In warfare, information can be the deciding factor between victory & defeat as well as living and dying. Being able to successfully determine what your enemy is sporting is always key BUT knowing what your side is also sporting plays an indirect, albeit extremely important, subconscious role in how you perform on the battlefield. Currently, players can only tell what both sides are running by direct line of sight, and being close enough to the enemy to decipher a suit size, suit color scheme, and weapons usually means you're in a combat situation anyways. Wouldn't it make your life so much simpler if there was a way to determine these qualitative factors a little easier?

Send In the Icons!
My suggestion is to take a page out of the EVE book and update the interface to reflect the size or kind of suit a hostile is wearing IF and ONLY IF: 1) you are in passive scanning range and can be detected as such, or 2) you are in line of sight. Blueberries, on the other hand, should share the icon information about their suit size/role at the same distances that we can currently see blue chevrons. Here's an example of EVE's more recent icons for ships, clearly differentiating between Capsules all the way up to Titan. Such a change would allow players to pick and choose their targets both easier and more tactfully, and better identify opportunities with teammates.

"But Diablo! What about Active Scanners!?"
In my opinion, I think that Active Scanners should still reflect the location of enemies as they do now, but NOT determine the kind of suit that a hostile is wearing and thus still only showing the simple red chevron.


Some feedback would be appreciated, and here is a crude example of something I just came up with.

Passive Scans were ruled to be "OP Wallhacks" not that long ago. There's more potential for balance problem now than there was then, thanks to 8x and 16x shared squad sight. So ... what's changed? I love how Diablo's thinking and am very much in favor of making EWAR more interesting, but are we really in a big hurry to make Passive Scans scans better? If so, why?

I'd suggest that we maintain former trajectory. Keep Passive Scans weak; perhaps make them even weaker on account of 8x/16x shared squad sight. Buff Dampeners or nerf Active Scans (especially those from the GalLogi) so running Damps on non-Scouts might actually prove a worthwhile option. Once always-on scans -- be them passive or active -- are no longer a competitive constant , then we could come up with ways to make scans more interesting and EWAR interplay more dynamic.

Do we want to play chase the Red Chevron?

[snip]
remove shared passives completely ...

We're all responding because Diablo has some cool ideas, but in terms of gameplay this is a step backwards. Also, shared scans are too powerful. We need to tune them down or, perhaps better in terms of gameplay, introduce various types of jammers/eccm.

Assault squad leader to his squadmates, "Alright fellas, around this corner is a squad of scouts. Get ready for some WPs. Breach now!"

Greeted with a room full of HMG sentinels. Breathing heavily, like asthmatic murder-gorillas, pre-spinning their barrels.

"It has been an honor serving with you, gentlemen..."

Do it CCP. It would be very entertaining to have scouts think I'm a scout just to find I'm a Gallente Assault with dual Complex Damage Modifers.

Is it possible the Gal Sent can have a lower Db profile innanately so it can be a very good ambusher/ganker? If we repurpose the chevrons of suits to lessen UI clutter, Sentinels that can look like assaults could make tge suit appealing. 07

This is cool. During the scanning overhaul, we talked about having signature profile being demonstrated as bigger circles, so a 8 dB scout would be a tiny dot, and a sentinel, much bigger. Effectively allowing damped heavies to disguise as assault, and so on.

This is cool. During the scanning overhaul, we talked about having signature profile being demonstrated as bigger circles, so a 8 dB scout would be a tiny dot, and a sentinel, much bigger. Effectively allowing damped heavies to disguise as assault, and so on.

Hi!

I like the OPs' idea. However, the proposed conditions for this feature expand the current information availability. That is a no-no for me. What I find to be acceptable is:

- Suit icon appears when cross-hairs are placed over redberry / blueberry / greenberry.

Which is to say: suit information we get in text form on our lower right corner of HUD would be placed over target like present day chevron in the form of an easily recognizable icon. This way both ideas (OP and CCP Rattati) could be implemented in a non overlaying fashion improving NPE without removing information cost.

This means that ideally approx. 32 different icons would be necessary. But this could be simplified to only 8 or even 3.

See you around...

Aelns Dene

the passive scanning mechanics still need work. you would think that each race wouldve tuned their sensors to perform based on their particular needs.

right now its like every race is using off the shelf sensor packages from the same vendor.

a 4th ring would be nice, and then assign the strongest precision to a particular race, at a particular range, for each ring.

Agreed 110%. Wonder if the Dev Team can handle this now that they have Aquarhead? This wasn't an option last December, but it might be now.

I would rather have a specific dropsuit role have shared squad passive scans. The obvious choice for this intel/recon role would be scout, but logi would be another option as they have the second best scan precision and range.

Suddenly it becomes very useful to have a scout on the edges of the fire fight, passively lighting up potential targets for his squad to engage. If the logi was used for this intel role they could be an early warning system against scouts and flankers.

I hate shared passives many times more than Gal Logi scans.

I really like the idea of signature profile determining TacNet ID, the possibilities for more EWar interplay by disguising/altering ones profile...

Perhaps instead of removing shared scans, we could build on the EWar concept to mitigate the passive scan issues? A few ideas:

A " reverse scanner" that disables the TacNet and/or shared scans of enemies caught in the "scan".
An " EMP Mine", similar to a RE, disables TacNet/shared scans of enemies caught in the "blast" radius.
Perhaps a module that provides an AoE TacNet disruption to enemies within a certain distance, useful for snipers hiding, lone heavies or scouts slipping behind enemy lines for clandestine EWar operations...

Any of this sound interesting?

What about when you look at a suit with ur crosshais and it says "invalidstring- 718639(44826592656" hmm mister smart guy?

oh I like the EMP mine but I would have it like a nanohive (needs a tme limit that only counts while a red is in it) so it is a piece of equipment and takes up bandwidth but a much bigger area effect and invisible unless you have a lower DB precision. now the real question- would you have it spawn random reds on the TACNET or hide blues by making their DB lower and harder to see. though can not stack with other emp mines to drop db to 0 and split the usage of nanomites until they pop.

I would rather have a specific dropsuit role have shared squad passive scans. The obvious choice for this intel/recon role would be scout, but logi would be another option as they have the second best scan precision and range.

Suddenly it becomes very useful to have a scout on the edges of the fire fight, passively lighting up potential targets for his squad to engage. If the logi was used for this intel role they could be an early warning system against scouts and flankers.

Yayy,another way for logis to be singled out and hunted down.

-1

Do it CCP. It would be very entertaining to have scouts think I'm a scout just to find I'm a Gallente Assault with dual Complex Damage Modifers.

This is cool. During the scanning overhaul, we talked about having signature profile being demonstrated as bigger circles, so a 8 dB scout would be a tiny dot, and a sentinel, much bigger. Effectively allowing damped heavies to disguise as assault, and so on.

How about Medium and Heavy frames that get a bonus to dampeners?

Right now you can easily build Assault that Scouts can not see on they passive scan, and that have 100% more HP and you want M/H class that do it even better?

Yes, yes I do!

So young, so naive.