jonnykefka
Adhocracy Incorporated
Adhocracy
196
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Posted - 2013.05.09 16:39:00 -
[1] - Quote
Disclaimer before I get nasty: I think this is cool and about 80% of the way to being an AWESOME feature.
There are some issues in how it works and some issues CCP needs to think about.
1. The animation does get old, and as a w-space resident I'm going to have it going constantly. It would be nice if I could get the info without the perpetual sweep effect. It started to make me a little motion-sick after a while, and I'm not particularly prone to motion sickness.
2. The list is a tricky issue, but we should have one for the reasons that everyone has already said. We NEED a list for anoms, as the old onboard scanner gave us. I'm torn as to whether the list should include the sigs as well, because on one hand it makes constructing a signature list very convenient (and yes this matters a lot in w-space) but on the other hand it makes it in some ways too convenient, especially with the sig-naming-convention thing where sigs that spawn after DT have noticeably different letter codes. Also see (3)
3. Updating and sigwatch and ganks. This is going to be long, but I implore you to read it.
Right now, one of the primary methods of finding PvP in W-space is to chain-roll your static. This finds you PvP in two critical ways:
a. You cycle through many systems very rapidly, so if a system is dead you don't have to waste time scanning your way down a chain to find something that may or may not be there.
b. Your prey may not notice that you have opened into their system, giving you a crucial element of surprise. The primary mechanics of w-space rotate around denial of intel. No local, dscan dependance, etc. The ideal way (from an attacker's perspective) for someone to notice your presence in a w-space system is when you tackle them as the fleet lands. Ideally, they shouldn't even know that your wormhole is in their system until they've already been podded.
As the overlay is right now, in the current sisi build, (b) still works most of the time. Sure, if they happen to see it spawn in space that's annoying, but they have to have the camera pointing at it or notice that it's new and stuff. It makes it easier for someone who is vigilant, but someone who isn't will probably get caught all the same. Fine. It will probably cost us maybe one out of three surprise attacks and that's not ideal, but I can see the logic and I'm willing to accept that someone will occasionally see us coming by sheer dumb luck.
Potential problem 1: The list. If the list produced by the continuous scan includes signatures, then it will be VERY easy to spot a new one. Just ignoring all existing signatures would be enough, which is of course what we do now but with probes, which we have to manually cycle. Automating the process makes it too easy. I think the list needs to include anoms, but for this reason alone I think it's worth NOT having signatures in that list.
Potential problem 2: The relationship between the overlay and scan results. Let me give you a hypothetical. You scan out every sig in a system, and every result on the overlay is a nice green diamond. Then you warp to some convenient outer planet or deep-safe and point your camera towards the nice cluster of green diamonds at the core. Then you see something orange. Sure, you might not know immediately that it's a WH, but you know SOMETHING spawned and you need to react to it. I'm actually in favor of NOT linking the two, and similarly not allowing us to "ignore" overlay hits from space. I think that would completely obliterate this particular element of surprise, and that would be detrimental to w-space gameplay. Yes, there are other elements of surprise, but right now, in an era when most w-space residents are relatively cautious and often try to crash every link to their system before engaging in any PvE, this could reduce risk by too much.
4. It would be nice if the anom hits also showed up in your solar system map. You can right now do this manually by initiating and cancelling warp to each one, so having it just do it automatically seems reasonable.
5. Ending on a positive note, I just wanted to say that this is going to be a tremendous boost to finding out where potential targets are in space, if you are already adept with d-scan. It will take me mere seconds to find targets when I jump into a new system now. This partially offsets some of the things I noted above, but I would say that my cautions are still very much valid. If they know that a new wormhole has spawned instantly when I jump through it (or when I scan it down to 100%, never totally clear on what causes the K162 to spawn), even if it only takes me ten seconds to track them down, they will probably have initiated warp already. |