Bumping mechanics

Is the reason why sporks and chopsticks exist. :smiling_imp:

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Nah. The fundamental point is the game was built so ships need to achieve a defined vector to enter warp. The only reason to do this is to open room for game play around achieving that, and preventing people from achieving it. Otherwise, just make a warp spool-up timer that is equal to align time from the beginning. It certainly seems like it would have been much simpler to me.

As I said, just because someone decided to build a game system almost 20 years ago doesn’t means it is perfect or fun game design, nor does it say that something that came later may not interact with it in a less-than-ideal way. But fundamentally, the game was built to have bump-tackle being ‘a thing’. Maybe that needs to change like learning skills or clone grades or the whole other collection of game mechanics that have been deleted or replaced, but the game was always intended to allow ship collisions to affect when ships enter warp.

But even if somehow, CCP hadn’t notice their convoluted warp system would allow ships to prevent/delay other ships from entering warp by colliding with them, I still see no problem that the largest, most powerful ships in the game have a weakness the smaller ships don’t. In fact, they should - trade-offs like that make the game far more interesting. Freighters are clearly overpowered as compared to the alternatives as evidenced by their usage profile, so the very last thing we need is to make them even more useful and more oppressive in the highsec hauling meta.

I get that being bumped for an hour isn’t especially fun for someone who has made a whole bunch of mistakes and is being called on it. I’m fine with a reasonable warp timer that still allows some delay of a capital ship in highsec, even if that now requires a periodic suicide point to encourage the highwaymen to get on with administering the coup de grâce. But you and I both know threads like this won’t stop if CCP ever gets their act together and implements it. These calls for nerfs will continue, asking for shorter warp timers, or new mobility abilities as long as freighters keep exploding - which they always will as that is the game we are playing.

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While I am more inclined to believe the warp requirements were probably aimed at having ships warp in the direction they are facing so that the effect doesn’t look ridiculous, the rest of Black Pedro’s post is a very even handed appraisal. The freighter is very powerful, as a hauler, and is in constant use by players even in spite of whatever threats can be brought to bear against it.

I never see PushX or Red Frog weigh in to say Freighters are too vulnerable. Since freight is their business, I would expect to see some significant complaints from them if there were an actual problem with the de facto king of highsec hauling.

I would agree that some way to warp or safe logout after a fairly lengthy delay would be good so that people can carry on with their real lives in the event someone decides to bump a player for a very extended period, but it would do next to nothing to stymie the tide of complaints, and there are already proactive ways to avoid being bumped.

Some in game problems are opportunities for those players who can devise ways to cope with or counter those problems. The risk of freighter destruction if you don’t do your due diligence is what makes the business of shipping for profit viable. If you don’t want to do the work, or dislike the added complication, or just don’t have the manpower, then hire someone to do the work and take the risk you don’t want to. If you don’t want to pay, then assume the risk and take the necessary precautions to mitigate it.

Eve can live without a warp timer. It might be a ‘nice to have’, but even that is debatable in a game where we need problems to solve and hard choices to make for our entertainment and opportunity to achieve something we can feel good about.

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My proposal was not a Warp Timer, but a widening of the tolerance for entering warp. That’s not a “get away free”, it makes it easier for a pilot who is actually piloting to get unstuck or escape a bump. Granting she made big mistakes to get into such situation in the first place, but given the Pilot is on the helm she would have a better chance to escape if the highwaymen take their sweet time gathering their gang.

While not a timer in the most strict of senses, if it is effective it still is essentially a mechanic that limits the time a target can be held, and with some math you could probably compute just how long a target can be pinned. You won’t see a countdown, but there is an invisible interval that will expire and your target will warp away.

I understand that the maximum tolerance deviation and decay can be tweaked, but I see few outcomes no matter where this balance is set.

If the effect is too low for freighters to escape in the protracted time frame we’re talking about, then nobody will be pleased.

If the effect is so high that a freighter can automatically escape, few people will be pleased because they will reason that they are still being bumped for that lengthy interval, and if they’re going to escape anyway then why should they have to wait?

If the effect is on the cusp where a prepared person can make use of it, then few people would be pleased because the prepared don’t often get caught in the first place.

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Freighters:

increase cargo capacity with increased skill.
ability to fit cargo expanders
ability to fit bulkheads

blah, blah, blah…

Also, if this ship is bumped it becomes immune to any form of warp disruption and will enter warp after 2 mins (this effect is only functional in highsec space within 1,000 km of a gate or NPC structure).

Bumping still works if you have a gank team on standby in-system, it fails if your gank fleet is deep in nullsec and has to ‘cepter’ to the ship arriving 10 minutes after bumping started.

Fair to gankers, fair to the ganked.

I have always stated that harming someone else’s game play because you don’t like it is wrong, a statement i continue to stand by and why the bump mechanic i proposed still allows for bumping to work.

That being said, ganking in highsec space should be a challenging thing to do, if you want to blow something up easily there are wormholes, lowsec (and you could even surprise the **** out of us and go blow something up in dullsec where massive amounts of destruction should be taking place 23/7/365 but doesn’t because the residents of dullsec are so fundamentally, ‘risk averse’).

It already is. Ganking a smart and competent player in highsec is virtually impossible, unless you hate them so much that you’re willing to forget about profit and throw away piles of ISK just to make them die. Only stupid and careless players are getting ganked, so if they want it to be more challenging they should try being less terrible.

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That’s how I do it! Sports hunting!

If freighter pilots don’t like being bumped - they can hire or use an alt to web them to make warp outs faster.

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Recalling the days of ships warping backwards I think it is pretty safe to say that somehow the ship has to be aligned when it warps, whether that is naturally of though some other mechanism who knows.

But I am pretty sure making a ship warp on a timer when it is not aligned is something that falls under “be careful what you wish for”.

I think if there is going to be a way to limit the time a freighter is bumped it has to be something that puts it in alignment, possibly some temporary mass increase?

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We can cut through 2k posts that the old thread had with that.

It’s not the bumping they don’t like, it is the ganking that comes after.

Somehow there is this entitled feeling that a solo pilot should be safe and victorious vs 10, 20 or more other players.

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No, there’s the “entitled” feeling that a successful gank should require organization and being prepared for a kill when an opportunity arrives. Extended bumping is bad because it rewards incompetence and allows a successful gank even if the attacking side is halfway across EVE when a target is spotted. Bumping should be a means of briefly delaying a target’s attempt to warp off long enough to execute a kill with ships already on-grid with the target, not an indefinite zero-consequences zero-escape “no warp allowed” button.

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Also covered in the original bumping thread. Comes down to:

The longer they take the longer you had to seek help, time helps those who use it.

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People have lives. People can not play 24 hours a day.
A use it or lose it time frame is a good thing for a game to have in all aspects of engagements. Not just bumping.
As mentioned before I have a different set of preferred solutions which create a similar picture while achieving the end outcome of making sure engagements have an end that isn’t downtime.
But asking for a mechanical solution to ensure eternal or highly lengthy engagements don’t happen is perfectly reasonable. As it keeps players feeling like the game and CCP respect their time.

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Speak for yourself, filthy casual. :wink:

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Knew I should have said 25 hours, just to see someone claim they do. :slight_smile:

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Except you’re missing the massive asymmetry in help that can be provided. A bumped ship has few options, the bumping side is just counting down the time until an inevitable kill. And they’re only able to do it because their “warp disruption” doesn’t technically count as an offensive act and can therefore be done indefinitely.

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Question: how does safe log-off work with bumping?

“Except you’re missing the massive asymmetry in help that can be provided.”

This is the only part of the paragraph actually addressing his post, and it’s irrelevant. The rest of the post pretends that the bumped freighter pilot is alone or that the amount of options matters in the slightest, when it doesn’t.

It’s irrelevant. Him not having any friends or alts is his problem, and his problem alone. Him not knowing how to deal with the situation is, again, his problem alone.

If it’s really the case, then that even more so underlines that that’s his own personal problem and nothing needs to be designed around the fact that he’s an anti-social isolationists who intentionally cripples his game-play without being able to actually deal with it.

Him having less options does not matter as long as the options prove to be effective.

Bumping is fine for a variety of reasons.
The artificial outrage is the problem.

In fact it’s exactly the other way. As I stated earlier I can accept being ganked as the result of poor decisions.
I explicitly complained about bumping that goes on for extended periods of time.

Again, no. I feel entitled to being ganked within 10 minutes if I’m bumped and 20 cats are in the system instead of being held up for 70+ minutes and not being ganked at all.

This:

I think opening up the warp entry tolerance with each bump could be a way to remedy this. I don’t fully comprehend the temporary mass increase, care to elaborate @Salt_Foambreaker?