The Hollow Box
- Thread starter Ozram
- Start date
Haven't seen a single hollow box in solo...........
Only if I can turn off NPCs in my instance. 
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Yep. Double edged sword I guess.
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Yep. Double edged sword I guess.
Only if I can turn off NPCs in my instance.
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Yep. Double edged sword I guess.
On the contrary, griefers would get tired of interdicting someone only to find out it's an NPC and they'd find a different game to amuse themselves with.
Edit: in fact, I would go further and remove all identification from blips on supercruise. Then someone interdicting could get an NPC with garbage-tier cargo, a CMDR with good loot, or a CMDR with a KWS. It would present what I think would be a welcome challenge for real pirates and give newbs herd immunity.
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Not if the NPCs followed similar ship demographics of players (which could just be data mined). At that point the pirate doesn't know the trader is a human and the trader doesn't know the pirate is a human. Wouldn't that be wonderful? I would of course fully support an optional "transponder" to announce the fact that you are a player if you choose.
Well here's how I see it - I'm trying to SC to a port, don't have time to maneuver my lumbering freighter and lock onto to every ship and check tags. The cmdr in an FDL could easily cruise around locking onto every target, as soon as he finds me with my cmdr tag in front of my name he rips me out of warp... I'll have no idea if a cmdr or NPC is interdicting me
They would at the very least have to get rid of our cmdr tags - Even if that was the case, pirates could lock onto cargo ships and make an educated guess if it's a human pilot, loadouts are generally a big giveaway.
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Hollow Box communicates Player. So that's confusing.
Currently the KWS will show "Scanned" if a KW scanned ship is in range. I would simply change that to read to show "Scanned" or "Not Scanned" at any range. An extra line in Contacts would be nice too "Local Bounty: #" & "Galaxy Wide Bounty: # (scanned)"
Currently the KWS will show "Scanned" if a KW scanned ship is in range. I would simply change that to read to show "Scanned" or "Not Scanned" at any range. An extra line in Contacts would be nice too "Local Bounty: #" & "Galaxy Wide Bounty: # (scanned)"
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TBH I would mind if there is no identification. ED would turn indirectly into a single player game and I am so a fan of multiplayer. I mean, I want to play with and against other humans and restricting the ability to just open comms to someone by denying the possibility of identification is odd.
It would be a huge barrier for any kind of player interaction.
It would be a huge barrier for any kind of player interaction.
Yep, I realized that and that's why I then suggested to remove everything but the blip while in supercruise. The extra information is useful only to hunters, the only thing the hunted gets out of it is that they're about to have a bad day.
I think it might have the opposite effect as pirates would also not know if they were dealing with people unless they scanned first meaning they'd take longer to see who is who in super cruise.
Not 100% convinced, I'm thinking from a pirate's point of view.. I could sit at the star waiting for ships to warp in, lock onto ships coming in during CG's etc. The cargo runners would have no idea who is human or not, there only goal is to get to a station asap.
I like the op's idea, it has been discussed many times before, I just don't think it would actually work well unless a lot of other changes were put in place.
There was a discussion a long time ago by FD about the Transponder - Sandro saw it as a halfway house to help people into open but not become immediately targeted and potentially ganked.
The idea: if it's off then everyone to you (and you to them) appear as NPC; if it's on and the other player has theirs on too you both appear as a player (hollow icon)
Huge debate // split group // arguments and rants .. people lost touch with reality during that time so perhaps that's why FD shelved it. (Or they thought of a better "to be implemented" way .. who knows)
The trouble with marking ships as scanned is that you actually make it worse for the trader. My understanding is that most PvP players use bandwidth scanning in addition to the hollow box. It's even included in the game (CTRL B). With that you can easily tell if there's another player in the instance. So the pirate enters an empty instance and scans all the NPCs, effectively tagging them. A new blip appears on the scanner and at the same time he notices the obvious sign that a player has entered the instance. He locks on to the trader as easily as the current system. Meanwhile the trader is oblivious to the threat until it's too late
Don't know about anyone else, but if I'm trying to avoid players, sure I look at the scanner for hollow blips behind me, but if I'm actively looking for players to warrant scan or fight with then I'm looking at the comms tab, and then switching to the contacts panel so the only difference it would make is that it would probably make me scan an npc or two until I got to the player I was looking for, that's less likely to see me coming.
Unless you do away with comms and the CMDR tag it'll make no difference or possibly make it worse for peaceful players, and if you're going to do away with comms and make it basically "pretend to be an NPC mode" then we already have a mode for that, it's solo.
Lets say everyone looks like an npc, so let's push the idea along a bit, let's say you're bounty hunting in a res, you come across a deadly ranked FDL or FAS, rub your hands together and think, "yes, nice bounty, I'll have that", open fire, it's a player that's much better than you and you die,
I can take a deadly or even elite ranked npc FDL or FAS in pretty much any ship I like, players, (regardless of rank) not a chance, some I can beat, lots I can't, and I have to have the right loadout, (I'm really not an expert at PVP).
Maybe that would add some challenge to the game for players that are a way on in the game, but it would make it darn hard to start out, and once you're a way on in the game you can find a challenge easy enough if you want one, just go to eravate, post on here saying you're going to kill noobs (don't kill noobs though, that's not nice) and a whole bunch of PVPers will give you as much of a challenge as you could ever need.
Unless you do away with comms and the CMDR tag it'll make no difference or possibly make it worse for peaceful players, and if you're going to do away with comms and make it basically "pretend to be an NPC mode" then we already have a mode for that, it's solo.
Lets say everyone looks like an npc, so let's push the idea along a bit, let's say you're bounty hunting in a res, you come across a deadly ranked FDL or FAS, rub your hands together and think, "yes, nice bounty, I'll have that", open fire, it's a player that's much better than you and you die,
I can take a deadly or even elite ranked npc FDL or FAS in pretty much any ship I like, players, (regardless of rank) not a chance, some I can beat, lots I can't, and I have to have the right loadout, (I'm really not an expert at PVP).
Maybe that would add some challenge to the game for players that are a way on in the game, but it would make it darn hard to start out, and once you're a way on in the game you can find a challenge easy enough if you want one, just go to eravate, post on here saying you're going to kill noobs (don't kill noobs though, that's not nice) and a whole bunch of PVPers will give you as much of a challenge as you could ever need.
You can see if you're jumping into a populated instance by checking the bandwidth before dropping from Hyperspace too.