Alot of people hate local, its instant intel about who is in your system which is free and comes standard in every systems (except wormholes) which makes it almost impossible to catch people by surprise etc and makes fights and destruction less likely.
Alot of people also love local, it gives them a sense of safety so they can rat/mine etc. with the knowledge that noone in their system is gonna blow up their ship as long as they keep on eye on one window for anything not blue.
Everyone knows we need more ISK sinks in this game to stop the rapid hyper-inflation, so ive come up with an idea for a way to sink some ISK, and in return - people get to keep their local intel.
Step 1: Remove all local intel in nullsec, the same way wormholes work
Step 2: Make an anchorable structure for which the BPC can be purchased from CONCORD for a load of ISK + LP, once anchored this structure provides the current players in the system which are of the correct standing (owner could make it public to everyone too?) a list of all players currently in that system, either the same way it is done now, or a new kind of dscan-style thing which lists players when a button is pressed, make it so it cant be anchored in wormholes, lowsec and highsec will keep local intel as usual.
Step 3: Give it 1 reinforcement period and not too much HP, so they arent too difficult to blow up, but can still be defended (similar to ansiblex’s), make them take fuel too.
Step 4: every null sec bloc in the game is having a ton of ISK & LP sinked into buying these structure BPC’s and tons of minerals are being used to build them and fuel to keep them running, they will get blown up quite often by invaders etc so there will always be people buying them and sinking even more ISK into them.
You now have a new constant ISK sink that people will put their isk into.
I like this idea, but it would be better served with a few changes:
Don’t make it an anchorable structure with a reinforcement timer. That only favours the big corps/alliances. Instead, make it a deployable that lasts for 2 hours, but can be relatively easily destroyed (100k-250k ehp or so?). Make it bulky (200 m3?), but fairly cheap to produce (15-25 mil).
Unclear whether it would be better for it to simply enable Local for everyone, or be corp/fleet/standing-specific. Surely as hell would be a lot easier to program just activating it for everyone, as a sort of extension of the jumpgate communications network.
Would have to come with an increase in ISK-making in nulsec. Either increasing NS rat bounties by 25-50%, or giving people a flat bounty bonus for completing a combat site, based on the site’s tier and level. Say, just off of the top of my head, 1 mil for Yards, increasing by 50% per tier, repeating (so 1 mil yard, 1,5 mil rally point, 2,25 mil port, 3,375 mil hub, ~5 mil haven, 7,6 mil sanctum), plus another 10% per level. Split the bonus between fleet members active in the site, but add a small bonus to encourage fleet running (say, +6% per fleet member, up to +30% total).