Sun Win
Mutually Assured Distraction
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Posted - 2007.04.28 08:42:00 -
[1]
Edited by: Sun Win on 28/04/2007 08:40:52
 Originally by: CCP Greyscale
The way I'm envisioning this is:
Go to a planet and run a scan. This takes say ninety seconds. You've got something like a 50% chance of getting a result.
...
How does that sound?
As a pirate and as a scout: Terrible!
You are suggesting that if I want to track down a target I need to warp to a random planet in the hopes that they are near and then wait 90sec-5 minutes to hopefully get a positive result on where they are? Hoping all the while that they don't notice me on scanner or in local?
The nice thing about the scanner as it stands now is that using it is a PLAYER skill, not a character skill. One of the tragedies of the new scan probing is that it used to be player skill (painstaking/rapid warping and dropping probes and bookmarks to get a fix, guaranteed result if you could get within 1.5AU) and turned it into server-rolls-the-dice.
The scanner is still player skill and you can tell the difference in better and worse scouts in how well they use the scanner, how quickly they can call out and narrow down targets, how well they can filter the results into useful information and how quickly they can get in position to drop the rest of the gang on the enemy/target.
As a scout, you get to know your hunting grounds. You know where the belts and planets are, you know where you need to warp to to get a good scan of the whole system, which central points are best for narrowing guys down. You get to recognize the ships that are always there in POS and the ones that pass through the systems regularly. You track targets as they warp through the belts, anticipating their movements and jumping one belt ahead of their pattern to catch them. You see bait ships or potential bait ships sitting in belts and decide whether or not to warp to them and give it a go anyway.
By replacing fixed terrain with random terrain and a player-skill scanning system with a server controlled random finding system you risk taking away a very fun and valuable part of gameplay. Eve needs MORE opportunities for player skill to shine over character skill/random mechanics and I am terrified that these proposed changes will do the opposite and take another element of player skill out of the game.
Also, if you are going to make everything into exploration sites, PLEASE let us use MWDs in deadspace. It's bad enough that speed tanks get screwed in regular missions/mission busting. Don't make is so that the only place to use a MWD is at a gate or an enemy POS.
P.S. If you want a fraps of how we use the scanner now to find targets, let me know where to send it.
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