Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Okay Nikk, I see your point here. If other intel sources that are often overlooked are changed too (e.g. dotlan wont tell you how many rats were killed in the last hour) then I agree that removing local alone would not be as bad as it otherwise would be. Still not sure I'd want to go down that road.

The idea of a portion of null sec that has no local would be an interesting experiment, maybe a portion of Jove space. See what happens there, is it just a bunch of cloakers, BLOPs and gangs, or does it have others doing PvE too?

But you don't need a hide button. By your own admission unless you are super unlucky you wont get caught.

As for cloaking, keep in mind with a change to local, I'm all for nerfing cloaks.

It would be as simple as taking a couple of wormhole systems, and linking them by gates.

It could even be entirely new ones, so to leave the existing ones alone.

Again, I do not advocate this beyond a theoretical exercise.

I advocate for local to be reduced, or replaced by an intel system based off of meaningful effort.
And I advocate for cloaked vessels to be hunted with this.

IF I DO EVERYTHING RIGHT, I will not USUALLY get caught. That's a little bit different from a cloaker, who needs to literally push a button to get safe while already positioned.
The only time a cloaker has to work to get safe is if he's jumped at a gate, at which point I would certainly die in a miner, and a cloaker will get away if he's at least slightly awake.

And it wouldn't nerf cloaks. We could ping them, but could only scan them down if they sat still. Even if they were AFK and flying to one side, when you probe them down, you'd warp to where they were, not where they are.
You'd need to do some weird double bookmark thing, scanning twice, warping to BM1, then aligning to and past BM2, then hope to god the bookmakers are precise (which they generally are not precise enough), as your angle being off by half a degree will send you in a direction where you'd never meet the cloaker.

Setting up a handful of bookmarks like that is childs play. If you don't want to do it though, then you should be exposed to more risk. As for "knowing my trade", the only thing I can do to figure out what grav site it is is hitting dscan, which takes time, and which I have to then spend a couple seconds reading to figure out. That gives you more than enough time to get away. How come hunters must have such razor thin chances at success, while conversely locals only have razor thin chances at losing. It's not balanced bro.



For a start, the risk is higher than you make it out to be, and secondly, the huge huge huge difference is the miner or ratter or whatever is gaining isk or materials, the other guy is gaining... um, well he jumped a gate. You can't look at just the risk and not the reward. And the reward from running anoms in null is about a trillion times bigger than the reward of using a gate.

lol, it's not child's play. You have to fly out too each one, making sure your trajectory is right for each, and getting at least 200k off, since if you end up too close to a BM, you'll fail to warp. After setting up 6-8 of them in different directions, making sure there's no rocks in the circle you are running, you then can use them. Once the belt pops,due to time or depletion, you have to do the whole thing again. I don't even bother since it takes up way too much time.
And no, knowing your trade, you should know your target, and be able to know the order in which miners run gravs. This then tells you as soon as you are in which one they are most likely to be running.
Your defense and my defense are equal. Seems balanced enough to me.

Pot, Kettle, Black...
The risk of me ******* up is higher than you make it out to be. You act like I'm granted auto immunity, but I have to work harder to stay safe in a belt than I do to stay safe jumping a gatecamp in a covops.
You chose a ship with the ability to move around invisible. You can do that.
I chose a ship suited to mining in null. I can do that.
We can both do our roles safely.

What you are complaining about is that when you chose to engage in PvP, I don't just lay down and die like a good little puppy. If you want to fight, turn up in a fighting ship and expect a fight. I'll often engage combat ships, I'm not one to turn down a scrap with a Cynabal If my main combat pilot is about, even though his win/loss ration against them is... tragic. Continue to turn up in a scout ship, and you can expect the same result every time.
Either way, I'm not going to throw my exhumer at you. It's good at evasion by design, and I'll continue to use that.

I'm against it, as it boosts local's intel.

This.

Every time the game gives something for no effort / free, it is playing itself for you.

If your response to a piece of intel is an obvious and given action, the game may as well take it for you if it is prompting you to do it with the intel already for free.

For every free piece of intel, our choices are reduced. The "bad" choices are eliminated for us, in a way that makes some choices "bad" simply by being known in this way.

The only intel it "hands out" is removing the false intel planted by players that are AFK. Why should they be able to plant that intel?
At the end of the day, if we can;t even agree on that then there's a fundamental difference in our belief in the system. I simply want to deal with the ability for AFK players to permanently add threat to a system. If we can't get beyond "local bad", we're never going to get anywhere.
So the only agreeable solution is, it stays as is, I stay safe, but continue to move when a cloaker hijacks the system. Null continues to be clustered into non camped systems leaving the rest empty. Local remains as is.

Ah, that would be a fundamental difference in our perspectives, I think.

I personally view local as a chat channel, which is being exploited as intel.
Since CCP doesn't care, and EVE is a sandbox, it kinda works for everyone on some level.

It also works against us, as you point out.