By your standards, if “good players” want to shine, they can just simply not group the modules.
That is so stupid that is isn’t worth debating about.
The point of “to shine” is to achieve something that other’s in your situation can’t or won’t achieve. And that means, if someone can just “jump up” to your level of skill by “grouping modules”, your performance may be still great, but it has no improved impact on the fight any more. I personally don’t want every mediocre player be as good as today’s good logi pilots because you remove like 50% from the managing stress of this job. It won’t be good for the game in my opinion.
There is a clear skill progression from T1 Logis (2-3 Reppers) to T2 Logis (4-5 Reppers) to Nestors (up to 7 Reppers) to Fax (up to 3 Reppers + Local tank- and Capacitor management). Grouping of Reppers would simplify that too much imho, since you can basically use a Nestor with 7 Reppers easier than you can use a T1 Logi today. Thats bad. And another step towards multiboxing, since controlling even 3-4 Logis would now be absolutely no problem for a somewhat quick person if they are all anchored and passively tanked. Something that is close to impossible to do efficiently right now - because reppers can’t be grouped. And I absolutely don’t want to have even more multiboxing in the game, it’s a cancer already with the DPS ships, we don’t want to see that for logistics too.
But as @Gerard_Amatin wrote isn’t spredding the reppers activationg over time typically better? You can’t do that with grouped modules. But I am not a logi pilot so I don’t know, perhaps the skilled logi pilots just activate all at once…
Again, having the option to do so is my intention. If you don’t want to group them, don’t group them.
Although I do agree that grouping tractor beams in paricular serves no use really. With salvaging, mining and huffing, I beg to differ.
No offense, but I doubt he is a top-notch Logistics Pilot of his group.
If a target is the opponents primary, you want to have as much rep power as possible on it ASAP. Which is a lot easier by grouping. If using multiple logis (which is the most common scenario) intentionally staggering them througout the cycle isn’t even making a difference, because the different reps from different logis will arrive at different ticks most likely anyway. And you have no way to predict that. Staggered reps often are the natural result of little delays in clicking or switching reps over to another target or spreading reps among multiple targets if nessessary. It’s almost impossible to keep all the modules synced here over time.
What I can say - as an experienced logi pilot - is: Grouping them up would remove a huge amount of clicking stress from the logi ship. Which - absolutely obviously - would make logistics more easy to use, lowering the skill ceiling by quite a lot and - worst part - enable convenient logi multiboxing of even more than 2 or 3 logis at a time.
Right now, if you begin dualboxing Guardians for example, as a fast player you can still manage that. But instead of achieving 100% performance of one Guaridan, you maybe get 80% Performance of two. Still 160%, so benefitial in the fight. I have met a handful of Pilots that were able to pull of the stunt of managing 3 Logis decently. But we are talking of like 50% performance per Logi compared to what they could have done from focusing on one account only. Still 150% performance, still benefitial. However: the usual player wouldn’t even achieve 30% performance when tripleboxing them. It’s just too many broadcasts, too many locks & delocks, too many modules to activate and deactive, capchains to establish and so on. And thus there is a natural limit of what normal pilots can do with Logis in this game. They will - on average - at most be dualboxing them. The overwhelming majority will only use one. Some very very few might tripleboxing them. But thats it.
Now group Highslots and I can fly two Guardians with like 95% efficiency. 3 with still 80%. 4 with still 60%. And people better than me could fly 5, 6, 7 Guardians on their own because they are all anchored, passively tanked and there is only ONE (grouped) module to bring on your target on each account.
But I don’t buy this anyway. Afaik logistic ships have typically two repairing modules as the third slot (if they even have it) is used typically for remote cap into chain link.
Is activating two modules at the same time really that hard that you are giving it two more points of “play difficulty” ? I don’t think so, in fact I think it is trivial. If you write that logi is difficult to play I am imaging behind it that you will be using each repper on different target perhaps (and in such case the the grouping option is counterproductive anyway), because activating all you have on one is not difficult at all. The only thing that might make it difficult is that deactivating is bugged sometimes and the modules are not deactivating all at the same speed. Which can heavily impact a fight when you are sometimes waiting up to 4!!! more seconds for the deactivated module to become activate-able again. That might not happen if the reppers are grouped, but maybe it still can happen and in such case you can’t activate whole group? Not sure. Regardless this type of buggy mechanic is stupid to take account for in such a debate anyway.
As a smartbomb (ab)user I can tell you activating up to three highslot modules is trivial. This can be done with one hand easily. It is even easier if you have a keyboard with anti-ghosting mechanic, then you can just “stick-press” whole row and it will all activate at the exactly same time (doing this with a “mundane” keybord will not activate anything or just 1/2 modules). The skill starts with 4 and more especially when you are not using same bomb type and you need to trigger for example EMP first. Then you can’t “stick-press” because if the keys are pressed at the very same time game sometimes messes up the order. Afaik logistic ships dont use 4 or more repping high slot modules, correct me if I am wrong.
Oh so it is all multiboxing pvp. I heard that the actual skilled pvp fifghts in null are not plagued by multiboxers as it is “not possible to do efficiently”. Well yeah, if multiboxing in pvp any small improvement helps tremedously, thats a given…
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Then why aren’t you calling out people for grouping guns? Good players can turn on all guns instantly without grouping them up. Honestly, it’s not good for the game for guns to be grouped.
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This is true.
For quick reactions you want to cycle your reps as soon as possible, so at the same time.
Staggering is a bad idea then indeed. It’s more of an efficiency thing, but has low prio.
There’s a much better reason to have full control over my individual reps though, because when I notice my target is gaining less damage I want to decycle two or three of my repairers so I keep slowly topping him up while the hostile fleet still has him redboxed, while also having my other repairers ready for the inevitable upcoming target switch.
Or at least I decycle one or two to drain my capacitor less (if I’m not flying a cap-chain logi with endless cap) when the pressure is lower.
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Then don’t.
And please inform yourself before discussing. Guardians and Basilisks usually are flown in a 4-2 or 5-1 setup, means 4-5 repping modules + 1-2 for the capchain. Scimitars and Oneiros usally use 4 repping mods without a capchain. Trig Logis have only 1 powerful spooing Remote Repper, but that one starts low and need time to overpower the performance of the other logis, so you have to switch repping targets very carefully and are unable to burst-RR critical targets.
I have explained that above. On a combat ship, Guns are only one part of all the stuff you have to manage. On a logi ship, Reppers are the main attention focus. It makes much more of a difference to group reppers than to group guns.
Oh okay, then you got a point. With this amount of modules the difficulty is indeed there. Should have simulate the ships ingame, but ever since they “improved” the ship info window, it is pain in the ass to get into simulation for ship I don’t have saved in my fittings so I avoid it as much as possible…
Didn’t want to sound rude tho. My apoligies if that was too blunt.
Just - as a player with ganking expertise - imagine the following scnario:
- CONCORD doesn’t come
- your Guns have 60km optimal
Now imagine someone with x Catalysts want to blow up stuff.
For the same clicking effort of a single ungrouped Catalyst he could now probably control 3-4 Catalysts. Not saying 8, because you’d have to bring other accounts into focus first. But still easily 3-4 times as much as before.
But even without grouping, a good pilot can instantly activate 6 guns with ease.
Grouping salvagers does not speed up salvage time. My Salvager 2s have an 80% salvage chance. Putting 2 onto a single wreck doesn’t improve that at all, merely gives me 2 rolls at that 80%. If the first salvager succeeds, then I completely wasted the cycle of the second salvager.
As far as mining and huffing, you’re telling us that having one extra key press every asteroid is too much effort for you. Throughout an entire 23.75 hour gaming day, you’d save a few dozen key presses.
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On paper, you make it sound absurd. In experience, convenience says otherwise. Once more, better to have the option anyway. Not to mention, if some miners and huffers are using macros which is against ToS, this will just allow them to use an in-game feature.
But then there is still my initial argument with macros. Macros are against rules, but CCP can’t really detect it. I don’t believe that and never heard of anyone banned for using keyboard macros.
So if a player uses macro then suddenly for that player the difficultyx already drops “2 points” while you are struggling to compete because he is cheating and you play legit… At that point is is better if every player can do what macro abusers can.
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That path leads to the dark side. Modern keyboard macros can basically automate almost any aspect of a slow-paced game like EVE. I don’t even want to begin to give examples, the list simply had no end.
You want to automate then everything just by default? What is left of the “game” if you do? Sry, “people can break the rules” isn’t an argument for me.
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Yes, CCP can tell when macros are used. Even if commands aren’t executed on the same tick, the system still logs the interval between them. When that interval never changes, it’s kinda obvious what you’re doing. The methods around this don’t remove that, they just make it less obvious, but all modern RNG uses an algorithm that can be analyzed and predicted.
CCP doesn’t generally announce when people are banned or for why, at least not on any platform I’d willingly visit. Even then, CCP has never equally applied their own rules. I’ve seen the rage posts over people getting banned for using ISBoxer for half a dozen accounts when even to this day, there’s a nullsec alliance that is one guy. The whole alliance is his dozens to hundreds of alts, and people who rent from him.
Now, my opinion is that unless someone complains about you using macros, CCP doesn’t care. They also don’t care if you pay them enough money, in the case of the one man alliance. If you want to risk the TOS violation to save yourself a few clicks a day, you go right ahead. Do I think CCP should waste time on this, no. Would I complain if CCP did this, also no. This has been suggested many, many times over the years, so if CCP were going to implement this, I’m sure they’d have done so long ago. Weapon grouping isn’t new, after all.
This is a thing many players don’t know. They believe CCP “can only see from the server side when the commands arrive, so they can’t tell if they were macroed or not!” - but that isn’t true. CCP has not only access to the server, but also full access to the client on your machine.
It is absolutely easy for them to track down module activations, intervals or patterns down to milliseconds. Even if those actions were -for the server- in different ticks, the client still has the absolute correct times saved and those logs can be accessed on demand by the server if a char or account is under suspicion.
And in times of AI, it gets easier and easier to detect if a pilot shows inhumanly high performance over a longer period of time, which dramatically increases the chances that some kind of non-legal support tool is used. (not saying CCP is already using it, but it CAN and probably WILL be used in the future).
It’s not that a single event leads to detection or not, it’s the understanding of human capabilities and human psychology. It is - for example - humanly absolutely impossible to play a game like EVE online legit and still keep DScanning every few seconds constantly. Nobody can achieve that over a prolonged timeframe. Even if some people claim “yeah but I do that, it’s already automatic for me!!!” - no they don’t. If you would track their logs over a longer timeframe you would still find whole minutes where they didn’t do it. 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds intervals where they didn’t do it. So any algorithm searching for macros would instantly report someone as suspicious who over multiple days DScans flawlessly every few seconds. And every GM closely inspecting the client logs would instantly reveal him as macro user. Simple as that.
The question is, does CCP care that much to put any effort into detecting? And at the moment, I’d say: not too much, unless it becomes blatantly obvious or you get into public focus of abusing anything, then they take action. For them, it’s more lucrative to just not care in the minor cases. Time will tell if that is going to change at some point when detection can be done more reliable and more automated by pretty cheap AI algorithms.
There is a reddit post of someone claiming to have been banned for macros.
It’d be pretty silly of them to not already be using AI to check for people that have been reported, but I doubt they’ll ever be running active or random checks for people using macros.
Macros are the gateway cheat in online gaming. It starts with macros, then moves to activity monitors, and the next thing you know you’re in a dark alley giving ****jobs for aimbots. Not a pretty place to be in life.
