Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The reason autopilot still warps at 15 is to make it strictly worse and riskier than manually flying your ship and being aware of your surroundings.

If you force a random warp to 15 then you're just buffing ganking and gate camping (which is not always a good thing, it depends on how you do it) and increasing travel times. Traveling in space is part of what makes Eve what it is and allows for a diverse economy, but massively increased travel times would probably just cause a lot of pilot frustration.

Also, I can already think of a work around for your trick here. Most stargates have a greater than 15km total jump radius, so I can defeat your random radius by just making a bookmark on the stargate. Since the bookmark is an object with zero radius I'll warp directly on top of the gate with no issues.

Overall -1. Poorly thought out and only increases frustration in the name of making Autopilot 'equal' to normal piloting, something that's not needed in the game.

For those who do not want to decipher that wall of text; OP is complaining about auto-pilot warping to things at 15km.

OP then goes on to propose an idea; make any and all warps (manual and auto) to drop you at a random point within 15km of your intended destinstion.



To address the complaint: The reason autopilot drops you 15km from the destination is to penalize you for using an automated function.
People who warp manually will thus be rewarded by getting around faster.

To address the idea: No. While part of me would maybe enjoy this at first, it would quickly become tedious and disrupt pretty much anything and everything I wish to do.
And I have a pretty high tolerance for stuff like this. Others would outright scream and threaten to quit the game.

could it be that CCP wants there to be a reason not to autopilot?

That would ruin **** up for sure

It would work, for the same reason that bookmarking a spot inside the docking ring on a station works very slightly better as an insta-dock. With OP's idea you would warp to within 15km of the edge of the gate, but gates aren't points in space and the jump range is bigger than the model. In fact on very large gates the jump range itself is more than 15km in radius by a large margin.

So, for example, if I bookmark a point right next to the superstructure of a gate and warp to that bookmark I'll be 15km from the bookmark, but right next to the gate itself because it's huge.

What I'm talking about would still work, or at least work better than a raw warp.

Right now you arrive in that sphere next to the EDGE of the target. If I'm targeting a Bookmark that's at the center of that gate then I'll arrive relative to that bookmark, not the edge of the gate's hitbox or a station's docking zone.

As I said previously, you already see this with certain stations and "insta-dock" bookmarks that people put inside the docking radius to avoid the risk of having to burn a panicky few hundred meters in a Freighter.

If I'm not being clear I can make a diagram when in a bit when I'm at my home computer.

Okay, back, diagram time. I was able to find this fantastic diagram of stargates and their approximate dimensions from the Eve subreddit to aid in this.

For the purposes of this explanation we're going to say that the gate 'hitbox' for jumping is 10km, though I'm reasonably certain it's larger for the gate type shown and the smallest gates in the game are at or around 10km, plus the 2.5km grace zone where you can still jump.

Scale of these images is not going to be exact, FYI.

This is approximately what warping to a gate currently looks like. Your ship roughly targets the red point and lands somewhere within a sphere represented by the green circle. The blue circle is the gate's jump range.

I think OP is proposing that you show up at a random point 15km from the edge of the gate, like this. Some others have proposed that he's asking for that circle around the warp to be enlarged, in either case you can defeat it with bookmarks.

If you bookmark at the approximate center of the gate's warp range then you'll warp to within 15km of the bookmark rather than the gate and for most gates this will either let you instantly jump or at least be rewarded with a much slower travel time to the gate than if you warped directly. This also works in the case of expanding the current arrival bubble, you just adjust the location of the bookmark so you get about the same landing circle as presently.

In either case bookmarks become the quick and logical workaround to OP's suggestion, so he would simply re-incentiveize mass bookmark spamming around gates and stations, which was what I was originally talking about and one of the (many) reasons OP's suggestion is bad.

Then OP is either a fool or a wizard, since that's impossible without forcing anything warping near the gate to act as if it's warping to the gate, which would kill so much tactical gameplay around gates that it would be hilarious if it weren't so sad.

Also yeah, there's that, but it's easier to poke mechanical holes in someone's argument and tear at them than it is to convince someone that an idea is bad because it would make for bad gameplay. See: almost every other thread in PFaID.