Here we go again.

Here I have taken a few of the intelligence tools available to us and mapped where I feel they fit on the Span vs Quality graph. The brown boxes represent tools for locating people, the blue boxes market information tools and green boxes military info such as fits etc. I’ve also added to a graph the red line which is the current trend and the green line which is where I feel the trend should fall.
Once you visualise the tools in this manner it quickly becomes very apparent where problems may arise from, Intelligence in eve online is far too perfect and while there is a very healthy deviation in the focus of information you are receiving there really is no cause to question it.

So to kick off on a positive note, I think the current state of industry intelligence is one for the other “categories” to take as an example, I say this in the terms that in order to fully trust your information you have to be specific. For example you can look at regional averages and that’s a great way to get an overview of a large area, but these averages are effected by anomalies (not always a great deal granted), you can’t always be 100% sure because there will always be some hero selling 1 tritanium for a billion isk and it is orders like this which act as a counter intelligence. In fact these counter intelligences are so effective that there are popular and successful scams based around them, the marginal trading scam and many contract based scams work purely because the scammers are able to misinform the victim regarding the market, and this is a great thing to be able to do. Market history is also a great example of an intelligence tool that works because it gives you a huge amount of info from the market to use however to actually apply it you have to follow patters and make speculations, and in this sense it is far from perfect but still unmeasurable in its usefulness. And that is what makes the market Intel tools work In order to be certain that the info you’re getting is correct you need to move yourself to the station you want to check and physically look at the orders yourself, either this or use a community tool such as eve-central and get the happy middle ground of being able to see individual orders at the risk of being 10-20 mins behind the live market.

So as I’ve already said the acquisition, use and manipulation of information and intelligence in market PvP is already in a pretty good place, but I’m a strong believer of always having room for improvement. I’m not a market mogul so I’m not sure of the entirety of third party tools available, but one thing I’ve always liked the idea of is an in-game tool which allows a more broad view of the market than mere regional.
One idea plucked from the aether of my musings includes some sort of indefinite visual representation of the supply and demand of a given item, or if you wish to go even greater in scale an entire market group. What I mean is for instance you could right click an item, click a button and our friend the map would pop up shaded in relation to a ratio of buy orders to sell orders, this would tell not where the item is worth the most or which is the best system to take it to but rather provide information which could be used to come to educated conclusions to where the best place to sell or buy may be. Something along these lines I feel would compliment the coming industry changes also which have been speculated to dilute the market away from localised trade hubs such as Jita and Amarr somewhat.

Going in the other direction towards more precise focused information I feel there is less potential for improvement, It’s pretty much where it should be right now. At the last Fanfest round tables there were some suggestions from both players and developers to further increase how much information you can see in the market, such as who has placed orders or which orders are related to each other. To me this would be an unnecessary addition and would heavily damage the scamming community (and yes they may be scumbags but scammers deserve just as much of a representation in this game as any other player.) I personally would neither benefit or suffer from changes but that’s just how I feel.

Next I want to look at an extremely powerful form of intelligence which is sometimes underestimated. Fitting and composition intelligence is the difference between gfs in local, a colossal whelp and a disappointing case of blue balls. The obvious objective here is to gain as much information on the enemy’s composition and let up as little of your own. So what’s the issue here? Well there isn’t too much in the way of issues I feel however I do feel there are one or two things that stick out like a sore thumb. To obtain information on fittings isn’t itself really that much of a big deal, it requires little to no preparation or skill. With the introduction of [fantastic] third party tools such as Dingo’s Toolbox all it takes is a drive by D-scan, a paste in the bin and you’ve pretty much got all the information you need, especially when you can pull up their names from local chat and check their killboards, you’re able to make very informed guesses at their exact fits. And if this tactic isn’t an option? suicide intel is best intel, and death mails can tell you a huge amount of information.

The issue I find when it comes to fitting and comp intelligence is the way eve is played now there is no inherit risk to obtain this information and no real way to defend against it, and that is what I feel needs to change. This is one I spent quite a while thinking about and I couldn’t really think of any mentionable suggestions, nor did anyone else’s suggestions leap out at me. There have been discussions for certain counters such as being able to pay concord a fee to omit certain intelligence from kill-mails, or ship rigs that disrupt itelligence gathering tools such a D-Scan, and of course the suggestion of the player deployable which you can load a BPO in and send out false positive D-scan results. These suggestions while interesting I feel do not tackle the issues at hand in the right way, nor do they address the lack of risk, I would very much invite you to share your ideas as this is one subject I’m very interested in.

Finally I’m going to moan about the bigger issue, Location intelligence. Location intelligence’s current situation is slightly more in question than that of the market and of course the more topical factor is local chat, but we’ll get to that. My issue as I’ve mentioned in previous articles with locational intelligence is how on a broader macro sense the edges are perfect, being able to identify someone entering and leaving a system with pin point accuracy seems a little silly to me and to be able to do it through proxy with no initial information of someone’s location in 4 minutes is also a little extreme, granted that this is somewhat mitigated by the 30 minute cool-down. The fact of the matter is the more broader locational intelligence tools need to be dragged down into the less reliable area, make players have to question or verify the information they have received rather than knowing for sure that it’s perfect. But before that allow me to share another point I discovered.

I carried out a small experiment in which I told a friend to go and hide In a system anywhere in Eve and I would hunt him down. The results of which I feel highlight another issue with this particular form of intelligence.

What is revealed is that the acquisition of information, rather than happening over a prolonged period of time in which you converge upon your target, happens over two bursts. After two minutes my locator agent had come back to me and completely bypassing any requirement to discover my targets region or constellation I knew which system they were in, and with very little travel time I was in system with them and able to confirm this without a shadow of a doubt. There is then a period in which no information is really obtained until finally the target is probed down in which all at once you get their exact location, what they are flying and if you have a ship scanner fitted their exact fit and capacitor levels. It’s as if there are only 3 states, Not a clue -> In System -> On their toes. There’s a distinct lack of what I think is missing from the game which would be states of “My target is in this region, In one of these 3 constellations” etc. I’m sure you guys are catching my drift by now.
I also think it’s a bit of an issue that I went from knowing nothing about my target to knowing absolutely everything about their current state in a mere 22 minutes but that is not something I wish to focus on in this article.

It’s all very well complaining my tits off about these issues but what can be done to fix them? The answer of course is I don’t know, I’m not an expert so I’m not going to claim I have all the answers but I’m here now and you’ve somehow managed to get coaxed into reading this colossal wall of text so I may as well throw out some ideas that I’ve either heard or had that I feel would benefit the game in terms of intelligence game-play.

The thing that made the market based intel work as I already mentioned and especially with regional averages, is the fact that they can be distorted by people feeding them misinformation, and this is something that I would really love to see in terms of locational information. We have already seen the introduction of the Mobile Scan Inhibitor, a device which blocks everything in its range showing up on scanners. This was a huge step in the right direction in introducing counter-play however I still would like to see a more active counter where rather than simply denying information you are manipulating it and feeding false intel. CCP have already expressed that they have a similar interest as I do in terms of introducing more counter-play and at Fanfest there were mentions from CCP of a mobile deployable which a blueprint can be loaded into and that deployable will show up as the blueprint on D-scan and possibly even combat probes. If this is the sorts of things we’re to expect in the future then I personally am very excited, I dream of an EVE where entire capital fleets can be sent on a wild goose chase only to be lead into a trap, or where a black ops fleet would be hot dropped onto a ratting carrier to find out it was all a ruse and get ambushed. So to approach this clinically let’s look at each feature individually.

Locator Agents contribute quite largely I feel to the issues with location based intelligence, as the sole contributors to the first information spike I mentioned at around 2 minutes into a search. So if the problem is that the information is too perfect and too fast then how should this be tweaked? Well in terms of how fast the information comes I’m not going to sit here and say “this level agent should reply after X minutes with a Y cool down” because my opinion on specifics such as that aren’t worth anything to anyone however I feel it should at least be revised. In terms of how perfect the information is the answer seems relatively obvious. As it stands the information given by the locator agent is perfect at the instance it is received and then becomes less so the longer it is left without confirmation and while this is a good thing I feel it should start out this way, the results should not tell me where my target is, but rather where my target has been (and may still be). In addition to that I also feel a jump straight from no information to a single system is a bit of a steep jump, perhaps a system where locator agents are able to give more precise information depending on their distance from the target could be explored, for instance a locator agent in the same region as the target could return the constellation, an agent in the constellation the exact system and so on.

For Local Chat, There are a billion and one suggested fixes and I’m not going to sit here and list them all because no one wants to hear that and I don’t want to write that, if you want to see some of the ideas people have had, and some of them are really good go here and have a read.
But ignoring all that here is one suggested fix I personally like.

Facetious gifs aside let me explain with an example, and I can already hear you typing your “CLOAKY WhineER Fegggit” comments from London champ.
Let’s say that you’re ratting in a system and you get a +1 in local, without any sort of active input you’re able to know exactly who that person is and more importantly what standings they have to your corp or alliance etc. The consensus seems to be that this is an issue, especially when dealing with nulsec, the issue, as I have already mentioned, is that the information is far too perfect and I feel that this is credited to the fact that obtaining information from local is an entirely passive process, no effort or verification is required.
It’s with suspected little objection that I state that the way local works in hisec and wormhole space is pretty much where it needs to be, the questionable area lays within nulsec and lowsec. The solution to this I feel is relatively simple, meet at the middle and increase active interaction, or in other words have the local chat of a wormhole wile retaining the “number of pilots in system” information. This would mean that if you’re ratting and you see a +1 in local you then have to investigate if they’re blue or not, have them x up in chat and reveal themselves in local, are you willing to dock up for every +1 knowing that it could be a blue and sacrifice precious isk making time? Risk Vs Reward (BUZZWORDS!). This solution I feel introduces the perfect amount of danger and interaction, can still be obscured by things like cross jumping but also allows big fleet operations to detect local spikes and such. To me this would be the way to go, and I also feel that a similar solution is required to Local Chat’s slightly more ugly and greatly neglected little sister, Station Guest Lists.

Probing and Signatures are in a pretty good place right now, a probed signature gives the player a huge amount of information however it requires the skill set and effort to suit, while I’m not too keen on how the whole mechanic has been getting easier and easier over the years I feel it’s still going pretty strong provided they don’t carry on the trend. My only complaint would have been in the very specific example of wormholes where new signatures appear instantly on your scanning overlay, which gives wormhole residents instant warning to new connections however with the coming K162 signature changes this issue will be of the past. CCP doin’ it right again!

D-Scan strictly looking at it as a location finding tool I think is in a pretty good place, the accuracy of the information is defined by two factors; how much effort you’re willing in to find your target and how much effort they’re willing to put in to hide, which if you ask me is exactly how it should be. Thinking about it now my decision to put location D-scanning where I did on my graph is a bit off and it probably should be a bit closer to the green line.

Finally there is On-Grid intelligence, which by all rights is fine where it is, you’re putting a sizeable amount of risk by getting on grid with someone and therefore should be rewarded with the juicy juicy intel, and even if you’re cloak if you wanted further your intel into fitting and specifics such as cap levels, ammo types or cargo you’d have to de-cloak and cycle a cargo/ship scanner further increasing risk and gaining reward. So long story short I’ve got no real complaints here.

So clearly my issue in terms of locational intel lays within the early regions, the acquisition of regional and constellational(?) information is non-existent and to get system information is far too easy with it all snowballing from there.

So there we have my two pence on the situation; the guy who always moans about intel…moaning about intel. Hopefully I’ve given you some food for thought, as I aimed to do no more and I invite you to join the hellscape below which is the comment section.