Warfare & Tactics

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Wow - someone's complaining about AFK cloaking. I never thought I'd see the day.

Everyone knows cloaks are getting changed the same day they remove local from null.

But I still like these 'Im scared of the guy who is afk so I stay docked' threads:

Notice how the people in high sec never complain.
Notice how the people in low sec never complain.

But - the big bad scary null sec people cry like little girls.

There is a very simple solution to this that would make you happy and not require cloaks to be changed.





Hint:
The 1st word of my response is the solution to your problem.

Good point.

Funny that , must be something to do with the inability to jump to a lit cyno in WH space, might that be the reason, engage the grey matter and you might just get there!

you only can hide something you already got there.

I'm new here but i've never heard about 100 person fleets in WH. Did i miss something? Is it connected to mass limit of WH and absense of persisting connections?

Nullbear tears are just so much more awesome than high sec miner tears!!

AFK cloakers are not an issue in iteself, there are two issues coupled to it that make it problematic:

Local: The instantaneous and omniscient local chat as an intel tool is too perfect... It makes the vigilant pilot impossible to catch... and ends up disheartening roaming to the point they'd rather sit on a titan and put afk cloakies in your system...

Cyno's: The ability to light a cyno and drop a pragmatically unscoutable gang of any size, shape, or composition instantly on a target makes countering a "cloaker that's decloaking and attacking" difficult and generally impractical. There are many solutions to this, but most of them make it impractical to hotdrop... which is a mistake.... Hotdrops should exist... The best solution I've heard of is different classes of ships take different amounts of time to "traverse" the bridge... Frigates travel very quickly... BS's arrive much later.... This still isn't perfect, but helps...

In the end.... several things need to change....and I'm not sure afk cloakers need to at all....

A.) Local chat needs to become less ideal.... give it a moderate delay (10-20 seconds) before a person appears in local so they have more of a chance to catch someone...

B.) Nullsec PvE should be modified to encourage more grouping... Reduce bounties, and instead give a solid payout for completing an anomaly... Structure that payout similar to incursions where payouts require a fleet and X number of ships... and less than that dramatically reduces your payout... If you want to solo... belt rat!

If A occurs, I'll support a cloaky prober tool to hunt afk cloakers in your system... so long as it doesn't interfere with a cloaker's ability to traverse gate camps or scout a system... (i.e. a slow scanning (30-60s), combat probe that doesn't decloak a ship, but enables you to warp to their location.... )

A) I have seen lots of people get caught in 0.0 even with local, only the vigilant are mostly secure, and even they can get caught at times by people who work out alternative strategies or are prepared to go for a long term hunt. Why should the vigilant player be as easy to kill as the inattentive? So what is the point in being skilled then?

Of course I could do the D-scan thing, hell I did that in a NPC 0.0 system where we were fighting for the system, but its not so much the Tengu, or the BS that has an issue but the carrier, now I will be aligned in my carrier aand ready to warp out if I get anything on D-scan or it de-cloaks, but to be blunt it makes pointing a carrier too easy, the only thing I suppose you could say is that it balances off against the AI, but that was too far in the gankers favour before.

B) Well I hate to point out something, but not everyone does CA's solo, we have had fleets doing them when we have campers, in fact having cloaky campers was a benefit for this in my experience. Its just that most people are not prepared to setup for CA's that could turn into a PvP experience, we did that and it was fun, surprisingly enough when we did this we never got hot dropped...


In a nutshell I like it as it is, cloaky campers can drop a ton on you, but you have to manage that risk, my own experience has been that if you keep operating regardless of them being there in cheaper ships and just have fun they soon go off and pester the more weak willed. I really do not think removing instant local when you have instant cyno ability works, but I liked your idea with the cyno taking longer for bigger ships.

In terms of the WH's, I had some idiot suggest to me in another of these threads that WH's was a test for removing local, so it had proved to have worked so now they could apply it to null, so I pointed out that the test was incomplete in that they needed to add cyno ability, at which point a VOC player gave me a mouthful of abuse. And then said what I had effectively said!

The ability collapse wormholes until you get one to enable you to attack someone means that a fleet could be dropped on you at any time, but the attentive player is out there scanning for a new hole. He will have a scout next door ASAP, it is not the same as having to keep tabs on every system around you which is in bridging range and of course you get a warning as they warp to the WH and jump through. Moving into position will give you away, unless they have moved to the WH as soon as they found it and cloaked up, which I guess is what the better WH groups do. As I said better skilled players working hard for their advantage.

So as such, I think the idea of a 10 to 20 second delay makes it too easy, I suggested that local only show when people actually arrive in system, which would be better, but any more than that makes it not worth while. It gets to the point where you will not use a carrier as the risk is too great, so you might as well do incursions in HS, and then someone will be calling for them to be nerfed again... The cricle of gaining advantage for you own point of view, but for me, the fun is using my own abilities not to get caught and I can tell you that attentively watching local after a couple of hours of carrier ratting is damn hard.

Very wrong... I stay out of Null because whenever you look for some small scale pvp the opposition drops a cap fleet on your ass.. even if you in a drake... and off course all the politics that comes with belong to a sov holding alliances.. ie.. you can't rat there..thats for me cause I am the alliance leader.. you can't harvest that moon but you better damn well protect it in a ship I dictate how you will fit and if you lucky we compensate you for your loss...

ya, but that'd involve effort and competence .... much easier to forum-whine for CCP to 'fix'.

Anyways a jammer only keeps a subset of hotdroppers off ya case … altho a lot of people still learn that fact the hard way. It takes a little more effort (reduced range atm, more restrictive fleet comp, and more demanding fuel/logistics support) to hotdrop into a cyno-jammed system, but the name of that module can be quite misleading in the end. Cyno jammers jam ‘vanilla’ cynos, but not covert cynos.