It'd be really spammy if you consider approach plus departure. Every vehicle that passes on the street, you're talking like eight messages just to let you know it went zipping past.
AV's already operate in this manner, and from much further away, regardless of their speed.
I'm not sure it'd really do much from a gameplay perspective too, because it's a little odd to go 'uh oh, I hear a vehicle, I'll bet that's definitely someone after me'
It would provide several benefits. It would incentivise people to drive slower if they are trying to be sneaky.
It would add tensions when you're RPing something and you hear a vehicle approaching at high speed.
It would give players a chance to react to vehicles traveling at high speed. With the duration that a vehicle is in a room at racing pace, the only way to interact with them right now is with an automated macro.
That being said, it would be fairly easy to block these noises from being heard 'inside', cutting down the spam when you're indoors.
I will say the 'vehicle in the distance' idea would translate well out in the Badlands, where its already pretty funny you don't notice a semi barreling across the flats until its right on top of you.
As for knowing when the WJF were arriving in the Mix, Judges are already at a huge disadvantage in Red, being called out immediately and the entire sector being hostile to them. It'd diminish RP in this regard more than anything.
The only item I can even think of that could potentially deal with the situation has an arming time longer than it take for a cruiser going 150kph even exists in the room object for.
Barring getting a GM plot rolling in advance because you know they're coming minutes or hours in advance, I don't see how there's any way you could potentially fuck with properly driven vehicles moving at speed -through- the mix.
Obviously this is totally bubkiss if the plot or whatever has the topsider stopping and meddling with things within the mix, which is sometimes the case.
It'd be nice if there was a 5-10 second wait to get through Omega for drivers. So that if people who were actually prepared to capitalize on something could actually have the time to do so.
Right now it's like the flash teleports out of your car and you're through.
Instead of RPing a way to find out plots and movement travel hours, days and weeks in advance or betrayal you want a mechanic to announce the arrival of a vehicle so you can capitalize on that in the moment?
Your argument is the gate, but nothing's stopping you from the -other- side of the gate -after- you already know.
I don't think it's realistic to hear traffic sounds in the city unless it's something like a jet, which is already coded and in game.
I visualize Red as being totally deafening and Gold probably only slightly less so. It's like spotting a car in the humongous walls of traffic and honking that really should be existing in the streets and not simply the tubes. Obviously, we want to have some incentive for people to actually own vehicles, so that's not the case.
Having a risky checkpoint you try and crash through as fast as possible that you could potentially get caught out in.
Vs.
Assuming there's going to be some cowboys and bandits high-speed chase in the content wasteland that's outside the city? Fortune favors the Jake or Mixer player who managed to pack more jerry cans in their car so they can outrun the other?
It's devastating just losing a combat loadout that can reach waaay into the middle six figure mark.
Having my Holden with miniguns and radar and spike trap Inspector Gadget slash James Bond car blown up?
I mean, what percentage of the playerbase is ever even going to get to experience this content when it gets made?
We already have players bitching the mix is too rich because some immy bought a 16K coat, you know?
Also I take offense to the idea that introducing this mechanic would mean better RPers and planners have an even playing field. Are you suggesting there's no planning on the other side?
I'd like you to justify that statement. How you could possible take offense to me saying 'the team that planned/RPed better should prevail' is beyond me.
This is how that sentence reads to me, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong - I read it as you're saying introducing a mechanic to alert people via said mechanic makes the scenario being described - noticeable vehicles going somewhere - more about planning and RP.
The way you framed that makes it seem like you're writing that right now ti isn't about planning and RP. If I read that sentence wrong, I apologize, and please correct me.
I've personally sat and camped out WJF cruisers going in and out of the city for things like characters getting banished. It's literally in the room for half a second. That's not like 'oh, you're not prepared!' material here. That's like, literally, I can sit, have a command queued and ready to be pressed, and by the time I hit it when the car appears in the room any items I might have to use to try and stop it are invalidated because it's gone.
If you want people to be able to react to things, you need like, at minimum 1.5 to 2 seconds of time whereby they can see, understand and respond. We're playing a game where the server is centralized and I don't have the ability for my game client to go through a handshaking process with the server to authenticate that what I did on my client's side is legit. You see this problem literally all the time with server desynch trying to kill players fleeing.
This is how that sentence reads to me, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong - I read it as you're saying introducing a mechanic to alert people via said mechanic makes the scenario being described - noticeable vehicles going somewhere - more about planning and RP.The way you framed that makes it seem like you're writing that right now ti isn't about planning and RP. If I read that sentence wrong, I apologize, and please correct me.
There is absolutely planning that goes into it, and to their credit the topside vehicles that come through red -absolutely- act as if they could be affected in any way.
That being said, when the call goes out 'jakes in the mix' the time to react to the topside vehicle is insufficient to get them on outbound. Conversely, the actual dwell time of the vehicle in the rooms is insufficient to affect them on the way back up (due to many factors that really should not be discussed in this thread).
That means that there is really only one way to attempt to deal with the topside interlopers, and that way in of itself is both an exceptionally low chance of success, and exclusionary of a lot of, if not -MOST- of mixer characters.
Giving a simple warning that something fast is coming even a couple seconds beforehand dramatically alters how things player out, allowing ambushes with player typed actions to occur.
"I've personally sat and camped out WJF cruisers going in and out of the city for things like characters getting banished. It's literally in the room for half a second. That's not like 'oh, you're not prepared!' material here. That's like, literally, I can sit, have a command queued and ready to be pressed, and by the time I hit it when the car appears in the room any items I might have to use to try and stop it are invalidated because it's gone."
Here's my issue with the counterargument. Initially it was that a mechanic is needed so players have between like ten seconds to a minute to respond and be alerted that a high powered and fast-moving vehicle is coming through an area. Now you've separatelyalso introduced a second issue where cars move too fast to respond to under certain circumstances.
But also the scenarios you're personally describing, Talonczar, there's a lot of time in the 'inbetween'. Time you could work with staff, who are 95% likely to be active in your described scenarios, to prepare for a second sighting.
@redsteelbutterfly
Again the major complaint seems to be on the outbound as you wrote.
But what's stopping you from working with staff to get people on inbound scenarios? If this is something staff denies, okay, but maybe try if it hasn't been tried.
Work your hustle on the RP side to get valuable information that allows an ambush as well.
I have all of the tools to do this in game. The only thing that's missing is the ability to time it. The time between Omega gate and the nearest expressway at racing pace is less time than it takes for the necessary item to arm. Especially when you factor in needing to wait for a human to react to something and press enter on their keyboard without any sort of warning.
I'd leave @RSB to be the authority on what they meant, but personally speaking, I don't see these as separate issues at all.
The essence of the argument in the OP is that it's hard to react to or engage in RP with vehicles in transit. I agreed with some of the other posters that I don't think it was fitting to be able to see cars and such moving around in the mix or tubes as some kind of early warning system. I however, agreed with the premise of cars being hard to RP with or around when in use, which is why I brought up the example of cars coming in and out of Omega- since it's one of a few chokepoints for automotive traffic.
Regarding outbound traffic, you might be right, and there simply isn't any recourse to them leaving the city. As for return traffic, it's a similar issue, from a purely mechanical standpoint- cars moving at high speed really can't be interacted with.
You are absolutely right in that we can interact with staff and try and plot something in that lag between exit and return, it's just a little problematic in my mind (and I am wholly admitting to ignorance of the details of how banishment works outside the dome here) when we don't know if the car is going to be gone for 30 seconds or six hours. I remember one time waiting at the gate for something like an hour and a half on the return and never seeing them, but I don't know if that was extenuating circumstances or not.