Someone's always watching
20th May 2013 – 5.40 pmThe reds have gone, isolating their system from ours by collapsing the wormhole connection, and hopefully whatever they didn't find through our static wormhole has changed by now. I would say so. A cursory scan of the home system finds nothing changed, letting me warp directly to and jump through the wormhole I scanned earlier, to see on my directional scanner a Drake, salvage drones, Anathema, and lots of canisters. I smell Sleeper combat.
The Anathema covert operations boat is presumably present to hack databases or analyse artefacts, seeing as there are no probes visible but the boat is, and the canisters must be flotsam from Sleeper wrecks caused by the salvage drones. I've not used them, but they are salvage drones after all, not looting drones. But what this means is that I am not looking for a basic anomaly, and I'll need to launch scanning probes. Easily done. That planet out of d-scan range of the ships will do.
Sure enough, the ships aren't in either of the two anomalies, so I am aiming to resolve one of the ten signatures, preferably in a single scan. I aim d-scan towards their rough direction, note the distance as being around 5 AU, which is a little far but manageable, and start narrowing down their position. It doesn't take long to have the battlecruiser sitting down a five degree beam, along with, it appears, a Loki strategic cruiser. That rather puts a dampener on my ambush before I've even scanned.
I may be a match for the Drake, and for the Loki, but perhaps not both together. Unless, I suppose, that Loki is already ambushing the Drake, in which case we can happily both shoot at it and then turn on each other, Grosse Pointe Blank style. But whatever's happening, I won't know unless I get closer. I call my probes in to scan. No Anathema, 70% on the Loki, and a solid hit on the Drake. As for the site, it's apparently not there, which is news to me, them... everybody.
The site is obviously still there, as there are structures and cans and everything a seasoned capsuleer expects in a site. There's something screwy happening with site signatures disappearing, I tells you. More disappointingly, though, the Loki and Drake are both being friendly to each other. They're just tidying up, the Drake looting the cans his messy drones have left untouched, and the Loki is, um, stopping me ambushing the Drake. That's a shame, really, because if he'd stayed away a minute longer then they could have caught a fool in my Loki.
The Loki cloaks, which makes me consider my options again. Has he gone, will he return, how many more of them are there? I don't know any of that, and as a cloaky strategic cruiser is terribly unlikely to be fitted without a warp disruptor I don't have a warm feeling about engaging the seemingly solo Drake. Of course, that could just be another hull breach in this damn Minmatar rust bucket. Even so, I've got close to the only remaining wreck, which the Drake is approaching and setting his drones on, so I really should make a decision.
No decision is a decision, right? The salvage drones salvage the Sleeper wreck, and I sit passively and watch the Drake align out of the non-existent site and warp away to wherever he came from. Maybe it's for the best. And at least I saw which way he warped, so I should be able to resolve the wormhole they are using and see what they get up to next. That means scanning the system. I'd better launch my probes again.
6 Responses to “Someone's always watching”
Site signatures disappear before the site content does. I have tested it in highsec radar sites. As soon as you successfully codebreak the first can, the site is no longer scannable. That was not the case before Retribution; then, sites were scannable until (a) they'd been "completed" according to whatever trigger they had (probably the same thing as now), and (b) they'd been empty of all players for a minute or two. Not sure when it changed, but yeah, there it is.
This is also true of anoms -- they cease being scannable when you kill some triggering ship, which for sleepers is always one of the third wave. I assume that is true generally, not just in wspace, but as I have not run any non-wspace anoms in a while I don't know.
That makes sense of when the sites disappear, although I can't quite fathom the why of it. If there are structures, there is a site. It seems more functional to me if the signature disappeared when the site disappeared. But what do I know?
Thanks, Von 1. Or are you 2?
I think it was a fix for people keeping sites somewhere alive long after they were supposed to despawn (by not leaving) and thus preventing new ones from spawning.
Not sure tho.
"Grosse Pointe Blank". Oh what a classic movie...
pj, I see you want some sort of scientifical type consistency in your space game. "Realism". Well, me too, but... EVE. I think I was here slightly before the other Von so you can call me 1.
We'll see what Von 1 has to say about that.
As for realism, I think I simply want consistency. If the site is in space, it should have a signature. I understand that they now despawn even with ships in them, to prevent abuses, but I don't see why the signature should disappear with any trigger other than the site itself disappearing.