Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hey Vas, go get him for altering quotes!!

Hey, at least I added the word "revised" and bolded the changed parts.

Added:


Please see my posts. You really have to add in the part about cyno generators in order to understand the whole story. If the cyno gen could not be fit to a cloaky ship, the entire story would change and I would say, bring 'em on. If my hundred man fleet could bridge to any cyno near any ship in my fleet, that would certainly change the story too. Or simply add a cyno gen rig to the game so that everyone can have a cyno gen at a moment's notice to counter all the cyno cloaky threats. IT IS ALL ABOUT THE CYNO.

I am thinking the real issue, is not specific to cloaking so much, as it is specific to fears about cyno usage.

Nobody really cares about that bomber so much, unless it can bring friends.

So, let's be honest here. The real fear is the unknown possible ships that COULD be available.

As I explained in the past, about cyno usage:
Hot Dropping: Bridging is intended to bypass reinforced blockades and travel time. Here, it has been fine tuned to avoid advertising the presence of a fleet to the free intel tool as well by delaying the easily recognizable population spike till the last possible moment. The intention is to deny the warning local provides, although it still reports the presence of the cyno boat enough to be associated with AFK Cloaking instead.
Quite simply, while PvE pilots would never resume regular activities with a hostile fleet present, they are sometimes willing to gamble over whether a cloaked vessel represents that level of threat at a given time.

There you have it, and the logic really is obvious behind it.

Now, and this is obvious to those familiar with intel already, spotting a fleet is not hard.
Hiding a fleet, however, is made effectively impossible with local chat. Often it doesn't matter, as these are marching bands on parade, looking for trouble. Anyone willing to form up and oppose them can have plenty of time to do so, as most intel channels advertise them far enough out to re-ship and be ready for them.

But then, that limits this style to consensual only, as it is mind numbingly obvious how easy it is to avoid these, unless you are clueless about EVE.
They can never hide effectively in a system, no matter how hard they try. Oh, sure, you could have them logged off at the gates, but that too would be obvious, as they had to go somewhere, and intel would have tracked them to that point.

So, what we have is what was described above. Local makes cynos a combat tactic.
And you love local.

Sure, in your stylized example, then the risk is harder to determine and using a naive prior (i.e. 0.5 probability either door has the dude behind it) is not unreasonable.

However, as other have pointed out you aren't stuck in this situation. Go through kill boards to see if there are any kills associated with the guy in local. If so, when? If he is EU TZ and you are US TZ that should change your probability assessment. Look at how long he has been there, that too should change your probability assessment. And as one person, sorry forget who, suggested....sacrifice an old ship you have hanging around in your hangar if you can. That is a great way to get intel if it works.

And if you want no risk in null then dock up, POS up, or cloak up. You have those options too, probably more than the neutral in the system you are PvEing in. He just gets the cloak option.

How do you know how cloaks were intended? And do you have any data on AFK cloaking other than your own personal anecdotes?

As for being in station, the point still remains, he raises the level of uncertainty which is what you seem to find so problematic.

It's not uncertain though. If you see him in there, you can monitor the undock. You will know if he choses to start engaging. You can't watch a cloaker. In fact in your idea you won't even know he's there until you are already scrammed and under attack, hence the general feeling against the removal of local.

You clearly aren't a programmer. Seriously. go give it a try, see what happens.
This who "it's not attached thus it's impossible to detect!" is utterly moronic. They can flag you based on certain criteria, which also flag some regular players, then test against you to pick the bots from the actual players. Not only can they do this, it's one of the methods commonly used by MMO developers.

Yes, it is an increase in the uncertainty. That I can take steps to mitigate it proves it. Just as you can take steps to mitigate the risk of a cloaked pilot in system with you.

No, it doesn't. All of my kills are on various public KBs. I've never put my API into them, oddly enough, but damn there they all are.

Yes, I could, and probably do have kills way outside my TZ (alarm clock ops). But they are in the distinct minority. If you are going to let this kind of a thing paralyze your...well, you really are very risk averse. Very risk averse...I'll just leave it at that.

Yes, which is why CCP doesn't just run around banning people based on idiotic algorithms that can't tell a person from a program. This is why botting still exists in the game. When it comes right down to it, CCP will most likely err on the side of the paying customer, especially with brain dead algorithms like you are suggesting. If it is something that will generate too many false positives it is no good.

A good method of bot detection is engaging the bot in a conversation, say with a GM. That is impossible to program, at least for game players. Of course, it is also labor intensive.

And I doubt CCP is going to share their bot detection algorithms...it would give the bot makers too much info.

Lastly, a timer is a nerf to cloaks for active player too. Why punish the very people you supposedly don't have an issue with?