Wormholes

I am coming around to the position on probing that it needs to be simplified and/or sped up significantly.

In before Jester: I'm already got gud, shut up, you dinkus.

There's several themes here, and I'll go through them individually and separately, so even you people can make stupid ill-informed self-centred crybaby exceptionalist and elitist declarations about how i don't know jack **** and jack just left town.

#1. Data sites.
Remove these already. They are utterly worthless, no one does them, and in many wormholes they represent 50% or more of signatures. Convert the Frontier sites to their relic site equivalents, if you must, or up the sleeper BPCs significantly. But realise there's precious little that anyone ever does with the nullsec sites because decryptors aren't worth diddly and datacores? hahahaha.

#2 - Relic sites
Generally OK, except the Sleeper relic site cans are worthless. We only ever do them for the sleepers, and then we warp away, leaving the cans to expire. Maybe put ribbons and salvage or something into the cans to make them at least worth contemplating doing.

#3 - Time-sink

As said in #1, above, data sites eat up incredible amounts of game time and play time for zero reward, zero potential reward even if you are rich as Miton and swoon upon your couches denigrating poors for being bad at the game and doing activities not related to escalations.

Be as that may, however bad we all are at the game, people waste plenty of hours ust probing through fields of worthless chaff which no one ever does. CCP needs to admit that this is a problem for the game, as much as structure grinding is. it's not exciting, so it's not gameplay, it's boredom. Less boredom = more people paying subs to access content - be it PVE or PVP.

Of course, illiterate untermensch programmer types with ego invested in never getting rid of anything in the game, will hoard these things because it produces richness. No, guys. It just means boredom. Get rid of it all.

Addressing time wasting "gameplay" in EVE is crucial to reinvigorating the most intense but boring game known to man.

Humang (who I have known for years) made a poast a while back discussing turning probing into more of a timed process, eliminating multiple probes and moving them around, squashing them down on a sig repeatedly, blah blah.

Humang got shouted down for it, but I do believe that a time-based mechanism should be investigated to simplify the act of probing cosmic anomalies.

Yes, it does mean that a skillset and a comparative advantage of experienced, skillful probe wizards like myself may be forever lost to the game, but realistically the number of people i blindside with ninja probing every week is around 5-10. Yes, i've got a set of skills and methods some people lack, but it's not a great loss to replace hours of boring, brain-destroying drudgery with a semi-automated process.

Design Principles
1) The rate should be a bit less than a good prober, but better than an idiot.
It should not take more than 15 minutes to blitz every sig in a reasonably sized system with the average of 10 sigs. Right now, without midslot mods or implants, I average about 25 seconds per sig, doing it manually - including the fiddly ones. I am probably not a 21st Level probing Wizard, but more like 18th. That's fine, my e-peen can deal with not being elitest. But it serves to give you an idea of the rate at which an automatic method should clear unknown signatures - about every 30 seconds.

2) Manual should potentially be faster.
Natch. if you want to git gud, you gain an advantage. just like autopilot.

3) Combat probes should be twice as slow, if not eight times slower.
Got a depot to find? Launch your combats, come back in 15, warp to depot. Got a Paladin to probe at a safespot? better git gud, swaggot.

4) it should be semi-automatic.
Like, you place a spread of probes, hit probe, and wait.
Move your probes to an area of space you know the sig is in, and it goes faster. Just dump them wherever, it takes forever.

Altogether, if we remove data sites, roll them into relics as one type of exploration content, investigate making every piece of content valuable to someone (not even 1 week old noobs do data sites!), and put in a time-saving automatic sig probing system, this game will become enjoyable and less literally razorblades in urethra painful.

Now proceed, O trolls, with calling be an imbecile.

Well, I am terribly sorry that the game got too hard for you mate but "I win" button has never had a place in Eve. I think that devs done a lot already to make the game simpler and easier for people like you but it never stops, does it? Now we need scan to be automatic? Autopilot to 0? "Reject any PvP" button?

Probing is fine as it is.

Problem is that there is too many wormholes for the current amount of players living in wormhole space. Probing just seems like a pain the ass because currently you have to scan down a large number of empty wormholes before you can find people to shoot.

Also unoccupied / rarely used wormholes tend to have a huge amount of sigs because no one runs the gas etc or rolls the wandering whs. I do agree about getting rid of the data sites.

Everything should just be on my overview and warpable from the click of my buton...

Ohh hai Trinket.

posting because I saw my name in OP

The only time I fully scan down data+ relic is if I want to hunt. If all the sigs are in a nice little cluster you can clear a hole out p quick. Don't like changes to combat, makes on-grid warping nigh impossible and makes everyone safe (unless I read that incorrectly).

May as well poke my head in here, as it's still something I wouldn't mind talking about.

Sorry in advance for the world wall...

The current mechanics for probing is fine, and I always agreed that it was; it's simple to understand, to learn and to become quite proficient at. However where I believe the issues lies is in it's lack of relevance to the intent of the person that is probing, as someone who knows that a w-space system is dead and empty still has to commit the exact same amount of time and attention as someone else that is in a system with know activity, and there is a lot more motivation for the second individual than the first to scan every signature in system.

What I was trying to do in my original thread was to provide an alternative that make life a little less monotonous for the guy in the dead system or the solo/small corp w-space hermits that only have 1 to 3 people who actually scan , not to further dumb-down or replace the current system that is working just fine.

So to follow on from Trinkets Friend:

Cleaning up some of the signatures that can clutter w-space would help with this, less to scan down and more time spent finding potential content. However instead of just removing the data/relic sites unique to w-space, I would suggest that the number of them simply be reduced, and the loot payout from the cans be increased. (likewise maybe for the null-quality data/relic sites)

For the automatic scanning concept, there are a lot of ways it could be implemented or function, however one thing I would highly suggest is that the method being used to scan a system, manual or automatic, should be externally recognizable to everyone else in system. (ie using d-scan)

While I agree that manual scanning should always have the advantage over automatic scanning in time commitment, risk or use, some form of compromise, again I think that the scanning method should match with the scanners intent for what they intend to do once they are done: scan it faster with more commitment to find the points of interest in system, or scan it slower with less commitment and only to find specific items in the many.

There would be nothing to stop someone from being involved in content regardless of the scanning method they use, if they are looking for PVP potential then they will be paying attention to d-scan and while they scan (as any good wh'er should), and if they aren't then in 99% of instances you can't actually do anything with the fact that you know they are there until they start doing sites, so if someone is afk scanning then all you have to do is check back every few minutes and look for them on d-scan.

Trinkets Friend isn't talking about "replacing" the current mechanics of scanning, just offering an alternative to make life a little easier and less needlessly time-consuming so we can focus on the important things, such as blowing each-other up.

All I want is to know what signature type I am scanning when hitting 10% or so. If you are looking for wormholes, the amount of garbage signatures you need to process is too big. Of course we are years ahead compared to scanning in old days. But doing tedious **** like resolving 20 signatures of which 18 is not interesting sooner or later gets to you. You go afk, let others scan or do a break from EVE.

When I come to system and see 20 signatures, I say: yea, no thanks. Why not introduce deep space probe back again, introduce new skill and let it be specific to determine what type signatures are there in the system?

It's not about the pirate sites, the sleeper sites are just ridiculous. There is a massive oversupply for both datacores and the ancient relics, leading to a point where the only thing you ever hack is a talocan wreck. So if there is no talocan wreck, your data/relic just scored as a better anomaly where you can't get ganked without the aggressor dropping prrobes.

There is not much wrong with scanning itself ever since one-handed probing was introduced, it's just more repetitive even compared to traditional missioning pve still. Sadly, the spectrum for k-holes and large holes like c5-c5 or c4-c3 (5% I think) has so much junk in it... Ever since they increased the tiny sigs' sizes (like 2 years ago, when they doubled the size for stuff like M267 and such), it all became a fair bit more cluttered to add to that :<

No you cant, unless its a ****** gas sites

Obvious how? Bunch of sigs are same as k162, but i love people talking out of their ass and talking nonsense as if they have everything figured out. Closest you could get to "figuring out" was deep space probes.