Filaments require a re-balance

Communications Center General Discussion
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Filaments. Yes, we understand, they were intended as a way to bring new content to the game, unexpected combat appearing right there in your system! And, on paper, that sounds great!

But let’s be honest. Filaments are most often used as a means of escape, rather than as a means to find fights.

If a player is being hunted or feels threatened, fear not, all they have to do is activate some wild space-magic and they will be mystically whisked away to safety.

The end result is that many people now don’t even bother trying to chase and kill hostiles in their space, as it is likely the hostile will just filament away. This is having a NEGATIVE effect on PvP, not a positive one as envisioned.

The problem isn’t so much the filaments themselves, as they DO (Albeit occasionally) bring content, the problem is in the fact that, as an escape tool, they have no counter. Nothing. (A filament timer is the same as a cloak stability timer, so 90% of the time you can’t even take advantage of the timer and attempt to scan them down)

So here is my suggestion for a fix:

"Have filaments work similar to a Cyno beacon.

When “Activated” the filament will form a rift in space, that takes 30-45 seconds to “Charge”.

During this time, the rift will appear on D-scan and overview much like a Cyno beacon, and can be warped to accordingly. The ship that activated the filament will be unable to move/cloak much like a Cyno also. If aggressed and given a PvP timer before the filament timer completes, the rift fails to open, and the filament is wasted.

If not, once the timer has completed, the rift will pulse and drag the user and his/her fleet through as normal, before collapsing behind them."

This will at least provide SOME sort of risk to using a filament, and give hunters SOME sort of counter to what is currently “Space-magic” with no counter what-so-ever, While still retaining the ability for fleets to use them to find fights.

Eve’s main selling point has ALWAYS been that it is a hostile and unforgiving universe, Filaments (In their current state) only serve to take away from that…

Any thoughts/ideas would be appreciated, CCP need to realise that filaments are having an adverse effect on the PvP aspect of the game and need to be fixed.

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lol

No.

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FYI, Professor: EVE is based entirely on “space magic”: travel gates also function on “space magic”, or did you think we already have that technology?
Most of EVE works on “space magic”.
Ships that stop on a dime in space do not exist, Professor.
The whole environment doesn’t exists either. Planets that don’t orbit their star is “space magic” too.
Filaments definitely belong in EVE and, no, they don’t need to be nerfed so you can have an easier time to catch preys. Learn to PvP better.

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Yes please.

It’s far too easy to use filaments as a means to escape, or as a means to travel to high sec through Pochven untouched. This isn’t the intention of filaments, merely a bad sideeffect.

An activation delay is the bare minimum change needed to make filaments more balanced, as it would allow chasing players on the tail of the filament-users to actually have a chance to catch the players before they teleport to somewhere else in the universe.

An activation delay is needed.

Whether the filament should also be a warpable beacon during this time, I’m not sure. It would make chasing easy, perhaps too easy as even people who aren’t prepared with combat probes looking for the filamenting group will see a beacon pop up on their overview. Combat probes could already allow prepared players to do the same thing if the activation delay is long enough.

On the other hand, with a warpable beacon the activation delay can be much shorter (as combat probing takes time) while still allowing players to chase you, which is nice for uninterrupted regular travel as you don’t have to stay a minute in space before you move on.

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Another problem with filaments is people just bypass lowsec.

I can’t think of any reason for the game to include filaments to Highsec - they should be one way trips. Teleporting to the CONCORD umbrella is just lame. At the very least, people should have a suspect timer when they arrive in Highsec.

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Lets preface with that I’m against any sort of insta travel as it avoids content, makes the game world more empty and makes how deep you are in space and on the map entirely meaningless. But then I’m a solo pvper who makes use of filaments on the daily so that shows how much of a hypocrite I am, that duality doesn’t stop me from understanding how broken they are though.

There is no counter to it, they are all about avoiding consequences whether it’s jumping in to null or jumping out of it using the Pochven express and that is simply not the EVE way. It’s exceedingly convenient and broken (which is why people will rally against changes) but it NEEDS a change, it needs a counter play. CCP should really look at this for they have created a (convenient) monster.

What the best solution is I don’t know (yet) mostly because we haven’t really given it some thought or discussion but the OP’s idea isn’t bad at all although it could do with some numbers rebalancing perhaps.

CCP needs to address this (saying this as a frequent flyer myself).

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As someone who live in Lowsec, I don’t Mind I use these to go Deep null and Burn Nullbears :smiley:

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Since I do not use filaments (yet) my understanding of how they work may be “a bit” off.

I propose filaments do not crash after their “user” went through it. It stays for 30 sec. That way people can either follow/chase them through or use the same filament to partycrash whatever is on the other side.
Warpable beacons are for the lazy. Probing ftw.

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Yawn

Another thread by crying gankers for crying gankers to cry about some perceived slight on their ganking entitlements.

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Filament’s kill the tactical advantages of geography and need a complete rework imo.

Reducing roaming time is great, but not at the cost of skipping 40-50 systems at a time.

filament’s imo should take your group to a random edge of your current region, which means people can still secure those region entrances and geographical advantage stays relevant and roam time is still reduced.

Similar to front line systems coming to FW, a change like this would make those region edges more valuable space to hold and much more conflict in these areas.

Using filament’s to escape blob’s is not terrible think about it, you are engaging 5 to 10 people with 100 people and you expect them to stay around get real. But those escape routes can be narrowed from 8 000 to maybe 4 which means the null guys will have to work hard to catch these dudes but it would still be posible.

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Actually, the thread looks like its by a null bear who doesnt like the fact that gankers can escape retribution.

I dont care about that, Im more into the pros and cons of using them as a totall safe alternative to WH hopping back to high after going deep into low. And Im speaking as a hauler.

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As someone who uses filaments fairly often I have to agree they need a rework. Although I think sone of the things suggested here go a bit to far.

In my mind first and foremost the pochven thing needs to go. Pochven is established now and filaments and wh’s seem sensible in the short term but I’m sure the lore guys can come up with a better way to enter and exit that space which will allow the pochven filaments to be phased out. At least the exit ones anyway. Filaments that drop you in high sec are the bad ones and it’s always super telling that those are the expensive ones during the winter event.

Once that is done I’d be tempted to see how that works before doing much more. But other things that could be considered in my opinion.

  • change noise and signal filaments to include low sec. If players bypassing that space is an issue make it so they might be dropped there instead.

  • counter play introduction. The spool up idea is interesting. I wouldn’t be against that in principle. My own position on this was to allow players to give chase in sone way. In another thread I suggested that maybe the remnants of the trace stays around for a while and another player can use there own filament to reopen it and follow. On balance thinking about it the spool up is probably better.

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Filaments as they stand have killed the need for Null territorial v Empire chokepoints in Eve.

And I agree, it was a stupid implementation.

Instant Gratification Brigade, as usual.

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Cretin.

This is anything but a crying gankers thread.

Nerfing filaments would actually hurt those instant gratification gankers you speak of, all coming in so easily into null to tap farmers, and able to escape just as easily …

It’s a stupid mechanic.

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These filaments are a really bad addition to the game. It allows you to bypass much of the content. You don’t really have to scan wormhole connections anymore or pass through a lot of gatecamp possibilities. While I understand this is nice if you just want to go and gank something. It actually removes a lot of the other content. The game should be less focused around ganking, and should focus more on the beautyfull space theme.

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I find myself agreeing with this

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and

Chasing a filament may seem like a good idea. However, filaments have limits on the amount of players being able to take them for a good reason.

Travel filaments are limited to 5, 15, 25 people, which is good for small gangs and solo players. But if people could chase a filament to whatever random spot they went to, those limits are gone. People could then form 100 man fleets and take a filament to roam. One group pops the filament, the rest ‘chases’ them to the same location.

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True, even if you set up filaments similar to black holes for instance. They could collapse after X players pass through - but that would still allow for a group of say 10 players to use a 5 filament, then pass their other 5 through and collapse it. And other abuses.

The OP “warp beacon on activation” is going too far though, since it means an undetected roamer would be instantly jumpable to even by ships that have no means of detecting them.

Filaments could create a scannable anomaly for instance, that remains for 2 minutes before opening. Then make it so anyone with a combat timer can’t jump through. It would also add risk to high sec Abyssals since now the scanning could start even before the Abyssal was entered.

(I’m assuming any filament changes should apply to Abyssal filaments as well to help address some of the issues there.)

The flaw there would be the inconvenience of waiting every time you wanted to use a filament. I don’t use them (yet) so not sure how much that would irritate legitimate users.

Hopefully CCP gets some good ideas from both users and abusers of this since it seems to have a lot of exploitable aspects.

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The problem is thwt you solve "too much instatravel " with “more instatravel”.

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Well, I don’t use them so I’m probably not the best one to propose an all-in-one solution, just tossing out ideas.

That said, I think the “escaping bad combat situations” part of the issue is more of a problem than the “fast-travel” issue. I’ve long felt that one of the significant barriers to getting content and action in EVE is the long slow travel times to get from A to B. So personally I’m not opposed to fast-travel options so long as they don’t create more problems than they solve.