Sunday, August 24, 2014

Hide me please: Counter Intelligence

I was reading EVENews24 and there was an interesting wall of text about intel gathering and how relatively easy in it to find people in a game this large. Using locator agents a hunter can go from having no idea where prey is to the system and station they are in. That got me thinking about game as a whole how players should be able to hide themselves in game.
So I want to propose a new skill, Counter Intelligence.  This skill would be a 3x social skill that was aimed disrupting the intelligence that can be gathered by a Locator Agent. For each level that you train in, it give better counterintelligence to your location in the cluster. This would give pilots a chance to "hide" from intel sources and require more eyes on targets.
So for example if you train this skill to Lvl 1, then when asked about your location it will be reported back that you are in a group of systems, The system you are in, plus two more connecting. At Lvl2  it increase it to five systems. Lvl 3 will allow you to hide in constellations, Lvl 4 will give you 2 connecting constellations issue a warning that you are being searched for and Lvl 5 will give you three constellations and tell you who requested the search for you.
Now this would be a very powerful skill, but I want to offer a counter to it as well. The higher your standing with the Agent you did the search will the more it counters the effects. So if you have basic standing with an Agent then the full effects apply, but if you have Standing of +5.5 then it counters Lvl 1 by showing two systems not three. If you had perfect standing with the agent then it would treat Counter Intelligence lvl 5 as lvl 1 and hide that you were looking for the target.
With the size of New Eden I feel that it should be possible to hide if you want to and require people to come out and look for you. I think that giving people this chance will increase make intelligence gathering more hands on and could even give a chance for the hunter to to become the prey.

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