St Mio
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
1087
   |
Posted - 2013.01.06 12:13:00 -
[1] - Quote
Oh dear, this is going to be one of those threads isn't it...
 Cosmic signatures despawning
Cosmic signatures will remain in the same location until:
a) A player runs and completes them, or
b) They expire naturally
Downtime does not force sigs to despawn, if you scan and bookmark a Gurista Scout Outpost, and downtime hits, it will still be there after downtime (albeit with a new sig ID) unless a) or b) above.
Cosmic signatures spawning
Sites respawn constantly during the day regardless of downtime.
If you don't believe it, scan a system after downtime, write down the list of all the IDs, then rescan it 12 hours or so later. There will probably be new signatures. Remember that there are thousands of solar systems that sites can respawn in, just because a system doesn't always have new sigs doesn't mean it never gets them. Also, remember that just because you didn't see them, someone didn't run them while you were out.
Cosmic signatures respawning
- Cosmic signatures, when completed, can but don't always always respawn in the same region (or constellation, or system). (Proof).
- However, it is possible to complete a site and have it respawn in the exact same solar system. (i.e. It's happened before (rarely) to multiple people on multiple occasions)
- If it causes a signature of the exact same name to respawn, I would guess that the new location would probably be limited to the set of all eligible solar systems (high/low/null sec, correct pirate faction).
- It wouldn't cause a new cosmic signature of random type to respawn, because everyone blitzing combat sites would eventually turn all the new sites into gravimetrics (this doesn't happen) (see below)
- New sites only seem to respawn once other sites are completed. The only viable way to see this is on the test server due to low population and almost no one exploring. If you take a list of all the sig IDs in a region and come back after a few hours, you'll see that there are no sites despawning or spawning (unless sites have naturally expired).
Downtime sig IDs
After downtime, signatures get allocated a new ID. The numeric portion seems random, but the alphabet portion works with a counter. Multiple signatures in the same solarsystem will have the left most letter increased until it reaches Z, after which it will reset to A and the second letter will be increased, which upon reaching Z will increase the third letter. When it skips letters on your scan results, remember that POS and abandoned ships in the system receive sig IDs too!
The counter seems to be persistent between regions as well. Again, on the test server, most of the solar systems will boot up in an offline state. When the first player enters the solarsystem after DT, everything will be allocated new sig IDs.
The main point of this is that if you have multiple signatures in a system, and some of them have the same second and third letters, it means they've been there since downtime. This usually means that:
a) They are gravimetrics or wormholes (as these usually take long to despawn), or
b) Sites that no one wants (i.e. drone sites, mags in highsec)
Type of new spawns
While it is possible that new sites are chosen on a weighted random basis depending on how many of each sites are currently spawned, it seems like an overly complicated solution, especially compared to all the other mechanics in game.
Having a list of fixed x amount of y site would appear just as random to the average player given the range of systems they can spawn in. If you consider high sec Sansha, there are +- 337 solar systems that a Sansha Lookout can spawn in. Even if there are a fixed number of 20 of them at any given time, the chances of finding one will still seem random to a single player.
Having the weighted random approach would mean having to keep a running total of how many of each site exist at any given time, as well as desired min and max limits. IMHO, to a single player exploring over a normal play session, it would seem just as random as having fixed amounts. |