EVE General Discussion

Cool trick.

Well, this and autopiloting. I hear autopiloting makes it much less boring, and your trip will be over before you know it!

The mechanics of speed vs. modified speed are used in several instances in New Eden, including sling shotting freighters, combining a MWD and a cloak to align while cloaked and warp out when coming out of cloak (this takes practice as I understand it), and pulsing a 100mn MWD on an Orca for a roughly 10 second align time.

From an older thread...

Ok, so... warp requires two things...

- alignment towards the object in question.
- be between 75% and 125% max speed.

The MWD-pulse and webbing trick are not inconsistencies... rather, they are workarounds that manipulate the speed requirement (alignment isn't a consideration when starting from a "dead stop"... you are already "aligned" once you start moving).


How it works:

- The MWD-pulse trick increases the max speed of a ship, however the agility (acceleration) of certain ships are so low that they will never reach even close to max MWD speed within one MWD cycle. Instead, they just happen to reach (or be within) that needed 75% to 125% max speed threshold when the MWD is turned off.
For example: 100mn Orca

- The Webbing trick does the exact opposite of the MWD-pulse trick... instead of temporarily increasing max speed it reduces it to where the current speed is.
Again, remember that some ships have very poor agility (meaning very poor acceleration).
A single web reduces max speed (not current speed) by 60%. Two webs by ~87% (because stacking penalties do apply). This means that a freighter that has a max speed of ~100 m/sec only needs to be going ~10 m/sec for the desired outcome (warping).



What CCP thinks of these things:

- the MWD-pulse trick has been known and used for years. More thrill-seeking players often combine them with a cloak (the T2, non-Covert-Ops one) to get through gate camps in battleships.
Petitions (and threads) have often been filed against this tactic but they usually are rebuffed and the filer pointed towards the Features and Ideas forum if they "feel very strongly" (which is then generally rebuffed by the playerbase because we do not see a problem with it).

- The Webbing-trick was never intended by the DEVs... but it was showcased by CCP during Fanfest 2013 as an example of "emergent gameplay" that they were generally fine with (note: watch the whole thing, it is quite interesting how they view their own game and mechanics).

You use a Vigilant for hauling?



DST can also use a 10MN MWD for 10 second align times.
Messing around the other day I learned that 10MN AB gets my Iteron aligned in 8 ticks. Need to test on DST.

This is quite valid and not an exploit in any way shape or form. Feel free to use it at your leisure.

Okay, Here is an explanation.

In order to warp you have to be pointed in the direction you want to go and be going at least 75% of your maximum velocity.

Your ability to change speed (Or direction but that doesn't matter, I'll explain slightly later) so that you can get to warp is based on your ship's Inertia Modifier or agility. For example a Kestral has a speedy inertia modifier of 3.27. Larger ships tend to have smaller inertia modifiers. For example a Raven has an inertia modifier of a slow 0.12. What is the inertia modifier of a Freighter? A Charon has a inertia modifier of 0.0625. Meaning that it can accelerate as fast as cool molasses.

Mathematically the system treats your ship like a vector with the direction being the direction you are going and the length being how fast you are going in that direction. Since you start at exactly 0 m/s when you jump into a system the direction you are facing graphically is not relevant, your vector has 0 length and therefore no real direction. So when you start heading to the other gate you turn to the proper direction instantly* then start accelerating (slowly in the case of a you flying a Freighter).
However, if your corpmate** has a stasis webifier fitted they can help you out. A Stasis Webifier decreases your maximum velocity. It does not directly decrease your actual velocity, except if your velocity is greater than your maximum velocity you will slow down (You won't be having that problem in a Freighter though).

Here is the beauty part. Your corpmate's webs have reduced your max velocity and so reduced how fast you have to go to get to warp. Your inertia modifier is the same as it ever was and you lose no speed from before you were webbed, You are always pointed in the direction you want to go by the laws of linear algebra. Therefore you warp faster. It is not an exploit, but rather a clever use of game mechanics, the same mechanics that save at least one hostile daily who was webbed first instead of warp scrambled***.

*If you have ever seen a battleship warp onto a grid sideways this is probably why, the graphics have to turn the ship ponderously but the math has turned the ship the proper direction already if they were at exactly 0 m/s. Also this is why 'passive aligning' doesn't do anything. If you have no speed, you have no direction, any direction would be good enough (although FC's can still catch sleeping people by telling the fleet to passive align)

**And it has to be a corpmate, or someone who continuously accepts dueling requests (Or a wartarget, or someone who activated a killright)

***I'll leave why as an exercise for the reader.

One thing to remember is that webbing freighter for faster warp is best done at gates after the jump, i.e., when the freighter is at stand still (0m/s), which means that there is no alignment time.

If you web a freighter coming out of undock and aligning to its jump destination, it seems that your warp will initiate actually slower than not being webbed.

Yeah, when tricks like these help freighter pilots escape ganking death its always "emergent gameplay".
Arguably, the warp speed threshold should scale with the web effect and a web would have no effect on your time to warp.
This would also be a pretty thing to fix. But it gives pilots a way to save their assets, so game on, 'its A-OK'.

On the other hand, when webbing tricks are used in a similar manner to KILL targets and victims start screaming?
Suddenly the 'emergent gameplay' turns into a bannable exploit.
Never mind that faction police frequently killed -10 pilots using this same 'exploit'.

exploit notification from lead gm grimmi

It has come to our attention that some players are making use of a broken game mechanic involving web modules preventing people from warping, for the purpose of killing them. This is a clear exploit and anyone found abusing this will be dealt with accordingly. Exploiting may result in a permanent suspension from the game. Our Game Design team will be working to deploy a fix for this issue in the near future.

Hooray for coddling.