Hey fellow pilots! Former wormholer, full time null resident here with an idea. I’m not sure if it’s technically feasible or even desirable but I thought I’d throw it out here.
When in jspace, it always says that the sub space communication beacon is not available (no local). While I don’t support removing local from null entirely, what if we could do something like this?
Add an option when you right click on your capacitor to manually connect to the beacon. This would make you visible to all other pilots in the system that are connected to the beacon so that allies can see each other. If you don’t manually connect, the beacon will scan the system every 60 seconds and you would have a chance to avoid detection based on the systems Truesec. My home system is -.68 which would mean, say, a 34% chance to avoid detection. Maybe this could be increased with rigs and/or an electronics upgrade module to a hard cap of say 75%. Once you connect, you stay visible to all other connected pilots until you leave the system.
Hunters would have a window to locate and stalk targets. They would see ships on dscan but wouldn’t know who they are because they aren’t connected to the beacon. You would see your allies but you would never be able to tell with 100% certainty that the system was clear.
This may have been thrown out already and I’m sorry if I’m beating a dead horse. What do you all think of this?
That’s the best concept for local rather than, “delete local” I think I have heard. It would be hard pressed to get it done and would need to be refined. I do enjoy the aspect of it though.
Sure thing. However, your clone is connected to the gate network as well. If you chose not to connect yourself to the gate network for identification, you will lose 5M skill points when your pod dies. And if there are no 5M SP available, your characters gets biomassed.
Yeah, There would certainly need to be some refinements. I was thinking, if someone is detected they could just jump out of system then come back in… a timer would probably need to be added to prevent abuse.
Also, I wonder if it would be possible to make an IHUB upgrade that would upgrade the detection ability and/or shorten the cycle time of your systems communication beacon. Make local part of the sov mechanics. I think this could go a long way toward addressing the bot issue.
None of these hugely over-complicated schemes people keep suggesting are the way to go, in my opinion.
This idea is practically equivalent to removing local, as people will have to assume that the local list is inaccurate at any given moment and therefore can’t be relied on for intel. So they’d have to change their tactics in exactly the same way they would if local were removed.
It will have the precise same effect on the game, except this would be hugely complicated to implement and confuse the crap out of basically everybody.
What about tying local to the ADMs? Say your alliance holds sov over 80 systems but only has a noteworthy presence in 10 of them… you’d have 10 systems with good intel and 70 systems with spotty intel.
The only thing that would do is ensure nobody ever ventured outside those 10 systems, leaving the remaining 70 completely void of anything.
Presumably the goal with these kind of changes would be to increase risk and give hunters/roamers a better chance of getting kills. Driving the entire population of nullsec into highly concentrated, extremely well protected, pockets of space would be very counter intuitive, and likely result in the exact opposite of that goal.