EVE General Discussion

I agree that the idea of the new system (and for a big part also the implementation) is an improvement over the old "launch DSP, hit scan, filter out sites, recall dsp, launch 7 core probes, scan sites, do sites, repeat".

With this current change, though, either the array of usable ships (at least if you want to be effective) shrinks, or, if you limit yourself to doing certain types of sites, the time to find these will be considerably increased because you have to scan through every site in a system instead of being able to rule anything out.

The formations are good.
The discovery scanner is good (except how it scans whenever you jump, undock, or come out of warp even with the overlay turned off).
The new scanning modules are probably pretty good.

Automatically returning probes when docking or leaving the system is ambiguous (some people had applications for leaving probes behind, coming back, reconnecting, and scanning).
The Astrometrics skill changes are ambiguous.

Forcing players to launch all of their loaded probes up to 8 is bad design.
Forcing the probe "focus" (that is, the default location of the probe's initial scan after launch) directly onto the sun in every case is bad design.
Forcing players to launch into formation at all is very bad design.
Removing DSPs, replacing this functionality with an added function on the discovery scanner/overlay, and then removing this functionality a week before release, is very, very bad design and shows pretty poor judgment.

People have spent the last two years saying exploration was being made too easy...

In high sec it's very profitable, which is what I've been doing, the profit from that comes from supply vs demand in regards to the loot and as such it's player managed and I don't see any problems with it. Apart from that I don't see why exploration should be "punished" because there's much more problematic forms of income going on and many of them are faucets which exploration really isn't.

And less than chaining anoms, which doesn't require scanning of any kind apart from "press butan, receive warpin".

Let's play open-hand misere.

You're in a wormhole. You're doing stuff. You want to make sure other people don't catch you by surprise. If you spam D-scan at 360° you will catch people as they warp into your site. But you can catch people earlier than this!

If you have DSPs, you can deploy one (and only one) DSP and monitor signature strength. If someone probes out a wormhole into your system, this will show up because K162 wormholes have a different signature strength to (for all intents and purposes in this discussion) every other signature you will find.

This works for DSPs but not a constellation of core or combat scanner probes. The catch is that DSPs have a very low signal strength and a very high range. This means that regardless of where a signature appears in your 256 radius sphere of detection, a K162 will show up as about 0.27% signal strength.

With core or combat probes, you have a much higher signal strength which means that that K162 really close to your probe will look like a 1% signal strength while far away it will be a 0.2% signal strength. As such, core and combat probes are not as effective as an early warning system: all you can see is that something changed. You don't know whether this is a new signature such as a grav site (well, after Odyssey there will be no grav sites, but work with me here) or a K162.

So whlie CCP Soundwave's idea of a constellation of core/combat probes has some merit in terms of replacing part of the functionality of the DSP early warning system, it only does half the job.

Of course CCP could just come out and tell us that with this expansion they had the design intent of removing the ability to filter sites and possibly identify them by signal strength, and we'd accept their decision to remove DSPs, etc. In the meantime it looks like they have removed DSPs because they don't understand how the players actually play the game (remembering the great nullsec nerf of FanFest 2011 for a classic example).

So for people like James Amril-Kesh and myself, the question is: are CCP deliberately removing this feature because they feel that our current abilities are overpowered, or are they bulls let loose in the china shop?

Here is a post I missed which lays out quite plainly that CCP is deliberately removing the ability to filter sites based on signal strength: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=3019117#post3019117

You should edit the first post. You come off as a sulky GSO farmer who gets a much needed nerf. While the post is actually about how the change makes pvp situations where probes are involved a bit more complicated. And of course: Did CCP intend this?
Mara Rinn said it like it is.

There are also the cherry-picking scenarios, since I know for example that the specific thing that I am looking for in my k-space today will show up with signal strength of about 0.07% with a DSP given my ship, rigs, implants, launcher and probe. This thing only appears every few days, and it appears anywhere in my current constellation.

I can cherry-pick with a DSP and find it with about 12-15 minutes of work, or I can probe for it which will take me about 40-80 minutes depending on the number of signatures in a system.

Yeah, securing wh bear ops is one use, but I've also used DSPs to monitor large target systems during sieges. If you don't have all targets on your watch list and some towers are out of your dscan, DSP tells you when someone logs in at a deep safe or another tower. Or someone jumps in from an existing hole. And really, just the fact that nobody sees your DSPs on scan is an important feature.

I find the forced return of your probes on jump a terrible change. I seriously don't want to be forced to relaunch probes when returning and expose myself. After the introduction of corp bookmarks, the threat of getting trapped in a wh diminished, this change along with the automatic scanner overlay revealing new sigs reinforce safety even more. There has to room for mistakes and failures, or risk is removed. Danger and the need for attention to details are key features of wormholes, and getting trapped has lead to numerous adventures, player interaction and stories- the kind of content that makes EVE special.

on the plus side actually scanning is way less swear inducing.