I recently wanted to get across the map (IIRC I was travelling between two trade hubs) and used EVE - Check before you jump! to help me find a safe-ish route.
I then tried to actually use that route, and found that the game’s router was consistently sending me on a radically different (and longer) path to what the website was offering me. (I also used https://evemaps.dotlan.net/ a little bit to try and understand what was going on, but without success.) I checked every system in the route (probably 40-ish jumps) on the in-game map to see if there was a system with no paths in or out of it that matched what the gatecheck site was trying to get me to follow, but learned nothing - all seemed well.
Anyway, long story short: I manually followed the route, and found that once I got to Zarzakh, I was hit with a 6 hour (!!) lock before I could continue the journey. (I backtracked and followed another route.)
Having done some googling, I have found hints that in the past Zarzakh was used/abused as a shortcut across the map, and as a result the devs blocked it. (I don’t fully understand the story behind this, and am curious to learn more, but it’s not the main thrust of this thread.) It also seems that it’s the one and only system with this special treatment.
So here’s my question to those who understand the game well: is there truly NO way for a new user to tell that Zarzakh is special, or did I miss something when consulting the map? (Yes, the failure for the in-game router to send me that way might be considered a clue, but note that it didn’t help me work out which of the dozens of systems on the gatecheck route was the issue. It occurs to me that the gatecheck site may also need a tweak, but that’s probably not news to the people who run it.)
If in fact there isn’t anything on the map (or elsewhere within the game) to alert noobs, maybe this should be considered…?
Zarzakh is a special system and should not be shown as part of your in-game route.
If the eve-gatecheck website somehow sent you through Zarzakh for a route then that’s an issue you should bring up to the person maintaining that third-party tool.
Once upon a time in the period shortly after Zarzakh was added it was indeed possible to use it as shortcut, but as this made force projection too easy and null blocs were sending battleship fleets reliably to the other side of the universe this lasted a very short time before this was changed and Zarzakh was no longer a shortcut.
After all, the intention was for Zarzakh to be connected to the four corners of the universe, but it never was intended as shortcut. And with the 6 hour delay on leaving through a different gate than the one you entered through it is no longer a shortcut.
You can still leave the way you entered Zarzakh without cooldown!
It’s hard to even find Zarzakh with it’s special gates and it not being part of the regular routes. That alone should ensure most new players won’t stumble upon Zarzakh by accident.
Once you enter you also see that the system is strange. You cannot go anywhere in the system besides a few protected places as your ship disintegrates if you move too far from the gates or the station, the skybox of a black hole effect is vastly different than anything you’ve seen and the lack of a directional scanner makes me feel blind when I enter.
It’s a special system for pirates, the Deathless faction and a place to trade whatever you earned with your mercenary dens.
I was lucky enough not to disintegrate - I docked up at a station to work out what had just happened. (To add insult to injury, I wasn’t notified about the emanation lock until after I had paid about 500k ISK to use the gate, lol.) I didn’t notice anything special about the skybox - just looked like a bright, glowing cloud, and I’m too much of a noob to know how unusual that was. Also, I hadn’t yet learned about the d-scanner
Indeed, the game didn’t path me through it, no matter how hard I tried to replicate the route offered by the website, but I couldn’t see anything special about it otherwise. I can’t recall if it was in the default avoidance list, but then Jita is in that list (and not because noobs shouldn’t go there ).
Did the game show you a warning message upon entering? I can’t remember because it’s years since I was there… maybe it’s mentioned there in the text that you can only leave through the gate which you used to enter, else you’d have to wait for the others to unlock…
Just realised that I forgot to thank you for this explanation of how it all came about
Yup (after I paid the gate fee ) I jumped and was immediately told about the emanation lock, and how I could only leave by the gate I arrived through unless I wanted to cool my heels for 6 hours.
).