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Ok, pay attention kids. My name is not Juckto, but even I can tell you suck at Allegiance

Why is it that most people seem to be utterly clueless about probing? My brain hurts every time I see a sqadded player go through an aleph, turn towards the next aleph on his/her route, and drop probes on the way. What on earth are these people trying to achieve? Every time I discover such probes while flying a blind int, I die a little more inside.

Probing takes time, and dropping the probe smack on the flight route between alephs wastes that time. The probe you just dropped there will be eyed and destroyed the first time an enemy comes that way. Quite likely it will be destroyed without even eyeing that enemy.

So you are out in a scout, and you took probes along. Good for you. Take 10 - 20 sec longer to place that probe, and it will actually be useful. Dive or climb at least 600+m below or above the route you are taking, or even (ooooh!) look how you could place it about 900m from a He rock or two to eye the miners that may come around later. Even better, place a probe to eye important stuff that will come through an aleph. An EWS 1 has a a sensor range of 500m before faction mods and GAs. That means that if you place it 900m from an aleph, it will eye anything with sig 200+, which is pretty much everything important in early / mid game. Bonus points for putting it on the enemy side of the aleph.

Go to the side of the aleph cone (yes, I know you actually have to take the time to get there, and even check the range by targeting the aleph... man, if you wanted to work this hard you'd sign up for volunteer work, right?). For extra points, get away from the plane of the map, to make deprobers work extra hard. Drop at 900, when the aleph looks like this < and you have actually dropped a useful probe! Then go on your merry way, and drop more of them.

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This public service anouncement brought to you by a recovering scout-ho.

Do not listen to him!
He's trying to trick you into putting your SG grade gameplay to PuGs!

I say a probe is good wherever the noob pooped it.

Get one of those RT buggers on your team, they probe like the business. I still have nightmares of the SG against them where I did nothing but deprobe all game, only to find those probative bastards continuously sticking EWS up my arse every time I flew back to base.

i heard RT maps mouse button 1 to the dispenser

mouse1? all my buttons are for dispenser!

probing is an aRT!

There are some reasons for dropping probes in obvious places, just not very many.

eg - you're off to do something low-sig in your scout, so you want to have shield & missiles unmounted. But, you still want to keep them for later on in your mission, so when you load up, have two probes in there, which you can drop on your way to your real destination. The space these two probes were in can now be taken up by your missiles & shield, but because your real mission is more important, you don't take time off to put them in "good" locations. (It's more than 10-20 seconds if you include deceleration & reacceleration afterwards).

By and large though, you're right, it's just laziness/newbieness to drop them there.

Adept, why don't you do something about the lack of probing before complaining about it's quality.

Mr. Kltplzyxm wrote:QUOTE (Mr. Kltplzyxm @ May 18 2009, 08:33 PM) Adept, why don't you do something about the lack of probing before complaining about it's quality.

Because 100% useless probing bothers me even more than lack of probing.

I see opening scouts and such drop probes quite a bit, but on a bad day maybe one in four drops anything that is actually of any use.

Nonsense, probes are best placed immediately after launching from base or exiting an aleph.