IME they either accept pvp time is over and leave
Or, i presume they think its safe again and start engaging, at which point you can strike, if in fact you are prepared to do so.
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Just a question out of curiosity:
- Would it hurt the game if the grid outside the ESS would just be normal space instead of deadspace? How?
From my understanding, the whole ESS thing was implemented to give roamers a chance to either generate a fight or get a part of the ratter’s bounty payment if they don’t fight. So far, so good. But you have to go inside the ESS to do that anyway…
I don’t think the grid outside the ESS was ever meant to act as area to use for endless kiting? And yeah, I have done enough PvP in my life to see “bring 7, 11, 23 booshers and sync them up to reach them” as quite hilarious suggestion to catch a small gang of kiting ships…
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due to the nature of how deadspace works, it isnt possible to make the outside non deadspace
While I agree, that answer explains little @Drake_Iddon
The main problem I see if there is no deadspace around an acceleration gate is that it would be too easy to bypass the gate.
Instead of taking the gate you could simply warp back and forth a couple of times from the gate to bookmarks somewhat behind the gate until after 10 or so iterations you land in the room behind the gate.
I’ve regularly done such warp iterations to get in a nice position next to a planet aligned with the sun for screenshots, and once to catch an AFK Ishtar on a despawned sig without conbat probes.
Deadspace means you cannot iterate, you land at the same spot (gate) each time while you’re still near that gate. And if you somehow ended up in warp to a room behind it, you again would land on the same gate.
While you could try something similar without warp drive, by burning in the direction where the gate points with MWD, sub-warp speeds take significantly longer and aren’t practical in normal gameplay and therefore this is rarely if ever done.
Bypassing gates with bookmarks and warps would allow people to much more easily bring ships outside the restrictions behind the acceleration gate.
Imagine the acceleration gate a door in a fence.
In that case the deadspace grid is the fence, and without deadspace you’re looking at this:
With this ‘fence next to a door’ function as main purpose for deadspace to exist, I can see ways to modify deadspace so that it still fulfills it’s function but does not result in problematic gameplay like ‘allowing players to fly to positions in space reachable only by burning for 5 minutes straight’.
I also can think of solutions to use desdspace only for the space behind the acceleration gate, but that requires some additional rules against entering a deadspace grid from the sides so that people still cannot easily bypass gates.
Another downside of a lack of deadspace at an acceleration gate is that it allows players to bubble an ESS entrance permanently with deployables.
But that could easily be fixed by not allowing anchored bubbles in range of an acceleration gate, and does not require deadspace per se.
Did I miss any crucial function?
As far as I can tell deadspace has a function but could be replaced by less problematic solutions.
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Spot on.
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lol
If only it had actually been designed.
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okay, I get that. But that seems to be a rather technical problem that Fenris could solve.
What would happen if we:
-
stretch the distance from the Acceleration Gate to the ESS-Grid (inside) to lets say 1 million km.
-
around the ESS-Grid (inside) is a “bubble” of 500.000km in which you either cannot make any bookmarks or any warpins that would end there and are not initiated by the Acceleration Gate, will automatically be redirected to the Acceleration Gate.
Correct me if I have a mistake in my thoughts, but this way you could place the Acceleration Gate in a normal grid, you could still combatprobe and warp to any ship there unless it has travelled 500.000km into the direction of the “no warp bubble around the ESS”, which will in practice never happen. I mean, “in theory” someone could fly ~20 hours in an 7k m/s Interceptor into that direction and then “hide there”. Which wouldn’t be worse than what we have right now and it would probably not get any relevance in any realistic combat scenario.
And warping back and forth making bookmarks won’t work, because you won’t ever stop on the ESS grid and you can’t bookmark anything there or make any bookmark reasonable close to warp to.
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Yes.
FC could create a different solution where the only time players encounter deadspace is after taking an acceleration gate.
I think such a design is much better and avoids a lot of current deadspace problems.
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These seem like sensible suggestions, but my guess is that no-one has touched, or understands the Deadspace/gate code in decades, and fiddling with it is likely to be as successful as removing PoS was.
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That’s not unlikely!.
And don’t try to fix what isn’t broken. 
I do however think that current deadspace design is somewat broken. It’s jarring to be able to enter space with such a different set of unexplained rules through a simple warp alone, to a fleet member or combat probe result.
If you ask me deadspace makes sense only after taking an acceleration gate, and it would be a lot more consistent, predictable and less exploitable if deadspace was reworked a bit, even if it isn’t completely broken and in urgent need of a fix right now.
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To be honest, I am not a big fan of the ESS in general.
I don’t live in Null, but it probably feels kinda “punishing” to rat and then have a part of your bounty stored in some arbitrary structure that offers it for some pirates you don’t like to take it and/or force you into a PvP fight you don’t really want.
And on top of that, it is designed in a way that you need special ships/fit to successfully fight in there (AB fitted), which on the other hand are pretty bad for fights outside. So the only logical thing happens:
- A well prepared ESS gang will come in and if you don’t have your own well-prepared ESS-Gang you simply can’t engage them.
- If you can engage them, they will try to avoid any fight outside the ESS, because with their AB-Fit they simply stand no chance there. And they know they can’t break through bubbled gates either, so what they will do is simply rationa: They will try to filament or log off.
However you twist it, you only get the worst out of the situation.
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How do you know as none DEVs of the game how the inside of the Software works and don´t works?
Where do you get this information?
Who are you asking, Kane?
If this is about what I wrote, I got this information about the function of deadspace by observing what it does and by reasoning what would happen if it did not exist, which then likely shows the reason deadspace exists.
If there’s a flaw in that reasoning or if I missed something please let me know what it is so we can see if we can get to understand the situation better. However to ask for ‘source please!’ when we’re discussing observed mechanics of a closed source game is not going to be constructive to the discussion, I fear.
We do not have such a source, unless you can find old dev blogs or patch notes to explain the introduction of deadspace and it’s purpose, or can find a dev who knows it’s purpose.
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I edit my post ot reflect the question towards the person which started talking about it in the first place, to be more clear.
it was not about your post. Sorry.
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happy to answer your question kane, please see below:
because ive worked with the devs on pochven for the last two years, pochven is almost entirely deadspace sites for content
no idea why you think the devs dont understand how deadspace works, what a moronic statement to make
And there is still no progress to remove the massmultiboxer alts from farming them over and over?
I mean, I need no more than 15 minutes on the porcelain throne to come up with a better design for those sites that would make it literally impossible to manage mor than 2 or 3 ships in there… how come those highly qualified devs aren’t able to in a year?
because if we spend all of the time we have available on tweaking or reworking obs for the 50th time we dont have time to actually finish the rest of pochven
at this point i wouldnt particularly mind if obs were disabled while we work on the rest of the region, the region can survive without it now
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Maybe I was unclear: This issue could have been fixed on January 10th (years ago) if you begin working on it at new years eve. It really isn’t something you need invest all the time into. Exactly those 49 unsuccessful tries show that someone involved obviously don’t understand what he is doing there.
you operate under the assumption that any mechanical change cant simply be overcome by multiboxers, the payout is enough incentive for them to learn
you also need to do it in a way that also doesnt make it cancerous to run for normal player fleets
yeah, thats why it takes 15 minutes instead of 5 to come up with a design better than what is currently in place 
and no, Multoboxers cannot “learn” to overcome problems you base on game mechanics. No incentive in the world can overcome a simple mechanical block. Unless they want to cheat of course, which would hopefully get them banned soo, as we don’t need or want players with such a personality in the game.
but we are getting off topic, I think you got the message that I highly doubt the devs deep understanding of their own mechanics. I have seen so many bad examples over the years where players literally warned them and told them what would happen, they didn’t believe it and it ended in a desaster they took themselves years to fix.