In a DevBlog released on July 10, CCP announced that their planned changes to Local chat channels across the entirety of NullSec would go live on Tranquility at downtime today (Friday, July 12). CCP are still looking for feedback in the official forum thread, which at more than 6000 comments in 6 days is one of the most-used threads of recent years.
The changes, which can be summed up as ‘Wormhole-style Local’, have been described by CCP as a switchover to “delayed mode”. This isn’t exactly what it sounds like, though. The actual system being implemented is that players will no longer be shown permanently in the Local channels of Nullsec. In fact, the only time players will become visible in Local channels will be when they choose to send a message to the system they are in.
If you live in NullSec, you should play carefully if you hope to survive the weekend and the coming weeks, and the Imperium’s Ministry of Truth has created this helpful graphic to inform you all of how to manage the risks of not having active local intel.
This is a significant change to the mechanics of Nullsec, and will affect other aspects that are used and abused regularly, such as AFK cloaky camping. Cloaky camping being the logging in and cloaking of a character in a system and leaving it there 24/7 with the intention of causing concern among the home residents of particular systems or regions and reducing player activity there.
At present, CCP have not indicated how long this particular blackout situation will last, although they do say they will be monitoring the effects of the change to the cluster. Only time will tell how this changes the way Nullsec EVE is played.
In the meantime, watch your backs. You never know who’s behind you.
