Salvos, the issue quite simply is that without local you will just destroy all of the smaller alliances in Eve in one fell swoop. As a player above quite rightly pointed out it would destroy smaller alliances from using their space as they cannot out escalate those that can drop on them. Instead of seeing carriers and supers all you will see is VNI’s, furthermore the only places carriers and supers will be used is in the areas where the major alliances have TZ ascendancy and can react. This will drive even more people out of the game or into the big groups.
A lot of ships get blown up with local, as I said in previous posts in this thread most of the people who complain want it easier because they are not very good at Eve. I leave hunting to people who know what to do and who use the right ships and do it well.
The balance of local is good, because it allows smaller entities and solo players to operate, furthermore you can not link it in to WH space because maintaining hole control is key to maintaining your security, this is not the case with null sec due to cyno’s where gates do not matter as such, one guy in a interceptor with a cyno can unleash hell in null sec, in a WH he is nothing and getting in a full overwhelming force via a WH is not exactly easy nor is it easy to hide, it takes effort.
Overall the game balance of local is about right IMO. If people do not like local than WH space is for them. And I am sick of WH players crying for local to be removed in null sec, they really get up my nose in a big way.
Other people here are also pointing out that the map and dotlan are free intel, when I first started playing Eve I did not realise that and was blowing up my wrecks, I did not know that a count of the NPC’s I had killed was on the damn game map, so much for easy intel to allow someone to zero in on me. If you go down the route of no local then game balance requires all the intel to go.
We disagree because we approach the topic from different angles with different priorities.
I completely understand your arguments, and they are rational and sound. There is nothing “wrong” with them, nor do I dispute the veracity of most of them. Im not stupid. I can intelligently comprehend your arguments.
Nonetheless, my priority is more conflict and less safe space, and imo removing Local would result in a net increase in that, as well as more space for emergent gameplay.
Have you seen how much activity falls away in alliances that are heavily camped in the main? I say that from knowledge of the other side of the coin where the alliance I am in broke an PL attempt to take our space which included blanket AFK cloaky camping, but that was because in our main TZ we would out escalate them and they knew it.
The more people you have active, the more ISK they have the more likely they are to say lets dance…
If we wanted to live with no local, then we would live in wh’s.
removing local would make it 20 times harder to find targets in null, since you would have to actually check every system, rather than skip all the empty ones.
Come to our space in our prime time, it is more like go back to the station to get into something to go and kill the non-blue. At which point the non-blue as you put it is running away at speed as they have a real fight which they cannot handle. We also have people who like to get caught by interceptors in their VNI’s and kill them.
AFK cloaky camping is nothing to do with local, ignore that fallacy, its all to do with lazy people who can’t hunt properly, in my experience of these forums they are also the ones calling for the removal of local. I have hunters in my alliance and they catch a lot of stuff in null sec, that is because they are good hunters.
Hunters in real life often take the old, the injured and the sick, same rules apply in Eve, the hunters often catch the unaware, the nonobservant and the stupid, do you seriously want a game where you are guaranteed to catch someone even if he does everything right. What you are telling me is that Eve hunting should be made ultra easy, this is not Eve to me.
Each area of the game has a balance, with null sec the balance to cyno’s is local, in WH’s there are no ahem hot drops so the balance of local is not needed.
It is obvious by now that the current state of local intel is regarded as suboptimal for the health of the game by at least a vocal group of players.
Regardless of how you want it to be tho, whatever means of remedy that might be planned need to be in place before local is removed so that those that see the removal as a big disadvantage are able to come to terms with it and are allowed to adjust. Because their ire and discontent with the state of a game without it would be also damaging to the health of the game.
Thus, any debate about it being a good idea or not should be postponed to a point after all the planned changes to null sov have been implemented and we (CCP and the players) can examine the state of the game on an “as is” basis.
So you agree it would lead to more explosions.
Albeit, lack of Local also makes hunting harder, as you dont know if there is prey there until you dscan/probe it.
Sum total from Local removal, is more unwary targets.
I cannot see that as a bad thing.
Risk is returned and only the diligent/prepared/connected survive.
Your carrying of the hunter example was valid, except to consider that vigilance and attention is what keeps a game animal safe from a hunter.
With respect, have you ever been in a WH? The ability of a new connection opening up to someone not paying attention serves the same as a hot drop does in null. The “WHs don’t have cynos” argument really doesn’t hold water because of that reason. The only people who use that argument are people who never lived in WHs.
Local is the biggest determent to conflict in null. All it does is give people risk free intel, and gives people a chance (10+ systems ahead for large alliances) to dock up and avoid conflict. Local chat benefits the large nullsec alliances more than any group in game. There’s currently no counter to it. The solution? Get rid of local.
Without local you don’t have a 100% chance of catching someone even if they “do everything right”. Do you really want to play a game where the hunted have a 100% chance of getting away every single time, with no real effort? Because that’s what local gives large null alliances right now.
EVE already is ultra easy for nullsec living. It’s about as safe there as highsec, and has been for years. Do you really want that?
And yet somehow ratcaps and rorquals get popped on a daily basis. Even in the heart of the null block territory.
It’s almost like local doesn’t provide 100% safety and perfect Intel unless it’s used.
The only thing removing local would do is force alliances to place scouts on their in-gates. Like WH corps do with their holes.
This would not hurt the large alliances at all, since they have the manpower to do that quite easily. It would however hinder smaller groups, that might not have the pilots to spare to keep a perimeter up. Forcing more people into the mega blocks and even furthering the move towards the big blue doughnut.
It would result in easy catches and hence people would shy away from being a patsy, it becomes more like a first person shooter experience, bang bang, not something where fitting and ship choice makes a difference. The risk becomes too high basically and impossible for small groups and solos players.
A key part of that vigilance is local, as I said it means that people doing it right would be almost certain to get caught, that is not good game balance period.
Let me try to reply to you without you getting all insulting and stuff like you did in previous threads, you started well this time.
You know I have not lived in WH space, I told you that in the AFK cloaking thread, however as I pointed out I used WH space a lot to move stuff at one point and I had friends who lived in WH space who gave me a full run down of the mechanics.
I suggest you go deeper in the way that the new WH opens so people can understand what you mean by new connection, people have to scout for new signatures, but this means that they know what their risk is, it is also a single system only. People attacking have to find the connection and get a fleet there and people scout. Collapsing a hole or weakening it so not too many nasties can get in is how you control your risk, an element of control K-space does not have, I stand by my comments that WH space does not have anything akin to cyno and local is a balance against that, mainly because I live in 0.0.
Jamunda is in Curse, it is next to 1P in Catch, we then have F4R and then WLAR and then MB, PL were staging in Jamunda, now that is not 10+ systems, in fact for a good part of the conflict we would get knowledge of them in F4R, but they would often go to ZXIC so we had one system WLAR which gave us advance warning if someone was in there and active and depending on the TZ often it was not.
You are looking at someone like the Goons and assume everyone is the same, or you look at the DRF and assume that all are the same, that is not the case, trhis is like the Rorqual nerf, the setup of the Rorqual was perfect in terms of risk reward for someone with one or two of them, but not for certain Goons with 60, so you adjust the game because someone uses it to the max making it much worse for those who are not in the same situation.
Furthermore anyone living on a pipe or has systems like a pipe and F4R is a pipe will get a lot of false positives, if I warped out every time I got a report in F4R I would never kill a damn rat.
People will wait until something comes in local, and then warp out, this can take time with a VNI as you have an oversized AB and are recalling drones, so people using interceptors can make a choice on which anomaly to warp to and can and do get on them. Carriers take an age to warp and they are very vulnerable until they align, again good hunters know this. That is way people fit hyperspatials to their hunting interceptors.
You ask do I want nullsec to be ultra safe and suggest that because in some areas people have made it so everywhere has to go down to a level so those areas are not safe, well for me null sec is not ultra safe I just don’t see it and it is the case for almost everyone who lives in nullsec. But of course we are all Goons and all DRF, no we are not, many alliances control small areas of space and that is not the +10 you talk about.
Ill admit it could swing either way, but I am confident players would find a way to adapt to no Local which would result in more leeway for aggression/emergent play in NS.
I see Local as an artificial limiter, and an automation of what should be as player based as possible: Intel.
I think even the most steadfast Local supporter would have to concede that removing Local from NS would make NS more dangerous, regardless of how it favors larger/smaller entities etc.
That this topic keeps coming up demonstrates that people really can’t learn from the past. CCP tweaked null anomalies 6 years ago in an attempt to ‘spur more conflict in null’.
Expected consequences
•Some alliances will immediately start wanting to look for better space •In the longer run, there’ll be more conflicts going on, with more localized goals
•Newer alliances will have an easier time getting a foothold in nullsec
•Coalitions will be marginally less stable
•Alliances will have to choose more carefully what space they develop, where their staging systems are, and so on (low truesec systems generally tend to be in strategically inconvenient places)
None of that happened of course, and yet the “remove local” people think that what they want will do the trick. What happened with CCP’s changes to anomalies gives you a clue to what will happen.
The smaller groups in null will either ‘isk tank’ rat with VNIs and mine with Procs (bye-bye ratting carriers and rattlesnakes and Rorqsthat are actual good content) or just seek to be absorbed into bigger coalations that can offer “supercap high guard” support.
The larger groups will just mount Cynos to everything and outlaw ratting mining at times when the SUPERCAP REPSONSE FLEET falls below a certain number. And as soon as someone gets tackled, the cyno will go up, the supers will jump in and wreck everything and no one will be able to stop it unless they have supers or Dread bombs nearby, which they usually won’t because of jump range limitations and jump fatigue (which is why you put your ratting and mining systems as far away from low sec and npc null as you can).
The end result of no local is the same as CCPs efforts to ‘spur conflict’ by nerfing anomalies, LESS conflict as smaller groups get absorbed into larger ones for safety (just like in Dominion Sov, which was supposed to help small groups but instead created the environment for the blue donut of mega-coalitions).
Those who don’t assimilate into these mega coalations will simply leave (like they did in 2011) and find other ways to make isk like FW missions, incursions, wormhole alts, npc null burner mission alts and high sec burner mission alts that make 200 mil per hour…in high sec…
As i’ve said before I am half hopeful that one day CCP does something like remove local. I know some people can’t be convinced with words and the only thing that penetrates those thick skulls are actually seeing their ideas fail in real time…
Even if local gets removed, intel tools will adapt. There’s plenty of stuff you could scrape from Twitch streams without jeopardizing your EVE account standings. You could OCR for names (remember, the cloaky shows for one server tick before it can cloak and fly off!) and run audio analysis to listen for the gate flash, for starters.
*Unless it’s used. That’s your key phrase. Anyone not using the tools available has it coming to them. If someone is using local while PvEing, they will never die in null.