These forums have been archived and are now read-only.

The new forums are live and can be found at https://forums.eveonline.com/

Player Features and Ideas Discussion

 
  • Topic is locked indefinitely.
 

scanner drones - more natural than launchers
Author
Previous Topic Next Topic
TheExtruder
TheExtruder Corporation
#1 - 2014-12-29 13:48:51 UTC  |  Edited by: TheExtruder
Scanner drones would be more accessible and natural to use for newer players than launcher with probes. its a good way to help familiarize people with scanning down a wormhole for example, as well as familiarize them with the scanning UI.

Idea:
You unleash 3 drones into one direction and they scan very far in that one direction (triangulating a small radius). You can put a special module on your ship to increase the range/radius. Different drones specialize in finding different sites, for example a drone that only finds wormholes

feel free to post other ideas for a scanner drone
Gawain Edmond
Khanid Bureau of Industry
#2 - 2014-12-29 17:04:52 UTC
how is this better than probes and since you know the general direction of all the sigs in a system you can just point them at the sig and get hits all day long. Also how is it easier than a probe launcher since all ships can fit a probe launcher but not all ships can use drones.
Komi Toran
Perkone
Caldari State
#3 - 2014-12-29 17:48:39 UTC
Back in the day, before there were wormholes, you had four sets of scanning probes. You had magnetometric, ladar, radar, and gravimetric. Each probe was used to find a particular type of site, what we would call data, gas, relic, and ore/ice today. The were removed. And do you know why? Because it was an annoying system that didn't add anything to the game.

And how exactly is this more "accessible?" Right now, if I want to probe, I can take any ship in the game and put a core probe launcher on it. With your idea, I'm limited to drone boats. Are we going to go around giving the Magnate, Heron, Probe, and their T2 counterparts drone bays now, while giving the Imicus more high slots? Do we give refunds to everyone who bought an Astero? Or do we have the odd situation of having dedicated probe ships that can't use these probe drones? How does that make sense to new players?
Selaria Unbertable
Bellator in Capsulam
#4 - 2014-12-29 18:51:02 UTC
Komi Toran wrote:
Back in the day, before there were wormholes, you had four sets of scanning probes. You had magnetometric, ladar, radar, and gravimetric. Each probe was used to find a particular type of site, what we would call data, gas, relic, and ore/ice today. The were removed. And do you know why? Because it was an annoying system that didn't add anything to the game.

And how exactly is this more "accessible?" Right now, if I want to probe, I can take any ship in the game and put a core probe launcher on it. With your idea, I'm limited to drone boats. Are we going to go around giving the Magnate, Heron, Probe, and their T2 counterparts drone bays now, while giving the Imicus more high slots? Do we give refunds to everyone who bought an Astero? Or do we have the odd situation of having dedicated probe ships that can't use these probe drones? How does that make sense to new players?


Basically, this... Plus, combat exploration would become more complicated. You'd either need a scanning alt, or use a ship with a large enough drone bay to put those additional drones into (not all ships have a drone bay, and those that do don't always have enough space for spare drones). CCP is still in the process of rebalancing ship classes, your suggestion would require the devs to do that again...

tl;dr
Just no, probes and probe launchers are fine the way they are.