Please come up with a fair and simple drawback and we can discuss it. I personally was thinking of making the module that disconnects the ship from local have drawbacks.
For one, the module itself means that the ship cannot use combat modules in that spot. But other drawbacks are also possible, such as less health, less damage, slower ship… Just take a look at the drawbacks for cloaks, nullifiers and warp core stabilizers, it shouldn’t be hard to come up with a module that has a significant upside but also has drawbacks.
Those things are gone and I see no reason to reintroduce them.
Does a wormholer, who also is not connected to local chat, lose SP when they didn’t update / insure their clone when they get podded?
SP loss and clone insurance doesn’t exist anymore and in my opinion it should not be brought back either. But if you want to make a thread about bringing SP loss and clone insurance back, go ahead. But this is the local chat thread, so please do it elsewhere.
I have proposed a fair and simple drawback. Drawbacks on the ship or module are not nearly enough to compensate for the huge benefits that this module offers. Not even 100% reduction in scan res, ship speed, targeting range, shields/armor is enough.
Of course you do not. You did not even talk about drawbacks in your opening post to begin with. You don’t want drawbacks, you just want easy hunting.
That’s a different matter. Quite frankly, I would not mind if they had to insure their clones but in turn could have death clones in holes. However, as it is today, they already have drawbacks by only being allowed to clone to their school station/home station.
Your module module provides similar benefits as w-space without nearly the same drawbacks.
I am not talking about bringing these things back without reason. I am talking about giving your wet dream appropriate drawbacks for its immense power. So far, you have yet to name a single tangible drawback for the module that is appropriate to compensate the powerful benefits it provides. Your vague hints at less HP (irrelevant, ceptors are already fragile), less damage (ceptors don’t deal damage and hunter cyno ships don’t deal damage either), slower speed (something relevant but not nearly enough). May I suggest that you do that before you keep talking down my definitive drawback suggestion that appropriately counters the power of the module?
How about you think one up? I have already given you one that makes the most sense compared to what you want.
However, here’s another thing: I just happened to have a chat with my corp ceo about this suggestion and he theorized that even my SP loss penalty is not enough of a drawback. An expendable bomber alt doesn’t care about SP loss. So, in order to make this module/feature work, combat cynos need to be go. Simple. With your module and cynos, you can just drop stuff with impunity and there are no relevant drawbacks to counteract this. Without cynos, your group would have to be local to attack things. You could not just have your myriad of hunter chars disappear from local and drop things left right and center.
This is realistic and tangible drawback suggestion #2 from me. How about you put some work into this, too? I am the only one carrying your suggestion here to make it into something that might work, you know?
Thinking of a drawback is of less importance than the discussion about local chat itself. How can we start thinking of a fair drawback when we’re still discussing the kind of change local chat would require to be less reliable as intel tool?
As I said before, I personally like the idea of a small delay after players enter system, they join local chat. Short enough of a delay that people will see a name appear in local before that player has a chance to catch them, but a long enough delay that using other intel tools like D-scan have an edge over a player who only rely on local chat.
But that’s just one possibility.
There are many ways local chat could be changed, or many reason to keep local chat as it is. Let’s discuss that and leave the minor details of a solution, such as fair drawbacks, for later once we have a good idea of how to change local.
Zhalyd, before you come with more drawbacks for potential changes, I would like to hear your stance on what you think about local chat. Do you think it is too reliable and too powerful as an intel tool? Or do you think it is fine as it is?
As said above, I am very much fine with that as well. As long as I see everyone in local, the delay really doesn’t matter to me personally. People could just stay out of local chat for the duration of the gate cloak, for example, which is one of the more popular suggestions to introduce a delay feature.
I pointed out above that I do not think that local should change. It may be considered too reliable but I don’t see evidence of that. People and ships are still dying everywhere. If you make local less reliable, for instance, with a blackout, it does not lead to more things dying, it leads to less destruction because fewer people are in space. As Blackout has demonstrated.
Just as another example: Yesterday, I took a really hilarious encounter because I knew I could take it and have fun. A guy in a not particularly combat capable ship started combat probing me after he saw me going through gates in my definitely not combat capable ships. He thought he had a chance to get a kill or two from me. I checked his killboard and he is rather successful at what he does in other places (he kills mining ships in a hilarious way). Since I knew what he was was flying and doing, I decided to stay in my PVE area when he started to probe me. He tried to combat probe me without success, he tried to core probe me without success. Since I wanted this engagement, I dropped a depot that he could definitely probe. Sure enough he landed shortly after and died just as I wanted him to die. I had fun and he learned a lesson. I checked his killboard beforehand and knew what I was up to. He could have done the same or should have been more thorough with the checks (he would have noticed that he’d not stand a chance against me in his current ship). Despite local he decided to take the engagement because his past activities gave him the confidence that he could deal with my ships.
Would I have taken that engagement without local? No. I would have cloaked and waited a while until that guy hopefully got bored and left because combat probes usually mean unpredictable risks that I am not equipped for to take on. And I would have destroyed my keyboard’s dscan key again, like during Blackout. Are there still uncertainties? Yes. This guy’s KB hinted at occasional fleet activity and I knew about a WH next door to a low sec area close to his regular hunting grounds. He could have had people on the other side just waiting for him to catch me. I did not know if he has a fleet or not because I don’t have enough alts to check everything around me. I simply made a bet that he does not. I won the bet this time, I failed it a few times in the past. All with and despite local.
This is not the only example where local allowed me to decide whether to take an engagement or just let the danger pass. Based on my experiences, I value local as a tool that allows me to have fun and not waste my time. Thus, I don’t see a need for it to change.
I too use local chat a lot to see who I’m up against and I believe this is part of the identity of null, low and high sec space: you know who’s with you in that system. And I don’t want that to change.
The main thing I want local to change for is hunting. Lately I’ve got into this nice type of gameplay (you can check my zkillboard because I do post under my main’s name) and it’s a refreshing type of gameplay.
I have been ratting in the past and with one eye on local there was nothing that could happen to me. And from the other perspective I see the same thing happening: when people dock up as soon as they see a name come up in local, there is no way the hunter can respond fast enough to get tackle on anyone who isn’t afk or not paying attention.
Other types of gameplay have options to outsmart enemies. Local does not.
If a player always automatically warps to a safe spot or docks up when a name pops up in local (and some even more automatically than others), there is very little a hunter can do, especially now that leaving a cloaked ship afk in local all day long is no longer an option.
I never liked AFK cloaky camping, but neither do I like the simple warning to everyone in system that you have arrived, even before you have loaded grid.
A small delay in connecting to local chat after entering system would allow hunters to have a better chance catching the locals who do not pay attention to intel chat or their dscan:
Hunters would have a chance at d-scanning down targets while the locals aren’t in warp yet
Hunters would have a chance to log in a sabre and bubble on top of a structure, before the locals are in warp
Local ratters who are willing to play a bit smarter by not only relying on local chat, but also d-scanning, intel channels would have higher payout and more sites to themselves than the AFK and/or automated ratters.
I, as both someone who regularly hunts and as someone who rats but never without paying attention, would benefit from delayed local in both situations.
The only people who would lose are bots and players who pay no attention except to local chat.
Any change in local would massively favor hunters unless ccp reworks combat anomalies. Ratting is already boring and monoton, now if i had to press V for dscan every few seconds i’d just quit ratting.
+any change to local would mean more disposable ratting ships. Ratters need some kind of safety to undock their shiny ships. Thats it unless you enjoy hunting ishtars, gilas and 350m domis
There are many ways to get more safety for your ratting ship than just relying on local chat of your system.
Even if joining local chat were to be delayed, there are ways to rat in near perfect safety.
Just an example I came across while exploring: paladin ratting in non-pipe system of empty constellation with bubbles on each gate and corp members/alts keeping eyes on the ingates. Good luck catching that guy, even if local chat were to be delayed.
The tools to rat safely exist, but people often don’t use them, because local that is more than enough to be almost perfectly safe.
If local chat would be less reliable to keep players safe, there are other tools you can use to stay safe.
But it would offer hunters a little extra time to catch people who automatically get safe once a hostile face joins local chat.
So i’d either need to ask my mates to scout and die of boredoom for me or sub extra accounts and buy a few extra monitors to please the hunters who refuse to hunt in wh space where their perfect conditions for hunting are met. That sounds pretty bad.
If you want more/better targets you have to increase rewards, make the sites harder so they cannot be completed in cheap disposable ships or increase safety so ratters feel safe enough to undock their shiny battleships/capitals.
Reducing safety in any way will only force ratters to adapt and use cheaper/smaller ships. That is bad for both the hunter and the prey.
Im not against reducing safety, but changing local will not give you a better experience in the long run as a hunter.
If the choice is between cheaper ratting ships or perfect local, I choose cheaper ratting ships.
The expensive ratting ships wouldn’t even be able to warp off immediately anyway when they’re locked in place due to bastion, siege or industrial core running, so those ships already need to rely on more than just their system’s local chat to stay safe.
I think a simple “non blackout” solution might be to remove local and have constellation or region chat. This way you can still know someone is there (pleasing the krabs) but not exactly where. It introduces a fog of war and encourages active play to gain the “exactly where” part of the equation not only for the krabs but for the hunters as well.
I imagine the disadvantage of this is that for seeing blobs coming or for groups that are smaller with not as good intel networks, they would see larger fleets coming from further away even if they don’t know exactly where they are at first.
Ugh… the best “intel tool” should not be an all powerful user list in a chat box!
