Warning: I've abandoned EVE because I've found very disturbing things and do not recommend you to play. This page is old and likely outdated!
Welcome EVE player! You made your first step to stop being a gank target. Keep reading and the gank that sent you here was the last one!
To answer your question: you were ganked because you were an easy and lucrative target. Of course gankers have their personal reasons, some want a good killboard, others want tears, most of them are just bored. But you being ganked had nothing to do with them and everything to do with you being an easy and lucrative target. There are more than enough morons and slackers for them to kill, they'll ignore you if you aren't such.
You can be completely safe from ganking. Me, Gevlon, the author of this blog have never been ganked in my three years of EVE career. Ever. I'm writing a blog that makes lot of the "bad guys" mad. I haul expensive cargo. I run mining ships. I was threatened to be ganked thousand times and they never-ever delivered. I went to the middle of the griefing campaigns of the 30000 members Imperium, trolled them, put bait into my cargohold and they couldn't gank me. I'm no superman. I have no "skillz". All I have is the proper attitude towards the game and enough knowledge. These are the things you can get too.
The first thing you need to understand is "being lucrative". The ship you are flying worth money. If it's killed, a kill report is created. It is hosted in various sites. Click this link, it leads to one of the EVE killboards. You can see a Mackinaw kill here. It worth 218M ISK. This is a number that the killer got. Consider it a game score, an evidence of their "good hunt". PvP-ers compete for these numbers and reports. They are proud of big kills. The kills of supercarriers and titans get into the news. Thousands of other players will read that they killed a titan. While you are not flying titans, your ship also worth money. Killing enough of such ships gets them enough "internet points". So the first thing to learn is the more expensive your ship is, the more people want to kill it!
This makes lot of things counter-intuitive. In other games the better gear makes you stronger. In EVE, it just makes you a bigger target. How can you prevent being a target? By using the cheapest ship that can do the job well. Just compare Retriever and Mackinaw mining ships! The Mackinaw mines 5% faster and holds 27% more ore in its hold. Since it has to dock less, it's about 10% better in mining than the Retriever. But it's 600%!!! more expensive. Does 10% more income worth 600% more ganks? Same is true for missioning ships: Tachyon Beam Laser II does 95% of the damage of Selynne's Modified Tachyon Beam Laser and costs 1.6% of it! Look what happened with the guy who picked the Selynne lasers: he was ganked and lost his 22 billion ship! So the second thing to learn is: only use an upgrade if its performance worth the increased risk. If in doubt, use the cheaper!
"But I don't want to only fly noobship!" - you might say, and you are right. The solution is understanding align and tanking mechanics. In highsec the gankers have a very little time to kill you. This time depends on system security status, about 25 seconds in 0.5, 20 in 0.6, 16 in 0.7, 11 in 0.8, 8 in 0.9, 6 in 1.0. That's not much time. If your ship has enough defenses to live trough this period, you won't die. So the first thing to increase your defenses is choosing the system. The higher the security status, the safer.
Below you can see series of posts [some to be written later] that inform you about the details of gank avoidance:
Welcome EVE player! You made your first step to stop being a gank target. Keep reading and the gank that sent you here was the last one!
To answer your question: you were ganked because you were an easy and lucrative target. Of course gankers have their personal reasons, some want a good killboard, others want tears, most of them are just bored. But you being ganked had nothing to do with them and everything to do with you being an easy and lucrative target. There are more than enough morons and slackers for them to kill, they'll ignore you if you aren't such.
You can be completely safe from ganking. Me, Gevlon, the author of this blog have never been ganked in my three years of EVE career. Ever. I'm writing a blog that makes lot of the "bad guys" mad. I haul expensive cargo. I run mining ships. I was threatened to be ganked thousand times and they never-ever delivered. I went to the middle of the griefing campaigns of the 30000 members Imperium, trolled them, put bait into my cargohold and they couldn't gank me. I'm no superman. I have no "skillz". All I have is the proper attitude towards the game and enough knowledge. These are the things you can get too.
The first thing you need to understand is "being lucrative". The ship you are flying worth money. If it's killed, a kill report is created. It is hosted in various sites. Click this link, it leads to one of the EVE killboards. You can see a Mackinaw kill here. It worth 218M ISK. This is a number that the killer got. Consider it a game score, an evidence of their "good hunt". PvP-ers compete for these numbers and reports. They are proud of big kills. The kills of supercarriers and titans get into the news. Thousands of other players will read that they killed a titan. While you are not flying titans, your ship also worth money. Killing enough of such ships gets them enough "internet points". So the first thing to learn is the more expensive your ship is, the more people want to kill it!
This makes lot of things counter-intuitive. In other games the better gear makes you stronger. In EVE, it just makes you a bigger target. How can you prevent being a target? By using the cheapest ship that can do the job well. Just compare Retriever and Mackinaw mining ships! The Mackinaw mines 5% faster and holds 27% more ore in its hold. Since it has to dock less, it's about 10% better in mining than the Retriever. But it's 600%!!! more expensive. Does 10% more income worth 600% more ganks? Same is true for missioning ships: Tachyon Beam Laser II does 95% of the damage of Selynne's Modified Tachyon Beam Laser and costs 1.6% of it! Look what happened with the guy who picked the Selynne lasers: he was ganked and lost his 22 billion ship! So the second thing to learn is: only use an upgrade if its performance worth the increased risk. If in doubt, use the cheaper!
"But I don't want to only fly noobship!" - you might say, and you are right. The solution is understanding align and tanking mechanics. In highsec the gankers have a very little time to kill you. This time depends on system security status, about 25 seconds in 0.5, 20 in 0.6, 16 in 0.7, 11 in 0.8, 8 in 0.9, 6 in 1.0. That's not much time. If your ship has enough defenses to live trough this period, you won't die. So the first thing to increase your defenses is choosing the system. The higher the security status, the safer.
Below you can see series of posts [some to be written later] that inform you about the details of gank avoidance:
- Tanking and EHP
- Aligning and the three ways of hauling
- Transport Tengu
- Transport haulers
- Providence and Ark
- The safe ways of mining
- Orca
- There is no police outside of highsec: don't go there unless you are looking for a fight or in a cloaky ship!
- Corpmates can kill you at will: there is absolutely no need to be in a player corporation with people in highsec. Do not join player corporations unless you know all the people in the corp from real life. In highsec other players can't really cooperate with you, but they can kill you. If you don't like the tax in the NPC corp, just start a 1-man corp for yourself.
- War targets can kill you: they can't wardec you in the NPC corp. If your 1-man corp is wardecced, just quit and make a new one!
- You can be killed if you are a suspect/criminal: there is a little dot next to your big ship icon. It must be green. If it's not, click it and set the safety on green. It prevents you from doing criminal acts by accident. If anyone says to set it other than green, he wants to trick you into being killable, don't believe him!
- You can fire on a criminal/thief even if your safety is green. Then he can fire back (limited engagement). Don't fire on them, no matter how easy targets they look!
- You can be killed in a duel: don't accept duel requests! Ever. There is a switch on the options to reject all duels. Switch it on!
