EVE General Discussion

Having player engagement happen at load-in zones, ie spawn-camping in any other game, is largely a product of having a game with little or no environment.

Perhaps with the rise of new structures some new options will emerge. CCP could have gone a lot of places with deadspaces, but it just never materialized. It's hard for any outsider to say if the developers who came up with them are even still with the company today.

This feels so close to the truth, I want to give you a medal for it.

Gate camps are more boring than mining.

I can't even get people to omni tank rat while gate camping.

Gate camping happened to fit my life style at the time I last played. Not much RL time for gaming, so being able to jump into Eve and instantly join a fleet was great.

Some of the best fights and laughs I've had in Eve, have been at gates. Ralph nailed it quite nicely.

You're right about gatecamps and players not wanting to go to null. There are of course lots of other reasons people don't want to go.

In defense of gate campers - the gate camp has been in the game since day one... sortof. It was actually much worse when EvE released. You'd spawn in the middle of space, nowhere near a gate, uncloaked, but only after your ship had sat there for 30 seconds while the game loaded system. First time I died to a camp I could hear myself getting locked, shot and killed / podded while my screen was still black.

Defense - basically there's close to no other way to reliably engage a person. Why? Local. People dock up, cloak, log off.

Somethings that's really remained untouched is the gate camp. You're still spawning 15km or less from a gate, exactly the same as you were in 2003. Meanwhile since 2003 we've seen the introduction of 1) bubbles 2) dictors / hdictors 3) remote sebo's 4) interdiction links.

Yet, we've seen no alternative to camping gates developed that would make player interaction more interesting or less dangerous during travel. Campers would ask why make it less dangerous, well, less dangerous = more targets, more targets = more opportunities. With the right tweaking CCP could make it both safer to enter null / low, and at the same time, easier to hunt targets due to an increase in targets being available.

Of course the other reason null and low are not popular or dont' get many visitors is there's not much benefit to go into low, its pretty crap and as to null, you can go out there, make a lot of isk but the task is made extremely difficult by the limited availability of stations, resupply and unless you're running combat sites which can net you billions a day, there's stuff all to do that's interesting or worthwhile for visitors.

That sounded like it hurt to say.

There is alot of truth in this. It's low effort but far from risk free. I lost count of the number of times I got hot-dropped in the space of 9 months and lost 2 HICs in 2 days. Ofc on the plus side I got to drink alot of beer and get some killmails that made you go "wtf was this guy thinking*, and got to -10 and looked like a badass :)

Right. i may be a bit of a noob at two and a half years game play, but from a solo point of view the original posts actually have it nailed (IMO).
The main points to me are that a Sensor boosted frig of most varieties will lock your insta warp ceptor faster than you can warp off and a cloak is a little dodgy because of the weird tick it has and the fact that ' you cannot do that becuase of interference from the cloak you are currently doing' means its actually quite easy to mess it up or press cloak 0.2 seconds later than the sebo'd frig mentioned earlier just ctrl-clicked you.
Also saying a ceptor or a cloaky ship can be used to get past the camp is not really useful if you want to run combat sites, it means bringing combat ships of any variety other than the T3 nullified cloaky ones, is quite dangerous (and bearing in mind the pretty collossal reduction in DPS for using these subs make it less viable as a combat runner as the 'overseers' can just tank the dps you will be doing). I still chuckle a bit (bearing in mind i am, and probably always will be, a solo player) at the idea of actually taking BS to null, even though that is what is clearly needed to run the combat sites, they cannot stealth warp or be nullified, so will always appear in a gate bubble totally screwed, with a max speed of about 1km/s(assuming MWD), surrounded by faster ships all doing buckets of dps.
Additionally; there is no way to know what is on the other side of that gate and it can easily be an auto death situation, that can waste all of your actually really nicely pulled of hard work because some people are standing in the same place not having to really put any effort in and knowing that you WILL appear within their little death trap no matter what you do.

I know you've all had to listen to morons gripe about losing ships this way, but to me it does take a way some of the 'sand box' huge world element because people can KNOW where you are going to be within a 30k radius in a game that measures its maps in 150million kilometer segments. The main reason why space is so empty and devoid of other places is because so much fighting occurs at this bottle neck that there is no point in having much else because the campers have no reason to move, and the people entering system cant be any where else.
This bottlenecking was one of the most disappointing game mechanics to find in a game for a solo player with this many options for combat as it makes loads of them obsolete. and one ship always loses to ten if your on grid and in range, which you will be at the gate camp.
Suggestion::
So here is a simple suggestion that affects the actual combat mechanics in no way whatsoever : when you jump to a system change the distance that you appear on gate in the new system to be a 'random' number that can be much higher than the standard 10 -15k from gate that you would normally spawn. Bearing in mind the keres and garmur etc all have increased scram ranges so 10 -15 k is easy for them.
Lets say anything up to 100 k from the gate, this would allow more chance of ships making it through as the grid that the gate camp has to cover is much larger. It would also mean that the defenders would actually have to resort to some kind of hunting. (i.e actually using probes and dscan to find people), and interdictors would have to put more probes out to cover the holes in the grid.
I think this would lead to more benny hill style chase scenarios through systems and regions as the defenders have to try to pin their target down, and actually more interesting (maybe less profitable in some way for the campers) pvp scenarios for all parties involved. It would allow solo players to have a bit more of a chance to evade a fleet, that they would otherwise have had no chance of taking out or getting past, allowing more of them to make the venture into dangerous space and thus offering more targets for the said defenders to hunt.
If you jump to a system you would still have to get to within the 2k of the gate to do so but would appear on the other side at (possibly) much greater range.
It would make the 'burn back to gate' scenario far less viable, but if not in fleet (i.e solo) this is usually just a pointless excersize in time wasting, anyway.
Maybe a terrible idea, but hey, at least I've said it now.

Eve will never reach its potential until gates are removed.

This literally sums up the reason for every gate camp i've ever been apart of.