Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Oh come on now.
AFK cloaking it's not an exploit it's a badly designed mechanic that has consequenses and should be deal with but it's still not an exploit. And even I agree that local is a bit broken and should be fixed somehow. But cloaking afk is definetly not an exploit.

Truth be told, and this time I'm not trolling (quite the exception I assure you).

The moment AFK players are removed from the equation, you'll have maybe a week (tops, I'd say more like a half day) before someone trains a parrot to move his mouse or open his inventory window so he won't go offline.

And even if that were not the case, the simplest work around would be to go afk, wait for the logout timer to expire, wait 20 minutes or maybe thirty, log back in then then wtfpwn everything in range with your cyno gang.

And the crying would start again. Only then ppl would cry for ban of login traps, parrots on PC's or whatever else.

Wouldn't change a thing.

Best solution I heard so far was to remove local (aka WH local) but give a systemwide message whenever a gate is activated.

And then some sort of mechanic how cloaked ships could be detected. And by detected I mean just that, not scanned down, not decloaked or disabled for the giggles.

That's fine. It would be EULA breaking to use any form of automation, and while yes, it would be easy to do and not get found out, I like to have a little fairth that the majority of people would simply choose not to.

This is also completely fine. I in no way want to prevent an active cloaker (which is what this would be) from wtfpwning anyone. Returning from AFK would change you back to active, and warp you from deadspace back to wherever you were. This would be much the same as logging on, or jumping in system, thus making AFK cloaking redundant. The change is simply to stop someone begin able to gain an advantage 24/7 with no effort. Even if they only put minimal effort it, that's fine and at least from people like me will generate no complaints. I have no issue with active cloakers.

This doesn't scale though. Things like fleet battles would suffer, since it would be impossible to use in-game mechanics to source intel, so people would rely on scans, and out of game tools to get a rough idea of who is in system with them.
While I'm not totally opposed to the idea of removing local, I think it needs a LOT of thinking about, because it could break large fleet combat which is a unique selling point of EVE. This is why removing AFK cloakers by a different means seems to me to be logical. It's simple to do, would not affect active cloakers, and would hopefully promote a bit more spread on null players rather than tightly packing everyone into a few select systems.

They already have done something about Sentry Drones outside the POS shield. It's considered an exploit and forbidden. If you see someone doing it, report him.

If you weren't talking about hundrets of players afk cloaking simultaneously about what scale are you talking then?

It may be fine to you, right now. But people are already whining about login traps. Imagine it would be the only way to successfully damage the enemies supply and industry operations, everyone would do it, no miner would ever undock again because there could be some offline guy in the system.

You wouldn't even have to be logged in to disrupt the enemy ops. just enter a sytem and log off. That's even worse than the not-a-problem situation we have now.

They have NOW, yes. but for years this was possible and nothing was done. Surely you see how this is comparable to AFK cloaking?

I was talking about large scale coordinated camps blocking out regions. In comparison to 10 drones here and there, then the 500 or whatever it was drones on a single POS that triggered this latest change.

No, it is not comparable. Not in the least.

It would be comparable if any cloaker found a way to deal direct damage to your ship without uncloaking, but that way does not exist.

Read about that a few weeks ago, someone complaining about loosing a ship to a login trap.

Aside frome the obvious hilarity of the situation he described (ratting alone in a acarrier) nobody in that thread ever mentioned that login traps were considered an exploit. Though some people would certainly want it to be considered an exploit...

I bet my grammar is way off. I hope that was halfway understandable.

People whine about all sorts of things. That's no reason to disregard every issue though. At the end of the day an AFK cloaker cannot be distinguished from an active cloaker. This leads people to see someone and have to make the assumption he is active and watching them. Removing the ability of the AFK cloaker to be AFK means that someone wanting to do this has to be active. Logging off can be done by anyone already, so that won't change. Active cloakers in system happen already, and that won't change.

Look, I'm not going to get into another argument over the EULA enforcement, since it's not allowed anyway. But at the end of the day I DON'T CARE if it's easy to bypass. There are ways to bypass every mechanic in EVE, but people still don't do it, and that's good enough for me. Whether you would cheat it or not is beside the point. Most people wouldn't.