You can kill them with guns if they AFK or autopilot, what more do you want?!
That is what EVE is about. It literally marketed itself a such. Especially in low sec and below, every gate jump can land you in a gate camp, every warp can be a bubble or smartbomb trap. This is core EVE gameplay, and it is YOUR obligation and gameplay to counter that with more cunning and situational awareness.
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That is way too much effort for today’s player.
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You sound very confused. You highlight the awesomeness that is Eve then try to say it’s a negative? That frustration you felt, that time you sank, that choice you made, all genuine. Embrace it! Don’t call things names just cause your brain had a reaction. Feel the reaction, learn what it meant. Can you get around taking those long jump paths? Suicide, jump clones, cyno, autopilot? All choices. You had cargo, well then buckle up and feel the pressure of transporting that much value and remember it isn’t realized isk until it’s been sold! Scared to try it alone? Make some allies or even better some friends! If they’re set up to smart bomb then they won’t be ready for you bringing the pain at range! Invest, plan, execute! Feel the thrill of victory! Shake as the moment of conflict arrives. Focus through the immediacy of action. This game is fun, play it and have fun.
Ps. Watch your language please.
Then you are blind. Just a few examples from CCP itself:
I am not saying that the victims enjoy that. I certainly do not. However, if that happens to me, I simply failed at fulfilling my obligations to be vigilant, observant and intelligently judging the situations. Just the other day, I blindly warped to Shera in Ahbazon while a ton of red flashies were in system. That could have easily cost me my ship because I know some of them were Smarty Praxises. I was lucky, though.
I regularly do couriers from Outer Ring, for instance. From experience and after a few trips, I know where the real danger hotspots are, I know where the local sov scrubs love to setup gate camps, I know where detours allow me to avoid them. This is the counter gameplay that you and this Calder guy ignore.
Rightfully so if that means that you could start to transport expensive clones and items in these shuttles, (assuming) which you could not do before. CCP made nullification a module exactly because people used nullified ceptors as safe/nigh smartbomb immune and hard to intercept travel and transportation means, which CCP wanted to curb to an extent with the modules and their drawbacks.
Sry, absolutely nothing you just said has anything to do with smartbombing shuttles with the click of a button. Quite the opposite, all those fancy trailers are supportive to my argumentation, that EVE’s core gameplay is longterm strategy, relations and group-building to achieve goals together.
That is why people come here and stay here for years. Not because you have a handful of low skill instakill mechanics in the game that makes a handful of guys drooling about everything ‘being so hardcore’.
Sorry man, but CCP/FC has removed simply annoying things in the past as well and it has led to a more enjoyable game. See nullification for certain ship classes, I have seen topics here where people literally complained that they can’t easily kill Shuttles and Haulers with their ‘highly skilled’ Interdictor char any more, and guess what, they were laughed at and be told they should learn how to fight instead. And a few weeks after nullifiers were in the game, the overwhelming majority agreed that the breaking up of former impenetrable camps was a good change.
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I’ve been killed by smartbombs a couple of times. And honestly, each time (after the initial hit of frustration of losing my ship) I thought it was a pretty good catch.
I would consider the possibilities of such a new tool for combat and would imaginge the pipebombs that can be created with a good trap.
I mean, who doesn’t love a good pipebomb?
I still would like to pull off something like that some day.
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Then you didn’t pay attention to the trailers. These trailers are about traps and exploiting the misjudgment of others for your own gains. Smartbombing lazy shuttle travelers is just that. Exploiting their laziness for your own gains by killing the one or two shuttles that don’t just travel empty but move expensive goods.
Who said that? I have heard nothing like that.
But by all means, we could remove shuttle smartbombing. In exchange, shuttles can only be boarded by empty clones and have 0 cargo, and they are not insta warp.
Funny story on that topic.
I too saw those concerns that people could become nigh-invulnerable in shuttles and would use them as untouchable scouts.
That change happened in the middle of WWB2, at a time the entirety of null sec was gathered in Delve in the system of T5Z to siege the Imperium in 1DQ on the other side of the massively bubbled gate.
Thousands of people and lots of scouts on both sides of the gate were looking for opportunities or for fleets that were about to form.
And many of those scouts started using shuttles which quickly warped between the many hundreds of bookmarks on that grid, as these could not be caught by nearly anyone.
So I made a combat probing smartbomb Proteus fit, did some tests and figured the scouts were not invulnerable after all, but could still kill the now-nullified scouts in shuttles that bounced around that gate:
So luckily nullified shuttles were not problematic for the game.
… because they’re still vulnerable to smartbombs.
Remove the ability for smartbombs to hit shuttles and you’re creating invulnerable scouting ships.
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Which is already a problem now if you do not have dedicated smartbombers on the access routes to intercept them. And even if you intercept them, they can just come back as shuttles are completely inexpensive.
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Nah, please don’t mix up things.
First: Pipebombs and smartbombing shuttles have nothing to do with each other. Making the latter harder / requiring some skill doesn’t prevent the other.
Second: i remember that time. The change was new so people tested around and others found counters. Fine, but you miss two things: ‘Invulnerable Shuttle scouts’ never became a problematic issue in all the years after their nullification change. And not because you could still smartbomb them, simply because they are horribly inefficient. And second, even assuming that in a large scale conflict either side is dependent on ‘Shuttle scouts’ is ridiculous. They have all the scouts they need to see what the other side is doing and absolutely nobody needs Shuttles to see what is going on.
Besides that, I am not advocating to make Shuttles somehow ‘invulnerable’. I just laugh at the idea that being able to instapop them out of warp or ‘needing bounce bookmarks everywhere’ is some kind of ‘hardcore quality design’. It isn’t imho and EVE could get better solutions than that to have interesting gameplay.
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remove cargohold from shuttles - easy solution
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Could you explain how players can catch and kill a shuttle of a player who is not asleep when smartbombs are no longer an option?
They are tiny and warp within 2 seconds. You won’t catch them unless you’re in a very specialized setup requiring at least two ships already at the location of the shuttle, like in a gate camp, just to kill a simple shuttle.
Advocating against smartbombs versus shuttles is advocating against the only reasonable tool to kill shuttles.
To me that looks like a request to make shuttles practically invulnerable.
I don’t think it’s healthy for the game if even more pressure is put on ultralock gatecamps as the only solution to kill certain ships.
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Another instance that shows your lack of knowledge. It does indeed require a level of knowledge to kill even a shuttle. You need to know how they warp, the warp timing and have the proper ships. A few months ago, I survived a smartbomb Proteus in my Amarr shuttle because that Proteus didn’t start the smartbombs correctly. It is disingenuous to say that smartbombing shuttles does not require skills. And it’s even more disingenuous to say that both Pipebombing and ShuttleSmarties have no common principles.
You are so out of the loop, it’s not even funny anymore. All the big blocks use shuttle scouts now simply because they are uncatchable and if they die, they are ridiculously easy to replace and return to the front. On top of that comes that any scrub can use them, no training required.
Why is it not? What better solutions do you have to intercept an insta warp, inherently nullified ship? Hint, being a Hyper Locker next to the server farm in London does not count.
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That would be a solution.
… but then we wouldn’t occasionally get those lovely multi-billion kills of shuttles that got smartbombed while carrying far too many blueprints.
I think it’s good if players have the option to take such risks, just like I think it’s good if such players can improve their survival chances by not warping straight gate-to-gate when there are signs of a smartbomber in local.
Or, increase their survival chances by using a special shuttle that can withstand smartbombs a bit better. The Council Diplomatic Shuttle for example is immune to the Proteus kills I shared above. Too many hitpoints. (I’d need a different Proteus fit for that and give up some of my agility and warp speed, making it harder to catch them while they’re moving around.)
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Such a shuttle is available and it is named “Monitor”, also it has no cargo right as everyone asks for.
To be honest most (pvp) activities in this game are.
- station camping (to whore on ganker’s ships, to shoot at suspects, to gank)
- gate camping in lowsec
- bubble camping in nullsec
- hotdropping pve pilots in lowsec
- bubbling explorers in wh/null with Sabre or alternative
- bashing (abandoned) citadels
- suicide ganking (that from what I heard is absolutely zero skill and zero brain activity)
- anti-ganking the suicide gankers
- F1 monkeys in large fleets
This whole game lacks skill expression and is more about knowledge, knowhow an intel than anything else.
And your idea would make smartbombs basically useless. Shuttles and pod would be still doable but nothing else. If this was working this way then players would just kept them on endless cycle and multiboxed it with 1 second delay to cover all ticks. Which would take even less skill than now. And I have to say that smarbombs take more skill than other weapon platforms because they cannot be stacked. Some targets will give you only 2 second window and the game often lies about the actual ship position, so that reduces it to single second window for some targets.
To be specific: You can’t really realiably activate the bombs when the shuttle is in front of you or next to you - in about 1 of 10 cases the bombs will not hit the target, because he is not actually there yet despite game shows him there, I wait for the shíp to land behind me before I activate bombs and very often the wrech appears in front of me (and 50% times next to me). (This is my experience using Maller, Battleship seems to have a bit leevay in this as they seem to cover more area due to their large model size .)
It’s a killmail.
Although this wouldn’t be a problem if we had our SoCT ships…
I agree with this part. It literally multiplies the number of jumps one has to go to destinaton. If you’re going less than 10 jumps, that’s fine, no big deal. But for long distance travels over 20j, that’s gonna amount to your whole game play for the day. Not particularly fun or engaging. Not even a learning experience much. More like an automatic activity you just have to get over with.
I don’t have a good solution though, because I also think shuttles should be able to carry a tiny amount of cargo, and still be vulnerable to being caught.
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What’s wrong with it though if traveling long distances takes time and feels like long distances?
If travel times are short space feels much smaller and gameplay elements like hauling and other logistics become trivial.
EVE’s space is big and dangerous.
I get the feeling some people want it to be smaller and safer instead.
No thanks!
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