Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Want to make K-space strategy/tactics interesting again?

Kill local chat.

/bow

-Jal

Totally, bro, totally.

Or they could change local to constellation wide. The perfect middle ground between current local and w-space.

You need to provide an intel gathering mechanic and tools to share that intel before you completely remove the only "effective" intel gathering system from the game.

Dscan with appropreate overview settings. noob.

Combat probes already tell you what kind of ship a person is flying without being on grid with them. And they take some work. AND both groups have an equal chance to scan down the other first (sort of. Slight home field advantage, as there should be). That was easy!

As for pilot identity, I don't see how a sensor could realistically figure that out from 600,000,000 kilometers away if the person didn't want to be identified. That seems pretty ridiculous. A bag of meat is a bag of meat - there's no way it could figure out your facial features or whatever to distinguish you from another person (unlike the thermal signature of a ship, etc.)

Nor do you need that information from a game design perspective. If you're running a responsible and bang-up corporation or alliance, then you should KNOW what people are up to, or be able to easily implement communication systems by which friendly pilots can let you know they are entering a system that your group watches over (to save you the trouble of investigating). Not knowing if a mysterious pilot in the system is friendly or not is your own fault.

I say you should have to indeed be ON GRID with them to know their identity. Maybe not even then, if they choose to hide it (instead, within the game's "looking distance" which is 100km or something).



Edit: People could choose to carry and activate transponders if they wished to, which would broadcast everything about them upon entering the system. This would allow alliance members to announce themselves voluntarily when entering your protected alliance system, to ease the strain on intel people. (Rather than "not blue shoot it" you'd have "not transpondere'd investigate/shoot it")

^

game lore says because people use gates they know your in system, concord still run the gates even if they arnt in null low etc.

How ever people titan bridging, using black ops or cyno/wh connections could technically be excluded from local until they jump through a gate to the next system.

Wouldn't work, they would AFK cloak themselves, to say nothing of each other.

Maybe that's the solution, keep listing pilots who logged off in systems for two hours after they logged....

I think it's fine for the game to tell you how many people are in the system. Just not anything else without dscanning (within 14 AU) or combat probing (further than 14 AU)

And I'm guessing that the US military either uses encoded transponders to identify themselves in less critical situations, or they just know when and where they deployed their own planes...

Both would be perfectly viable solutions here. I mentioned the possible game mechanic of choosing to have an actively broadcasting transponder up above, and corps/alliances who wish to lock down a whole system should have the burden of having to keep track of where their own members are. If you want to do that as a corp, then you need to be organized and disciplined enough to have everybody fit on their transponders before entering the system, OR announce themselves in chat, etc.

I did read your thread. it seemed magical and overly hand-holdy. if you just had an alt in a ship 4 AU from each major gate (or if your system is smaller than about 10AU across), then it would function exactly the same as it does now with those ideas, which defeats the whole purpose. It does NOT make intel harder at all. It just makes intel harder for people who can't afford 4 throwaway alts to run on second monitors all the time... That reinforces the status quo if anything, rather than mixing things up.