EVE General Discussion

I understand why I, as the game currently stands, need to spam d-scan (at least if I'm in a wormhole or something). What I'm asking is, what is the GAMEPLAY DESIGN reason for this?

There can be no lore aspect to this. In the real world, even our (relatively-speaking) low-tech airplanes - even el-cheapo ones - have continuously updating radars. The pilot doesn't have to keep reaching over and spamming the 'show objects' button while flying the plane.

The only reason I can come up with is some kind of misguided 'Starcraft' notion of having to click and spam buttons to expend APM to separate higher-skilled players from lower-skilled ones. Even in Starcraft, this notion is debated (although the spam-clicky side won), but I don't think there should even be a debate in this game, however. I don't think anyone thinks, or should think, of this game as a spam-clicky Starcrafty real-time tactical.

If that is the reason it is designed this way (the game should be a spam-clicky RTT kind of game), why stop at d-scan? What about the local chat window? Why not add a button to spam-click for updating it? What about the overview? Why not add a button to spam-click for updating it? What about the window you are looking at the 'game world' through? Why not add a button to spam-click to update that? Come on, let's separate the men from the boys here, and let's separate the wheat from the chaff. If we are gonna have a spam-clicky game, don't do some pathetic, half-handed approach. Let's go all out with it.

If I'm missing something as far as the reason for this, pray tell. Or, if the reason is "we need pointless APM sinks," give me an argument as to why. Otherwise, come on guys. Update the damn d-scan. Turn it into some radar-esque type of thing showing blips, or at the very least, keep it the way it is but make it continuously updating like local chat or overview or anything else. The way this thing is designed now is just dumb. And yes, I'm quite good at hitting the stupid thing every 5 seconds without forgetting, I just think it's dumb.

The reason is simple: Activity is rewarded.
EVE is living from PvP and in Eve a lot of PvP are the results of an errors on one side. You don't click the D-Scan -> you get killed. You don't realize that cloaking deactivated -> boom, You didn't check local often enough -> hello clonebay. You trade locally -> you get scammed

CCP could stop all this with automatics but this would result in a harsh reduction of PVP or other "unwanted" player activities. Most console titles have aiming helps. Now think of a shooter with 100% perfect autoaim. It wouldn't be fun because it wouldn't need any skill on your side. So game design has always build in imperfection. Need to click D-Scan is one in EVE: yes CCP could make it better but it would make the game worse.

Posting in another one of Beast's "wahh, I don't understand the mechanic so it must be broken" threads..

He has a point, radar that doesn't update itself seems primitive and breaks immersion. If they can't handle the server traffic then we just have to live with it, but Eve players please stop having such a sensitive and touchy armpit about every little criticism of the game, Eve is not perfect and is not a large game, it cannot afford to be foolishly ignorant of its faults.

I think one simple solution is to create a "module like" button that activates a Dscan cycle every 5...10...15sec (like repeat mode on).

You didn't explain why this wonderous 'activity' mechanic, and 'punishment of laziness' mechanic, shouldn't also be added to overview, local chat, etc.



I'm a professional server developer. I'm sure others who post on these forums are also, and opinions may vary, but it seems to me that whatever info which is already being sent every ping (local chat info, overview info, etc) could just be augmented with the dscan info. Yes, it would mean more data being sent. But with server speeds, bandwidth etc. available today, I doubt it would be a big deal, especially if compression is being used, which I'd guess it is.

Still, I don't know that for sure, it's just a guess. If some CCP developer posted and said this was the reason for dscan being the way it is, I'd be relieved. I'd much rather it be a technical issue than a gameplay design choice.

At any given time only very few people run Dscan, now picture everyone doing it all the time. Then picture a 1000 man fleet against another 1000 man fleet, they normally don't use Dscan because it's not needed, that's what the scouts are for. If automated they all use Dscan all the time and it'll grind that node to a halt, N+1 messes this up massively.

If you don't understand how this would be a big deal in regards to server CPU then you should probably start to question your own logic, reasoning and knowledge.

Is using autohotkey allowed in EVE?

Of course I understand how something could or would be a big deal, depending on the particulars. I don't know how the server and clients are designed, I don't know the data involved, the payload sizes, etc. If experts who have been working on this describe the problem (which I'm not familiar with), the size of the 'deal' (big or small) would be easy to see. I'd either agree with them, or disagree and decide it could all be designed better. It all just depends.

Probably the 'right' way to do this, all other things being equal, would be to send the data on all ships in the area to the client with each payload, and let the client do the computations for the dscan. But again, I don't understand all the issues here, and neither does anyone else who doesn't work on the client, server, or both.

This is pure theorycraft - I don't know how many bytes to encode a ship, but assuming it's a couple of bytes (a big assumption on my part), a couple thousand ships could be some multiple of a couple thousand bytes. Theoretically it could be 'cheap,' but I don't know.

I changed my hotkey to space bar for the directional scanner.

Space space space space space space space space