So, if I got it right, this should make organised groups targets for jump-out-kidnapping.
And if I understood it correctly, you can protect yourself against it by CDing every Khara or Vagrant ship during a 3 minute charge period.
That does actually not sound that hard, but you need a CDer.
At least in theory that should make the market for escorts more interesting.
The Vagrants will be allowed to use the Jump Drive for the following purposes:
- To survey systems, obviously.
- To escape.
- To bring nomads and related entities from A to B.
- To snatch people, in order to either drive them out of nomad-controlled space or in order to fight them on another battlefield.
What the Vagrants are not allowed to:
- To snatch people and just leave them in some random system at 200k distance from the closest solar.
Explanation:
The Jump Drive is bound to the Nomad Countermeasure Dropper and uses the Vagrant ID or the K'hara ID as fuel (without consumption). The Jump Drive has a "bubble" range of 500M, so anything in that radius will be jumped out once the jump is in process. This does not include NPCs, solars, etc. It is only affecting players, currently of any size. It is not possible to use the Jump Drive on Nomad indies, as they don't have an ID that serves as fuel. It is also not possible to use the Jump Drive and a Cloak, as a Vagrant/K'hara has to decide wether to use a Cloak or a Countermeasure on the CM slot. What is possible, though, is to have one ship using the jump drive and other ships within the jump bubble to be cloaked.
A nomad ship will glow with the typical jump drive animation, white glow and white shooting stars whirling around the ship. This is both while charging and when being charged. You can use a Cruise Disruptor on a charged ship to kill the charge and save yourself from getting snatched. Keep in mind, the snatchers can use their Countermeasures. The charging process takes three minutes.
The blind jump is very inaccurate and will definitely spit you out in a random system at any point of the system, which can be 50K close to a solar or 300K. It can also spit you out in systems without jump holes (Uncharted) or systems that will instantly crash Freelancer.exe, as they are no systems but universe files (sector 1, sector 2, sector 3). If a jump lead to any of those non-systems, FL will crash and when loading it up again, the ship will be at the last point where you have been docked - just as if you died. If you are not able to load your ship again, write a thread in the support subforum or contact an Admin to have your ship checked. That is an issue that should be fixed, but we all know Discovery. ;3 This happens with a chance of ~3/160, by the way.
The Vagrants will use this to remove people from the Nomad-controlled systems (in our case, specifically Omicron Lost, Omicron Major, Omicron Psi and Omicron Iota and possibly uncharted systems). The Vagrants will also use it in an attempt to even out fleets, as in trying to snatch single entities to fight them somewhere else. Imagine it like a Xenomorph coming out of the bush, pulling one of your people away from the group and then fighting it. This will very likely happen via random jumps, as entering coordinates is pretty difficult in a combat situation. (Note: Coordinates are entered with the charge, not with the jump, so the very first charge might be a controlled jump!) Take it as a chance to experience something that is rather out-of-the-box. I can only speak for the Vagrants in this, but we'll try to make encounters fair, and in best cases, fair and fun. Again, this is Discovery, so expect things to go wrong, just as we expect the worst and hope for the best when having interactions with other players. If something unpleasant happens, do contact us. Either Foxglove or me, we're available via PM, we have a Vagrant Feedback Thread, some of you might even have our contacts on Skype (although it is likely not my contact, as I remove people once the talk is done.)
We will use the Jump Drive also for cool RP situations. We really want to make the best of this nice feature. We requested it practically the moment we designed the Vagrants, we got it now, and we intend to keep it. We also don't want to be seen as meme/troll faction, so if something like that happens, do contact us and we look into it. Also, do contact us if a Lesser.Vagrant (our Bounty Hunters) does bad stuff with it.
I hope we'll have a cool time with this nice feature, in the best cases giving both ourselves and the human player a nice experience with this. While I not necessarily agree with K'Hara having this feature as well, I do understand why they got it as well. Some may call it leeching off it off the Vagrants who put effort into it, I call it compensation for their most recent nerf. That being said, I hope for K'hara to use this feature in a reasonable way as well.
Edit: Also, the people using this feature actively might notice how often they end up in a system with a Omicron Lost starsphere and a medium blue (the Gran Canaria central star) in it. This is just a default system that has been copied multiple times - pretty much all ???-systems look like this, but they are not the same. You can see that in the universe map. Don't worry, the jump drive works perfectly fine. There are just many of the ???-systems ingame currently, as the old guard systems have been reverted to those systems.
Edit 2: Our Vagrants received the order to, by any means, not use Vagrant-collected jump drive coordinates on human ships. Just to mention it. We don't want this kind of metagame.
Revision 1. 2017 10 02
Changes will be implemented after the restart.
Nomad Jump Drive ''bubble'' reduced from 500m to 150m
Nomad Jump Drive charge time reduced from 180s to 60s
Nomad Navigator coordinate accuracy reduced from 25k to 150k
Nomad Navigator coordinate survey time reduced from 60s to 10s
Nomad Abduction Field Mutation commodity added for testing purposes
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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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Essentially a commodity that acts like a jumpdrive, is lost upon death and costs 50mil and can jump everything in a 10k radius.
FOR TESTING PURPOSES
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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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(10-02-2017, 10:55 AM)HanCloudstone Wrote: >Nomad Navigator coordinate accuracy reduced from 25k to 150k
This is just weird. Adding several minutes of flight even to a proper jump?
It does seem counterintuitive. If you blind jump, you land about 200-250k away from all solars. Now, if you do a coordinate jump, you almost land the same distance away, only that you actually intended to land in that system. Let's see how it plays out, though, especially with the new commodity.
The change was implemented due to an ongoing idea regarding jump ranges for the item.
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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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It is not working as intended, sadly. I will need a separate item added for this, looks like.
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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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