Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Why should you even care?

Why are you trying to operate in the absence of hostiles in the first place, in a section of the game designed to permit them?

Plan for them to be present, plan for your response.

If you don't want combat, go where you get NPC support and simply need to last long enough for it to take effect.


Foolish suggestions, do you even realize what you are asking for?

AFK / Inactive flag: Will be used by hunters more effectively than you imagine.
Follow this for a minute, see if something clicks for you.

Hunter enters system. Sees in local 5 pilots are present, all non-blue good target variety.

2 of these have the AFK / inactive flags, so are sitting either in outpost or POS, possibly boosting from POS for others.
That leaves three targets in space to be hunted.

The value of local just failed in the moments after it revealed the hunter's presence. Unless and until it flags him as AFK, you will be out of reach to any ISK making activity short of trading, which is something you could have done safely from high sec.

He, on the other hand, only benefits from local telling him flawlessly who is in system.
With that inactivity flag, he even knows who to watch for.

Come back after the inactivity interval expires, adding probably 5 to 10 minutes.
Are any of the local residents still flagged as active?

If they are, you know who to look for. If they are not, you can stay flagged as inactive, not needing to check on possible mining or ratting spots, no need to search mission rooms, etc.
Local does the hunting for you, spotting your potential targets.

By all means, give that hunter advantages like this. Go team.

Try reading this thread FFS, and you'll see that is not the argument. Nikk Narrel is even a carebear himself (self admitted, and not intended as an insult).

The argument is that AFK cloaking is a symptom of another mechanic. Local as an intel tool. It is too easy and too good. The reasons for this are in this thread, go read them.

The simple fact is that if Local chat was not around, there would be precisely zero reason to AFK cloak.

Of course, simply removing local chat would likely be very bad for null sec population levels (also discussed in this thread).

Alternatives for dealing with the "local problem" have also been linked and discussed in this thread as well.

So, in you waltz arrogantly telling people in this thread to have an open mind. How about you read up on the topic before advertising your ignorance on a Concord Billboard?

bump

Just beat me to it.

Absolutely correct.

Local is the effective counter to cloaking.

This is why, in every thread where more counters to cloaking are suggested, it can be pointed out that local must be surrendered for that in exchange.
Having local in addition to any means to limit or hunt cloaking creates two counters.

Now, you may laugh when someone suggests auto ejecting people from an outpost or POS, because you can see how that would be absurd.
And yet, you are suggesting the equivalent, since you clearly do not understand how the game balances on the aspects of cloaking and local.

There is obviously a problem for some people regarding having docked ships in their system. Whether you agree that it's a problem or not, no one can debate the frequency that this rubbish gets posted on the F&Y forums. I would like to propose a compromise.

Some facts regarding the system "defenders" or "owners":

1) You can tell whether you have a docked enemy in your system using a combination of the intel from the Local channel combined combat scanners.
2) You can't even guess whether the player controlling the character is present or AFK. (as far as I can tell, this is the real problem)


Some solutions to the problem using current mechanics:

1) Move next door, as a group. Leave no one left in system. Rat or mine together in ships fit in part for pvp (include points etc). If the "AFK" docker follows you into system he's not AFK. If he stays docked in the empty system for any length of time you can make the assumption that he's AFK but you can't tell for certain (which is as it should be).

2) As a group, get into cheap, semi pvp fit ships and stick together and play together. If you're hot dropped you'll at least get a scrap out of it and not lose that much. You might even win. It's happened before, believe me. I've seen a black ops fleet decimated by a small fleet of procurers and skiffs.

3) Look at who the "AFK docked up" character is, check out their corp and alliance, do some research on their membership. See if they have a high sec presence and if so, take a fleet to high sec, wardec them and kill as many as possible. After killing a bunch, invite them to remove their "AFK" docked person from your system and say that if they do you'll remove the wardec. Or you could hire mercs to do it for you.

4) Same as 3 but if they live in nullsec get into a covert pvp fleet and do the damn same thing to them.

There are more but that'll do for my purposes here. I just wanted to point out that there are many ways to counter this "problem" at the moment. It's just that none of them involve staying docked up and whining on the forums about it. Therefore the "solution" to your "problem" should be more in line with a compromise and should itself entail at least a small amount of risk.

Now, from what I can tell the only real problem is not being able to tell whether they're actually there or not. All the complaints seem to be based on this. What the people whining about AFK docking are after is an intel method. Now, this shouldn't be absolute in my opinion.

So what I propose is a new type of probe which when launched acts like a deep station probe but only returns afk pilots. Now, whilst this might sound to everyone (like me) who really doesn't think there's anything currently wrong, it in fact works both ways. The client records when the player is afk. It shouldn't be too difficult to record that information in the main DB (client updates DB on change of state, for example) so that the probe would work. So, for those that want to know that an "AFK" docked player is actually AFK this will give them what they want.... to a point.

As I've explained in many other threads suggesting various methods of flagging people as AFK, there are ways around it. So, another level of meta. They have their intel but there's a chance it isn't accurate. For clever docked pilots that aren't afk they can potentially spoof themselves as afk and vice versa.

My main motivation for suggesting this is to come up with a compromise that doesn't adversely affect the game whilst stopping all these utterly pointless "I can't do solo pve in nullsec cos the big bad afk docked boogeyman is in my system and won't leave" threads.

I've probably missed something that makes this unworkable so please, fire away.

This corrected document brought to you by Unsuccessful at Everything.

Bumping the thread for Teckos, he has some family issues to attend to so he hasn't been able to keep an eye on his thread.

Third page, time to decloak and light the cov ops cyno and put a stop to the anti-cloaking nonsense!

Cloak is fine , leave it alone :)

What I want is somoene to remove Gallentes Faction Navy cloak jammer in every gallente system they have deployed that targets me due to -7.76 faction standing with gallente.

i mean i cant even stop and admire a nice asteroid field looking for FW targets for few seconds.

They seem to have the coolest anti cloak toy and none of the EvE scientiets have been able to copy its design.
so if its too powerfull we MUST NERF IT.

so get rid of the cloak jammers please :)

Why don't we make Outposts and POS's more like vending machines?

Or maybe slot machine would be a better analogy?

It would work like "Go Fish" card game.

Right click on the outpost, and a password window pops up.
Enter the correctly spelled name of a pilot, who is actually docked in the station, and the station will eject them in whichever ship was flagged active at the moment.

Now, if they are at their keyboard, they can simply dock back up.
If they are AFK, things happen.

If you enter the name of a pilot who is not in the station, you cloak is disabled for 30 seconds, and a cyno beacon effect is lit at your location.
(You can still warp away and leave, it's just to draw attention to the threat you represent)