Howdy friends! Just a suggestion for allowing players to call ‘911’ for help or to report suspicious activity around gates or stations that calls concord for a period of time to their location. Timer could coincide with their usual security status duration.
I understand the usefulness and gameplay aspect of gate camps and the logic of multiple people in cheap ships blowing up larger ships to have a net profit, but I feel this would be a nice addition and would be logically consistent as well. If someone has mugged another person in front of wal-mart the past 5 days and been arrested each time, the cops are probably going to be suspicious when he’s out at wal-mart day 6.
Finer points: Calling Concord for help in system would pre-emptively start the normal concord timer for that level system, allowing a vigilant gankee the ability to lower concords response time by a few seconds if he sees 6 catalysts within 1AU. Calling Concord once combat is initiated would do nothing as Concord is already on the way.
Calling Suspicious Activity at a gate or station would call 1 or 2 Concord frigates to a gate to stay there for X duration just being on location, not instigating anything. If something were to happen, Concord would be on location ready to assist while the backup is still on the way. This could cause gankers to need to fit a bit more tank to survive small fire and result in a change to how gate camps are set up in the long term.
There will be an immediate fee for calling concord and there not being combat for the duration. (reimbursed if combat occurs) The price of safety. Is your Venture worth a 5 mil call to Concord to minimize getting ganked? Are your 3 catalysts actually going to profit enough in the chance that badger called for help?
There will need to be a cooldown on this function; likely several hours if not a day. If you call Concord for help, the idea being you are in danger and need to leave as soon as possible. If you don’t leave, you really weren’t in danger and future calls are ignored. If you call for suspicious activity, a low tier concord ship will be at that gate for X minutes to help in case anything goes down. The goal is not for this ship to immediately kill any ships, but to provide immediate coverfire and be able to harass glasscannon ships that don’t have any form of defense.
Alpha accounts - Unsure on this one. A Corpmember suggested no alpha usage to prevent abuse, but I feel new players would be helped most by this. However, this may also be a mechanic most new players wouldn’t learn about until they have gametime under their belt and by that point, may have transitioned to Omega. Perhaps an extended cooldown for Alpha and shorter (6-24 hours) for Omega?
System call limits - could be abused, abuse prevention methods need to be taken. If 7 catalysts find a Gilas safe spot in space, the catalysts could all call Concord at a distance and block the system from further concord calls potentially leaving the Gila unable to call for help as they warp in and blast. This would be a necessary addition to prevent overload in populated systems like Jita with 100 players all calling concord to see how time dilated they can get it. Perhaps if Concord is called in a system, they will warp to any pvp combat in the system, so even if the aggressor calls Concord, they are effectively calling it on themselves as Concord will warp to where the PVP is taking place once they arrive at the original location.
Finishing point - this is not an attempt to stop gate camping or high sec ganking. Those will still occur. This is to simply provide attentive players a small headstart in preventative measures when they suspect they are in danger in a game friendly way, while also costing the player to prevent unnecessary usage / abuse. A gate camp meta change to fit less glass cannon would also be a neat addition. Are you going full glass cannon to secure kills and risk getting called for suspicious activity, or are you going to sacrifice some dps to prevent the local fuzz from taking shots at you? Choices choices
