I feel like we'll definitly start upping our SF "levels" should that be implemented.

My only objection is when making an alt or another account, there should always be a way to 'skip' the tutorial station and the containment to the sector, system, and nation space. Maybe something like they'll throw you in a sector with assaults, and see how many you can kill in an EC-89...

Permitting a skip will give newbs the ability to whine at us all over again when they find out that they don't know how to play. Similar to games like WoW, you still have to get through the beginning levels even if you have existing characters at higher levels. This would be no different.

Aramarth: I was suggesting something more like throwing you suddenly in a sector filled with dentek assaults and orne guardians, and having to kill a bunch. of course it would be noob-proof, or enough that a noob that could get through it wouldn't need the tutorials... Im not sure a questionnaire would suffice, I would just like to do something when making an alt or another account, not spend several hours redoing the tutorials.

i love it full stop

on topic #4... sounds good to be able to have forgiveness of friendly kills... but even the "buy back ship" option window blocks chat, and either the FoFk window, or the buy back ship window would prevent the two users from being able to talk before a freidnly kill forgive is granted or not

This one is related to Incarnate's hints of a layered defense system behind the border turrets.

Suppose instead of traditional 'monitored' sectors (those roid sectors unrelated to stations or wormholes), every sector had a danger of detection. Put it on a timer. Allow me to illustrate.

If the dread pirate Niki runs the Serco border and parks in an empty sector of Pyronis, he is safe. What I propose, by contrast, is that if he remains in any sector for more than three minutes (time negotiable, faster time limit in capitol systems) the SF is fed his location, and it is reported on the defense channel (also hinted by Inc). This strikes me as a far more feasible and believable system than just spotty monitored-or-not sectors within systems. Now if Niki keeps warping and does not use any wormhole or station sectors, he is effectively safe from this variety of detection entirely.

Think of the timer as the time that the stations need to complete a 360 degree rotation of their long range sensors, like a radar array of today.

The advantages: No more can Joe Serco just hang out in Jallik and bot up his standing. No more can he idle in Divinia until he hears a newb spew a location on public channels. Infiltration is made an active undertaking, which will be more fun. The broken-ness of the monitored/faction system is greatly alleviated by this change.

If this is tried and everyone likes it, I could even see it being applied to wormhole sectors- but similar to capitol systems, such a sector would be scanned more frequently.

EDIT: Also, make ion storms a safe hiding place from the radar scans. Boom, useful now. Similarly, large bodies like stars and planets could create blind spots in some systems (see Betheshee E-8/Setalli N-2 for examples of such sectors 'in shadow')

long term: Guild stations could also have detection capability of this variety, reporting detected vessels in the system to guild chat. This would make choosing a location important in a tactical sense as well as in an economic sense, due to the presence of blind spots.

I agree with the Ion storm part, but making the SF jump in every x minutes makes an already repetitive task annoying, which isn't a good addition.

What? Slime is all I get? Surely someone has an opinion on this other than him.

So if you tank your faction it's almost guaranteed to be permanent?

You'll have to fly through the turret defenses, avoid the worm hole SF, and then get 3 whole minutes of botting! I don't see many people thinking that is "fun"

Nothing about what I suggested makes any changes to botting for standing. The difference is that you need to change sectors sometimes. Shoot bots for three minutes, switch sectors, repeat. It would just force a minimal level of awareness. Complacency would no longer be rewarded.

PVP flag

Here's another wrinkle to the strike force deployment idea: in the back-story, there is no big mention made of any form of inter-system radio comms or similar; all inter-system comms is by courier ships.

So, once a system goes to level three of strike force output, for each strike force that goes out send out a small robotic courier craft which heads off to the nearest station in the next door system to warn them what's going on. Make the ship fast at around 150 to 190 metres per second, but not so fast that a Valk or similar cannot chase it down if it sees it early enough.

This means that a lone-wolf pirate operating in one system can reasonably expect to not only get the local system annoyed at him but neighbouring systems also, whereas a team of pirates smart enough to shoot down the messenger bots can keep the alarm from spreading and give themselves a clean get-away, but only if they cooperate.

That is the key: force cooperative efforts on players, for mining, trading, piracy and so on; it also makes life miserable for lone griefers whilst letting organised players have much more fun.

Aramarth: exactly, it doesn't add any interesting feature and requires you to click a couple times every 3 minutes.. what's the point?

The point is that 1) it removes the monitored or not system which I find so inadequate and 2) members of any belligerent party cannot loiter or bot inside defended borders without active evasion. Passive evasion (aka the current system) is an exploit in my view.

In the same post where I mentioned reporting sightings of Hated people in Nation space, I also mentioned having SF's "sweep" through systems looking for bad guys. I would rather have that than an arbitrary "timer" that just tells people "oh, yes, write a script that waits 2:45 before jumping to another empty sector". Of course, a certain amount of the "sweeps" would be faked, since the sectors would actually be offline, but we could fudge decent numbers for the SFs.. saying "it takes them a random period between 2 and 4 minutes to sweep an asteroid sector".

Having Strike Forces actually sweep through also makes for much more interesting usage of stealth-based modifications. The ability to *hide* from a much stronger enemy (under certain limited conditions), and potentially gives rise to some of the more tense gameplay that is one of my goals.

Asteroid Radar Occlusion!

I do prefer it your way then, Incarnate. Again, my motive here is to do away with "monitored" (non-station, non-wh) sectors, because in the end people just avoid them in favor of the handful that aren't monitored. Very passive evasion.

The only part that you didn't address was the truly empty sectors- I'd like them swept as well.

You would definitely need to sweep all the sectors (empty or otherwise), or there would be little point in sweeping any. But I would anticipate empty-sector sweeps being much faster/easier for the pursuers.

When might this take effect?