Not really. If you have a dog with rabies running wild in your garden, it doesn’t make the situation better for the family to throw in another 3 dogs with rabies and watch them eat each other.
Hotdropping (which BlackOps are the worst part of currently) shifts the balance extremely towards big groups who can bait and outescalate basically everyone else. Yea sometime that fails and someone even bigger has baited them. But that makes the situation for the smaller gangs not a bit better.
I once lived in a Lowsec that was 99% free of hotdrops. It was the best environment EVE ever had. Titanbridges first and now BlackOps totally ruined that space, it was completely taken over by big entities that no smallscale group could or would fight because they always blob, but now you can’t even outmaneuver them, because…
Highsec has more potential danger than null/low. Every player who isn’t Blue or Green is a potential threat. Outside highsec, the actual danger from these pilots is higher, because there are few to no repercussions for their actions. In Highsec, there are more of these pilots, each one of which could potentially say screw it and disregard the repercussions.
Nullsec is safer, if you actually play the game. If you pay attention to intel channels, you see the neut with the cyno coming several jumps out and have plenty of time to safe up and let it pass by. If there’s a cloaky camper in the system you usually rat/mine in, go next door and do it there, bring some indexes up.
Bullsh!t.
Blops have been here for 19 years, and are massively nerfed from what they used to be. You used to be able to drop on Feythabolis from Branch within 2 minutes. If you can’t use basic intel tools to determine when someone’s assembling a fleet within a single jump of your location, you don’t deserve to live there, go back to highsec.
You know nothing Jon Snow. I played this game excessively in Lowsec for years. And BlackOps never were a thing to worry about back then. You simply couldn’t drop them on small gangs, because those drops were slow. It took too long to jump through the cyno. And you didn’t have T3s for RR, hard tackle, longrange tackle. You could only use recons, which were A LOT weaker. People hat a LOT less alts. There were no skill-injectors to create fresh baits and cynochars on demand. And so on.
You. Know. Nothing.
You mean in any one of 140 possible systems they could sit in?
It’s fairly easy to figure out where the local blops group is staging and put eyes on them.
Only if it’s a random group on a one-time roam you wouldn’t know exactly where they’re staging from, but these groups are on the move and looking for kills; if you wait an hour they’ll be gone. The real persistent blops danger comes from the group that’s staged within one or two jumps of your area and logs in to drop on anything they spot.
Between a limited number of NPC stations with jump clones, regional layout and locator agents it’s pretty easy to figure out which station they’re staging from and put eyes on them. 8 light years covers a really limited number of places to check from if you realize they want a spot with good range on your systems. Often only about 5 systems are good candidates, which you can then check with an alt or locator agents to find their staging station.
We had a local hostile blops group when we lived up north in Pure Blind, which staged from ROIR-Y. And when we lived down south in Querious/Delve the local hostile blops group staged from PR-8CA.
It’s really easy to figure out where they are and put an alt in system with them to know if they’re up to something.
Also, everywhere I’ve ever lived in lowsec had the same intel channels warning people doing PvE about neuts. Have you tried not being too toxic to be invited to those channels? They really do help protect you from being dropped on.
Okay, so you are telling me, if I want to engage a Hurricane that I could tackle in Resbroko, I should have “eyes” in Enderailen? Which is 16 jumps and 2 other regions away? THAT is your plan?
Sry I can’t take you serious. No smallscale gang has the number of alts, the time and honestly, the motivation to go through THAT kind of bullcrap nonsense just to have spontaneous smallcale engagements. Because it isn’t just one group that can BlackOps, it’s multiple. And you’d have to watch them all.
This kind of gameplay is simply ■■■■■■■■. There is no other way to say it. It’s bad to the core, it’s not balanced. It’s awful design from any perspective and it should be completely removed from the game. Insta-hotdropping should simply not be possible. The delay has always to be so long that any mobile gang will simply warp off long before your forces are through. So the big guys can still reinforce their fights around capitals, structures or mass-fleet-battles. But smallscale engagements can be done without being a lucrative target for hotdroppers.
But, but… what if the are just smart and move their BO fleet every day to a different system to lurk for targets?
I mean, sorry to be disrespectful but I can’t help myself: Are all you nullseccers simply that bad at PvP?
Only an Idiot would stage everyday from the same system, especially his home system. A competent BO FC would know multiple strategies to be 100% undetectable until literally 30 seconds before the jump. I for myself know at least 3.
However, in my experience they rarely ever move their staging system. It’s annoying enough to coordinate everyone to put ships, jump clones and spare stuff in one station that they most likely won’t bother to move staging systems even if you figure out where they are.
Smart ones will set up their fleet in another system when they put the blops fleet online and start hunting, but even then you could spot their fleet form in their staging if you were paying attention.
They might already be out, but in that case you could often track on zkillboard where they just dropped.
Ah, so now, before I can tackle a single Hurricane with my smallscale gang, I had to have scout in their home system some hours prior, paying permanent attention so I notice when they leave?
Interesting. Besides that, what should I do then?
So, just not playing? Yea, you got it. Exactly that is why 99% of all smallscale piracy corps in Lowsec are dead. Either quit playing alltogether, joined some big bluetrain block or fled into wormholes. EVE has lost thousands of players over this hotdropping nonsense. If not more. Basically an entire population of lowsec smallscalers.
You are making your case worse, do you notice? Everything you say is reason to nerf those things into oblivion.
Oh, interesting. So I see they have killed something 20 minutes earlier in Mara.
And from that kill I know that they had jumped in from Enderailen? So they could be back there and thus jump on my in Resbroko too? Please tell me which black magic you use to find that one out.
And especially tell me if you are seriously convinced that this is how the game should work. Please, tell me it isn’t so. If it wasn’t so sad, I would laugh hard at the sheer stupidity of this argumentation. The current BlackOps mechanic is simply ridiculous. The more you try to defend it, the more of a joke it becomes.
Please, I urge you: You cannot be serious about that nonsense.
There are no BlackOps groups near me. I could just vomit all day long seeing what null and lowsec has become, compared to what we had when EVE was at it’s prime age. And then seeing people even defending all those crappy mechanics that have lead to this point.
It is really like seeing crowds of 75 IQ people around you smacking and slurping 0.49ct budget freezer lasagne and murmuring “hmmm thats tastyyyy hmm soo tastyyy” while you shake in disgust and think about the nice italian restaurant that was here 10 years before. And thats why I will keep arguing against those awful mechanics at every occasion.
