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Dev Post: Delaying signature appearance for K162s

March 24, 2014

Hey everyone. Team Five O has been working on a few concepts for improvements to wormhole mechanics and we wanted to run one idea by you all to start some discussion in the community. This idea has already been discussed with the CSM, and we don’t currently have specific plans to implement it but we think it’s at least worth getting discussion started.

We have been thinking about and discussing the way that the Sensor Overlay has affected Wormhole life, mainly in the ease with which players can now observe new wormhole signatures appearing (which often indicates that the entry of hostile players may be imminent).
We investigated what would be involved with delaying the appearance of signatures on the sensor overlay, but that solution is somewhat unsatisfactory since players could always return to the old trick of spamming probe scans to check for the new sigs. Basically, the Sensor Overlay had only made the existing problem more visible, and it would be better if we could get right to the source.

The potential change would be to delay the appearance of the signature beacon when K162 dungeons spawn. This would prevent the dungeon from appearing on probe scans or the Sensor Overlay for up to a few minutes.

This change would make life in wormholes a bit less safe, and increase the sense of real danger that unknown space should include. The flipside is that actively hunting for pvp in wormholes should present more targets that have a slightly shorter notice to your arrival.

The delay could take a few potential forms, either a set timer of a couple minutes, a timer that has random elements or even one that is variable depending on the amount of mass that passes through the wormhole.

This would obviously be a very significant change to wormhole mechanics, and we think it may be a very good opportunity to shake up wormhole life and further encourage the best parts of the wormhole experience.

I’d like to repeat that this change is currently not planned for any specific release, but we would like to start community discussion on the idea and see where it goes.

Let us know what you think in this thread, and we’ll be watching closely.
Thanks!
-Fozzie

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