Player Features and Ideas Discussion

At the moment, bubble mechanics are extremely powerful. and a little bit boring. For example: I drop a drag bubble, or a stop bubble near a gate and every ship warping in from a particular direction lands at exactly the same location. If I was camping in null, I'd have a can or a ship at that location to uncloak covops and I kill the thing. It's not PvP, it's farming. Sometimes opportunities exist to avoid a bubble, such as a planet or a anom to warp to, sometimes they don't. As a result, travel in null is horrifyingly difficult and tedious for any ship but nullified T3s or interceptors, which is why T3s are nearly the exclusive null site runners, and interceptors are the taxis of null.

In another instance, I'm in a big battle and want to bring in some sniping ships, but alas, there are bubbles everywhere, and I have to do some warping around Houdini tricks, or again, I get caught in the edge of the bubble. and warp straight to brawling range.

I suggest a change to bubble mechanics, not to remove the influence on warp, but to make it a hair easier to influence, both for the bubbling entity and the person warping in. Let's make them more or less like gravity. Instead of the current system, how about a bubble has a diminishing, area of effect pull on an incoming ship, centered at whatever is producing the bubble (HIC, probe, or mobile bubble). In addition, in the case of multiple bubbles, this pull gets a stacking penalty, so 2 bubbles can pull a ship further, and even in different directions, but the further bubble will influence in less by virtue of it being further away, and the stacking penalty. For harware performance's sake, perhaps there should be a hard limit on how many bubbles can influence a warp, say 3. Take the following scenarios as examples of what I mean:

1. Someone drops a bubble exactly on a gate. I warp to 0 at the gate, the bubble's pull is 100% and I intended to go to that spot, so I land exactly at gate/bubble.

2. Someone drops a drag bubble 50km off the gate in line with the direction I'm warping in from. I warp to 0 at the gate. Since I intended to land 50km away from the bubble, the bubble's pull is at 50% strength, and I land 25km further than my intended target.

3. Someone drops 2 drag bubbles 50km from the gate in line with the direction I'm warping in from. I warp in to the gate at 0. As before, the first bubble drags me 25km, the second bubble, with a stacking penalty drags me another 50% closer times the stacking penalty. or 10.8625km (if I did my math right), so I land 35.8625km off the gate.

4. Someone drops a drag bubble 50km off the gate, in line with the direction I'm warping in from. I warp to 50km off the gate. Since my intended target is a full 100km away from the bubble, the bubble's pull is only 10% and I land 40km from the gate.

5 Now the complex scenario: Someone drops a drag bubble 100km off the gate, in line with my warp in, and a second drag bubble, 50km from the gate, 90 degrees off of the first one, so the angle between the first bubble, the gate, and the second bubble, is 90 degrees. I warp to 0. The closer bubble drags me first, as before, 50% the distance from my warp in location to it, which puts me halfway between the gate and the bubble. Now the second bubble gets its shot. My land point is now 101.54km from the second bubble (I think, trig not my strong suit). It gets about a 10% pull on my ship X the stacking penalty. and pulls me ~8.69km closer to it. Ultimately, I land somewhere in the triangle between the gate, the first bubble and the second bubble.

In general, this would make land points a lot more difficult to predict, and give people meaningful opportunities to land at strategicly important places in big battles. Bubbles would still have value as strategic assets pulling people off of landing points, and helping gate camps, but it wouldn't be as insanely powerful, giving non-nullified ships a realistic way to travel through null without a near-guarantee of getting ganked. Is it feasible? I don't know, but I can't imagine the math is much more taxing on hardware than current shot mechanics, which take place hundreds, or even thousands of times a second in large fleet battles.

The angle you have to be warping from in order to be effected by a drag or stop bubble is extremly narrow. Warping to a gate from greater than that angle makes it ineffective. Warping from pretty much any celestial other than from gate to gate will get you past them.

Nullified t3s and interceptors are the most prevalent transport in null not because of drag or stop bubbles but because of bubbles placed directly on gates.

if you fly smart you can avoid bubbles

People will just put more bubbles to catch you. It changes nothing if you land 35 off the gate of 50 off the gate. If the camp is worth it's salt, you die in both cases unless you were nullified. Your suggestion adds server load in a rather complexe fashion just because you think it should be more complex. The server would have to calculate all those vectors with their respective DRs for every ship warping to a point on that grid. In a large fight, I could generate TiDi just by dropping some bubbles because the node would now have loads of additional vector to process. CCP want people to use gates more by nerfing jump bridge/drive and you want to add a massive load of calculation for any fleet warping to/near a gate.

then solution for your fleet is to have interceptor scout that knows how to make a warpin to avoid bubble... and you warp to him (simple?)
btw wardecs are more like farming than pvp, same for ganking... this is eve - hunter learn new tricks so must the prey
(have that strange feelings prey stopped learning few years ago)

Sometimes that's a hell of a long way around.

Ain't no avoiding a T2 large slap bang on top of a gate.