Hidden sectors and locateships

“I’d be more for the clan doing some work and developing some vessel/satellite/or something of the sort to serve for that function.”

I may be misunderstanding what you mean by this, but it sounds like you want rebels and criminals to run around in something that can be easily destroyed by the Empire/whatever, and not have the protection of a safe sector.

My whole thing with this is the fact that, why would a criminal organization register all of their ships with a galactic database? I would think that as soon as they get the ship, they’d remove any identification from it and try to keep it hidden. With locateship, all they have to do is locate a certain ship class to find any ship they want, which takes out the whole “leg work” thing you want criminals/rebels to have to do. If the Empire wants to know the details of an enemy fleet, they should have to have people working as spies going around getting the information for them.

As for finding criminals – it shouldn’t be easy to find them, unless they’re dumb and bad at being a criminal. If they keep going LD on you, then it’s just a matter of telling the immortals that they did it and then you get handed them on a silver platter, simmering straight out of hell.

I’m kind of torn on the locate thing, I’ll admit having used it, though not to the extent of actually finding a hidden sector and locating random ships to see what ships imms have in immland, or to because OOCJoe told me Rebels have this fancy new ship. I mostly used it while chasing a guy, who kept changing his ship’s name every time he landed or to find criminalA who changes his ship’s name every 2 seconds. Which, personally, don’t see anything wrong with that. If it’s so easy to change a ship name, it shouldn’t be terribly hard to scour the database to find it if you have the ship model.

In regards to criminals going LD with whatshisname, It’s the fact that they are AFK and going linkdead. If you are away from the game long enough, the game will disconnect you. How long that takes is a mystery, because I’ve had the game keep me logged on for days, while at other periods disconnect me after 5 minutes of idling. Of course, there is always the chance they sat down to unafk, and decided to read their buffer and saw “Oh hey, that guy trying to kill me is in the room. Better skip dodge!” in which case, that’s a problem with the fact AFK lets you see things going on in conjunction with people being able to see AFK people.

To Gyndi – The function of making a ship unable to be located using locateship, not making a safe sector. I never said finding criminals was easy, I said I’ve poured hours upon hours into it. Also, deleting ship registries or identification would mean they’d themselves need spies in whatever Galactic order is keeping those registrations in order to get them deleted from said database. You could say, “Oh they can hack it” and I can reply “Oh, we have good security” but I think it would just be better to make use of develop and create something that can protect your ships from being locateshipped/pinged. Doesn’t have to be a destroyable satellite, perhaps they can make ships that are made specifically to not be located. Who knows. The power of imagination!

I think it’s utterly ridiculous that there’s one great big infallible galactic database that has every single ship ever in it. The closest thing, canon-wise, is the Bureau of Ships and Services, which was a third party group that tried to keep an updated listing of all the ships in the galaxy. Ships in Star Wars work a lot like planes do in real life, they use transponders for identification purposes. What we need are skills to remove/change/modify transponder codes.

One detail I want to add here about locating ship types, if you’re going to remove that you need to make locating ship names more case sensitive.

I can try locating ‘Shipname’ and end up finding ‘Shipname Sandwich’ every time because of the name similarity. This makes the first ship impossible to find unless you add in the ship type to specify. So maybe we could keep the ship type part as a seperate tacked on thing.

command Locateship shiptype shipname

Then when people try locating just by type, it’ll ask for a name.

Or you could make it just do the whole thing.

“GR-75 Medium Transport ‘TelgornCarrier05′”

That’s why he said if you’re going to remove locating by ship type, find a way to distinguish between such cases.

I was giving a suggestion.. get off my case. Jesus.

I wasn’t getting on your case. I was just clarifying that if you removed locate shiptype’shipname’, you’d need a way to distinguish between CaptainA and CaptainAmerica.

Wouldn’t my suggestion fix that?

Not really, because that’s how the “glitch” works to begin with. Locateship Shiptype”a”/Locateship Shiptype”b” and so forth.

Personally, I just think it’s a little ridiculous that you can even locate ships period. The skill needs a major rework. We need the ability to broadcast fake ship IDs too. I mean, the only reason that people knew that Han Solo flew Millennium Falcon or that Lando flew Lady Luck was because those were the ships they flew all the time. Smugglers and pirates are known for broadcasting fake ship IDs all the time with varying degrees of success.

But I guess it was one of those skills brought about by someone’s need to be lazy and not have to do any legwork. Go figure.

Kinda goes with the game balance, factor. Considering 99% of the pbase has no quarrel with dropping a grenade in a Walldo fashion to “instant-karma” their opponents, having a vague idea of who you are going against makes sense. That’s half the reason Smugglers can steal ships. If they’re smart about it, they can steal a ship who’s owner isn’t well known/inactive and pretend to be them. Not saying the transponder idea is bad, just saying it makes sense to have the locateship skill.

Not to mention the tracking factor locateship brings to the board, otherwise it’d be pretty much impossible without farsight.

…No… the glitch works because you type in “locateship american” and get “american cowboy”.

If you type in the entire string you see when you look in a ship room, it will only get the 1 ship because it is ship type and name, all in quotations.

By “glitch”, I was referring to the thing everyone is complaining about that lets you locate any ship. If you type

Locateship “X-wing Starfighter ‘A'” – You will get the an X-wing registered under the letter A.

locateship “X-wing Starfighter ‘A'”
You begin the process of tapping into the shipyard databases.

You manage to locate a record on the target vessel…
Ship Information: X-Wing CG Starfighter ‘Asmodeans Fury’
Ship Owner: Ashamorcg
Location:
Dock: -=( Free For All Staging Platform )=-
Planet: GNI Report