How to Stop 4th Empire/Spying/Sabotage?

**Malorn** · 2012-06-18, 08:16 AM

Spies can only do damage if they can see things the enemy can't. Spying will happen, you can't stop it. But you can limit the damage it can do. Spies could follow the main zerg and fly around scoping out potentially vulnerable territories, but if that is information they could get as a hostile player with roughly the same amount of work then having a spy isn't really worth it.

1) Limit showing friendly positions on the map, especially anything that could show how troops are distributed across territories. Spies will use this information to figure out where to attack or send their outfit. So if I open up the minimap I shouldnt' be able to see the locations of every friendly on the continent. I should be able to see nearby friendlies on my minimap though. That makes it a lot more work to spy areas.

2) Don't give a way to show where a particular person is. No /who or crap like that. No outfit scanning. Might be able to identify if a particular person is online, but don't show their continent or location.

If it doesn't really pay off and is a lot of work to get the intel then the number of people doing it will be very low. In games like EVE online spying had a potentially astronomical payoff. In Planetside it wasn't really that big of a deal, but PS also had limited showing of friendlies to CUD abilities that were on a cooldown. So you could find where your empire was but the information was quickly stale. And they also gave reveal enemies to you also so you didn't really need to do that.

If they continue with that, even if people show up on the minimap I'm not terribly concerned. I think the /who stuff did more damage, and being able to find out where specific people were - they shouldn't do that. As others said, opsec. Don't tell people where you're going or what you're doing that you can't trust. If that's the case the only thing a spy could do is follow you. PS2 has friendly fire, which means if someone is following you and you don't like it, tell 'em to piss off and if they don't just kill them. You may also be able to identify spies by stats - few kills/captures, but a lot of playtime, especially as infiltrator or pilot. Might learn to recognize a few of them and if they trail your outfit, kill 'em.

megamold · 2012-06-18, 08:23 AM

Originally Posted by Malorn

2) Don't give a way to show where a particular person is. No /who or crap like that. No outfit scanning. Might be able to identify if a particular person is online, but don't show their continent or location.
Spying will happen, you can't stop it. But you can limit the damage it can do. Spies could follow the main zerg and fly around scoping out potentially vulnerable territories, but if that is information they could get as a hostile player with roughly the same amount of work then having a spy isn't really worth it.

that would be the work of a scout

a spies job isnt really to find out where the enemy is right now, or in 5 minutes time.
his job is to find out where the enemy will try to be in an hour or 2.
or where that specials ops team is being sent before it gets sent out, and why they want them there.

infiltration, social engineering, abuse of trust
being a spy is awesome, to bad im not cut out to be one

**Malorn** · 2012-06-18, 08:41 AM

Originally Posted by megamold

that would be the work of a scout

a spies job isnt really to find out where the enemy is right now, or in 5 minutes time.
his job is to find out where the enemy will try to be in an hour or 2.
or where that specials ops team is being sent before it gets sent out, and why they want them there.

infiltration, social engineering, abuse of trust
being a spy is awesome, to bad im not cut out to be one

In EVE that's certainly true. In PlanetSide I could look at the map and tell you where the enemy will be with a pretty good idea where they will go next. Didn't need a spy for that.

Outfit spies are the kind that could potentially do damage, but even then it's just one outfit, not all the others on the empire. The scope of the spy is very small. In a game where the spy could help bring down the outfit permanently it would be a different story. But things change so quickly in PlanetSide that the most warning you might get from a Spy is a few minutes, and even then only one outfit. Having a spy in CR5 chat might have been useful in PS1 if they were planning raids and what not, but that was easy enough to counter by having only a select few CR5's calling the target and not revealing that target until the last possible moment.

EVE and Planetside are very different, and I know spying is powerful and potentially extremely damaging in EVE, but it wasn't in Planetside. Scouting really is the most useful thing a spy can do, especially without a CR5 chat. Apart from that, infiltrating a large alliance of outfits might be profitable. But if that's the case there's nothing SOE can do about it because at that point it's a social engineering problem and an opsec problem.

I still think the pacing of PlanetSide is such that the value of spying is quite low. Low enough that it isn't worth the effort unless you want to see how well defended an area is or scope out a potential target without drawing suspicion. That's about it.

lolroflroflcake · 2012-06-18, 09:12 AM

There is nothing wrong with spying in a game, if your whining about it you have only proven that you completely missed the point. Besides a spy cannot actively keep you from having fun or sabotage without being labelled as a griefer and being punished as such, they just help their team win through information and that is a legitimate tactic in Planetside.

The fourth empire is the only real problem, but if they want to make a totally different account for each empire on a server then that's up to them. Cause I am almost entirely certain that there will be measures in place to keep people on one empire per server for one given account.