Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Thanks for reading, Annihilatus. I agree that cloaking should make one more difficult - much more difficult - to detect, but not that one should be completely undetectable when under cloak. Right now, cloaking intelligently (at a safespot, maybe even mobile) is the safety equivalent of docking up - however unlike being docked up in a station, you still have the ability to move, gather active intelligence via dscan, and immediately decloak and point a hostile ship with no more delay than the time it takes to target the vessel. In effect, cloaking is (can be, if you do it right) safer and harder to counter than an alliance putting up an outpost.

I think I explained the rest in my original post, so to put it as concisely as I can: local is a mechanic that unfairly favors people wanting to avoid PvP at all costs, and cloaking is a mechanic that unfairly favors players who want to hunt those ratting targets, or gather intelligence and "block" activities in perfect safety.

Honestly, I hope the ones who are genuinely so risk averse that they refuse to adapt to any changes simply go to high sec.

If they are going to avoid PvP by choice, rather than for tactically sound reasons, having them in null makes no sense.
(And by tactically sound, I mean you can see on sensors or on grid that they will simply overpower you, and their is no contest to be had)

The test for null, you have to be willing to pvp.

Make it so more effort is needed all around, this daycare level of intel is dumbing it down too much for my taste.

You may be right, I certainly have no reason to doubt these kills exist.

I saw threads recently complaining about how rats would change targets unexpectedly, and roasted the would be ganker. Especially if they used the wrong type of module, that seemed to make em crazy.

Having someone watch your back while you pound the rats, that sounds like good planning. Solo in null sounds risky, gotta be really smooth if you don't have amazing intel warning you.

Cost effectiveness comparisons to high sec such as this are valid.

You make an excellent point, about how adding another character diminishes the return on investment to below that obtained by the dual boxed L4's in high sec.

This would suggest, if the risk were made more real in the absence of amazing intel, the reward index would justify attention to bring this properly in line.

I agree this would make no sense to use two characters currently.

id say that the comprehensiveness of local is not so powerful, however the instantaneous feed back is. and if the ratter does POS up, switch to a combat ship and go looking for the cloaker, then mad props for him. Unfortunately there is a large demographic of players who instead stay in their POS, open up the threads and demand a way to hunt cloakers that would not include risking themselves (note the desire for POS modules to reveal the cloaker for them, rather than having to leave the safety of the shields to start searching themselves)

I didn't say Completely Safe(docked safe), I said "safe for at least 10min" notice the timeframe, if they are AFK longer than that and you manage to scan them down and shoot them, well then they are no longer safe are they

No, the problem is you let the person into "your system".

The problem is you don't know for sure what that pilot is doing. He could be absolutely AFK out partying it up having a lot of fun with some cute college co-eds. Giggling gleefully that you are in that system all docked up and afraid to put yourself in harms way. The balance to that is you have absolutely no way to interact with him and he has absolutely no way to interact with you. For all purposes, you are completely safe, and so is he! Nice! Right?

On the other hand, that same guy could be just sitting down for a long set of EVE. He's done everything he needs to do in order to not be disturbed by anything other than internet spaceships. He's showered, eaten and has a stash of extra food and drinks close at hand. He has used the restroom and even has a device setup that he can relieve himself if nature calls in the future. Or maybe he's on a laptop in his bathroom, who knows?. The kids are at the grandparent's and the wife is at her sister's (at least he hopes so). Even the dog went with the kids. And who gives a damn what the cat is up to, right? This guy is setup to play! And, most importantly, he's hunting you and those in the system who choose to undock and engage in PVP (because undocking is the signal to engage in ship-to-ship PVP, regardless of your real intentions).

The point of my wonderfully entertaining explanations is if a player is trully "AFK Cloaky", he has no impact on you at all. It's Smoke And Mirrors™. He can't give intel (real time at least) because he is not at the desk. He can't come into your belt and hot-drop you because he is not at the desk. He can't scan you down because he is not at the desk.

And, if the person IS at the desk, then it is their damn right to give intel. And hot-drop you. And scan you down.

Also, what is the difference between an "AFK Cloaker" and a spy who never undocks in your alliance controlled station? They both used some form of skill to get into that situation. Whether that is diplomacy in order to get into the alliance. Or game mechanics in order to get into the system and cloak up. It's the same effort, just a different method. And the best thing about the example is the spy could undock at any time and hot-drop you or scan you down or become a threat in the matter of time it takes him to sneeze... All without ever training the cloaking skill.

I have other characters (egads!) that have been in alliances. You know what we did with "AFK Cloakers"? We ignored them. Well, that's not entirely true. What we did was keep track of the people in our systems and recognized who was who and what they were doing. Were they in our alliance? Were they somehow docked up? Most of the time, we figured out very quickly who was who and what they were up to and we made judgement calls on how that would impact our gameplay. That usually resulted in us going about our days in complete bliss. Knowing that the person was not a threat. Yet still recognizing that we could be wrong and that is the Risk of undocking in 0.0 space.

Thank you.

I once suggested using energy mines as a way to briefly make cloaked vessels detectable.

Another neat option is to make movement and warping generate a signal that breaks the cloak (without the module turning off).

When in warp a cloaked vessel is detectable on directional scan (even cloaked), but is not when it lurks silently. When a cloaked vessel moves, it generates low disturbances not detectable by directional scan, or only randomly detectable.

Visually we can have a neat faint glowing effect when a cloaked vessel moves, the strength of the effect must be proportionally to its speed vs max speed and/or the level of some skill that can minimize this effect (but never completely wipe it out). It would not reduce normal effect of cloak as hiding tactic or lurking tactic, but make countering a cloak when you know its there more of an option.

I've read your posts on this subject before and it feels a lot more reasonable to me then completely removing the local channel. The only thing I would disagree with you on is removing POS shielded vessels from local and that's because they can still be seen on d-scan and they can be relatively easily be determined to be at a POS using d-scan only (not to 100% certainty but close enough). Essentially I feel you can refine this idea to simply be ships on d-scan appear in and can see local.

The idea of removing local completely was floated around for a while but seems to have died off and for the better I think, I'm positive removing local would not work out the way people seem to want to envision it. The suggestion seems to be that more gangs would freely engage because they can't take a quick head count, but I suspect over the long term it would make people much MORE paranoid and risk averse then by leaving local completely untouched, yeah it's all psychological but so is so much else in this game. Imagine the rare instances in null where there is a gate out 15 AU or more from anything else and your route leads to it, perfect place to drop a bubble camp and with no local at all I can see a lot of people just being unwilling to even warp to the gate.

Ultimately I feel that if AFK cloaking is deemed a "problem" then I feel your suggestion is the best starting point for fixing it. In any case I only use local at this point to see if I should be using d-scan to find targets (another feature you'd lose if you removed local completely but this suggestion would also keep you from scouring for docked/cloaked ships)

that is my opinion, but atm, everyone is pretty safe