If I understood @Gerard_Amatin correctly, he wouldn’t make every grid an “open grid”, just limit the max-kiting distance with an abyss-like boundary. I mean, a sphere of ~300km diameter is pretty okayish to play around with positioning and manveuvering imho. And if you at some point in time need to warp out because the pressure is too high, well, you can…
I genuinely don’t think that will solve any of OP’s problems. An artificial boundary that instakills you only harms a specific group of people playing on the ESS, when there are already tools to fight kiting that have existed for the entire existence of the game.
Kane,
Games don’t need to hand you broad, easily applicable counters to something as simple as “burning away in the opposite direction”
MJDing and booshing is difficult to do, and doesn’t work in every scenario, you need to:
A: Use it correctly (you struggle with this)
B: Know when to use it (you struggle with this)
Sniping at 300km is a valid counter if they are less than 300km away.
If they are more than 300km away, they are not hurting you either, that’s a stalemate. The nano group isn’t achieving anything by being 500km away on a deadspace grid.
“Chasing isn’t a counter”:
This is a massive joke, chasing IS a counter, but you need to have the right shiptypes, the right fits, and the right support. Which you don’t ever do. The only advantage a kiting group gets when you chase is that they are separating you from the people that are not chasing.
If you knew how to fly a decent comp, in formation this isn’t an issue, you will be at worst on par with the opponent.
“Bubbling the ESS is not a counter, because when I bubble they don’t warp”
The scenario you just described is by definition a counter, YOU BUBBLED THE ESS, SO THEY DID NOT USE IT.
You are now in a position to utilize every non deadspace mechanic to catch them.
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Unfathomably based beyond belief, here’s some reddit gold good sir!
Many of the lobotomites in this thread have not reached your intellectual heights!
Scholar!!!
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If chainsaw devil eats ESS devil will all nanogangers quit?
If chainsaw devil eats kiting devil will Nullsecers finally win the game?
If chainsaw devil eats ganking devil how will nanoganger get kills?
If chainsaw devil eating ishtar devil will all nullsucker become homeless?
I’m not sure why deadspace is problematic.
In hostile space, roaming groups are:
Outnumbered (virtually always)
Unable to replace losses.
Can’t dock.
Can’t reship to counter/escalate a fight.
Can’t rely on an umbrella or local staging cynos.
Can’t use ansiblexes.
If you don’t want enemies to go to an ess, you can bubble it.
If an enemy is on the deadspace grid, you can’t mindlessly probe and warp onto them, you now need to rely on some degree of piloting to catch them.
Most nullsec groups cannot do that, so they give up. This is not the same thing as a safe space.
Seconding this 100%.
If you wait for the ESS ping to start forming up, then you’ve given the “attackers” a head start to get positioned. And that is entirely on you.
This mindset of “I’m going to sit docked in staging and wait for an ESS ping before doing anything” is problematic.
As is the refusal to use cruise missile fit doctrines with near full center to edge range. The attacker’s having any sort of advantage other than forcing a subcap-only fight is a falsehood.
There are obvious methods to contest and counter those ESS fits that generally handle very poorly outside of an ESS, and the defender’s ability to have sufficient time to switch to a perfect counter fleet while the attackers have already shown their hand should make that quite easy in any situation where the defenders have equal or more pilots available.
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Do keep in mind that ‘ESS pings’ or whatever goes on inside the ESS is not the topic here.
It’s about the problems of the deadspace outside the ESS:
The easy accessibility to a safe space on demand in every sov null sec system where players cannot be reached without telegraphing an attempt minutes in advance, where combat probes don’t work, allowing players in fast enough ships to safely sit out their engagement timer until they can teleport away.
“It gets abused as a safe space” → I’m too stoopid to fit projection or coordinate properly so I can’t win without warping ontop of you and winning the fight through 10-1 numerical superiority in a brawl
You literally bring 10x the numbers sometimes and lose. Why? It’s not because there is “no counterplay”, it’s because you’re literally not skilled or knowledgable enough to coordinate properly or just bring ships with projection, or use booshers, or use carriers, whatever. You have all the tools available right there and your only way to win fights is overwhelming numbers at zero. If that’s your only way to win fights, you deserve to lose and suffer, because you’re bad at the game.
Complaining about getting just dunked on by 5 individuals each more skilled than your entire fleet together bc they don’t sit at zero and just automatically feed their ships to you like you expect, is like complaining that soccer rules need to exclude tactics like passing and coordination because people keep outplaying you and you can’t keep up. You’re literally just bad at the game.
Especially when you have literally all the advantages, you know what they’re in and can fit and choose ships accordingly as it’s your space, you have all the numbers, and you can even elect to use caps. And somehow you still don’t manage and that means… the grid is to blame? Makes straight up no sense. It’s funny how nullbrains always complain no matter what you do, fighting highly outnumbered and outshipped but doing okay → complain. Being put in a situation like 2 carriers or a super on ESS grid and leaving your space → complain. It’s like the only option that is okay with you is being entitled to just freely execute whoever comes to your space and that’s not how the game works. The game shouldn’t bend around you being incompetent, currently it rewards skillful gameplay, knowledge and coordination. If you learn to do a decent job at flying your ships no nanogang of 5 will stand up to 30 people.
TL;DR you have all the tools, ESS creates fights all the time, you being unable to use said tools is NOT on the game, lol…
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You keep using the term safe space, without actually engaging with the fact that it isn’t.
If you come to an ESS gate grid, I can catch you, and I can kill you. It’s categorically not a safe space.
The actual issue you are encountering is the inability to catch an enemy without warping directly ontop of them, which is categorically a skill issue.
Of course it’s not absolute safety, but relative safety I’m talking about.
If it takes someone minutes to burn towards you and you can warp off at any time because you’re hundreds of kilometers away from the only warp-in point you have to admit your relative safety is very high.
You wouldn’t be sitting there in that part of space otherwise if it wasn’t for that deadspace grid safety.
Why else do you think FC declared many strategies of deploying otherwise warpable things such as CRAB beacons, filaments and cynos on such a grid an exploit, if those things are according to you ‘not safe’?
Of course ‘reachable’ and ‘interactable’ in this explanation are a bit vague, because it’s not declared at which point objects stop being reasonably interactable, and whether that’s after hiding your object 10k km away from the warp-in point (definitely not interactable!) or 2k km or 500km, but the message is clear: people abuse deadspace grids to become non-interactable.
Unless people spend time flying there, of course, because then anyone can cross that 10k km and still kill CRAB beacons or cynos at that place.
In other words, time is what makes the difference between interactable and non-interactable.
If you can fly 150km away from the warp-in point I think that’s reasonable.
If you can fly 10000km away from the warp-in point I think that’s no longer reasonable.
And I would like to have a boundary somewhere in between those values.
Which value do you think is where it turns from reasonable to unreasonable?
Nah, good luck killing them under a POS, on a Higsec Gate, before they can dock up at a station or in front of an (armed?) Upwell Citadel, at their safespot or just finding the right moon of the 12 ones in their warpout vector and guessing the warpdistance correctly.
Warping out successfully means ‘safe escape’ in like 99% of the cases, completely independent from how skilled or experienced the hunters are. You only get the stupid ones, but those are usually the ones who wouldn’t even try to use deadspace grid to their advantage.
I agree tho that especially in Null it isn’t a big issue, Booshers, longrange EWAR and 200+ km Snipers against Nanogangs should be part of any Defenseconcept and the locals should have all that prepared and ready to undock from minute one. So the Nanogang can only decide to leave, die or be forced off so far that they can do literally no harm any more.
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You misunderstand the exploit. The bannable offense is to put a deployable in a location that cannot be gotten to, such as a cyno beacon where if you warp to it, you instead get sent to the deadspace entrance and the deployable is off-grid from being too far away.
There is no restriction on putting a ship or fleet in that type of location, or otherwise using that tactic to “avoid a larger fleet from easily catching them”.
But that works in your favor, as if they were to burn that far off grid and then use a fillament, you can report that bannable offense and those guys wont be bothering you again for at least a week.
Then you have been letting them burn off without doing anything about it, and now need to make up for lost time.
Anyone can warp off any grid when they want to, and if they do that, they are not in the ESS grid and you can probe/bubble.
I play on the ESS because it requires my opponent to manually fly their ship instead of warping directly ontop of me.
Because those aren’t intended to be used on the grid?
That would be awful because you can’t dictate range and will virtually always be in dps range of most battleship comps, fundamentally changing the meta to be nothing but putting as many tanky sniping ships at 0 of the ESS as possible, which is the SAME meta as every other part of nullsec, defeating the point of the ESS grid.
I don’t think its unreasonable, if a player has burned 10000km off the ESS grid, they are literally achieving nothing, its the equivalent of you docking in an astra in your own space.
It would be like arguing a player shouldn’t be able to dock if a red is in system, the onus is on me to prevent you docking, the onus is not on FC to make it impossible to do.
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‘Achieving nothing’?
What if safely sitting in otherwise hostile space is what they want to achieve?
They can stay there safely in any hostile system with their cyno camping for something shiny to undock.
Mobile observatories are intended to make such semi-AFK cloaky campers warpable if they don’t pay enough attention, but the ESS deadspace grid makes this impossible and keeps them safe.
I have little against active cloaky camping, but the safety of the ESS grid adds an extra hour or so of reaction time before they have to be paying attention to not die.
I think that’s just as flawed as these other deadspace expoits I linked.
A kill boundary at a reasonable range would solve that.
What would be a good range though?
500km?
300km?
You could still be kiting all you want within that sphere, just not further than a certain distance from the entry point.
So you think people are sitting in the ess hoping someone isn’t checking local, to start ratting, to then hot drop them?
Is this the incredibly niche scenario you are trying to prevent?
I take it you’ve never encountered cloaky campers?
There’s this strategy in null sec where people camp multiple systems with cloaky ships and cynos.
I’m familiar with the concept, I evicted you guys with it in 2016.
I’m saying people aren’t sitting 10000km off in the ESS deadspace pocket to hunt ratters, because you are showing in local, which just denies the system, the easy counter, is you just go to a different system.
If this was a super widespread issue, we could just make it so that cloaky campers can’t cloak on the ess grid past the current range limit.
Disabling cloak on the deadspace grid is a good idea, thanks.
Still, is there a good reason you need to be able to fly over 500km straight away from the gate on the deadspace grid?
A boundary does not remove the deadspace grid’s ability to let you kite immune to combat probes, it just stops you from going in one direction indefinitely.
I’m sure you can manually pilot well enough to be able to turn sideways. You could keep kiting all inside a sphere with a 500km radius.
Or am I wrong?
Why not add a boundary?
The easy solution is to ram the enemy in ships faster than the enemy currently (and in a better comp), yes if you have let them burn 10000km away, that’s gonna suck and you wont do it.
500km still alters the meta, carrier booshes carry the fleet 250km, which will mean you can always be atleast 250km at worst, from the enemy if you boosh correctly.
The deadspace grid is probably the 1 place in the game where you are required to attempt to out pilot the enemy to achieve a goal, I don’t really understand why you’d want more places where you can easily reach an opponent you already outnumber and out gun 10x1 before you’ve arrived on grid.
I think the real frustration is that you’ve cornered a small fleet in a system, you’re camping the gates, and they filament instead of suiciding, which you feel entitled to them doing instead of bringing something remotely engagable.
The fact that roaming groups get the option after 15 minutes to filament without getting scanned, so they can roam somewhere that will offer better content is a net positive to the pvp ecosystem.
The actual alternative, is them just safe logging, which is legitimately worse.