Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This might have been thought of before but here it is again.

A module that a ship can add to high slot that shoots a tracker tag that attaches to an enemy ship.

You have a module in the mid slot that you can activate to get a location of the ship with the tracker tag attached. This module will show you what system the ship is in. If you are in the same system of ship then after activating module, you can warp to the ship.

Once you activate your mid slot tracking tag location module, the enemy is notified.

Tracker mod will only work in same region. If ship goes into another region, tracker mod will become inactive.

Logging off will not neutralize the tracker mod.

Defense for tracker tags:

Enemy ship can fit a mid slot mod that neutralizes the tracker mod.

The enemy ship can dock & do a repair which neutralizes the tracker mod.

+1 for locator agents.

Locator agents are slow, and it would be pretty cool to track your target from system to system. It would be an almost overpowered intel tool, but you'd have to actually tag a ship to actually follow them which helps really balance it out. Especially if the range of your "tag launcher" is pretty short.

That's a very thin "counter".

How many people fit ECCM?
The answer is very few... unless they know they are facing a jamming ship. This is because there are generally many, many more useful modules to utilize. In other words, even if you create this counter-module, I highly doubt it will be utilized outside of outlying situations, thereby making it practically irrelevant. That means your covops is still highly overshadowed by this tagger module. The only way I can see balancing the homing beacon vs covops is to make attacking a homing beacon blatantly obvious to the "tagged". They can then warp away from the rest of their fleet, they can dock and repair/remove it, and they can take steps to avoid getting tackled.

To be frank, I think your world-view is fairly limited. While in highsec this could work as you suggest, because locator agents are nearby and quick to return results. There, an alt is of low risk in being killed (even if going suspect), this is not the case in nullsec/lowsec. It is not risk free to tag someone by any means.

Can you explain why this is so exploitable?

Im assuming that to tag a ship you must be on grid and target/activate the module on them... This is far from eclipsing scan probes... I think it's different enough to provide a niche... Also what if covert ops ships had a bonus to these modules that made the tag live longer?

You absolutely should have to be on grid and target/activate the tagger module on them. I suppose if the range at which you can tag is fairly short (like 20-40 km's), then you'll often need combat probers to actually tag a ship.

So make the range of the tagger module 24 km's. Now it is fairly risky to do this, as you might end up in a bubble, you might end up pointed, etc. Sure, you can get away with it regularly, but not always. It would not be without risk.



As you mentioned, people ALREADY do this, and it is already easily circumvented. There is a reason Red Frog and Black Frog use ALTS to accept their courier contracts, and then trade the package to their hauling character. Is there a use for a tagging in this context, absolutely. But so what. You still have to get the gankers in front of the hauler and setup the gank. This doesn't imbalance the courier market, nor make ganking easy-mode. I find your objections here really over-the-top.




I honestly don't even understand what you are trying to say here.

"you can get fast tackle on everything bigger than a destroyer". What is your point? If you had the choice to tackle a target, or tag a target, you usually chose tackle.

I already explained two scenarios this would be very useful:
1.) A gang comes through that your corp isn't ready to take on yet. You have a person tag a ship in the fleet so you can potentially monitor where the gang heads. This is very usefull, and locator agents are typically way to slow to provide the level of intel being proposed.

2.) A group of dreads undock from a staging system. You tag one to perhaps locate where they are tower/POCO/IHUB bashing. This gives you time to form up, setup a hotdrop, and hit them before they return.

I can think of traps to setup for this, both as the tagger and the tagged. I can think of many useful ways to use these modules. Just because your afraid someone will follow your courier contract and gank your ship, which they ALREADY can do, is not a reason to shoot this down.

No surprise.


You are defeating your own objections.

If you take a step away from the screen you might notice you are being defensive for no reason and support a silly idea.

And even the other point i didn't quote, you mentioned red frog accepting them through shadow corps and so forth trying to avoid this and say in the same breath that the new features wouldn't impact on that, which is exactly the opposite as stated by you below....

If you hadn't 4000 likes and posted some good arguments in other threads I would believe you quite thick... I can only concluded you must be biased somehow or got some skewed perception on this.

Take a step back, breath deep, look at it fresh, without your personal 'this is cool' feeling.

Seriously ... and now I am off.

Since I get the impression you don't know this, Red Frog and Black Frog ARE shadow corps. If you are a member of these premiere freighting services, you don't put your freighter character into the Freighting corp. You put a contract alt into the corp, and segregate your freighter pilot so wardecs have very little effect on conducting business. This is why your complaint about tagging freighters makes little sense. We already have some intel tools to follow these contractors (local, dscan, probes), and while a tagger would add to the toolset, it would have little impact on these businesses because they already obfuscate their freighter pilots.

Current real-time intel tools in this game are Local Chat, Combat Probes, and DScanner. I've been an advocate of adding more intel tools to the game, and see this as a decent proposal. Perhaps you feel having the realtime location of another player too powerful. I concede it is powerful, however I consider the effort it takes to tag a ship an acceptable cost for that information.

I personally think that a warp-to-me tag is a bit too much, but feel that having it be shortish time duration coupled with it directly informing the tagged they have been tagged as a reasonable trade off.

The System location tag is moderately powerful, but again I don't see it as too much. I like the idea you can use it to follow a target's movements, which will facility future engagements.

It sounds like your main objections are:
♦ You can easily tag a ship and then have Realtime location intel on them. -- You think a suspect timer is too easily avoidable for this intel, to which I would also point out docking and repairing removes the intel very easily too.

♦ You can "hunt" a target by following them, and this intel tool would remove the need to follow your target. -- This is a good point, but the information is much more limited than you get from actually following a target. Following a target, you keep up-to-date on gang size, gang location, and gang activity. With the tag, you only get information on a single ship's location, which might not be with the rest of their gang anymore. It doesn't tell you if the gang size was reinforced with another squad. In short, while the location is very useful, it is also very limited, which is why I don't see this as over-reaching.

I have a lot of likes because I generally put some thought and reasoning behind my posts. I point out flaws where they appear, but I also point out good ideas and helpful feedback. Let's stop the innuendo, lets not hint at problems, and instead speak blatantly. Tell me how you would abuse this, and/or tell me how this would negatively impact your play style. When is the intel the tagger provides exploitable, when is it too powerful?