Warfare & Tactics

Oh look, a WH'er talking about how to fix something that he doesn't take part in.

You can close said WHs, you cannot close stargates.


Edit: Wow, I got in the single digits pages of a threadnought, what do I win?

I'm sorry for the late reply, i had completely forgotten about this thread (in all fairness, there are so many "afk cloaker" threads made by imbeciles now that it's hard keeping up with all of them).

You are essentially repeating the point i made: In places like Lowsec there is so much traffic that no one really uses local as an exclusive intel-safety tool. In places like NPC-null it's a stronger tool as there are less people, but you still have reasonable traffic; multiple corps or alliances living out of the same systems or constellations who are neutral to each other, so a neutral character is something that is essentially always around. When everyone have equal docking rights, they have equal footing to take fights or not. In Wormholes you have no local.

As such, AFK cloaking is generally not practised in Low, NPC or WH because there is no "need" for it and because it doesn't spawn the same reaction or behaviour. There are definately people going for PvP-opportunities on PvE-efforts with stealthy ships, but they are not "AFK cloaked" as the system as a whole do not suggest neutrality as an anomaly - so active content is available to them in parity to personal actions (ie., people may run once you actively drop probes or hit their missions, plexes or belts). They do not modify their behaviour based on the local mechanics though, which is the important difference.

Sovnull represents a pretty exclusive scenario where you have a rather large amount of players who will instantly go to safety the second a neutral player enter local. They will then proceed to amass a large force (with their political allies), not to earnestly fight you - but to chase you out of local or discourage you to come back, as to not deal with you themselves. They will in many cases not even be apart of the defensive effort to push you out, or they will only play a trivial role in it.

Once again, a key difference here is that they don't want fights. They don't want AFK-cloaking to go away to combat it; what they want is the removal of neutral anomalies from local. As such there are no fights and thus no sandbox-content. They adapt a "wait and bleed" strategy.

This is why AFK cloaking exist there, the cloaker do the same, because prolonged active presence in the area is void of other options short of taking their infra (taking and holding the grid, which is all about who can commit the most resources over timers and generally excludes underhanded and thus independent play; it's not just human behaviour that has caused the EVE scale-up from 2007 onwards, it's more importantly what the game mechanics premier and the behaviour derived from that), and because that same amount of players have grown so complacent with the immense defensive advantages in those systems that they will yawp and bawl at any percievable threat that they'd need to deal with themselves in a timely manner.

That's why we see these ridiculous suggestions regarding "decloak timers" and "decloak pulses", because complacent players (who can not maintain an active presence in those systems, and de facto hold them themselves) want an advantage in the "waiting-game" (pos/station waiting, vs. cloaked timers) and in the system-holding game with "local bleed" (run to pos when the enemy is superior, decloak him to run him off when you are superior). This ultimately leads to less fights and less spontaneous hostile elements in sovspace, as there is little content to be had even if you take the initiative to go there (from multiple regions away) and provide it. The ball is no longer in the court of those taking the initiative, it is at the behest of the defenders to give you or not, based on their liking and not on the necessity.

The larger ramafications are that we have seen such a scale-up since the inception of the Dominion sov-system; where not only sov-holding alliances have turned into coalitions upon coalitions, but also where "irrelevant" roaming have gone from corporation efforts to alliance efforts or more. The role of "roaming PvP" that would threaten locals in place of AFK-cloaking today is essentially maintained by such small entities as the Neo Curse Coalition or the N3 Coalition that consist of several reasonably sized alliances (1000-man outfits). They are the spontaneous "roaming PvP" providers and content-spreaders, while smaller groups are turning their sights inwards, and limiting themselves to "Syndicate", "Curse", "Providence" or "Lowsec" rather than roaming both Low and Null. Something i presume you'd be more familiar with, no?

... or why don't you fly in Sov nullsec? That is a more interesting question than anything else really .

That's where the "AFK cloakers" fly anyway, and where all these complacent players spamming these threads most likely live. I'd be genuinely surprised if they were Lowsec players complaining about cloakers.