Spawn Killing Yes, it’s fun but, ambushing players where they spawn is really unfair.
Here’s what -10 pirates are doing in high sec now:
They create courier contracts as bait. They target you specifically so there’s no intel; nothing in the star map or on websites to warn you that there’s an ambush waiting for you.
They have spotters on all the gates in your destination system and one jump out.
They don’t need to warp scram your industrial ship, just bumping it will prevent you from warping until they bring in a sacrificial ship to attack you.
No arrangement of mods will give your industrial ship any chance to survive. You’ll just delay the inevitable and lose more.
What if, instead, ships jumping into systems are made to spawn at random locations in dead space? In faction space, pirates would still be able to camp gates and attack other ships passing through but only as they are warping in from other locations, not as they spawn. Other ships would at least be able to defend themselves by warping in at a distance first before fighting or fleeing. That sounds way more fair to me. And please increase the “Warp to within” option to 1,000 KM.
Pirates will likely resort to camping stations then so, undocking needs to change too. Instead of spawning right in front of a station exit in plane sight, make players spawn similar to the way we currently do around jump gates- at random locations between 100 and 500km around a station in a temporary cloaked state.
In null sec, the change to jump gates would make it more difficult for player corps and alliances to defend their systems and the change to undocking might put players outside of their base shields so perhaps these change should only apply to structures in faction space.
To be clear, these suggestions are specifically aimed at eliminating spawn killing, to level the playing field for new and solo players living in faction space. There’s plenty of opportunities for players to engage each other elsewhere, like asteroid belts and wormholes.
It takes a team to have an effective gate camp and even then it’s not guaranteed they’ll catch a prepared traveller.
Blocking off systems is one way to protect your space. It takes time, effort and risk to do. What’s more unfair than a gate camp is how easy it is to get past the concerted efforts of multiple players with a single ship and light a cyno for all your buddies in the heart of their territory.
Aren’t that bad? …perhaps not if you’re flying a dread. Anything less then that and you get popped in less than 30 seconds, no matter how it’s fitted out.
It takes no skill or experience or critical thinking to erect a warp bubble on or near a gate and focus-fire every fly it catches. It’s just a cheap way to farm kills.
It’s only ‘easy’ for cloaked ships to evade gate camps but then, that undermines the whole point of a gate camp for the purpose of presenting to you a proper challenge. Because defending territory should never be as simple and easy as camping gates, which is a.k.a. spawn camping. Nothing is more unfair than spawn camping.
It’s an effective way to control your space. It takes effort, time and can easily be dealt with by avoiding it or removing it. Why should you get free passage through someone’s space?
Nothing? Come now, that is the burthurt talking. A simple scout lets you know and avoid one, as does choosing the appropriate ship to crash one. Plus they are just sitting there so you can gather your friends and challenge them for control of that gate with a good old fashion brawl.
You know what I think? It shouldn’t be too easy to pass through defended territory but it can be done without blindly taking gates. If that’s too much to ask the maybe you don’t derserve the ability to travel through hostile space safely.
See what if did there? Just get over your loss and learn from it and don’t make the same mistake again. You’ll find it more productive than coming to the forums and asking for the game rules to be rewritten in your favour because you lost a ship. Gates have always been choke points of stratigic importance and that isn’t going to change because you were outplayed one time.
I’ve been on both sides of gate camps and it sucks both ways. You can’t avoid it when you have no way of knowing it’s there. So it’s not a matter of wisdom or intelligence or strategy. The only lesson to be learned from losing your ships to random gate camps is to not bother with training more than 5 million SP and use nothing but rookie ships.
Random spawn locations won’t give anyone free passage. You can still camp your gates, you just won’t be able to farm spawn kills anymore. So I’m not here requesting “to change the game in my favor”, I’m requesting to change the game in everyone’s favor.
Yes it will. How can you camp gates if no one comes through them and those leaving system can just go around your bubbles? In lowsec (and highsec I guess) there wouldn’t even be bubbles to catch the totally lazy, and those with insta-docks and undocks would be 100% safe traveling everywhere.
Taking a gate is pretty much the only window of vulnerability for many ships. I don’t see at all how the game would be in “everyone’s favour” if no one could ever catch anyone else.
You realise you don’t have to auto-pilot everywhere? There is a way to warp to zero on a gate and (provided there is no bubble) you can jump instantly without getting touched. On the otherside your pod will insta warp and wont be lockable.
Sometimes true, depends on the situation; but, you can have a lot of fun just shooting the breeze with the guys. It’s a social situation.
I’ve been shot by gate campers and ended up being invited to join in on roams.
This is just a guess on my part; but, CCP design. It’s probably coded that way to create the potential for conflict. It seems similar to real life hunting, i.e. a watering holes.
This is a game, in many ways dependent upon conflict and to foster conflict you have choke points, where players with opposing aims/goals collide, i.e. traveler(s) and gate camp.
A: Fly ships that can either slip through, or fight and survive a camp.
B: Don’t fly alone, if you can’t handle it on your own.
C: Use intel in form of a scout alt, other players, websites like zkillboard, or even just the god damned statistics of the ingame map (that alone allows you to avoid about 90% of all gatecamps).
D: Don’t be stupid.
A: Nope- can’t afford them after losing all my money as collateral on courier contracts.
B: There’s no such thing as ‘friends’ in Eve.
C: They’re target me specifically, as a courier, so there’s no statistics, no warning, nothing.
D: How about you not give advice until you actually know what you’re talking about.
What I mean is, spawning on gates is unfair and unfun. Camping gates is fine as long as players aren’t spawning on them.
That great, good for you, but it doesn’t change my point.
It’s BAD design. Watering holes is NOT how jump gates currently work but it’s how they SHOULD work. Animals don’t fall out of the sky into crocodile-infested pools of water surrounded by packs of lions. They approach from a distance and scout it out first. Likewise, players should spawn at random locations in dead space so we can approach choke points with caution.
I’ve been playing Eve since 05 so I understand what it’s about. There’s a big difference between a choke point and an ambush. A choke point gives you the freedom to choose whether to fight or flee while an ambush does not. Any location in a star system other than where players spawn are perfectly decent choke points.
Full cargo expanders, no mids (such as tank or prop mods to get into warp faster), no rigs (such as cargo rigs so you could fit better tank lows instead). You decided to fly a god damn pinata.
It was an Iteron. No mods would have changed the odds. If that’s your definition of stupid then, the next time somebody knowingly fucks you up in some way, just remember it’s only because you were stupid so, just blame yourself.
It’s not stupid to use a jump gate for how it is intended. What’s stupid is spawning me next to the opposite gate.
