In my opinion:

Currently, as they stand, ion storms are hardly a positive contribution to gameplay. They are annoying at best, and incredibly frustrating at worst. I completely agree with statements such as "you should have seen how boring it was before storms" etc and understand why they must exist. But storms currently, seem a poor effort to implement a much more important design goal of making the universe more interesting, and have continued to simply exist rather than evolve or improve. There are many many threads on this board about making storms a more worthwhile element of gameplay (NPC pirates, one exit point, continuous damage while in transit etc) that I hope are implemented, but until this issue is solved, I believe we need a more powerful tool to deal with the tedium of storms.

My suggestion involves a simple addition to the navigation menu that could be toggled on or off.

-- When a storm is entered for the first time ("You have been caught in an ion storm") the sector should be auto-marked in a distinguishable visual way on the nav map (ie. a luminous highlight, similar to a waypoint, but hopefully more stylish :P).

-- This indication of a storm sector should fade over time, in line with the median length that ion storms exist. (note: this means a storm may or may not still exist, your nav map will only ever give you a visual approximation.)

-- There should also be a simple check box system allowing you to toggle the sharing of this information with "Nation", "Group", or "Guild".

I believe this will be a useful navigation tool, that will continue to hold value, even as the role of storms changes.

Comments and (useful! :P) opinions?

Infinite_Skillz

[stamp of approval]
Although I think I've heard this suggestion somewhere before...
-:sigma.SB

[Flamebait deleted]

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/8469#98343

I posted this and thought that it would get more recognition but hay... oh well.

I suggested this because i thought that there needed to be more then just an ion storm... expetially because there are no ion storms in station sectors. (why not, do the stations have a protective anti ion generatorm that prevents the ion storms in the sectors?)

anyway, this would be a fun one to have.

for the indicators, i think to share them you should have to have a comunications array, for that channal, IE, a nation array, guild array, Group array.

I agree with infinite, not knight.

[stamp of approval]

^^the original, everyone else stole it from me

I have a reservation about the automatic sharing of the info. Nobody would be surprised by a storm.

And storms are the salt of CtC. I mean, this is where you really can have fun and try to win against all odds. Imho they should be kept if only for that reason.

In particular to the mapping of the ion storms, how about the mapping of (some sort of pop up menu) ships?

Maybe it could show friendlies or whomever depending on the device you purchased. The device would have to be loaded into your cargo bay in order to work. (that is until we have the option of adding devices to ships, without using a port)

It would be great for hunting down pirates.

Maybe the pirates could purchase a jamming device (make it real expensive), that way it could be fair.

If it were up to me, the ion storms would actually span multiple sectors, sort of like a weather front. That would make them a lot harder to fly around, at least until they were mapped out. They could move too!

Of course you would need to let them happen in empty sectors then. Which would make it easier for pirates once in a while.

Of course, I don't run things here, so it will probably never happen.