Aren’t your kills not listed until you activate Zkill yourself? Or something like that idk. There is a way to not appear on Zkill though. I used to see it all the time after a scrum, you’d go to ZKill to view a tasty kill only to find the player had not yet activated his ZKill and so it doesn’t appear.
Whenever a ship is killed, both victim and victor get a mail with the parties involved, type, fitting, location and value. If either of them uploads it to zKill, the mail is appearing on the killboard.
The only way to “not appear” there is if both of you (or only you if you lost a ship to NPCs only) don’t upload it.
Sounds like a true crime case - i want to kill someone but don’t want anyone else know about it but still want to see it in my personal logs but for the rest it’s just became a secret.
Zkill doesn’t require any ‘‘activation’’ to function for any one character. It is the kills themselves that can be only selectively posted. 2 parties always get the killmail, and even if one of them doesn’t post, the other party might. Also – killmails are often linked in chat for everyone who took part in a fight. You don’t have to be the victim or last blow to post it. As long as you have the link you can do it.
Additionally – most alliances and some corps have filled their API information on zKill and so in those cases killmails will upload automatically.
Right, I knew there was something going on there. My zkill sucks so idk. Space majicks mumbo jumbo to me man.
I don’t think zkill is as huge a part of the game as OP suggests, or at least it doesn’t have to be. I spent most of my time in fleets, doing fleet type stuff so there isn’t a lot of zkill checking going on during that. At least not by line or whatever, scouts are maybe doing zkill scans. I could see doing a zkill scan for small roams but generally when you have a fleet you’re kind of looking more at comp rather than the individual pilots.
Now if you’re a FW fan then okay sure zkill plays a bigger part, but even then the problem of being outmatched can often be alleviated by getting moar frens. Does this lead to batphoning and shenanigans? Yes, sure. But that’s eve.
There are also people out there just looking for good fights too and will totally square up on even ground for the love of the game.
I guess I could understand why you wouldn’t think intelligence tools have a significant impact on the game when it sounds like other players do most of your thinking for you.
the main problem is “realtime surveillance”. Means if you go on a roam, on your first fight your whole composition (numbers, ships, doctrine) is instantly revealed. Which now means one of three things happen:
a) everyone in your vicinity who thinks he can’t fight you instantly goes docking/leaves.
b) everyone in your vicinity who thinks he can fight you will form a counter-gang explicitly built against your setup. Which means you get a very one-sided “fight” at best.
c) some curbstomp hotdrop gang is spotting you and instantly begins to move a bait into your direction and their BLOPs fleet in jumprange. To create a massacre instead of a fight.
The good fights of old where no side knew what the other really had in the end so baiting and slowly escalating was an art, knowing local groups and their strengths and weaknesses to manage fights growing bigger and in the end one side could turn the tide and boths sides had a fight to remember - gone.
That is the main reason why all Killboards should have an inherent delay/obfuscation feature at least for some hours.
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Your entire fleet was dscaned and that list copy/pasted to an intel channel within three jumps of your roam leaving station. Every time you saw someone in Local, they got your info and sent it on to their intel channels.
The only people who needs zkill for intel are in highsec or playing solo. Everyone else already knows you’re hostile, because you’re a newt, and they were told what you’re flying when you were still 5 jumps out.
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I don’t disagree with them though, yes wormholes have delayed local but they still have cloaky spies and those can sit on wormholes watching you come and go, d-scan also still works fine and even against cloaky fleets will often catch more than enough intel to know whats going on
As for d-scan immune ships, yeah there is a tiny handful and you’re not building a whole fleet out of them, there are less camera alts than there used to be but i remember the days of there just being characters named after the system just relaying local intel to chats
The point is: such a “scout” can only watch “his grid” and to a degree his Dscan range if he scans in the right moment. He has to do it manually, he has to pay attention. 3 minutes in the bathroom and he misses you passing. A delivery man at the door and he misses your fleet. His mom throwing stinking socks at him for not cleaning is room in a week and he miss… you get the idea.
Especially if you are very good with baiting (aka not moving the whole fleet as a group, staying 2 systems out with the reinforcements, measuring warp-distances etc…), scouts have (and should have) limited use. And they serve only one group. If you roll the hole after a successful or unsuccessful bait attempt, the next group doesn’t have those informations. And from just “seeing ships” you can’t tell for sure what concept the fleet is, especially when using T3 cruisers which can be DPS, Logi, Neut, EWAR…
Insta-Killboard surveillance reveals everything on the first kill or fight. Instantly. The bait is burned for the evening, the ragerolling fleet is revealed. The fleet will be hardcountered or completely dodged. And that pendulum swings both ways, for those baiting and for those counterbaiting. An escalation of fights like in the old days is hardly possible if each side instantly knows what the other side had active.
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Oh there are 100% people automating it 
Local in dead systems is pretty easy with some basic OCR and a bot sent to ping a channel on discord etc, you can do the same with looking at the overview on cloaked alts near wormholes
Manual intel is so 2006
Well, cheating is cheating, up to CCP to find and ban those bots. Any alliances leadership persons should be totally responsible for tolerating, allowing or promoting any kind of automation tools. But thats just me.
EVE was really great back then. Lets go a bit into that direction!
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One of the annoying things about automating intel is that I’m not sure it actually qualifies as a violation.
It certainly seems to violate the spirit of the rules, but thinking through how it’s likely to work, I’m not sure I can readily pick out the “illegal” step as nothing needs to interface with the game or client itself.
Image capture is allowed, and you’re allowed to OCR files on your own computer, and you’re allowed to automate messsaging in third party applications that don’t belong to CCP, etc.
It doesn’t have to violate the letters of the rules for CCP to take action. In general their stance of third-party software assistance, like window managers and preview software, for example, is that it’s fine as long as the player has to actually take action. So clicking F1 then Tab then F1 then Tab to activate all three multiboxed ship’s weapons in the same server tick is fine, but if your software just copies the initial F1 into the other clients on its own, that’s a violation. In this sense I very much see these intel alts with OCR outputting into Discord as something that violates the letters of the rules, the spirit of the rules, and the precedent set by enforcement of the rules.
Little is done about it because it’s presumably not easy to detect, but I would advice against risking it still. Same thing for something much lower tech like setting up AHK to just play a siren when a neutral enters the system you’re currently in.
This is one of those thoughts that’s maybe technically correct, but is wholly useless in any practical sense.
like window managers and preview software, for example, is that it’s fine as long as the player has to actually take action. So clicking F1 then Tab then F1 then Tab to activate all three multiboxed ship’s weapons in the same server tick is fine, but if your software just copies the initial F1 into the other clients on its own, that’s a violation.
I am aware of the rules re: input broadcasting and making input to the client in general. They’re not pertinent to a bot sending a ping on discord, OBS capturing a video stream, or a python script running OCR on frames of that stream.
Well, it’s a bit moot to discuss what CCP might do or not do or whatever, isn’t it?
The point is, the game doesn’t need to make it unnessessary easy to give one-click intel about a characters activties, fits, wingmates, gang doctrines etc… There is no real downside of having a “timer” running on killmails that hides certain details for a while. So you can still brag around having killed a Megathron in your Hecate and share the link if you want to some intel channels. But the details like Location, ship types, weapons used and involved parties are obfuscated for a certain amount of time. After that, the mail link automaticall unlocks those infos and it can be freely scooped by any third party killboard.
I could even be different for different spaces:
- in HS CONCORD surveill any combat activity and allows real-time access to those informations, for the sake of everyones safety. So killmails in HS are never obfuscated.
- in LS the Militas do that, but they don’t have that advanced tech and/or guidelines, so mails are obfuscated for like an hour.
- outside empire space, no one tracks combat actions and the SCC (or whoever) needs ~2 hours (of 4, or 6 whatever…) to confim authenticy, thus details are only revealed and accepted for API/ESI access after that time.
removed ~5 off topic posts.
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You tell em Drew!
Do you feel better now?
I never pay attention to kill boards unless I am in the top 20. So you are safe from me looking up your score card. The thing about the title “Anonymity” got me here thinking, do you really think my name is Srima Darkstar? About the only person here who uses his real name is Mike Azariah. If Mike came in here and asked for this feature request, my response would be, use a damn alt Mike, then we won’t know it’s you!
I guess my point is, if zkillboard gave out my real name, phone number, and mailing address, then I would totally agree with you. They give out the info freely, and frankly if any of you have nothing better to do, than to look at this forum character, and say Srima Darkstar has a non-existent PvP score. Well then, you really need a hobby!
I do have a high sense of paranoia. I blame some on military experience and most of it on my second ex-wife. I tend to browse in private mode, use VPN, and avoid having social pages. When I shop online I try my very best to shop as guest. It is very hard and getting harder no to leave a trace behind.