EVE General Discussion

I always thought it was a feature to keep from going the same way to and fro.
(My trips to Dodixie have me on different outbound and return routes.)

It happened to me too. I send two pilots to the same destination, with the same settings and sometimes they go through different systems. Its a bit annoying. Especially when they are freighter and webber.

Use fleet jump, so they end up at the same next gate.

And on often used routes, check the distance between gates. It can safe you a few minutes.

Funny someone mentions this. Just about a week ago I was travelling from Amarr into lowsec to drop some things off. Plotted the route, then checked both the in game map and dotlan for suspected gate camps and went on my way content that it was all clear. Dropped off my ship, hopped into the shuttle I had brought along in the cargo hold and plotted the course back. Confident that in the 10 minutes since I passed through on the way out that my route was still clear I undocked and headed back. Only this time it decided to send me through an active Mach smartbombing camp. It ended badly for me and my rather shiny pod. Thanks for that route variation ccp. Good stuff.

Now I check my route before undocking every time and even if a suspected camp isn't on my route I add the system to my avoid list any way. Also NEVER traveling into lowsec in a shiny pod anymore if I'm in something that can't fight back or hold up to wave of smartbombs.

Been in EvE a long time but still getting refreshers in proper procedures and what not to do. Complacency is a *****.

Certain areas, Dodixie being one, do indeed have multiple possibilities to get from one place to another. They're like a Y at both ends - even if that doesn't make sense.

So, you may be one system along the way, or one system out and get two different routes, but they're always the same amount of jumps. So, the algorithm achieves its goal - shortest distance between two points.

So you cant rely on automated system coded by CCP.
You said it put you on a route to gatecamp.

Hmmm. Interesting.

<--*Puts on tinfoil hat when setting autopilot route.*

This isn't something recent. This behaviour has been in the game at least since I started playing in 2009. Probably since the start of EvE in 2003.
Always check your route(s) before undock.

CCP doesn't maintain a list of routes between systems. (that'd be around 25 million routes. takes a while to generate that many). It'd also not give you the option to not have certain systems on the route.

The route is created the moment you add the waypoint.

What I _suspect_ will have happened is that you and your fleet mate had slightly different autopilot settings. Or the statistics are slightly different (if you use the 'avoid systems where podkilling has recently occured' setting. )



On a total side note, which is only marginally related, this is part of the reason the optimization can take so long when you get more than a certain number of waypoints. It's a hard problem, and the only real way to do it is bruteforce it. So it has to run through all the combinations of systems, working out the distance between them. Then it needs to add them together in a chain, to work out the shortest distance. so with 10 waypoints, you have 10! (10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2) possible combinations to work through. That's 3,628,800 possible options. 11 waypoints is 39,916,800. 12 is 479,001,600.

you can see how it gets _painful_

My Tomtom tries that often. It tells me, the new route would be faster. But i prefer the short route.

Maybe warp speed is a factor in which route gets chosen?
In slows ships i've gotten one route with faster ships i've gotten different routes.

The fastest route could be a result of the factors time, warp distance, etc.

I've noticed on "prefer safer" when traveling from a high sec island back to the mainland that once I am in low sec, the behavior, but not the setting, switches to prefer shorter. I noticed it when the return trip had several fewer low sec jumps, because the system was trying to keep me in high sec.

I would imagine with prefer shorter that if there are 3 different paths that are all 14 jumps, it gives you the first path it finds, which may be different than the previous time it ran the convergence algorithm.