Player Features and Ideas Discussion

no problem with afk cloakers imo but i still do love the idea of the old 'sonar' destroyer idea, i think it adds gameplay and more uses for destroyers = win

like blops being able to warp around cloaked you mean? to me the idea of adding something that gives more cat and mouse to a game is better than having just the cat

yeah the lore isnt exactly correct, technically anything lighting a cyno (or via wh) into a system arent using gates so shouldnt show in local, lol theres tonnes of tweaks i'd like to see though, like not so direct cut off points for cyno's, like blops able to cyno into 0.5's or 0.6's (dont hate me)

lol, people who mine and mission during decs should pay attention, besides if they know you can blops into 0.5 or even 0.6, dont run missions there, just like if theres an afk cloaker in system, dont run the damned anoms like a tool

i wouldnt say op tbh, but definatly a new change and more use to blops (they are extremely expensive dust gatherers half the time, and extremely expensive gankers the other half, it'd be nice to just be useful)

The problem with this sort of argument, which unfortunately comes up all too often, is that there is no way to distinguish between an active cloaky and an inactive cloaky. Consequently, there is no way to determine the level of risk a cloaked player poses at any given moment. Any good EVE player will rightfully presume that the cloaked player is active and hunting for them; if he does not, and gets ganked as a result, he will be ridiculed for being stupid, and rightly so. So even if the risk at any given moment of being attacked by the cloaked ship is fairly low, to any individual player the risk is enormous.

Consider the case of a player who runs anomalies in a 200-million-ISK tech-1 battleship, and makes about 40 million ISK per hour after taxes. That price is a bit on the low end for folk who rat in Abaddons; a bit on the high end for those who rat in Dominixes. That player would need five hours of safe ratting in order to make back the ISK from his ship. Would anyone reading this like to bet their ship on those odds?

Now consider the position of an AFK cloaky. I take my alt into a popular mining/ratting system in a stealth bomber fitted with a covert cyno, cloak and point. The inhabitants see me come in. I sit in system for two days doing absolutely nothing, from downtime to downtime. The real risk I pose is zero, but the inhabitants have no way of knowing that. Objectively, I pose no risk to them, as you try to argue. But subjectively, I pose as much risk as though I were active and ready to pop that cover cyno, because there is no way to determine risk objectively in this situation. And in EVE, the subjective risk is the only one that matters.

Lastly, consider the effort needed to counter my presence, as some folk propose, with apparent seriousness. Say three of the system's inhabitants fleet up and go ratting, using semi-PvP ships (you can't really PvE in a properly PvP-fit ship). I find their anomaly, pop the covert cyno, bridge in ten or twenty recons, bombers, and black ops. So much for countering my threat. If you are fighting fair in EVE, you're doing it wrong. Unless the target system is in the middle of a wide cluster of inhabited blue systems, there is no way to detect the presense of a black ops gang until it drops in on you. And assuming that black ops gang is detected, it can sit AFK in a staging system just like I can idle in the target system, for days on end, posing the exact same amount of subjective risk regardless of activity levels.

So, in summary. Cloaking is fine the way it is for active players. The problem with cloaking is that there is no way to tell how much of a threat a player poses once cloaked. In every other case, we can tell with absolute certainty whether or not an undocked player is AFK: if an undocked player is AFK and not sitting inside a POS forcefield, he can be probed down and killed. This is why we do not see complaints about non-cloaky ships ganking people; a player can tell whether they pose a threat, and can form a fleet to go kill them or force them to log off. A fleet of cloak-fitted ships has no such counter; it can idle in a system for several hours, at no effort, completely defeating the much greater efforts of the players hunting it.

The Op's proposal is quite good, all things considering. It does not particularly affect active players. An active player can bounce between safe spots while his cloak recharges, or can eat the costs of signature radius bloom. At the same time, it allows for AFK cloaked players to be probed down and killed, same as for AFK uncloaked players. The system may be open to exploitation, depending on how it is implemented, and I do not think it is the perfect solution, but it is better than some proposals I have seen.

What about adding a cloak booster that offsets the sig radius increase?

There is already an environment without local. It's called wormhole space. Folk interested in it can and do live there. Not relevant to the discussion. Besides, good players catch miners and ratters on a fairly regular basis, despite local, intel channels, and all the other things you're complaining about. If you "hate" AFK cloaking, no-one is forcing you to engage in it. Plenty of other ways of ganking folk out there.

The actual price tag of the ship used is irrelevant. The time to return on investment actually increases with ship price, since ship effectiveness does not increase proportionately to ship price. For example, a Nightmare, properly fitted, can cost ten times as much as a properly fitted Dominix, but it is perhaps only twice as effective at making ISK. So more expensive ships need a longer streak of "luck," since it takes longer for them to pay for themselves.

Fact of the matter is that AFK cloaking has no viable counter. It provides the cloaked player with absolute safety while undocked, which is contrary to EVE's core premise that no player should ever be safe while undocked, especially not while AFK. At the same time, a cloaked ship poses the exact same risk to others regardless of whether its owner is active or not, merely by being in space, because there is no way to determine the risk a cloaked player poses after going AFK. The cloaked player may be scanning the system, or he may be at work; there is no way to tell.

My own view is that we need an active mechanic for scanning down cloaked ships that sit in space for prolonged periods of time. The difficulty is in preventing that mechanic from interfering with active players, because cloaking is fine when used actively. There is nothing wrong with a player who camps a system in a cloaked stealth bomber, provided that player is active.

So because there is already dangerous space, all other space should be kept safe? I kind of disagree.


Yes, but they do not need to "pay for themselves", because realistically these ships will not ever be lost if piloted by a pilot who can keep an eye on local. The only real danger to anyone who isn't an idiot in null sec is awoxers.


I'm not arguing that AFK cloaking isn't a stupid mechanic with limited counters, I'm merely pointing out that it is currently a necessary mechanic.


And my view is that null sec is already too safe, join a major power block and you can just chain anoms all day with zero risk. Or fully upgrade a few systems and chain rated complexes, which gives an even greater reward for even less risk. (and allows you to ignore AFK cloakers.)

the guy talking about wh space is forgetting a big part of what happens in null. hotdrops.

this is where the cloakers get their power to instill fear for the most part. you dont know whether or not that guy is afk, has a cyno or whatnot, all you know is that hes can dscan while cloaked, find your hulk fleet in a belt and call in a recon gang or larger in less then two minutes of being active. a schedule hes setting without any warning or ability to counter.

were it always a solo cloaky or even a cloaky gang that would be a different story, and one that you see a difference in response to in wh space.

I think that thats true, outside of sov space.

but in sov space there should be some controls that allow you to force people that are not actively fighting you out of your space, a triggerable pos module that uncloaks people after a time limit. a probe that can only be used in your own sov space, a ship that connects to the ihub, whatever the mechanic is, something ought to be there to secure sov space.

while, at the same time not breaking the cloaking mechanic for people who are active.

There's some good advice in post #4 of this thread for how to live with a cloaker in local. As long as you are actively flying and keeping aligned to a safe, you're in pretty good shape to avoid most of the trouble he can bring. For the case of the domi mentioned above, this is trivial. Problems do arise when you are multi-boxing 4 domis, in which case you may not get them all away in time. vOv. Whose fault is that?

Think of the poor cloaker. Whenever he shows up in a system, everyone scurries to the stations. They have 100% immunity there, and can wait him out for as long as they want. They might even go AFK! It's no wonder that the cloaker goes AFK himself.

So with the nerf to AFK cloaking, I propose a compensating buff. Ships that can fit a cov-ops cloak should also be able to fit a module which bumps ships out of station. This should save both parties a lot of boring waiting time and do away with AFK problems.