Player Features and Ideas Discussion

When you quote someone and reply, its customary to inclued at least the full sentence. Then you can base your reply on the context of that persons statement.



You've been in a Wormhole before right?

Send out a bunch, position around the system, scan, detect..... Nothing else. You now have a list of all the ships in the system (as long as your probes cover the system). Granted you dont have a 100% warpable point to these ships, but knowing they are there and what they are can be enough.

My point stands.... Covert Probes break Wormholes.

You can do ANYTHING with enough time and force. So stupid argument meets stupid argument.

on-topic: Cloaking and afk cloaking is perfectly fine as is. Here are ways to counter or prevent afk cloakers and keep your ratting systems safe. I've listed them numerous times in other threads as well (on alt forum chars), but here they are again:

• Containers, wrecks, corpses and bubbles, lot's of them!


• Get a proper intel channel (or other form of intel)


• Put some perma-scouts in your constellation/region, preferably with decent scanning skills


• Diplomacy


• Baiting and killing afk cloakers with similar tactics in their home system and force them to stop doing it to you.


• If the afk cloaker is smart enough to be in an npc corp or alt corp, be a detective and find his ties to whatever hostile corp/alliance his main is in, through locator agents, forum posts, corp history, etc.


• Hotdrop the hotdroppers with a fleet on standby (you should have at least a few capitals or pvp support... as pure pve alliances shouldn't be able to thrive in 0.0 / w-space anyway). Use jump bridges properly if you have them.


• Your corporations/alliances espionage network should be able to provide warpins if needed


• Bribes / Ransom (as a last resort, because this will encourage other afk cloakers)


• Fit your ships accordingly. A sebo/sig amp to lock up bombers before they cloak/warp, web+disr or scram to hold them down if you are in a slow ship, 1 medium or large neut pretty much nullifies a bombers effectiveness. A lot of ships can field ecm drones as well to help you. Heck, even smartbombs or ecm bursts help in certain situations.

- nvm

You clearly didn't get my point. With enough time and force (as the poster before me stated), you can do anything. Even finding an afk cloaker somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Think of the analogous brute force attacks in cryptography. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack )

More realistically, with some 50-ish pilots in fast warping ships, you can sift through a lot of safespots between celestials fairly quick and maybe weed out the more stupid afk cloakers. But if they align anywhere in a random direction, it's near impossible (it's never fully impossible) to catch them.

I have personally managed to decloak a cloaker by bookmarking and warping to several points in between celestials, I didn't manage to kill him though as he wasn't afk :p

My point being: If you aren't paying enough attention to local + dscan, then you are allowing an afk cloaker to find himself a decent enough spot to sit in while cloaked.

if someone dedicated decides to sit somewhere, where you used to jew, with a cyno, you're f*cked. Thats it.
Why should that be different tbh? Why should you have immunity to something like that? There is no reason why...
Space is for everyone, for this purpose CCP gave us cloak and cloaky ships. Its all fine and intended. You are afraid of ratting in such systems with other people hanging around there but its a different story and something you have to solve, game mechanics around that are all fine.

I cherry picked this response from the forest of back and forth rhetoric.

It symbolizes the out of touch perspective being projected onto cloaking.

First off, cloaking is not ratting. It's purpose is not the direct recovery of ISK.
It is, in point of fact that is quite established: A COUNTERMEASURE.

Clarifying this point, you must accept that local is being used to gather intel. Do not pretend otherwise, as in a majority of cases local is what informed the local system a pilot was present they could not otherwise know about.

So, the opposing player has flawless intel telling them you are in the system. What are your options to counter this?
Blob them? Grossly ineffective. A blob cannot be realistically maintained beyond a certain point, and requires extensive effort. Local in outlying systems allows scouts to instantly know a fleet is approaching. Don't bother against targets that can either dock or log off.

Send a cyno scout? Same problem as the blob. Local makes their presence obvious, allowing potential targets ample time to easily evade them.

It boils down to the real obstacle being local intel. So long as local intel is useful, offensive strikes are handicapped to a level of absurdity.
As intel tools go, due to it's flawless reliability and zero effort to use, it is over powered.

And this is why you have AFK cloaking. It is the only means demonstrated to counter this intel source. So long as local reports intel that is not actionable, people are forced to either choose inactivity or risk.
That is it's goal.

If you want to remove AFK Cloaking, remove the reason it exists.

This is backwards, and comparable to a child stuffing their fingers into their ears, and saying, "lalalalala I can't hear you"!

There will be ZERO AFK cloaking to threaten with so long as the intel provided by local stops interfering with PvP.

Defense should require at least some effort beyond watching a chat channel's roster.

you wont even have to add some kind of cycle timer on cloak if there wouldnt be instant local intel, because people wouldnt be forced to do that - the only reason people afk cloak is to stalk in the chat window, to force you between inactivity or risk because they have no other means to get you killed in presence of such powerful and flawless tool.
Afk cloaking comes at huge costs, its not free, it takes a whole paid account being busy all the time, 23/7 to be effective, which denies anything else on that paid account; it takes a lot of energy running a PC, it takes your CPU power which you maybe would need otherwise. You really should understand why afk cloaking is done and required and thats not free kills.

The point is, local creates the need to use a countermeasure.

AFK Cloaking did not just happen, it evolved to meet this need.

It only exists to meet the need for a countermeasure to local intel.

(Consider how ridiculous it would be to AFK Cloak while noone knew you were present)