Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Having read this thread on Reddit: I got an idea for an anti-bomber defense., I thought of a different approach:

Could we have a script for a HIC bubble which causes the bubble to be a decloaking bubble. Anything cloaked inside the bubble (or perhaps within 2km of the bubble) is instantly decloaked. Using such a bubble should eradicates any resists (like polarized weapons), have a fixed duration (1-2 minutes perhaps), prevent movement, and probably cause a huge signature flare.

The HIC can be bombed off the field of course as the bubble is smaller than the bomber range, so bombers can get in to position cloaked, but a buffer tank (no resists) should mean exposing multiple bombers to achieve this. It should be possible to fit at laest ~40KHP buffer, while also fitting HAMs or RLMLs.

Anyway, I'm sure there are many faults with this, for example it might make gate camping too easy, although perhaps a "cannot be activated within 50km of a gate" means it only helps the really serious gate camps with over 50km of bubbles surrounding the gates, who already use debris well enough to decloak. I did a search in the forums, but could not find this idea previously (potentially as it is catastrophically stupid for some reason).

You've gone way too far already. If the bubble only decloaked and did nothing else, the camp fleet could use a second HIC to make a warp scram bubble, and then you easily have all of the bombers. All those other effects are needless fluff and make it severely overpowered.

This thread comes up on almost a weekly basis. In fact, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a nerf cloaking thread in the first 2 pages on this forum section. Almost every single one of them goes like this:

1. OP posts a post with a new (lol) idea that always boils down to some variation of the following:
- "There's a big meanie who is sitting in my system and not doing anything, but I don't know where he is and I can't ever just go next door. I can't find said meanie and even though I know that he's probably at work and poses no threat at all, I wont do anything in my system that I absolutely can't leave ever because he might not be at work and I might lose a ship. CCP please stop the meanie from being able to do nothing to me because he's probably at work"

2. Thread gets trolled because its been done literally to death. This horse has been beaten so hard and so often that it's little more than a memory of a memory of a red smear on the grass, and yet it STILL WONT DIE! In fact it's been done so many times that this particular horse is now undead; even if it does die, it will still be remembered and parodied.

3. Someone comes along and suggests that AFK cloakers can't hurt you, because they are, by their very definition, AFK. No one ever lost a ship to someone who ISN'T PLAYING THE GAME.

4. Someone else comes along and points out that while the cloaker might be AFK, he might not be, and so we have Schrodinger's Hot Dropper. The cyno pilot who might be AFK... but he might not be as well, and you will only know for sure when he decloaks, points and lights his candle. (Yes, I know this isn't how the cat works)

5. Someone else comes along and suggests that you use bait and setup a TARP. Or have a defence fleet on standby. Heaven forbid you have to actually fight to defend your space.

6. A further person comes along and suggests that the problem isn't cloaking AFK in your system that you can't possibly leave ever, but that you KNOW that the person is AFK in your system... and perhaps local should be removed because free 100% accurate intel is probably not the best thing in the game and if you didn't know that the big meanie was in your system, you wouldn't be worried about leaving the undock/POS.

7. Then another person pokes their head in and complains that local is 100% NEEDED because D-Scan and probing are such bad mechanics, and IF YOU TAKE MY LOCAL AWAY IM QUITTING FOREVER AND NO YOU CAN'T HAVE MY STUFF!

8. Someone asks if they can have 7's stuff.

We end up with another thread which goes on for pages and pages between complains about local, defence fleets, inability to just go next door, people who aren't playing the game but are playing the meta, lots of bickering and in the end nothing gets solved. CCP wont remove cloaking because it would mess with waaay too many things and it creates content (which is a good thing) by removing content (which is a bad thing) but they can't really think of any way to do it without a complete overhaul of the local and scanning systems.

Now that I've had this entire thread's conversation, can we just let it die? Please?

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