Originally by: Iseen

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I would like to see a smoother process for BM's with many of the changes suggested, *however*...

The problem I have is with instant sharing of bookmarks and the effect it has for those operating in WH space; you become massively more vulnerable.

At the moment typically a scout scans down a WH, enters, scouts out the hole for signatures, players and POS facilities. Should any juicy targets turn up they have to exit the WH to share the Kspace location of the WH to the rest of their gang. This gives two chances to spot the enemy and a little time to respond.

With instant bookmark sharing, if a scout needs a single positive result to allow the rest of the gang to immediately head to the WH and get in to back them up any non-pvp fit operation (mining?) is toast as the only notification you get is when they are already in warp towards you.

A counter would be having someone diligently watching the WH for that characteristic flash as a ship enters, but it is very boring for that individual to do. It also means you waste a player/account on that (which if WH's are for small gangs to succeed in, you can't often spare). You need to know when the scout enters, the point an enemy combat fleet enters a WH is already too late for your gang as from experience tacklers can often align, warp and lock faster than a hulk takes to get up to speed.

As WH are often scanned down in the operating region of the scout's corp, finding a fleet to gank that WH mining operation is usually going to be easy.

Don't get me wrong, I am happy with the pew, but sometimes when there is no-one or nothing to shoot, it can be profitable to spend your time mining. If bookmarks could be instantly shared, I would cope, but instead of "living" in a WH, I would scan down a bunch of WH's before prime, and then go through each of them until I found a mining op to bring the corp down on. This could be further sped up by having all the corp scanning WH's, and switching to combat ships when the (more likely to find) opportunities arrive.

As a suggestion, I would implement the majority of the suggestions, but require BM's to be added to or retrieved from a corp/alliance/'trusted user' BM "store" in a station, outpost or POS (the tower would make sense). This would allow the benefits of sharing bookmarks in a logical way, but also require gank fleets to do a little planning still rather than making it really simple for any opportunistic pilot to 'bring the rain' on every op.

For those who operate in WH space, having that functionality in a POS is a must.

The roleplay version would be "a BM is not merely a location, but the alignment data and technical readouts necessary for an accurate warp". Imagine it being a big, big bunch of data specific to your ship, with the "exported" BM you currently have in cargo being the raw data so another ship type could compute it for themselves. That way, you can argue that POS, Outpost, and Station (and maybe caps, supercaps or blackops BS to expand it's role) have the additional CPU and comms facilities for massive data transfers.



On a different subject to the above, collaborative corp/alliance WH operations require BM's in cans rather than hangers so any improvement on that lag fest would be great.

p.s. this is posted on an alt for security purposes.

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