Hold on a second
Posted: 2011-11-19 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: AHARM, Botting, crucible, eve, Exploit, RMT, russian, supercarriers 8 CommentsCrucible has been announced with the long awaited supercapital nerf, which makes them mostly tools for fighting other supercapitals and/or things that hold still.
A while back, AHARM was caught using a kinda-sorta-obviously-exploit in a certain type of wormhole. For those who don’t know, some wormholes have special effects, like increasing RR power but decreasing local rep power, increasing armor resists but lowering shield, ect ect. These effects go from barely noticable in a C1 class wormhole to holy-shit-this-3xRR-domi-is-stable when you’re in a C6.
One of these wormholes increased damage from all ships(Sleepers included) by 100%, as well as boosting the strength of all types of EWAR, including tracking disruptors. Some bright spark figured out that if you tracking disrupted someone so hard their midslots swapped places their tracking would go into the negative or go below -1 or something similar that wasn’t supposed to be doable. The result of this was that the ship being disrupted gained LITERALLY perfect tracking and optimal range(250k), if you happened to be sensor dampening them at the same time or something.
Rooks and Kings, some nullsec or wormhole or whatever group whose name I only know because they attacked Split Infinity Radio, attacked AHARM in their home wormhole and were a bit supprised by being hit by blaster boats from 250k away perfectly each time. They petitioned CCP, CCP changed the way that wormhole worked and didn’t ban anyone, everyone went their separate ways.
Now some large group has gained an advantage over another MAYBE through an exploit(bots). They are almost impossible to kill and everyone is still trying to work on ways to counter and/or welcoming their new overlords. And since CCP either can’t or won’t detect and remove the bots, they have gained this power “fair and square”.
(Incidentally I use the term maybe because they might have used the bot money for something other than supers. Like titans or candy.)
Supercapitals aren’t being nerfed because the Russians gained critical mass of them through exploits, they’re being nerfed because nullsec stood on the edge of becoming carebearland and/or Russianland. The game has almost been “broken” through some means because one value grew too big using CCP-Approved methods.
So they’re nerfing supercapitals. If I were the DRF CEO or Director that said “hey, we have all this ISK, let’s sink it into SUPERCAPITALS”, I’d feel a bit cheated right now.
Supercarriers are expensive. Right now, on my “list of shit to do on Eve”, “own a supercarrier” is pretty far down on the list, mostly because of the 18 bil cost and that I’m probably going to lose the damn thing the moment I board it. For me, flying the second biggest ship in Eve defines the “endgame”.
My point is, what if instead of supercarriers RUSEve spent it on, say, making accounts or hiring people to fly with them? Okay, they did that with PL and THEN got the supercarriers, but what if they had taken it even farther? What if fighting RUSEve didn’t mean one unstoppable fleet, it meant THREE fightable fleets attacking separate targets with huge subcap numbers, reps and such. You could fight one, and win, but it would be instantly replaced while the other two wrecked whatever they were attacking. Controlling multiple accounts is not hard, and I could probably write a script or program to control an alpha fleet BS(pleasedon’taskmeto pleasedon’tbanmeCCP).
And also, now that the context of nullsec and supercarriers has defined “Overpowered”, can we please have the old wormhole exploit back? If everyone has it it isn’t an unfair advantage, and it would make for extremely weird/fun fleet fights.
k162space 
Can you remember me what was the WH exploit please ?
In a magnetar wormhole, tracking speed and tracking range are reduced. When a ship uses a tracking disruptor on another ship in a magnetar, the target ship’s tracking speed goes below zero, which the game engine interprets as perfect tracking, so blasters hit at 250k. The same is done with sensor dampeners, to dampen a ship’s targeting range to below zero, which causes perfect targeting. (also 250k away)
This exploit has been fixed.
Nice 🙂
Thank you for this informations.
Actually from what I understand the sensor damps worked as intended, it’s just the negative tracking that was causing weird results
My bad then >.<
Please tell me you aren’t seriously advocating returning a seriously gamebreaking exploit to that small portion of C6 wh’s. While it’d be cool to have a fleet fight or two where you could sit at 150km and blow away anything you see with your Blaster fit Vindicator, it gives a serious advantage to the corps that run sites in that C6 wormhole ISK-wise.
On top of that, the exploit ruins the rock-paper-scissors aspect of EVE that clever FC’s try to take advantage of with fleet compositions.
And anyways it’s just silly to ruin the immersion factor of the game.
Tell me if I’m wrong, please, or if you were just trying to make a point that botting is just as serious of an exploit as infinite tracking in C6’s.
You’re right, this would seriously be unbalanced in terms of isk farming, I was only considering re-implementing the pvp aspect.(Don’t ask me how)
If someone wants grandiose fleet fights, they can join a null corp. If someone wants a carefully tactical fleet composition, they can join Rote Kapelle or something. If someone wants a carefully tactical fleet that can sneak up on someone, they can join a WH pvp corp.
If someone wants a fucktastically weird fleet fight, they can’t have that. MAYBE an incursion scripted event, but not so much.
There’s what, 93 or 113 c6 wormholes? Maybe 10 Magnometric wormholes? Compare that to 5000 k-space systems, all I’m thinking about is ten systems being crazy-fuck-fight land. any idea of a fair fight went out the window when the two groups are “we gonna fuck deez site runnerz up” and “aw sheet sun dey fukkin us up wid a counter-fleet, run fer de heels!”
What’s immersive more or less about a wormhole mysteriously giving a 100% bonus to remote repair compared to a wormhole giving worse or better targeting?
It’s totally true that there’s a huge amount of opportunities for tactical fights and such and not really any opportunities for lolraep engagements. It’s just the way EVE is.
I’m sure there’s still a few “exploits” still out there, though, or at least a few tactical decisions that you could make that’d turn most ‘fair’ engagements into a lolraep moment. Good luck finding ’em though.
The main complaint that any player would have about the exploit in the MagC6’s was that there wasn’t a truly effective counter to having 100% accuracy and a 250km optimal, and there weren’t any drawbacks to the exploit, it was just kinda an ‘I WIN’ button. Maybe if you sensor damped each individual ship and ECM bursted the fuck out of the field or tracking enhanced the enemy fleet. I know not of such things though.