EVE General Discussion

Firstly please forgive my spelling and grammar as English is my second language. I have been playing EVE for about one month. Initially I was very interested in exploration but I gave up after tried it for some time. Here are my thoughts about probing:

1. From gameplay perspective, probing is extremely boring. As a newbie explorer, i used spend hours probing for dozens of signals. Sometimes I find a good site or two, but most of time i am just repeating the same routine again and again for hours. It's even more boring than any thing i have done at work. Basically I feel like working rather than playing a game.

2. Exploration can be fun, it's always exicting to find something random and new, knowing I am the only/first person who have found it. In this sense, WH is a great content for explorer, but it's too harsh for new players like me. Maybe CCP want to create some content that's available to everyone while don't want to make it too easy. But for me the probe draging and zooming has ruined the fun.

3. On the PVP side, lack of quick probing is probably the main reason why we rely so much on local and star gate in finding a fight. D-scan is fine for me, it's meant to be a simple but crude method of space pinpointing. However, in a world where everyone flies shinny space ships, we are still finding targets by manually draging probes? That just feels weird.

_____________________________________
EDIT: if you feel it's too long, just read below:
_____________________________________

4. In a spaceship era, rather than some magical new technology, we still need 4 probes to find a target in 3d space--I can live with that, but it has to be done in a more intelligent way to be convicing. To avoid too much uncontrollable change to the game, why can't we just add an "auto probing" option, similar with "auto pilot" vs. "warp to 0m". "Auto probing" can use the exact same mechanism, but sightly slower or maybe with other restrictions. Everything applies to current probing still apply during auto probing except i can do something esle while it's scanning or just lay back and wait. Manual probing will still be an option, in case you are a real pro, or you want to use some tricks to make it much faster.

5. Combat probing is not as useful as it should be. It's ok if your target isn't moving, but in real pvp no one's gonna sit there and wait for you to catch. We need a mechanism which can track and follow a target to indicate its approximate location once it is 100% pinpointed, so that you can probe it out again with minimal effort. It could be a new type of probe, a module that could be fitted to a dedicated ship. Deploying such tracker to cover possible target locations will make the vast space of EVE more meaningful strategically.

In short, adding auto probing and "signal tracking" to current probing mechanism could make probing a lot easier and useful, and may solve the local problem.

1 - EVE offers dsp's, known signature strengths and nameplates, and sigs live at known ranges from celestials, and congregate in concentrations of celestials (center of system usually), and when congregated you can often avoid a lot of intermediate scanning.

Between all of those things, I rarely scan more than 2 or 3 things before hitting content, or I do a bunch of shortened scan routines (ie only changing between 2 and 4) to get a large body of sigs done. There is a lot of avoidable button pressing for those that pay attention.

That is correct for the way EVE works, as that means the faster scanner will get a possibly useful headstart in racing for content.

2 - when you don't know any of the content, it doesn't matter so much, whatever you scan down, you can go look at and its new.

3 - bit backwards there imo - gate PVP scares off the rabbits, hence you have no rabbits to scan down, and the survivors are all in fact hares, which from a foxes perspective are faster, stronger and harder to catch.

4 - I needed alt-drag thingie as not having it was enough to make me unsub.
not convinced I need auto probing, since I don't do much to get to content now. see point 1.

5 - combat probing will give you the bm to the escalation, safe or mission space the hare is using. Those tend to fulfill your desires because its likely the hare will come back to those locations at some point in the near future. ie it pays to figure out what the value of your BM actually is. if you have "space superiority" in the system concerned, you can go right ahead and take the escalation - bearing in mind that the escalation may often drop more valuable loot than the hares hull and fitting is worth, and may be nearly complete to boot.

No.

Of course you have not read what I said above... I am proposing a new mechanism (probe or ship module) to track a signal once it's 100% probed out, so that you don't have to probe all over again once the target moved.

yeah dude great id... oh w8 NO! get ur ass up you lazy bum

Well, what i mean is, just like auto piloting vs manually jump to 0. Auto probing will make things easier but slower. The hardcore explorer can always probe manually with whatever tricks they feel more efficient.

Regarding your "mining in my alley" comparison, I do feel exploration should be more like mining, but more mobile and random. After all it's just another PVE activity. Except a few tricks, probing itself is mostly mechanical repeating. With auto probing, you can still use all your fancy tricks to be faster than average pilots, but sets you free from click-drags. It should not be like who clicks and drags faster, that's not cool at all.

I am just saying what I feel is better, if you feel bad I am sorry to hear that. Combat probing is fast when your target is not moving or in a mission space. But when your target knows you are probing him, and is warping around dodging you among safe spots, combat probing is almost useless. The only way to catch such a target is probably wait until he decides to engage you or camp him at a celestial/station.

I agree, probing is a pain in the ass.

Evasion is a necessary strategy for managing asymmetric opposing forces, and allows the tactical circumstances to change without having conditioning losses (ie 20 more people can log in, which would be no use to you if you lost your 30 man gang prior to them logging on and getting to you). Its more work for a fleet to evade imo than it is for a single fleet member to keep pressure on with probes.

Its also necessary for kiting ships to engage 1v1 - as the game is being reorganised such that kiting ships usually lose to bricks in ehp/damage tests, but can usually disengage, so 1v1 between some hulls is very much looking for a weakness and scooting if a weakness doesn't show.

Sure. As long as those using the auto-probe feature will have the results of their probing delivered by return post in a self addressed, stamped envelope.