Baarhyn
A fateful lack of ideas
3
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Posted - 2014.05.07 08:44:00 -
[1] - Quote
Crossposting from FHC where the opinion mirror these pretty hard. Gaze at my comprehensive post about the subject where I explain Why people whine, Why they SHOULD whine, and why they SHOULDN'T whine.
Elmnt80;1080995 wrote:So, the problem with doing actual recon with a cloaked alt in a wormhole you're interested in hitting is what exactly?
It's effort mate.
No but really, with the new odyssey scanner people don't have to spam scan anymore, so let's say you're in a site, someone is in their home rolling holes to try and find PVP.
They collapse the static, it reappears in system but doesn't actually spawn until you initiate warp. they find it, and initiate warp to it. At that moment, you as a farmer sees it appearing on the odyssey scanner right away.
T=0
Now being an intelligent human being, you hit siege/triage red, and refit to warp core stabs and a cloak. at the worst of times, you've just hit siege or triage and you have 5 minutes to wait. As soon as you drop, you warp off and cloak.
From the attacking side, they have 20s-1min to warp the fleet to the hole, then they jump in a scout who (currently) yell the J signature and drop probes while another bloke put the signature in your tool of choice, that's another 10-30s, then the signature dude screams on comms that there is activity in system as the scout is D-scanning and/or fiddling with probes to find you. (that is given a lucky shot where the tools have updated just now or the PVE side his in a longer session).
Best case for you, your anom is either a scannable signature (mag or radar site) or out of D-scan range, you can add an extra probe round or 20-30s of warping around before they land on your ass.
T+1min30-2min30
The scout gets a bead on you, and initiate warp to your site, he has 10-40s of warp time, they jump a HIC in, he has 30s-1min of warp time
T+ 3min-5min
They land on you, tackle t3 first most of the time, either you're really unlucky and had just started another siege cycle, but most likely they arrive too late or you slip point as the hic land.
Now on average you should be in the middle of your siege cycle, so even with good circumstances and a on-the-ball crew you should only catch people 25-50% of the time, in real life, maybe what? 10-30% depending on how incompetent people are at looking at the odyssey scanner.
Now this change does not change this dynamic very much, you might increase your average time to target by a couple seconds at most since tools are delayed anyway, what it really fucks up is the loggonski traps, you use the tool to quickly and faultlessly assess the farming pattern of a group to figure out if seeding caps in is worth the hassle.
People are bummed because the only "reliable" way of ganking people right now is seeding considering the time table I just wrote down, rolling into someone actively farming is rare considering TZ coverage, 650 or so different holes with X amount of people in them and the average farming session probably lasting between 30mins and 2h at most. On the bigger time zones like med EU to med US you might need to roll 10-20 holes before you get lucky. We had a meta-tool that scraped the sleeper kills of all c5/c6 and gave us a % of hole in current use back in the days, I would expect people to use that kinda stuff right now. We where happy with a 8-12% activity index in our med to late EU TZ back then and I would be surprised if it was much lower nowadays.
Now the fact that logonski traps are the "best" way of getting action is telling about the state of the meta, people vehemently defending it as a valid game strategy are forgetting that CCP stated a couple of times against that type of gameplay. We should not fall back on broken game mechanics to alleviate other broken game mechanisms.
Now in a vaccum this change is good, you shouldn't be able to defer gaming schedule, TZ coverage, activity and rough player count from outside a system in any shape or form. You can basically scout a full chain without having a single character logged in. In the current meta though, it pushes alot of power in the hands of the PVE crowd since assessing the worthiness of seeding a given system becomes a really tricky affair. You need to strike gold and roll into someone has they are farming, and manage to sneak caps without them noticing on D-scan, and then you need them to farm the following day without a care in the world.
This does not mean that we should stop the devs from implementing that change, it simply means that we should clamor for a better playing field where catching already elusive targets is better than 15% on a good day. Asking for this not to go through is extremely short sighted and partisan however, it means you want to have those free kills no matter what, and in an MMO the health of the game should always pass before player comfort. |