Blog Banter 44 : Thoughts on Local

 

Blog Banter 44: Is There Anybody Out There?

A conversation, led by the literary pugilist Poetic Stanziel and fiction champion Rhavas, has been rumbling in the bowels of the blogosphere for a few days now. Due to popular demand, for posterity and for the attentions of CCP Sisyphus of Team Player Experience, I have been asked to envelop this discussion into a Blog Banter. The community has spoken and so Drackarn has provided the following question:

“The local chat channel provides EVE players with an instant source of intel of who is in the system. With a quick glance you can tell who is in system and what your standings are to them. War targets, hated enemies, friends and corp mates all stand out clearly. Is this right? Should we have access to this intel for free with no work or effort? Should the Local chat channel even exist? Should normal space be more like wormhole space where the Local channel appears empty until someone speaks?”

[See blogpost for current links]

 

Personally, I like how local works now for the most part. I am a PVPer- a part of Factional Warfare, and sometimes pirate.

My corp likes to roam and hunt, and having local makes that fairly easy. I do not think it a great idea to make the roaming process even more time-consuming by having to scan every system at various points for potential targets.

The idea of having stations camped by people you don’t know are there seems like it’d be such a headache.

I just don’t like the idea of changing things really.

However, if things were to change I would prefer something like this:

1. Have an opt-out-of-local-chat button, which would mean there would be no text in local. There could be some sort of flag beside your name so that others would know you’ve opted out. It would be so much easier to opt out than to block people who annoy you. Granted there is the blink off button, but it’s not the same. People usually have local always open, regardless of blinking or not.

2. Allow pilots who cyno into systems or come into known space via worm holes be on a delayed time in local. Wormholes are mysterious, shadowy places where it makes sense not to show up in local. That’s kind of cool for wormhole space. Jumping into and out of wormhole space should be mysterious!

For known systems, we have stargates that would be recording who passes through those gates. Hence, why it kind of makes sense for that intel to be in local. However, if someone came into system via wormhole or are cyno’ed in, then that information wouldn’t be immediately available. Perhaps a five-minute delay?

Black ops would become so much more fun!

3. Down for maintenance stargates. It could be fun if randomly stargates weren’t able to broadcast their information for local for X amount of minutes per day. So that could mean if you jumped through a stargate that was ‘down’, then you’re not going to register in local.  Maintenance would be infrequent, but there would always be a slight possibility of something more being out there, I think that’d make things a little more interesting!