Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So when you get your wish and afk cloaking becomes impossible and everyone swaps to MWD fitted 'ceptors, what will you ask to be nerfed then?

how about this, you go fly around in a cloaker for a few months doing what you describe everyone says cloakers can do, then come back to us, cause honestly from the sound of things you have no experience in cloakers.

What does an AFK cloaky camper get?

Isk? No.

Killmails? No.

Tears? Well only if he goes back and reads his logs.

The very premise of the OP simply does not exist. There are minimal rewards for AFK cloaky camping.

If you have evidence of an AFK player lighting a cyno I think you need to file a bug report and not make mother $%!@ing stupid #$%! sucking posts on the forums you $%(!.

I think you've misquoted me there. I never said "risky", I said that it was possible to catch cloaky ships and that I've been doing a fair bit of it recently, ie that it is not "virtually risk-less" as you have described it.



That sure helps, but you're still not immune to a vaguely competent pilot trying to catch you, let alone a competent gang with interceptors waiting to decloak you on the other side of the gate once you have been reported in an intel channel traveling in a particular direction (ie ships and pods killed in the last hour won't show you anything useful).



Funny how you should mention the difficulty of getting a large number of pvpers to wait on a titan. Isn't that exactly what the cloaky camper has to do too? If you can herd cats well enough to get a bunch of ADHD gamers to wait around for a hotdrop, then you deserve to catch people that are ratting alone and unprepared with cloaky campers in system.

No you won't. By the time you probe me out and warp to my location I'll be a long way away, heading into a random direction with no celestials, so I'm not sure how you'll 'warp to 100' to try and catch me.

What you'll actually spend all day doing is chasing my 'ceptor, so still not ratting, mining or making any isk, still, it's probably more interesting than cowering in a station because of an AFK cloaky

Let's say you afk an mwd 'ceptor away from ALL celestials .. I scan once and warp, but you are off grid before I get there. I scan again and align. Now I have an intercept vector. I know exactly which direction to go to get you. My scan ship and my 'ceptor warp from scan #1 to scan #2 while I scan again. The second scan #3 finishes, I warp the 'ceptor to it with fleet warp. Now it is all about speed. If my ceptor is close to the target's speed, he continues the chase while I complete the last couple of steps (left as an exercise for the reader) to ensure a catch it. Can't reveal all the secrets and I am sure that you all have enough brains to figure out the rest.



A vaguely competent cloaky pilot can tell when intel becomes interested in him and can avoid most traps. He looks for ships in system, sovereignty, ships sitting on gate perches, ships not on dscan (cloaky intel ships), etc. and he is willing to avoid systems instead of waiting for hours to see a gate camp disband. Remember, if you can't see how cloakies can travel with near zero risk and esp. camp a system with zero risk, just remember that a few tips and youtube videos do a lot of good.


AND on the issue of how people can wait on Titans and blops to hotdrop, the key difference is that on the offensive side, the targets are usually uncloaked, ready for hotdrop, and high-value because they have been selected by the afk (or not) cloaker, while on the defensive side the targets are cloaked, not ready/available for hotdrop, and low value (SB is 30 mil). So the pvpers on the offense have many high value targets available to choose from, while the defense has none available, and most of the targets are low value. Can you bait a carrier or faction BS to "draw out" the aggressors? OFC, and in null sec the carrier implies a dread and/or super/titan response which the defenders have to wait for an indeterminant amount of time for the potentially immense level of force to form against the bait. Every operation on the defender's side is required to be a bait operation with multiple escalation options continually available. All because a cloaky cyno ship sits in a system risk-free and invulnerable; one in each sov system of interest.

That's what afk (or not) cloaky campers get, Datarunner: the knowledge that they are projecting up to an infinite amount of firepower into the system that they are camping without any risk to themselves. You would think that sovereignty would give more defenses against cloaky cyno ships and their cyno fleets.

Added: I use the term "afk cloaker" to indicate that the projection of unknowable (spies cannot always be trusted and the log-off trick can hide numbers and equipment) levels of force can be maintained with zero effort/interaction from the covert cyno ship for 23/7. It only takes a step to the keyboard for the afk cloaker to become an active cloaker and the defending forces have no way of knowing when the threat becomes active. So I say afk to emphasize how zero effort is required to project the threat of potentially immense force, even though the actual projection of the force does require the mere scan, warp, decloak, point, and cyno lighting. These five very easy steps do not bring risk, until the decloak, but the mission is a success as long as the covert cloaky is able to keep the cyno and point up long enough for his friends to come through and gain a point as well; if his cheap SB lives through it, all the better. Obviously projecting the ability to complete the mission without actually exercising that ability is even better because the threat of the force projection affects everyone continuously, while the actual projection only affects the target and only lasts only while the cloaky cyno ship lives. The reward that people have a hard time grasping here appears to be the effect of the threat of an unknowable level of force projected through a ship immune to any counter while cloaked.

Greetings Andy Landen!

It is coming to the point where you sound like you are advocating to permit competition against cloaked vessels.

If this is the case, I believe you will find acceptance under one condition: balance is maintained.

You have described being cloaked as an absolute in effect, with no risk costing no effort. I would not say this myself, but for the sake of my point here I will let this pass.

There exists a stalemate, present whenever PvE pilots use Local Chat as an early warning system. They can always get away, presuming proper preparation on their part. The cloaked vessels in turn are able to maintain their presence as well.
Regardless of our opinions, the devs silence on this issue has effectively stamped it as being acceptable, and therefore balanced in their view.

As with any exchange, it is necessary for both sides to give up something in order to remain balanced.
In exchange for the ability to hunt or otherwise counter cloaked vessels, the intel which requires no effort granted by local needs to be limited.

I would suggest cloaked vessels fully become disconnected from local, to the point where they cannot see the pilot's list and they are not listed in it either.
In exchange, I would put forth a mirror image of the cloaking system as the means to detect and thereby hunt it. By setting the skills and requirements equally on both sides of this, it should balance.

For the love of God...

What you are asking for is to be left virtually completely safe to exploit null sec resources. The only way to stop you is if you screw up majorly.

Regarding #1 the cyno mask:

Your cyno mask makes any kind of hot dropping all that much more diffuclt. In fact, it could be used to counter-hot drop people. Get some good intel from a spy and you set up a juice target, when the hostiles cyno into system you counter drop them. So why even do it, especially BLOPS?

So the cyno mask is wildly unbalanced. No. From a sov stand point it is utter fail. Sov warfare as it currently stands is a PITA, your cyno mask would make it more of PITA.

What is the point of even having a covert cyno in the game anymore then? Please, try to answer this seriously.

Regarding #2:

Congratulations you just ruined stealth bombers, force recons, and covert ops for one of their primary duties...BLOPs. Now you decloak and have to wait a freaking minute before you can try and point the guy dumb enough to rat in a bling ship in a system with a hostile present.

Regarding #3:

Okay, so the Arazu that can fit a covert ops cloak, get into a system past a the gate camp, light a cyno so that the fleet can be bridged in and a great big fun fight can start is no totally completely ****ing useless. Now he jumps in, he has no speed to get away from the camp, he can be probed, and if there is a bubble, which there almost surely will be, he is pretty much dead.

Are you serious? You want to turn null sec into goddamned candy land.

Regarding #4

You really are a giant wuss aren't you. You want to be able to see the cloaked ship in local, but they can't see you? Have I got that right? You want to take local and put it on steroids in terms of an intel tool while completely nerfing it to oblivion for the cloaked pilot.



Are you drunk or on drugs or something? These will do nothing of the sort. They will reduce PVP because now cloak ships, one of the main ways to get fleets into a system for the big fights, wont be worth ****. Every gate camp/fleet will now have a number of cloaked ships (as per #5) to kill the cyno ship. If we go with #3, then the cloaked ship will have a Hell of a time getting into position before it is scanned down and killed. #4 renders cloaked ships useless for gathering intel during the big ops. An FC will often put cloaked ships in various systems to watch what the hostiles are doing. The hostiles will try to get cloaked ships into wherever their enemies are to get intel, but with #4 that is no longer possible since the ship will have to do things like decloak to get crucial information. These scouts, especially the ones in surrounding systems are often alts, and the notion that they have to periodically decloak makes that kind of work all that much harder. #2 would make many fights more difficult. For example, in one fight group A might be shooting a POS, and group B wants to drop on them, but now with the 1 minute timer any cyno ship that decloaks runs the risk of being scanned down and killed before they can light the cyno. And they sure as hell wont light the cyno near the hostile fleet.

All of your suggestions would make the big fights many of us log in for more difficult...i.e. fewer. That is a bad thing considering how tough sov warfare already is.

Stop thinking just about yourself and what would make the game awesome for you (apparently ratting away in near perfect safety) when making these posts. Cause you know why, here is the extreme version of your childish mindset:

I want a button that whenever I push it Andy Landen blows up wherever he is in New Eden. That would be really, really cool. For me. It would suck for you, cause I don't think I'd ever get tired of pushing that button (and I'd even be quite happy forgoing the kill mails).

Oh and BTW, in terms of the benefits that would accrue to each of us regarding one of your suggestions: I'd get way, way more benefit than you. Why? Malcanis' law

Another problem with Andy Landen's suggestions is that the majorly gimp active/non-AFK cloak ships too. If a guy is out hunting for a BLOPs gang and lurks up on a guy who isn't watching local like he should be Andy's "suggestions" would make catching him that much damned hard for most of them.

As such, these suggestions all need to be rejected out of hand. They are all horrible.

Added via edit:

Oh, and Black Ops battleships are would be seriously weakened under Andy's suggestion #2. The pig decloaks to bridge everyone home, but has to wait an entire minute...a minute where a defense fleet could get into system and scan down the pig and shot it down. I suppose the pig could warp around for a minute or two before landing at a safe, letting everyone else warp to him, then opening the bridge letting everyone jump through and then jump through himself...yeah I don't see how that could possibly go wrong.....

Sorry Andy, these ideas are simply ****. Pure unadulterated fecal matter.