Visitors to zKillboard can now easily see which ships were destroyed by a suicide gank.
The bright red label, which distinguishes ganks from other arguably more legitimate kills, is a new feature introduced in the spirit of Burn Jita. Burn Jita 5 is The Imperium’s current incarnation of their annual pilgrimage to high-sec space, and the event is taking place this weekend.
Zkillboard website creator Squizz Caphinator wrote on Reddit that the label and accompanying page is an experimental feature. “Please keep in mind this is an experimental page and far from perfect,” he wrote, twice.
In a comment to INN, Squizz noted that the idea wasn’t a long-term plan in the making, and that nobody ever asked for it. In fact, it only took about two hours to create from inception to launch. “I saw something on Reddit this morning about Burn Jita and thought it’d be nice to have a page that displays ganks only. I put some thought into it a bit while working my (real-life) job and came up with the idea to start with Concord,” he said.
Squizz identifies suicide ganks by searching for recent Concord kills, then cross-checks the victims of Concordokken to see if that player managed to destroy someone else. In that case, zKillboard labels the kill as a gank if the ship is worth more than 100 million ISK, and has more than 25 pilots on the killmail.
“This could easily set up some false positives, but overall I think is a good start,” he wrote. With it being such a fresh feature, Squizz told us that he aims to keep mistakes to a minimum. “Processing and re-labeling killmails based on other killmails is a brand new feature that started with this ganked page,” he said.
Indeed, one of his personal priorities is to always looking to improve zKillboard. His current focus, when real life allows, is to make the site more friendly for mobile devices because about 10 percent of his visitors are scrolling through on a smartphone.
While this new feature is still in development, it is likely that some smaller scale ganking groups will be disappointed to see their efforts go unrecognised at present. We will watch for further progress on this up-and-coming feature as changes are made.
