Now I come back after a hiatus, and I can't get a mag site above 65% with 4 sisters core probes in a rigged cov ops ship, with 4/5 level skills?

"Adapt, or die ..."
- old eve truth

As subject says. First they do a ninja patch on it to make it harder to scan, just because one dev over there thought it was a good idea for extra probes past 4 probes to make a difference, even though all it does is make the screen EVEN MORE CLUTTERED and a pain in the ass to use.

Now I come back after a hiatus, and I can't get a mag site above 65% with 4 sisters core probes in a rigged cov ops ship, with 4/5 level skills?

This is annoying. QUIT NINJA PATCHING A PERFECTLY GOOD SYSTEM.

Four in a square, one in the centre, all on the same level and then one above and one below. I usually just go the five probes, four in a square and one in the centre.

Four in a square, one in the centre, all on the same level and then one above and one below. I usually just go the five probes, four in a square and one in the centre.

As subject says. First they do a ninja patch on it to make it harder to scan, just because one dev over there thought it was a good idea for extra probes past 4 probes to make a difference, even though all it does is make the screen EVEN MORE CLUTTERED and a pain in the ass to use.

Now I come back after a hiatus, and I can't get a mag site above 65% with 4 sisters core probes in a rigged cov ops ship, with 4/5 level skills?

This is annoying. QUIT NINJA PATCHING A PERFECTLY GOOD SYSTEM.

You are bad at scanning.
You now need 6 probes to get the same strength as 4 probes, previously.
If you use 7 or 8 probes, scanning is easier than before.

Also, use the alt-key.
Finally, stop posting.

Thank you.

No ninja patches. OP just sucks at scanning. Astrometrics 5 (for survey probes), rangefinding 3, pinpointing 4 (only because I hate having the sigs jump around) on an unbonuses ship and using only 4 sister's core probes, I have no problem finding any signature. In fact, I lock most sigs at 0.5 AU. Only the really small stuff or best sites do I ahve to reduce range to 0.25. Practice moar instead of crying to CCP to make it easier. Probing is already very easy.

Above approach works very well, and is easy to implement. I've been trying to figure out an 8-probe config that works better, but haven't yet.

It takes no more time than moving one probe. Select all probes, hold... shift I think? It's so reflexive now I don't even rememeber. Anyway, shift-dragging moves all probes at once. Then alt-dragging moves all probes around the center probe outward or inward from the center probe. It's freaking easy.

Hi there. I'm the dev you're talking about. I don't think I've made much of a secret that I changed the formulas, but allow me to hit the motivations more for ya.

The scanning system was not a perfectly good system. When scanning in a highly populated system, the request would take many seconds of execution time due to poor scaling of the calculations backing it. In a world when we usually talk about things in thousandths of a second, a system eating up many seconds is a severe problem.

Allowing more than four probes to count solved one of the scaling problems. In the previous system, the "best four" probes for any given scan result were used, and due to some of the intricacies involved that meant calculating everything out for every combination of four probes. With all 8 probes in range, that's 70 combinations to compute for every result. If some day the fine folks over in design ever think allowing a 9th would be a good idea, that would have taken the worse case up to 126. Scaling with the factorial like that is plainly not acceptable.

So, I redid the formulas. They scale a ton better now and are loosely balanced to have 6 probes give about the same result as 4 used to, given reasonable geometric layout, as observed by posters above. Probe 7 and 8 are gravy.

So, I redid the formulas. They scale a ton better now and are loosely balanced to have 6 probes give about the same result as 4 used to, given reasonable geometric layout, as observed by posters above. Probe 7 and 8 are gravy.

The scanning system was not a perfectly good system. When scanning in a highly populated system, the request would take many seconds of execution time due to poor scaling of the calculations backing it. In a world when we usually talk about things in thousandths of a second, a system eating up many seconds is a severe problem.

Does this apply to combat probes too?

In that case it's a nerf to combat probing and you should consider decreasing the deploytime of of combatprobes.

Now if we could just save our preferred pattern and have the probes automatically form up in that pattern...

a CCP dev has already admitted on the old forums to ninja patching the system with Incarna. Try again.

PWN

Now if we could just save our preferred pattern and have the probes automatically form up in that pattern...

Err, isn't the scan time improved now? That would mean that combat probes were buffed, when they really didn't need to be.

dont take these detrimental comments to heart op...

there is something funky with the probing system .

i have seen it personally .

its complicated to explain i tried to explain it before but failed miserably .

and was greeted with the same response as you .

but basically 9 out 10 times your probing will work fine .

but there will be one that for some reasons gets goofy . i dont know why, there is no explanation for it. and i dont care how many probes you have or if your 5 5 5 5 + 5 and cov-oped and sistered the damn result will not probe.

So, I redid the formulas. They scale a ton better now and are loosely balanced to have 6 probes give about the same result as 4 used to, given reasonable geometric layout, as observed by posters above. Probe 7 and 8 are gravy.

Under the old system - you could run into trouble if:

- Your probes were too close together
- They were on the same XYZ plane as another probe

(Think "interference patterns".)

So when we'd run into trouble in the old days, we'd wiggle a few of the probes up/down to get them off the same exactly Z level as the other probes. Which generally fixed the interference issues. But I'm not sure whether that game mechanic still exists.