Nullsec local intel changes

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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Let me start off by saying:

  • I know the thought of change is scary.
  • I am not talking about a full blackout 1.0 of nullsec local.
  • I do not want a situation where players feel like they are unable to rat/mine/whatever in their own space, or where they always get caught by roamers.
  • I want to reward space owners for reducing the reliability of local chat intel.
  • If implemented in the way I envision, this hits both ways. Used right, the lack of local intel can give both the system owners and roamers an advantage.
  • I know there are problems that need solving before this is implemented, and this point should not be taken lightly.

First a little bit about myself, and my point of view. I have been a roamer, I have been a ratter, I have been a miner. I have lived in lowsec, nullsec, wormhole space. I currently reside in nullsec. This affects me directly. Local intel is something that is constantly brought up, but I have not heard any well adjusted suggestions of what to do with it. Its either leave it alone or go full blackout 1.0 with no inbetween. There are things I wish I could do in null, which local make hard or even outright impossible. This is something I have been mulling over since the Equinox changes were released. I give some examples of things I imagine could come of this at the end.

The problem:
Local chat gives full and perfect intel about everyone in a system instantly. This restricts gameplay and opportunities.

Examples:

  • A single scout can effortlessly watch an entire system, no matter the size.
    • This turns the job of scouting into a mostly passive activity and it removes a lot of potential plays for both sides.
  • It makes travel through nullsec pretty safe.
    • If you take precautions, you can be safe anywhere. But you only need to take precautions in systems that have players in local.
  • You can not hide your presence, neither as a system owner or as a guest.
    • This devalues cloaking and covert play. Not just cloaks, but also d-scan immunity through ship traits or hiding behind the deployable.
  • Certain activities can be done in near perfect safety, assuming you keep an eye on the local member list.

My suggestion:
Connect local chat function to a sov hub upgrade with multiple tiers. Should consume power/manpower, though relatively small amounts on the lower tiers. Should ideally be dynamic enough that you can make changes to the functionaltiy without waiting for next downtime, as well as easy and cheap to swap out with other tiers.

Missing or unpowered: No automatic members list updates unless the pilot speaks, like we currently see in wormholes/pochven.
Tier 1: A delay before member list updates. Maybe up to 1 minute, same as gate cloak. This tier should be very cheap, and be considered the baseline.
Tier 2: A significantly shorter delay than the above, 20 seconds maybe. Otherwise the same. Cost should be high enough that it is felt.
Tier 3: Local as we know it today, with instantly updating member list. Cost should be high enough that it feels like a sacrifice.

Issues:

  • Adding another system power/manpower draw this soon after the old numbers were “solved” might be real unpopular with the people in charge of setting their space up. Making this addition might require an adjustment to available system power (again), increasing it by a Tier 1 or Tier 2 amount. On the flip side, doing so would open up an opportunity for prioritizing other upgrades over local.
  • Tier 1 represents significant danger to ratters and miners, and could be too unfair. This might need solving in some way where it doesnt just devolve into forcing people to keep an alt watching the gates, or the incentives need to be large enough that the reward outweighs the risk.
  • I must admit only a surface level knowledge of the workings of the current sov hub upgrades. The underlying systems may not permit the dynamic system I would like to see.

Possible PVE incentives, ramping up as the tier decreases:

  • Increase bounty modifier maximum and recharge rate.
  • Increase the number of anomaly spawns or reduce anomaly respawn time.
  • Increased chance of faction rat spawns.
  • Increased escalation chance.

Desired outcome:
Nullsec space owners choose to downgrade local, either for incentives or for strategic purposes, or both. Should make nullsec more risky, both for the inhabitants and the roamers. More wrecks, but also more rewards. Adds more space topology, potentially increasing the value of large systems

Examples:

  • Turn off or downgrade local in certain systems to allow pilots higher rewards at the cost of higher risk. If more system power is added to accomodate for the local upgrade system addition, could also increase the value of currently too low powered systems to fit desired upgrades that get enough when local is removed.
  • Easier to catch out roamers who cant see local spiking while they bully the ratters/miners.
  • Harder for roamers to know if there are ratters/miners in a system, especially in a fully dark system.
  • Strategically shaping your space:
    • Deny intelligence for travelling enemy fleets and hide your own scouts in key systems, hiding the fact that the fleet has been scouted.
    • Hide a gatecamp. Could use d-scan immune ships or the deployable to make it even harder to tell its there.
    • D-scan immune ships waiting inside a juicy ESS without showing in local, waiting for the next victim to try it.
    • Go local dark before a defense to hide your numbers. Same could apply to stagers, hiding the fact you are forming a response fleet.
  • Promote group activities, where scouting nearby systems and gates can also have value to the group as a whole. Potentially a job for lower skill power pilots who cannot parttake in the main activity.
  • Make travel through enemy space more dangerous.
  • Make unowned space feel more barren and unlived in.

If you got this far, I hope this made some kind of sense to you. If you got input, please post it. I got no illusions about having thought up a perfect system, and I am sure there are sides of this I am not taking into account.
On the flip side, there are bound to be more fun ways than I can think of to take advantage of it.

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Poor idea. Why should sov holders pay for random people to have local chat. This has been suggested before and it still makes no sense for 2 reasons:

  • Either everyone has local with these SH-upgrades, but that means Sov Holders pay for local that hostiles can use. This is ridiculous from the sov holder’s perspective.
  • Or Sov holders have local but random people going through their space do not. This immensely disadvantages them over the locals. This is also ridiculous.

Either outcome has downsides that only increase frustration in the game and add nothing positive in return. You even admitted yourself that you want option 2 as outcome. That is absolutely not desirable for a healthy null sec.

The way Local currently works is perfect. It’s a level playing field for EVERYONE. Everyone is visible, no one can hide, no one has an advantage.

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Cloaky camper has entered the chat…

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I think this statement can be proved false simply by inverting it.

Everyone can hide, no one is visible, no one has an advantage.

If the former were true, then the inverse would be true. Yet, I believe most would say, “Absolutely not. Without local, the home team is grossly disadvantaged to roamers.” Therefore, the status quo advantages the home team. This was demonstrated pretty well with Blackout. Nullbears just stopped playing.

As a sometime null roamer myself, I don’t feel the status quo does me any favors. If I’m passing through, or if I’m doing a little PVE plunder-and-run, I care much more about not being seen than I do about knowing who else is in a system. As it stands today, I can get lucky and use a filament or wormhole to arrive in an empty system. But as soon as anyone else pops in—even if we’re on opposite ends of the system, well out of d-scan range—I’m spotted in local, alarm bells sound in the holding alliance, and the hunt is on.

Perfect intel is clearly an advantage to the sov holder. Generally speaking, in EVE, one has to pay a price for advantage. I think the OP’s suggestion is overly complicated (and unnecessarily wordy) but I agree with the sentiment that local should be a sov upgrade (a simple binary one, on or off).

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It’s an advantage to everyone as you also have perfect intel. It is not a one sided advantage like Sov hub local chat only for sov holders. Getting spotted is your risk for plundering things that don’t belong to you.

Only players did. Bots found ways with intel bots at gates to keep reporting in- and outgoing traffic.

Then the sov holder pays for a system that hostiles can use. That is not acceptable. It also goes against all other systems around sov and alliances. You can shut out hostiles from docking, using JBs, from seeing and using your services and so on. Why should a paid for local service be accessible for hostiles?

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But I don’t need perfect intel to do what I do. My ability to slip in, do my thing, and slip out is not benefited by local any more than by d-scan. Local and the intel it provides benefits the home team far more. As I said previously, if local advantages everyone equally, then no local would likewise advantage everyone equally. But if we’re honest, we all know it doesn’t.

Thank you for substantiating my point. I’m not here to solve botting. That’s a different thread.

Firstly, that’s a straw man. I never argued that local should be accessible to hostiles, and I’d have no problem if it wasn’t. But you could also flip that question around and ask why should sov holders get local for free?

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That’s not a flip. Everyone has access to the free local. It’s not a sov exclusive thing.

You did:

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The point is, it could be. Local is a service, enabled by the stargates, that apparently uses some resources to provide (hence, the lore behind Blackout). Presently, the empires (or is it CONCORD? I don’t recall) effectively “pay” for that service. You enumerated a number of other services that sov holders pay for, and there’s no reason local couldn’t be such a service. I.e., the default condition could be delayed local, and the sov holder would choose (or not) to upgrade that to immediate local via a service structure.

I suppose you could interpret “local” in that statement to mean “local as it presently is,” but that’s not what I intended. And when I said, “a simple binary one, on or off,” that was in opposition to the tiered solution with various timers that the OP proposed. You could certainly have delayed local by default, and then a sov upgrade that provides immediate local only for the holding alliance members.

All that said, your argument for the status quo seems to be that it’s the status quo. Can you give a reason other than, “because it’s always been that way,” that immediate local should be provided for free to an area of space that is effectively “the frontier”?

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My argument is not that it’s always been this way. My argument is that changes to local as suggested here have no positive impacts and only negative downsides.

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There are only two ways about it. Either everyone has local, or no one does. We’ve already tried the no local for anyone route, and null sec cried to the heavens. So, local for everyone it is.

Wormholers manage just fine without it.

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Nullsec somehow seems to think they are special. Make changs to local, they cry about it. Make changes to mining, they cry about it. Make changes to cloaking, they cry about it. Make changes to moons, they cry about it.

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To be clear. Because I pointed out above that there would be a positive impact for someone [myself] who is not a nullbear. So to say there would be no positive impacts for anyone is disingenuous.

By the way, it’s fine to make an honest argument saying, “I don’t like the proposed change because it would be bad for nullbears.” There’s nothing wrong with representing one’s own interests.

Also, note: I use the term “nullbears” simply as shorthand, and not with any pejorative intention.

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Personally, I don’t think any security space should have local. It would increase engagement for everyone. Gankers couldn’t just pop into a system and see how many people are in there. Miners and mission runners would have to watch dscan. You also wouldn’t be getting random corp invites from players just clicking on your name in local, and other such nuisances.

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It’s because CCP caves every, single time. And this emboldens null-sec to continue to believe they’re “special”.

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I expect it all comes down to financials.

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Maybe. But that’s also why EVE has been stagnant for over a decade…

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It’s a Catch-22. You can’t grow without shaking things up and adapting to the market, but if you shake things up too much, you might lose your existing playerbase. So the safest option is to do little or nothing.

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Unfortunately, that’s the way it’s going to stay. Any major change to the status quo would cause an exodus of quite a few players. Enough that CCP wouldn’t dare make those kinds of changes. I think they learned their lesson with Blackout.

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They could’ve been working on EVE 2 to
give them options.

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Given who is currently at the helm, I wouldn’t want to play it. It would be chock-full of micro-transactions from day one. And, given the current generation of gamers, would more than likely end up being a carebear fest focusing more on style than substance.

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