Player Features and Ideas Discussion

There is only one thing that I would like to see about this thread implemented with Cloaking.

Forget Probes... They're too "easy" to use to try and detect a cloaker.
If you know they're cloaked and they're in your system... Then you should have a little fun with them.

Place a Module on your ship that's like a 'Sonar'.

Radar Waves bouncing off of objects. You'll get a Density Scan of the area showing you that there are things around you. Say someone decides to cloak in an asteroid belt.

A Frigate would blend in better. A Capital Ship would not... meaning that you just target the highest density / biggest object out there.

You'll still not be able to target them but you should be able to get a rough enough target that your chances of hitting them are the same at your typical optimal as they are if you were 3x farther out from your typical optimal.

The problem with this is. You can't just scan them down. You have to actually be within 100km of them to get even a faint signal back.

It'll give you direction as well. Say you're at a planet and you align to another planet and fly away from the planets warp in point. you get around 100km out the person warping in to that planet sends a scan to it and you happen to be 100km away from the warp in. He'll spot that density and a rough direction on it. Then have to narrow the field until he gets you. (kinda like directional scan but with space taken up in space. ^_^)

And the problem is that your suggestion does the former, not the latter. You are not disincentivising AFK cloaking — you are disincentivising cloaks.

The incentive to AFK cloak is that it scares the locals. No local takes care of that problem. You do not want to see “no local”, which means you're not actually interested in removing the incentive to AFK cloak. It's really that simple. No matter how much you dance around it and try to come up with reasons why this is bad for you, the fact remains: it is the solution to the problem you claim you're having. Yes, it may cause other issues, but those are easily solved by making it a double-blind system.

Likewise, no matter how many times you repeat your suggestion, it doesn't get any less flawed. It doesn't stop breaking cloaking just because you say it n+1 times. It doesn't suddenly provide a reasoning why it's needed on its n:th iteration. It's just the same bad idea over and over again without any reasoning behind it; without any argument why it is better than the alternatives; and without any case for its implementation.
And the very very very very simple fact that you still somehow, miraculously, fail to grasp is that this breaks cloaking. It is a horribly bad idea. It is unbalanced like you wouldn't believe. And above all: it doesn't solve your problem (largely because the problem you claim you want to solve isn't the one you actually want to solve, which is why I keep asking you: what is the problem you want to solve?).
Here's a great adaption to the plan: throw it in the bin and instead remove the incentive to AFK cloak, and add in a double-blind system to make it balanced.

So no. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from all of this is that you do not, in fact, and no matter what you say, want to remove the incentive to AFK cloak. What you do want is to remove cloaks. Your rhetoric does not match your suggestion. Your rhetoric does match other suggestions, but you reject them because they do not do the thing you want them to do — instead, they do what you say you want to do.

Ok lets make this real simple.


No local.

You go into system and cloak up. Nobody knows you are in there. Go AFK for some hours. And come back, Well look in response to your no local a group has formed to protect some miners. How sweet. Let you just run up there and drop a nice cyno for them to look at for a few seconds before they are owned by your fleet. But wait because of another topic it cant be just any cyno. No its got to be the uber steath only one because hey frak those titan pilots and those who don't want to join the cool sungalsses wearing stealth club. Only the stealth guys deserve the free kills here.

The point is removing local isn't going to remove AFK cloaking. Just make it nuclear and the ones who can afford to launch hordes of em (AkA the big alliances) Will get that great advantage of course.

Yes it is, because without local, AFK cloaking no longer exists. There is no longer any reason to do it, whatsoever (except maybe if you have problems logging in and don't want to deal with that process). Your request to remove the incentive to AFK cloak is 100% fulfilled.

As an added bonus, nothing else is really affected. The threat of an enemy uncloaking next to you and doing nasty stuff is exactly the same as before. Whatever you did back then to prevent and/or mitigate it will work now. If you still have issues, then guess what: those issues are not related to AFK cloaking, and you should stop accusing AFK cloaking of being a cause of your problem — in particular, your solutions should address the actual problem, rather than the imaginary one.

So, without local, what issues would you say remain that would be in need of fixing?
No, he's not. Unless you're saying that the movement required to remain undetected is so small as to never leaving the field of view of the object you're observing, and unless you're saying that the scan time is so long that in the time it takes to get a fix, I can set up multiple warp points on the grid. Your proposed solution is insanely cumbersome and causes quite a few issues that then require fixing, not to mention that it doesn't actually do what you say it does — it doesn't remove the incentive to AFK cloak.

…and even so, you still haven't answered the question of why you need to be able to hunt down AFK people. What is the problem you're trying to solve?

And experienced cloaker will know how to warp off and back fast. That is that. I have given you all the benefit I can without removing the ability to attack those that are AFK. The next ideas are things that WILL affect you such as fuel bays and random decloaks.

Something tells me you wont support the fuel bay idea. Then again if you are AFK cloaking you wont like any of my ideas anyway.

Regardless. The idea is here. Make the AFK ones able to be probed down and solve the issue.

Any mechanic that breaks cloaking won't be liked, this is true. You're attacking the wrong problem, and seem far to happy to break other areas of the game to try and ease your own personal fears from living in a area you're obviously not ready to live in. Instead you're offering a boon to bots everywhere, be they mining bots, rat bots, etc. Those are the only ones that truly benefit from your ill-thought out proposals.

You're not making it possible to only probe down the AFK cloaked ones, you're making it possible to probe down any cloaked person. This is a broken idea, and adds a gross level of imbalance to the game.

Why should the mechanics of how we gather intel in wormholes wind up broken because people panic at the sight of an unknown in local in null space? Why should the whole wormhole meta have to be changed to require people nearly constantly keeping these damnable probes out while anyone's trying to function?

It creates an excessive amount of hassle for a non-issue that can be taken care of more eloquently without reducing the inherent danger aspects of wormholes and null. This isn't Hello Kitty: Probe Adventures. Grow a pair and go play.

You... you have something against cloakers in general, that explains it. You don't really care about "afk cloakers", you're out to nerf everyone with a cloaking device attached. Well, you've clearly shown your hand, and what little credibility you had left has gone. You're hiding under the skirt of nerfing "afk cloakers"... why... you get ganked? Your precious hulk get popped by a cloaked vessel? Hulkageddon makes you sweat and lose sleep at night? What are you really hiding? Where did the bad cloaked vessel touch you?

This is the only thing that makes sense now regarding your posts... you're out to get cloaks in general. Ah well, I look at the lack of likes on your OP and that says plenty.

Stacking a larger pile of crap next to this one won't make this one smell any better.

This is getting out of hand. As amusing as it is to read, please take a breather. Or take it to GD.