Player Features and Ideas Discussion

First, I don't think I mentioned ratting at all. Miners are not combat ready and yes, there are miners in null sec.

Secondly, this is an ideas forum. Counter it with constructive criticism. Telling me to go back to highsec, does not help.

Third, the advantage is ALWAYS to the afk cloak/blops. I could have 20 combat people ready, and all they need to do is get 30 in a blops fleet. They choose the time, place and numbers which I think is unfair. Even more so if it is an industrial corp full of miners who mine rather than rat. This means a blops will be able to jump in, kill as many people as they can, while the miners have to warp out, swap ships, and then go find the blops fleet.

FFS, fit a skiff right and it will tank a shitton of damage (with boosts you should be able to go well over 100,000 ehp based on a few minutes of playing around in EFT, overheat and you should get well north of 100,000...as in like 145k+). Yes, you may have to sacrifice some yield for tank, but at least your out there mining and not docked up and whining on the forums. And mining with 4-5 guys with tanked out skiffs will make things problematic for even a fair number of bombers.

Now, if you are still uncomfortable mining in a camped system...then go to another system and mine. Moving 1 jump out, if the guy is AFK, solves the problem. If he shows up then you know with certainty he is NOT AFK.

And here is the other thing...blops are not going to pick ANY time to drop you. They'll pick a time in their prime time, and even then they don't have unlimited numbers. They'll have whatever numbers they have. Saying, "OMG, they might have 20 or 30 or 50 guys!!!!" Yes, they might or they might have 5 or 10 or even nobody and the guy is truly AFK.

And if it isn't bombers its 20-30 guys in strategic cruisers. Or a combined fleet of both and if 20-30 aren't enough it will be 50, 60 and so on.

This is what I really dislike about discussing this issue with people like you. You ALWAYS assume the other side has superior numbers, fleet comp, and will drop you when you are at your weakest. In other words, you stack the deck against yourself so that there is never any chance of winning then come whining and complaining here about how unfair it is and stamp your foot demanding that CCP nerf this, that and the other thing based on your bullshit strawman. Yes, in that scenario you are screwed...but, that is part of life in null, or it is supposed to be. Sometimes you are screwed and the other guys have the better of you via better numbers, better fleet comp, both.

And let me guess...you aren't running a fleet of 4-5 or more people, but are running 5 accounts by yourself. Never mind that having a fleet of people, some in combat ships and chatting on coms is how combat fleets deal with the boredom of POS repping, structure grinding, and other such boring ops. Instead of actually doing what your opponents are doing...having multiple people...you want to play all by yourself and not have to deal with the players who want to come and ruin your game. And instead of trying to find a way not to let them ruin your game, or even better ruin theirs you come here and say, "CCP its broke, fix it." You never stop to consider that maybe...just maybe its working as intended.

BTW, BLOPS fleets aren't exactly the most exciting fleets to be on. You log in, get on the pig, and then wait. Wait while your hunters are out looking for targets. And you can spend quite awhile waiting for your hunter to find something. In fact, you might spend several nights waiting since your hunters may very well have been AFK cloaking in good systems hoping to lull the targets into undocking and doing something foolish.

Please stop spreading your lies around and/or don't post anything if you know nothing about the situation.



Then you go next system:...O look, another cloaky camper....Next system: Oh look, another cloaky camper...until you run out of systems you own. Then what? You go rat in enemy space?




Yea no, the afk cloaky campers are usually a shared account between ceo's or fc's spread around different time zones. And since no small group of people will afford to plex afk cloaky campers, the ones behind that toon will always have something large to drop on you.





Please do tell me, have you EVER seen a blop drop in when they are at a disadvantage? No? ...didn't think so!

Yeah, now they are everywhere. No systems left to rat or mine in....anywhere in null. Which is why we have shortages of zydrine and megacyte...oh wait. We don't. And a casual glance at dotlan tells me there is plenty of ratting too. In fact, as I noted rat bounties are the biggest source of isk flowing into the Eve economy. So much so, CCP watches it rather closely.

Oh and yet another example of, stacking the deck/strawman argument.

And Nikk raises a good point as well. If you have many, many people AFK cloaking (or appearing too) in your systems, there is an organized and serious effort being made against you and your alliance/corp. Depending on how you are reacting things could escalate.



So now you have to accuse people of outright cheating/violating the EULA/ToS? I think it is at this point that you either show us evidence of this or stop. Also, it makes your position very weak when you have to resort to this sort of argument.



Yes, I linked one a bit earlier. Guy went AFK while ratting in his carrier, a blops gang dropped on him. His geckos returned and shredded the blops gang just as the was getting back to his PC.

Now admittedly those events are rare. And you are, without realizing it, making my point. If you look only at those events where the blops gang goes in you are only getting half of the picture. You are getting those events where the blops FC felt he had a good chance of succeeding. You are NOT seeing those events where the blops FC passed on the target(s) because it was too big of a job.

Let us consider another analogous situation. Go online and check newspapers...you'll find several stories about "pitbulls" attacking people. Looking at just that data they look like vicious monsters. However, your data set is woefully incomplete in that you are missing out on all the "pitbulls" that are family dogs and have no issues with aggression at all. In this case we are talking millions of observations that are not being observed. In short you are basing your conclusions on an unrepresentative sample.

Same thing with blops. You point to the successes and say, "See!!! No way to win! Nerf!! NERF!!!" But that is based on, again, an unrepresentative sample. If you make the blops FC move on to another target....you won! Congratulations you've just made their game a bit more boring as they sit there on the pig listening to the FC tell them about that target they'll be skipping. They can try pinging for more pilots if possible, but even that is not a sure thing.

What you need is a afk cloaky frig per system to protect, and a roaming blops fleet ratting around. Upside is your fleet doesn't need scouts to jump on defense. You'll have to make a deal with some more combat-inclined people (finance some ship replacement lost defending you or something else) because null sec is supposed to be cutthroat and unforgiving. Unforgiving environment always favors aggression.

This kind of setting may be hard to get outside of big alliance and could attract PVPers attention.

100% non PVP players in nullsec is bad recipe.

I love how in these threads, AFK Cloaky players are always attentive and alert to jump on a player when they are at their weakest. I find it fascinating.

Fear of local chat can be cured. Replace local chat in Kspace with the WH local chat format please.

Except it doesn't it simply moves PvE. They've got a long way to go to make PvE challenging, but it should never involve supporting AFK play.


*Snip* Removed a reply to an edited out part of the quoted post. ISD Ezwal.

Members of CCP have publicly stated that they don't like the way local acts as an intel source. CCP Explorer here, and I'm pretty sure Fozzie has said something similar but my google-fu is failing me at the moment.

It's pretty clear that they're not going to change local without adding another intel source of some kind, serving a similar purpose, but it's not at all obvious that the replacement will be 'the exact same thing'. It seems far more likely that if and when a change happens it won't be functionally identical to what we currently have now - that would be relatively easy to implement, so if that was what they were looking at, it would have happened a long time ago. The evidence suggests to me that what they want is a significant rework of how intel works - and if intel mechanics are going to be given any depth, that will almost certainly include the ability to miss intel and for enemies to interfere with your network or fly under your radar.

Incidentally, if those assumptions are accurate, replacing local need not favour either the attacker or the defender. Since neither side now has perfect knowledge of the other's presence, both have the ability to gain the upper hand through stealth and vigilence. (And the defender has one potentially major advantage: for the attacker to win they need to detect the defender and remain undetected but the defender needs only to do one of the two.)

You're right, they have mentioned it, but that doesn't mean a change will occur. And while a replacement not be exactly the same (it may not have names or may only work for some parties, etc) the basic function of being able to tell when someone first arrives will likely remain. This is because this is the only defense a PvE player realistically has. If you look at the killboards now, plenty of PVE players get killed, and this is because it takes only a momentary lapse in focus to be caught. While local is there and available, it's only good if you can react quickly enough to it flagging up a player joining you.

I imagine that any replacement will want to keep the current status quo - that is that when both an attacker and a PvE player are playing perfectly, the PvE player will just about get away but will no longer be performing their PvE, so it's a minimal loss to both sides. Swinging the mechanics any more in favour of the attacker would mean that if both players were to play perfectly, the attacker would win. I can't see that being a chosen option, and so that's why I believe that any replacement will be in line with what currently exists, regardless of whether or not it shows full details and such.

But then since CCP are heavily against one choice mechanics, I'd wonder if they would put in the change at all, since it would always be the right choice to have intel. There's would be no reason to not have intel. The only reason to put it in as a usable mechanic would be to allow defenders to control the availability of intel, but then that would be a boost to the already too powerful defending alliance.

True. Finding anything that's a significant improvement over the current system is hard, and if they just wanted 'local, but on a structure' it would have happened by now. My personal reading of the situation is that it's probably a matter of 'when' a change happens rather than 'if'... but that doesn't mean that 'when' can't still turn out to be 'a very long time from now'.

Perfect play by both sides leading to a very narrow escape by the defender sounds like about the right balance, yes. The question is what 'perfect play' represents - and, for that matter whether a human should be able to reliably achieve it. Often, the point at which someone can play perfectly in any given game is also the point at which they stop playing (cf. Tic-Tac-Toe...).

At the moment, for the defender, perfect play means 'be aligned and watch local' - that's simplistic enough to be problematic from a game-design perspective. There's zero opportunity for the opponent to force an error, and relatively little actual skill involved since the only failure modes are 'didn't bother taking precautions' and 'didn't click the run-away button fast enough'. Note that I'm not claiming that it's not easy to make a mistake - staying on high-alert for an extended period is hard, especially if nothing's happening - just that we have a mechanic where one side's strategy boils down to 'stare at local for an hour and don't blink', and the 'contest' between attacker and defender is often decided by a single test of reflexes on the part of the latter. That's bad game design, and should be thrown out as soon as possible and replaced with something involving a measure of actual gameplay.

My personal belief is that any change won't be intended to swing the balance towards either the attacker or the defender, but to add depth to the mechanics - so that it's plausible for a defender to play well and still get caught if the attackers play better.

That means that the 'choice' to have intel stops being entirely in the defender's hands. Details would obviously be up for debate, but the key is that an intel network would require active player involvement to keep it in perfect order, and hostile forces would have tools available to degrade, delay, or falsify the information gathered if the defenders' counter-intelligence operatives miss a trick somewhere.

Perhaps you have an upgrade to the OA that gives you instant warning when someone unauthorised enters the system... but the OAs are networked, and a hostile CovOps just found an unguarded system two jumps over and dropped a jammer that takes the whole net down for the next five minutes. Perhaps there's an offensive OA module, and an aggressor managed to deploy one in range of your system without being detected (this would probably need a long set-up time - 48hrs, perhaps).

One thing I'd like to see is CovOps frigates without a cyno being near-immune to any static detection systems. Active searching by a player in an intel-bonused ship could still counter them, but the passive structure-based systems wouldn't be a serious obstacle to them. Complete immunity is probably too strong, since the defenders would need something to start from other than just constantly spamming scans in every system they hold, and a cyno-equipped ship is an active threat and needs to be handled differently. But the ability to infiltrate an unarmed scout without automatically broadcasting its identity and location every second it spends in hostile space would add an interesting new tool to the sandbox.