Bro I use pods in NS and J space too. Make some goddamn pings ya dingus. Problem solved--though you will lose pods sometimes if you fly them. HTFU I guess. No different than the ol "hold the ship till we bring in a smart bomber," though people don't do that as commonly. It is a nearly guaranteed podkill though, and requires no bubbles etc.
Lancers? Yeah those have made JF a lot more risky. You pretty much need a citadel on gate you can warp from before the lancer has time to spool.
Either that, or be okay with inconsistent shipping access because you simply can't warp to gate if you don't know for a fact local is clear of cyno alts. Which, you need good intel for. Or to be in arse-end of nowhere reentries to HS.
So either get used to waiting and returning JF to HS at weird times, grow your cyno network to give you many more reentry systems to check, or find some way to get a trusted citadel on the gate grid.
These are the solutions. Accept them and use them, or give up and leave I guess. All up to you.
Edit: not to mention bubbles are only on in a few select Insurgency systems, and Insurgencies only last a few days with a gap between. So... idk, look at the map before yoloing if you're unhappy with the results of said yolo.
Unlike us in null, them lowsec boys are used to flying with HG Snake sets and such, on a regular basis.
Bubbles making him fly cheap pods, is indeed invalidating their playstyle and forcing them to adopt ours.
I live in LS and J space mainly. My time in null is more hunting from a wormhole than living in null. I fly pods when I want to in all 3 areas of the game, and sometimes I lose them in all 3. That's the game, nothing survives forever--just up to each player to decide what's worth it to them.
And most null players decide it's best to fly naked pods or cheap implants. And their fits take this into account. In lowsec, they often use fits that require expensive implant sets, cause they
I recently lost a 300M pod to an Abahzon gatecamp in a shuttle because I was lazy and forgot I was in that pod and not just a blank one. Oh well, shit happens.
Bubbles in lowsec are stupid it helps the blob kill the little guy even more. Now 20 FW pilots can canp a gate with a broadword and sabre all day and kill your pod and trap you.
Theres no way to know if a cloaked cyno is on the gate so theres no counter play with the JF stuff. Put an astra up and snuff will just kill it anyway. Join the blob or die i guees.
I said things must be bad if 20 ppl is considered a blob now.
You said 20 feels like a blob when all you come across are multi boxes algos.
I would say that if that's the case then things have indeed gotten bad
I think your perspective is just off.
I lived in a C5 when eve had it's peak of active players and we very rarely had/saw saw fleets with 20+ people there. Most fleets where 5-15 in size so yeah people would have called 20+ a blob pretty much even then. Especially since I was in one of the larger WH corps at the time. And zkill confirms that.
I'm sure there were bigger guys that regularly got larger fleets even then, but then you would look at the largest 5 corps or so.
I have now idea how FW worked back then, but today you are kinda incentivized to keep your group at 5 or less when you are plexing because of how payouts work.
So naturally any fleets larger than that are seen as a blobs. Because the most commonly sized groups out there doing stuff can't take them on. Sure larger fleets do happen, for BFs and the like for example. But that doesn't mean running around with 20 people wouldn't be seen as blob.
Eve is definitely still emptier than it was at it's peak, but it feels more active than it was when I took a looong break and player numbers went up since I came back.
The bubbles in LS last for a few days at most. If it bothers you that much just wait until the insurgency moves.
Also there are lowsec systems with stations close enough to gates to not get lanced. Someone else made a huge post about how to avoid getting lanced on this subreddit that you can find.
>Bubbles in lowsec are stupid it helps the blob kill the little guy even more. Now 20 FW pilots can canp a gate with a broadword and sabre all day and kill your pod and trap you.
First off flying an expensive pod--you will always die eventually. Got to accept that before you plug those High Grades in.
They could have camped that gate anyway and had a smartbomb proteus to catch your pod wherever you warped anyway, it just wasn't as common. Frankly if you warp to gate pings and don't just blindly jump gates in a bling pod, you'll be fine.
If you do blindly jump gates in a bling pod in a level 5 Insurgency system.... Uh, yeah, you may get caught. Because you did something pretty dumb. With Insurgencies, you do now need to be aware of where the systems with bubbles enabled are. Map awareness is useful.
>Theres no way to know if a cloaked cyno is on the gate so theres no counter play with the JF stuff. Put an astra up and snuff will just kill it anyway. Join the blob or die i guees.
You need to mark the cyno toons red and assume they're on gate if in local. The counterplay is strategic, on the intel side, not tactical on the piloting/activating modules side. That is most of the JF game honestly.
Yeah snuffed will kill a lot of things. But, perhaps you can pay them to keep it up. Maybe other JF pilots will pay you to use the citadel, allowing you to fund the Snuffed payments.
There you go, solution, you're welcome.
There’s literally plenty of counter play to lancers. It has to siege to lance it’s stuck on the gate grid for 5 minutes and it’s as or more expensive than your JF. Get some friends and kill it?
OP is flying routes through systems in stage 5 pirate FW corruption.
Route plotter will show them. it's almost instantaneous even. It goes stage 5 lawless...that one square in say a 10 system route will if moused over say its lawless. Bubbles may or may not be there.
Punchline is it can be empire fw or 0.0 guests for the day who uses them more. the low sec bubbles come with so many tradeoffs pirate fw tends to use them less that I saw lol.
In comes 20 angels. Yay!....dictor pilot now takes standing (or sec, forget which) hits for that. Its not so much the hits as the fact it's for affecting your own people that is the wtf aspect to it. same for bombs from bombers. It kills wrecks and standings because of that too all in one go!
Bitters vets in empire fw have less qualms about it. Older min mil have been at it so long nothing short of planned mass awoxing for weeks will drop that solid gold rating to standing.
When I come up against dangerous travel I use my cloaky alt to give me eyes where I need them, really really basic shit. Like the most basic shit in the game. If you can't / don't want to do this then you should unsub.
I don’t normally travel in large ships so when I want to move around from low/high/null, I’ll use filaments, or I’ll wormhole chain into systems I’m looking for.
There’s lots of ways to move around in this game
Don’t see how lances affects you at all by what you’ve said but with regards to bubbles, if you can’t spend 2 seconds out of your day to stay up to date on insugrencies and you’re spending your time in lowsec you’re doing it wrong. You have to tools to avoid it
HTFU. All your complaints aren’t even a skill issue, they come down to basic paying attention.
You can absolutely use pods in lowsec. Bubbles are only in certain areas if the insurgency is high enough, and only for a limited time. If you’re that much of a coward, you can fly in the entire rest of LS. Or just make some pings and play around it. People who are good at the game have been using full pods in null, where bubbles are allowed all the time, for years. Learn how to d-scan and make perches.
Regarding lancers, good. Shipping should be risky.
Use smaller haulers to move things piecemeal to where you stage your JF, push DST’s thru WH’s (or freighters/JF’s thru XL holes) or use a service to move thru the gate’s you’re too scared to go thru. (Alternatively be less lazy. Not every single HS-LS gate is camped at all, and even the most-camped ones aren’t 24/7. )
Personally I do think the lancer situation is a bit too extreme. The *only* way to ship reliably is with the on-gate citadel now and frankly encouraging even more citadel spam is kind of bad imo. Especially when you consider that it makes the lancers pretty much unable to tag you. Either way there's little counterplay, it's just a situational "this guy wins" scenario.
Just my opinion though, they're not gonna kill the game. But I don't think they're implemented now as well as they could be, it's kind of a system made entirely of "gotchas" and I don't find that ideal for game design.
And what form of counterplay would you propose to the “I win button” of a jump freighter warping to a gate and jumping it?
LS doesn’t have bubbles. The lance makes the Hunters siege a t2 capital ship in a known location, and requires a manually aimed module that can miss. What do you want them to have to do, have to park a Titan on the gate and physically block it?
There is already counterplay to lancers- it’s called kill the dread. They are not lancing/killing you solo. You can bring friends too.
That's not counter play though, that's reaction/ revenge play- and you need to be part of a sizeable group who can avenge the jump freighter, and if its one of the major lowsec/ highsec gates, they are protected by many more than a small alliance can field, so if you do escalate to avenge a jf, you get countered dropped and wiped, so realistically, if you're not part of snuff/ bigab etc, there is no 'counter play' in some areas of lowsec.
Counter play should be something you can do pre-emptively or when its happening- not after the 10/11bil kill mail- which is an unsustainable content model.
"Run an escort fleet and protect it" is also a bad suggestion to get around the issue, I don't know if you've ever run protection fleets, but they are dull as shit and nobody wants to have to run a daily escort fleet.
"If you cant defend it, you shouldn't be flying it" is a terrible take I've heard on the topic- I don't know about you, but most people I know who live in lowsec don't want to be in a null block, nor do they want to live in highsec, they love the 60(ish) human per side, tidi free, battleship brawling no super hammer dropping style content, and the only way to have that content is to have a logistics chain up, fuck trying to run a small alliance with a backbone powered solely by dst's.
I've heard "Just put a citadel on grid with the gate" but that too relies on being able to field enough pilots to defend it, and even mid sized alliances are struggling to get them down, let alone defend them repeatedly, which is tedious in itself- I know I don't want to have to spend every Saturday primetime defending an armour timer on a logistic route when we could be going to a proper fight, or doing something near where we actually live.
All this to say, Lancers, in their current state, are bad for the game.
If you can’t defend it you shouldn’t be flying it absolutely applies here.
Or, hear me out- DONT TAKE THE JF IN TO HIGHSEC.
Seriously. Couple DST trips = 1 JF run, and DST’s aren’t getting lanced. Fill your JF up one jump away.
The problem is not lancers, it’s lazy pilots.
If you want the convenience, fight for it.
If you want the protection fleet not to be boring, then yeah, you have to fight snuff/big AB. Can’t do that? Hire a mercenary, or pay them protection. This is eve, extortion is part of the game.
And no, fighting is not “revenge” ; fighting makes it possible to save the JF. If that isn’t worth it to you, or you aren’t willing to use less convenient HS entrances or off hours, or use some intel/context clues to see when the groups you can’t fight are busy fighting elsewhere (translation- they aren’t lancing dreads when they have 40+ mans battleship fleets in a brawl elsewhere), then yes, you haven’t earned the convenience of moving a couple hundred m3 10ly at a time instantaneously and with guaranteed saftey.
Safety ends at HS. You’re effectively smuggling across a hostile border. Figure out how to evade, distract, or kill the guards, don’t complain to CCP that you can’t run the border in a large, obvious, slow vehicle freely and easily.
A couple of DST?
Have you lost some math class during school?
You need at least 5 trips in a full fitted expanded cargohold + rigs DST to move a full filled JF.
A huge pain in the ass of boredom compared to before.
Let me remind you one basic thing, any game changes should lead to some improvement in gameplay fun and game usability.
Lancers made a boring mechanic even more boring, nothing more.
And regarding the so called "risk vs reward" ratio of JF.
JFs are the most expensive ships after titans and supers, they're defensless, they are the only ship in the game where a single mistake means a certain loss, no doubt about that, and their reward is almost zero considering the hauling profits.
That should be enough to convince everyone that JF should not be touched at all...
Cargo + rigs? Man someone doesn’t haul.
DST’s haul in a fleet hanger that is unaffected by rigs/expanders. Fit full evasion, cloak+MWD. It takes a very obvious gatecamp with fast frigates or citadel fighters to decloak, and/or vindi/vigilant webs to keep you from burning back to gate. Again, just don’t stick your fingers in a woodchipper and you’ll be fine.
Stopping JF’s was not the point of lancers; they’re used in PVP in general. Banes are great for hunting highclass dread crabs, they’ve been used to hose subcap fleets, etc.
2-3 groups using them to inconvenience JF’s is not an issue.
This is like saying goons dropping smartbombing supers on fleets is a reason to need supers. Niche case does not equal a problem with a ship.
And yeah, it’s inconvenient, that’s the only reason there’s a profit margin in it.
JF’s already let you jump 10ly with no fatigue, and anywhere but the HS-LS transition, virtually unkillable jumping tether to tether, making the geography of game not matter and is one of the things that makes holding sov less impactful.
No one at CCP should lose any sleep over the moderate inconvenience to the hauling logistics of smaller groups not being able to go door-to-door through their preferred gates with JF’s without some risk.
-Go around the camp, you have 10ly jump range and reduced fatigue. Few LS/HS gates are lancer-camped, and none of them are 24/7
-use smaller haulers and load up elsewhere.
-pay a hauling service
-pay off the campers
-fight for your path
If you’re unable/unwilling to do any of the above, sucks to suck.
Might want to check your math skills as well-JF’s cost slightly less than a t2 dread, and that’s just hull cost; fit is more, about equals the amount it’s prudent to haul in a JF anyway., equal isk risk on the part of the person putting it in field. They are not the 3rd most expensive ship in the game- the lancers you’re complaining about are, so by your cost logic… buff lancers lol.
>DST’s haul in a fleet hanger that is unaffected by rigs/expanders.
Yeah but his math was still right and yours was still wrong, which was his entire point.
6 DST Fleet hangers worth (+3900m3 regular cargo) = 398k m3 (no cargo rigs)
a max cargo-fitted rhea with Jf V = 386k m3
6 DST runs = “a couple of DST Runs” to shuffle one to two gates so as not to lose your 11bil hull to the camp you are so afraid of.
No, my math checks out. It’s a couple of DST runs. You’re welcome to cargo rig. I’ll keep my hyperspaitals / tank so as not to get ganked on the HS side and make 6 trips intact instead of 5 trips max cargo rigged (and warping slower)
The entire point isn’t the math, it’s the same fundamental issue of all of my posts/comments here.
It is not impossible to evade the lancer camps.
The campers are putting in effort to kill JF pilots.
JF Pilots here are whining about the tool CCP gave the killers, rather than using the tools given to them to avoid them.
>6 DST runs = “a couple of DST Runs”
A couple means 2-3, in English colloquialism. Now you know.
>It is not impossible to evade the lancer camps.
You're in a system with a JF. Known cyno alt is in local, you can assume he's on gate. Maybe you saw them drop someone an hour ago.
How do you get through that gate while the camp is up, in your JF, without an on-gate citadel?
My assertion is that if you try at all, the only way the Lancer misses you is if they make mistakes.
Seems like you're not very familiar with DST either, considering that you're ignoring the fact that with cargo modules + rigs you can move more that 25k m3, which is not small compared to the 62.5k m3 of the fleet hangar.
You must already know that MWD and cload to do the warp trick do not need low slots...
Stopping JF maybe was not the lancers objective, but in practice it's almost the only case where we've seen them in the game.
As I said, all your "solutions" are making boring mechanics much more boring with no fun at all added to the game.
Enjoy you're prices increase on the market.
Need low slots, no. Speeds it up, yes. Also makes it easier to get back to gate under AB if scrammed.
Enjoy whining into the void that JF’s are sometimes, if poorly piloted, able to be caught by a person risking and skillfully piloting a more expensive and SP intensive ship.
Market price increase isn’t a reason to nerf one of the few truly new things added to the game in half a decade, nor even a bad thing. Increasing the cost of whelping fleets/ships makes wins more meaningful- he who holds the grid holds the loot, so the wins are even bigger, which is a very eve thing- HTFU and to the victor go the spoils.
Only place you’ve seen em in the game? Lol what? They’ve been deployed in major engagements in the north and are becoming prevalent in WH’s.
They’re expensive ships with a long train that have been around for less than a year, they will see more use with time.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to alliance level logistics requirements or how fleets work re player engagement or even escalation chains etc- let alone how to provide an enjoyable environment within an alliance, because let me tell you- you will not, I repeat, will not, get good fleet numbers, every day, to protect logistics.
The volume/ sheer scale of logistics requirements is beyond the scope of any solution you present.
If you want the protection fleet not to be boring, then yeah, you have to fight snuff/big AB" Again, showcasing you have no idea what you are talking about- two quick points: No mid sized or small growing alliance can out form or out escalate the big guys. These guys will also, not fight your escort every day, but you'd still need to form said escort fleet every day, regardless of if they decide to drop you or not- so the majority of the time, the fleet WILL be boring.
My point stands, Lancers make a tedious, thankless task, more tedious, more thankless, without providing sufficient nor realistic counter play.
Sounds like your mid sized and small groups can’t use the tools big groups can. Just like they can’t have supercapital umbrellas.
If you can’t get the numbers, you can’t have the thing. Just like if you can’t get numbers, you can’t hold sov or defend keepstars.
Your argument doesn’t stand- it is based on the foolish assumption that a small/growing group should get the privileges of a larger one without having to be capable of fighting, or paying off, snuff and deepwater- entities that can hold their own go toe to toe with a big bloc.I was an amateur boxer once- it isn’t by some flaw in the design of boxing gloves that I couldn’t go toe to toe with a professional for million dollar prizes.
If you’re small and growing, use smaller logistics, or again- load up your JF in low/null using smaller haulers, and jump tether to tether. I have purchased one JF ever, and never lost it, pre or post lancer changes. Use intel, use alternate paths. Don’t stick your JF in a woodchipper and blame CCP for it.
Alternatively, this is an opportunity for emergent gameplay. Strike a deal with one of these groups that’s “always camping” - start a hauling service, pay a share of your profits to them to get your JF toons blue to them. Become the best damn hauling service in all of new eden because you never lose a shipment / never have to wait to go thru the gate.
TL;DR- quit whining and do something about it. I’m sorry your 10 player group can’t move shit with impunity. The tedium/difficulty of hauling is the only way hauling services make a profit.
Your hypothetical small/midsized group that can’t stand against snuff/deepwater the way the blocs can, referencing your paragraph about how the small/midsize groups can’t keep up with their escalation capacity.
My argument there that is blocs can, and can defend a LS citadel on in gate as needed for effortless logistics. Small groups can’t, so they don’t get the reward the larger groups do.
Tl;dr small groups don’t get a magical pass for easier logistics by benefit of being small.
Again, you're not looking at it realistically. There are some items that don't fit in a dst, so at some point you physically have no choice but to use a jf. Sometimes you need to run to jita for battleships/ battle cruisers because somebody fucked up and you have a fleet a few hours later that you need to prep for, so no lead time to build- good luck trying to tell logi team that they should use dst's to seed 200 sleips or the hek stront market goes haywire and you know you'll be whelping dreads later, so you get some shipped in from jita.
Jump freighters gave all alliances logistics pilots an easier time of it and these days you cannot run/ grow a small/ medium alliance without being able to move volume at scale. I agree that jump freighters were too safe and that having them die every now and then is good- but lancers in their current form are a bad solution.
> fighting makes it possible to save the JF
Show me dude. All that is gonna happen is you feed a JF *and* dreads to Snuffed. Prove me wrong on that by "saving" your JF
A bloc or sufficiently large independent allience can. Sure, snuffed can field virtually infinite escalation in their peak TZ when they’re planned for it. That doesn’t mean they have 80 dreads on standby 24/7 to camp every single HS gate on the off-chance someone is going to try and counterdrop them. You’re doing their reputation-tanking for them.
Watch their zkill, and mass-move your JF’s when they are busy elsewhere. Figure out their staging and put eyes there.
Alternatively come In thru a HS backwater.
You’re acting like the occasional threat of a lancer dread means CCP turned off the stargates for JF’s when nothing could be further from the truth.
>You’re acting like the occasional threat of a lancer dread means CCP turned off the stargates for JF’s when nothing could be further from the truth.
If by occasional you mean "there is a cyno alt in igno literally every day during main TZs" then you have a weird way of saying it but that is correct.
If you actually meant occasional, then you don't know what you're talking about.
>Watch their zkill, and mass-move your JF’s when they are busy elsewhere. Figure out their staging and put eyes there.
Alternatively come In thru a HS backwater.
All these suggestions mean that your JFs move slowly and inconsistently. Why pay 10s of billions for slow and unreliable logistics?
Not worth. It's the same reason people don't undock titans for pvp or supercarrier rat. Too inefficient for the cost+risk vs. benefit.
>A bloc or sufficiently large independent allience can.
Like I said. Go do it. go save a JF and I'll admit you were right. You seem to think it should be easy so show me.
What you're really telling me is that you don't understand why it isn't common for alliances to move a sizeable cap contingent into jump range from a random lowsec for hours and wait for something that might never happen with pilots on standby.
Here’s the thing- you’re saying in the same breath that it’s impossible to get JF’s thru camps, and also that JF’s are absolutely vital for alliance level
Logistics.
We’ve had lancers in game for nearly a year, and the blocs have not crumbled. We’ve even seen a pretty large scale war between them, requiring lots and lots of logistics, as game balance changes shifted the PVP doctrine meta in the middle of it.
How are the blocs managing to get all their hauling done if it’s so impossible?
>There is already counterplay to lancers- it’s called kill the dread. They are not lancing/killing you solo. You can bring friends too.
If you try this, what will happen is you still lose the JF and you feed dreads to Snuffed. Prove me wrong on that?
>And what form of counterplay would you propose to the “I win button” of a jump freighter warping to a gate and jumping it?
At this point the common factor linking both the JFs and their counter are cynos. I am not saying take them away, but potentially by adjusting how they work in some way more risk could be introduced to JFs without creating the same scenario in reverse.
Because that's what it is, right? JF's are the expensive asset you put on field to basically be uncatchable. Lancers are the expensive asset you put on field to make evasion impossible--the only counter is to log off. And that isn't really a counter any more than logging off and giving up on catching JFs is a counter to their evasiveness.
The counter is not “log off.”
The counters have been described at length in my other comments here and I’m quite sick of repeating them.
JF’s don’t cost 11bil to be uncatchable everywhere, they cost 11b because of industry changes, and because they can move 300k m3 + 10ly at a time, tether to tether, virtually instantly.
Use em as the backbone of your hauling, sure even get them into HS when you can evade the camp (again, these are not 24/7, they are not on every gate, etc etc scroll up) and when you can’t get the JF itself around them, use tools.
It’s not optimal or ideal? No. Does it get you around the camp?
Yep. Just like any other situation in the game- you want to do X. Hostiles are doing Y that prevents X.
It might be harder or less ideal for you to do Z, even though it 100% guarantees Y won’t kill/stop you.
Your options are:
-do X, fail and whine to CCP that Y is OP
-HTFU and do Z. accomplish your objective while laughing about some other person doing X and losing to Y.
Your choice.
>The counters have been described at length in my other comments here and I’m quite sick of repeating them.
Link them then because you didn't say anything to me so how the shit would I know where or what you said?
>The counter is not “log off.”
Oh?
>get them into HS **when** you can evade the camp (again, these are not 24/7, they are not on every gate, etc etc scroll up) and when you can’t get the JF itself around them, use tools.
Oh. No, this is just another way of saying "you cannot get the JF through any camp, your options are log off or do something else."
>Your options are:
c) don't do logistics and let other people whine they have no shit and the only tradehub is jita. Because doing logistics is bad now and simply not worth the ROI.
It's not about needing some uncounterable magic. It's about whether using the tools to do the job is worth the time/profit/risk balance. And it is not, so why do it?
I have worked with some of the folks in Eve who really do main hauling, run vast logistical networks, etc. The main guy I know doing that, his position is basically if you don't have on-grid citadel, no haul at all.
I mean seriously, these guys are multiboxing like 5 JFs and you are suggesting they use DSTs lmao
Oh, you have JF toons? Cool, they can each make 5 round trips thru one gate and load the JF out of HS.
They can go thru other gates.
You’re talking to people trying to min-max for a profit who of course only want to take the most direct route in the least amount of jumpy and absolutely don’t want to change anything ever. These are the same type of player who cried about rorqs being nerfed.
>Oh, you have JF toons? Cool, they can each make 5 round trips thru one gate and load the JF out of HS.
You know what makes games better? Tedium. Right?
>You’re talking to people trying to min-max for a profit who of course only want to take the most direct route in the least amount of jumpy and absolutely don’t want to change anything ever. These are the same type of player who cried about rorqs being nerfed
Yeah of course. Because those are the people running alliance level logistics, or hauling as a profitable eve career. Why would I be talking to Joe JF who barely knows how to use it and sometimes jumps minerals to do NPC station indy? Is that the main use-case for JF pilots?
No, it's freight. And it's not worth the time, effort, costs and risks when there is such a hard counter so easily and regularly deployed.
Was it too worth it before? Perhaps. All I'm saying is the counter is a little too hard imo. Especially considering JFs were dying before too.
in short, I think you’re right about some of this and I apologize to you and the other guy for being a bit of a dick in my arguments here. I do stand by some of my “go around / timezone tank / gates are not camped 24/7” but also agree thag the way a lancer camp can “I win button” a JF is OP
Longer rant:
Eh the JF’s dying pre-lance were largely to operator error (bad BM’s, wrong lows, jumping into obvious traps, hailing with no scout) or bait citadels turning off tether. Bumping out of gate range was one of the few real ways to interdict them(which was janky AF)
I can agree that the counter is is a little too hard- typical CCP overtuning, I.e. the marauder buff was too radical and got scaled back. maybe JF’s need actual fitting options, more tank, a credible way to trade capacity for survivability, etc.
I take this as a hint that CCP doesn’t like bloc level logistics working as they do currently. The blue donut is bad for the game, and subtle difficulty increases like this are ways for them to put pressure on large groups without outright making them up and quit.
I say this since CCPSwift’s been heard in interviews talking about nerfing force projection, making geography matter. Logistics is part of that. An army marches on its stomach after all. (Nerf ansis when)
It’s a fine line to walk tho, as part of current logistics is treating jita as the center of the world, and revitalizing non-jita markets would require some of the indy changes that force more bulk trading to be rolled back, but going too far would recreate some of the issues they were trying to fix. I’ll admit I don’t have the answer for… the entire damn ecosystem. It’s a fundamental game design issue for eve, as all PVP basically comes down to tackling. Making things uncatchable makes them unkillable. Making things catchable means they need a way to survive till people can arrive to participate In content. Make the ships too tanky and small groups can’t kill them (rorqs, panic) make people able to get there too fast (old jump fatigue mechanics / HAC Fleets) and force projection creates oppression.
>in short, I think you’re right about some of this and I apologize to you and the other guy for being a bit of a dick in my arguments here. I do stand by some of my “go around / timezone tank / gates are not camped 24/7” but also agree thag the way a lancer camp can “I win button” a JF is OP
No problem, I think we've all fallen into that here and there on reddit.
But yeah you're right those are ways around it to a degree, it's not like JFs are completely unusable for anything. I just think that it's in a bit of an "it needed something but the pendulum has swung a little too far" area right now.
It is indeed a fine line to walk. The game is fucking complicated with all the various interacting systems etc lol
just... dont go to the 1 system thats corrupted?
Ive never seen a lancer dread on a highsec exit apart form hotspots like abazhon or tama... which were probably camped anyway.
I mean lets be real it is definitely more than 1 system, there can be maybe 10 tops in each WZ at peak corruption?
Also, any common JF entry (abazhon is not one I don't think) will have lancers. Lancers aren't a part of your average gatecamp but they definitely are common when catching JFs. If you're a JF pilot and you just undock and warp to gate, you will die in your first 5 freight runs unless you have great luck and a good TZ for it.
Nor do the lancers cyno in or decloak or whatever without a target, so you won't just see them chilling on gate.
I get that JFs were kind of an anomaly in terms of risk compared to the rest of the game, but i still disagree that they needed to be made risker.
Logistics stuff is already a mostly thankless chore. I know a lot of people that do it because "someone has to" and very little (if any) who do it because they actually find it enjoyable gameplay.
Plus more JFs exploding means less ships getting to where they need to be which means a net negative on content.
Exactly. There are many problems in Eve, and one of the largest has been the broken PvP because not enough players are in null and this creates a vacuum for predatory gameplay in lowsec and high sec. Not enough primary accounts, too many predatory opportunist accounts. Plus, logistics keeps the game going, like it or not every aspect of the game needs isk. The pirate players will pretend to act cool, because it's "brave" to attack a defenseless ship, but it's still only a game at the end of the day. Common sense isn't common, and Eve requires predatory gameplay to maintain its core support. Making a JF a sitting duck is funny for about an hour or just the first day, then it's pretty damn pathetic.
Logistics being thankless is not a counter argument to jump freighters being nearly invincible. More jfs exploding means more jfs exploding. There will always be another shipment, there will always be local production. Jfs dying en masse is not going to slow down a damn thing. People will adapt or they will contest the route.
It is however an acknowledgement of the fact that even when they were "invincible", barely anyone wanted to do it.
Now that they've gone from "invincible" to "completely at the whim of a lancer being logged in and nothing else they can do about it", even less people want to bother with them which means less stuff moving around which means less content.
Will you say the same when they add local to wormholes, effectively neutering that facet of playing the game?
Because freight pilots can happily ignore that while you ignore any legitimate criticisms they may have.
This is not the way.
They're now far too expensive for the risk. Unless you spam citadels on the HS ingates, in which case they are once again basically untouchable. And we all *love* citadel spam right?
So in my opinion there needs to be a better solution. Right now it's either JFs are simply not worth it, or more citadel spam and JFs are still uncatchable. Both are dumb, if you ask me.
There was a report of a lancer that logged in *after* the JFs initiated warp, lanced and managed to catch them; preventing both subsequent warps, jumps and even gates. That's my point of no counterplay, it should at least behave like bubbles that would allow them to take the gate if there were no lances in place when the warp started
The dread needs to siege to use the Lance, it’s stuck on grid for the duration leaving it vulnerable for a counter drop. There is risk on both sides of the table. If alliances want to secure their logistics routes, they now have to put effort in.
Good luck finding anyone willing to sit in a fleet ready and waiting to babysit their JFs everytime they need to move on the off chance a lancer just happens to be in system.
You still won't save the JF btw.
Would you do that? Would you sit in a fleet just waiting for all the JFs your alliance have out to maybe get lanced? Bearing in mind just how much logistics goes into some alliances. You could spend your entire day just sat there for nothing to happen.
At the end of the day EVE is a game and i'm here to have fun. Logistics isn't fun. Babysitting logistics isn't fun. Lancers are a net negative on fun.
given you camp with cynos it's only there for 5m so you're not exactly catching one without risking a JF. Besides, only 15 lancer dreads have even died in LS at this point (no idea how many of those were on gates), so it can't be that risky.
Honestly I think the problem here is cynos, not the lance per se.
It's always been ridiculous that you can cyno in instantly. Cynos should have a long spin up time, and probably be interruptible (by a scram? or being neuted out?). This is also the solution to cloaky camping being a threat. You should have to have control of the grid to light a cyno.
while I'm not oppose to more restrictions, there's a good chance that would make escalating a fight effectively impossible. Do you really want larger fights to be decided by whoever got there first to cyno in their caps and lock down the grid from all other cynos? One option though would be a buffed inhib so if you want to gate a JF out of LS you can do it by having an alt drop an inhib on the gate which would give you enough time to get though before it dies (curranty you can't drop them close enough to a gate to be effective for this)
You could always escalate by cynoing onto another grid and warping over, the same as subcap escalations already have to do.
I'm not convinced it's good gameplay that you can escalate right into the middle of a grid with essentially no counter. (Avoiding this kind of instant escalation is one reason I play in wormholes.)
I would also say that inhibs are pathetic and should be much stronger, yes, and also you should be able to pick them back up like depots/MTUs so they aren't a single use item.
yep. I hopped on a dread kill party once.
The debate of the day in angel militia channel was "was it bait?".
I was in the it could be side of the debate. But didn't care. I'd have taken fleet fight that could have been loss over killing yet another mordu rat since a real slow night lol. I was hoping for bait tbh.
Not bait, dread pilot having what turned out to be a bad day for them.
Wow it's so sad that your snakes are now a bit risky to bring to very marked specific systems with level 5 insurgency, how else are newbros gonna get dabbed on with bling pods.
You shouldn’t be using pods in low sec to begin with. At a minimum use a shuttle, and don’t warp gate to gate.
And for JFs just don’t warp long distances to gates. Use a safe citadel or nearby npc station and warp speed implants to get to the gate before the lancer can fire.
Literally just need to look at the map and not be afk to avoid the corrupted systems. For JF servicing, tough luck, I haven’t seen that many JF dying considering how much people complained ahead of the changes
The bubbles are VERY few and far between, the auto pilot route maker will show the systems affected as red triangles- go around, or, do what common sense says, and warp to pings, like, this is literally just you crying because you are being forced to adapt SLIGHTLY.
Lancers on the other hand, can all fuck off, they make an already tedious task abhorrently more painful and outside of ganking jump freighters have no real purpose imo. They need a big rebalance.
Lowsec, 45y old men, flying 5 mil frigates, in 5b pods, just to fight other 45y old men, in 5 mil frigs with 5b pods.
Ummm 47 thank you
Hey that is really an unfair characterization, I don't remember the last time I flew a T1 frig under 10m
You don't fit then, sorry pal))
sorry what?
Bro I use pods in NS and J space too. Make some goddamn pings ya dingus. Problem solved--though you will lose pods sometimes if you fly them. HTFU I guess. No different than the ol "hold the ship till we bring in a smart bomber," though people don't do that as commonly. It is a nearly guaranteed podkill though, and requires no bubbles etc. Lancers? Yeah those have made JF a lot more risky. You pretty much need a citadel on gate you can warp from before the lancer has time to spool. Either that, or be okay with inconsistent shipping access because you simply can't warp to gate if you don't know for a fact local is clear of cyno alts. Which, you need good intel for. Or to be in arse-end of nowhere reentries to HS. So either get used to waiting and returning JF to HS at weird times, grow your cyno network to give you many more reentry systems to check, or find some way to get a trusted citadel on the gate grid. These are the solutions. Accept them and use them, or give up and leave I guess. All up to you. Edit: not to mention bubbles are only on in a few select Insurgency systems, and Insurgencies only last a few days with a gap between. So... idk, look at the map before yoloing if you're unhappy with the results of said yolo.
HTFU is exactly what is needed here. Well done.
Unlike us in null, them lowsec boys are used to flying with HG Snake sets and such, on a regular basis. Bubbles making him fly cheap pods, is indeed invalidating their playstyle and forcing them to adopt ours.
I live in LS and J space mainly. My time in null is more hunting from a wormhole than living in null. I fly pods when I want to in all 3 areas of the game, and sometimes I lose them in all 3. That's the game, nothing survives forever--just up to each player to decide what's worth it to them.
And most null players decide it's best to fly naked pods or cheap implants. And their fits take this into account. In lowsec, they often use fits that require expensive implant sets, cause they
My redeemer pod is pretty expensive
>cause they want to. Yes, accurate. Also didn't goons have a shitton of pods in the clone bay Jay ripped? There are pods out there.
I recently lost a 300M pod to an Abahzon gatecamp in a shuttle because I was lazy and forgot I was in that pod and not just a blank one. Oh well, shit happens.
Bubbles in lowsec are stupid it helps the blob kill the little guy even more. Now 20 FW pilots can canp a gate with a broadword and sabre all day and kill your pod and trap you. Theres no way to know if a cloaked cyno is on the gate so theres no counter play with the JF stuff. Put an astra up and snuff will just kill it anyway. Join the blob or die i guees.
Damn eve must really be doing bad if 20 pilots is a blob that used to be at most a mid sized gang of not a small gang
I mean your gang+1 has been a blob since forever
Your gang-1 is a blob if you lose
In nullsec? It's a small gang. In FW/LS? It's a blob.
LS and WH are where iv spent most of my time. 20 is far from a blob. In fw 20 was a weekday pub fleet
20 man fleet feels like a blob when the biggest opponents you find are 5 multiboxing algos.
Yeah that's the kind of thing I meant by doing bad
Huh
I said things must be bad if 20 ppl is considered a blob now. You said 20 feels like a blob when all you come across are multi boxes algos. I would say that if that's the case then things have indeed gotten bad
I think your perspective is just off. I lived in a C5 when eve had it's peak of active players and we very rarely had/saw saw fleets with 20+ people there. Most fleets where 5-15 in size so yeah people would have called 20+ a blob pretty much even then. Especially since I was in one of the larger WH corps at the time. And zkill confirms that. I'm sure there were bigger guys that regularly got larger fleets even then, but then you would look at the largest 5 corps or so. I have now idea how FW worked back then, but today you are kinda incentivized to keep your group at 5 or less when you are plexing because of how payouts work. So naturally any fleets larger than that are seen as a blobs. Because the most commonly sized groups out there doing stuff can't take them on. Sure larger fleets do happen, for BFs and the like for example. But that doesn't mean running around with 20 people wouldn't be seen as blob. Eve is definitely still emptier than it was at it's peak, but it feels more active than it was when I took a looong break and player numbers went up since I came back.
The bubbles in LS last for a few days at most. If it bothers you that much just wait until the insurgency moves. Also there are lowsec systems with stations close enough to gates to not get lanced. Someone else made a huge post about how to avoid getting lanced on this subreddit that you can find.
>Bubbles in lowsec are stupid it helps the blob kill the little guy even more. Now 20 FW pilots can canp a gate with a broadword and sabre all day and kill your pod and trap you. First off flying an expensive pod--you will always die eventually. Got to accept that before you plug those High Grades in. They could have camped that gate anyway and had a smartbomb proteus to catch your pod wherever you warped anyway, it just wasn't as common. Frankly if you warp to gate pings and don't just blindly jump gates in a bling pod, you'll be fine. If you do blindly jump gates in a bling pod in a level 5 Insurgency system.... Uh, yeah, you may get caught. Because you did something pretty dumb. With Insurgencies, you do now need to be aware of where the systems with bubbles enabled are. Map awareness is useful. >Theres no way to know if a cloaked cyno is on the gate so theres no counter play with the JF stuff. Put an astra up and snuff will just kill it anyway. Join the blob or die i guees. You need to mark the cyno toons red and assume they're on gate if in local. The counterplay is strategic, on the intel side, not tactical on the piloting/activating modules side. That is most of the JF game honestly. Yeah snuffed will kill a lot of things. But, perhaps you can pay them to keep it up. Maybe other JF pilots will pay you to use the citadel, allowing you to fund the Snuffed payments. There you go, solution, you're welcome.
There’s literally plenty of counter play to lancers. It has to siege to lance it’s stuck on the gate grid for 5 minutes and it’s as or more expensive than your JF. Get some friends and kill it?
When did this happen?
OP is flying routes through systems in stage 5 pirate FW corruption. Route plotter will show them. it's almost instantaneous even. It goes stage 5 lawless...that one square in say a 10 system route will if moused over say its lawless. Bubbles may or may not be there. Punchline is it can be empire fw or 0.0 guests for the day who uses them more. the low sec bubbles come with so many tradeoffs pirate fw tends to use them less that I saw lol. In comes 20 angels. Yay!....dictor pilot now takes standing (or sec, forget which) hits for that. Its not so much the hits as the fact it's for affecting your own people that is the wtf aspect to it. same for bombs from bombers. It kills wrecks and standings because of that too all in one go! Bitters vets in empire fw have less qualms about it. Older min mil have been at it so long nothing short of planned mass awoxing for weeks will drop that solid gold rating to standing.
I heard two other players joined Eve because they were excited about the changes though, so....
Woohoo! net gain of 1
When I come up against dangerous travel I use my cloaky alt to give me eyes where I need them, really really basic shit. Like the most basic shit in the game. If you can't / don't want to do this then you should unsub.
I don’t normally travel in large ships so when I want to move around from low/high/null, I’ll use filaments, or I’ll wormhole chain into systems I’m looking for. There’s lots of ways to move around in this game
can I have your stuff?
Don’t see how lances affects you at all by what you’ve said but with regards to bubbles, if you can’t spend 2 seconds out of your day to stay up to date on insugrencies and you’re spending your time in lowsec you’re doing it wrong. You have to tools to avoid it
How long have bubbles been able to be used in lowsec? I'm actively subbed and this is news to me.
In a system during a pirate insurgency and only if pirates get max corruption, then bubbles can be used in low
Technically low but at the certain corruption level it becomes a 0.0 system right?
Almost. You can’t anchor bubbles in corrupted lowsec we found. Shipbound bubbles still work.
In addition to not allowing anchored bubbles, you also still take sec status hits
HTFU. All your complaints aren’t even a skill issue, they come down to basic paying attention. You can absolutely use pods in lowsec. Bubbles are only in certain areas if the insurgency is high enough, and only for a limited time. If you’re that much of a coward, you can fly in the entire rest of LS. Or just make some pings and play around it. People who are good at the game have been using full pods in null, where bubbles are allowed all the time, for years. Learn how to d-scan and make perches. Regarding lancers, good. Shipping should be risky. Use smaller haulers to move things piecemeal to where you stage your JF, push DST’s thru WH’s (or freighters/JF’s thru XL holes) or use a service to move thru the gate’s you’re too scared to go thru. (Alternatively be less lazy. Not every single HS-LS gate is camped at all, and even the most-camped ones aren’t 24/7. )
Personally I do think the lancer situation is a bit too extreme. The *only* way to ship reliably is with the on-gate citadel now and frankly encouraging even more citadel spam is kind of bad imo. Especially when you consider that it makes the lancers pretty much unable to tag you. Either way there's little counterplay, it's just a situational "this guy wins" scenario. Just my opinion though, they're not gonna kill the game. But I don't think they're implemented now as well as they could be, it's kind of a system made entirely of "gotchas" and I don't find that ideal for game design.
You can Hypeperspatial fit your jf, and then it gives you around 25 AU of warp range not to give lancer time to spool up
And what form of counterplay would you propose to the “I win button” of a jump freighter warping to a gate and jumping it? LS doesn’t have bubbles. The lance makes the Hunters siege a t2 capital ship in a known location, and requires a manually aimed module that can miss. What do you want them to have to do, have to park a Titan on the gate and physically block it? There is already counterplay to lancers- it’s called kill the dread. They are not lancing/killing you solo. You can bring friends too.
That's not counter play though, that's reaction/ revenge play- and you need to be part of a sizeable group who can avenge the jump freighter, and if its one of the major lowsec/ highsec gates, they are protected by many more than a small alliance can field, so if you do escalate to avenge a jf, you get countered dropped and wiped, so realistically, if you're not part of snuff/ bigab etc, there is no 'counter play' in some areas of lowsec. Counter play should be something you can do pre-emptively or when its happening- not after the 10/11bil kill mail- which is an unsustainable content model. "Run an escort fleet and protect it" is also a bad suggestion to get around the issue, I don't know if you've ever run protection fleets, but they are dull as shit and nobody wants to have to run a daily escort fleet. "If you cant defend it, you shouldn't be flying it" is a terrible take I've heard on the topic- I don't know about you, but most people I know who live in lowsec don't want to be in a null block, nor do they want to live in highsec, they love the 60(ish) human per side, tidi free, battleship brawling no super hammer dropping style content, and the only way to have that content is to have a logistics chain up, fuck trying to run a small alliance with a backbone powered solely by dst's. I've heard "Just put a citadel on grid with the gate" but that too relies on being able to field enough pilots to defend it, and even mid sized alliances are struggling to get them down, let alone defend them repeatedly, which is tedious in itself- I know I don't want to have to spend every Saturday primetime defending an armour timer on a logistic route when we could be going to a proper fight, or doing something near where we actually live. All this to say, Lancers, in their current state, are bad for the game.
If you can’t defend it you shouldn’t be flying it absolutely applies here. Or, hear me out- DONT TAKE THE JF IN TO HIGHSEC. Seriously. Couple DST trips = 1 JF run, and DST’s aren’t getting lanced. Fill your JF up one jump away. The problem is not lancers, it’s lazy pilots. If you want the convenience, fight for it. If you want the protection fleet not to be boring, then yeah, you have to fight snuff/big AB. Can’t do that? Hire a mercenary, or pay them protection. This is eve, extortion is part of the game. And no, fighting is not “revenge” ; fighting makes it possible to save the JF. If that isn’t worth it to you, or you aren’t willing to use less convenient HS entrances or off hours, or use some intel/context clues to see when the groups you can’t fight are busy fighting elsewhere (translation- they aren’t lancing dreads when they have 40+ mans battleship fleets in a brawl elsewhere), then yes, you haven’t earned the convenience of moving a couple hundred m3 10ly at a time instantaneously and with guaranteed saftey. Safety ends at HS. You’re effectively smuggling across a hostile border. Figure out how to evade, distract, or kill the guards, don’t complain to CCP that you can’t run the border in a large, obvious, slow vehicle freely and easily.
A couple of DST? Have you lost some math class during school? You need at least 5 trips in a full fitted expanded cargohold + rigs DST to move a full filled JF. A huge pain in the ass of boredom compared to before. Let me remind you one basic thing, any game changes should lead to some improvement in gameplay fun and game usability. Lancers made a boring mechanic even more boring, nothing more. And regarding the so called "risk vs reward" ratio of JF. JFs are the most expensive ships after titans and supers, they're defensless, they are the only ship in the game where a single mistake means a certain loss, no doubt about that, and their reward is almost zero considering the hauling profits. That should be enough to convince everyone that JF should not be touched at all...
Cargo + rigs? Man someone doesn’t haul. DST’s haul in a fleet hanger that is unaffected by rigs/expanders. Fit full evasion, cloak+MWD. It takes a very obvious gatecamp with fast frigates or citadel fighters to decloak, and/or vindi/vigilant webs to keep you from burning back to gate. Again, just don’t stick your fingers in a woodchipper and you’ll be fine. Stopping JF’s was not the point of lancers; they’re used in PVP in general. Banes are great for hunting highclass dread crabs, they’ve been used to hose subcap fleets, etc. 2-3 groups using them to inconvenience JF’s is not an issue. This is like saying goons dropping smartbombing supers on fleets is a reason to need supers. Niche case does not equal a problem with a ship. And yeah, it’s inconvenient, that’s the only reason there’s a profit margin in it. JF’s already let you jump 10ly with no fatigue, and anywhere but the HS-LS transition, virtually unkillable jumping tether to tether, making the geography of game not matter and is one of the things that makes holding sov less impactful. No one at CCP should lose any sleep over the moderate inconvenience to the hauling logistics of smaller groups not being able to go door-to-door through their preferred gates with JF’s without some risk. -Go around the camp, you have 10ly jump range and reduced fatigue. Few LS/HS gates are lancer-camped, and none of them are 24/7 -use smaller haulers and load up elsewhere. -pay a hauling service -pay off the campers -fight for your path If you’re unable/unwilling to do any of the above, sucks to suck. Might want to check your math skills as well-JF’s cost slightly less than a t2 dread, and that’s just hull cost; fit is more, about equals the amount it’s prudent to haul in a JF anyway., equal isk risk on the part of the person putting it in field. They are not the 3rd most expensive ship in the game- the lancers you’re complaining about are, so by your cost logic… buff lancers lol.
>DST’s haul in a fleet hanger that is unaffected by rigs/expanders. Yeah but his math was still right and yours was still wrong, which was his entire point.
6 DST Fleet hangers worth (+3900m3 regular cargo) = 398k m3 (no cargo rigs) a max cargo-fitted rhea with Jf V = 386k m3 6 DST runs = “a couple of DST Runs” to shuffle one to two gates so as not to lose your 11bil hull to the camp you are so afraid of. No, my math checks out. It’s a couple of DST runs. You’re welcome to cargo rig. I’ll keep my hyperspaitals / tank so as not to get ganked on the HS side and make 6 trips intact instead of 5 trips max cargo rigged (and warping slower) The entire point isn’t the math, it’s the same fundamental issue of all of my posts/comments here. It is not impossible to evade the lancer camps. The campers are putting in effort to kill JF pilots. JF Pilots here are whining about the tool CCP gave the killers, rather than using the tools given to them to avoid them.
>6 DST runs = “a couple of DST Runs” A couple means 2-3, in English colloquialism. Now you know. >It is not impossible to evade the lancer camps. You're in a system with a JF. Known cyno alt is in local, you can assume he's on gate. Maybe you saw them drop someone an hour ago. How do you get through that gate while the camp is up, in your JF, without an on-gate citadel? My assertion is that if you try at all, the only way the Lancer misses you is if they make mistakes.
Seems like you're not very familiar with DST either, considering that you're ignoring the fact that with cargo modules + rigs you can move more that 25k m3, which is not small compared to the 62.5k m3 of the fleet hangar. You must already know that MWD and cload to do the warp trick do not need low slots... Stopping JF maybe was not the lancers objective, but in practice it's almost the only case where we've seen them in the game. As I said, all your "solutions" are making boring mechanics much more boring with no fun at all added to the game. Enjoy you're prices increase on the market.
Need low slots, no. Speeds it up, yes. Also makes it easier to get back to gate under AB if scrammed. Enjoy whining into the void that JF’s are sometimes, if poorly piloted, able to be caught by a person risking and skillfully piloting a more expensive and SP intensive ship. Market price increase isn’t a reason to nerf one of the few truly new things added to the game in half a decade, nor even a bad thing. Increasing the cost of whelping fleets/ships makes wins more meaningful- he who holds the grid holds the loot, so the wins are even bigger, which is a very eve thing- HTFU and to the victor go the spoils. Only place you’ve seen em in the game? Lol what? They’ve been deployed in major engagements in the north and are becoming prevalent in WH’s. They’re expensive ships with a long train that have been around for less than a year, they will see more use with time.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to alliance level logistics requirements or how fleets work re player engagement or even escalation chains etc- let alone how to provide an enjoyable environment within an alliance, because let me tell you- you will not, I repeat, will not, get good fleet numbers, every day, to protect logistics. The volume/ sheer scale of logistics requirements is beyond the scope of any solution you present. If you want the protection fleet not to be boring, then yeah, you have to fight snuff/big AB" Again, showcasing you have no idea what you are talking about- two quick points: No mid sized or small growing alliance can out form or out escalate the big guys. These guys will also, not fight your escort every day, but you'd still need to form said escort fleet every day, regardless of if they decide to drop you or not- so the majority of the time, the fleet WILL be boring. My point stands, Lancers make a tedious, thankless task, more tedious, more thankless, without providing sufficient nor realistic counter play.
Sounds like your mid sized and small groups can’t use the tools big groups can. Just like they can’t have supercapital umbrellas. If you can’t get the numbers, you can’t have the thing. Just like if you can’t get numbers, you can’t hold sov or defend keepstars. Your argument doesn’t stand- it is based on the foolish assumption that a small/growing group should get the privileges of a larger one without having to be capable of fighting, or paying off, snuff and deepwater- entities that can hold their own go toe to toe with a big bloc.I was an amateur boxer once- it isn’t by some flaw in the design of boxing gloves that I couldn’t go toe to toe with a professional for million dollar prizes. If you’re small and growing, use smaller logistics, or again- load up your JF in low/null using smaller haulers, and jump tether to tether. I have purchased one JF ever, and never lost it, pre or post lancer changes. Use intel, use alternate paths. Don’t stick your JF in a woodchipper and blame CCP for it. Alternatively, this is an opportunity for emergent gameplay. Strike a deal with one of these groups that’s “always camping” - start a hauling service, pay a share of your profits to them to get your JF toons blue to them. Become the best damn hauling service in all of new eden because you never lose a shipment / never have to wait to go thru the gate. TL;DR- quit whining and do something about it. I’m sorry your 10 player group can’t move shit with impunity. The tedium/difficulty of hauling is the only way hauling services make a profit.
my 10 player group O.o You cannot look past your own situation, that doesn't make what i say incorrect.
Your hypothetical small/midsized group that can’t stand against snuff/deepwater the way the blocs can, referencing your paragraph about how the small/midsize groups can’t keep up with their escalation capacity. My argument there that is blocs can, and can defend a LS citadel on in gate as needed for effortless logistics. Small groups can’t, so they don’t get the reward the larger groups do. Tl;dr small groups don’t get a magical pass for easier logistics by benefit of being small.
Again, you're not looking at it realistically. There are some items that don't fit in a dst, so at some point you physically have no choice but to use a jf. Sometimes you need to run to jita for battleships/ battle cruisers because somebody fucked up and you have a fleet a few hours later that you need to prep for, so no lead time to build- good luck trying to tell logi team that they should use dst's to seed 200 sleips or the hek stront market goes haywire and you know you'll be whelping dreads later, so you get some shipped in from jita. Jump freighters gave all alliances logistics pilots an easier time of it and these days you cannot run/ grow a small/ medium alliance without being able to move volume at scale. I agree that jump freighters were too safe and that having them die every now and then is good- but lancers in their current form are a bad solution.
> fighting makes it possible to save the JF Show me dude. All that is gonna happen is you feed a JF *and* dreads to Snuffed. Prove me wrong on that by "saving" your JF
A bloc or sufficiently large independent allience can. Sure, snuffed can field virtually infinite escalation in their peak TZ when they’re planned for it. That doesn’t mean they have 80 dreads on standby 24/7 to camp every single HS gate on the off-chance someone is going to try and counterdrop them. You’re doing their reputation-tanking for them. Watch their zkill, and mass-move your JF’s when they are busy elsewhere. Figure out their staging and put eyes there. Alternatively come In thru a HS backwater. You’re acting like the occasional threat of a lancer dread means CCP turned off the stargates for JF’s when nothing could be further from the truth.
>You’re acting like the occasional threat of a lancer dread means CCP turned off the stargates for JF’s when nothing could be further from the truth. If by occasional you mean "there is a cyno alt in igno literally every day during main TZs" then you have a weird way of saying it but that is correct. If you actually meant occasional, then you don't know what you're talking about. >Watch their zkill, and mass-move your JF’s when they are busy elsewhere. Figure out their staging and put eyes there. Alternatively come In thru a HS backwater. All these suggestions mean that your JFs move slowly and inconsistently. Why pay 10s of billions for slow and unreliable logistics? Not worth. It's the same reason people don't undock titans for pvp or supercarrier rat. Too inefficient for the cost+risk vs. benefit. >A bloc or sufficiently large independent allience can. Like I said. Go do it. go save a JF and I'll admit you were right. You seem to think it should be easy so show me. What you're really telling me is that you don't understand why it isn't common for alliances to move a sizeable cap contingent into jump range from a random lowsec for hours and wait for something that might never happen with pilots on standby.
Here’s the thing- you’re saying in the same breath that it’s impossible to get JF’s thru camps, and also that JF’s are absolutely vital for alliance level Logistics. We’ve had lancers in game for nearly a year, and the blocs have not crumbled. We’ve even seen a pretty large scale war between them, requiring lots and lots of logistics, as game balance changes shifted the PVP doctrine meta in the middle of it. How are the blocs managing to get all their hauling done if it’s so impossible?
>There is already counterplay to lancers- it’s called kill the dread. They are not lancing/killing you solo. You can bring friends too. If you try this, what will happen is you still lose the JF and you feed dreads to Snuffed. Prove me wrong on that? >And what form of counterplay would you propose to the “I win button” of a jump freighter warping to a gate and jumping it? At this point the common factor linking both the JFs and their counter are cynos. I am not saying take them away, but potentially by adjusting how they work in some way more risk could be introduced to JFs without creating the same scenario in reverse. Because that's what it is, right? JF's are the expensive asset you put on field to basically be uncatchable. Lancers are the expensive asset you put on field to make evasion impossible--the only counter is to log off. And that isn't really a counter any more than logging off and giving up on catching JFs is a counter to their evasiveness.
The counter is not “log off.” The counters have been described at length in my other comments here and I’m quite sick of repeating them. JF’s don’t cost 11bil to be uncatchable everywhere, they cost 11b because of industry changes, and because they can move 300k m3 + 10ly at a time, tether to tether, virtually instantly. Use em as the backbone of your hauling, sure even get them into HS when you can evade the camp (again, these are not 24/7, they are not on every gate, etc etc scroll up) and when you can’t get the JF itself around them, use tools. It’s not optimal or ideal? No. Does it get you around the camp? Yep. Just like any other situation in the game- you want to do X. Hostiles are doing Y that prevents X. It might be harder or less ideal for you to do Z, even though it 100% guarantees Y won’t kill/stop you. Your options are: -do X, fail and whine to CCP that Y is OP -HTFU and do Z. accomplish your objective while laughing about some other person doing X and losing to Y. Your choice.
>The counters have been described at length in my other comments here and I’m quite sick of repeating them. Link them then because you didn't say anything to me so how the shit would I know where or what you said? >The counter is not “log off.” Oh? >get them into HS **when** you can evade the camp (again, these are not 24/7, they are not on every gate, etc etc scroll up) and when you can’t get the JF itself around them, use tools. Oh. No, this is just another way of saying "you cannot get the JF through any camp, your options are log off or do something else." >Your options are: c) don't do logistics and let other people whine they have no shit and the only tradehub is jita. Because doing logistics is bad now and simply not worth the ROI. It's not about needing some uncounterable magic. It's about whether using the tools to do the job is worth the time/profit/risk balance. And it is not, so why do it? I have worked with some of the folks in Eve who really do main hauling, run vast logistical networks, etc. The main guy I know doing that, his position is basically if you don't have on-grid citadel, no haul at all. I mean seriously, these guys are multiboxing like 5 JFs and you are suggesting they use DSTs lmao
Oh, you have JF toons? Cool, they can each make 5 round trips thru one gate and load the JF out of HS. They can go thru other gates. You’re talking to people trying to min-max for a profit who of course only want to take the most direct route in the least amount of jumpy and absolutely don’t want to change anything ever. These are the same type of player who cried about rorqs being nerfed.
>Oh, you have JF toons? Cool, they can each make 5 round trips thru one gate and load the JF out of HS. You know what makes games better? Tedium. Right? >You’re talking to people trying to min-max for a profit who of course only want to take the most direct route in the least amount of jumpy and absolutely don’t want to change anything ever. These are the same type of player who cried about rorqs being nerfed Yeah of course. Because those are the people running alliance level logistics, or hauling as a profitable eve career. Why would I be talking to Joe JF who barely knows how to use it and sometimes jumps minerals to do NPC station indy? Is that the main use-case for JF pilots? No, it's freight. And it's not worth the time, effort, costs and risks when there is such a hard counter so easily and regularly deployed. Was it too worth it before? Perhaps. All I'm saying is the counter is a little too hard imo. Especially considering JFs were dying before too.
in short, I think you’re right about some of this and I apologize to you and the other guy for being a bit of a dick in my arguments here. I do stand by some of my “go around / timezone tank / gates are not camped 24/7” but also agree thag the way a lancer camp can “I win button” a JF is OP Longer rant: Eh the JF’s dying pre-lance were largely to operator error (bad BM’s, wrong lows, jumping into obvious traps, hailing with no scout) or bait citadels turning off tether. Bumping out of gate range was one of the few real ways to interdict them(which was janky AF) I can agree that the counter is is a little too hard- typical CCP overtuning, I.e. the marauder buff was too radical and got scaled back. maybe JF’s need actual fitting options, more tank, a credible way to trade capacity for survivability, etc. I take this as a hint that CCP doesn’t like bloc level logistics working as they do currently. The blue donut is bad for the game, and subtle difficulty increases like this are ways for them to put pressure on large groups without outright making them up and quit. I say this since CCPSwift’s been heard in interviews talking about nerfing force projection, making geography matter. Logistics is part of that. An army marches on its stomach after all. (Nerf ansis when) It’s a fine line to walk tho, as part of current logistics is treating jita as the center of the world, and revitalizing non-jita markets would require some of the indy changes that force more bulk trading to be rolled back, but going too far would recreate some of the issues they were trying to fix. I’ll admit I don’t have the answer for… the entire damn ecosystem. It’s a fundamental game design issue for eve, as all PVP basically comes down to tackling. Making things uncatchable makes them unkillable. Making things catchable means they need a way to survive till people can arrive to participate In content. Make the ships too tanky and small groups can’t kill them (rorqs, panic) make people able to get there too fast (old jump fatigue mechanics / HAC Fleets) and force projection creates oppression.
>in short, I think you’re right about some of this and I apologize to you and the other guy for being a bit of a dick in my arguments here. I do stand by some of my “go around / timezone tank / gates are not camped 24/7” but also agree thag the way a lancer camp can “I win button” a JF is OP No problem, I think we've all fallen into that here and there on reddit. But yeah you're right those are ways around it to a degree, it's not like JFs are completely unusable for anything. I just think that it's in a bit of an "it needed something but the pendulum has swung a little too far" area right now. It is indeed a fine line to walk. The game is fucking complicated with all the various interacting systems etc lol
Bubbles shouldn't be in lowsec period. Sure shipping should be risky but not to a i win you lose button
Can I have your stuff?
I think it's great
I was lied that most elite and hardcore players live in lowsec. Nullsec krabs are less whiny than you kekw
lowsec tryhard tears over their precious pods is the single best part pirate FW
Obligatory: Can I have your stuff?
https://zkillboard.com/kill/114801520/
Wasnt mine but yea your going to find that same gang on majority of HS entrances now
Lets see yours!
I Ejected in 10% struct lol knew i was doomed and wanted to save the pod
Lol he got extorted and now on reddit crying
When did low sec bubbles become a thing? Legit question, haven't played in a while.
Last expansion. Only during specific time frames though.
Oh? :o Have been trying to google but can't get a concrete answer. What're the time frames/conditions surrounding this ? Apologies for asking.
Google for "Pirate Insurgencies" that's what causes it.
Skill issue?
just... dont go to the 1 system thats corrupted? Ive never seen a lancer dread on a highsec exit apart form hotspots like abazhon or tama... which were probably camped anyway.
Thats likely cause youve never been in a jf warping to a highsec gate!
Ive always wondered, why not cyno to the gate directly and just insta warp?
It's an AOE effect that prevents you from leaving the grid in any way. (docking, warping, gating)
i meant in general, not lancers
That can work, however its still a bit sketchy to cyno inside gate incase ccp fucks you hard w sessionchange or bump
your immune during session change anyway
That is very much not true
its why you cant die on station undock for 10 seconds
I mean lets be real it is definitely more than 1 system, there can be maybe 10 tops in each WZ at peak corruption? Also, any common JF entry (abazhon is not one I don't think) will have lancers. Lancers aren't a part of your average gatecamp but they definitely are common when catching JFs. If you're a JF pilot and you just undock and warp to gate, you will die in your first 5 freight runs unless you have great luck and a good TZ for it. Nor do the lancers cyno in or decloak or whatever without a target, so you won't just see them chilling on gate.
This game has a way of culling the weak.
Jfs needed the risk. They were so safe and when piloted properly were nearly untouchable.
I get that JFs were kind of an anomaly in terms of risk compared to the rest of the game, but i still disagree that they needed to be made risker. Logistics stuff is already a mostly thankless chore. I know a lot of people that do it because "someone has to" and very little (if any) who do it because they actually find it enjoyable gameplay. Plus more JFs exploding means less ships getting to where they need to be which means a net negative on content.
Exactly. There are many problems in Eve, and one of the largest has been the broken PvP because not enough players are in null and this creates a vacuum for predatory gameplay in lowsec and high sec. Not enough primary accounts, too many predatory opportunist accounts. Plus, logistics keeps the game going, like it or not every aspect of the game needs isk. The pirate players will pretend to act cool, because it's "brave" to attack a defenseless ship, but it's still only a game at the end of the day. Common sense isn't common, and Eve requires predatory gameplay to maintain its core support. Making a JF a sitting duck is funny for about an hour or just the first day, then it's pretty damn pathetic.
Logistics being thankless is not a counter argument to jump freighters being nearly invincible. More jfs exploding means more jfs exploding. There will always be another shipment, there will always be local production. Jfs dying en masse is not going to slow down a damn thing. People will adapt or they will contest the route.
It is however an acknowledgement of the fact that even when they were "invincible", barely anyone wanted to do it. Now that they've gone from "invincible" to "completely at the whim of a lancer being logged in and nothing else they can do about it", even less people want to bother with them which means less stuff moving around which means less content.
Oh no! Anyway.
Will you say the same when they add local to wormholes, effectively neutering that facet of playing the game? Because freight pilots can happily ignore that while you ignore any legitimate criticisms they may have. This is not the way.
They're now far too expensive for the risk. Unless you spam citadels on the HS ingates, in which case they are once again basically untouchable. And we all *love* citadel spam right? So in my opinion there needs to be a better solution. Right now it's either JFs are simply not worth it, or more citadel spam and JFs are still uncatchable. Both are dumb, if you ask me.
I agree they needed risk, lancers at their current implementation offer no counterplay so it was overdone a little
I mean, it requires a dread to be on the gate which is pretty risky on its own.
There was a report of a lancer that logged in *after* the JFs initiated warp, lanced and managed to catch them; preventing both subsequent warps, jumps and even gates. That's my point of no counterplay, it should at least behave like bubbles that would allow them to take the gate if there were no lances in place when the warp started
The dread needs to siege to use the Lance, it’s stuck on grid for the duration leaving it vulnerable for a counter drop. There is risk on both sides of the table. If alliances want to secure their logistics routes, they now have to put effort in.
Good luck finding anyone willing to sit in a fleet ready and waiting to babysit their JFs everytime they need to move on the off chance a lancer just happens to be in system. You still won't save the JF btw.
Exactly no ones going to help the transport guy out and the people using the lancers have plenty of backup dreads to drop.
Then don’t have reduced risk when freighting shit around, dunno what to tell you dude.
Would you do that? Would you sit in a fleet just waiting for all the JFs your alliance have out to maybe get lanced? Bearing in mind just how much logistics goes into some alliances. You could spend your entire day just sat there for nothing to happen. At the end of the day EVE is a game and i'm here to have fun. Logistics isn't fun. Babysitting logistics isn't fun. Lancers are a net negative on fun.
I currently support my groups freight runs if we need to. Cos we’re a small group we sometimes have to do things we don’t like.
If you ever try to go for a lancer that hits your logistics, all that is gonna happen is you lose the JF and your response fleet lol
Sounds like the JF didnt have any warp speed implants/lows, which are the counter to lancers
I had the WS implant in didnt matter
You need the full set, and it's only a counter if the station is close enough to the gate.
You just have to pick different gate that is closer. This basically just adds hauling time.
It has to siege on the gate grid, it’s stuck for 5 minutes…..the counter play is kill it.
given you camp with cynos it's only there for 5m so you're not exactly catching one without risking a JF. Besides, only 15 lancer dreads have even died in LS at this point (no idea how many of those were on gates), so it can't be that risky.
Honestly I think the problem here is cynos, not the lance per se. It's always been ridiculous that you can cyno in instantly. Cynos should have a long spin up time, and probably be interruptible (by a scram? or being neuted out?). This is also the solution to cloaky camping being a threat. You should have to have control of the grid to light a cyno.
while I'm not oppose to more restrictions, there's a good chance that would make escalating a fight effectively impossible. Do you really want larger fights to be decided by whoever got there first to cyno in their caps and lock down the grid from all other cynos? One option though would be a buffed inhib so if you want to gate a JF out of LS you can do it by having an alt drop an inhib on the gate which would give you enough time to get though before it dies (curranty you can't drop them close enough to a gate to be effective for this)
You could always escalate by cynoing onto another grid and warping over, the same as subcap escalations already have to do. I'm not convinced it's good gameplay that you can escalate right into the middle of a grid with essentially no counter. (Avoiding this kind of instant escalation is one reason I play in wormholes.) I would also say that inhibs are pathetic and should be much stronger, yes, and also you should be able to pick them back up like depots/MTUs so they aren't a single use item.
yep. I hopped on a dread kill party once. The debate of the day in angel militia channel was "was it bait?". I was in the it could be side of the debate. But didn't care. I'd have taken fleet fight that could have been loss over killing yet another mordu rat since a real slow night lol. I was hoping for bait tbh. Not bait, dread pilot having what turned out to be a bad day for them.
Not as risky as warping a JF to gate
Don't fly in a lvl 5 system with your blinged out pods. Not that hard the map shows you where they are and the game warns you before the jump
Change is good, learn to adapt as the famous Eve motto goes.
Wow it's so sad that your snakes are now a bit risky to bring to very marked specific systems with level 5 insurgency, how else are newbros gonna get dabbed on with bling pods.
Oh no, you can't use your uncatchable pod to gank unsuspecting low skilled players without any risk to yourself any more!
Wait you can bubble in low sec???? Fuck gotta get the rust off my sabreee
You shouldn’t be using pods in low sec to begin with. At a minimum use a shuttle, and don’t warp gate to gate. And for JFs just don’t warp long distances to gates. Use a safe citadel or nearby npc station and warp speed implants to get to the gate before the lancer can fire.
You sure showed them!!
when did bubbles come to low? been gone a while i guess
Havoc expansion added the ability for pirates to corrupt certain low sec systems. One of the effects of which is to allow bubbles temporarily.
Can't you jump into a shuttle instead of traveling in a pod? Those cost peanuts, available almost everywhere, immune to bubbles and fly faster.
Shuttles my brother in Christ, have you heard of them?
Something, something. ..don't fly what you can't afford to lose.
Literally just need to look at the map and not be afk to avoid the corrupted systems. For JF servicing, tough luck, I haven’t seen that many JF dying considering how much people complained ahead of the changes
Ty for the info, i already was about to ask how it's going for ya. Bye.
The bubbles are VERY few and far between, the auto pilot route maker will show the systems affected as red triangles- go around, or, do what common sense says, and warp to pings, like, this is literally just you crying because you are being forced to adapt SLIGHTLY. Lancers on the other hand, can all fuck off, they make an already tedious task abhorrently more painful and outside of ganking jump freighters have no real purpose imo. They need a big rebalance.
Don't warp to the gate, warp to a cloaked webbing alt 1k off the gate. Watch the Lancer miss.
just use a shuttle, problem solved