EVE General Discussion

I can see you're one of those people who assumes that anyone who reads your writing will agree with you because, well, it’s you and only stupid people would fail to get your point and agree whole-heartedly.



Yes you did say EVE was dying. You just didn't set a timetable. "it won't kill EVE... Yet." Your implication is clearly that it will kill the game in the long run, which is strange, given that “it won't change the game much.”



No, your point wasn't really clear. The “sandbox” represents creative freedom and undirected game play. The sand doesn't represent UI elements or specific probe mechanics. Your metaphorical argument is that the “choice” of whether you recall all or one probe is a slippery slope to the death of EVE, because removal of those choices is tantamount to killing all creative freedom and forcing everyone into some sort of directed game play. If they were removing the choice of going into wormholes at all or they were forcing you to follow a certain path to get to the point where you could scan, then you might have an argument. But they aren’t. They’re fine tuning the most boring, useless part of the probe mechanic.

Here’s a question I’d like the purists to answer: if the fictional technology in the EVE universe is so advanced, why can’t my onboard computer compute the optimal probe formation and then cycle through the probe down process without my direct intervention? Why would a critical, life-or-death function be left to my unsteady hand and my inability to properly determine precise measurements in the vastness of space? Of course it wouldn’t. Anymore than the commander of an Aegis class cruiser is expected to “probe down” enemy aircraft in THIS century. The act of probing shouldn’t be a human skillset; the use of probing should be a skillset.



Re-read that sentence. Who's making assumptions in that sentence? You are. Don't do that. Also, don't say annoying things like, don't do that.



You're the one who decided to build an entire thread around the concrete metaphor. If you're going to shoot for the literary stars, you're going to have to accept the possibility of failure. It’s a fun metaphor in the most general sense, but it ended up hindering your argument and muddying the point you were trying to make, which seems to be "I believe that certain elements of the new mechanic constrain my choices and constraints of any kind on the choices I've been making up until this point are bad." I point you back at my paragraph above.

If you don’t know what hyperbole is, you weren’t paying attention in every single English class from 6th to 12th grade and, assuming you went to college, in the 2 composition courses that are required by almost every university in the country. It would also imply that, at the moment you wrote the statement, you hadn’t bothered to look it up.

Nope. Players will always group together and a player who doesn't is of course rightly at a disadvantage.

But let say I as a single player decide to go to an unclaimed system in EvE and claim it as my sov system. The players will come, blow up my shite, kill me and kick me out. Thats good. Whats not good is putting in place mechanics which prevent me from doing the stuff I mentioned.

There is no reason to restrict a lot of the toys in the sandbox but they're restricted because the devs want to force the players into null. Thats not sandbox. If null is interesting enough and worthwhile people will go. That requires content not restrictions on which part of the sandbox people can play with the toys and enforcing as well how they can play with them.

Kids these days and their easy scanning!

Why, back in MY day, we didn't have probes that warped around. If we wanted probes to be somewhere, we had to fly there in our ship and push them out into space with our bare hands! (I'm not kidding - probes did not warp) And if you think that is bad enough, probes couldn't change scanning ranges on the fly - if you wanted a wider scanning probe or something that scanned a small area, well, you better hope you brought the right ones with you! On top of that, probes weren't recoverable. So you had better bring a LOT of them! NOT ONLY THAT, but to scan correctly, you had to use the "general purpose" probes, scan until you found out what kind of signature it was (Radar, Ladar, etc.), and THEN you had to break out the appropriate probes to match! AND THEN, if you were LUCKY, you might get a lock on the signature!

Mumble grumble, kids don't know how good they have it, exploration used to be a time consuming, excruciating process that rewarded the true masochists of Eve! Now anyone - and I mean anyone at all! - can scan things down.

So stop yer whining and GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

(I do think that probing has been made a little too easy, but more people involved in exploration isn't a bad thing)

So your complaint is that CCP are forcing players into nullsec by not allowing Titans in highsec? You are aware that most players don't even want to pilot a Titan, right? I think that's where your logic is flawed; You're comparing WoW end-game raiding to flying a Titan, when there is nothing to compare.

What I get from this is that your goal was to teach. A noble purpose. I would love to know, however, if you always teach this way or if it's just on the internet? Because you really take your time getting to the point. And there's a whole lot of extremely passive aggresive smack going on before you actually get to the teaching part.

I do thank you, though, and I will keep what you said in mind.

Condensing all the probes down into just a couple of types wasn't really necessary, but I do think allowing probes to warp was a good thing. The old system was, at times, masochistically difficult and annoying since you can't warp to wherever you want to in space.
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I do think these changes to probes themselves do make scanning easy, mode, but I'm not too bothered by them. What bothers me is it seems to be taking away the learning curve and leaves nothing for the veteran scanners. Having to figure out how to place your probes to maximize a signal is important. Now that I know how to do that, I have MY standard probe formations, and I want to save MY probe formations to quickly deploy in that formation rather than having standard preset formations that everyone has and I have to use.

If formations were user saved only, then you would still have to learn what works and everyone would have their own stuff. There's also less incentive to train up astrometrics to get more probes since you always have 8 now.


I also don't like autorecall either. You are already warned you are leaving probes behind before you jump so you only have to worry about losing probes if you ignore or turn it off, so not much is gained. it also works against me, since I sometimes leave probes out on purpose. When scanning down wormholes, if I come across a K162, I sometimes hop through to see where it's coming from and do a quick survey of the system, but I leave probes in the system I came from so I can pick up scanning where I left off. THe fast deploy does marginalize the use of that, but I still don't think the game needs to recall them for me. Given that there's a warning, if I jump with probes out, I either want them out still, or I am in GTFO mode and don't give a **** about the probes.


I am also led to believe the ramifications for wormholes wasn't considered. Ships are spotted on d-scan or in person only. Spending several seconds decloaked launching probes one by one isn't very safe, and you are certain to be picked up on d-scan by the time you cloak, and they might even figure out where you are coming from. Being able to pop probes out and recloak and warp off in mere seconds might actually let you slip under the radar as it were. In addition, grav belts being anoms makes mining in wormholes (which was also very risky) suicidally dangerous.

Speaking of that. I think it harms miners as well. Grav belts generally have higher quality ores, usually only found in systems of a lower sec status, so miners who took the time to scan were rewarded. Now if any joe blow in his venture can just warp to one, it kind of dilutes the value of grav sites since they just become roving asteroid belts and everyone is mining those ores.

I appreciate making things easier for newer players, but lowering the barrier of entry on certain things isn't necessarily a good thing. if everyone can do something, it loses some value, and it would be extremely bad if making exploration more accessible led to it becoming a mostly worthless activity.

0/10.

For real. You can do better than "concrete in the sandbox".

What kind of ship is deploying those probes?

Yes you can scan for probes, we still have D-scan

I agree, probe recall should remain manual due to the ability for login / leave and reenter local scanning traps in PVP.