EVE New Citizens Q&A

I've been doing alot of research on the forums and I haven't found any concrete answers. Right now my condor can get 2800 scan res with just two SeBo's, but with two tech two signal amps and 3 scan res rigs, I get a measly 3100 scan res. My question is whether or not that extra 300 scan res is worth it for the 5 extra slots it uses.

I know the server runs in 1 second ticks, and supposedly having a lock-on time of faster than a second is all you need, so with that in mind shouldn't there be a "magic number" for scan res to be to catch pods? Do I have too much scan res?

I know it's much easier to smartbomb, or just catch them in null-sec, but I'm after FW pods in hi sec.

If they're pre-aligned and spam warp before dying you won't catch them no matter what scan res you have.

But in practice, with >2.000 scan res you will catch many.

This is the case, and they do not need to be pre-aligned.

It takes less than one second to warp a pod away. It takes around one second to acquire a target lock on a pod, then an additional one second to activate a scram or gun.

That said, you will catch people that lag, make errors, or do not understand the mechanics of getting pods out, and you will catch more if you follow them in warp and catch them at the sun or a gate or a station.

I play on minimum graphics settings explicitly to reduce the lag on losing one of my ships.

There is still always a full second between the lock acquisition and the shot firing due to EVE running on a 1Hz server tick.

The first tick you do not have a target lock so your shot does not get processed by the server. The next tick, it goes through unless the pod has left in the interim.

This is also the same reason that if you are primaried in a fleet fight, your tank goes down in big clumps, not lots of little amounts, and why damage packets dealt by your (non-sentry) drones are in obvious 'clumps', not more smoothly distributed over time.

A few things to add;

- Insta locking doesn't exist simply because of the server ticks involved and how the client and server have to communicate with each other. As such it's mostly used by bad people feverishly trying to find an excuse for why they died. "Damn I got insta locked man", just like "I got perma jammed". It's just people wanting to use fancy names and excuses for stuff they don't understand.

- as stated above, anything over ~2500 scan res is pretty much a waste

- even if you do everything right, if the pod pilot is paying attention, isn't lagging or DCed, isn't an idiot and has semi decent navigation skills you will not catch his pod. "But I got 3 pods today". As I stated; people who aren't an idiot :)


So, optimise your game play and actions but don't really put too much emphasis on trying to catch pods in the way that you're going overboard on stats or effort, because it won't really make a difference. The outcome of you catching a pod or not is more based on the (in)actions of the pod pilot than on the tackler.

You're forgetting that it's the server who allows the tackler to see the target in the first place, so while you're right that lock completion may fall "between ticks" you KNOW it always starts at the start of a new tick, where it shows up on overview. And THEN it's a simple calculation figuring out which scanres is needed to target something before the next tick and that's, roughly, 2500 scanres.

More scranres might help if the tackler is too slow to react and thus make up for the time lost but frankly we're talking 0.1s of seconds here and anyone who's truly interested in making that work will probably start with learning how to target properly; not how to make up for being bad at being a tackler simply because human reaction time is far too slow to be made up for by an excess of scanres.

It wouldn't help a tackler who does it right, because he's fast enough. It might help a tackler who does it wrong but the window for that to make a difference is really really small and most certainly not enough if that tackler would rely on his actual reaction speed.

So you either tackle "pre clicking" and be fine with 2500-2800res or whatever, OR you rely on your reaction time. The issue is that someone who chooses to rely on reaction time chooses to do it wrong. That's why some tacklers perform miracles, same thing with uncloaking targets. People who are **** can't be helped with scan res, people who are good won't need that scan res.