Originally by: MaiLina KaTar

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Some questions I asked myself yesterday evening and some of the answers I gave to myself. Basically my own little observation of all this:

Why do I use instas?

• In every ship that doesn't carry the label "MWDing frigate", approaching the gate takes too long. The ships are just too slow.
  This affects both vulnerability and total time spent travelling.



• When mining, I use BMs so that I don't have to spent minutes approaching good mining locations. Once again, my ship is just too slow to do it in a reasonable time so I have to resort to insta BMs.



• Coming back to the station from anywhere, same thing. My ship is too slow to approach the station in a reasonable time, unless it's a frig.

Gameplay dynamics/scenarios and problems in which instajumps play a role all have one thing in common:

• They arise from a situation in which the player is unwilling to deal with the fact that his ship is going too slow to accomplish the task at hand in an acceptable timeframe.

This is just my personal observation, but tbh I don't think it's far off.

If we think about a cruiser trying to approach a gate without IJ... it's not like there's any real chance of survival if the gate happens to be camped by one or two decent snipers.
Defensive modules are pretty much irrelevant, not because they aren't effective enough but simply because they have to last too long since the ship is too slow to approach fast enough for those mods to make a difference.
The *only* alternative is an IJ bookmark (although that will only save you on one side of the gate but that's another story) and that takes us to the other extreme where the cruiser becomes invulnerable and any effort to stop it from jumping worthless.

Think about it. Why is the MWD such a no-brainer module especially on frigs? Because all of the ships are going too slow to be fast enough to respond to most scenarios in time, on their own.

In my opinion, instajumps are a problem because ships are too slow to get to their desired locations in time on their own.
If you'd increase the base speed of all ships and slightly decrease the difference in base speed for all ship classes you would address a number of problems:

• People would approach gates much faster. You move time spent approaching into an acceptable timeframe.


• Less time for campers to pound people trying to run gates. This leads to more efficiency for defensive mods and more incentive for campers to employ more sophisticated tactics and more manpower.


• Less time spent approaching other locations (stations, belts, cargo cans, etc).


• More room for maneuvering in battle. Tactical combat maneuvers would play more of a role, leading us a bit away from the simple slugfest type of fight.

Increasing ship speeds would lead to a hell of a lot of other problems of course and I would have to spend like six pages of text to get into that. Main problems would be tracking, signatures , missile speeds and orbiting. To be honest though, I don't think it's something the devs couldn't handle.

Well this is how I see instajumps and before you start flaming, keep that in mind. There's many solutions to a problem but personally, I believe that an increase of base speed for all ships would be the most efficient, although of course the most demanding, way to handle it.

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