Shaden Nightwalker wrote:Roime wrote:I don't cherrypick sites, but had other high value unique uses for DSPs.
Which ones, if I may ask, now that they will be gone soon, anyway?
Let's play open-hand misere.
You're in a wormhole. You're doing stuff. You want to make sure other people don't catch you by surprise. If you spam D-scan at 360-¦ you will catch people as they warp into your site. But you can catch people earlier than this!
If you have DSPs, you can deploy one (and only one) DSP and monitor signature strength. If someone probes out a wormhole into your system, this will show up because K162 wormholes have a different signature strength to (for all intents and purposes in this discussion) every other signature you will find.
This works for DSPs but not a constellation of core or combat scanner probes. The catch is that DSPs have a
very low signal strength and a very high range. This means that regardless of where a signature appears in your 256 radius sphere of detection, a K162 will show up as about 0.27% signal strength.
With core or combat probes, you have a much higher signal strength which means that that K162 really close to your probe will look like a 1% signal strength while far away it will be a 0.2% signal strength. As such, core and combat probes are not as effective as an early warning system: all you can see is that something changed. You don't know whether this is a new signature such as a grav site (well, after Odyssey there will be no grav sites, but work with me here) or a K162.
So whlie CCP Soundwave's idea of a constellation of core/combat probes has some merit in terms of replacing part of the functionality of the DSP early warning system, it only does half the job.
Of course CCP could just come out and tell us that with this expansion they had the design intent of removing the ability to filter sites and possibly identify them by signal strength, and we'd accept their decision to remove DSPs, etc. In the meantime it looks like they have removed DSPs because they don't understand how the players actually play the game (remembering the great nullsec nerf of FanFest 2011 for a classic example).
So for people like James Amril-Kesh and myself, the question is: are CCP deliberately removing this feature because they feel that our current abilities are overpowered, or are they bulls let loose in the china shop?