Player Features and Ideas Discussion

How come your suggestions are all massive horrible nerfs to cloaks without any balance in the other direction

it's almost as if you simply want "I WIN" buttons

Push button, get bacon!!! Great idea to fix something which isn't broken!!

Balanced how?

Balanced if you ignore the fact that they represent the only real threat to PvE or other risk averse assets in system?

Before you declare your idea to be balanced, you need to consider that cloaking is already balanced currently.
Is it convenient when you want to mine / rat / run missions? Not necessarily, but that has no connection to balance.

So, let's look at your proposal again:
You are creating an EMP blast probe, presumably to decloak ships too close to it.
This idea, standing alone as you have it, is an obvious shift in balance towards favoring the PvE assets.

The same assets, (in case you were unaware), that can use local as a warning so they can hit warp and get safe every time.
All they need to do is stay aligned, which is not difficult.
That point being established, your idea is only useful to flush out the cloaked vessels, since you can remove all others at your leisure already, never having risked anything but dedicated PvP ships, and hardly that since it is typical to use overwhelming force.

Where is the balance?

When do the cloaked vessels get something in exchange for this newly found vulnerability?

You're so right. The problem is these people that consider cloaks overpowered don't want to use their brains. They don't want to come up with a solution in the game. They want CCP to create a solution for them even though many solutions already exist.

The best solution to no problem is nothing.

A module that would turn other people's ships into giant pink space elephants would be cool. That doesn't make it balanced, fair or sensible though. A bit like an anti-cloak bomb.

Please create a thread for this, I want to +1 it!

It could be a new ORE class of freighter or something, having better bonuses in exchange for only being able to move ore hold items....

That's just a very arbitrary definition that you made up yourself. Your idea aims to make cloaked pilots more vulnerable therefore it IS defacto a nerf to cloaking. That you don't want to consider it as such for your arguments sake is a blatant and intentional fallacy.

It would have to be a full second (probably closer to two) because that's how often EVE's servers tick.

Ok, fine. I should clarify, as I was trying to follow the K.I.S.S. method and left out some detail that I thought was implied.

Currently cloaky camping/AFK camping is thee single most unbalanced form of game play in null sec because they can move freely throughout a system for weeks without any danger to themself and MOST IMPORTANTLY (and my only reason for writing this in the first place) they can light a cyno or covert cyno and drop 1 to 255 people on you at anytime.

At this point it means your only defense is to 1) not do anything in your own system, 2) bubble the gates to hell and camp them 23/7 to make sure no one gets in, or 3) bait them and have a full fleet of 256 people sitting on a titan to be bridged in, so you can wipe the floor with the group that has been camping the system in hopes they will never do it again.

Important note: Cloaking in and of itself is currently fine. But in the above situation, it puts the cloaker in a situation where they are perfectly safe and can choose when it is safest for them to drop on a target (whether they wait minutes or weeks) and eve is not suppose to be safe.

Ok, now you asked, "When do the cloaked vessels get something in exchange for this newly found vulnerability?" to which I can point you to this quote, "[the probes] warp to the destination then have a short time delay (so active cloakers can see them on d-scan and gtfo) and then emit their EMP." Remember, I am specifically addressing AFK cloaky camping and thus active cloakers can bypass my proposed method very easily. Also note, I did not include numbers such as AU radius or the exact time delay because that it CCP's job to decide what works best.

A question for you, Nikk Narrel:
You said, "This idea, standing alone as you have it, is an obvious shift in balance towards favoring the PvE assets." what do you mean by "shift in balance towards favoring PVE assets"?

Suzuka,

My point is that you are, well, incorrect in your estimation of cloaked ships with an AFK pilot. Why? Because nobody in this game has ever died to an AFK player, let alone a cloaked ship. Now, you could argue that I'm being picky on that last one since for a cloak ship to pose any kind of real threat he will have to decloak at which point he is vulnerable. But still the point stands.

A cloaked ship is harmless. What it does represent is a potential threat. But that is not enough to nerf something in the game. If you look back over various nerfs you'll see that they were nerfed because of two factors:

1. They represented a very real threat to other players that were very hard to counter (e.g. nano hac gangs, tracking titans, even supers).
2. They created massive imbalance between groups in game regarding acquiring resources. (e.g. technetium, T2 BPOs).

A cloak is only a potential threat and it is in no way helping the player who engages in it acquire assets.

Further, a cloaked ship is only a minimal potential thread to the vast majority of PVE pilots*. Staying aligned and watching local greatly minimizes the risk. Once you safe up (and activate a cloak--how ironic), warping to POS or to an insta-dock for a station the PVE pilot is totally safe. Thanks to intel channels, others in nearby systems are also safer as well. Why? One simple mechanic that the AFK cloaking pilot used to send the PVE pilot to a safe haven: Local. In fact, the residents have two options at this point:

1. Try to bait the cloaker and send them home the fast route, or
2. Sending in their own cloaked alt to see what he does if anything and let people know if he leaves system (i.e. becomes active in some tell-tale way).

How is this accomplished? Again: local.

We can see that there is one mechanic in all of these aspects of play. That mechanic is, local. So, the real issue is local.

Why local is a problem:

Local offers the residents in a system unparalleled intel regarding hostiles, whether it is a fleet or a lone cloaking ship. Local is so good that the resident will have warning of a hostile pilot(s) even before the hostile(s) have a chance to load grid. Plenty of time for an alert PVE pilot who is aligned to warp off to safety. This is one reason why catching ratting bots is near impossible. A program never gets tired, its focus never wavers, and it is almost always going to be aligned, so when a hostile comes in it warps off and cloaks, and then has unbeatable patience to wait out the hostiles.

It is almost too easy. And there is some evidence to suggest that CCP thinks this too (I'm sorry, I'm too lazy to go find the threads I've linked these bits of evidence in, but if you search themittani.com for an article titled The Local Problem your should find it).

Once you deal with local it will likely cut the Gordian Knott known as AFK cloaking. If local is no longer the awesome intel tool it is now, then AFK cloaking could very well become pointless, and with other changes (i.e. hunting cloaked ships) could even become a dangerous form of game play.

Not changing local and simply nerfing cloaks practically hands isk to null PVE pilots on a silver platter. They still get the advanced warning and now hostiles have one less method to either disrupt their isk/resource generating activities and/or make BLOPs a viable method of asymmetrical warfare (many BLOPs gangs will park a cloaked hunter in a system to create a false sense of security in the hopes of luring a pilot into a dangerous situation where he can be killed).

No matter how hard you try to make an anti-AFK cloaking method it will eventually work out that players will use anti-AFK methods to make their null PVE activities about as safe as being docked.

As for your list of solutions you left off at least one option: rat in a group. If you have 5 ships with fits more geared towards PVP then it ill be harder for that cloaky to do anything by himself. And even if he has a cyno you'll have a better chance of killing the cyno if he is on grid and lights it close to you, and if it is a BLOPs gang they could be in serious trouble unless there are alot of them, and even then some of them will die to the ratters. And if it is a conventional cyno, learn where your enemies keep their titans for bridging.

And as for nothing being safe in Eve, I really hate that statement. Because unless you are going to give me a button that will let me eject people from stations when they are afk or out of their pos shields, then a cloak is not an issue. Sure the cloaked ship is perfectly safe when it is cloaked...but then again, so are you.



Hopefully Nikk wont mind if I put in my views on this one....

It means PVE will become incredibly safe. Everyone in null will have at least one alt that will have trained anti-AFK skills and will use them as soon as it becomes apparent a hostile shows up in local and is nowhere on D-scan. The cloaked pilot will either have to leave system, keep warping around to not be caught and thus unable to really do much, even if he has a cyno, or risk destruction. Ships that fit a cloak are incredibly weak when uncloaked for the most part.

*And let me note that I'm not disparaging PVE players/pilots as most of us do it at one time or another.