I see… I can’t help but disagree though. You see where I live in Stacmon, there is often a gatecamp next door in Ostingele. I attained this knowledge by staying put in the area and gathering intelligence on my own. That intelligence came from the map, killboards (searching by system) and simply flying through the gate a bazillion times.
When I fly through that gate I’m tyically in my travel Dramiel or in a PVP ship, most likely an AF or hecate so I never get caught, it’s a non issue. I say hi to the campers, they often say hi right back. If I want to bring something bigger through to maybe access southern Placid or roam north into black rise or west into syndicate, I can go through the Corvyn gate or one of the other entries and come into Ostingele from the side and avoid the camp.
At the beginning of a play session I check the map (it’s literally the first thing I do when I open my eve clients) and if Ostingele is glowing with kills from the last hour I know to check the killboard. The killboard tells me a few things including: what ships died, and where they died and who they died to. If I see several marked “on the gate to stacmon” I know there’s likely to be a camp. I also know the alliance that lives in Oistingele, I check their killboard daily, and if their kills are happening elsewhere or not at all in recent hours, I know they’re probably not camping at the moment. And if only one or two of them are camping, I’m willing to fight.
Now, I have an alt. He’s a good alt, can fly drams for travel, rattlesnakes, asteros and all sorts of other stuff. I usually have him sitting in a combat probing astero, and I often use him to scout however I rarely even bother using him to check for a gatecamp in ostingele specifically because it’s a waste of time. It’s already so easy for me to apply my knowledge of the area (because I know my neighborhood) and read the obvious context clues to prevent myself from dying. I’d much rather send my alt in a different direction and have him start scanning for wormholes and signatures for me to do stuff with (either complete sites or gank explorers) over the next few hours or however long my play session ends up being. I can simply detect a gatecamp on that gate because I know the area so well and know what goes on, and I have a routine of map checking and killboard checking, so a scout is unnecessary.
I can’t do this for every gate in the game though, I can only detect gatecamps at gates I know and use often, and which I know to be camped often–I have to have a suspicion to begin with. Tama is another good example. Everyone knows Tama gets camped a lot, I don’t jump in there willy nilly.
The only other gatecamp I encounter often and actually die to is the Goonswarm titan camps in the Delve pipe. But the way I see it, I don’t have any right to traverse delve unscathed without exerting effort to do so. It’s not my local neighborhood, I don’t know the people there, and it’s in fact one of the most hostile regions of the game. When visiting that area or similarly defended areas, one is taking a risk. If you go there you do so at your own peril.
So i guess my point is, if you spend any extended period of time in a region, you will not only learn where the gatecamps usually are, you’ll also develop a sort of sixth sense for detecting them and on top of this you’ll have the navigational awareness to find an alternate route. If you go somewhere unfamiliar and you’re flying through in a battlecruiser and happen upon a gatecamp, it is because you are not at home, and you lack the awareness of the area and you did it to yourself. You can’t just go anywhere in any ship and be ok, that just isn’t an option in this game.
Edit: Lastly I wanted to mention that sometimes I do jump into a gatecamp in a cruiser and I have to go with plan Z and try to escape. Here’s what I do:
-Check ship types and try to guess which one is most likely to catch me–thats the one I want to fly away from
-Look at my cloaked ship and see where it’s currently aligned and see if I can simply warp to something
-Decide if I’m going to try to warp out to something my ship is aligned to or burn back to the gate
-In most cases I burn back to the gate. If you’re at a gate with danger on both sides what you do is burn back to the gate but don’t jump. If you get disrupted/scrammed you have to jump. If not you can warp out while sitting on the gate at 0. This leaves you with options. They think you’re going to try to jump out but you don’t unless you have to.
-Sometimes it’s best to burn away from the blob, ie below:
The other day I jumped into ostingele and there was a large camp of 10-20 ships. I was in a stabber that could fly at 3kms no heat so I risked it and overheated and burnt away from the group. They chased me but I was able to pull range and warp out. One of them ended up catching me on a celestial because I was fiddling with my alt who had just decloaked on the same gate, but I didn’t die on the gate. And I even got respect from my assailants after the encounter. They were very friendly and said they were recruiting.