Warfare & Tactics

If you remove local I will put a 5 man fleet in a pull bubble with scouts watching the gates in the surrounding system. When you engage them I will uncloak 60 tempests and alpha away your entire fleet. It will be like getting hotdropped. Only no few seconds of warning when the cyno goes up, and I won't have to pay, house, and care for a 100bil isk ship.

I will BOPs bridge stealth bomber fleets into your system in deep safes. The first time you will know something is wrong is when the suicide dictor lands on you and 30 bombers decloak in three different formations and drop 30 bombs on you in groups of ten patterned to avoid overlap between the groups. 10 seconds after you realize there is a problem you will be dead.

We will leave cloaky cyno hictors across the map. You will never know if your next warp will land you in a bubble in the middle of hotdrop.

We will fight epic cat and mouse battles across 0.0. Bombers, cloaky snipers, and cloaky T3 gangs will be the order of the day. Paranoia will be the watchword. Any moment you may be seconds away from a death you had no way of preventing. It will be epic.

REMOVE LOCAL NOW.

Local chat doesn't have to go, but I see no reason for a list of people to be on its right.

Your reading and comprehension skills are pathetic, idiot!

One of you WH types suggested that because having no local works in WH space they should apply it to Null, so I suggested that conversely we should develop the test further by allowing cyno's in WH space as the test was incomplete!

Perhaps I should try to explain slowly, so you might get it, WH works and not having a local is good, however you do not have cyno's in WH space. So if you have no local in null space based on the WH experience you will draw the wrong c o n c l u s i on, got it?

I find you rather amusing, please continue to make a tit of yourself!

I'm thinking post was a troll. He accurately explains why nerfing local will turn the game to **** but then he says he wants to do it.

He is being sarcastic, yes.

I am expressing a slight irony over that, since his conclusion is incorrect.

The underlined sentence is a glaring example of where his attempt at logic fall flat on it's arse.

He goes on to write those long snide remarks only to sum it up based on the assumption that it's impossible to fend off any of the ideal scenarios he "would love to inflict on others". The thing is, regardless if you have access to cynos or not, the situations he describe are already possible with some modification outside of claimed and otherwise intel tooled space. So while he is being sarcastic, similar scenarios are reality for other people today. It's one of the key issues in the discussion and he's writing it off as some fable: "if only we could do this, look how exploitable, hurr hurr...". I would love for him to come do those things where i live, and get me local fights. Fights that enable him to initialize them rather than burnt-soil denial and just being run out of local when i amass a superior force.

I said earlier that i'm uncertain about my own position when it comes to the potential removal of local, and i still stand by that. His post however is yet another perfect example of why that discussion is not only eligable but also quite healthy for the community to go through. Those attempts to discredit the very discussion of the topic only serves to point out the importance of trying to keep an open mind and discuss the topic instead of barging in with some preconcieved notion and trying to be sarcastic.

You don't need cynos to surprise and overwhelm targets in WH space, and if cynos are such terrifying contraptions he could take a look at how lowsec play out today, where traffic is so high in a large portion of the systems that no one use local as an intel tool to discern potential cynos. Yet cynos are allowed there and do affect both the PvE and PvP environment. Instead, most people there actually do rely on the onboard scanner and inventive player response to any threats. That's something certain aspects of lowsec, npc-null and WH have in common - and something that is sorely lacking sovnull.

I'm uncertain about any drastic measures with local because i'm against any form heavy limitation to specific mechanics in the game. I don't think only relying on the scanner would be better than only relying on local. The issue today is that many pilots rely quite exclusively on local (and extended use of intel from local). That's not good either - and certainly worth discussing. Complaints about AFK cloaking is a subset of that discussion. As with any discussion regarding balance, the discussion should revolve around finding balance between the extremes. That's far more constructive than hurling poisonous comments at either extreme.

That's exactly the discussion i'm trying to objectify, so we have have an earnest talk about it.

When you say something like that "you think local is a balanced intel tool", you need to define it by comparing it to whatever other tools it's supposed to be balanced to and in what element it's being compared. The discussion about local as an intel tool and the extension of AFK cloaking (which is the particular topic this thread pertain to) talk about the balance of those intel tools in that specific environment: sovnull. AFK cloaking is generally not considered an issue out of sovnull. Local as an intel tool is also generally not considered malbalanced outside of sovnull. Thus the discussion can be objectively limited to the balance between local with intel channels and other tools (such as probes and onboard scanners) in sovnull. If you belive "local is a balanced intel tool" you also belive that the onboard scanner is as important as local in sovnull. Is it?

When you use a loose term like "pvpers" to limit the pool of your example, you also need to define that. If you refer to it exclusively as someone who is actively on the offensive in a system that is quite far from a player who would describe themselves as "a pvper" in general (ie., being a member of a corporation that primarily deal in PvP). Arguing that most people you know tend to use the scanner when they look for PvP-targets is quite obvious and pointless without an extended discussion. Most people i know tend to use local when they do that too, however very few people other than those i know tend to use the scanner defensively (either when they PvE, or from a defensive position in PvP).

Does that say anything about the power of local as a defensive intel tool?

Does that say anything about the balance between defense and offense?

Does that in any way relate to AFK cloaking and the percieved safety of sovereign systems?

The same goes for the loaded words of "making PvP pretty silly" as that is not a commonly accepted definition. Some people will argue it's not silly and others are yet to make up their minds and want compelling arguments rather than blank statements. Blank statements have the same problem as sarcasm: If you meet a person who know that there is more to it, they will quickly look beyond the statement and disqualify it. If you are a keen participant in a discussion you tend to aknowledge opposing positions and appeal to the middle ground. Saying it's "silly" is rather silly.

While i am still undecided about local, i know this game well enough to having experienced alot of the options you still have, to deal with a disadvantageous position (such as being pointed by a cloaky scout). In fact, i have dealt with that from a numerically inferior position many times in both PvE/PvP and PvP/PvP. I have dealt with it through piloting, i have dealt with the attempt of it through precaution and i have dealt with it through counterception. Saying that is silly is not going to move me any more than AFK cloaking where i dock is going to stop me from playing the game.

That alone is obviously not going to make me climb the fence and demand a removal of local either - but i aknowledge that it's eligable and i do so from a position that currently seem to have much more depth than what you or Mukk have presented so far.

I can only repeat, i consider the dream scenarios he mentioned to be reality already in certain aspects of the game and i consider them far from silly. You wouldn't belive the amount of times i have escaped "certain death" through simply keeping cool and making the job of the ship(s) tackling me difficult. Flying numerically inferior in general tend to give you daily practise of that routine. It's far from silly suggesting you kill a bomber (or spot a cloaky dictor before-) tackling you, or warp before a ship that does not have decloak-bonuses manage to lock you or actually discourage poaching in your home by actively defending your system yourself, beyond an occassional show of force by the accumulation of your coalition. Being pointed does not equate to being dead and a hostile ship appearing in local, or even on grid, does not equate to being pointed. A hostile cyno being lit does not necessarily mean that you have to be right ontop of it.

That comes from experience, and is not something that can be so easily shrugged off as silly.

Those finer points of the game are also what's becomming more and more of rarities, as scale of resources dominate.

How about this.

Local stays the same, in the sence that you see how many pilots are in system in the top right. You just dont see anyone unless they talk in local. Dscan then give more info and has like double the range. If you scan a ship you can click show info on it and see the pilot info and all that. When someone is scaned and you show info on them, they apear in your local and then disapear when they leave system.

i mean thats really all local does is lets you see who is in system and see if they are in the same corp/aliance.

removing local in nullsec would be the best thing ever, null would still suck poopie tho, not sure how to fix that

No

Because some people like to fly solo and have an idea when the trap has been sprung. Plus I already have to hit that stupid dscan button enough, at least when local is empty/blue I can take a break.