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Cloaked Espionage - Printable Version

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Cloaked Espionage - Binski - 01-30-2020

With the recent change in rules to capital ships being prohibited from engaging transports, I'd like to re raise the issue of espionage and cloaked espionage.

I've thought about it a long time and it always drove me nuts that it was axed.

Perhaps now it might be good to think about allowing cloaked espionage on the server again, and it might stir some activity. It could also become a good rp catalyst for RP developments, or any rp change, that are hard to get moving.

The option for caps would be to act more as cloaked observers that would be able to get the evidence of smuggling for a fine by hunting them to sneak up on them for scans, not so much attack them.

Mainly I see it more so being used to listen in on inrp conversations, where characters RP openly as themselves, or talk about their real intentions, where they don't usually when unknown parties are nearby. A lot of times it's near impossible to prove certain things without sneaking up on someone to get the information. This used to be really fun, and was challenging. Another reason was to observe enemy POB's and find out if faction tagged ships were using/supplying certain bases, which usually you'd be lucky to get proof of, unless cloaked.

Personally I don't see the problem with making sure the onus is on the player to be careful not to let their guard down to the potential of spies. We have cloak disruptors, so that means areas and events that must be protected from spies can be.

I also think that the bounty business would be a lot more active if you could spy on ships and use the data to levy bounties. With the cloak beep and chat list its still a challenge to go totally unnoticed, and with limits on cloak times it keeps cloaked spying potential contained. The same goes for using scans for unlawful extortions, or intel bounties.

Bring back the spy business to the server please! I know some argued it avoided interaction, but I think that was just to make protecting themselves easier. This is the type of thing that should be doable here.

And although it would be a separate topic, maybe this would open up the chance to add something like a new shield that would dampen scanners, requiring you to get extremely close to get scans regardless of your scanner type.




RE: Cloaked Espionage - Nightowl - 01-31-2020

Good idea, difficult to implement.

In my experience, it has always proven extremely difficult for players to be spies. You end up in metagaming extremely quickly.
The problem is simply that a spy is 98% indistinguishable from a normal player, especially when you consider that there is a language barrier for many of the players here.
This is simply because the player of the spy must either do so badly (and deliberately incorporate mistakes) so that the person opposite has a chance to recognize that something is wrong.
I have seen this in many different types of role-playing games, but it only * worked if the spies were NPC's and the Game Master portrayed them.

* Works in the sense that it was fun for everyone involved.

Based on this (at least 25 years of experience in roleplay) I would advise against it, because there will only be more drama about it.