Returning to New Eden after a long hiatus, what's up with the ability to instantly lock any ship?

I’ve played EVE off and on since release, once for a 10 year span. During that time I lived in nullsec exclusively. Forgive me if this is my ignorance of lowsec or failing memory.

I don’t remember being able to instantly lock ships. We used to have to use bubbles to catch people. Has this been changed?

Flying through lowsec in cloaking frigates, what I used to escape bubbled gatecamps in nullsec with, I get instantly locked and destroyed. Even my pod seems to get instantly locked.

Were there changes to signature radius to allow for this? What was the reasoning behind those changes? What is the rationale behind not having a cap on sig radius?

Thanks for the info!

You’ve provided so little information that it’s pretty difficult to know what you’re talking / asking about.

Bubbles don’t work in lowsec (which you said was the region you were killed in), so this really isn’t relevant. There hasn’t been a change to that and bubbles still can’t be used in lowsec.

No, there were not.

…there weren’t changes to this.

I don’t even know why you’re bringing up sig radius as if it’s a relevant issue here.

The best guess I have is that you just got caught by an ultralocker using technique (fairly) recently figured out in order to receive updates from the server soon. Reddit - Dive into anything

I’m aware of this.

My point was that in nullsec, we weren’t instantly locking gate activations. We had to bubble the gate in order to catch them. Otherwise, people simply warp off if you don’t beat the lock–especially if there’s a good align setup. Trying to have small ships with the signature and high scan to beat helped, of course, but not guaranteed.

How so? Signature Radius vs. Scan Resolution dictate lock time. They seem relevant to instantly locking ships.

You saved the helpful part for last, thanks. :wink: This makes sense.

You got caught in a Rancer gate camp in a covert ops capable ship:

Nothing has changed. You should be able to escape that camp by immediately cloaking when you initiate warp, and get your pod away by spamming warp as your ship is dying.

Cloaking isn’t foolproof though. If there are wrecks, drones or ships too close to where you spawn, you will not be able to be cloak and easily be pointed. Also, you can also mess up your cloak by poor timing, or canceling it and get caught.

Still, even if that happened you should be able to get your pod away. Again, either you messed up and waited too long to initiate warp, or your internet connect has very high latency.

There was this recent post:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/l4mg4y/how_i_got_170_killmarks_on_my_daredevil_an/

claiming a way to lock even faster by playing with gate jumping, but I don’t think that explains your pod loss. That points to a lapse of some sort of your technique.

I suggest you practice cloaking and pod saving more, but also just avoid the handful of lowsec systems that have professional-grade gate camps like this. Your cloak does not make you invulnerable.

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Agreed. Though I wasn’t referring to the Cruiser, which I don’t expect to make it necessarily. In a 2s align covops frig I would, which I lost on my main account in a similar way.

At any rate, thanks for the info. This is helpful!

It’s simple. They made some interceptors nullified. Then people found that they could make a nullified intercepter so fast they were almost impossible to catch.

The next stage of progression is camps learning to catch them anyway with smart bombs and tricks to lock even faster. This translated to catching other things easier as well.

If CCP didn’t nullify interceptors you would see a much different evolution of camps for sure.

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sure but after ~3500 scan res or so it doesn’t matter. Add in a low ping and they lock very very fast. AFAIK it’s pretty much always worked like that. was using high scan res hics to catch things in lowsec 10+ years ago.

read the link scoots posted, I can’t really say it any better than that.

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