No more magical safe zones!

Svarog said:

There would be enormous number of pirate-wannabes preying on helpless spawners. Zero needed skills for shooting an immobile blind target - every landlubbing asshole who barely can fly his sleipnir planetside would create an alt for that. In fact, there might be no work left for real pirates

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That is EXACTLY 100% how it is now. Well almost - you got a number of the current facts correct.

DavinFelth said:

That is EXACTLY 100% how it is now. Well almost - you got a number of the current facts correct.

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It's wonderful how many brave ppl u can meet on the forum's Space section!

I'm a frequent quad-flyer between planets and haven't noticed any significant changes in the pirate population for the last few years. During events there's a slight increase in their numbers - more players flying around, so probably more loot too. After events it dies down again.
Now and then there's a new name out there, pretty soon it's gone again and all u see is the same old names.
That's what i see out there, so... are we playing the same game?

As it is, this space is one big honeypot for douchebags. It is so by design. A role is offered in a role playing game, and is naturally filled by personalities who fit the bill. Who just like to be obnoxious and smug. So there is a place for everything in the universe that we know and love from the real world. They must understand a thing or two about psychology at MA, or hired someone from the field when they created it.

Space pvp like The Hub on Cyrene: When you enter, all skills are equal. That would be a game everybody could play and still feel like it's a game.

Er, sorry, no to OP's suggestion.

Npcs? Nah. P.c.s run by planet partners with unlimited ammo and si perhaps?

I still don't get how PK thingie is not a harassment

Virot said:

I still don't get how PK thingie is not a harassment

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Because it made MA a ton of money selling overpriced motherships, upgrades for space ships and kept the angry hanger owners from losing their shit. Pirates are very useful at times to MA, so they allow them to stay around and only get a light smack on the hand when they step out of line.

Unfortunately they seem to get this idea into their head now and then that they can "demand" certain things from MA to make their pirating life easier/more entertaining. Most of these attempts are not dangerous, but innocent looking ones like this can be. First they start off with a "hey wouldn't this be cool?" then move on to "wow that would be super cool and you know what I bet it would be even better for you guys in the end, you should all send support case suggestions to MA!" and then suddenly we get some retarded, half assed bullshit added to space. Since its MA's coding this supposed harder but more rewarding pirating will get exploited 3 ways from sunday and MA won't move a finger to fix it.


So when they come up with suggestions like this, the best move is to say "no, bad pirate, get your scamming ass back in your hole."

Bad Idea If this was actually implemented as the OP suggests, no-one would go into space at all if they could expect to be attacked as soon as they spawned at the ss with no possibility of defense.

FFS, there'd be nothing stopping ppl from shooting up MS and privateers parked at the SS just for the "fun" of it! Or to cause maximum inconvenience to the owners. It would also make it impossible to run scheduled warp services as the pirates would know when the ship was summoning and attack during summoning and before the passengers had a chance to log off. Though ofc the OP would like to see that option removed as well - not going to happen

Fifth said:

That's a fair point. The actual experience of every player is important. For someone who will be spawning into warzone and is killed without even seeing what killed him... that would be unacceptable.

There's a way around it, spawn the incoming ships inside SS. By the time you fly out the system should make sure the surrounding area has fully loaded. Might be too much for MA to code maybe, but definitely doable from purely technical viewpoint.

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Easy solution right there - until we have seamless space and flying up into space from everywhere on the planet without loading times on serverswitch i guess we could just as well have the planetside tp's connected to the spacestation tp for a fee equivalent to the decay of a space thruster.
Have safety bubbles on the spacecrafts once they leave spacestation hangar until they start moving and have lots of automated gun turrets on the spacestation as well as rocket launchers for higher range.
Give players radar in space to find each other and give each spacecraft acceleration capabilities instead of maximum speeds and make them harder to turn on higher speeds due to mass effect - that will do nicely for pvp, catching up to other players and flexibilty in fights.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this

Xane said:

Your not seeing the big picture....your just looking at one potential out come. Pirates would not be sitting in the spawn zone waiting to kill new spawns because the cost would be too high for non looters. If a pirate was killed by an npc and had to fly back from pirate base imagine all those that would now be safe to fly during that time.

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Does that imply that pirates don't shoot random ships??
(Not in my experience. Anything that moves get fired upon )

Or maybe, that only ships that leave the SS are likely to carry loot??
(I don't see many sightseers there )



Could it possibly mean that from a pirates perspective, time not spent camping is considered lost loot (lost profit)??
("I'm on the clock, but not gettin' paid" )




More importantly, I wonder why one such as Xane would suggest this.
Alas, I have no understanding there either.

i don't like the idea of no Safety Zones around the SS, but if want them policed by npc mobs, and players doing jobs you should also be given a bounty on your head if you open fire within these zones in an act of piracy which also bans you from entering that planet unless you pay a fine or avoid the area for a certain timescale (ie 3 days per kill)

Does no one remember the outcome of MA moving the original spawn points in space and forgetting to move the safe zones. It's partly because of people camping that spawn as to why ships spawn at the stations now.

The only safe method of removing the safe zones would be to make every ship entering space invulnerable for 60-90 seconds, anyone camping the spawn would then be open to direct attack from them but that's open to abuse by having a spotter in space and having the pirate enter space just before someone enters the station.

John B Knight said:

[...] Have safety bubbles on the spacecrafts once they leave spacestation hangar until they start moving and have lots of automated gun turrets on the spacestation as well as rocket launchers for higher range.

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I've just arrived to the same conclusion, after trying to imagine a squadron of SteelBirds patrolling the SS.
U know how it would look like? One pirate flies through their aggro range and the whole flock is on his tail, following him faithfully for the whole eternity.
How to avoid dragging em off to the edge of the world? Cuz there's like no off-switch in the mob AI. OK, as an improvised stopgap solution, u can put an invisible "barrier" around the SS that doesn't allow our brave SteelBirds squadron to fly too far away from SS. Next thing that happens is the whole gang gets glued to that invisible wall like fish in the aquarium waiting to be fed - until they all go "Unreachable".

*facepalm*

So yeah, that's the reason why EVE is based on PvP and also why there's no mobs/NPC's anywhere near SS in EU. Compared to human intelligence our mob AI is still utterlly n hopelessly pathetic. The Stone Age cave paintings had more AI in em than our games.

John B Knight said:

Give players radar in space to find each other and give each spacecraft acceleration capabilities instead of maximum speeds and make them harder to turn on higher speeds due to mass effect - that will do nicely for pvp, catching up to other players and flexibilty in fights.

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Now that's brilliant! Yes, give us acceleration instead of fixed speed. That would be realtively easy to code and so much fun.

I would more like that we have TPs to and from planets, but limited only to transport the ava without stackables.

Not all ppl transport lootables. They may just want go from A to B, without transport any loot. It is anoying then, get several times shoot from same pirats, and noting is to loot.

Oh and i do like save zones like it is.

krazykat said:

Bad Idea If this was actually implemented as the OP suggests, no-one would go into space at all if they could expect to be attacked as soon as they spawned at the ss with no possibility of defense.

FFS, there'd be nothing stopping ppl from shooting up MS and privateers parked at the SS just for the "fun" of it! Or to cause maximum inconvenience to the owners. It would also make it impossible to run scheduled warp services as the pirates would know when the ship was summoning and attack during summoning and before the passengers had a chance to log off. Though ofc the OP would like to see that option removed as well - not going to happen

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If there were gun turrets and rocket launchers on spacestations, every pirate in a sleip/quad would face quick destruction if attacking a mothership/privateer - much quicker then he/she could destroy the ship - you actually would get free repairs onboard without having to collect mobs if they tried

Appart from that the thought that logging off is mindarks intended way has been stated by some players for several years now without having any proof to base it on.
Mindarks statement that they try to fix current ways of riskfree travel actually states quite the opposite.
Orginally even Kim posted back in summer 2011 that logging out for a flight was 'not deemed ok'. However his post got removed shortly after - likely when mindark realised that they couldnt come up with a 'quick' solution.

But then we do have mission galactica 'crates' which could become mindarks 'easy way out' of having to truely fix the logged of stackable transport situation.
Lots of good suggestions were made.
Time will tell.


PS:Never ever would i as a game developer intendedly create a situation where my players can have an advantage by NOT playing. You will always want your players ingame and creating income for you instead of making them logout to play other things meanwhile...

John B Knight said:

If there were gun turrets and rocket launchers on spacestations, every pirate in a sleip/quad would face quick destruction if attacking a mothership/privateer - much quicker then he/she could destroy the ship - you actually would get free repairs onboard without having to collect mobs if they tried

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So what would be the point of removing the safe zone just to replace it with all that? Also, how do the turrets distinguish between "friendly" and "unfriendly" ? I can think of several ppl who fly around in red tagged quads but who are not pirates. So they get shot by the turrets as soon as they tried to shoot a pirate?

krazykat said:

So what would be the point of removing the safe zone just to replace it with all that? Also, how do the turrets distinguish between "friendly" and "unfriendly" ? I can think of several ppl who fly around in red tagged quads but who are not pirates. So they get shot by the turrets as soon as they tried to shoot a pirate?

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The system can check who shoots first, thats sufficient to keep the area secure - there is no need to hunt pirates near a spacestation when turrets are there to sort agressors out.
Pirates of course hope they can distract defence mechanics to successfully attack others when a bluezone is removed - thats why the suggestion was likely made for npc ships instead of longrange turrets - turrets can not be pulled away and will hit and keep the area clear they will also shoot down any mobs that are pulled to a spacestation (just like turrets do down planetside) which would be much better then getting them 'drowned' in a mysterious bluezone.

Another advantage of having the bluezone removed would be that pirates can no longer sit in safety waiting for players to leave the bluezone - if a player gets attacked when he leaves turret range and flies back in turret range then the turrets would sort the attacker out quickly - that same player could fly right accross the security range of the turrets and leave at the opposing side whereas the agressor/pirate would have to fly all the way around the station in a wide circle to avoid the turrets before he can follow his prey.
This will lead to pirates camping further away from the stations and players getting more opportunities to fly out without immediatly being followed.
Additionally to turrets there could be npc ships patroulling space near spacestations a little bit further out from turret range - every planet could have an own faction and attacking players or npc ships could give negative faction hits for that planet/faction and/or eventually gain faction with another planet - after all pirates still need a place to orginate from