EVE General Discussion

That''s either missing the point or ignoring the actual problem.

The AFK cloaker can sit in a system all day but only needs to be actively used by the player when they (and possibly their friends) are ready to take action. If they're bored or there are no targets they can leave the character sitting there and go do something more interesting until an opportunity presents itself.

On the other hand the defenders have no idea when the cloaker is active or genuinely afk. Their only response is to remain docked and do nothing or to actively form a gang to protect whatever activity is going on.

This sounds reasonable at first but what this means is several things are stacked against the defenders:
- Several defenders are forced to stop what they are doing to baby sit others and (if they have an organised defence) there is then a realistic chance that nothing will happen. The attacker only requires a single character and can be active when they feel like it.
Also maintaining this type of defence constantly is neither engaging or fun.

- An attack is only likely to occur if the attackers know they have enough of an advantage to win, the defenders can never preempt this or counter attack.

- The attackers will always have the advantage of knowing what they are engaging in advance, the defenders have no information at all until the attack is launched.

- The attackers have the advantage of mobility since their goal is typically combat orientated and they can move elsewhere. Defender goals are usually around resource collection of some form which is mostly static, so the option to move around is limited.


None of this is really the fault of either side, it's just the inevitable outcome of Eves mechanics that hand out information to the players at no cost or effort.

Make cloakingdevices only fit on barges and exhumers, no other ships.
That would stir up the pot for sure.

My bet is that local and the inabillity to find cloaked ships will be fixed within 2 months tops after such a change

yes, screwing with somebody with your mere presence is considered psychological warfare

however, AFK cloaking doesn't quite work if you never engage anybody - after a while, they'll just continue on ratting, even with you in local, and if you wait long enough, you'll be considered benign, not willing to attempt a kill. simply cloaking up in a safe somewhere is no guarantee that you'll have any effect on the residents.

simply removing local would have far-reaching effects, one being that it completely skews the balance against the residents of any given system and towards cloaky gangs - bombers are nearly impossible to intercept if they're flown by somebody competent, and they have no targeting delay - the lack of local would break them beyond belief.

local makes sense in nullsec where travel occurs through static routes and most of the activity is done in areas that do not require probing, unlike wormholes.

Would the removal of local affect your botting or why are you so against it ?

If people want to find you then they can tell when you are online

they can locate which system you are in

They can tell how active you have been in a system



Unless you get rid of the above avenues then cloaking is truly the only defence you have.

Personally, I love it when people cannot formulate a good argument and just barf out a pointless “no” for no good reason…

And anyway, local is what's causing AFK cloaking, so that's where the “fix” needs to happen. It doesn't have to be removed, as such — it just have to stop providing instant and infallible intel to all and sundry. The best solution so far remains the idea that cloaking removes you from local, in both senses: you cannot be seen in the local user list, and you cannot see the local user list. If you want to do something non-AFK, you will have to expose yourself and/or spend a lot of time finding absolutely nothing.

I don't honestly think there's a problem with AFK cloaking as it is now. As Richard Desturned stated in his post, it is an excellent psychological warfare engine. You can simply get a person to cloak up in your enemy's carebearing system and interrupt the ISK flow in that system pretty nicely. Removing cloakers from local would make this much less effective.

CSM chairman and former CCP-dev Seleene explained on the CSM Townhall Meeting the reason why CCP isn't touching the cloaking mechanics.

Basically when somebody cloaks it makes him literally 'not be there' in the game. While that was an easy way back then to implement invisibility, it's now biting CCP in the arse, because it also makes it impossible to change things.

Many of the ideas to balance AFK-cloaking or even normal cloaking, would involving modules cycling, which would require completely rebuilding the cloaking mechanics. Something CCP currently doesn't have the resources for.

If CCP revamps cloaking, personally I think the best and easiest way to balance it by the consumption of simple cap charges by the cloaking module. The module should only contain a fixed m3 and the size of the ship's signature determines the minimum necessary charge size. Though some bigger cloaking modules with more m3 should be added for larger ships as well as some larger cap charges (though the capital ships could use a capital-size capacitor booster anyway).

I think a guy earlier hit the nail on the head; cloaky campers mean that you either have to safe up, and stay safe, or you have to drag a support fleet with you to do so much as run an anomaly.

At which point the ISK per person might as well drop to nothing, not to mention a lot of boredom being injected into the game, at no cost at all to the "aggressor", whom may very well be completely AFK.

You have to act as though he or she isn't, though, and THAT is the problem... it's a broken mechanic in risk / reward for the attacker. They have absolutely no risk, and for 23.5 hours per day they get rewarded by harming their opponents economy.

Edit: To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with stealthy-on-stealthy warfare. I had some awesome times in Geminate with 2 enemy bomber / recon wings going at each other.

Did they mention any technical difficulties with modifying local chat? I'm also of the opinion that cloaking is okay as-is, and local is what really needs to be fixed (for this and other reasons - in particular it's just bad form to have a key intel source be a side-effect of the chat implementation).

But there has been talking about modifying local for so long without anything happening, I wonder if they've painted themselves into a coding corner there as well.