Player Features and Ideas Discussion

maybe make ships appear on dscan (as the actual ship or as 'cloaked ship' signature).

then you can set your dscan at say 60000 km and just spam it and warp out when needed.

you can't scan it, but you know that he is active or not

In sov space you can plant Cyno Disrupters so hotdrops are no longer an issue, which leaves the cloaker themselves who are an easily balanced threat.

What's the problem again?

There is such a control: it's called flying decent ships decently and denying your opponents kills. If they can't gank anything, they will leave.

I am made to wonder, however, is it really balanced to have cloaked ships able to do more than use their own resources?

By that, I mean cyno hot droppers are totally blowing the curve for the cloaking pilots who wanted kills more directly. (IE: they made a nice SB, are ready to stalk out a system to hunt, but cannot get anyone to come out because of cyno fears)

Not many people point at the armaments on cloaked ships, and comment how they consider them dangerous beyond reason. Not anymore, at least, assuming that they used to.

Me, I want to hunt cloaked. I am not interested in cyno dropping anyone, but the chances of prey taking the risk I am not a cyno cloaker are not good.

While it amuses me to know I can strangle a system by just being in local, it gets dull.

I have a better chance of getting on a killmail with my logi.

I think the problem is that one of the most common ships used for anoms in null is carriers, and the only way you're going to kill it is:

a) Titan bridge a gang in.

b) Drop supers / Dreads.

c) Sit a massive roaming gang next door and hope the guy isn't watching intel.

Cynos are kind of a necessity, again because they're one of the only mechanics that allow us to devalue local chat intel.

Giving that dead horse one extra kick: Nobody is defending "AFK activities". Because, by definition, they don't exist.


This is where it gets frustrating. There is good advice for flying a ship safely in the presence of hostiles in this very thread. But people refuse to read it or apply it, which is the only reason AFK cloaking is a "problem" which gets brought up over and over again.

Yeah, it's still somewhat risky. Yeah, flying safely might cut into your optimal profit margins. But you are flying in null because you wanted to be a tough guy and reap the tough guy rewards. To do that, you need to take the time to learn the game. Do that, and you'll be fine, no change of rules needed.

This subject has been much discussed. There are some truths surrounding this well talked about situation:

1) AFK cloakers can't hurt anyone.

2) Local has no bearing on AFK cloakers, only on those who chose to be scared of them.

3) Removal of local will help cloakers to gank people and will do nothing about AFK cloakers except make the aforementioned scared folks garner a false sense of security leading to forum whining about how removal of local was unfair.

4) A cloaky cyno ship isn't overpowered. It's a valid tactic for black ops fleets which are, in themselves, valid and not over powered.

A person who is NOT AFK but is cloaked in the system is a valid player and therefore not an issue. A person who IS AFK and is cloaked in the system isn't a problem because they're AFK. The issue is that you don't know which it is but you know there is a cloaky in system because there is someone in local that you can't find in d-scan. Stop whining about it. Try going and living in a WH where you have no idea how many cloakies are in system and where people regularly mine thinking that they've got it all covered when BAM, a force recon appears and toasts them.

All these people harping on (and I do mean harping on, it's always the same ones in the plethora of threads that reiterate the same old tired and completely meaningless arguments) about AFK cloaking and cloaking being overpowered are just whining because they're too unimaginative to foster alternative methods of mutual defence other than whining on the forums in order to try to "fix" a system that isn't broken.

Those who complain because one AFK cloaker can lock down a null sec sovereign system are looking for the solution in the wrong place. Stop looking at CCP to fix what your corp/alliance is too lazy or incompetent to fix itself.

There are those of us that live perfectly happily with the cloaking situation as it is because we use these simple approaches - "It's dangerous. Take all practical precautions. Have contingencies. Make allies. Don't fly anything you can't afford to lose."

This is an awesome idea!

I recon this should solve all the problems with cloaking. I wonder how much time it would take for CCP to develo........ Oh, I see.

This is usually an issue of paranoia, "Oh God! There's someone in my room!".

A better, safer solution would be just to have idle people stop receiving updates in local participants and have them marked idle in the local (but not any other) chat list if they're in space.

A proposed solution:

Create a new T2 destroyer class. Call it a "Seeker," or some fancier name. CCP has said that they want to create new destroyers, and a destroyer-type hull seems like a natural choice for something meant to counter frigate- and cruiser-sized ships -- it will be able to eat solo bombers, but will need support to deal with recons and especially with black ops. It should be able to eat stealth bombers.

Create a new probe launcher and probe type, which can only be fitted onto this new destroyer hull; call it a "Seeker Probe." Exclusivity will prevent ratting ships from using them, and maybe even create a mini-profession out of finding cloaked ships that sit in one spot for too long.

A Seeker Probe will be able to find only cloaked ships. it will not show uncloaked ships. It may be analogous to early SONAR, which submarines could counter by surfacing. Like all probes, they will show up on a properly set up D-Scan, so an active player will be able to spot efforts to find him and take the necessary precautions. The upside of showing only cloaked ships is that the prober will have to deal with fewer results; the downside will be that he will need to manage a second set of probes to scan down cloaky ships that decide to uncloak, or else work in conjunction with another prober. I am not sure whether the names of cloaked ships should show up on the Seeker Probe's scan results; I think that they should not: if there are friendly cloaked ships in system, they should coordinate with the Seeker pilot, or else risk being nuked by him by accident.
Alternatively, have the probe return ship names but not types. Or have it only show ship mass.

A Seeker probe most likely should have a higher scan time than standard probes. Minimum scan time after skills should probably be ten seconds or more. A good prober uses dscan quite a bit, and that tool will be unavailable to him, so the scan time cannot be too long; on the other hand, a Seeker ship should not be an instant win button against cloaked ships. As well, it will probably be a bad idea to allow players to simply have an alt spamming "scan" on top of their anomaly or belt every ten seconds. It comes down to how effective we want this ship to be against active players.

I suspect that the proposed signature radius penalty for prolonged cloaking may come in handy at this point. Give cloaked ships a hidden signature radius penalty multiplier. The multiplier is linked to a timer, which counts the amount of time a player has been cloaked. Warping and being uncloaked reduces the timer, perhaps at double-speed for being uncloaked, and at quad-speed for warping or something similar. The purpose is that a player who actively moves around looking for targets is not only not penalized, but is rewarded. The multiplier will start at 1 (no effect) and will increase once the cloak timer hits a certain point -- maybe twenty or thirty minutes. Once again, the purpose is to avoid penalizing active players, while hitting full-on AFK players. This way, a ship which is AFK for a long period of time will be easy to scan down and kill; a ship which is active won't be so easy. A big concern will be for Black Ops ships, which cannot warp cloaked, and which may need to receive a reduction in cloak timer accrual. I am not sure making "cloak boosters" available is a good idea: bombers have few enough slots as it is, and must-have utility modules in general are a bad idea.

Anyways. Once a Seeker gets a 100% scan result, it cannot just warp to the cloaked ship. Instead, it has to launch a Subspace BOmb, or something similar. Because it would be analogous to a depth charge. Make it specific to the Seeker hull. The purpose is to give an active player more time to get out, or alternatively to nuke the Seeker ship. I am not sure whether or not this charge should be an AoE or not. I like the idea of a Seeker decloaking a bomber wing by getting a bead on its safe spot. Better yet, of a Seeker decloaking a friendly bomber wing due to miscommunication. But the cycle time on the launcher would have to be sufficiently long to prevent a player from parking a cloaked alt in a belt and targeting him; although I suspect that anyone with two throwaway alts to burn on finding cloakies can just as easily put them into Falcons and set up a proper trap.

Once our S-Bomb explodes, the cloaked ship's cloak turns off for a set period of time, and can be probed down. Maybe a 4 or 5 minute timer. That ship also gains a 15-minute aggro timer. The purpose is twofold: (1) An active player caught in the blast can start bouncing safe spots to avoid being probed down. (2) It prevents use of easy macros that would log off the account or reactivate the cloak.

Concerns I haven't been able to properly deal with:

This mechanic will hit conventional cloakies particularly hard. A Cynabal cannot warp while cloaked, for example, so once a Seeker backed up by a few conventionals enters system, the Cynabal won't be able to hold in one position for long. On the other hand, a Seeker is going to be fairly fragile.

It also still seems too easy for someone to park a Seeker ship in a system and spam the scan button to detect cloaky activity. I really do not want a mechanic that makes it too easy to tell where a cloaked ship is. Maybe implement a time penalty for repeated use without moving the probes?