Originally by: CCP Oveur

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Personally, I don't like local, it's supposed to be a chat, so people can hear you scream in space, not a tactical tool. Taz is spot on with that aspect, just removing local would make space more empty than it already is. That's why I've been fond of changing it to Constellation for quite some time. On the other hand, local gives as much advantage to the defender as to the attacker. You really can't argue about that, you see "him" coming and "he" sees "you" coming for him. Sure, we can spend the next century arguing whether some of them actually has a bit better benefit than the other, but usually I find it comes down to the players that are at each end and in what way they inerpret the information they get. But as always, we have ulterior motives, things which we believe could create a situation where we're adressing some of the flaws associated with changes to local, instanerf etc. We believe our new view of the universe, the seamless zoom view, where we have changed system scanning and put it into that same view, which we think we can move the tactical aspect of local to. We're increasing survivability of ships in general, not only with increases to hitpoints but with Rigs and other balancing as well. With Exploration, we'll eventually move all asteroid belts into the exploration system, so that you have to search for the fields - and so does the pirate that wants to take you on. For short, I'm quite fine with people seeing other people, being able to talk and interact, but we really dislike that it's more a tactical tool. As can be seen, there are many reasons for what is chosen into the different releases.

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