Player Features and Ideas Discussion

My account expires tomorrow, before I go I would like to suggest a idea I have few days ago when I was taking a shower.

Currently there are some people that want local to be removed in low or null sec, and there are even more people that does not want this. So I came up a idea with a ship that can fit some kind of module, that is when activated, it will create a invisible bubble that shield your fleet member within 500km (number can be changed for balance purposes) that does not show up on local when they are within the field and directional scan. This module would be turned permanently on or permanently off all times, that means even if you are in warp, as long as the fleet is warping with you, the fleet would still hide from local.

However much like how HIC operates, only this ship can fit this generator module, also when this local cloak generator ship enters the local, the character's avatar would display an special icon, similar to global GCC right now, so everyone in the local system can see this person is flying this generator ship, but they would have no idea how many ship it is hiding, it would be hiding 0 ship or it would be hiding 100 ships. Also this ship itself cannot fit Cloak modules.

This would make the game more interesting in few ways, it would make roaming in small fleet much more interesting, because it would bring some kind of uncertainty into the fight, when you are your fleet jump into the system, the enemy have ot make a dicision to run or stay and face you, they won't automoteally know whatever to say and fight or run away like right now.

This would also be very interesting in big fleets, because you can warp multiple genetaror ships into multiple system that enemy is trying to defend, and the enemy won't know which system is truely under attack, basically you can use this ship to bluff your fleet. To strike fear into your enemy without showing your numbers, or even just to bluff your enemy into running away if you are in no position to fight them.

Also with this ship, fleets would run into each other by accidents all the time, and this would give much more interesting pvp encounters.




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If you think above idea is interesting, I would like to build up on it even more, this ship would also field a STEALTH generator, that actually hides the ships in space and from overview on grid. However, ships that are being hidden from grid CANNOT lock anything or turn on any modules without the stealth generator ship gets killed, or generator ship turns off its stealth generator module.

Reason I don't want the ship to able to cloak because it is already cloaking other ships, so if you cloak yourself while cloak your own fleet, then nothing would show up on gate, too overpowered.

Another problem I can think of is if you have multiple generator ships on the field, you can use them to suicide to help your fleet to escape from gatecamp, so that means if you have 3 of them functioning, 1 of them dies, the other 2 would still be hiding the fleet, and by the time you kill off all 3 of them, your whole fleet would already warped from the gate, so this would be a exploit, to fix this, I would think only 1 of the ship's stealth field would function at a time, and once that ship dies, it would take at least 10 second for the 2nd ship's stealth field to function again. That means if 1st ship dies, then there is enough time for the fleet to be exposed to be engaged by the enemy.

The goal is a compromise between remove local and keeping it, by that I mean hide your ship from local, but at same time people in local would know you may or may not be hiding ships. (by showing your avatar have some kind of special icon next to it like what is GCC now)

if you only use existing ship fitted with modules, then it would be hard for people to know that you are hiding ships.

So the ships cloaks the other ones but not itself. Wow, use 2 of them side by side and they will cloak each other.

NPC faction ships should be the same kind as the one they sell to players, ie normal ships for this to be balanced for both the attackers and defenders. They should use tactics like the players do, so that the ratters and PvEers in general would be more prepared for PvP both in skills and in ships. This game is supposed to be primarily a PVP game, anyway and it does'nt make sense that the pirate factions don't use the same kind of ships as the players since they sell ships to players in the first place.

Also, like someone said in another thread. Cloaked ships should have their local shut down. No one see them, but they can't see anyone. Hidden like the spy they're supposed to be.