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GoonFleet
GoonSwarm
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Posted - 2009.04.06 21:10:00 -
[1]
First off, the premise in the OP is flawed. Wormhole space is a completely different arena to New Eden space, Sleepers are designed to encourage (loosely speaking) pvp-esque fittings and small gang work to take them on, which means in theory a sleeper ratting group that gets jumped by gankers has at least some chance of getting out alive or fighting back. The fittings required to run L4 missions or rat 0.0 belts, let alone mining ships are completely different from PvP/Sleeper setups, and leave the pilot a sitting duck to any ganking ship that finds them. Saying that 'not having local works fine in wormholes, so it would work in New Eden too' is like saying 'not having CONCORD works fine in 0.0, so we should get rid of CONCORD in Empire'. They are different environments with different requirements.
Second, why are you all so insistent on CCP spending development time reinventing the wheel to get us right back where we started? "Hey guys lets get rid of local". "Hey guys lets rewrite the scanning system to emulate the effects of local". We already have a system which emulates the effects of local, its called local, and for the most part it works fine.
Third, the solo and small gang advocates in this thread seem not to realise that they rely as much on local to find things to shoot as their targets use it to look out for things shooting them. I've done my share of scouting for both small gangs and full fleets (insert LOL BLOBBING GOON NUBS NO SKILLS NO HONOUR comments here) and being able at a glance to see that a system is empty and I can move on is the only thing that allows a roaming group to cover a decent amount of ground quickly. Imagine if on your next roaming op you had to wait several minutes on every single jump while your scout warped around scanning to see if anyone was even present, rather than just jumping in and saying 'ok no-one in local here, system is clear guys, jump in and get to the next gate'. Removing local is a token gesture which merely creates the perception of lowsec and 0.0 being places where you'll be suddenly and unavoidably ganked if you undock (and so scares all the ratters and miners back to highsec to lag out the mission hubs even more and leaves fewer things for the rest of us to shoot). It has little effect on the ratter with his 6 accounts and macro programs set up to auto-scan constantly for new signals and ctrl-q at the first sign of anything coming in. Its most significant actual consequences for the most part would be to obliterate the reconnaissance and intelligence gathering side of the game, vastly increase the power of cloaking ships and login traps, and cripple the ability of PvP groups to find targets because it takes them an hour or so to check and move through 20 systems.
The net result? Small to mid scale combat consists entirely of recon gangs stumbling around blindly in the darkness and occasionally bumping accidentally into each other.
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