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Vimsy Vortis
Shoulda Checked Local
Break-A-Wish Foundation
4526
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Posted - 2016.11.05 06:13:12 -
[1] - Quote
Ralph King-Griffin wrote:And if you were to watch the roundtable you would see that the Merc community (or those of us present) unilaterally agree with you about this
I don't think that word means what you think it means. |
Vimsy Vortis
Shoulda Checked Local
Break-A-Wish Foundation
4526
|
Posted - 2016.11.05 06:44:55 -
[2] - Quote
Minerva Arbosa wrote:Last I heard locator agents still work pretty well on tracking down targets and such. So does doing your own research on where players might be before initiating war decs.
They do still work, the difficulty is that there is no way of knowing who it is you need to run a locator agent on and that in high security space, where people can move with near total freedom and were there's no real need to be in any particular place at any particular time.
Addi tonally if you get to a system which the locator said the individual is in and they aren't there the only way to verify if they moved or logged off is to run another locator after you arrive and wait for the result and if it indicates another system, move to that system and repeat until you either find them or it tells you they're in the same system as them, but they aren't present in local.
This means that if you're at war with more than a tiny handful of people you will spend hours upon hours scouting individuals who simply are not present in the world at all, which is further exacerbated by the long cooldowns and low availability of locator agents.
You may think "It's not that much worse, is it?" and the answer is yes it is, actually hunting people using locator agents was not a particularly fast process before and was sufficiently a pain in the ass that trade hub campers existed. Now because of the huge amount of time you'll spend chasing characters that may not even have logged in for months a process that would previously have taken 40 minutes will take you 18+ hours.
Locator agents are not a substitute for the watchlist, the watchlist was the reason why locator agents worked at all. |
Vimsy Vortis
Shoulda Checked Local
Break-A-Wish Foundation
4533
|
Posted - 2016.11.06 11:12:45 -
[3] - Quote
Corraidhin Farsaidh wrote:
The allies mechanism would need to go though. If another corp wants to help you they should also wardec the opponent. This makes being an ally a real decision with associated risk and cost.
The ally system is a difficult beast. On one hand it is an extremely heavily used mechanic and is extremely useful for actual mercenary work, on the other hand it is both incredibly powerful and totally in favor of the defender.
There's three things that are really wrong with it:
1. It completely bypasses the costs associated with declaring a war and essentially allows anyone to declare war against someone who have themselves declared a war for free. Even if you have enough players to max out the cost of declaring war on you, someone joining as an ally in a war you declared is free. This pretty much obliterates any attempt at balancing war costs based on any kind of logic.
2. The wait time on joining a war as an ally is only 4 hours vs 24 hours for a war that you actually paid for, which makes joining a war as an ally an objectively better as a means of gaining a war than actually declaring a war of you own. The difference in timers also leads to situations where people can intentionally manipulate timers to their benefit.
3. There is no approximate way for the aggressor to respond to someone bringing in allies. The defender can escalate a war by bringing in of thousands of pilots as allies completely for free without any risk of the aggressor doing the same thing back to them. If the aggressor wants assistance in this situation their allies would have to declare war on not only the defender but every one of their allies individually.
I don't think the ally system should outright be removed, but I think that right now the impact in has on PVP in highsec is overwhelmingly negative, it's used as a tool by large, established mercenary groups to crush new and smaller ones, it puts weaker aggressors in a position where they tend to suddenly find themselves faced with overwhelming opposition and generally creates an environment where everyone is incentivized to join very large mercenary alliances so they don't have to deal with constantly being at war with those same alliances.
You could fix it by making it actually have reasonable costs associated with it, by it having the same wait time as a war declaration and by making it so that if a defender chooses to bring in allies the aggressor gets to do the same. |
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