How to make deeeeeeeep safe spots

[Warcold]

How far can you go?

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/bec/Poseidon-Manual.pdf

[Warcold]

And disregard this guide after coming expansion:

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=748

the great deep safe nerf of 2010
reported by CCP Lemur | 2010.04.12 20:14:12 | NEW | Comments

Tl;dr After Tyrannis, for any point more than 10AU outside the furthest celestial in the system, you will not be able to open cynos, create bookmarks, or warp to that location. Also, all "stuff" outside this range will be deleted during Tyrannis deployment.

Hi, we are CCP Lemur and CCP Greyscale and we want to talk to you about DEEP SAFE spots.

First, a quick terminology primer, to make sure we're all on the same page. "Safe spots" are bookmarks made in space, at any point that you can't normally warp to directly. Ships at these locations can usually only be found via scanning (or infiltrating an enemy fleet, of course), hence the "safe" label. "Deep" safes refer to safe spots made outside the usual boundaries of the system - usually made a while ago by various techniques which have since been removed from the game, they can be up to thousands of AU from the nearest planet. Ships in these locations have always been very difficult to pin down, and following the changes made to the scanning system last year they've become nigh-on impossible to locate.

We've been debating what to do about these bookmarks since before Apocrypha was even released: with the new scanning system, ships in these locations are essentially invulnerable in the majority of situations, and they can be utilized by any ship without any inherent cost.

On top of this, in Tyrannis we're (hopefully!) removing the last of the various bugs that allow deep safes to be created. This will place us firmly into a situation where the only way to access locations outside the system proper will be via "legacy" bookmarks. This creates a division between older "haves" and newer "have-nots": as a new player coming into the game, the only way you'd be able to reach points outside the system proper would be to acquire a bookmark from an older player.

This is not something we're comfortable with, and we've now reached the point where we have both a solution we're happy with and the resources available to implement it.

What we're doing

We're defining a "deep safe" for these purposes as any bookmark which is more than 10AU further from the local star than the furthest-out celestial object (planets or stargates).

    * You will no longer be able to create bookmarks outside this range
    * You will no longer be able to issue a "warp to" command to any location outside this range
    * You will no longer be able to open a cynosural field at any location outside this range

This should make these locations essentially unreachable, thus forcing ships within a given system to use the other measures available (docking, cloaking, warping around an awful lot) if they want to avoid being shot at.

Additionally, please note that we will be doing a "clean sweep" during Tyrannis deployment: ALL OBJECTS outside the 10AU perimeter will be removed, and by "removed" we mean "permanently deleted". Ships, cans, territorial structures - nothing will survive. If you have characters in ships outside this distance, the ship will be destroyed and your capsule will be returned to the station that your clone is set to. If you have things parked at "deep safe" spots that you'd like to keep after Tyrannis, or characters parked out there, we strongly recommend that you move them prior to May 18th.

That's all we've got today - please keep this in mind, and tell your friends to read this if they haven't already

[Warcold]

update:

the not-so-great-after-all deep safe nerf of 2010
reported by CCP Greyscale | 2010.04.16 21:18:40 | Comments

tl;dr EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED. No more deletions! Things will be moved at some point!

 

So... what happened?

A defect reared its ugly head right at the end of last year, detailing a way to "overshoot" a warp, thus allowing you to travel a fairly arbitrary distance in a given direction under certain circumstances. This was fixed by software and marked for deployment in Tyrannis.

Once the actual defect was fixed, we realized that it would also make sense to clear up all the extra bookmarks created as a result of this defect - and, by the by, all the other deep safe bookmarks created by various no-longer-functional legitimate and illegitimate mechanics over the years.

The neatest solution would be to move all affected objects in a given system closer to the sun. However, EVE Development's resident DB guys were booked pretty solid for Tyrannis production, so the quickest solution was to instead make a few code changes to render deep-safe locations effectively inaccessible. Early in this process we committed to informing pilots about this as soon as possible in order to give proper prep time, which in turn focused us on finding a satisfactory solution as quickly as possible: the "quick" solution.

In the rapid process of defining this "quick" solution, we discovered a series of issues with the basic plan, which we fixed with further "quick" additions prior to writing the first blog. Player feedback to this initial bookmark blog identified further issues that we hadn't considered, which would make the "quick" solution even less quick to implement properly. We quickly decided that the "neat" solution was absolutely necessary.

To that end, one of our Ops DB guys has volunteered to find some time in his schedule to write and tune a "move script", allowing us to implement the clean solution without disrupting any of EVE Software's plans for final development of Tyrannis.

We can't 100% commit to this being tested in time for Tyrannis, but we're committing to implementing a full and proper solution on this issue: the move script will be deployed when it's ready, likely either in Tyrannis itself on May 18th, or in a release shortly afterwards.

Thanks to everyone who raised warning flags once the blog went out - we've caught our mistake with plenty of time to spare and we're implementing a better solution instead.

 

What's the new plan?

Here are two things that we're doing right now:

1) Getting ready to deploy the fix for the original defect with Tyrannis.

2) Testing a move script to move the old deep-safe bookmarks and all items in deep space.

The move script will locate all items (physical objects including ships, cans and structures - anything you can collide with is an item) and bookmarks that are more than 20AU further from the sun than the furthest celestial. It will then move them towards the sun until they are exactly on the 20AU boundary for that system. No physical items will be deleted. No restrictions will be made on warping, module activation etc.

If you have any further comments then, as always, please let us know in the comments thread.



The fun bit at the end

    * There are around 2,300 items outside the 20AU boundary
    * Around 60% of these items are ships
    * Around 25% of these ships are unpiloted
    * There are around 430,000 bookmarks outside the 20AU boundary
    * The furthest bookmark is 5,900,000,000 AU (95,000 light years) from its sun. This is roughly the same distance as the diameter of the milky way

(These statistics courtesy of Ops being awesome)

[Mangala]

We are now ready to deploy the removal of deep space spots during downtime on Tuesday, August 10. The removal was announced in a Dev Blog by CCP Greyscale. It is important to note that items and ships at deep safe locations will not be deleted but will be moved to the 20AU boundary of the system.