Startled by a signature
28th January 2014 – 5.38 pmI hope I have better luck at staying in space tonight. And with the stability of wormholes. I get to test the latter immediately, as scanning our home system sees only the static connection has changed, and I warp to the wormhole to see it in rude health. Already I'm doing better than yesterday. Feeling in good spirits, I jump through to our neighbouring class 3 w-space system, update my directional scanner, and get a sinking feeling.
D-scan shows me a Retriever mining barge, floating in space, free of a tower, and my immediate thoughts turn to my recurrent frustrations with the idiotic discovery scanner. How long do I have before the pilot of the barge is made aware of the new signature in this system? How long before he retreats back to wherever he came from until he can be assured that this new signature isn't a wormhole?
I have no idea how long I may have to find the Retriever, but the dumbscovery scanner showing me a single ore site in the system helps. I move from the wormhole, cloak, and warp to the rock field. And I'm too late. Even getting here under a minute from entering the system, without having to ping d-scan around to look for the ship, the mining barge is alerted and gone from the site, leaving behind a handful of looted Sleeper wrecks amongst the rocks, and any sense of outbound wormholes being dangerous dashed against them.
Ever the optimist, I make a perch in the ore site and warp away to locate the Retriever. Maybe he's coming back. There's only one planet with moons outside of d-scan range, and there I find a tower with an Orca industrial command ship, Crane transport, and the Retriever. The mining barge and Orca are piloted, naturally, the Crane empty. Of course, he's not going back. The refinery is loaded, set to run, and the two capsuleers get busy idling.
It wouldn't have been much of a hunt anyway, not with ore sites being moved away from cosmic signatures that need to be scanned by probes to cosmic anomalies that simply appear on the scanner automatically. Frankly, I don't understand either the decision to add the discovery scanner or change the type of ore sites with respect to w-space. Neither makes any sense for the environment.
Okay, do I continue to mope—quite reasonably, I feel—or scan out to low-sec and look for K162s? It's a tough decision, so I take the third option. I head home, grab a Noctis salvage from our tower, and return to C3a to salvage the ore site Sleeper wrecks. It's out of d-scan range of the tower, so the local pilot won't be any the wiser, but they are just ore site Sleeper wrecks. I gain some pocket ISK, nothing substantial.
Salvaging gets me doing something, though, and I go with the momentum, swapping back to my Loki strategic cruiser to scan C3a for its exit wormhole. Five anomalies and twelve signatures are in the system, nine of the signatures far enough from the tower to be resolved without my probes being visible to the two pilots who, let's be honest, aren't even watching d-scan at this point. Five gas sites, three data sites, and a wormhole.
The two signatures near the tower are both chubby and, given that the Retriever ran at the sight of our K162 appearing, are probably two more gas sites. I ignore them. I ignore the exit to low-sec too, with it wobbling away at the end of its life. Hasn't this just been a frustrating start to the evening. The locals won't come out again, and I can't go out myself.
5 Responses to “Startled by a signature”
An expensive slow Noctis to grind five wrecks from an ore site? Yikes. You can do these with much less at risk in a destroyer, or even a Venture. And probably just as fast, considering transit time.
Did you waste any time in your own system after instantiating the wormhole?
Nope. Bookmark the wormhole, jump through. If the discovery scanner is trying to make EVE Online a twitch-game when entering new w-space systems it can go to hell.
Well, it can go to hell either way. I'm fed up explaining why it breaks w-space. I don't care that it emulates precautions some players were taking. Moving ore sites to anomalies and introducing the discovery scanner has made w-space much less involving and, as a result, more boring.
No doubt that the discovery scanner makes wspace harder to hunt in.
What's your beef w/ ore in anoms? Seems like it should make hunting easier. Ah, you said "involving" -- right. Hunting is more fun when you have time but it's hard. It's less fun when you either get the gank or not, but hardly have to work for it either way.
I would venture a guess that mining frigates also made wspace less fun to hunt in, although I was not in wspace when they introduced them.
Ventures aren't so bad. Their align time can make them tricky to catch, that's about all.