Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It still sucks unless you are going also do something to nerf local.

You just want to have nearly risk free PVE in null. So no. If you come up with something more balanced, that would be more interesting than rehashing this half-assed idea.

The IFF beacon is one of ideas I support myself - as someone who often is the one people on the pig are waiting for (and there's hardly a worse thing to say to them than "Target docked" or a variation of it...). Local as an intel channel earned by the sov holders.

There isn't really a good way to nerf the cloaking device. Hell:

- Bombers are flimsy and can easily die to drones. And those are the usual culprits that can suddenly decloak on you, lock you immediately and shell away. That's the cost of their firepower and cloak.

- Covops... the only thing that can do is light a cyno and they suffer from the same flimsiness bombers do. Hell, I remember some people trying to drop us on a beacon tower once - a single POS gun volley took 70% of its total hitpoints out and I finished the guy with a torpedo before anything came through the cyno. There are cases of ratting boats killing stationary covops frigs as they're about to light the fire or chasing the target to point it.

That eliminates the "3 days (which is unreal anyway) old altchar" bit. Those are baseline cloakies you can use to catch people.

- Recons are a bit more meaty and designed to catch someone. They also aren't that disposable anymore and take time to train - we're talking at least a month for appropriate Cruiser 5, another month for Cyno 5. Plus, of course, related support - Recon IV is minimal (5 best) + support skills and an actual pilot skill. Likely he needs to be good and quick with directional scanner. Ballpark 200 million ISK for one, so not that disposable (though they can pay for themselves with a single blingy catch, yes.) and you actually need to get one in place safely. Bubbles, gatecamps - those are cruisers after all, not the fastest thing out there. Oh, one thing: a Recon needs to wait 5-6 seconds before locking you after it decloaks ;)

- T3s The closest to "getting safe" is a Cloaky/Null T3. It does let you bypass some gatecamps (but I wouldn't really fancy my luck against re-sebo'd interceptors. That's a bit of a 50-50). It has a downside though: Cloak/Nullifier T3s are a shade of usual T3 tank and firepower, and you need really good skills to make up for it. After Odyssey hits, it may get even worse with resist nerfs. It also costs over half a billion to throw one at someone and if you happen to lose one you will lose a skill.

Furthermore T3s don't get reduction on Cyno cycle time - if you want to covert cyno drop someone using a T3, count on being stuck in place for 60s as your awesome sig tank counts for nothing and you stare down the barrels of a Vindicator.

What you also need to remember is that rats now target whoever uses electronic warfare nearby. Stasis Webifiers (Rapier), Warp Scramblers (Arazu), Tracking Disruptors (Pilgrim), Electronic Countermeasures (Falcon) all count as that (and all point the target, of course) - causing rats to aggress the cloaky. Furthermore if you're ratting in a Deadspace plex, one cannot light a cyno within it - making you effectively un-droppable. To add insult to injury, if someone in a T3 goes solo after you - not only the acceleration gate will decloak them, showing them on directional scan. The landing beacon will do it too, and likely on grid with you some 60km off.

I will also skip the part where the black ops attacker isn't usually alone - a hotdrop isn't just him, it's an entire gang of bombers (and possibly recons) and a Black Ops battleship. The latter takes as long to train as a carrier and pretty much costs as much as a carrier hull - and is a rather fragile battleship. So - a hunt for you and your blingy boat is an effort of many, not just one.

AFK Cloaking also has its major downside of being extremely boring. You're sitting in one place, doing nothing. You could be making ISK on that character. You could be roaming solo and brawling some people. You could be in a gang - but no. You're camping a system, hoping the guys in a station undock and do something stupid. A few drops later you likely get watchlisted and nobody rats/fights with you in local (maybe in a mission while being on the ball with dscan up in case you launch probes) except for a cocky triple-plated Kronos that thought he can tank it and redock. (Spoiler: he couldn't.)

As for the "fake threat" if you know a threat is fake - it's a T1 frig with protocloak... you're letting yourself being pushed around and CCP isn't going to fix it for you. If you're falling for a "device of terror" that petty so easily, you'll probably have hard time realizing that any second your towers can be sieged by a hostile dreadlfeet you can't counter (and if you escalate to caps yourself, they coutnerdrop with supers).

CCP isn't going to help the weak - the T1 non-covert protocloak probe will chase them out of the system and an industrialist with some friends will move in. His friend will have knowledge of the fact that protocloak ships can't warp cloaked, have scanres penalties and a long recalibration delay. He'll bring a T1 rifter to the op and when the dreaded T1 cloaky shows up - he'll give him an express ride home.

I'll try to make this a very short one, but for the very very very impatient ones, tl dr : cloaking devices should use fuel: strontiun clathrates.

What if cloaking devices will use strontium clathrates?

Well, for starters why stront? Because stront is cheap but it has big volume, it costs almost nothing but you can't carry tons of it with you. YESSS, you got the idea already, you can't AFK cloaky camp for three weeks anymore.

We'll have here probably about 3 different opinions:
First would be the scout, the cloaky one. He will tell you that his job would be impossible in such a case or badly handicapped. I would answer that a careful calibration of stront needs compared with cargo size could lead to an acceptable consumption. For example, one unit of stront for every 10 minutes of cloak or for a single activation (gate-to-gate travel) , with an average of 300m3 of cargo would grant a cloaker 100 jumps without refuelling or 16 hours of cloaky camping. If your roam lasts longer than that, then you're doing something wrong I would say :)
Second would be the carebear who might or might not hail such a decision. It all depends whether he has cloaky eyes next system or not. If he does, his ratting odyssey would become more dangerous (in case he has no place to refuel his cloaky eyes), but if he doesn't use to use cloaky eyes, then he will surely say “amen , no more cloaky faggotry in my ratting system”. No, don't take me wrong, I ain't the carebear, actually I am the cloaky camper, but I find it too easy.
And of course, third comes the cloaky camper who will just see his dreams ruined, his absolute pleasure in annoying carebears by his simple presence becomes a logistic nightmare.
Whether cloaky afk could be actually considered botting or not is a debate, but gaining advantages while not actively participating to the game process might be an offend.
Cloaky travel will become more challanging but not to a pain-related degree, just a bit of planning needed. Same goes for cloaky scouting or “next door eye”. Cloaky camping for longer periods of time would still be possible, but it would definitely require much more interaction and planning.

Your thoughts?

I'd say:

IFF/Communications network Broadcaster - outpost upgrade. Estabilishes constellation-wide Local channel, and in the system - falls only when the outpost itself falls. It would possibly be common to locate it in the "capital" staging point of the alliance as well as per-constellation outpost. Just to increase their actual usefulness. Big cost to discourage onlining it in every single outpost system, perhaps? Let's be honest - I just shoot people, my knowledge of alliance management is bad.

Communications broadcast relay - anchorable structure. Anchored to extend the nearby local network from the nearest system. If bashed enough or hacked by hostile entity, it'll go offline (and likely cut off broadcasters down the line.)

Balancing this would be iffy. "Small gang should be able to knock one out" - small gangs nowadays can swing by with shield blaster taloses that move fast and are well capable of killing a structure before a backup arrives. Making it beefy enough to survive such assault would render it immune to things such as assault frigate gangs - perhaps PvE modules, such as Codebreakers would find a use here? Temporarily hijacking the channel for instance. Or, perhaps, it would be a POS module - outside of the shield, like the cynosural field generator.

Still, alliance logistics pilots already have it bad with POSes and usual sov hassle. Dumping even more on them (beacon maintenance) could be something simply horrible.

Yes, cloaking up in someone's system is relatively easy to accomplish - doing damage is harder, but the morale impact is still there. Perhaps a beacon should periodically decloak the camper - but it'd have its price.

Knowing how risk-averse we all are, we'd huddle up in beacon systems and wait out the camper. We have local intel already. He can't disrupt it alone - and if he has to maintain the hassle of checking his cloak, he'll leave earlier. Same with the strontium idea - if you know the cloaky bides his time in some way, you just dock, log off for 3-4 hours and come back. Chances are he's not there anymore.

What they get in return is nothing. AFK cloaking works on a very simple principle: people in system get complacent and cease to consider the cloaked ship a threat. Then he turns out not to be AFK. Why does he do that? Because in the current metagame, PvE ships are very vulnerable to dedicated PvP ships - in addition to that people are afraid to lose them, since they cost billions, and the ease of not losing one (LOOK AT LOCAL. DOCK.) will make the entire alliance laugh at you if you get nabbed. Hell - be blingy enough and you'll end up on ALOD column at tmc and have your very own pile of "X alliance is full of botters and idiots" "lol nice rmt" comments.

Since you can't pick a fight with the station, you now need to count on them undocking. Since they know what you're in and it's their home turf, you'll likely face a counter to what you're using. And what you're facing will likely be a disposable, T2-fitted pvp ship - unless you're facing a rare guy with enough balls to use blues'n'greens. And if they're in an alliance, there's a word we hear all the time: blob. You're about to face it. Not because you're sooo eliiite they need 10 pilots to kill you - because you're in the wrong 'hood and everyone wants a piece of that killmail.

In short: AFK cloaking is an awful, horrible, lazy and cheap mechanic that is a response to flawed metagame and certain issues with null income/pve. It's a symptom of a disease, not a cause. To make any steps towards "fixing" it in any way shape or form, we need to take a look at the underlying issues - PvE forcing specific fittings that make ships extremely vulnerable to PvP and largely imbalanced risk vs. reward ratio.

If you fit your ship for a mix of pvp and pve, your income ratio will go down but your risk won't really decrease that much - you might be able to fight off a lone attacker, but not a gang. And there comes a point where you end up realizing that you'd for instance make more money grinding L4's in hisec for a fraction of the risk.

up to the first page you go....

I'd like to suggest making it so that Cynosural modules and Cloaking modules cannot be both fitted on a ship. That is if you are a cyno ship that has friends waiting for you, then you cannot cloak. And if you are a wolf-pack of cloaked ships, then cloak away without the ability to hot drop. I think that the covert and regular cyno hotdrops are what make afk cloaking annoying.

If a system has one or two cloaked campers then people can still function while remaining vigilant. If there is a large number of cloaked afk campers then the attacker is tying up significant resources to impede activity in the system. Similarly speaking, this would prevent a cyno ship from holding a system hostage while afk cloaked for hours on end.

In terms of implementation, the covert cyno and cyno module could have a penalty to the CPU requirements of a cloaking device, and vice versa.

You cannot kill these threads, every. I wish we could, but after, what, 6-7 years they keep on going strong with one sided "fixes" and totally balance breaking "fixes", sometimes both which shows the poster is really playing the wrong game.

Nobody has ever been harmed by another player who is genuinely AFK.

And a cloaker does not shut down a system. The residents shut themselves down.

Bullshit. It shuts down the system because there is no way to know when the person is active or how many people they have ready to cyno in.

I know that forces of elite pvp love it but let's be honest. It's bullshit mechanic. You are impacting other players while not playing the game.

So afk cloaking is a problem. Question is just how to fix it. If you want to shut down systems then you will have to actually play the game.

So break a part of the game so you can do what? Rat endlessly with little fear of getting caught? Why don't you just petition for more isk in your wallet while you are at it.

AFK is not powerful...it is only powerful because you can't deal with it. Which is surprising as a Goon is one of the last people I'd expect to be whining about this.