Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Your basic premise is flawed. They provide intel for people who have earned standing with their corporation for a notional fee. It is not "free intel" in that you have to both earn the standings and pay for the location. Given here is also a cooldown timer on how often you can use a particular agent (I don't know how long of one, but I do know that you can't use the same agent twice within a few minutes), at best it gives you a starting point for your search. If your target isn't moving, it will also happen to be where you find them.

I use locator agents regularly to find war targets and potential war targets and quite often I end up having to do some searching on my own to find them, especially if I happened to locate them while they were traveling somewhere.

What about when you don't want them to know that you are coming?

I personally think locator agents should be removed with the upcoming jump changes.

Large fleets of supers moving "secretly" to a new staging point shouldn't be discoverable by an alt near Jita with a week of standings grinding.

If they have someone watching in system, sure, but not remotely (IMO).

I quite like the idea of using connections to track someone, it would be better if it was a little more involved and where some activities leave more of a trail than others depending on the in game method you use to track them.

Everything your character does could potentially be traceable but tracing does need to be kept to a workable level of complexity, it is very simple at the moment, that saves game time. Espionage could provide a lot more information than just character location but how far do you want to go with it ?

So by your reasonning, one needs a network of hundreds, if not thousand of scouts reporting all the time to be efficient at finding a specific target. I see how CCP would enjoy to have you and your buddies as paying customers...

It might slow down that rate that wardec organsiations randomly target everything they can within their budget. Might make you better at the game instead of just neutral alt-scouting with -10 standings on everything thats flavour of the week.

Or it might not. Seeing as you're FA your opinion suffers much bias.

OFC I am biased, considering I depends on Locator Agents to find my contracted war targets when they do log in. Not having these Locator Agents would make finding most if not all of them almost impossible. Unless one is to sit neutral alts in trade hubs and permacamp them, which is something FA is not in the habit of doing.

Except for Marmite, who has more players than most, most of the actual Hisec mercs will have between 5 to 20 people active on average in their peak time zones. Most of these players will have 1 or 2 neutral alts for scouting, which can cover a very finite amount of systems in any given time.

Now say I got a few WT online, I spend the next 5 hours to try to find them without Locators, without success. In fact, I recruit the whole FA 'intel network' which consists of 20 alts with 10 players online to find these 5 guys, for 5 hours.

Ooops, they seems to be nowhere in sight, maybe they are 15 jumps in Lowsec in the deep end of Khanid, or 45 jumps away in Dronelands, or whelps, they are in a WH.

How long anyone looking for specific people will continue to actually play that kind of game? Not me. Locator agents are needed, no in-game 'intel network', especially not a Hisec small scale pvp would be workable, unless you only want to cover a handful of systems.

If anything, Mercs and other hisec pvpers would just increase the number of wars and sit all day long on trade hubs and trade pipes and/or some select mission systems because finding your Contract targets would be almost impossible if they keep a low profile.

NPC Locator agents stays, or finding a specific target in New Eden becomes so hard nobody will care to do it.

maybe wardecs should remain between those corporations who actually have a reason to dec each other than just the random alphabetical lottery system wardec groups used when I was in 'the game'. Maybe merc corps should actually be contracted mercs instead of wardec instigators which falls far outside the intended design parameters of wardecs.

Let me make something clear, unless your corporation has a strong industry/whatever side to it, you ARE NOT the intended user of wardecs. Wardecs do not EXIST FOR YOU. They are for groups who are competing against other hisec manufactuerers/whatever and you as a military force are contracted in to deal with an armaments shortage, you are NOT the intended instigators.

Does that clear up wardecs for you? Or are you so self-invested in the status quo you can't see outside your carefully constructed OGB +2x neutral logi alts box that it's impossible to notice the obvious?

This is a subject for for a Wardec thread maybe, I thought this was about Locators?

You are making a lot of assumptions here, without knowing me or how I work. I run 1 scout, no Logi. I spend hours zipping around to find War Targets, running Locators as I go. Sometimes I am lucky and I get on a killing spree. Sometimes I kill nothing in hours. Look me up.

You also seem angry. Bad souvenirs about your time as 'I don't know how to pvp so I joined Whores in Space'? Or your more recent blobfest KB elite pvp?

Back to your OP: Fact is, when you use a Locator agent, one of few things will happen:

1 - Target is actually moving and you just lost a lot of time 'getting there' to catch it, and need to run another Locator.
2 - Target is docked. You may decide to ignore target or go and take a look anyway, at the risk of dealing with an AFKer and losing your time.
3- WT logged off or docked and went AFK and you still lost your time getting there or waiting for him/her.
4- He's space, and actually still there or around in the same Constellation when you get there, in which case the WT is likely either a mission runner, a miner or another PVPer - Which you should know already having gathered some intel beforehand anyway.

1,2 and 3 happens way more often than 4.

Locators are used to find actual WT, not to decide who to target - Unless one is gathering intel prior to said Wardec.

FA wardecs are Contracts to a ratio of maybe 1:5 random wardecs (those to give us content when actual Contracts stop logging for the week or hide in WH) - Locators are heavily used by a lot of us.