Warfare & Tactics

The same can be said of all that quote or respond to my posts, i.e. the bit about the risk vs the reward of prolonged cloaking.



Personally if I was cloaked I'd have no objection to being eventually found. If I needed to be AFK, I'd simply log off. If I'm in station then by all means camp me in, same with me being at a POS, get your friends and bubble up the POS. Camping and Bubbling may be counters but these counters cannot be applied to a cloaked ship in a safe.




This is one of those border line cases I guess, if the cloaker is engaging then hes actively playing, again, no-one has an issue with this.




Getting escorts is no counter to a prolonged cloaker in a safe.





I have no objections to people AFK'ing, whether they be cloaked, in a POS or in a station. However, if I was in hostile territory and there was no benefit to me sitting in a system cloaked I would just log off. This means that there is a benefit. Gaining this benefit has no risk. I'd like there to be some risk, how does one generate risk, a counter of some sort maybe, ultimately I couldn't answer that question but if you want some suggestions I'm sure you could hunt down one of the many threads on the topic.

Fly safe. o7

The thing is that there should be some sort of tolerable difference to the whole thing. That's what balance means, tolerable difference.

If we agree that cloaking can be compared to sitting in a POS or station, then any restrictions applied to cloaks should similarily apply to POS and stations. Correct? Not equally, but within a tolerable difference.

That means if a cloak have something like a cycle time, so should the POS - and eject players camped in. The ejection-time of a POS stretches over days. Would it make a difference if cloaks had a 48hr cycle time? 5 hrs?

Another problem with any of your tactical suggestions as they exist today is that they assume either alot of players, or more players. It's all a question of volume in numbers and resources. It either requires numbers or grow exponentially with numbers. It has a lower threshold and below that treshold those options do not exist. They are most likely not available to the people using cloaked infiltration, as they would be superior options.

The inevitable follow-up question would be wether there should be a lower threshold of numbers or resources to participate and interact? What should the threshold be? 10, 100, 1000?

The same thing would apply here. If dealing with POS or station should be within a tolerable difference from dealing with cloaks, there would be alternatives to dealing with them at size and scale near the requirement of dealing with a cloak. Many Titans have died while cloaked. Using a Titan even in a small gang have very real risks. Small gangs can bubble a Titan but not bubble a whole POS. Alot of people die all the time from getting decloaked, but very few die from getting ejected from structures (those situations assume meta gameplay, not gameplay).

It leads to the pretty amusing conclusion that killing a Titan out of POS is easier for a low number-threshold group than catching an AFK appearant PvE pilot in any ship inside a POS.

Anyway, there are options to changes for you right there. Instead of complaining about cloaks, we could look at alternatives that allow said meta to be achieved through ingame mechanics. Maybe a POS password could be hacked by hacking modules, and the shield temporarily lowered? If people could do that, they would impose a real threat and not just a percieved one. If they could do that in 10min, it would be completely reasonable to give cloaks a 10min cycle time.

Until such options exist though, AFK cloaking present an equalizer - a counterweight - that promote balance.

It's all about fighting fire with fire.

That means we need those suggestions first, if we are to maintain balance.

- It was the same with the nano nerf. It is the same with 100mn Tech III and Tech III boosters.
- It was the same regarding the complaints of NPC pockets in nullsec, and how structure grind should be forced.
- It's the same as with the Titans vs. Numbers discussion of this year, numbers should have been adressed, first.
- The HML nerf? It's the same thing. It's attempting to nerf around numerical advantage, while avoiding the issue.
- Some people want only the side with the most numbers to have fire. Sadly, some of those people work for CCP.

Numbers is already inherently advantageous, and endorsed even further by many mechanics in the game. Yet some people are not content. They want more, they want safer, they want less alternatives.

If we keep making numbers better and better, our coalitions will grow and grow. Until it's twosided. Today it's five-sided with twosided dominance. The same groups of players in new (fewer) constellations. Isn't only five sovereign actors few?

Adress cloaking without attention to numerical balance, and the effect will be the same. Less.

I don't do it myself, i only sympathize with (AFK-) cloaking, because it is reasonbly numerically balanced. More ships are not better when dealing with cloaks, within some tolerable difference.

Come up with more varied scale content - and you will have more conflicts pop up. Not just a single forever-war.

Having individual PvE players take such risks and secure redundancy in the form of escorts or traps is such varied content. It draw focus from a single front to create content in smaller scale at home. That's why AFK cloaking is good, despite mechanically debatable. If you remove that without attention to alternatives, you remove that content. EVE become less. Look for alternatives to the AFK cloakers instead of simply looking to alienate that playerbase, or hide them away in a theme park.

Stations, as far as i can remember - no one can affect a player docked in a station. If the station flips, i can still remain safely within, for all eternity. You can flip the cloning location, but you can never eject players. That's why so many of us have assets all over the world.



There isn't any benefit to it. That's been the argument all along.

The only benefit there is to it is what other players make of it. The only benefit i have of it is what you let me.

If you are not too scared to go about your business with other players in local, there is no benefit to it what so ever.

For most people in the game, that risk is reality and part of daily life: low, wh, npc-null, unsecured sov-null.

The Schroedinger of "he could be active, but appear AFK" does not make PvE impossible, for them or you.

Sorry, mate, but just because you would log off doesn't mean that everyone else should have to. AFK cloaking is the most efficient terror weapon in a game where, ultimately, if you can afford to lose a ship you suffer virtually zero consequences.

AFK cloaking is all about economic warfare, and psychological warfare. It starves you frothy-mouthed nullbears of income by stopping the lazy, scared, unimaginative and intel-bereft fools from ratting. Therefore, there is a benefit to AFK cloaking in a nullbear ratting system - you deprive your foes of a source of cheap, easy, brainless income. Moreso if your foes are botters, as they won't ever modify their behaviour and counter your threat.

AFK cloaking is, to my mind at least, a valid terror weapon used by nullsec power blocs. TEST used to AFK cloak MO-GZ5 when NEM3 herpaderped around out in Delve. It forced our guys elsewhere, and stopped them from ratting in carriers. This prevented people from accumulating sufficient capital to gain enough supers and cojones to defend. Ultimately, it worked on the majority of NEM3 nullbears. It never stopped anyone with 1/11th of a brain and a nadger from ratting.

AFK cloaking never stopped me from ratting - I just did my ratting in a Tornado pair 70km away from one another. When a dude tried decloaking, he died instantly and the supposed "victim" just MWDed away from the BLOPs drop. After a while, they stopped trying to jump ratting nados.

You are also conflatting the usual argumeent about risk-reward which is a core tenet of the relative income levels in EVE between security status tiers (hi, low, null, wh) with PVP. Sure, there's no direct threat to the AFK cloakeer, but so too he is getting no ISK while keeping his client logged in to EVE. This meets the "no risk, no ISK" tenet which everyone on the forums seems to agree on. At least the AFK cloaked isn't botting.

So, to sum up, you should work out a way to neutralise the threat, modify your behaviours, and not try to make the game suit your inefficient and shoddy gameplay style. If no one could deal with AFK cloaking, wormholes wwould be deserted. If no one could deal with logoffskis, no one would rat in any system's anoms, ever, because someone may be logged in a haven and watch wormnav for a ratting tick and try a logon trap. It works, eventually. What's your method for stopping that?

You say there is no risk, finally someone agrees, in fact everyone on the forums according to you.



So we have no risk yet it yields the benefits you describe. To me this seems unbalanced for the risk involved.



So he was actively playing, no-one has an issue with this.

I can't envisage somebody expecting personal isk from prolonged cloaking, its done for the greater good and to have the impacts you've described, its just that this greater good comes free of risk.

Also I don't think its accurate to compare null and WH space, the two are vastly different and the motivations for cloaking are different. As mentioned earlier the strategic window if the same null tactic was applied to a wh just wouldn't work, they're just not comparable.

As for trying to neutralise the threat, its pretty much impossible if the cloakers objective is to stay cloaked in a safe for a prolonged duration ...and reap the rewards (for no risk) that you mentioned above. On the subject of modifying ones behaviours, I already agreed with the gent that posted about cloakers in whs.

Fly safe. o7

Not sure if serious.

The fix is even more simple: flag everyone that hasn't interacted with the game for more then 15 minutes with an AFK flag visible in local. Once you come back, you get unflagged and after 30 seconds you can interact with the game again.

Wow..i haven't seen such BS in a long time.

usually the cloakers are AFK and when you read their bio it usually says something among the lines: If you want to get rid of me, pay ISK (usually 1 bil).

We are not talking about Cloakers that do intel.

There should be a countermeasure for this...or just an auto disconnet after 30 mins.

AFK flag alone is not going to help. But add AFK cancellation timer to it and now you have some time to react.

You would probably argue that people will use it to simply hide when this happen. True, but there are also some of us who like pvp and are ready to catch cloakers who are not AFK.


Or lets introduce new scanner probe that can detect cloak anomalies in the system. It will have long scan duration (1 hour or so) and after this time it will give you position of cloakers who were in the system and they position havent changed more than 1 AU (again pure imaginary number).

But...but trollbears need to eat to?