Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Is there a link to the video, blog or something regarding this news?

What basically happened was that someone took whining about AFK cloaking to a new level and did it live. And I'm hoping the dev team looks into the issue before they deploy the sledgehammer solution.

The issue behind AFK cloaking is long and bad, it's a player-made 'mechanic' designed to counter perfect intel and certain behaviour in dangerous space. It's not an issue tied to the use of cynos, as I've recently found - in hisec, New Order people actually managed to AFK cloak in non-cyno areas.

With current system, the ability of directly getting rid of a cloaker would be just plain ol' godawful, negatively impacting 0.0 once more.

You want to use a pop up as an analogy here? AWESOME

MAIN SOLUTION: Use a frakking anti-virus so the pop up can't actually hurt your PC

After THAT, if the pop up still bugs you:
Solution one! Stop going to that buggy website
Solution two! Get a pop up blocker
Solution three! Work around the goofy thing, minimize it, whatever.

Not using your monitor at all is like not undocking at all, and shows poor understanding.

The more you know....

Erm yes, I know, there are other solutions. That was my point.
And no, not using my monitor is like getting rid of local. If I were docked, I can still see the cloaker is there (you know local doesn't disappear while docked right?).

You are some special level of genius. But thanks for supporting my point.

ROFFLES!!

I wouldn't call it supporting your point so much, the analogy is garbage.

You are not going to get rid of the nutters causing the popups. Live with it.
You do not know where you will encounter them either, but if you travel to the null equivalent of the interwebz, you can expect to find all kinds of things. Null seems to be where this has meaning, so whatever. There is no local equivalent for your analogy, more like a wormhole.
You know them nutters are out there, but you can't see them till they POP UP on yer grid.
You got two choices, either stay in the safe part of the webz, or take your chances.
You can't be in the null security interwebz with the same expectation of safety as the high sec version.

Are we still talking about cloaking even?

Agreed, the probe is providing no useful information.
Local already made the hostile pilot's presence known to you.

If the pilot was not already revealed by local, it would be balanced to let you even hunt them, since you would need to make an effort from start to finish knowing they were there and finding them.

Here is a secret: Local is protecting cloaked pilots.
So long as they can be listed freely in local, it is not balanced to detect them on top of that.
Therefore: Local is protecting them by keeping it unbalanced to locate and hunt them.

I suspect this is more of a hot button on both sides, than the forums would imply.

The people who post here do not always represent a proportional amount of those playing.
(It makes sense if you really think about it long enough)

The people we do not hear from, are those who resolve the issues in the game itself, and see no need to complain on the forums.
Why would they come here? They don't see a problem, so coming here for a solution has no cause.
We only see players who see a problem, and cannot resolve it in game.
OR
Those players who like the game, but for whatever reason are unable to play it enough to be satisfied, but can access the forums from their jobs, and think... Hey, I'll go ahead and read up about the next expansion, or cool new ideas being pitched.
Then they discover threads created by people who could not resolve an issue in the game, they read up on both sides, and take their own experiences on the topic to sift fact from opinion.

Yeah, they show up too.... cough - cough....

LOL

The quoted section, suggesting that local being dropped as the only change, is about the most ridiculous straw man argument which ever shows up.

Of course that idea can be beaten, which is why it is never considered as a complete solution by anyone serious on the subject.

The REAL debates usually end up like this:

---

Anti-Cloaking: I want local left completely intact, and cloaks limited so they cannot tie up my PvE experience. I see no reason to change my game play because someone figured out how to keep a hostile ship in my space.

Pro-Mutual change: No problem, we can even let you hunt cloaked ships, but we want to keep the balance on the expectation that the devs are NOT clueless idiots who arbitrarily threw this together one night after binge drinking.
For that reson, we want to take away the free intel, in exchange for you being able to use effort to get more complete intel.
The amount of effort would relate to the quality and amount of intel you got, working as a team would really boost it, and you can absolutely keep cloaked ships out of your PvE system if you want to make the effort.

Anti-Cloaking: What part of "I want local left completely intact", did you not understand?

---

While the posts are usually longer, and contain some wild opinions about how people will quite EVE, move to high sec, or adopt llamas as pets, they essentially can be reduced to those key points.

I love this part. He really cannot see what he just said except in the context of his bias.

I numbered the bits above, to respond to, so it can be understood what I respond to.

1. Both sides are being changed, hence mutual.
Both sides would need to also adapt, obviously.
More effort would be needed from the cloaked pilot, since they would have almost no warning about being hunted, until the hostiles showed up on grid with them to ambush. They would want to keep moving around, if they liked not being ambushed.
More effort would be needed from the PvE pilot, as in clicking d-scan. This goes so far as to assume it may not be automated, but require clicking like wormhole pilots use it. Many ideas automate it to toggle on for this.

The bits about it not being balanced, well, those are called opinions, since there is no basis to use in order to verify any of it.

2. His opinions about the devs ability to balance EVE, summed up on one line here.

3. This one is funny, once you pursue the logic and what it implies.
If the "cloaker" was working alone, they would have absolutely no threat to project beyond their immediate ship itself.
That would mean a cyno would be pointless, as there would be noone ready to come through if they found that target.
It also suggests that the cloaked vessel is, at most, bluffing about it's ability to attack, since the majority of cloaked ships are simply not cost effective at attacking a target with any potential of defending itself.
(That comes back around to how they were balanced to be weaker in exchange for the ability to cloak, which is well established in the game)

Oh, and just in case anyone was unaware, I am a miner. My killboard can be easily found and demonstrated absent of meaningful ganks that would support any involvement in that type of PvP.

Unlike the other questions some people started to clap when the question was asked. The response had a bit more vocal response as well. It is quite clear its quite a heated topic and kinda big deal. Its not just any other random balance fix. Its one of the older balance fix debates that is growing as more fuel is pored into it by CCP.