I am on the road and it we be a while till I get back, what happened?

Stealth Patch!
Added Proximity Probes with 2000 Masking.
With the Ability to Deploy them on Alpha, and right underneath the alpha gates.
Boy that was a great idea, the one who came up with that idea needs a medal.

A detecting castle (200 detection) will see them at 100 Meters too.  Awesome good times.

No Problem with beta ones we can at least kill those. But Alpha?  Really?

Just Sayin
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You should be able to kill the alpha ones as well, as you can with most of the deployables on Alpha.

I don't think these probes are inherently bad, but that this current form may not quite fit the game.

2000 masking!!

lol ...gotta get within 40-60 to find them

I'm at work and not ingame
How expensive?
How long to 'activate'?
How many hit points?
Do we have to target a buddy to kill them (like plants) or can we target them directly?
If shot directly, there is an aggression flag on Alpha/Beta when you shoot them right?
Any notification they are being shot? besides the sudden loss of sight...
Can I build 100 feet of walls around it when those come out?

Oh get off your high horse.

Currently the masking needs to be lowered.
Price needs to increased much much more then what it is now.  (5mill ish)
Alpha ones need the option of being killed, somehow, don't really care how it happens.  Or just removed all together.

This is just undoing all the changes that the Dev were working for, smaller tight groups, aka, no blob warfare.
Little probes undo all of these changes.

Edit, something needs to be done about dropping them directly under Tele's.
All it takes as it is now, is 8 mill in beacon detectors and you have a fully scouted island.
8 mill is a very small price, vs 15 mill for ONE inter-island tele.

Just Sayin
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Pie is a economic power house and you think 8 mill isnt trivial?  I'm shocked at this, just about any beta access corp/individual can easily make 8 mill to cover a ENTIRE island, very easily.  That's just ONE person, not 3 or sometimes 4 corps living on one island.  If they cant find the bank to put up more then 8 million to defend their island, they have a problem before it even stated.

I'm not asking for them to have pittens for armor either, I think that should be increased to offset some of the costs.
In reality, balance is what I'm after.  Its far from it now.

Just Sayin
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WRONG!!! You just take your free arkhe and go to ninja mountain and destroy 1M NIC item...

Now, to be serious though, having a detection range of less than 200m with detector is probably too hard to find. What finally swayed me, was that you don't 'know' that you've been detected, so you can end up sifting through the wrong desert.

Alternately, if you are in range of a detector, and there is some visual indication of such that you know there's one around to start searching for, that would be OK too.

Probes have been removed, so I agree, trivial.

I mentioned mine sweeper above, and what I was really thinking of is those large spinning wheels with chains on them that are used to clear anti-personnel mine fields.

Depending on how the probes end up being reintroduced, making a complex 'counter' to them may not be neccessary.

There's been some talk about wanting more specialized bots in the game too, based on the existing chassis, like stealth assaults.

Mine sweeping, or Proximity detection bots, could be one of those, with the standard build ewar chassis, but the ability to detect probes is baked in, at the cost of having some type of reduced basics; cpu/acc/reactor. Possibly, this same bot could be the only bot that can deploy a probe too (just adjust U size of probes so they can carry 2, and you can't put them in field cans).

Or, again, keep it simple and change the mechanics of the probe itself.

Full disclosure: Personally I'd like to see more role specific bots, but then I'm a producer, so that means more things for me to make

Binary, Yoslin and I were talking on IRC and I agree with his point that L-demobs on bots smaller than mechs is what is killing solo PvP combined with the PvP flag system + small islands. Also I have come to the conclusion that Troiar MK2 tackle is silly as well still...

I agree.  But then again a cam running 103 fully fit with guns and a masker is fun too.