Upcoming Feature and Change Feedback Center

Hi Space Friends,

The current range that warp bubbles are effective (how far from your destination they can pull you out of warp) is a little unclear. This has lead to some 'interesting' possibilities, such as bubble camping a gate with a citadel.

With the 118.7 patch, we are considering changing the maximum distance for a warp bubble (mobile, probe or hictor bubble) to effect a warp to be 500km.

This means only warp disruption bubbles that are 500km in-front or behind your warp destination, which are inline with your warp, will pull you out of warp early or drag you.

What do you think? We'd love your feedback!

Update 2016-07-04 - Q&A

Fair and elegant change. Ship it!

Seems like a very good change.

Seeing as we don't generally care about bubblefucked gates you jump into, I doubt this is a problem.

This seems like such a no-brainer that I'm not sure why it wasn't done back when the grid size was expanded so dramatically.

In general it doesn't seem like the drag effect was intended to work at ranges of thousands to tens of thousands of KM. Allowing this in the first place is a major buff to the tactic, as being within MWD range of the gate/station/etc is no longer feasible.

Specifically looking at the citadels issue, my understanding is that citadels can't be placed close to gates precisely so that they can't interfere with gate travel. Dragging directly to within range of a citadel rather negates that limitation.

I disagree

Currently there are interdiction nullified ships present in the game, allowing for the avoidance of Citadel drag bubbles. Travel ceptors are unlockable and should be used to scout your routes. If you're travelling a route you haven't scouted, it should the defender who has the advantage.

Grids are currently 8'000km. Grids of this size would be not be fully utilized if we're only going to use 500km.

Warp disruption bubbles and drag bubbling allow for grid manipulation and control. The ability to change the terrain and manipulate it allows for interesting scenarios to develop based upon point of origin and setup.

Bubble camping a gate with a citadel only puts you in range of the PDS systems, as such small things (if you haven't scouted your) will be affected. If you have scouted your route, why are you warping gate to gate? Shouldn't you bounce from a moon, planet or anomaly to avoid bubble?

If you're bigger, haven't scouted, and land in the bubble depending on the ship you have you'll land in a warp bubble as normal and suffer the consequences.

Citadel camping, i.e being on a citadel with carriers and attacking people on the gate bubbles won't be fixed by this.
Being in a Citadel camping with the PDS smart bombs won't save you from a manned gate camp.

So in brief this change is an attempt to protect travel from manned gate camps. Which it won't prevent because apparently the smart bombs on citadels are too OP (which they aren't) on account of people traveling through space without scouting (which they shouldn't).

Does that about cover it?

This is a pretty fair change - I don't have a problem with it as someone who enjoys bubbling gates.

Seems like a good idea.

are you saying this is fine, or are you saying you'll fix this some other time?

it's not fine btw, it's really awful

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only way that you can end up with this currently is if the Larger Bubble is put there by a HIC/DIC, I believe that Kahanis Inkunen was concerned about them both being Anchored items, which current mechanics would put you on the edge of the larger bubble.


----Direction of Travel----> A(edge of Large Bubble B(edge of smaller bubble

Concern is that currently you would end at A, with the proposed changes and the correctly distanced bubble placement you'd end up at B.