I'm not new to life in dangerous space, but I have always found it very difficult to check d-scan regularly and still do other things. Many times I fail to scan not from forgetting but out of needing to focus on something more important.

I've been thinking about aspects of EvE that I find fun and aspects that I don't, and one area keeps sticking out as an annoyance: DSCAN.

Proposal: Change DSCAN from a passive (update on click) to active (updates automatically) function.

Background: DSCAN is an incredibly useful tool, and one of the most important PvP utilities. It tells you all kinds of useful information. Learning to use DSCAN properly is an integral part of moving to lowsec, nullsec, and wormhole space. There many nuances to DSCAN, and learning to focus a scan to find someone or something at a celestial is a fun and rewarding practice.

Problem: Because it is so important, experienced players quickly learn to get in the habit of clicking the "Scan" button every few seconds to keep abreast of any changes. The actual process, however, of clicking the button is tedious and makes virtually no difference to the skill involved in its use.

To use a comparison to gunnery skills, there is skill involved in piloting the ship to the proper ranges, keeping a good transversal ratio, and knowing when to disable weapons, overheat, and change ammo types. If you could not set guns on repeat or group them, however, it would add nothing to the skill involved, and instead create a tedious clicking game that would not meaningfully affect the skill involved in the activity. I believe this is how the "Scan" button in DSCAN is used; it's like having to click modules over and over to activate them.

Reasoning: If the passive scan button were removed from DSCAN, the actual mechanics would require little change. You would still have the ~14 au range, you'd still have to interpret what you see, you'd still have to reduce the scan angle and distance to find specific targets, you'd still have to pay attention to the list, and you still couldn't warp directly to DSCAN results. The only aspect that would change is that someone who forgot to click the button every couple of seconds might not see combat probes or a nearby ship, which would only affect those players who are still learning how to use DSCAN and will probably be caught anyway. Someone distracted by hacking or missioning is only slightly less likely to miss important data.

On the other hand, this will reduce a huge amount of tedium and increase the likelihood beginner players will start learning how to use DSCAN early on in their career. It's a huge quality of life improvement with very little gameplay impact; those inexperienced with DSCAN will still be caught, and those experienced with it will have to click less buttons over and over.

It might also make people more likely to risk missioning, mining, and other PvE activities in lower security space because you've removed one of the biggest annoyances of being there. Sure, clicking DSCAN is easy, which is why it adds nothing to gameplay.

In the interest of making mechanics more modern I feel that this is an easy change that veterans will appreciate (even if they grumble about how they used to have to walk uphill both ways in their spaceships...) and will draw more people out of highsec by reducing the tedium of dangerous space without meaningfully decreasing that danger.

Let me know what you think!

Next thread in this chain:

"I forgot to run my DSCAN from 5 degrees to 360 and died, please automatically reset the values for every scan!".

-1

Edit: to expand why this is a bad idea; you are effectively turning your overview from on-grid to a 14.3 AU pos trash scanner and this would be highly exploited.

I like Mornak's take on the idea.

No auto dscan is needed. If you forget it: your mistake. As you mentioned, clicking dscan is easy, so I don't see the problem?
Mining is easy + dscan is easy = mining + dscan somewhat easy !
Shooting us easy + dscan is easy = nullsec plexs is somewhat easy !

Short: -1

-1 . Imagine sticking a cloaky alt in your system all day. Then just having them port out the dscan to some tool like dingo every 5seconds. Then have those fetched from some email server.

...so if i'm scouting ahead of my fleet, somewhere mid-warp i get hostiles on d-scan... i'll have 2sec to remember their numbers and their fleet-composition?

...or if i try to scan down belts/ano's while in warp, i'll have to keep my camera-drone pointed to that belt for as long as i want to see the results of the scan?


i understand that this would be a very helpful change for carebears. if you use your d-scan as a purely defensive tool, aka a "when to warp out"-tool, this feature is helpful. For PVPers on the other hand, this feature ****up d-scan.


i wouldn't mind if you could switch between what you call active/passive-modes, just don't force me to use this.

CCP please save pilots from Carpal tunnel syndrome

So in terms of functionality, would you be able to set this to ping over a set interval, i.e. every few seconds?

I would also suggest that dscan doesn't auto-update as fast as it could if you spammed the button (say, every 3s, instead of 2s?)

I'd go with 10s. That's plenty fast enough to get me using that feature.