Player Features and Ideas Discussion

They wouldn't be able to hack it in Highsec.

Highsec is a lot riskier than nullsec for someone who is used to docking up when a non-blue is on local.

In highsec, there are lots of unfamiliar neutrals on local, all the time, and there's no way of knowing which ones are suddenly going to appear on top of you in a Catalyst and gank you.

this is the main annoyance I have with people who want to push the risk-averse out of highsec while assuming that nullsec is just fine.

Why not make the game more challenging and remove local rather than giving you even more easy mode of knowing when someone is in your system.

Residents of nullsec make their space safer over time through working together & putting in effort. Highsec residents don't have to do any of this, yet that space is better at pretty much everything.

I read the thread title. Despite it being an obvious attempt to cloak an anti-AFK-cloaking themed posting I read-on.

Then I came across …

… which, like someone starting a sentence with “Honestly …”, is a construct designed to mean the dead opposite of what is actually written or said.

Still I read on. More fool me …

Same ol’, same ol’.

The only things that a cloaked ship can do in eve are move within a system, watch, ‘talk’, and uncloak … and in my case they can also crash unexpectedly, all too frequently, due to the great ISP conspiracy. An AFK ship cannot do any of these things, except the ‘crash unexpectedly’ option.

There are already many legitimate ingame counters and responses to cloaky camping. Mind you most involve effort and competence and so may be out of reach of some players.

I regularly cloaky-camp target systems and it’s gratifying to see how the competent players (please don’t tell our enemies I said that about them) respond: They move their carebear efforts to another system, even if it’s only one jump away, out of my direct observation; They escort their haulers and use deep space transports for out-of-POS efforts; They virtually stop cynoing ships into non-outpost systems or guard their cynos and deploy webbers to quickly get the heavy into the POS (or use station-cyno spots if there’s an outpost in system); They taunt me and set traps for me. Others move their staging titans or BLOPS to different systems, or deploy first to intermediate locations, to get their fleet activities out from under the watchful eyes of cloaky campers (scouts I think they’re called).
Those that do not do these things tend to lose expensive ships, sometimes hordes of expensive ships.

Similarly our home systems and busy systems are also cloaky camped by hostiles, pretty well 24/7. The same caveats apply to us. If we do not exercise due diligence we lose our toys. This happens from time to time, and our senior folk give people a bit of a rev-up and they’re more careful … for a while. Laziness and repeatedly doing the same thing are the main sources of losses to cloaky campery. Some will argue that ratting in a shiney ship with a hostile or neutral in system is sheer stupidity rather than laziness … that is a semantic issue I do not need to explore.

Cloaky camping requires the expenditure of resources. It means an eve client needs to be running for all of that time. In my case that reduces my ability to do other things in eve. So I am only going to bother cloaky camping if I am ‘rewarded’ somehow. By completely denying me any rewards you will be causing me to cry, and to either stop that camping campaign or move my camper somewhere else.

So IMO:
- Cloaking is legit, reasonable, and entirely appropriate in its current form.
- Cloaky camping is fine and relatively easily countered by care and competence.
- Local is fine in nullsec and there are a huge bundle of systems without local already available for those who wish to eschew that service.

If Local no longer hands out free intel about cloaked vessels, the balance may allow for a means to hunt cloaked ships.

In that case, I recommend this method, which uses 1 module to take currently existing mechanics and hunt with.

And if the duplication of cloaking is not the ideal balance for it, I cannot imagine a better one.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2668453#post2668453

I don't really need to since you have fooled yourself.

My intent is very straight forward: avoid nerfing a mechanic I enjoy flying, Cover Ops, while adding something new to the game: the ability to probe out the approximate location of a stealthed ship. It is not a click "I win against stealth". It does not nerf stealth by adding timers or fuel or other non-sense. This simply provides a counter to stealth.

I am perfectly happy if things remain as they are since it benefits my play style.

Check my kill (loss) boards. I've flown and lost them before (mostly when being half-asleep or on a bad connection or worse: lazy). If you stop making assumptions...

There are lots of things in EVE I do for giggles. I fly Covert Ops for "business" reasons as well as harassment.

Edit to add:
By the by, lets say CCP were interested in doing something about cloaking and by interested I mean intent on actually doing it. What would you rather see? Something that required you to fuel your cloaking, click a timer button, POS scan/ping/cover JAM, or something that required the people who were actually interested in finding you work at it?

I like cloaking as it is and my proposal revolves around the concern that if CCP does something it not end up being a nerf but a reasonable counter.

So... is this a reasonable counter should CCP attempt to change cloaking?