What is Gank?

It's one thing to have vague ruling to 'not gank', without examples. It's another thing to have an exhaustive list of examples of things that are gank, and to be avoided. I say this as someone who made a mistake in judgement, and I'm probably not the only one; what one player considers gank, someone else considers fair game.

So, here's a game for the community, because I need a hard list for reasons; list as many examples of 'gank' as you can.

• Uploading kill laws to an AI.
• Vampire Dominations that are essentially suicide orders.
  
• Blowing borgs who didn't do anything, even as Traitor RD.
  
• Buying an antimaterial rifle and scoping a headshot on a random target down the hall.
  
• Bombing an area where are lot of people are gathered, with the specific intent to kill a lot of people.
  
• Any murder that follows a sleepy pen.
  
• Teleporting into a room as a Ninja and decapitating your target without warning or interaction.
  
• As a ling, using Silence Sting, flash and cable ties to get an easy succ without a chance to escape your fate.

Go.

From my POV, gank is a kill or an attempt at killing that is done under the pretense of random murder without any other justifiable motivation.

Blowing up the borgs roundstart is gank. Blowing up the borgs when you're about to execute your plan and don't want to deal with validsalad robots is not gank. Murdering someone with a sleepy pen without having interacted with them prior or for no real perceivable reason besides the fact that you could, is gank. Murdering someone with a sleepy pen as an escalated measure as part of your multi-point plan to pursue your in-character objectives is not gank. Randomly headpopping a random person in a hallway with an AMR is gank. AMR headpopping a security officer with a gun that you perceive as a threat is not gank.

Hopefully this makes sense.

There's two main things I consider, the escalation up to the murder, and the purpose of the murder.

If you've escalated enough to murder someone, you would naturally have a reason to kill them, otherwise, what were you doing?

the purpose of the murder might excuse lacking or outright missing escalation.

For example someone witnessing you in the act, you can't take any chances, so you dispose of them.

Another is when crew go out of their way to antagonize you, in that case you are free to dispose of them again, though relevant to how much they go out of their way.

Like a cargo tech denying you an order, was the order valid and he should've accepted it? then you can sneak in, say a one linear and blow his head off, is it usually inaccessible to you? you can sneak in and threaten him to order it, if he refuses, kill em.

You can't really list down all possible gank situations, but you can try to list down the most common, though I can't think of any at the moment to add to your list.

Yeaaaah, but we've kinda changed since Doomberg. While the message remains that you shouldn't burst into hostage situations without consideration for your own safety and the hostage's safety, Doomberg as an admin had a very immovable opinion on what constituted as gank.

I asked Garnabo and they said it's basically still policy.

The problem is that the idea of "killing someone without roleplay or interaction leading up to it" appears to be a different meaning depending on who you're talking to. And I think policy has changed from the interpretation of it being, "If you don't give this person anywhere between a sentence and an essay before killing them it's gank and wrong" to, "it needs to be a fathomable reason to want to kill someone even as an antag or it's gank." I imagine the gank rule is intended to prevent random murder from happening, and instead promoting premeditated murders instead to make the round more interesting.

ganking is what happens when you bite off more than you can chew, get owned, and bitch about it