Player Features and Ideas Discussion

With whatchlist removed back in March, there's been some playstyles that benefited by the change, but it hit some small community's in eve hard. I want to suggest a few small changes that imho will fix a lot of the problems and still make it work for everyone without being OP.

First allowing watchlist to work IF a wardec was active.
This will help defenders have a tool to see if their aggressors is online or not, and in effect if it’s safe to undock.
It will also give back the possibility to be able to do "focused wars" and limit the amount of wardecs needed.

Then introduce a new structure for corp and alliances, a defensive one*.
This would be a rather expensive structure you have to anchor in space, visible on scan and not be anchored within 1000km of anything.
The structure would have the same ehp and reinforce timers as a poco. Its area of effect would cover just the system it’s anchored in and online it would take 24h.
Having this structure anchored and online while at war will "shield" you from being visible on watchlist and locates within its area of effect.

* Alternatively have different sizes of defensive structure. Small for system protection, medium include surrounding systems and large for constellations that would only be able to anchored in 0.0 systems. The structures can't be anchored within another structures area of effect. (cant overlap)

And finally make locators work on people in wh's and give online status when delivering the location. This will give a minimum 10 minute delay on the online status.

With these suggested changes in place it would open up the possibility to hunt larger groups in highsec and give Mercs and wardeccers an option to hunt rather than being forced to use not commonly known workarounds or hubcamp/gatecamp tactics hoping the target comes to them. And also give defender side a tool to keep safe and be able to play if no aggressors is online. To solve WL being to overpowered the structure would work as a counter and opening up new objectives and a "reason to fight" other than isk.

Is this something that makes sense?

Except the group this benefits the most is the group with the most wardecs active. Why bother having fewer wardecs when you can have more? While it's true that this somewhat benefits defenders it does so in a way that discourages conflict entirely and brings us back to the days of free and unlimited scouting.

Realistically I don't even need to give my opponents any useful information to make use of this, I just need a free alt in corp that I can log in to check who is online and then log out. It's highly unlikely the other side will even know about the alt's existence (no kills, sits in an out of the way station in high sec and never leaves) and even if they do they won't be able to easily tie it back to the person checking.



First off the entire set of reinforce mechanics used by Poco's are going away, so it doesn't make sense to bring them back on a new structure.

Realistically, if something like this were to be used, it would make more sense to have it as a Citadel module or rig, not as its own structure.

Basically though this is pretty useless. You would need to basically just hang around, in space, near this thing gain its effect which is... pretty boring and pointless. On top of that you've actually made it easier for the troll-deccers because they don't even need to attack this thing, it's keeping all of their targets in a fairly small area of space around it. They just need to run through and check to see if anyone's there that they can shoot.



See, this is vaguely reasonable, but it's completely disjointed from the rest of your suggestions. It doesn't interact with any of the other mechanics and there's no reason you couldn't make this change on its own. Though the whole "locators work in WHs" thing is, IMO, a bad idea. That's a local terrain feature of Wormholes and you haven't presented a compelling reason to change it.



It makes sense, but only if you feel that high-sec wardeccers need their playstyle buffed, and personally I'm not seeing it. Yes, that whole set of mechanics is broken, but bringing back the watchlist (especially in a way that favors the attackers even more) isn't a great idea, and you've presented very little reason for this change beyond 'it hurt certain playstyles' which was kind of the point of the change. Those playstyles relied on infinite free information that had no reasonable counter beyond not playing the game. Your idea here proposes a possible counter but it's passive, boring, and actually helps the attackers by keeping their targets in a small region of space for "safety". Plus it's quite clear that this change has, at best, stubbed the toe of any playstyle that relies on war-decs, it hasn't actually killed any of them or even seriously injured them, it's just forced them to stop relying on the watchlist and actually go hunt their targets (which some people found to be boring, or risky) or camp trade hubs (which has been going on for literally years before the watchlist change).

The poco reinforcement mechanics was an example.. my main point is that it should be a defensive structure.
With putting this in a citadel it would force the defender to have even more assets in space, and would benefit the larger groups. The idea behind a defensive structure with aoe is that this will make a counter to the OP watchlist function if you group up as an entity. This will encourage pilots to group to well run and established corporations, instead of being left for them self in badly run corporations and alliances.

No, making it a structure simply means you as a member of a wardeccing group will simply have a list of systems with those structures and check them for targets first. It makes target hunting even easier than it was before the watchlist changes. Why should it be easy to find one particular person or a small group of people in a game with hundreds of thousands of people across thousands of systems?

And no locator agents shouldn't work in WHs. They should return the same message that they return if someone is in a WH if they are offline. If you're frustrated about not being able to find targets, have you considered leaving highsec? You can find one almost immediately if you go to the right non-highsec areas.

Fair point when it comes to being a merc. I've only spent maybe a month in HS in EVE, so I don't necessarily see the appeal of it. I would imagine a merc's lifestyle is 90% research and stalking, 10% actual fighting. That makes sense from a logical point of view.

Regarding WHs (as a WHer) you definitely can find a specific person/corp. Sometimes it takes six months, then a few weeks of planning before you can take them out, but that's the nature of WHs. There should be absolutely no free intel into WHs. They are designed to make you work harder than other areas of the game.

It seems this solution does not "trigger" people like other similar threads, could it be its an actual good solution that no one have arguments about?
At least from the people who know the mechanic

The defensive structure with aoe that hides you from locates and watchlist should be a powerful enough counter to the watchlist in wars.
And if thats not enough, there's always npc corps.

Or soon.. social corps

What if the structure did the exact opposite as suggested.
You would have to anchor, maybe constellation wide effect, and it would act like the old watch list but only for your WT and only for the constellation that it is anchored in.

This is benefit the agressor imho.. and the biggest one of those. As a defender you would have no counter, other than leave or not log on

You are limiting it to 1 system of effect. Do you know how many systems have supers and titans in them?

To even move a super or titan, each of the groups would have to first go and put down these structures in each system they are going to jump into, otherwise as soon as they move, watchlist notification.

That proves alone would provide a nice beacon of hey, supers/titans are going to jump here.

When you look at all the groups that use supers and titans, almost all of lowsec and nullsec would have to have a defensive structure, for mechanics that otherwise have nothing at all to do with lowsec or nullsec.

The logistics of that alone is a nightmare and not at all reasonable.

Just geo-restrict the watchlist functionality to highsec only and the whole issue disappears because capitals can't enter highsec.