I’ve seen it quite often (well, almost always) that gate campers use local chat as an indication of a ship jumping in, which allows them to effectively trap it while it’s gate-cloaked before it’s pilot can take any action. This is either by dropping an interdiction probe (which normally takes a while to expand) or simply knowing that it will de-cloak within 60 seconds and instantly locking it (happens because the window is so small and well-defined).
I think these possibilites kinda take away from the purpose of the system change protection and makes ships with low but >2 second align time pretty meaningless in these kinds of situations (extends to non-interceptors for nullsec). It also allows gate camping to be a pretty passive activity with no real drawback when treating it as such.
As an improvement, I would like the gate protection to extend a bit further. That is making the player jumping in not visible in local chat until he drops the gate cloak, speaks in local or uses D-scan. This would effectively mean that campers can tackle a ship while it’s aligning but cloudn’t prepare for it unless they have more intel (having align time minus 2 seconds to react).
I think this should bring gate camping towards being a thing done for a specific purpose for a short period of time rather than being a kill-hoarding activity.
You don’t seem to be aware, but there is a gate animation when someone jumps into a system to that particular gate. Even without local, people will not only know you’re there, but whether you’re about to decloak at the gate they’re looking at, or a different gate in the system.
Given the developers went out of their way to program these animations, I think it’s likely they intend for people to know you’ve jumped into the system as much as they intend the short period of invulnerability you enjoy on arrival.
I wasn’t aware of the arrival animations and after looking at some combat footage, they seem pretty noticable (much brighter and longer than the departure ones). It’s also well-synced with the local pop-up, which gives it the same kind of intel but in a way that’s entirely intentional.
Next question of course is whether or not it takes something away from the gate protection itself.
Campers are not looking at local, they hear gatefire & call it on coms. Automated insta lock scripts don’t use local from what I have seen they just use overview pulls.
Local should have been delayed as to destroy botring but CCP got a mahoooosive shock at just how much of its null player base bots & reversed the change. This is never going back and a CCP dev’s career ended because of this.
Local is never changing again so forget about it. Fit stabs, learn to do the cloak mwd trick and stay out of null bubbles.
12hr a day weekend camps, why not automate it to guarantee 1hz grabs, let the boys watch the film instead of micro managing eve.
The script will always hit that tick even the fastest finger might be onto 2nd hz, which means you missing 2 hz aligners which carry good lootz. There is no reason not to script other than fear of a time ban & since eve is a 1hz game CCP would not even know who scripts this and does not, so the answer is why are pointers not scripting this?
Don’t write yourself off, learn to read and understand. What I posted shows how to actively make your situation even better, as the guy writes, you then also do not need too good ping.
The text shows more than the stuff that was known about instalocking for ages. The post also mentions a way to improve your chances of instalocking that was not known to me before. I wonder how much of it is true though, but if he managed to succesfully use it to instalock regularly, I guess there’s some truth to it.
The update order thing? Explanation is so mind numbing that I need to read it like 10 times to understand anything. While he only needed to write “while you change session in middle of server tick, you get delay”.
My only complain is that this is wall of text of terrible explanation.
there is no ping in EVE. it’s that way because server uses 1 ticks instead for example 64 (64 updates per second). Which is common for FPS games. With such fast update rate, your connection time matters. In EVE unless you exceed 1000ms it shouldn’t have effect.
Difference in EVE makes when your client actually receives updates. While I knew that it’s not always inline with server. I guess not everyone know this. This is explained in your link.
The thing also explained in the link is how to use that knowledge of the update order within the 1000ms to his advantage and to get earlier in line, allowing him to more reliably catch instawarp ships.
Well that line, queue, update order or whatever you may call it is exactly what makes that thread interesting and new. Because he claims there is such a line, queue or whatever you want to call it… and that he can manipulate his place in that update order in his favour.
Either you didn’t read it well and missed the important and controversial conclusion of that thread, or you’re sceptical about his claims.
I would understand it if you were sceptical about his claims, I’m not yet convinced either. But you’re not telling us he’s wrong, nor are you refuting his points. You just tell us ‘its old news’.
To me it seems you just skimmed over that thread, missed the controversial conclusion, thought ‘whatever’ and told us all here what we already knew about instalocking. That thread isn’t old news. Go read it again.
Most camps will have eyes on the other sides of gates
It’s my understanding that the gate cloak’s purpose is to give you a little bit of time to assess the situation and form a plan, which it does.
The best defense against a gate camp is to not jump into one. Use intel tools such as the in-game map, zkillboard, and Eve-Gatecamp check to avoid most of them.
Covert Ops capable are also a good counter to gate camps, especially if they know how to avoid bubbles.
I’m not sure that gatecamping needs any balance changes. Nerfing it would encourage more roaming (and indirectly nerf nullsec krabbing), but I’m already of the belief that most of the people that get caught in gatecamps are lazy, impatient, and/or unknowledgeable. Thus, nerfing it would essentially be a buff to bad game play. Plus, we also have filaments now.
Saying that “having more than a 2s align time is pretty meaningless,” makes more sense from a theory perspective, than from one of actual practice. For example, a lot camps don’t have insta-lockers. Thus, 3s align times can be actually be used to run a lot of camps. And even 4s align times are good enough to help you avoid getting tackled by a lot of passerby’s and the random ■■■■ that responders might try to throw at you.
Hearing that makes me want to write a m w d I sta script.
Although I am not admitting to actually intending to. Just wanting to, if no effort will be made to protect me from others using bots to lock me.
Above I meant a MWD cloak script. But I was typing on my cell phone. It’s true you don’t actually need a bot to instalock. It’s just easier. But why should the campers be the only ones who get to have it easy?
They whine and cry so much I think CCP starts to think they’re actually being neglected, and lets them get away with stuff.
Really they’re just playing a type of game that has few challengers. When someone show’s up it’s either a noob that’s so easy to gank it isn’t even fun to gank them. Or a more seasoned player who shows up once, loses, and then doesn’t come back there ever again. (Not a lot of repeat customers.)
But I don’t want to make it sound like I hate campers. They make the game interesting. But there needs to be seen a difference between playing a “mean” game, and playing a dishonest game. Scripting is outlawed. It’s not mean to script. It’s dishonest. (And doubly aggravating because I’m actually really good with autohotkey, and could totally script if I wanted to.)
First, people want to travel through some choke point, and someone sets up a gate camp to trap them. These travelers are the first tier of content.
Then, what is supposed to happen, is that the first tier provides intel about the gate camp to people. This could be the general public, their corp mates, or bounty hunters. Whatever. The desire to exact revenge driving a motivation to organize a counter force to bust up a gate camp, thus the camp itself is content for someone.
At some point, it seems, gatecamps shifted from an opportunity to mete out justice in the seedy back allies of Eve space or a mercenary payday to a problem that has to be rectified by patching it out of the game entirely, and I think that’s pretty strange.
When I was young, spry, and new to the world I hated gate camps and we would try, usually with little success, to bust them up or get someone else to disperse them for us. We would form adhoc alliances, marshal a militia and try to do something about it. This cooperation of necessity was something I did like, and is the source of many of my fond memories in Eve.
Being a loser isn’t so bad if you leave with the thought that you’ll get them next time and a few calling cards to use to bring in allies when that next time comes. Gate campers are part of a content ecosystem that connects us all in a complex web of allies, alliances, and enemies. I’d rather the campers stay in the game and let the players take corrective action themselves instead of having the developers patch it out or make it more difficult.
Again. Not really. Don’t mess up his initial speculations with actual conclusion.
When your client first requests an update from the server, by either undocking or entering a system, it gets put on a one-second interval that is independent of the server tick. Observing the network traffic by two Eve clients kind of confirmed this. They get updated precisely once per second, but at different millisecond timestamps.
Depending on when during the server tick your client requested its first update, you either get new info early or late. This means that there can be a delay of up to one second between the server calculating a “tick” and your client actually receiving an update about what just happened.
And that’s why I complain. He is right and shares good information. But that mind numbing wall of text called explanation is so hard to read and understand that it will only cause confusion and misunderstanding. While whole thing could be said in few lines.
