EVE General Discussion

Making things difficult for the sake of making them difficult is always a dumbass move. CCP has steadily made the barrier to entry to certain activies lower so that they can attract more people to that way of playing, thereby increasing (hopefully) the number of players who play the game. Despite the protestations to the contrary, "dumbing down" the scanning system is not going to kill Eve, or even harm it in any meaningful way.

Splitting the world into two realms would kill it dead in no time at all. The two things really aren't comparable.

I for one, loathe the changes in exploration now, and feel like this ... hope people here can understand the hidden meaning within the video and my reasons for posting it.

I'm not sure what I enjoy the most about the new system:

-The fact that I don't have to waste time dragging around little arrows anymore.
-The fact that I never have to see a grav sig again.
-The delicious tears being extracted from whinging numpties who desperately want to cling to the busy-work of the current system.

Hi forum lurker here...this post tempted me...

So the rides over. It's been a great year and a half to be an explorer (for me). I won't welcome the new expac. Yes, I have checked out/tested the changes on SiSi. With the death of DSP I won't be bothering to scan down an entire region, sometimes two. Yes I do truely mean scanning every single solar system. For my prefered region it takes a little over 2+ hours with DSP.

The DSP chart is no secret, if you're band hunting it's amazing. For me the last row was all the information I ever needed from DSP. 10/10 combat plexs show up as .03 %.

Jump into a system use a dsp, which I spent the time training for that single item -_-, then see results. If no .03% then move on.

I can usually find one every day/24 hours. Sometimes two if I changed regions.

Went to plex hunt on the test server in the same area and fashion I would if it where live. Wow it was aweful. All those dumb .24 signels have to scanned or you will miss what you are actually looking for.

Radar/mag/whatever (except ladars that can drop a skillbook) are worthless in my own opinion. In the case of 10/10s there is usually only one per an entire region. Despite what you can google I don't believe it instantly respawns after completion but can take up to 12hours for a new one. But it can respawn a few minutes later certainly. It has happened to me. I have also done it where I completed the plex and then rescanned the entire region as in all solar systems and still no respawn. After finding one these days I call it quits for the next 12-24 hours.

Before DSP and refining my own methods and habits, I'd be lucky to find more than one 10/10 per month. I don't miss those days of feeling hopeless. These days it's more like 5-7 per week but only do 1-3 because of competition/hostile/busy solar systems. But I take this any day to the huge time sink it was before.

For a specialized niche explorer the patch will kill me. Oh well. It supported all my expensive ship buying and subs for 3 accounts.
I never plan to pay my subs with real money (and never have). Hopefully the moving towards max trade skills toon I have will work out.

Did they dumb scanning down? Yes.
Do I think it will make new players pick up exploring? No, not worthwhile signels. Most of exploring is total crap.
Is exploration a huge time sink? Yes
Is exploration going to be more of a huge time sink? Definitly, if you want to make money that is.
For the the most part these changes hurt the long time scanners.
I'm at work hence the rant.
/rant off

PS Like St. Mio said, its been a good run so long and thanks for all the fish. (And all the billions of ISK)
PPS St. Mio please break this crap patch by making band filtering work with combats.
PPPS Screw whoever at CCP who brought up removing deep space probes.

O///////////

ahaha wrong thread.

For those that don't know what the changes are. Seamus Donahue from E-Uni did a training video on the changes showing how they work with some combat probes, also all 3 new modules.

Odyssey Probes on Singularity

Moving gravimetric signatures to "ore site" anomalies has removed some significant exploration content. It's as simple as that.

So with one hand CCP gives us the cool system scanner overlay & improved probing mechanics & give away probing advantages like candy (everyone can use 8 probes, and train the 1 skill to get all the advantages), but with the other hand they take away stuff to discover.

Can you see a reason for highly trained explorers to complain? Imagine if all your fittings skills were merged into "Core Fitting" which gave +5% per level to PG, CPU, shield capacity, armour strength and passive resistances? What if "Weapon Usage" replaced WU, AWU, Rapid Firing, Controlled Bursts, Gunnery, Motion Prediction and Sharpshooter skills? Wouldn't you complain about the complexity of the game being removed?

That's an apples to orangutans comparison and you know it.


In no way am I insinuating this is a first step with regards to scanning/probing, I was referring to it being a first step of their revamp of the concept. This is definitely a massive change from what the original vision and implementation has been.

When I first saw what they were planning on doing I had some serious trepidation about it, considering how it DOES come off as a complete rework and dumb-down. And it is. If this was done for the sake of dumbing down alone I'd be all up in their face about it, but that's at odds with my own personal opinion that this game lacks the magnitude of "exploration" as the game deserves.

IF this is a means to that end then I can get behind it. If it sits at Exploration Revamp 1.0 and they never iterate on it, I'll be first in line to rub it in their faces as a **** idea. ;)

Are people annoyed about the new mechanics or the fact that they will have more competition now?

I was actually pretty happy with it the way it was. I generally trust that CCP will get things right in these expansions but I don't believe exploration needed to be made even more accessible. I liked that it was something that required some effort to learn and training time invested, and I liked the aspect that there was something 'hidden' and 'mysterious' in the game that I could scan down and find. In short, I liked exploring the unknown, in however limited a fashion that can be in a game like this.