Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Your freighter vignette is not even remotely congruent to the observation tower proposals. The difference is so large that your vignette borders on hysteria. Sensor towers don't provide invulnerability; they provide intelligence that people living in sov can use to better police and evade those who wish to kill them.

Personally, I don't rat; ratting is for the lower classes. I'm far too rich to have to denigrate myself with such base activity.

My interests are more focused on being able to secure the space that belongs to me. Traffic control and detection will be vital for maintaining and defending sov under Sov 5.0.

I'm sorry - I wasn't aware he spoke for the entirety of sov null. My bad.

You see, what with the quite literally ENDLESS TEARS about "afk cloaking" and the utter hate that cynoceptors make hiding behing walls of bubbles tougher (you actually need to not fall asleep in your afktar) I'd rather believed ratting was ... something done quite a lot. As was hunting them.

I also do not believe that it is a stretch to think that if any combination of events is made possible to make ratting safer, the nullbears will be on that like flies on shite. Can't have any risk cluttering up the reward now, can we?

But by all means, try and convince me that null ratting needs to be SAFER than it already is. This should be hilarious.

Oh and in case it wasn't clear - needing to commit to tearing down sov structures over a period of days to endanger any ratter who has managed to stay conscious is not desirable nor is it reasonable.

It is tough to get a scout/alt to watch the pipe, it's true.

We don't know anything about how the actual capture mechanic would work. You are assuming it's going to take a couple of days. It's entirely possible that portions of an observatory tower could be treated like station services, simply turned on and off by an entosis link.

So instead of trying to tear down a high level concept with rhetoric about ratters. How about some constructive feedback about how this feature could work.

The whole idea of this is for players to build out civilizations in space. That is awesome. If somebody wants to stroll in and burn the fields, pillage the village and kill all survivors, it should be slightly difficult. That said with what they are looking at with players potentially being able to manipulate sec status and other things, I would think those structures would present an amazing target for asymmetric warfare. Something that can actually effect an organization as a whole as opposed to killing a single ratter.

The reaction when an individual loses a ratting ship is usually that it was their own fault and they were an idiot. The reaction when something belonging to a group as a whole is attacked, is that we need to all go and defend it. If what you are actually looking for is a real fight, instead of basically mugging someone in the street, you should like these changes.

Sharing an idea I heard on the Fanfest pub crawl

A one way directional jump bridge module.

1. You fuel it up and get everyone within range
2. Pick a rough destination on the map, no cyno required
3. Click the button and launch the fleet into the unknown
4. Based on the distance travelling the fleet does not necessarily land in the system they were aiming for
5. The fleet itself may also be scattered out over a system or even constellation
6. Everyone gets some amount of jump fatigue of course
7. You have to slow boat / pod express back

Could be an interesting day tripping mechanic.

Will observation arrays be allowed to block cynosural fields? Would be able to choose one attribute to affect [d-scan inhibiting, cosmic signature dispersal] be a good idea? Then one structure wouldn't be able to do a multitude of things, you would have to have more to do more, though it could cost more for smaller sov holders.

Will gates [npc ones too] in null-sec be destroyable? Say I want to isolate my system[s] from outside influence can I destroy the gates leading into my system from surrounding systems, effectively turning one of my systems in a pseudo-wormhole system? I imagine the logistics of getting back into my system[s] would be a lot more difficult but this could be a way of helping smaller entities survive in null-sec if they can isolate themselves from the surrounding bad boys at least until the surrounding bads build a new stargate into the isolated territory, invade via cyno or a wormhole entity shows up ^-^

I would have SO MUCH FUN using something like that for our NewBro roams and public roams! Back-dooring into random areas of deep nullsec... the gambling aspect of it - will we land split by a gate camp? ... sense of the unknown ...

Make this so, pretty please

GG

Assuming you don't carry a second of those thingies in your cargo... I am not sure whether such tools are a good idea since teleportation was recently identified as a source of trouble.

Altering the map including jump connections might be interesting. But this should require a something on both ends AND maybe also these gates should be public only.
If we have gates that are only usable by some people or can suddenly appear out of nowhere then we instantly have another hotdrop mechanism with a large threat radius that keeps people from colonizing nullsec properly.

And the scattering mechanism won't amend it.
After seeing the famous "Clarion Call 4" by Rooks and Kings, I would immediately think of this device as a gigantic shotgun shooting 100 Interceptors across the cluster before the FC screams "BELT BINGO!"
I expect that miners and ratters will love this. :-D

Obviously, this is tough to do without clearer ideas of what CCP is planning for these structures. In the absence of any official function information this will likely appear more of a "Want list" than a discussion on proposed function

Thoughts on the OA:
-- The OA should negate the reliance on Local Channel as a means of intelligence gathering.
-- Can anchor in kspace
-- Should allow owning player/corporation/alliance (hereafter referred to as entity) to control granularity of information available to others by standing
-- Entity should be able to control length of delay to pilots appearing in local. Note: needs to be a "Double-edged sword" and force entity to make a choice between options, each with their own set of pros and cons. (ie: lengthen delay but applies to all parties)
-- Tampering with star map filters is an interesting idea and I could see the usefulness of introducing a certain level of error into various statistics (pilots in space, NPC killed, cynos, etc).
-- Dscan disruption is a very tricky proposal simply due to lack of information on how far this could be extended. Is it only dscan results in regards to pilot ships? Does it tamper with appearance of deployable structures, wrecks, etc? There's a very large group of players who rely on dscan for information gathering purposes (and that extends well beyond just wormholers). I would suggest being very careful with regard to this. Some options could include reducing the amount of information that returns in results such as no ship names or types. Just a line item entry denoting ship and possibly hull size. Or possibly causing degradation of result reliability based on distance and angle of scan. This would cause pilots using dscan to use more narrow degree dscans to improve accuracy of results. However, if this path is taken then there ought to be some visual improvements to dscan in order to better pinpoint and "mark" results for re-positioning and further dscanning. (e.g. You find a pocket of dscan result signatures at 11.4 AU away and you've narrowed the band to 5 degrees. You then "mark" that spot in your 3D view in space, similar to bookmarks in the 3d view. This allows you to change position and get closer to the possible results to and begin to pinpoint the location further. Much like triangulating a position. Eventually you get sufficiently accurate results to allow your ships warp drive to lock that location as a warpable grid.
-- Pinpointing cloaky ships is, of course, the mother of all difficult topics for a large number of people. This tool, if not implemented very carefully, has the risk of negating stealth gameplay in systems it is deployed in. This would be very bad and a net loss in terms of gameplay methods to disrupt a sovereign entity. If implemented, this tool should be result in imperfect information and require a modest time investment. Something such that a player "actively" cloaked and moving has very little chance of being "pinpointed" in space. Perhaps the tool may detect a faint area of signal distortion and might localize it to the closest celestial. This provides the entity with a general idea of where a cloaked-something is currently located without identifying a cloaked ship's precise location rendering the cloak useless. The faster the ship is moving under cloak the less precise that information becomes. The slower the ship is moving the more accurate it becomes.

Thoughts on the "Gates":
-- Not sure how you could legitimately alter system-wide agility and mass and ship capabilities like warp based on standings to the owning entity of the gate so these would likely apply globally to anyone in system.
-- These could only be anchored in sov kspace. (removed sov 00 requirement based on further comment from Ytterbium)
-- The ability to alter agility and mass in a system is an interesting thought. There are multiple scenarios in combat where agility and mass are important. Most of these scenarios fall into the "small gang" meta though so I'm not certain how this would benefit the typical 00 system and 1000v1000 slugfests that those fights can escalate to. There's generally not a lot of "manual pilot maneuvering" in those fights and almost always rely on following declared anchor who is typically an FC.
-- Changing warp speeds could be neat too especially in large systems with huge warp distances. This could be a nice QOL enhancement to the entity calling that system home.
-- Wormhole altering could also be seen as a boon to the entity residing in the system allowing them to potentially augment the logistical options open to them by spawning more frequent large mass connections either to C5 and C6 class wormholes or other direct 00, low sec or HS connections. This, however, also is not without increased potential risk since you might connect to a system either occupied by or connected to another active PvP group in w- or k-space.

Ultimately, I think that these proposed systems offer some intriguing new options, but additional information about plans/goals would be needed to have a full discussion.