Why not?
The results are independent and both have inaccuracies. Two scans aren’t going to result in the same scanned location unless it’s a 100% scan.
You as a person could use the two independent scans to know that the real location is likely somewhere in between.
Because the initial sphere sets the boundaries. That’s the point of these spheres.
It only gives an estimation, not boundaries.
The second scan it’s independent and has it’s own inaccuracies.
You could conclude on the ‘boundaries’ of the first that the real location likely isn’t to the lower left side of the second guess, and that the second guess might even be too far to the lower left as it is too far away from the initial sphere.
That’s meta knowledge you could have as explorer.
The scans themselves won’t do that, they’re just independent scans with inaccuracies.
That’s the meta knowledge you gain as an explorer, just as “almost all sigs are aroun 4 AU around planets (besides WH and sleepers)”. But it is unintuitive that sig dots spawn outside the sphere that is purported as the volume where it’s supposed to be.
In my opinion, this is just an issue with the not correctly applied sphere sizes based on their difficulty tier.
It might be unintuitive, but I just gave an explanation for that behaviour.
The first scan says “it’s likely within this sphere” while the second scan says “it’s likely somewhere around this dot”.
You can conclude based on those two independent pieces of information that the true location of the signature is somewhere around the second dot and somewhere near the first sphere.
Like a Venn diagram.
It’s an excuse for a poorly implemented system that does not work intuitively in all instances.
This is possible, but I’d like to see a better example for that, one where without doubt the signature is outside the initial sphere.
If you have such an example, i.e. one where we can see the true location of the signature (in either a bookmark or a 100% scan) and can compare it to the intitial sphere we might have some proof of a ‘poorly implemented system’ like you claim.
Could you get that?
No, because the final sig will be within the first sphere. But this is again not what this issue is about.
If the final sig is within the initial sphere, what exactly is the issue?
Each scan is by design independent in EVE.
What you suggest is a different way of scanning, one that accumulates previous knowledge and one that makes it much easier for players who scan static signatures. It’s also a method that doesn’t work at all for players who scan moving signatures (i.e. ships), so it would make scanning behave inconsistent and have different behaviour whether you scan static or moving targets.
As a frequent explorer I don’t need such a buff, and I do not like inconsistent game design when it’s unnecessary.
Scanning is easy enough already.
How is a random location within a big volume of an original sig sphere in ANY way a buff to or makes it easier to scan static plexes? They are still at a random location within this sphere every time they spawn. The only thing that changes is that their scan progress steps would be always within this sphere, not outside.
Ship scanning is also completely irrelevant here because they do not have an initial sphere until you did a first scan with whatever probe configuration you use.
You are making a ton of wrong assumptions here that have nothing to do with the original point. So much so, that I believe you are trying to argue a completely different aspect on purpose.
Your request is essentially to let subsequent scan results to be limited by what earlier spheres have shown, or accumulative knowledge instead of individual scans with independent results.
This limits the area the ‘inaccurate’ signature can move to severely and makes scanning easier.
It also doesn’t work for moving targets, as these can move in between scans so it wouldn’t make sense to let subsequent scans build upon previous scan results. Scanning a moving target requires independent scan results.
It does not. The dot steps after you cleared the sphere phase typically already remain well within the original sphere’s volume. It’s just that there some outliers that do not behave like that consistently and that should change.
That’s exactly my point.
You wish subsequent scans to depend on the result of the previous sphere. And that those outliers are removed, and are also placed within the original sphere’s volume.
EVE doesn’t do that, each scan result is independent.
It does do that. Clearly. As most sigs stay in that sphere’s volume. The individual locations jump from place to place with every new scanning step, but they stay within that volume. Except for some outliers.
If it did not, there would be no need for the spheres. They could just have the dots on the map and the sigs would then jump wildly around space depending on your probe radius. The sigs do not do that, though.
What the game currently does is this, two independent scans, 1 and 2.
What you see after the second scan is scan 2, but you might know it’s in the middle part if you had paid attention:
What you’re suggesting the game should do is to let the game only show this part after scan 2, because doing otherwise would be ‘unintuitive’:
I can see why you would ask that, but I also think this makes exploration much easier.
And I don’t see why that’s necessary.
Also as I said before, dependent scan results like these do not work for objects which can be moving in between subsequent scans, so scanning would be inconsistent between scanning a stationary target and scanning a moving target, while these two types of scanning behave exactly the same now.
I think scanning requires no change and that your suggestion makes it less consistent, easier and worse.
(Note, second circle is not necessarily a sphere but might as well be a dot with a volume around it of the inaccuracy where the true location might be)
I did not know this and it may improve my scanning ability. You learn something new every day.
Since you asked, EVE provided:
Pre-scan
2 AU scan (I forgot the 4AU screenshot but the 50% orange step was at the same spot)
This sphere also mislead me to 4 AU scan around the planet at the bottom of the map as the sphere was clearly not touching the upper planet but also could not be in the center as I had done a 4 AU scan there for another sig and the sphere did not disappear.
Thanks!
This does indeed appear to be slightly outside the original sphere.
So the question is, is this too inaccurate? Could there be some kind of bug?
We don’t know yet, the initial spheres might behave the same as the sphere results we get from scanning, but they may also be more inaccurate than the sphere results we get from scanning.
After all our scan results are determined by both scan strength and deviation and thus benefit from our scan deviation bonuses where the initial spheres may get to do with a ‘default’ inaccuracy range. A scan with stronger deviation bonuses would see less inaccuracy than one without.
I never paid much attention to the exact range of inaccuracies we could get while scanning, but I can try getting some numbers now.
Looking at your picture (and doing some paint pixel calculations) I see the real signature is about 11% further of the original sphere’s center than it’s own radius.
If I look at Syzygium’s picture earlier as example the real (bookmarked) location was also somewhere near the surface yet slightly outside the sphere of his first scan:
In that case it was about 7% outside the sphere, but again outside nonetheless.
We’ve only seen two such examples, but 7% and 11% aren’t that far apart. Maybe we could get more examples to see if there’s some pattern, but with these two samples I think it’s behaviour of showing the sites somewhere near the surface and not necessarily within seems pretty consistent.
I don’t see a reason to suspect a bug yet.
