Heathkit
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
91
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Posted - 2014.11.07 13:23:39 -
[1] - Quote
Currently, there's only one way to specifically track people down. Have a group of people that have run enough missions to have access to a few locator agents, and who don't mind jump cloning around to help you find where, exaclty, a particular pilot is. Locator agents are relatively rare, require grinding standings, and give you perfect information.
There's room to expand on this mechanic - give players more options for tracking each other and to avoid being tracked. Here's some ideas along this line:
Gate Hacking - Provides a PvP use for the hacking skill. By hacking a gate, the player can get a list of the pilots that most recently used the gate. The information could be obfuscated in various ways, with higher trained skills giving you more perfect information. Maybe it's the 5 most recent pilots to use a given gate, with no indication of when. Maybe it's detailed times for gate activations in the past x minutes, with no pilot names but with ship classes. Or maybe just masses and activation times. Roaming fleets might bring someone in an exploration fit ship to hack the gates and determine where their prey went.
Mobile Surveillance Drone - A deployable structure that gathers intel on a particular grid for you. The structure would be cloaked and have a limited lifespan. It could be set to give you an alert when a particular pilot is on grid with the deployable. You could use it as a tripwire, to monitor when your target jumps in or undocks. Alternately, it could just be a recorder. You deploy it in hostile space and return a day or two later to collect a detailed record of ship movements and times. Use it to learn when your enemies tend to run industrials through a pipe, or what times of day people are more likely to undock from a particular station.
Witness Protection Agent - Locator agents are currently perfectly effective and give you no notification you're being tracked. This agent would be a counter - in exchange for a sum of ISK or LP, the agent would shield you from being traced by a locator for a period of time. Perhaps a cheaper option would just be to notify you when someone runs a locator. Or, perhaps this agent can only hide which system you're in, not the constellation or region.
The goal is to give players more options to stalk each other. In particular, I like the idea of deploying structures which will gather intelligence on a region of space for you, which you must later come back to collect. |