Okay, so you would like to see a situation where people need to micro-manage their probes better and actively keep moving them or recalling them when not in use, or simply replace them with new probes from their inventory.
As someone who scans a lot and also does a fair bit of combat probing I don’t see the point.
Finding and killing a probe seems like a waste of time to me, the owner can easily replace one.
Micromanaging my own probes also seems like a waste of time to me, I’ve got plenty of other things I’d rather want to spend my attention on like finding the ship of the owner of those drones, or not getting caught by that ship.
So the added intended gameplay seems rather pointless to me.
Disabling the ability for the enemy ship to scan is not interesting at all?
Free RSS anybody?
Micro managing, yes. Nobody cares if you micro manage your T1 probes badly, as it goes for beginner players. But when you get to the sister or RSS, it can become a thing to lose them (or scan, find, damage and scoop them for the probe hunter).
Not when people can easily carry dozens of cheap spare probes. They’re tiny.
I see only the addition of pointless tedium, if people even pay attention to the probes at all. If anything I’d ignore them because as I said before I would be interested in combat probing the ship sending the probes, not the probes themselves.
So if that’s the purpose if this addition, I don’t think that’s worth the massive unintended consequence of letting players flee or hide anywhere in system by probing probes.
Give scanner ships a separate probe hold, and make probes not fit in any regular ship or cargo with ease, maybe apart from haulers. I already said it before.
To extend the game in a direction, in a fun or a mattering way. In highsec shooting a probe could only give you a suspect status. Even a beginner could do it out there when probes have a big easy signature. And sister/rss owners need to be more careful.
But what is there to be gained by killing one of the 8 probes someone has out in space?
There’s no loot. The kill is barely worth it in most cases. Why would people even want to spend time to kill these probes?
Good combat probers will hide their probes immediately anyway once they’ve got the target to not have probes on dscan longer than necessary and spook the target. And as explorer I usually pull my probes too once I’m done, even though there is no pressure to do so. Adding your suggestion means there is pressure to do so, so I’ll pull my probes.
And then what, what did your suggestion add to the game?
Just tedium of not being able to bring spare probes inside wormholes because they cannot fit in a general cargo hold, tedium of having to always pull probes and the near-worthless gameplay of scanning probes to kill them which is going to be exclusively exploited to scan probes to create safe spots to flee and hide.
You seem to repeatedly not include anything in your reply that is in between the original post and your latest answer to the topic, only the headline and your opinion on the headline. Strange. Anyways, I can always adjust the original message to include those points.
Good combat probers will do that, yes, and thats the way to get past this feature. It would be really bad if it was easy the other way around, hard to keep your probes safe, and get killed for it, most of the time. Killing probes could give a wreck of something, including something? Probe making materials? I dunno. But the main thing is the thing you dont provide here from between the first and the latest post. Which is damaging and scooping a probe as yours. Maybe you dont even need to damage it, only pointing one would make it scoopable as yours?
For anyone reading this, this is just a suggestion, how many suggestions even get considered by the devs, how many of them get actually implemented? Suggestions can give further ideas. Im a veteran on suggestion forums on various games.
While I disagree with the ‘make probes scannable’ part, I’m not against the ‘make probes destroyable’ part.
Not that I think we should be able to shoot it, but area-of-effect damage can already destroy interdiction probes.
I think it would be a small change to also let smartbombs damage and destroy probes.
This way if anyone is using probes on grid it can be fun to bookmark one of the probes, warp straight at it and smartbomb the probe. A nice strategy against on-grid probing and a fun way to deal with expensive combat probes.
And best of all, this part avoids the ‘scannable probe’ exploits.
Look. Please think a moment who will benefit the most from such a change and who will be hurt the most.
Then you will clearly see that the experienced players won’t even be affected much, but the newer players that simply need longer to scan due to the lack of experience, skills, support modules or implants or the lack of ISK to afford faction/storyline probes will be the ones who will lose theirs on a regular basis.
Older players always can bring an alt with a dedicated scanning ship, so your new “increased cargosize” won’t touch them. They scan fast, rescan fast, scoop fast. Absolutely nothing for them to worry about. You may catch one if he is sloppy or goes making himself a coffe while having his probes out. So what, you caused a minor annoyance.
But the newbro who needs like half an hour to scan 15 signatures in a wormhole is basically screwed if he misses the attack on his probes and don’t react fast enough. Chances that he hasn’t a spare set are higher. Chances that he can’t continue with what he is doing are higher.
So again the question: What is the great benefit that would make the game better? I can’t see it. Just “evolving the game into a direction” is absolutely not enough. Your direction seem to put newer players at an even more disadvantage than now. And causes unnessessary annoyances all over the place. Requiring a handful of adaptations and rebalances on other fronts. Do we really want that? Does that make the game better? I doubt it.
Theres an infinite amount of differently experienced players in between the newb and the 110% experienced player, thats what i assume anyways. As long as theres an attraction made by a new feature, theres not just those 2.
Further while this thing is obviously not the pro player source for isk or content, it can be a source or interesting thing for probers all around highsec. As in highsec theres probing going all over the space. Just spot that one guy using RSS probes in highsec and youre done if hes not careful.
This would also be accessible by regularly scanning stuff wherever, whenever, peoples probes become available to warp to in your scan by the nature of scanning.
I didnt claim that there are only the two extremes. Still there is a tendency, over the whole spectrum of experience and skill. Those already stronger will be the least affected. Those who are already more vulnerable to all kind of traps, ambushes and shenanigans will be the most affected.
Then again: What is the best possible outcome from that idea? So under ideal circumstances, you find someone who doesn’t pay that much attention, you can counter-probe one of his probes and now disable/damage/destroy it. A T1 probe is simply crap, even if you can loot it. Even a Sister’s probe is just 400k. Also not worth it. Now RSS Probes… I live in WHs for more than 10 years, do you know how often I see RSS probes? Never. Literally never. I can’t even remember if I have seen them a single time on scan. So the first case where you could make any profit that would be worthwile would be the 1-in-a-million situation where you find someone that uses RSS probes and that one does need to not pay attention to them and just let you scan them down and hijack them. Dude, you won’t come into that scenario in years. It is absolutely nothing a game developer should put even remotely any effort into.
In all other cases you have just annoyed someone. I can’t see how that makes the game better.
In highsec i see RSS probes all the time. And how people knowing the probes are not at risk at all use them. Including other fancy things that they can farm all the highsec stuff at max efficiency. Be it this Winter nexus event or anything else. Thank god CCP had the last event dropping implants. I did not see a single RSS used during that time, and much less traffic all around, just because they could lose their fancy billions worth of implants? I can only assume this forum was lit on fire for the implant thing and how these people hated it.
If a guy is sloppy and loses that 1 probe, he is likely to lose some others too, and the next system has 3 other guys using sisters too, theyre used by everybody beyond the beginner level.
Today, yesterday and the day before that, i dont count for how many times i see them per day, or if its the same guy using them, but ive seen them each day for nexus. And the same thing seemed to be with events before crimson. I only scan around the same storm, so youre right it might be the same guy, or hes alts, which again does mean i see them all the time, but not wielded by different people. RSS cost 40mil a pop? So not a lot when youre certain you cannot lose them, i guess?
I dont see them in highsec either, apart from these events where there can be a lot of isk to get. Outside of events its sisters. Least i see the t1 probes in any of the cases.