Originally by: Merin Ryskin

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Originally by: CCP Greyscale

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Yes, this applies to ships, and yes it will make finding ships harder. Personally I'm happy with this - the current system is IMO too fast, and apart from anything else made ship probing far less common, in my experience. With the old old system people would use safespots because good probing pilots were rare and it took a long time. When the old system came in and everyone realized that there's no such thing as a safespot, the chances of actually finding someone (outside missions and so on) became much lower. I'm interested to see how this new system affects things.

That said, if you do have a strong opinion on this issue, please explain it here clearly :)

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Sure. Saying this as a low-sec pirate, experiences may be different elsewhere:

The problem with increasing scan times is that currently, even my covops alt with under a 30 second scan time has problems finding a target. Like you said, a lot of people realize that probes are a threat, so they either change safespots frequently, or keep refreshing a 14au 360* scan looking for scan probes to appear. I prefer the second option, I'll still safespot (especially while waiting to warp in on a target of my own), but I'll keep that scan up and warp to a new location as soon as a probe appears in the scan results.

Currently, with under 30 second scan times, it works at least some of the time. Scan the target, destroy probe, and with a little luck, the target isn't aware that they've been found and a gank fleet is on the way. However, if you increase the time to get a warpable scan result, you vastly increase the chances that the target realizes you're looking for them and warps off.

Or, in the case of safespotting while looking for a target (vs. safespotting to hide), the target finishes their search and warps in for the kill. Or moves on to a new system because they can't find anything. Or whatever other reason for moving on, but in the end, you only have a very limited window where the target is vulnerable.


Now, this applies much less to scanning for mission ships (and for deadspace sites themselves, of course), since it almost always takes multiple scan attempts, the mission runner is usually focused on their mission instead of watching for threats, and they have considerable motivation to finish their mission instead of warping off. So I don't think the new system will be a problem here.

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