EVE General Discussion

1) everything has to be done server side, because otherwise people could extract data they aren't supposed to have with the client to cheat.
2) do yourself a favor and google ^n+1. Math doesn't get much simpler than that, nor much more complex, and it happens to represent the universe itself telling you you're wrong.

That's a fun idea. Equivalent of seeing a shark fun break the surface then submerge. You catch a glimpse of something then it's gone. Now you know it's there but your not sure where and you've gotta narrow the scan in dfferent directions and hope yiu catch it again.

I think this is an issue of expectation management.

Part one: You need to realize who you are working with.

CCP is an Icelandic based software development company that was founded to create EVE Online. Basically a bunch of guys dreamed up a space simulation game, published a pretty successful board game in Iceland, and used those funds to make EVE.

To say that EVE succeeded beyond the scope of its original conception is to put it mildly. The biggest issue is that the original foundations were built in stack-less python by relatively inexperienced coders for reasons that I am sure seemed absolutely essential at the time. All of this, in combination with the fact that game development is quite a bit more complex then it seems from the outside, and you have an issue where the player-base frequently miss-understand the complexity of the "simple" solutions they come up with.

Part two: Don't act like they are not working on it.

All that said, CCP has invested a huge effort into understanding, and remedying age old problems within the game itself. Building EVE 2 would be the biggest gamble of a company that has not historically done exceptional with their non-EVE efforts. What you see instead is a gradual molding of EVE from what it was, to the vision of the new design and development team that was brought in by the old guard to better realize the vision.

We have already seen monumental strides in the form of Brain in a Box, which lead to less lag, and command burst changes. We have better effects, more responsive servers, and cooler toys and fights then was possible prior. However many of these efforts take a _long_ time, and CCP is still horribly understaffed. I know it sucks, and I know it seems easy, but sometimes it just isn't.

Part Three: Dscan

Dscan is one of the most impactful tools in EVE. You can tell that by the dramatic difference living in WH space feels in compared to null, and changes to it would be dramatic to the foundations of the game. Such a change would be very controversial, and in spite of good messaging (something CCP hasn't been historically great at) could be rejected outright by the game community at large. This makes investment in a dscan change like proposed to be expensive, technically demanding, and risky, a bad combination. Most of these kinds of projects are done in CCP devs 20% time, but that time are for passion projects such as the new fitting tool, the refined hacking UI, etc.

So all in all, not terrible to give your input, and your perception. The above simply is why I don't think you war going to see CCP act on it. Although I do agree it does take away a bit of the "immortal space god" that I have to pound a key like a frantic baboon on cocaine.

If you are going to sacrifice a mid-slot module for it, go for it.

I'll stay with the current mode myself.

IMO:

1. You mash the scan hotkey and get an image of who's out there as often as your finger allows.

or,

2. CCP decides to save some server CPU, and codes the D-scan to auto-update every 10 seconds, and we all immediately learn to launch the probes, group them on you, point your location, and recall the probes in under 10 seconds (totally possible) so you don't even see them.

Basically, don't expect CCP to make your life easier, and let you avoid PVP more easily. If anything, they'll nerf the D-scan with a 15-30 second scan delay to make PVP more likely.

And then you'll be sorry that you complained about "having to" click it every second.

In other words, click it every 15 seconds if every second is too much for you, but otherwise STFU.

D-scan is oversimplified, ugly, impractical and annoying.

But its does what its supposed to.

Improving it is kind of like attempting to re-invent the wheel.

Id be ok with some cosmetic improvements to the interface, such as perhaps color coding for different categories of scanned objects and saveable range/angle presets.

Why not put a cooldown on d-scan so that it can only be used once every, lets say, 15 seconds?

Now nobody needs to spam anymore, and systems in eve will actually feel bigger. Auto-update would basically increase grid sizes to 14AU as you'd be able to instantly see anyone in that range.

That could be achieved in that pulsethingy.

It could be 20 secs for unskilled, unfitted.

And maybe 10 secs for full on level 5.

Please use the dscan so you know what we are talking about.

The rest of your post is pretty much in before lock, but, as someone who spent an year or so stuck in a low class hole - can't help myself. Here, space friend, have a space like.

Happy new year.