Chance Ravinne wrote:I love watch lists as much as the next guy, but sometimes it feels overpowered as an intelligence source. Especially in w space where the lack of local adds to the mystery and shroud, but watch lists kind of undermine that. Any thoughts?
OK, here's my take on this.
When your clowns came into my hole, and set up EVE's Second Least Impressive Wormhole Camp (you outdid yourselves this week, btw) I parked an alt on the wormhole entrance and added every idiot who jumped through.
I went to zkillboard and researched each idiot to determine which other clown-arse moron he flew with. Soon i had scried out who was in my hole, which one had a bomber and who had a Falcon, who had a 800M Wingspan "doctrine" Stratios spendo-punching bag.
I had a good idea who was in my hole, and since they were on watchlists, and i had researched their behaviour on zkillboard, I came to a conclusion.
#1 - You are all US TZ and you were "hell camping" an AU TZ corp
#2 - As long as we didn't idle n the wormhole with MWD's running in a T1 frigate, we would be fine, because bomber camps against 150K EHP cloaky proteuses are, well, pretty damn pointless
#3 - I could tell who was online, what they were flying, and address the risk and alleged threat your clowns posed at any one time.
The watchlist was not the be-all and end-all of my intelligence gathering. Researching zkillboard and using half of one fifth of my brain was the majority of it.
I realised immediately, you and yours had no real teeth. You hadn't sieged anyone out. Haulers and mining barges would kill your bombers more often than not. You needed 12 guys to do anything. We could, and did, go about our business without interference. Finally, you were engaged in a collossal waste of time because your idiots never once brought a decent interdiction option to the field.
So is a watchlist bad? No.
it's a tool. A small and ineffectual tool. Which is why a small and ineffectual tool is trying to get it removed I suppose.
Sure, it's prone to abuse. Blood Union would invest billions of ISK in dreads, dread alts, etc, and seed hem into C5's inhabited by bears and pull logon traps partly informed by watchlists. But, and I'll educate you about what really happened because you weren't even playing the game when it happened, BU quit wormholes mostly when CCP removed API kill logging support and jump logging from wormhole systems, thereby invalidating BU's intel tool known as Siggy.
BU didn't even need to WL their victims to pull logon traps. a WL pinging with sign-ons is handy but it wouldn't have stopped them without the removal of NPC kill logging and jump logging which just showed a nice red or yellow flag on the holes in Siggy.
Would i want WL's removed? no. You know why? i have friends. Without a WL, the only way I now my friends, enemies and frienemies are online is to be in the same channel as them (local or otherwise).
Sure, some people may hate the fact I WL their whole active member base, but the key is that you and yours didn't get kills because a Wl informed me you were online. You didnt get kills because you were bad. Then you turned tail and ran abecause your corp is pathetic and weak when it comes to a pitched battle. if you hate the fact that camping a hole for weeks with bombers merely sees you get added to Wl and your sign on is greeted by derision in Local, well tough.