I feel like this relatively edge case is eating more of the discussion than is really warranted here. The biggest issue is the PvE case followed by consistency in mechanics between PvE and PvP.
IMO this would be solved by:
Making wrecks probable.
Make it so the only way to probe wrecks is with a specific probe type. This gives control over launcher type and ease of probing without tying the probing of wrecks to other values or systems.
Make it so that wrecks inside a site can’t be probed. This removes the issue with probing down wrecks making it easier to find the people making them in 95% of cases. The remaining cases are active fleet combat away from a celestial or other warpable object, which is a very edge case, and combat near a warpable object which is less edge case but also less of a concern since anyone on-grid can just bookmark or warp to a wreck anyways, and anyone not on grid can warp to the celestial or other warpable object.
I feel like a new probe type would be acceptable, but allow them to scan anywhere. The wrecks are smaller than the ship that left them behind so they should be harder to scan down than a ship of it’s original size. I believe you could limit the probing further by using 6 probes instead of 8 like the current ones. That way probes have a much harder time pinpointing but is still possible with proper skills and potentially fittings.
The problem is that probability is modified by sensor strength which wrecks don’t have, and NPC ships wouldn’t be particularly hard to scan down in the first place so you’re still back to the problem that got wreck scanning removed in the first place. Instead of scanning the person in a mission or scan site you can just scan the wrecks much more easily. Making it so you can’t scan wrecks inside an active site removes this issue almost entirely.
Making it so you can’t use 8 probes adds a weird exception that doesn’t apply to other scan probes and prevents the player from utilizing their skills which wouldn’t feel very good.
Which doesn’t make sense, would require them to either come up with a blanket value that works for all wrecks of a given type and size, or would require them to dynamically grab it off the ship which would be an unholy mess for the servers because of how Eve does types and items.
Which 6 probes doesn’t actually do all that well because if you play around with the system every probe after 4 is a marginal increase, and besides that if you have ever tried to scan down a Battleship with normal sig radius and Sensor Strength you’ll find that you can do it on an Alpha Account with 4 probes and bare minimum scanning skills. Which means if you’re basing the wreck stats off of the ship stats then any PvE player is screwed because nearly every PvE encounter in the game past a Level 2 mission has at least one Battleship sized rat. Really Cruisers and Battlecruisers aren’t even that hard to scan down.
Look I get what you’re going for but please go look at some of the details of the mechanics involved here… even the Uni Wiki page on probing will explain this pretty well at which point I hope it will become obvious why your suggestions just doesn’t work. It doesn’t solve the issues I’m bringing up and it doesn’t even do what you seem to think it does.
You’re making the assumption that wrecks will somehow expose you immediately while you’re afk ratting. I don’t know why you’re still crying over something that doesn’t even exist. If they added wrecks back to the list of what can be scanned down then they can very easily adjust numbers to make it easier or harder to scan down. I can just as easily scan you down while you rat as I can the MTU. The wrecks won’t make a difference. It will only insure the use of ships like the Noctis will continue.
Why exactly?
You can always use combat probes to find players and MTUs. If the wreck probe only finds wrecks that aren’t part of a site anymore, why should it be hard to pinpoint them? If you make it so these wreck probes can only be launched from the core probe launcher then you need to refit if you want to hunt players instead, but then you wouldn’t use a salvager fit to begin with.
The only downside of easy salvaging would be a price drop in salvage materials and rigs probably.
all we need is a probe type that scan down only wrecks.
And really, this is EvE if someone is AFK ratting then the onus is on them truly.
By AFK i include those that watch netflix, peruse youtube, etc etc while playing…their focus is split and they deserve what they get.
But other than that… @Cade_Windstalker what about arbitrary values assigned to wrecks? Like i dont really know the mechanics behind probing yet(just actually getting into it). But the values behind how cosmic sigs are probed, would it it be possible to give wrecks based on size a number value like that in conjunction with a probe type that can only scan down wrecks?
Yeah great idea… so long as no one wanted to find any wrecks. They only last two hours.
Real question isn’t does this make it easier to find people but does it make it so much easier that it’s a problem. The answer to that is no. If ratters are really to afraid of being found and to lazy to watch D then they can just shoot the wrecks
It’s not an assumption this is literally the stated reason from like 8 years ago for why wrecks aren’t probable. It makes it way too easy to scan someone down when they’re fighting NPCs, because the wrecks are immediately and easily scannable, generally far more so than the ship on grid, doubly so since ships in sites are harder to probe down.
By making wrecks inside a site unscannable you remove the entire issue with wrecks being too easy to scan down without making them so hard to scan down that you need a specially bonused probing ship, which none of the common salvaging hulls are…
Make sense?
Yes, that’s more or less what I’m saying, in addition to flat preventing wrecks inside active sites from being scanned. The issue isn’t assigning them an arbitrary scan value, we already have that for sites and other things that don’t really have sensor strength. The issue is that any value that makes them easy enough to scan on an unbonused hull would make them absurdly easier to scan than many of the ships running these sites, and an easy insta-lock from outside D-Scan range on a bonused hull.
Hence the whole ‘no scanning down wrecks in an active site’ thing.
Even if you just took the base stats for an NPC mission battleship and applied them to its wreck that’s easy enough to scan on a bonused ship that you can scan it with the probes well outside DScan range.
ok, but if you can not probe wrecks without using a “salvage probe”
and lets say they have only a .3 pt value per probe to start with…
Why could you not assign for example like
Small req 4pt
Med 3pts
Large 2pts
and so on…
And not worry about if in an active site or not?
Hope you understand what im asking here/getting at?
The only reason I would agree with making wrecks harder to scan than even MTUs is because of their size and scattered material. After all, it is a wreck and not a complete ship anymore.
People in this thread have their tinfoil hats on a bit too tight. Adding the ability to scan wrecks will not hurt anything if CCP considers the intended difficulty to scan a wreck vs structures and ships. PVP will still happen.
Obviously they could create a new module or new charge for existing probe launchers and they would have their own unique values to it. Everything in this “Idea” of a thread would be entirely fluid if done properly. That means a balance could be achieved.
There is a real chance for this to be a worthwhile addition if they consider it.
I get it, the problem you run into is still the way scan strength scales with bonused vs unbonused ships. A Cov-Ops hull will have a 50% bonus to scan strength, and that’s on top of the two 5% per level bonuses from two different skills and on top of that you have modules that can affect scan probe strength, and the effect of more probles. So the difference between a max skilled character vs a barely skilled one is close to if not more than three times the effective scan strength.
That means that something that a newer character, where salvaging as a profession makes the most sense, might be able to barely scan something down with a min-size formation of five probes, but an experienced character with a bonused hull and maybe even implants can scan down that same thing with a 16AU radius probe formation and do it in 2-3 scans.
This isn’t a problem the vast majority of the time because the rest of probing is balanced around this. With wrecks though you’re putting something in the site that can be scanned that the person running the site has no control over and that is separate from the scan value of the site itself.
It’s just much simpler and avoids the problem entirely if you just make wrecks in sites impossible to scan if you want to make wrecks scannable at all. Then the player running the site retains the same level of control over their ability to be scanned based on their ship, their fit, and the sites they choose to run. This is especially relevant for escalations which can’t be scanned as sites.
Scanning wreaks used to be in the game regular, I once forgot to bookmark a place then scanned it down and got wreaks that were left along with mobile tractor unit.
Recently though I did a agency thing, warped away (before site was completed), the site disappeared from overview and no scan group had wreaks.
It can have a use, was it removed from being exploited>