It has been proposed before. Its easy to implement. Introduce a timer before the sector-to-sector jump. The ship has to stand still (aka "Jump engines are being activated").

and make ships veunerable when making a WH jump. nothing else needs to change, just make it so they can take damage while warping OUT of a system at a wormhole.

There are two types of running.

1) The hunter turns around and flees after realizing they can't win

2) The hunter is chasing someone who never wanted to fight

While I think we agree that #1 represents dishonorable behavior that most players would like to find a way to discourage, adding a jump timer would screw traders trying to flee from pirates, n00bs fleeing bots in a storm, etc.

Allowing damage as you warp out is totally reasonable (imho), though.

""adding a jump timer would screw traders trying to flee from pirates, n00bs fleeing bots in a storm, etc.""

So change the nation controled area's to make them safer for traders, beef up the strike forces and such. that gives traders an area where they ARE safer. in grey space.. a trader travelling alone, SHOULD be screwed.

noobs running from bots in a storm... thats a little different, but storms need redone anyway, and with the new changes to the hive eventually bots in storms will be less likely on the main trade routes.

Ok, how about a compromise on jump timers. What if they were required for wormholes (where you are travelling a large distance to another star system), but not for short-hop jumps between sectors (including out of ion storms)?

no screwball, because the real problem is in system jumps. remove the inveunerablity on an outward bound jump at a WH and there is no need for a timer there. its the system jumps that make escaping so easy, which is what we are trying to prevent.

Trading should be extremly dangerous. Running away from a pirate should be essentially impossible. Traders will trade in groups or hire escorts and pirate-hunters such as myself. The single biggest threat to traders right now are roids you smack into coming out of a WH. Thats not what trading should be like.

OK personally Im a trader at heart. I love finding new and more productive trade routes. I also like teasing pierats. Unfortunately I can do that really well in even the biggest and slowest of ships. I do IMHO believe that running is FAR FAR too easy. I mean, I can jump in a behemoth loaded with my weapon(s) of choice and a bay full of cargo, find the nearest pierat and berrate him a little then jump,jump,jump and voila. No more pierat. Whats more is I still have all my cargo and most of my health. This should be much harder. Maybe a jump timer would work. Then again maybe it wouldnt. Maybe there needs to be something along the lines of the now existent 3Km jump rule that extends to hostile pilots. Say something along the lines of "You have to be 3Km away from large objects as well as 100m from a hostile." In this case I would consider a hostile as anyone "red" on your radar. Now I know that 100m is really not that far from someone. Perhaps 300m would be sufficient. That is one of those thing that would need testing. Anyway, in either case (100m or 300m) it is still not that hard to obtain when running from a bot. Any noob bus with turbo can do that. However, trying to stay 300m away from another faster ship piloted by a perfectly capable human is a whole nuther story.

This last patch did tweak the Behemoth somewhat, so it shouldn't be quite so easy to escape in it. But I haven't had a chance to test it & see if it's enough, or if the Moth still escapes more easily than it should. Has anyone done much Moth-chasing since this last patch?

Yeah, i Like the timer idea... a lot!!!!

for players and NPCs!!!

Mabye it'd be better if alongside the 3000m from large objects rule that you have to be 1000m from any ships...although that would make it really hard to get away...so i propose 5 seconds after you are first hit that rule is lifted...

This makes it so the pirate has a fairly good chance of killing the trader, and if the traders good at dodgeing he has a fairly good chance at getting away. Furthermore...if they did get shot at and this rule was lifted it should give a little bit of danger to the pirate. Now i propose that there be a 25% chance of them warping right into the pirate taking the full ammount of the smaller ships health from the bigger ship and killing the smaller ship instantly, seeing as how most traders are in bigger ships this will give them a pk and ultimatly make them more vulnerable to being killed until they re dock.. OF COURSE, all this can only happen once your out past the 3000m from large objects, after they get hit after that the 1000m is voided...That will solve pvp running also..

SUGGESTIONS? :)

I like the timer idea. Kinda like Battlestar Galactica - you have to "spin up" an FTL engine before you can jump.

Back in the first beta release there was a 15 second timer, which imo is far to long for all ships. But say that a timer is dependant on what type of ship you have, IE centurion 1 second, prom 9, moth 13, ect ect. That way if you need to "run a blockade" you could take an atlas (6 second timer) ect ect

Why not make it derived from battery charge?

have a delay of 1 second (maybe more but i'm hesitent to perpose anything above 2 seconds), and the countdown can't be activated untill you have a full battery charge. That way infinibnoost ships have virtualy no delay as to borrow fom BSG they generaly "spinn up" their engins as soon as they enter the sector, but combat ships with a lower endurance have to wate longer depending on how badly they drained their battery.

Also to use the moth as an example of runnign as a whole being too easy is foolish. the moth is an unbalanced runner, but fixing that does not warent changing the mekanics of running as a whole. I havent tried the moth since the new update but as they changed the engin i expect it will still be to uber as the problem is in the armor imo.

"That way if you need to "run a blockade" you could take an atlas (6 second timer) ect ect"

Ooo... Blockade runners! Now there's a good idea.

I've said this many, many times before... warp-timer, good! instawarp, bad!

Wormhole hopping isn't too bad since you know exactly where each wormhole leads... in fact if the in-system warps were fixed I don't think wormhole hopping would even be an issue any more since you'd never truly escape...

The reason instant in-system warps are so effective is that whereas a wh leads only to 1 sector in an in-system warp the player can escape to virtually any one of 256 sectors! This type of instant getaway detracts from the gritty realism of the universe, and takes away the feel of ever present danger.

Rationalize it however you want... BG's spinning up the FTL drive, SW's hyperspace calculations... in terms of drama, action, and gameplay... a brief period of vulnerability before you speed off into the wild blue yonder is a good thing.

The "spinning of the FTL drive" is pretty instant, even in BSG, it's the calculating that takes time, but they do that in intervals so that they can jump any time they need to, INSTAJUMP as you call it.

SW's calculations were made when you needed to go to an unknown location or somewhere between. If you were jumping to a known location you simply put in the coordinates and jump, INSTAJUMP!

We have a nav map, some players set their nav routes before entering combat in anticipation of having to jump out, others do not. To me, that's what the delay is, in setting your nav route manually.

How does being able to "instajump" take away from the "gritty realism of the universe" the whole game is a fantasy. Plus, you could jump in any direction in RL so why not any of the 256 sectors that are available. Be thankful that the nav map doesn't have three axises to jump on, plus, who's going to willingly jump into a bot sector if they are damaged, so that can narrow down your search by about 100 sectors.

Seems to me your just unwilling to even try to find these runners.

Are you high, john? 0_o

Heh, just kidding. Sort of. Are you saying it's possible to search 150 sectors for a runner? Are you saying it's possible to CATCH a runner should you find him? You're being unreasonable to the point of drug use.

We all know that you think PvP should be consensual and abortable at any time. We further know that the devs disagree with this direction - Incarnate has said so on numerous occasions.

So please, make useful, realistic suggestions and keep a sense of rationality about your counter arguments.

Personally, I favor a few seconds of timer before every jump, during which your ship's turbo is disabled. Perhaps, in a later tweak, the ships manuevering could be lowered to a max of 90-ship top speed (the idea here being that faster, lighter ships would not have as much power available to charge the warp drive as a larger ship). During this period, the old CTF glow effect would be applied to the ship to indicate he was warming his jump drives.

I think that's a good first step. It's not drastic - you can still dodge while waiting to charge up - but it does slow down someone trying to escape, perhaps making it possible for the chaser to catch up, make the kill and follow to wherever you're going. The glow is eye-candy, but it does serve as a visual cue to the chaser that the runner is about to make his getaway.

More drastic changes such as killing the manuever capability completely, or making the ship vulnerable during jump animations (you can easily kill someone during the time it takes to get out of a wormhole - ganking would become super rampant and annoying), could be added in as needed. I'm definately in favor of lots of minor changes to the way things are now, instead of one major change that has unforseen, devastating consequences.

you make it sound like running is a problem that needs to be fixed. In the case of dishonerable spam&run tactics, then I wholeheartedly agree. HOWEVER, what of the noncombatants that simply don't want to die? it would make abusive practices like newb-killing and ganking more prevalant by making survival of the weak more difficult, and PKs for the abusive easier.

It used to be a lot harder to run, in alpha. You could still do it, but it made things a lot more fun and tense. When the new universe came out and the engine changes went through, running lost all difficulty. It became a simple game of point and turbo instead of dodging and energy management. Most of those who remember the days when the game had a sense of danger know that it needs to come back.

Like I've been saying for a while: Vendetta cannot compete with other MMORPGs with its economic or political model. It probably never will be able to, because they've got years of development behind them that focused on the economy and politics and the like. So what does that leave Vendetta with?