Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The way I understand the cloaking devices, they bend electromagnetic waves around the ship, and prevent any radiation from leaving this 'bubble' created by the device. Now, that means the ship will heat up, eventually it would just evaporate from the heat.

What I propose is to make cloaking devices heat up, burning out if you leave them on too long. One would have to decloak periodically to let the cloaking device cool down again. Also add a skill and/or module that allows to stay cloaked for longer, and perhaps dissipate the heat quicker, allowing one to re-cloak faster.

Why do this? Quite simple. AFK-Cloaking is the most effective Area-Denial tactic currently available in the game. You can make entire regions close to useless this way. I think this is just a tad too effective. Forcing periodic decloaks would keep this tactic viable, but make it riskier, balancing the risk vs reward at least slightly.

Edit: Maybe also allow the cloaking devices to use up coolant, to stay cloaked longer.

As much as I like the concept of free Intel, I actually like your suggestion better than the OP's. At least removing Local won't nerf Stealth Bombers.

Hey look, a nerf cloaking thread.

And in doing so

= The death of eve online

This is not a fantasy MMO were it doesn't matter whose around you.

If you remove local

Null Sec becomes useless, fleets cant form up against other fleets because NO INTEL ON NUMBERS so systems fall and drop everyday

You people are stupid

What risk?
Needing to decloak once in a while when sitting at your safespot is riskier?
You could even start warping between safespots while waiting to recloak.
Where is the risk you speak of?

The only people, who would be influenced by this change are those, who need to cloak at their safespot because of some unexpected rl stuff happening.

Fact is that there are a segment who try blackmail "I won't leave this system until I get paid...." types who capitalize on the game mechanic. Problem is that the blackmailer (resisting urge to use derogatory names here....) might get caught infrequently but comes back over and over and over again which in the long run is (IMO) simply an indication of how "easy" it is for one guy to take advantage of the game mechanic which I also think is too easy to use, too quick to skill up for, and more often than not is used over long periods of time by a single player with no check/balance requirements.

Granted, 20 active players in a system aren't going to be intimidated by a lone wolf blackmail player. But the blackmailers know that there are many more hours of time when systems are getting used by smaller pockets of users (not the whole group) who are playing in very easy and vulnerable numbers while running plexes and mining. So, the 20 get together to run a trap and the blackmailer goes away until later. This is actually a fairly timezone friendly activity (I'm in N.A so I pick an EU system to ... um... take advantage of)

Changing the game system to require a higher price and/or introduce a balance is a good idea. In my opinion, another alternate solution is for there to be a "logistics" type cruiser with the ONLY purpose of cloaking fleets. This should be the ONLY cloak ship. Period. Also should be locked from moving. Period. Was never sure why cyno ship had such HUGE checks and balances, but the much more dangerous cloak capability is free to be put on a frigate without much penalty (to say nothing of a tengu etc.)

Finally, cloak should cost some fuel type similar to other "specials" like nano for heat and fuel for cyno. Then a solo griefing player will need logistic support to be 30 jumps from home meanwhile a larger alliance could make it happen for longer periods of time. Black ops bombers run in packs, so adding a logistic type ship to the equation isn't much of a problem for corps and alliances. Neither would a fuel cost.

AFK-cloaking wouldn't be one tenth as effective if you couldn't drop a ton of blackops ships instantly out of nowhere with a single bomber. Just sayin

Remove L3 and L4s from hisec.

I am kinda in favor of a nerf like this for NON-COVOPS cloaking devices. ie non-covops cloaks would have some kind of charge/fuel requirement for their use. here is my concept:

non-covops cloaks would require the use of cap booster charges, with base cloak time in seconds per charge equal to the charge rating , with meta level of the cloak determining:

• maximum capacity of the cloak for storing booster charges ready to use. for instance, a T1 meta 0 cloak would be limited to perhaps 5x cap booster 100's. a T1 meta 2 might be able to store 5x 200's, meta 4 would get 400's, and meta 8 (obviously faction) wold get 5x 800's. of course, you could load a cloak with a larger number of smaller charges if you're in the field without access to your max charge size (this way, a non-covops ship could conceivably refuel by looting wrecks, be they NPC rats or PVP kills), as an aside, this would also encourage the market for faction cloaks.


• efficiency of charge use - ie how long the cloak can stay on per charge. obviously higher meta=longer cloak time per charge. as a starting point, lets say each meta gets a 10% boost in charge life over the previous level when using a given cap charge.

the big thing is this: decloaking would use up the current charge. say youre in a cloaky vaga with a T2 improved cloak fitted, loaded with 5x cap booster 400's (a meta 5 cloak would get 645 seconds out of each 400 charge). you're cloaked up at a belt and decide to engage some miners. decloaking would terminate the charge your cloak is currently consuming to keep you cloaked (say you're currently on charge #x in the cloak... you would have to use the next loaded charge to cloak again).

to balance this charge limitation out, I would suggest giving all cloaks the ability to warp while cloaked, with the limitation being that the max warp speed would be directly affected by the cloak in the same way that sub-warp speed is currently. so a 3au/sec warp would now become a 0.3au/sec warp for a ship cloaked with a T1 meta 0 device, which would not improve if the ship decloaks mid-warp (if you want a high seed warp, dont initiate warp while cloaked).

this would actually make Blackops potentially effective, in that they could be given the role bonus that they do not suffer the warp speed penalty, but would still need charges to cloak (albeit they would get far more time out of their charges so as to achieve cloak capabilities somewhere between T2 improved and T2 covops units)

I think its time to make Corina's Law:

Anything done to hinder AFK cloakers will hinder active cloakers just as much, if not more.

thanks for the fake physics... "AFK" are not an issue.. at all. because they are not able to attack or even doing anything, they can't hurt you.... they are afk... theoretically anyway .. you have no way to know that they aren't really just sitting there at their keyboeard. No force decloaks that arent already in the game.. this is a transparent attempt to win a nerf on all cloaking. This would break it completely for any real use.

Remove the cloaked from local and never worry aobut the "AFK" again.