Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

I just posted this to Features And Ideas Discussion; please comment there, for the benefit of the Devs, if you have any substantive feedback on the idea.

As a salvager, it bothers me that I can see wrecks on the directional scanner that there’s no practical way to get to before they expire. That’s just wasted goodies.

We can’t currently probe for wrecks, presumably because it would tip the balance too much in the controversial matter of probing for mission runners. Like everybody, I have my opinions on where that balance should lie, but this suggestion is carefully crafted to avoid touching on that controversy.

A mission runner may, or may not, plan or desire to salvage his wrecks, or to have someone else do so.

But, once he leaves the mission space, he’s usually either coming right back with his salvage vessel, or he’s abandoning the wrecks — far more often the latter, in my experience.

So, why not add one or more probes that can probe for wrecks only, with the following very specific feature: scan signatures of any kind interfere with it, such that it cannot find any wrecks that are within, say, 10,000km of any ship. That would let dedicated salvagers probe down “abandoned” wrecks, without making mission runners any more or less vulnerable to probing. (You might need to adjust that distance to 20k km or 50k km to account for multi-pocket missions, if you need to guarantee the lack of impact on mission runners. Or you could just have wrecks in deadspace be “too hard to find” — they’ll still be findable if the mission runner turns in the mission without salvaging them.)

Whaddya think, a net benefit to the game without goring anybody’s ox?

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under EVE Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.