The Great Deep Safe Nerf of 2010
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 :)
