In the comics Spider-Man has a few tricks up his skin-tight sleeve that he uses to hunt down the bad guys. Certainly his tool belt isn't up to par with say Batman's Utility Belt, but he does ok. One of the things he uses to good effect is the Spidey Tracker (and no I'm not 100% sure that's what it is called, but it is the best I can remember.) and he uses the little device to track the bad guys. Say he wants to know where the mob meeting place in the abandoned warehouse is? Flip the little Spidey Tracker on the coat, or car, of the bad guy and use the little GPS device to follow along. Simple enough.
I started to think, why can't we do that in Eve? Say I'm cloaked above a gate and a enemy gang comes into local. I'm alone at the moment, but I put the call out and my friends say they'll be a long shortly. (They are never ready when you need them!) The bad guys warp away and while I try to keep up, or keep eyes on them, they manage to elude me. (This never really happens since I'm good at this, but follow along the hypothetical road with me.) Somewhere along the way, I release what we'll call a "Tracker Drone" which locks onto the target ship and follows it. It only has enough fuel for a hand-full of jumps, but it follows the targeted ship and emits a signal that shows up on my scanner. A signal that I can warp to, and that I can use to warp my eventual fleet members to.
I know, we have Probes, we have local, we have cloakers, and everything else - do we really need a Tracker Drone? Probably not, but that isn't the point of Gooder Eve! A Tracker Drone (or similar execution) would make Eve more fun in my humble opinion. As a PvP focused character I have to say that PvP is suffering right now and something needs to be done to save it. That is the point of Gooder Eve, to get us all thinking about ways to help. I'm tired of the bad guys just running away from fights, they come into your space and try to get easy kills and then run away when anyone brings a reasonable force to engage them. I'd like to see that altered a tiny bit, re-balanced if you will, to make it slightly less easy to just leave. I think something like Tracker Drones might do that.
Obviously we'd need counters and Tracker Drone skills and varying levels of success, signal acquisition, etc. I'm not for unbalancing the game, in fact I am foursquare for re-balancing the game. You come into my space and I am going to come after you, I just need the tools available to find your sorry yellow butt.
Your thoughts?