Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I posted this on Reddit earlier, and wanted to also give it a shot here, regarding the creation of configurable locations, and a tool that would allow them to be customized a bit more easily.

I've started exploration after a fairly long hiatus, and noticed that the current location creation tool is a bit lacking. Sure, you can simply type everything in, but when you've got 60 seconds to jet from that wormhole entrance or gate, it's best to waste as little time as possible when making your next move.

What I suggest is this: let us create naming conventions for our saved locations using some preconfigured values.

For example, I could have a format for exploring wormholes to new locations listed as:

"[currentlocation] Wormhole to [previouslocation]"

Where [currentlocation] or [cl] and [previouslocation] or [pl] would be self explanatory, listing the region of space that you last were at, and the current location you're in. This would yield a location noted as follows:

"J123456 Wormhole to Jita"

Or to mark when I had been in a location:

"[currentlocation] Wormhole Safe Spot [mm]/[dd]/[yyyy] [hr]:[min][am|pm]"

Where [mm] is month, [dd] is day, [yyyy] or just [yy] is year, and [hr] and [min] constitute the time, e.g.:

"J123456 Wormhole Safe Spot 01/28/2015 12:30pm"

That way it would allow for quicker, more responsive locations that could be easily saved, and modifyable to a player's content. Sometimes you don't have the time to type in a new one and fight the autocomplete drop down menus. It would reduce the amount of typing, and allow for a bit better

More suggestions for tags could include things like [region], [secstat] for security status at a glance, or [sovstat] for a snapshot of the sovereignty (not sure on the usefulness of that, as I've not dealt with sovereignty before). These values would not update, as they pull data once and then are stored in your locations folder as normal. Military time values should also be available, for those who don't want to tangle with AM and PM.

These conventions could also extend to location notes, if you want to do something crazy with default note additions. I can't think of anything specific here.

This would be configurable under the People and Places menu, and add a new drop down when creating a location, allowing you to choose which one you'd like to use during creation, or while editing an existing location.

If possible, a way to make these locations expire as well (such as during a restart period, or after 24 hours) would also be a great thing to add; wormhole entrances and exits only last so long, and it's a pain to go through them to

The 60 second or so cloak timer given whenever you warp through a gate or enter a wormhole. If there is immediate danger, it's not too bad to align to something and slowboat cloak out, but I like to try and get as much detail as possible for my notes before jumping to another point in a system and having to deal with the recloak targetting delay and cooldown timer.

I'm slowly training up to use covops frigates, but the use of them is irrelevant to the change I am proposing.

The point is to have access to this sort of information quickly and concisely without having to resort to copy-pasting a template; once you create the template, it just has to be chosen from a drop down menu, with no requirement for typing out wormhole numbers or attempting to figure out how to spell some of the less... intuitive system names correctly.

As is, any template I created would just save the typing of two or three words.

When i still lived in WH i'd have loved this...

01 HOME YYZ
02 HS XYZ
and such are annoying to type out if you want to do it properly