EVE General Discussion

On the con side, you have me.


Opening statement:
Good game design is based on the rock-paper-scissors paradigm. That is, for every offense, there is an effective defense, and for every defense, an offense.

For sub capital fleets, I think EVE generally does a good job of this. If you are in frigs, the enemy may ship up to cruisers. Then you ship up to BC. Then they ship up to battleships, then you downship to stealth bombers. They switch to frigates to counter your SB, so you go to cruisers..... Around it goes.

EVE breaks this offense to a defense and defense to an offense in a couple places. One is capitals. This seems to be somewhat intentional as capitals are seen as the main attack/defense fleet for sov warfare, and they seem to think that who has the most big ships should hold sov. I do not necessarily disagree, though I would not mind a flying bomb, suicide type ship that could crash into a capital for massive damage.... but I go off track.

The other place in EVE where the effective defense to every offense breaks down, is the cloaky camper. If you want to shut down an enemy's industrial base, all you need is a cloaky black ops fleet and a bunch of cloaky campers with cynos. There is no effective defense to this offense.

They can log in, go AFK, and shut you down 24 hours a day, even when they are AFK.

You can't scan down cyno ship. You can't go after the cloaked up attack fleet. You can't secure your area well enough to keep them from getting in, in the first place. You can't jam the cyno. You can't have a counter strike fleet sitting around active for 24 hours a day just in case the black ops fleet attacks.

The most commonly suggested counter is to find the cloaky people's home, and counter cloaky camp them in. This works against enemies that have established "homes" (contributing to the "blue donut"), but no so great when they make their ISK from unknown out of corp alts. Heck, more than once I've seen a region camped in by a couple dozen NPC corp pilots.

In reality, only effective counter is to do what I've done. Detach yourself from null sec corps and return to high sec.

Is that really what we want? A couple dozen toons in cloaky ships shut down entire regions, resulting in a huge % of the industrial population living in high sec?


Anyone want to take the "pro" current mechanic side of the debate?

if they're afk it's not an issue.
couldn't you think of something original to cry about today?

also for using "blue doughnut" i feel you've invoked some type of godwin's law that immediately makes you wrong since there's no such thing. it's a ******** fantasy propagated by idiots.

…or, more accurately, they can log in, go AFK, and you choose to shut down 24 hours a day — something that the cloaker has no control over.

AFK cloakers are 100% harmless, and as long as local works the way it does, they must remain in the game as the only tool to disrupt local's intel potential.

Yes, I see what you're saying but you have the tools necessary to deal with these tactics if you're in an organized group.

AGAIN?

Look! Another "nerf afk cloakers" thread in GD instead of F&I

dscan, probes. really not difficult to figure out if some one is trying to probe you down in your grav site.

define cry: your posting history. it's a salty waterfall.

Then like everyone else you didnt read them..or even glance at them. Most are whine threads that were moved to F&I, the others were whine threads disguised as proposals.

Either way, the merits/demerits have been discussed at exhaustable length, and another discussion is simply not warranted.

If you can show me a kill mail were somebody who was afk killed another pilot then fair enough otherwise stop crying and go and play a different game

Then you roll out the bait, spring the trap and take them out. Why wait around for them to decide to do something? Give them a reason to show up and your countering fleet won't have to wait. You will, in effect, be taking them on at a time and situation of your choosing.

We're talking fairly basic tactics here. How is this escaping you or your leadership?

If your response to this is "weelll wuh wuh we can't raise a fleet to counter them" then congratulations, you're out in 0.0 with insufficient support.