Player Features and Ideas Discussion

They do not have fixed points of entry, they do not have the threat of hotdrops, etc etc etc. There are tons of differences which would make "remove local" utterly unfeasible.


If you're talking about the dscan, and you're also making it into a range limited scanner, all you're giving anyone is a few seconds of heads up before you land, which again is going to keep people in hisec to suck on the L4 teat instead. And you're going to see a shift from normal combat ships to ships with covert ops cloaks for roaming gangs.


I've a problem seeing how CCP can possibly manage to **** nullsec up even more than they already have, apart from nerfing JFs.


FW is still :laffo: isk, it's just slightly less so. And I know very well that today's incursions aren't as iskspewing as they were when they were first released, and I couldn't give less of a flying ****, L4s is what I talked about. L4s set a dangerously high minimum level of rewards which CCP has tried, repeatedly, to up nullsec past, but every time they've done so they've had to panic-nerf it back to just slightly above L4 levels of income, which meant that everyone moved back to hisec to continue doing L4s.


Yes, yes, I know you're going to harp on and on about how "hurr jumpbridges are a force projection tool", when that isn't even remotely the issue nullsec has. If you're going to harp on about some force projection problem, then you should look at capital ships, since they project power much more effectively than JBs do. Basically the only power JBs project is intraregional, i.e. for defense gangs, and for that purpose they make sense. As I said, you're pissing in someone else's back yard, expect them to have a home defense advantage.

As for "hurr nullsec has it too easy", you could only wish nullsec was easy enough so it was more desirable than hisec. If nullsec had an economic advantage to the point where it could supply both its own needs for war and supply hisec, then there would be more people there doing mining, hauling, etc, and there'd be more people who weren't paying sufficient attention to local or intel channels, which meant that people wouldn't have to go "hurr remove local so I can get kills".

In fact, I'm going to go so far as to say that you're the one who's too arrogant to see both sides of the picture. You should want nullsec to be much more vibrant than it is today, and you don't do that by merely increasing bounties on rats, you do it by making it much more valuable than hisec. Again, if CCP decided to pull their head out of their ass tomorrow and actually turn nullsec from a wasteland where nobody does anything other than shoot structures and welp the occasional fleet into eachother, into a bustling hive of activity where roaming gangs actually must be fought back against (instead of just ignored like the unimportant little gnat it is today), then everyone would win. Nullsec would have the possibility of being where resources are extracted, refined, turned into finished goods and used internally to fuel the war machine, the surplus sold to hisec at a profit, and all of nullsec would turn into a place where roaming gangs could actually anticipate getting at least one fight, instead of just hoping, desperately, to catch even just one inattentive ratter like it is today.

You can call me arrogant if you must to make yourself feel better, but I'm fairly certain I'm looking more at the bigger picture than you are.

PS: if you can't see which corp/alliance I'm in when looking at eve-gate, then you've got issues with your account.

Anybody bitching about JBs being a force projection tool of epic proportions, magically transporting whole fleets, daily, from one side of the universe to the other, are deluded and out of touch with reality. Everyone who's been in any sort of war in the last 3 years (I'd love to say "since JBs were introduced", but I wasn't in nullsec at the time) knows that any force projection is done via staging systems, not JBs, and they're seeded by JFs and constant convoys.

No, local helps the blob track down, bait and kill smaller gangs, because the blob has more pilots to spare for scouting. Of course, when I say "scouting", I don't mean scouting in a sense that requires any competence or skill, I just mean "look at local". A lazier, more stupid mechanism for what is arguably the most important role in a fleet could hardly be imagined, and all it does is favour lazy, stupid pilots, who incidentally are just the type who sit in blobs.

This fits the cause and effect relationships I have both witnessed and heard of.

There really is no denying it. Once you have intel, it is meaningless to foolish to duplicate getting the same intel from a second source.
Blobs, in order to maintain cohesive behavior in a reliable manner, are forced to cater to the lowest common ability present. They cannot be creative in any way that violates that need.
Scouting for such a large force tends to favor the same logic, send pilots to ranged systems, and hope they don't get distracted.

The sum total of most scouting has been reduced to two levels:
You see the name appear / vanish in local.
You actually see the gate fire, hopefully with an opportunity to see the ship being flown. This is assuming you are at the right gate at the right time.

What use of DScan or sensors?

By it's simplicity, Local Chat intel favors brute force tactics such as blobbing, since they are also based on simplicity.

I should add that simply removing local in null isn't the answer, the whole system of intel-gathering and jump-related power projection needs to be reworked. But Local as it stand makes the mechanism of ECM look good - and although both local and ECM are arguably balanced, they're both terrible mechanics.

For example, owning Sov should give you options regarding the ease of collection of intel; intel gathered should reflect personal skill and the effort put in; intel-gathering structures should be able to be temporarily neutralised by single pilots.

Right now there's a horrible binary distribution of "perfect, instant local-based scouting", coexisting very uncomfortably with "near unscoutable instantly-teleporting hotdrops". We need to move away from these extreme end-members to a more sophisticated, nuanced system. It's not gonna be easy...