Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Ok standard reply

If afk cloakers bother you then just close local, then you can't see them and they cant bother you

Moving this from General Discussion to Features and Ideas.

Interesting correlation regarding AFK cloaking: CCP have resolutely ignored thousands of calls for changes to cloaking mechanics over many years (maybe they considered the benefits/drawbacks during the first few dozen calls), now EVE Online has grown to over half a million subscriptions.

I guess they must be doing something right.

I am highly amused by the suggestion that cloaking has no counter.

Every bottleneck gate a cloaked ship passes through forces it to be in a known quantity of space. Blame yourself if you cannot manage to make the effort needed to stop them.

As to afk cloaking, no counter? It is an absurd blind spot to make that claim, because it IS the counter... the counter to the absolute intel provided freely to everyone by local's Amazing Intel™.

Cloaking is already exposed by local. As local is an absolute factor, so is cloaking's concealment.

Exchange local for a less absolute manner of exposing cloaking. Something that requires player effort, and has no guarantee of success.
CCP will balance cloaking to match that, then.

Remember, it takes an absolute to balance another absolute, and balance is needed for gameplay.

Even though this is a troll/ironic comment, I'll bite: I doubt any new subscribers join the game because they know they'll be safe in the confines of Concord. They do so to play Internet spaceships. I honestly believe that the fear of dying is instilled in them mostly by bittervets ("if you'll enter null, you'll instantly die") and high sec bears ("we make most money here").

However, unlike what goon voice or James 315 are suggesting, I also honestly believe that the answer is not in outright nerf of high sec "to the ground". Why? Because that only tackles the second half of the message, but not the "instant death" part. James would say: "let them leave, EVE will be better without them". I don't think so. I think what he's missing is that we don't need to tackle the people - we need to tackle their beliefs. We need to give them a carrot for trying to live in low/null/WH, a way to attract them rather than trying to push them into it. However, James, although taking a somewhat extreme stance on the matter, is also sort of right - a rebalancing of high sec must be done in order to make null/low/WH more attractive, while at the same time avoiding dangerous power creep. For instance, I really, really, REALLY loved this article about Low Sec as an example of what should have been done.

So on the one hand, I agree with James' basic message, but on the other, I'm also hearing what for instance Ripard Teg is saying. I'm honestly hoping that both sides will be represented in the next CSM, as this conflict can spark a ton of very interesting compromises that we can all benefit from.

Back to original topic: I'm not against afk cloaking, as long as it doesn't use out-of-game software support (read: cyno bot). Null is too safe as it is, afk-cloaking introduces some risk again. The only thing I have trouble with is the relative safety of the afk cloaker, but then that's the selling point of the covert cloaks in the first place.

oh my god

hahahahaha

If you want to carebear in peace go to high sec

FFS who let all these crying carebears on the forums these days....

Carebear. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

A carebear is somebody who goes out of their way to avoid PvP interactions. Miners in nullsec aren't necessarily carebears, in fact I know plenty who are very active PvPers, particularly in capital warfare (funnily enough their playstyle enables them to PvP in the big ships).

I used to be in a heavily industrial corp (hi guys) and had a great time when our systems got camped by a couple of dudes in stealth bombers. We all just packed up our stuff and headed over to their systems and filled them up with cloaky ships (multiboxing miners have a lot of alts), ganking anybody who dared undock and making sure they knew why we were there. Apparently their CEO got angry at the guys who came to AFK in our systems so they left under orders.

Long story short, miner != carebear, so I don't give a damn if carebears don't build any more ships because there are plenty of players who appreciate that this is a PvP game who make their income building ships.

Told you all



It's the same as when pvp players think that they can actuly do something else than measure who has the biggest ship or most systems.

If they want to avoid all PvP at all costs, then EVE may not be the game for them, even in highsec. If you undock your ship it can be targeted and shot by other players. The only difference is that if somebody does that in highsec, they're guaranteed to get their ship blown up. If your highsec mission running ship is a loot pinata, it's well worth people's time and effort to blow it up, not to mention that other, often forgotten, resource that people spend ISK on getting: fun and entertainment.

This concept that some people are PvPers and some aren't is somewhat silly in EVE, because it is fundamentally a PvP game. That may not always come in the form of PvP ship based combat, but pretty much anything you do involves dealing with other players in some way.