Player Features and Ideas Discussion

if that means I can engage players with <-2 sec status in 1.0 sec systems (instead of the hard -5 wherever), then sure - get rid of the NPCs.

Faction police could still have a place as "border patrol", intervening only where FW is involved...... but in general, agreed: don't let the NPCs do the player's job.

While we're at it, perhaps it is time to consider automatically adapting sec status (turning pirate choke points into lowsec unless the players take it upon them to actually secure the system).

But yeah. I'll be following the thread ;-)

You over-look the part where players are attacking players, taking out the NPCs is just a way of making the shooting of players, and the blocking of the gate, more efficient.

And faction standings hardly matter, if you make it a long term project and get enough people involved to farm the NPCs - since the system will effectively become sov - niarja would be perfect, on a pipe, 0.5, only two gates, so an easily controllable number of NPCs... think of all the permits they could sell?

And if they got the operation up and running, I'm sure there would be plenty of annoyed people who will come and fight them, or send mercs... and no doubt if the idea catches on others will come in and fight for 'sov' - you get stations without the need to pay for fuel, and close the trade hubs etc - or they could set up their own operation in a similar system

It will be great... think of all the 'content' it would generate

Did you even read the quote in the OP? Faction police are having next to no positive effect right now, gankers are easily able to avoid them and in fact the faction police directly encourage the type of suicide ganks that annoy most highsec players. Without them you'd see very little difference in your actual safety (CONCORD and faction navies are unaffected) and you'd have the opportunity to actually go after flashy red players without NPCs stealing the job.

Facpo does not hinder gankers at all. All facpo does to gankers is force them to use cheap, disposable dps glass cannon ships, which Concord already does.

Facpo hinders player interaction by also forcing everyone else, not just gankers, to fly cheap disposable ships.

Ergo, removing facpo would not buff ganking, but it would allow more player interaction by allowing negative sec status players more feasible options for what ships they can use, and thereby what ships they can risk out in open space.

This is a purely positive change.

+1 from me.

I'm curious to know why you say that. It seems like a fairly sensible idea to me...

ETA: as an addendum, one obvious way to make it easier for players to take over the role of facpo would be for Local to reflect security status - after all, the information is available, just laboriously. Especially if combined with the hardy perennial suggestion of allowing Local to be sorted by interestingness not alphabetically.

(Yeah, I know, Local's magic intel is bad, etc. But as long as you can see everyone in-system, I don't really believe in making it gratuitously hard to find out facts about them...)

They don't. They don't do anything to gankers.

They do, however, hinder anyone else who might otherwise undock in something besides a shuttle or an interceptor. The suggestion is that, by removing facpo, you allow them to undock (and therefore die) in a larger variety of ships.

Vastly increasing the potential for player interaction in highsec.

People continues to want all spaces as null sec space. Some of these living in highsec do PVE activities mostly, so have a pvp fit when you do missions or transports is out of a question.

So you want MORE defendless targets to kill ummmm NO!

-10

Clearly, you did not read the suggestion.

The same? That's not how I remember it; so unless CCP changed it somewhere down the line, the Navy hunts opposing factions whereas the police hunts -2 to -5 security status (depending on system sec level).

The major difference being the facpo DOES warpscramble, whereas the navy does not.

An alert system was mentioned earlier and that is something we need to look at and adjust instead of just dismissing.
Local and locator agents can and do fill a role in this, but they are lacking in several critical areas as well. Local only gives you information on who is in the system, and you need to have a character name for locators to be of any use.

Police everywhere have the ability to track suspects and wanted persons and that list is updated nearly instantly whenever new information is available. To replicate this in game and to facilitate the use of the current locator agents for hunting these so called "pirates" I suggest a game wide listing of all the characters with low sec status that are located in high sec. To be determined would be how is this list updated and how often, and how much detail should it give on location of the characters. My thoughts would be updates once every minute although that may not be practical from a server stand point and only give the region they were last known to be in. Longer may be suggested but I would reject them since the combined time of this list update and the use of a locator agent would only give a system location for the pirate about once every 5 minutes which would be consistent with what is practical now.

As an alternative we could increase the update rate of the list to once every 5 minutes but give the same information on location as the current locator agents do. This would eliminate server load issues, gives the hunters the same information they have now and still keeps the overall time to about the same level as using the current locator agents.