EVE General Discussion

Well good, I'm glad we're in agreement.


Interesting idea. I think it has some merit.


If you're referring to local, the mechanic actively works for them as well. Not to mention that without local there'd be a lot less people in nullsec to shoot at, unless we had some consistent method of continuously determining the presence of ships, including cloaked ships, within several AU.


Local only shows the names of the pilots in the same system as you. That's the only information you get from it. It doesn't tell you whether they're docked, undocked, in a POS, what ship they're in, what the name of their ship is, their location, what fleets they're in (unless of course they're in your fleet).

The directional scanner will tell you a few more things, but it's a tool that gives you more information the more work you put into it. If you set it to 360 degree scan it will tell you what's out there that's uncloaked, what the ship name is and the ship type, but that's about it. It takes practice before one is able to quickly determine distance and direction to a target using the dscanner. In any case, the dscanner doesn't tell you who's in control of the ship or even that there is someone in control of the ship at all, except for a few cases like they forgot to rename their ship after assembling it or something.

That should be pretty obvious right? This is of course in the assumption that you do not have local or current d-scanner mechanics:

Small groups - easier time slipping deep into whatever enemy system without being detected. There is still always a risk for detection, as it should be, but chances for detection is to a large extent based on the size of the fleet and whether an enemy happens to pick up a scent or not, and if he does, how far said enemy feels like investigating said scent.

Solo players/micro groups of the more "care-bearish" nature as many of you like to put it which are extremely common will be able to consider taking the risk of visiting low/null.

Large groups - well, the opposite. They won't be able to hide as well so they will stand out a lot more, maybe be more open for ambushes and such. This depends of course also entirely on what the group intends of doing like PoS bashing or whatever. Changes would hardly affect them from the way things are today, except for the fact that they would have to take extra care of their surroundings in some cases.

Working for intel would be equal regardless of the size of the group however whether it is a solo player or a massive blob.

In regards to local, yes, it does work both ways, and that is the problem. Basically it counters an engagement before it has even taken place in many cases. Take the case of the lone miner as an example: why enter low-sec if you are announced the second you enter it? That alone is a huge risk considering that EVE is as far from Rainbow-land as you can get when you take player nature into account. A rare few may take this risk but we don't want this to be about rare cases.

Of course, removing local would require something else (in this case, the d-scan) to become better. I don't want it to become impossible to find players either. And whether local tells you that a player is docked or not etc does not matter. You instantly know that a player is present and the current d-scanner does the rest for you. Whether a player is in a fleet or not and such information is still up to you to determine for yourself from the information gathered.

I am not saying that local or d-scan by themselves give you all information, but individually they already give way too much, and together they complement each other extremely well.

In regards to a new d-scanner; the steps I have in my mind is something roughly like this:

1: Find signals on d-Scanner.

2: Investigate a signal to determine whether it is a player/several players or anomaly

3: If the signal is a player, determine ship type(s)/identity of player(s)

4: Once identity/ship type is determined, get a strong enough reading to lock on to signal

5: Once signal is locked on, warp to it. Signal stays locked on even if the target(s) is moving. Here you can even have further factors which determine what keeps a signal locked on. This stage is also open for debate regarding on how exactly the warp-in should work. Warp to 0 would probably be overkill for instance, specially if you take cloaked ships into account.

All these steps that have to be taken are done in an almost identical fashion to the current d-scan mechanics.

Going back to cloaked ships, they are of course unable to hide from the scans. As I said before, the only thing a cloaked ship does is hide you visually, and in that regard it works flawlessly. Here you can debate whether being cloaked would increase your sig-radius (purely for the sake of d-scanning - you can't shoot at cloaked ships regardless) or not for pure balance reasons if required.

The only thing I am still pondering on is how anomalies/sites should work in regards to the d-scanner. Anomalies in particular should help players to hide. The way you find anomalies however is with probes. Probes should still be king when it comes to finding said anomalies/sites/ships. Regardless they may require a slight rework (read: buff) when it comes to finding ships.

Meh, anyway, long rant became really long

...The inconsistent access to normal space is exactly why wormhole space is ideal for small groups.

In many situations, a very small group can annihilate an unprepared larger group.

For instance, an 8 man bomber wing vs any size fleet of sniping Tier 3 BCs. Or a group of bomber wings vs a battleship fleet.

Small and prepared beats up big and unprepared quite often in EVE. (Look at the way PL operated until recently. A small group was able to run roughshod over groups many times its size because they fielded competently lead composed fleets against groups that used the "everyone bring whatever" composition, or because they were willing and able to field capitals or Supers anywhere in EVE on short notice (before supers it was Dreads that PL were able to drop at will) against enemies who were not equally willing and able.)

What you're complaining about is that, given equal preparedness, morale, ships, fittings, and leadership, bigger almost always wins. You've yet to establish why that should not be the case.

In other words, you're assuming that "smaller" = "more competent" when you've provided nothing to support that assumption.

Screw mining barges. Collision Damage means CONCORD Ganking freighters for us or the ability to Bump-Gank Freighters at no cost in ships and Sec Status (depending on whether or not bumping becomes a criminal action).

I find your definition of small groups being confined to "bombers" only somewhat restrictive to say the very least. Not that it is bad mind, but it could be so much more. Frigates and cruisers are plentiful after all and right now you talk as if bombers are the right tools for pretty much any job involving small groups.

I see that some are still stubbornly locked on the false assumption that this whole discussion is all about straight up fights only.

It's not. I've mentioned things like kiting gangs a number of times in this thread. Bombers are simply a really handy example because they're the right tool for many encounters between a small group and a large group because they don't have to commit to a fight at all to do huge amounts of damage, and they move around so easily.

Just like RL Skirmish tactics, you do not want to fight a larger group in a way that forces you to commit to a fight to do damage because the larger group will murderfy you, (i.e. Blaster boats are right out) unless you're willing and able to run better ships in a more organized fashion, with better leadership (i.e. AHACs vs Scrub BS, Blaster Rokhs vs Scrub Cruiser, etc).

In other words, I only "talk as if bombers are the right tools for pretty much any job involving small groups" because you haven't been paying attention.

I'd love to hear examples of how he thinks "smaller groups" should be able to harass, take sov and defend sov from "bigger groups" as a matter of course.