Lol , it is clear you don’t know what you are talking about. why do you think people had to AFK? Because with local you know 100% that they are there. So the only counter to local and knowing someone is there is not knowing if they are active. The longer they “AFK” the more uncertain it is whether they are active.
The observatory combined with local means you 100% know they are there and they are active. So they stack. There is no longer any element of surprise. AFK cloaking was the only small element of surprise before and yeah it was terrible having to AFK cloak for days on end, but the answer was not to buff local by adding observatories.
How it affects at the keyboard players:
Say for example I am sneaking up on someone near a gate with a lot of trash/ships moving around or in a site with a lot of obstacles. I am at the keyboard manually piloting to get in position, but if an observatory is out anywhere in system, to prove I am not afk I would have to stop what I am doing, warp off, recloak, warp back, and then try and position again. Sometimes It takes hours to get in the right spot. At the keyboard play is severely punished by the observatory. It is idiotic that you have to decloak and show where you are at (or have to warp off and try again) every x minutes to prove you aren’t afk even if you are actually piloting your ship.
Wrong, there’s logoff traps, bubble their way to their structure, etc, also that demands effort
Lol really terrible to log 100 alts and go to gym…
You don’t need to prove you are afk, just do whatever you want to do. CCP where clear they are addressing afk activities like they did in mining, ratting etc, what makes you so special that your gameplay would be absent for those changes? Even being a miner at the time being i agreed that afk wasn’t good for the game, and i took the Changes and adapted to it. I agree afk is not good for the game, even if it hurts MY gameplay
You don’t have to stop mining to prove you aren’t afk, whereas a cloaky has to stop cloaking to prove they aren’t afk. There is a stark difference.
So basically, CCP wants the cloaker to press a button every X minutes to prove they aren’t afk. Rather than the button being the decloak button which is a large interrupter to their gameplay, they could have done any number of things to get the same result (do X to prove you aren’t afk) without causing them to have to decloak to do it. They are already don’t have “stealth” anyway due to local so this mechanic just makes it worse.
warp off under cloak before the timer runs out, recloak and then come back again every 15 mins if you are within visual range of someone?
The obvious difference is speed, a good cloaking ship should be able to do that with very little time lost, and some mild inconvenience, if a barge had to do something similar it would be game destroying, especially in a skiff, Rorqual or Orca.
Yup, stop what you are doing, manuevering around crap, etc. Warp off, recloak, warp back, and start all over, and of course your target has moved, etc. So nope doesn’t work. Way more than just a mild inconvenience.
Honestly Mobile Obs aren’t that common from what I’ve seen. If deployed, they’re squishy as ■■■■. Accounts are that 5ish non-polarized bombers can 2 volley them with torps. Or get some more folks and just 1 shot it. If one is even deployed, which, if you’re not there day in day out or really pissing someone off, there won’t be.
I don’t even know about taking hours to pilot into position near a gate. Are you using a prototype cloak or something and going 50 m/s? Even if you need range from them, you can use pings and warpins etc and I just can’t imagine it taking hours under any reasonable or common circumstance.
I was living in null durring the blackout, so much more fun living in the darkness with my pvp alts on standby. Most people though go to null so they feel brave but dock as soon as a neutral enters the system unless they have already done so due to intel. Carebears love null.
Local should ONLY show people on grid. CCP tried an experiment where local was not populated, and all the Botters and Care-bears went berserk. It was one of the best changes we’ve seen in many years and something CCP should have the courage to put back in place.
Definitely more people are thinking about having a structure in system for putting local online or offline or acessing and pulling this intel to your alliance or fleet or broadcast it all in local (as it is today).
In empire space the structure could be owned by the empire and broadcasted as it is today, but anyone could hack it and become a suspect. In non empire space then people should anchor it, it could be a big structure as a tower or small deployable that lasts for a couple hours.
Maybe the device/structure could have tiers and demand more hacks.
How to counter the broadcast structure:
-hacks
-bash
Empire space:
-hacking makes you a suspect, can turn it on or off
-bashing concords you, unless concord is off during events, then you can bash it
Non empire space:
-anchor a structure or a deployable
-bashable
-hackable
Hacking:
-can turn it on or off, can pull that to your fleet or alliance/corp, can broadcast all players into local chat (as it is today)
Bash:
-in empire space will it will respawn later
-non empire space it is destroyed and local is completely off
NullSec should have never had Local to begin with. There are players who actually think that removing Local from NullSec would have to come with an increase in “rewards” as if they NullSec empires aren’t already the most wealth-bloated whales in the game.
Perhaps local is a bit anachronistic for a verse 20,000 in the future from RL. And in those 20 millennia satellite technology will have advanced so that something the size of a coffee cup could provide intel of all gate activity. And even follow ships as they bump around the system like a drone would.
So yes, turn off local. But we all get 100 intel drones to deploy and a crew or AI to follow the ships and surveil space that interest us.
But that might be just a little too real. Perhaps maybe stick with local.
Or better, have full null sec regions go through rolling brownouts where one region will have no local for a month, the other will, then it rolls on, at random intervals.
Just my thoughts: blackout was too much removed with nothing added to help. D-scan can provide situational awareness but doesn’t provide enough friend or foe detection.
If it can be coded such, maybe try these options:
Remove local from null unless you are a member of the Sov owner. Just the owning alliance can see, not the blue donut friends. It’s their space give them that intel option.
Remove local from low because no one owns it and Concord doesn’t care.
If you use controlled-space Null gates you get seen.
If a wormhole/filament is used there should be a delayed local timer until the Sov gates detect them. Time could be influence by the ADM, but maybe somewhere around 5 minutes for low adm and less for high adm. Maybe proximity to gates reduces that time as well?
Add a new Rig that masks ship id (local), or a timed single use hi-slot module if it can operate during gate changes. The rig would mask the player’s ship id 100%, thereby allowing it to use gates undetected by local, even by the Sov owners. Having this rig fitted in hi sec may incur the curiousity/wrath of Concord.
Possible results: Null owners keep an intel option but it isn’t 100% anymore, low sec becomes darker, wormholers and filamenters get more time to pounce, dedicated gate maskers have the “no local” they seek and they give up a slot of potential pvp fitting/rig for it, industrialists get a new thing to make/sell, brings back active probing to find those elusive non-cloakys, promotes more self-awareness to watch dscan and watch for new anomolies spawning in system, Bots may be severely affected and more easy to catch.
Just my thoughts.
