EVE General Discussion

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Update 30.04.:

Which of the new changes in Oddyssey are increasing the speed of scanning?
a) an additional probe (now 8 probes launchable at the same time)
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OK so firstly, being "good" at scanning doesn't require to have maxxed skills, even if it did I'm not the type of person to call someone out after looking up their skills, your opinion and your content of your post is what counts, not stats or killboards or links to character sheets.

Secondly I think you need to have a long ahrd think about the phrase "in depth art".

ART is an indepth art. I can teach you to draw, in fact I could teach you to draw almost perfectly, but that doesn't necessarily make you a world class artist, it makes you a good at drawing.

The techniques you've described are, by and large, redundant too. The probing system isn't an art, it's maths pure and simple and if you assert otherwise I'm sorry to say but you're plain wrong, and if you haven't noticed, maths isn't an artform, it's maths and it's factual.

With decent skills in a good ship 7 probes in the shape of a cross with 1 in the middle, 1 above the middle and 1 below the middle is the only formation you ever need. Most of the time you can roughly pinpoint everything in the system in one scan in that formation, and then focus your scannning down.

The only bit that requires intuition is figuring out which of the things you have located is the one you want to go to. For PvE purposes this is easy as pie as it tells you. For PvP you need to be making sure you are warping to the right ship, which isn't easy and requires a balance of good probing skills to find the ship quickly, but also good guesswork to figure out what the target is likely to be based on information available to you.

In the examples you actually used twice you mentioned a "cross" which is the same shape each time and the only one you mentioned which I haven't seen before is a "sifting" pattern to see what's in system. I'm amazed you've ever managed to gank anyone if you are using your probes to see what is in system before scanning them instead of using your D-scanner. Maybe it's because your experience is only in wormholes where people don't know you're in system and Lowsec where people are used to having neutrals in local and are more likely to have fools who think they are safe in anomalies.

So I'm sorry, I don't buy your premise and I don't believe your examples are concrete at all.

So they stopped what they were doing and took your pro advice to design the new stuff? It couldn't be that no blog or detailed official information has come out so all of us are working off of speculation? And Saheed just compiled all the great peals of wisdom you morons have spewed out in 600,000 words or less?

Seek help for delusions of grandeur.

Hello folks,

so the new scan mechanisms coming with odyssey will give us

a) new scanning mechanisms like presets of probe-positions
b) new modules for your ship to increase the scan-range, scan-time etc. (adding to the old scanskills)

What are the consequences of this changes?
1.) easier access for casual scanning pilots
2.) a big decrease of the time you need to scan something (or someone) for experienced pilots

So, 1.) is a good thing. Especially for not so experienced pilots the old scanning was horrible. Easier access is good, especially if you want new pilots to expierence the new exploration sites easily.

But 2.) gives me and my corpmates some headaches. We live in a wormhole, and scanning down enemy pilots is an important part in our daily life. Also our enemies are scanning us down often, at least they try.
I dont now what the timeframe for scanning someone down with combat probes is, but i think it will be a lot quicker with the changes. Maybe too quick. Maybe you guys can give me some numbers on that.

Update 30.04.:

Which of the new changes in Oddyssey are increasing the speed of scanning?
a) an additional probe (now 8 probes launchable at the same time)
b) Button to deploy all probes at once
c) Probe-Formation-Presets (optional, you can still position the probes yourself)
d) UI changes in general so you can scan faster
e) new scan-modules which buff your scanspeed and efficiency
f) scanning skills are buffed (Example:
Current: Astrometrics L5 + Astrometric Aquisition L4 = 40% reduction in scan time.
After: Astrometrics L5 + Astrometric Aquisition L4 = 45% reduction in scan time.)

Additional Informations:
- No more deep space probes (CCP Greyscale: "The functionality of the deep space probe should largely be replaced by the new scanner overlay doohickey, which gives you a nice visual overview of what signatures are present in system, and their *approximate* location (give or take a reasonable number of AU)."
- Probe-Formation-Presets: CCP Greyscale: "There's two presets in Odyssey currently: one is seven arranged in a plane, for doing an initial sweep over as much of the system as possible, while the other is a gunstar for pinpointing individual signatures."

Also within the first 10 pages of this thread: Huge load of ideas how to change scanning completly, also solutions how to fix the problems with the big increase in scanning time.

TL;DR: Scanning ships down might be too quick now.

What do you think

o7

CCP Soundwave showed in the demo that it will deploy 7 probes at once since that is the optimal number, no more and no less. If you want to use 8 you will need to use the formation deployment and then hit F1 once to get your 8th.

2) Cloak - A person can use cloak and scanner probes together with zero risk to themselves.

All the risk is concentrated on a target and that doesn't seem balanced in a way that encourages fighting rather than afk or logging out. I would make it so that scan probes for the duration of the active scan force the ship out of cloak. (Why can probes send huge amounts of spatial data back to you without revealing your location?) This allows a target to see the ship and not just the probes (so where you park matters).

Another, fairly radical, idea i'll float: Make cloaks reduce but not eliminate your signature in the system. Add in skills to increase the degree to which the cloak reduces signature. Cloak would still make targeting the cloaked ship impossible. (Maybe like a non-targeting EWAR that of course makes it impossible to use weapons/modules). This also allows for skills to counter the sig reduction skills that combat pilots can use. Of course adding in localized anti-cloak pulse bombs/specialized warheads would further enhance this idea.

Just some ideas to toss around. I'd love to see criticism and feedback since I'm not overly attached to these ideas but would like to see changes to make PvP related scanning more dynamic.