Player Features and Ideas Discussion

When interceptors were changed to be unaffected by bubbles it seemed this was to encourage more fast/deep-strike fleets through ratting/renterspace to disrupt, in some minor or not wholly irrelevant way the otherwise completely unaffected people in their ishtars^Wcarriers far from places competent gangs could easily access. It was an interesting idea. But home def fleets don't form for the ratters which might or might not notice if a fast moving gang even found them. And it was, then in wanting for a proper solution to the sov problem - which sov 5.0/fozziesov may or may not be, but what we don't have are a range of users of interceptors in gangs making trouble/content or otherwise in providing niche interesting (and that is the key word) applications.

It's just annoying.

This is how I use interceptors:

- Personal Taxi
- Invulnerable Scout.

My view is that this degrades content from several aspects.

Basically they're an equivalent afktopilot. I don't have to take into account conditions.

It's too easy and it's low-skillpoint (not that them being high-sp would improve anything if it doesn't come down to more than math to actually use successfully). I even skilled 9 alts into them (or more, probably), with a standardised travel fit in unsecured hangar for myself and my corp to just pick up and go. And it's no skill, which means no (or, almost no) reasonable points of failure by which I mean being caught and killed; There's no benefit to dscanning a gate, or already having an offgrid (or ongrid) bookmark because e.g. you live there, or took the time earlier to plan how you'd get through a small-gang antismall region like say curse (or provi).

I can use it as a scout through basically any camp, including while carrying a cyno so where it can go, caps can still go. It's worth separating cyno from scout function however: even without the cyno (which recieved a one pass re-rebalance that didn't matter; it's still 2s align) it's still a useful scout, one I used to go over provi's jump bridge network in an afternoon because I didn't trust their own map and was less work and faster than using a covops.

(as for cynoceptor application, with clone change I don't even need a cloning station to spawn back to and reset, or even remain logged on for the duration of the cyno, there's certainly no downside even if I plan to use it again there later. It's too cheap and efficient to register.)

Yes there's technically vectors to attack these uses, but nobody does because the odds are so unlikely to work out (even in a long pipe) and it's such high effort to do even for a fleet it probably isn't worth it. This is not a two-part experience.

With probably ~20k of bookmarks from scouting (non-imports), i'm not asking for validation of the work I put into a 'useless' library of off- or ongrids. I'll use the least-effort solution as is available, which by significant margin is in by far the most cases, interceptor - which does too much, too easily with trivial risk/cost so that even I'm bored when we had a range of ship applications for scouting from covops to recon (even blockade runner, never you mind why), all of which presented a risk of being caught to a determined and appropriately setup camp.

As a thought exercise, fast-forward to whatever-link sov system in ~6 weeks. These intyscouts can check anything out, quickly, even run along with the fleet they're following, frankly. Faster than them even. No, you can't blind the scouts of your opponent - there is no fog of war. Constellation topology doesn't really matter for that. You can't blockade.

Sometimes, running a camp that can in principle catch you is exciting (it's not even like most people on bubble camps can catch a covops that know what they're doing). A variety of reasonable choices to choose to use for role, or the conditions is interesting to weigh. And the camp itself probably likes catching things sometimes too. This should be a risk of participation. It's not. And it falls from interdiction nullification, not the 2s align.

I don't think it serves the purpose it was supposed to, and its side effects have become the main feature (a very one-sided advantage). Does interceptor nullification still have value in proportion with its costs?

get rid of gate bubbles and maybe...

...not

cargoholds reduce max veloctiy, rigs reduce armor.

They affect your align time because you cannot fit as many Polies/Nozzles and Istabs/Nanos to reduce your align time sufficiently to safely escape insta lockers.

Being in KarmaFleet isn't really an excuse to post wrong statements.