to be fair except for a few areas most of the jf routs were still just as safe unless you lagged AND were dumb. I can think of one route that didn’t have stations with large SOI all the way there and that was just because we were to lazy to take two extra jumps.
Actually i participated in one such escort. Back in 2011-2012 we were moving something (i’ve never discovered what it was) in like 10+ freighters with support of full-scale battleship fleet and many supers.
Actually it was pretty exciting because having such protection you almost except to get ambushed 
But yeah, most of the time it tales from the past.
Even in the past it was rare. It’s always safer just to log off if there are people around then move when it’s quiet
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I generally would have agreed 6 months ago, but that’s not how things have shaken out in practice. If an Alliance drops a chain of 6 Raitaru ECs and moves a dozen jump freighters through them then even if every single one of those ECs dies they’ve still lost less ISK than a single JF is worth on the hull alone, let alone the cargo value.
Unless these ECs are attacked in the 15 minutes when they’re coming out of anchoring, something that’s pretty risky for the attacker since it’s not hard to station forces within jump range of your midpoint ECs, then you have no way of actually stopping these from being used for Logistics. You can kill them, but there will be another one up in time for the next logistics run, and that’s assuming you can even manage to destroy them.
In comparison with the old POS based system you could, if you were clever and quick, ambush a Jump Freighter with a single Capital or a small gang and kill it before help could arrive, something that Citadel chains make pretty much infeasible barring a quite egregious player error.
I doubt CCP will make them useless, just force people to light the Cyno within weapons range but well outside of tethering range, creating a window where the Citadel is useful but not perfectly safe.
Yes, but the devs create the mechanics, and that includes both Upwell Structures and their interactions with Cynos. If they made something in the first place they’re well within their rights to change it if they don’t think it’s generating much ‘fun’.
I’m pretty inclined to assume that either this was theater staged as a distraction or someone needed to move a ton of Capital components and thought it would make for a fun op, which it clearly did if you remember it so vividly.
I’d also note that you didn’t mention a fight there though, which kinda brings me back to the tactic being questionable as an actual method of moving stuff.
hm? If they wanted to move something and not “have fun” then it was total op success.
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Yeah, but was it op success simply because no one had any plans to mess with the move or because the forces prepared actually deterred interference? That’s my point. If you were moving stuff like that these days you could do something like login trap an out-gate with a 'dictor and then either use Bombers to nuke the Freighters and escorts or drop enough dreads to kill the Freighters before the dreads died. Even if you broke even on the ISK war on the drop the loss of the Freighters would probably be enough to declare a win.
Ptraci, that’s not a counter due to a factor of time. Ships that can lock a cyno ship fast enough lack the DPS to kill any reasonably-tanked cyno ship before it’s done lighting. Ships with the DPS to kill a cyno lack the lock speed.
Frostys Virpio, this is correct. However, in video games, when a mechanic and its counter are the same thing, that’s generally a sure sign that the mechanic is overpowered and broken.
I like the idea of making cynos less absolute and certain, but I think this would end up biasing very hard toward the dropper. The dropper knows what they’re about to do, so could fill their mids with sensor boosters and scan resolution scripts, allowing them to get cyno jam supremacy almost every time as opposed to the defender, who will most often have their ship fit for some other purpose.
The solution I’ve been advocating for a while has been cyno warm-up timers and mass limits. Risk bigger stuff on field for a longer period of time and you can drop bigger stuff. Risk an interceptor for 5 seconds, well, I hope you can win with a cruiser or two.
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It’s early and i may not be thinking straight, but I think this is actually a quality suggestion. Maybe with some workaround so as not to completely trash the BLOPS dropping scene, like a factor of reduction for covert cynos or something. Might also mean people need to protect their jump freighter traffic a bit more again which could be cool… You could seal off an alliance supply lines if they didn’t protect their jump stations along the way, since the cyno would have to be worth more than an ibis and stay on station longer before the jump allowing hostile entities to camp jump stations better than currently with jump-insta-dock tactics.
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that doesn’t work well when you have a fleet shooting a heavily armored damnation and it mwds 40km past a gank fit fleet, tackles a ship and 100 people poor through.
make it use fuel, itll have to be on all the time because just seeing a cyno come up is the wrong time to turn it on because the fleet already jumped in system.
… I’m still not convinced there is a problem needing stopping.
The effort it takes to avoid getting trounced by an unexpected cyno is far smaller than the effort it takes to use the cyno.
Not to mention the immediate and sudden nature of cynos is integral to many aspects of eve combat. Do to the risk adverse nature of players not having full certainty of what your fighting is needed for fights to even happen.
How long do you envision for this?
Jumping more Cyno ship make this irrelevant in most case.
Doesn’t really matter either it’s long enough for a fleet to break tackle and gtfo (killing allot of gameplay) or it’s largely irrelevant.
I would make multiple sizes for cynos, ranging from small, which would fit on frigates and destroyers, to capital, which would fit on, as the name would imply, only capitals and above. Small cynos would have very short warm ups, in the several second range, but very limited mass, perhaps just a couple of cruiser’s worth. Capital cynos would take a minute or two, but you would be able to move a super fleet with them. Medium and large cynos would fill the room in the middle. Also, you would have covert varieties of the small, medium and large cynos.
I would like to see some timer when you go through a cyno which prevents you from lighting another cyno for a period of time to prevent people from rapidly chaining cynos. However, I think covert ops ships should get a bonus to this, and their timer should be shorter than most other ships.
Ideally, I would like to see a drop against a carrier look something like this:
- Cloaky ship decloaks, tackles carrier and lights small covert cyno.
- 2 cruisers jump through and continue to tackle carrier and wait for their cyno delay timer to expire.
- Carrier lights large cyno (which can support a capital or 2) or capital cyno, and waits for it to warm up.
- One of the cruisers lights a medium, or perhaps large covert cyno.
- BLOPS come through and kill the carrier
- Carrier dies OR carrier survives its cyno warm up timer and drops a counter drop fleet OR carrier gets help from fleet that warped to it.
This nerfs both BLOPs drops and capital umbrellas, while not making either of them invalid. It also provides a way to balance both mechanics in case one gets too strong in relation to the other or in relation to gating and warping to a tackled ship.
I’m not going to lie and tell you that nerfing jump freighter logistics was a design goal of this, I think there’s a broader change that need to happen to logistics for that to be a good idea (like making DSTs and blockade runners stronger), but it does provide a mechanism to balance things like that if there was ever a desire to do so. I also agree that it should fall a bit less heavily on covert ops ships. I think hotdrops should still be a thing, but they should be less absolute and I think there should be some realistic counterplay other than non-participation (avoiding a drop) and a counterdrop.
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no it pretty much makes blops invalid for anything other than whale hunting… when you use these in an actuall fight you have to be fast enough that the enemy FC has trouble reacting or you’re ineffective.
but I wouldn’t understand someone with little to no experience in using any cyno tactics to understand that
When you say whale hunting, I think you’re talking about hunting carriers/supers, so I assume you’re saying that dropping anything but a carrier or super would no longer be valid and that’s the standpoint I’ll be taking when answering.
I can see two main difficulties with dropping using the mechanics I describe:
- Maintaining tackle. If you can’t maintain tackle on a subcap independently for a few seconds as you wait for your small cyno to warm up, I don’t think you deserve the kill. However, I can understand the difficulty of holding a ratting VNI or Ishtar while stationary, and I wouldn’t mind you having mobility during the warm up period.
- A fleet warping in and killing you. If you decide to drop in someone’s staging system, or right next door, I have no problem with that drop being a steep uphill battle and would call that working as intended. Make no mistake, this is intended to nerf BLOPs; not nerf them to non-existence, but a nerf none the less.
Please keep in mind that at this time I’m not really advocating anything too specific when it comes to warm-up timers or cyno delay numbers. It could be balanced anywhere you want. The important thing is that the ability to move as quickly and precisely as a cyno allows is a powerful mechanic that needs to be balanced by something. I think this provides a mechanism to balance it that can be scaled very easily depending on where you want the balance to fall.
Of course, I could be missing something, and if so, please let me know.
i was talking about hunting anything clearly one sided. those still work here however BLOPS are also used if actual fleet fights. particularly using the BLOPS BB themselves. your idea kills this and has yet to actually show that there is a problem with current cynos.
again avoiding getting dropped on is extremely easy in eve while setting up a large or even med sized drop is rather difficult.
you seem to be mostly concerned with how large groups use them but not only is that the minority of use it’s not something you can ever balance around without ruining it for the rest of eve.
The real problem with protecting convoys is the real lack of being able to interpose something beefier between the enemy and the target. Having tons of ECM ships would be a thought, but the real problem is simpler:
Some like to call JF logistics magical, then current eve combat is beyond magical since Line of Sight is not a factors. You can have two fleets firing through, not only their own ships, but enemy ships in order to hit a target. There is no need for serious tactical layouts other than distance to target.
I say that if CCP adds an LOS function to EVE that they can get rid of jump freighters and capital jump drives. Once you can interpose a battleship or fleet between an enemy fleet and a freighter so that shots fired at the freighter hit the other, you can then truly protect it.
Of course… it would change high sec wars dramatically if done as well.
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well… some one has clearly never FCed… or at least I pray no fleet had to be under you.
fixed that