not on saving themselves but to stop "bad people".
This is another ape-subroutine, mental scheme from ancient times when prehistoric men lived in small communities. There every single troublemaker could be identified and handled. A closed village could be kept clean from norm-breakers. This is much harder in large cities and completely impossible on the internet. Their coping attempt with ganking in EVE is totally futile since there are many gankers and alts. It was funny when I ganked the loudest anti-gank activist simply by using a different alt for scouting. He ignored the ship right top of his barge because it wasn't named "Goblin" so it wasn't identified as a "bad guy".
So ganking them is a more worthy activity than I initially thought. It has the prospective to save these people from this thinking. One who stops watching local for known gankers and fits tank did not change his gameplay, but his real life thinking. He stopped trying to be safe from bad people and started to defend himself from bad things. So, save a social from his ape-subroutines, gank an AFK-er!
It's surprising if we consider the ego of EVE players who are sooooo much better than WoW players. Well, the infamous cloth gear warriors are rare examples in the magnitude of 0.1-1% while in EVE the majority of the miners are complete failures. But it's not about re-iterating my opinion of the average IQ of EVE players (which I believe to be lower than of WoW players). It's about the miracle that they are still living/playing. I mean with their complete ignorance of ship fitting they should die more often than they could mine enough to replace their ships. Yet they are living and progressing enough to enjoy the game and keep playing.
The cheap answer would be "dumb people can progress in EVE because their competitors are equally dumb, an untanked mining barge is safe from equally badly fitted gankers". But I've seen a weird, greatly sub-optimal, yet fun functioning response to threat. While they don't even try to address the problem (their barge can be ganked by a single 10M destroyer) but they put great effort into resisting me, the player behind the destroyer.
I've yet to see a single advice (beside my own) in local to fit tank. But if I enter a system I've done some ganking before, I quickly see "beware, ganker in local, dock up". Some of them even camp the station or the belts with (usually horribly fitted) combat ships to stop me. Others try to locate my scout and convo the targeted miners. It doesn't really help, because they can't respond to warnings when they are AFK. However they are clearly trying to save themselves and their fellow miners from danger.
This behavior is too persistent and repeated by too many people to be random acts. This comes from the core of the social thinking: "people matter" as opposed to "things matter". They believe that the key to safety isn't being able to defeat a Catalyst destroyer but to defeat a "bad person". If people wouldn't be evil, there wouldn't be bad things! Their refusal to fit tank comes not from ignorance of EVE ship fitting, but refusal to accept the existence of the ganker. Fitting tank means "ganking happens, I'm prepared". They don't want it to happen, since it's evil. So they focus not on saving themselves but to stop "bad people".
This is another ape-subroutine, mental scheme from ancient times when prehistoric men lived in small communities. There every single troublemaker could be identified and handled. A closed village could be kept clean from norm-breakers. This is much harder in large cities and completely impossible on the internet. Their coping attempt with ganking in EVE is totally futile since there are many gankers and alts. It was funny when I ganked the loudest anti-gank activist simply by using a different alt for scouting. He ignored the ship right top of his barge because it wasn't named "Goblin" so it wasn't identified as a "bad guy".
So ganking them is a more worthy activity than I initially thought. It has the prospective to save these people from this thinking. One who stops watching local for known gankers and fits tank did not change his gameplay, but his real life thinking. He stopped trying to be safe from bad people and started to defend himself from bad things. So, save a social from his ape-subroutines, gank an AFK-er!
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