EVE General Discussion

Most of it is tedium. The skill bonus for Astrometrics now sounds like a waste but the other skills will still offer bonuses that make you better at it. There may be less need to have those skills when doing introduction level scanning, ie. High Sec anoms but it isn't to say they won't be useful in other scanning activity.

Came here to say this basicly.

Don't care about it being "easier", but the removal of features and blatant UI issues over the current system are what bothers me most.

Plenty of posts in the test forum about it to be fair, so I won't reiterate them here. Hopefully they get tweaked / fixed.

Can't believe they are seriously considering removing the list view of results though.

Of all of the complaints in the original post I wonder why you do not mention a much bigger problem. All your complaints are trivial and yet you do not complain about the 8th probe being removed. That makes me question how much scanning you really do!

Disagree.

It appears they've removed most of the skill from probling, which is only an invite to the plebs of HS to come disturbing us in W-Space. Living in W-Space has been a challenge - it has required a fair degree of dedication and skill. It appears that it will become much less unfriendly to boneheads, and that makes me sad.


Not always an option.
Especially when poking around in a system that's heavily occipied. labor-intensive scanning meant that you stood a decent chance of ninja'ing a site or two if you were good with probes.

It was kinda cute and had its own charm. Yeah, making bookmarks to drop probes in the right place was time consuming....and the scan time was crazy looking back on it......but it worked for its purpose back then.

Some of the current changes are taking the pretty good system we have now and are stripping features away. I don't know any proper who actually cares about the "easier" bit apart from the usual EVE IS DIEING crowd, but to remove features for a system that works? I'm not sold....because I've spent almost 5 hours playing with it.

Exploration was boring, tedious and anti-fun.

Now with odyssey it should be something to consider training into.

I see no problem here.

Stockholme syndrome is so damned bizzare.

The problem isn't even whether or not an incidental (emergent) mechanism is being used, the problem (at least in my opinion) is that the whole point of EVE is to be a sandbox, and what makes a sandbox game a sandbox game is having tools that do things, as opposed to having things that can be accessed through specific tools.

To explain that statement, take this comparison as an example:

In EVE a very essential tool is the ship. This thing is an object in the outside game environment - you can sit inside it and access its array of modules and functions such as warping, sub-warp engines, targeting, etc.. But you can also dock it in a station and trade it with other players, through the market, through a trade window, through contracts; while the ship is in a station, it's sort of just like a commodity.

Then you undock again and eject from your ship. Now that same thing isn't your player character or some item in your inventory, it's just a thing, floating freely in space under its own inertia (and eventually slowed down by the space jello that puts friction on everything and keeps everything facing the right way up, but that's beside the point).

So a ship in EVE has a purpose - it functions as your class and your equipment, and mostly everything else that defines your player character, but it is also an independent object that has generic properties which can be interacted with freely within the physicaly rules of the game world. It's a tool, just like a hammer is a tool, and you can use a hammer to insert a nail in a plank of wood, or pull it back out if it has a forked side, or your can plant the hammer in the side of a section of drywall and it will make a hole. Only physics decides what a hammer can and cannot do, even though it's manufactured for a purpose.

On the other hand, take a different MMORPG, any MMORPG, just imagine your standard, generic, class-based fantasy MMO.

In this type of MMO, you might have an item that functions similarly to ship in EVE in some respects, for example a horse. You have the horse in some tab of your character sheet as a little icon, and when you click on it, your player character's model changes to your player character on top of a horse, and it alters your movement speed. This serves a specific function; the horse mechanism is there to make you go faster. But beyond that, the horse has no function, no purpose, no existence. You can't get off the horse and leave it somewhere in the game world. You can't give the horse to another player, you can't sell the horse (in most cases, some MMOs do allow you to trade your mounts on the auction house or whatever, but mostly they're just bound to your player character as a "skill"). The horse is not a tool, it does not have any properties that you can interact with, it's just a button that you click to achieve a specific effect.


This is, in my opinion, what makes a sandbox game a sandbox game.

Probes used to be a tool - they had the property of being physical objects in space, which made them subject to the rules of physics in EVE, such as you can scoop them if you have a large enough cargohold, you can bring them back to station, etc.. They also had properties such as "no engines", which made them subjects to another rule of the physics of the universe, namely they couldn't move. If you wanted a probe in a certain spot, you had to physically go there and kick the probe out of your cargohold, and it would stay there.

More interestingly, the "probe" tool had some properties that made it a very interesting tool in the context of a sandbox game: They could generate coordinates (in the form of a bookmark-like point on your star map) that were more or less close to other objects in space. The important thing here is that this property was not a feature locked into doing a specific thing. Launching a probe wasn't synonymous with looking for a grav site. It just meant launching a probe. You COULD use it to probe out a specific ship, or a drone, or some other object, but you could also use the probe's functionality to do other things - emergent gameplay. In practice, one of those things was generating an extremely inaccurate ping on yourself, which would give you a warpable set of coordinates (little bookmarky thing) somewhere in the solar system very far away. This could be used to make safespots that were immediately guaranteed to not be directly between any two celestial objects where ships would warp, and even could be outside the warpable boundary between the outer-most celestials in a solar system.


Anyway, my point is simply that I play EVE because it's a sandbox game, and that means having tools that have general generic functions, not specific results. A knife can cut bread, the same knife can butter the bread, or poke your eye out, or pin a piece of paper to a tree. That is EVE to me.

While I can agree with the subsequent 2 issues you listed, can't the scanner overlay now take the place of DSP's?