Being able to access player faction information via HWS connect, if possible, would be helpful on occasion.
E.g., an alliance player may want to avoid trading with pirates. However, the Marketplace shows the player name, but doesn’t show their faction. If the player is offline, then their faction information is not available.
Basically, if there’s a wanted or something on the market place and showing the name Bob for example, we don’t know if Bob is a pirate,trader,_etc,etc. because they’re not online it doesn’t show which faction they belong to. So if there was a way to see what faction folks are a part of even while they’re offline is what they’re trying to get to here I believe.
Note there are a few people who don’t respect faction tags but in principle it is a sound idea. I would suggest making it searchable by specific name only and put a limit on the number of searches someone can do whilst logged into Connect to prevent abuse. Limits could also be a faction bonus i.e. Hunters could have reduced cooldown or a greater number of searches, traders less so.
In the first step I can make a “HWS Community” card in HWS Connect. There is everyones name + faction listed.
You have to scroll / press CTRL + F for the browser search to find the name.
Or you think it is a too private information @Kalsius so we have to limit it? Basically a player can write it down offline to a paper. Don’t know if a cooldown would make it too complex.
But as I said HWS Connect will be boosted the coming days regarding the connection to the game
Its not necessarily that its private but information is power in these types of games. I am thinking a little longer term and I thought of a way to abuse this.
I create a script that scrapes the page, depending on the refresh I then know who has joined/left/created/disbanded what faction. I can now build a set of intelligence based on other factors. If I know FactionY has a PvE base on Destiny and I see someone join FactionY, there is a good chance they will be heading to that orbit. So if I want to kill that person I have a sense that within say the next 30mins that person will be going to that location.
This is not information which is easily obtainable in game other than refreshing each faction in the player menu and writing it down. An automated system (again depending on the refresh rate) makes this ever easier.
Hence my suggestion of this being limited depending upon faction or being search specific, or having some kind of delay on the veracity of the information based on faction. Happy to write out some ideas but right now I think having a big long list of player information could be abused and impact the in-game metasystem.
I appreciate your concerns. The particular scenario you mention seems to be time limited enough that I don’t think it would be that significant of a concern. (Note: Destiny’s orbit is PvE. It’s not a vulnerability for that specific example.) Outside of your example, I haven’t been able to think of any other possible abuses.
I would recommend keeping it simple as Rex proposed. If it turns out there is an existential exploit, then I would support removing the feature.
Good points Kalsius and cookies to the guy who would do this fancy analytics / analyzes.
Maybe a kind of reward to the guy who is doing all of this effort? Sounds a good job for Bounty Hunters / Pirates at least.
To be honest technically it would be kind of difficult. My workflow is to first prototype stuff and refactor optimize it a bit later.
Like HWS Connect 2.0 coming soon (some improvements already happened in the background like the Copy Button for the OCD get command).
What I can do actually is (what I will do with fa:scan). Each faction has a kind of cooldown to view this page
So a trader can always refresh the AJAX call and get new informations. Pirates can get new data every 6 hours, bounty hunter every 3 hours and alliance every hour?