Safe spots are an integral part of EVE Online's tactical warfare, making it harder for other players to locate and consequently destroy your ship. They're created by making a bookmark while in warp, which causes the bookmark to lead to the middle of nowhere. When you're on the run from bad guys, you can often slip away by warping between several safe spots while they try desperately to scan you down. Deep safe spots are illegal bookmarks created far outside the bounds of a solar system. Pilots hiding here needn't bother warping around to evade pursuers, as they'll be quite literally off the grid and virtually impossible to locate. Deep safe spots several hundred AU from the nearest celestial object have also been used in the past to jump huge capital fleets into a hostile system without fear of being attacked.
Over the years, various bugs and exploits in EVE have been used to create deep safe spot bookmarks. Those methods were fixed in the Tyrannis expansion, but existing bookmarks continued to function. After Tyrannis, any warps to locations far outside the solar system were supposed to automatically fail. On May 18th, bookmarks and items outside this range were also meant to be moved to within the bounds of the solar system. When that date came, however, no items were moved and the illegal bookmarks continued to function as normal. CCP has recently announced that the safe spot fixes detailed in their April devblog will be enacted on Tuesday August 10th. If you have any items or ships stashed away at a deep safe spot, you have until Tuesday to collect them. After that, they'll be moved closer to the system and start showing up on people's directional scanners.
Reader Comments (6)
Posted: Aug 6th 2010 1:21PM DrewIW said
Rather than fix jump-in lag, CCP decides to eliminate one of the few functional workarounds for it.
Great priorities.
Great priorities.
Posted: Aug 6th 2010 2:45PM Lateris said
I have to disagree with this nerf.
Posted: Aug 6th 2010 3:03PM (Unverified) said
Oh lawd...
Nice prioritisation there CCP :/
Nice prioritisation there CCP :/
Posted: Aug 6th 2010 4:48PM Lateris said
Wait- I am an idiot. This concerns exploits. You can still go to an area within the solar system ( the allowed region) and do bookmarks which work the same. I deserve flames.
Posted: Aug 6th 2010 6:00PM Brendan Drain said
You can break pursuit by warping between multiple safespots without stopping at any of them. Making more mid-way safespots in warp and adding those to the rotation ensures that the chance of someone finding you are almost zero. They'd have to have their probes in the right place to get a 100% lock on your ship, and it'd have to be timed so that they get that lock the moment you drop out of warp and before you are back in warp to the next spot. And then you'd need to return to the same bookmark after they move hostiles to that location. I've only managed to do it once, and that was before the new probe system came in. I don't think it's feasible to find someone warping around between safespots like that any more.
Posted: Aug 7th 2010 10:09PM Aetrix said
I can't wait to get out the scan probes and see what ends up on the edges of systems







