The era of teleportation hits EVE

We've all been there. Well, we should all have been there, cloaky camping that POCO in a C1 with your trusty covops, when Numpty McFuckbags lands in his Mammoth, and you watch where he aligns. You figure it out after a few seconds, and align yourself, and warp. It's a, oh lets just say 30 AU warp.

You land AFTER him, and have to attempt to point his fat ass before your decloak timer wears off and he hits warp.

You eventually wonder how this shit works, I mean, really? Your warp speed is 13 AU per second (or more if you rig for it) his is 3. his align speed is 13 seconds, yours is 7. Yet, always, all the time, you are chasing him around and failing to get to a planet before him.

Hence, Rubicon will change all that. CCP in its infinite wisdom has decided that ships should accelerate to top warp speed faster, to more closely approach the quoted top speed. This is fine; they already tweaked it a little (which was barely noticeable), and certainly it should be done. After all, you never really reach your to speed except when traversing Oicx.

So: bueno.

The problem is...I think this is a bit too far.

Example gacked from Bam Stroker

That was 16 AU's in 14 seconds.

"What does it mean?"

Well...not much for Russian bots who clear the anoms/belts/whatever within 1 second of anyone entering Local. Not a huge amount for nullbears on their toes and looking at local in some fashion, who can probably be aligned out within time and entering warp by the time the interceptor is on the belt - though there isnt much room for error.

For wormhole folks? RSi of the index finger. You can be well and truly within 1 AU of a target between mouse clicks. This has made wormhole space inherently much less safe.

I am not entirely sure that this hasn't gone too far. Let me explain.

The majority of changes to the game thus far have involved tweaking ship statistics, numbers, abilities and the like. The physics engine behind EVE has stayed relatively (or, publicly) unmolested up until now. Ships may go slightly faster or slower, they may do more or less DPS, have more or less tank, and so on. In the main, medium neuts have behaved like medium neuts, cruisers have behaved like cruisers, etcetera. Things have turned the same, moved the same, and entered warp the same.

Now that's all about to change. It is arguable this is for the best. Frigates should, intuitively, be faster than battleships. This may or may not, depending on your intuition, carry over into warp speeds. I'm not so sure that warp needs to be dependent so much on mass, but that's an argument for physicists and concepts of going trans-light speeds (ie; mass becomes less relevant as you approach and indeed, exceed the speed of light).

Nevertheless, it is what it is. Battleships are slow on field, and slow to align, have fucked guns with fucked tracking and fucked DPS against speed+ low-sig meta, and are going to enter warp slower, accelerate to their mediocre top warp speed slower, and get somewhere slower.

The problem I have, which may be rooted in my bitter-vetness, is that this just seems too fast. This is essentially teleportation. As I have said before, battleships are mostly obsolete in the small gang sphere due to the sig + speed meta and the ridiculousness of larger guns equaling slower tracking. Now your ship will not even be able to align out of a belt before an interceptor is on you - let alone a carrier.

The good thing is obviously going to be the period of adjustment while people work out that align time is their key defence in nullsec against ceptor gangs. In wormholes...you're just going to be boned. if someone knowws where you are, they can have a ceptor on you before it registers on d-scan.

I remain to be convinced.