Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Well this is why I'm not against player enabled ways to adapt. But as far as NPC police in low sec are concerned, I am fully against it.

lowsec improvement concept #2 (not "or" - i'd ideally like to see both!)

Allow players to increase their factional standings with pirate NPC corps and get to the point that Level 4 missions become available.

1) If you have a high Guristas standing, they should stop shooting at you unless you shoot at them first. This seems like a no-brainer, though i expect the ancient coding behind this is a nightmare to play with.

2) Missions!
These missions should be the exact opposite of current NPC missions, where you fly in and attack military installations, caravans carrying goods, usual piratey goodness. The higher you go, the tougher this gets. When you get to Level 4 mission territory though, i strongly suggest a change here, and make it so that one of the following (perhaps both) are installed into the game's structure;

a) Suddenly a mission appears telling you to warp to a system (lowsec ofc) and await further orders. You warp to the beacon, and sit with a small fleet of pirate NPCs as an addition to a "respawn" that a mission runner is churning through. You warp in with the other NPCs and are able to attack (some limitations on ships might be necessary here) as standard.

b) You buy a Pirate Transponder using perhaps LP or something from the pirate store - this makes your ship appear for all intents-and-purposes as nothing more than a Pirate NPC -- other players see your ship as a red cross on their overview, and if they have NPCs turned off, they'll simply not see you at all. With this, you can have endless hours of entertainment as people warping from belt-to-belt ignore you at their peril. With this, i think it'd be good if you're marked up as something like "Gisti Hunter" or something equally innocuous BUT if a player physically zooms in on your ship, they'll perhaps see you don't have the usual NPC skin/etc.

This idea would actually require a complete expansion, but the end result would be a complete reinvigoration of many aspects of EVE Online, spawning from LowSec and moving toward High and Null. It'd also tie in nicely with the Bounty Hunting part of EVE :)

I don't think low sec should be "kinda safe". Otherwise it just becomes a place where good pvp can not occur and the security measures would be easily counter-able.

Anyway check out the idea in my signature for my kinda buff to low sec to make it more relevant.

This is exactly the kind if idea I'm trying to discredit. Also, read the thread before posting, you obviously didn't.


If this is true, then why are there so many "nerf highsec" threads trying to force more ppl into lowsec?

In response to OP:

I go back and forth from low to high sec almost every single day, along various routes, for the purposes of moving PI goods around.

I have run into exactly one low sec gate camp in the last, oh, 3 months or so of doing this. And it didn't even kill me. Lowsec is not a very dangerous place. Hell, NULL sec isn't even a very dangerous place once you get the hang of it (and once you are inside).




How do I not get killed by campers constantly in my indy ship? I follow a few very very simple steps that take less than an hour to learn how to do and less than 5 minutes a day to actually do:
1) Look up your route on the starmap if you are going through lowsec, and check "ships destroyed in the last hour." 95% of the time, this will clearly tell you if there is a camp or not.
2) If you are unsure/maybe the numbers are high enough, send a shuttle through to scout (you can carry one IN your indy ship). Since there are no bubbles in low sec, and shuttles can align faster than pretty much anybody can target you, you take almost zero risk, and it tells you if there's any obvious camp.
3) Fit a proto or improved cloak and a MWD on your indy ship, and use the cloak+MWD trick on any gates where you might still suspect there to be a cloaked dictor or something.
4) In systems in lowsec, add a simple gate observation bookmark and a insta-station-undock bookmark, and 2+ safespots (10 minutes to set up, and only a one-time effort), and then use them when you undock and such, and nobody will ever catch you, at least not often enough to make any real dent in your profits.

If you're mining in low sec:
Do the same stuff, but also stay away from the warp-in point, remain aligned while mining. When you get out of range, turn around and align with another celestial in the other direction and sweep past again. Thus you can insta-warp out without even really needing to use d-scan, honestly.

If you're missioning in low sec:
This is the only thing that might need actually game design changes. It's still easy to escape, but you can't go back to your mission anymore once somebody has found you, which is a problem. That should be addressed somehow. I agree. but still, not because of danger of dying. Just because of extreme annoyance and inconvenience beyond what it should be.

But the other types of gameplay in lowsec are already quite safe and indeed profitable for anybody who isn't an idiot. The problem isn't security. The problem is just not a big enough difference in income to make a lot of people care about the hassle.




tl;dr: Aside from missions, I disagree about the entire premise of the thread. Security ain't the problem. It really is the carrot and the stick still.

And even missions might sort themselevs out soon anyway. If CCP makes PVE and PVP fits more similar, as they seem to want to do, then missions would become very short, and thus you wouldnt spend enough time in any one mission to suffer much serious threat of being found or having to run away and wait to finish it.