[Malorn]

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.