I think there should be a way to drop a custom neon sign. Ovbiously this could get really easily abused, so there would have to be some sort of a limit. Either it takes all ur energy, or there is a 1 min period or whatever. I think it would be really cool to like drop a pirate flag and warn newbies to stay away or like something to that effect. If any of you have seen cowboy bebop, you may remember this from episode 4:
http://genplan.com/files/bebop/opening.jpg
http://genplan.com/files/bebop/one.jpg
http://genplan.com/files/bebop/two.jpg
http://genplan.com/files/bebop/three.jpg

It would add a custom touch to the game ie: something more than just a custom color.

I wonder why no one has posted about this. If anything, I think guides should be given this power. With the recent WH's out of order, a nice bright neon sign guarding it would help people from getting stuck

it cold be done so that the guids can drop custum sines, but players only have acess to a few pre set sines (to prevent issues regardin vulgarity and such)

I like that idea, Lord Q. Whenever you have player-added content along this line, there's the danger of abuse, but the pre-set thing solves that.

Which players would have access to this power, though? Could everyone do it, or is there a kind of standard you have to meet? Otherwise, "newbsine" will be added very quickly to CP's lingo-chart, methinks.

What if player dropped signs were limited to the non-phonetic symbols (since the phonetic signs would be way over used anyways). The one problem is it would be hard to encourage people to actually use the correct grammar. Most people would drop signs that used English grammar and word order.

Oh, cool, make it another type of "mine" with a given time-to-live. To prevent spamming, in addition to the proposed set of default signs, they should be rather expensive, with only one neon per launcher. Adding a faction hit penalty for dropping too many of them might be good too ("keep our space clean"). ;-)

I think that Eldrad made a really good point here. Symbolic signs seem to be a very good solution. Just to name a few possibilities:
- "Warning: Pirates" (red skull; dropped by traders that make it out of the sector/system alive)
- "Ore-rich roid" (showel; so that one can find the same roid again after returning to station)
- "Duel" (crossed swords; to suggest dueling or ask not to spoil an ongoing fight)
- "Dead WH" (big red circle/triangle)

And so on...

Or better yet, GTS!!! The player writes a message in English, the computer translates it into GTS alphabet. The player can then replace key words with GTS pictograms.

Or maybe people would just ignore them if they did that.

Grzywacz have you seen the signs that already exist? There's already a symbol for all of the following: Warning, Pirate, Roid, Die, WH. As well as many others.

CP the problem is that only names are written using the Phonetic alphabet, everything else is written in the Symbolic alphabet. Also the grammar is different. It would be possible to make something where users could construct English sentences with the limited vocabulary of GTS and then have it translated into a GTS sign allowing system or faction names to be written in the phonetic alphabet (to prevent people from miss using the phonetics, or writing vulgar messages).

Alternatively we could have a system for picking a string of symbols to put on a sign (again phonetics would be limited to system/faction names) and then when people target the sign they see the translation into English in the target box.
This way anyone can easily read correctly written signs, but people who want to write signs that won't end up coming out as gibberish would have to learn GTS.

Lastly we could ditch GTS and just use encoded English, but that's a bad idea since it seriously detracts from the already lacking RPing aspects of this game.

GTS:
http://www.vendetta-online.com/manual/app_gts.html

Eldrad, yes, but I didn't bother memorising them. Thanks.

What if the user could have custom signs that only they could see, and that lasted forever (or as long as you wanted to.) That way you could mark a custom roid, or whatever. The locations of the signs as well as the gifs could all be kept local. That way you could place infinite signs without having to worry about it clogging up the server. Does that sound doable?

PS: How do the current neon signs work? Jpgs don't support transparency, but heh, you could choose pure black as transparent and that would make sense.