EVE Information Portal

I really like these changes! Thanks CCP!

Hmm... big changes there. I have 2 comments and 2 questions:

Lifting the restrictions on freighters will make possible a new form of grieving. For instance, a bitter player might load up a freighter full of assembled cargo containers and jettison them in front of Jita 4-4. 9000 containers showing up in undock is going to cause a lot of lag, and could facilitate ganking as undocking pilots won't be able to redock before they are dead. As someone who does not grief, I look forward to the change because it makes my freighters more useful to me. That said, I'm mindful of those who do...

Second, love that loot is dropping from everything now. Everything destroyed in space should have some chance of dropping loot.

Question 1: Why make all these new uncompressed containers? Now that the restrictions are gone on freighters, why not just create a compressed freighter can and eliminate the freighter group all together?
A: Found in patch notes: "Freighters and jump freighters have been upgraded with a jettison tube and can freely jettison, scoop and move items between containers. They are still not able to load or scoop assembled containers into their cargo hold, except freight containers."

Question 2: Googled but get conflicting info... if you blow up a corp hanger array on a POS, is there some chance that everything in it will drop? I guess another way of asking it is "does everything in space now drop loot?"

Does this mean that someday you will be addressing the general anguish that is dealing with containers? The fleet hangar change wouldn't be so bad if containers weren't as awful as they are.

question

Does the blockade runner scanner immunity also work for NPC?

CCP has said they don't like the current mechanics for boosters(npc random scan everyship = bad)
I would love this to work as moving my drugs to market is all random and very frustrating for us drug runners.


Edit: Read the thread

Answer : No they still randomly scan players


Next Idea:
a dev mentioned that they were looking into the deep space transport ship and why no1 uses it.
I have a suggestion.

Make the DST immune to NPC scans BUT let players scan it just fine.

Bouns points: if you scan a ship with cargo scanner and the player is carrying contraband Give said player suspect tag.

Let the players be the police. Think this fit's in very nicely with EVE sandbox.

Nice changes, but this leaves one very big question unanswered: Do cargo scanners now work on offlined pos modules with corp hangars?

Currently, this functionality works like you are about to make blockade runners work (ie kind of buggy imo). You can activate a cargo scanner on an offline module (say a corp hangar, ship maintenance array, mobile lab), but it shows nothing on the scan. This leads the user to believe that it worked and there was nothing in it. However, there may actually be loot in these modules, and it may drop if you destroy them. Is anything different concerning this in Retribution? (plz say yes)

And secondly, something I just thought about while writing this, if you are making all other hangars in ships drop loot, shouldn't you also include the ship maintenance bay, and make it drop assembled ships... LIKE IT ALREADY DOES ON A POS SHIP MAINTENANCE ARRAY??

If there is one thing I love in EVE, it's getting loot.

I think it's a foregone conclusion that CCP is deadset on making blockade runners foolproof. Then when they're constantly getting ganked by opportunists, they'll hold down the 9 key until they're satisfied with the HP numbers like they did with barges.

Well its good to see divisions are around, but I question your reason why you gave the unscannable bonus to the BR, instead of the DST's.


The BR's can fly cloaked, the unscannable bonus is rather redundant, and considering that BR are pretty fragile, this is not going to help them much. A tornado can pretty much oneshot a BR so it won't help it at all.

The DST however is fairly lacking, the unscannable bonus would make much more sense for these ships, they are slow, the are supposed to be tanky. Giving DST the unscannable bonus will force gankers to do a guessing game and have to devote more than 1-2 tornados to do a simple gank.

Right now there is little reason to fly DST, giving them an unscannable bonus would help though.

CCP FoxFour already stated that it "fits" the BR's role more. I can't imagine what they consider the BR's role to be, but you shouldn't even be getting locked in a blockade runner, and if you're sticking around long enough for a scanner to cycle, you're doing something completely wrong.

Let's consider the differences between blockade runners and DSTs.

A BR is fast, aligns quickly and has a high warp speed. It jumps through a gate, clicks warp and cloaks. If you get locked, you're not cloaking. If you get pointed, you're done for. Even with a tank fit, you're trivial to gank. Opportunistic ganking on blockade runners will be hilariously easy. On TQ, properly flown blockade runners have absolutely no trouble running high-value, low-volume cargo through highsec. The "properly flown" part is near-trivial: undock, warp to an insta-undock, cloak in warp and travel the rest of your route.

A DST is slow, it aligns like a pig and its warp speed is lower than its T1 counterparts. It can, however, fit a tank comparable to a HIC, and it requires 2 scrams to tackle. On TQ, they generally go unused mainly because blockade runners have slightly less cargo capacity but have the advantage of being /much/ faster and much more maneuverable.

BRs being unscannable is just silly - as it is, they align like bombers and, as previous posters have pointed out, they are nearly uncatchable if properly flown. Unscannable Orcas worked because they required a lot of DPS/alpha to suicide gank and the cargo wouldn't drop anyway. Now, blockade runners will simply be targeted for "lolganks" when they are unable to cloak because of gate NPCs or whatever and the cost of a failed gank (i.e. nothing drops, the ship had nothing in cargo, w/e) will simply not be high enough to make their invulnerability to scans discourage other players from ganking them. On the other hand, unscannable DSTs would have a high enough cost to gank that unless the gankers have prior knowledge of what the guy is carrying (through metagaming, for example) or can reasonably expect it to be carrying valuable cargo, they won't make such casual gank targets.

it's a really bad way of making BRs foolproof. Making them unscannable makes it as risky to autopilot along in an untanked, empty blockade runner as it will to do it in one full of PLEX. This means that every time you autopilot in one it essentially becomes a crapshoot of pure dumb luck whether you get ganked or not, regardless of what you actually have in cargo.

Speaking as someone who only APs a BR when it's empty, this is insane game design.

Based on the feedback thus far on this thread, I suspect that the unscannable cargohold will end up being transferred to the DST next year, anyways, unless someone at CCP chooses to be stubborn for the sake of being stubborn.

Why not discuss this issue with Game of Drones today, and make the change once - to the DST now - rather than having to reverse the change later on the BR?