What is a gank?

[TheSauron]

In ye olden days, it meant hitting an enemy with such overwhelming numbers they stood no chance of winning. Nowadays, some people use it to mean an unfair fight in general (hence the "ganked by skill" meme). I think a lot of friction in all the different gank talks stems from this mismatch.

Personally, I think the latter is the definition of ganking we should be working with. Whether a fight was fair or not does not come down to numbers alone. Skill and ship classes used are also a factor. The problem is that judging whether a fight was fair or not is nigh on impossible outside very blatant cases. Four cruisers on three snubs is easy. But say you have four goods in snubs against eight bads in snubs, and the goods win with one casualty. Sure, by the old definition it was technically a gank, but the matchup was clearly in the goods' favour. What if they win with three casualties? What if the bads win with two people left? Three? Four? Where does a fair matchup stop and a gank begin? What if the goods are easily capable of perfecting the bads, but make a mistake and the bads get a clean sweep? Is that a gank? What do we do when it's a mixed fleet fight?

I'm not really sure how to fairly judge whether someone was ganked or not. It's certainly something staff should be doing to curb shittery, but outside of trying to holistically estimate whether the losing side was hopelessly outmatched or not, which is prone to staff making mistakes and guaranteed to make someone unhappy, I can't think of a way.

tldr ganking is complicated and not down to numbers alone

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One MD Admiral