Player Features and Ideas Discussion

There are many, many ways to implement the very general idea I put forward there. AWOXing is one of them. Some methods even avoid an AWOXer being discovered on killmails or in any other ways. Other methods do NOT use the AWOX. Those who are the smartest can see how to do this without AWOXing. And there are many, many other methods which use other techniques, which I will not name; an exercise for the smartest players to discover themselves. Point is, if you are not succeeding in Goal X, then you (indefinite you) should either rethink your methods or pursue other goals, not demand that a particularly ineffective technique is the only way made necessary by some game mechanic. Step up or move on.

PS: Be at ease, Nick. I am too smart to be forced into a style of play which compromises my principles. Then again, my principles follow my military training far more than my civilian heritage.

As a carrier pilot, I will tell you right now that no carrier would ever do this. Here are some questions and considerations for you on this idea:

Why a carrier and not some other ship? Do you see carriers as having some kind of special scanning ability role stronger than other ships?

Carriers only go into triage when they are sacrificing themselves to save a super. Or they are with a large support fleet and are willing to gamble that the other side will not escalate the engagement beyond what the tank can handle for their 5 min triage timer. You are asking a carrier to consider sacrificing itself for 2-3x the duration of triage just so the hostile (~30 mil ISK) can know that it is being scanned and that there is a carrier (~2 bil ISK) ready to be hotdropped. Unless you are thinking to allow the carrier to do this while within a forcefield (pos), it is foolish for any carrier to attempt this. But if you are thinking to allow the carrier to scan from within the pos, then why not just let the pos do it with a covert scanning array? And why broadcast in local when you are operating with covert mechanics. The whole point of covert is that everything is hidden; even covert cynos are hidden.

Okay, so if I read this right you do agree to the following:

1. There is an advantage to resident in as for as spotting an entrant before the entrant can load grid.
2. That nerfing cloaks in and of themselves without addressing the issue in 1, it is not reasonable.

OP changed.

Sorry for the delay, RL, as they say.

AWOX is just the tip of the iceberg, it is already here, and it is NOT a "response" to local. It is done because it provides a benefit which some players appreciate. Nerfs to cloaks will not make AWOX more powerful and therefore will not increase the rate of AWOXing.

The example I cited can be done WITHOUT AWOX, but you have to be really smart in order to see any of those methods.

Now, I do agree that a player should not appear in local until the gate cloak is lost (dscan all you want during that time). This would allow the player to warp to his destination at the SAME time that the locals see him, unless they saw the gate flash. If cloaks remove the player from local, I think that the name should remain listed in local so that reports can be made to intel channels, but that the red word "disconnected" should appear and that the cloaked pilot should only see the players listed in local at the time of cloak with "disconnected" stamped on all the players listed until he decloaks. I think that travel into wormholes should also stamp "disconnected" on the player's name for all residents in local at the time he jumped, so it is not clear if a pilot cloaked or left through a wormhole. Players who enter a system after a pilot "disconnects" should not see his name in system local listing.

I did not say more powerful, I said more common. And yeah, the probability it will increase will be very high. It is yet another way to "disappear" from local (a logon trap being the other). If cloaks got nerfed and I decided I wanted to:

A. Gank PvE ships in null, and
B. Create discord in an alliance,

I would use AWOXing. I'd shuffle characters around on my accounts and create an account for nothing other than AWOXing. I'd even consider selling and even possibly buying my AWOXing characters to create even more confusion and so forth. And the selling could allow me to roll over to new accounts rather quickly with AWOXing capable pilots.

Null would be a wasteland if you nerfed local...

AWOXing happens now. And it offers a far better opportunity than a agank, so is unlikely to be wasted on that. It also takes a LOT (in fact a LOT LOT LOT) more effort than AFK cloaking, and STILL requires you to be active to execute.

Why bookmark them? They show up in your scanner without scanning and are always warpable. A grav is no different to a belt now.

Interceptors are fast enough to catch a fairly decent amount of targets as it is now. they will soon be getting changed so they warp much quicker, which will mean interceptors will be great at their job - intercepting.
And sure people "might" have done things which make it difficult to catch them. If someone chooses to make themselves hard to catch, they can do that. If it was impossible to make yourself difficult to catch, then interceptors would be totally overpowered. At the end of the day this falls back to the idea that if a hostile puts in the most amount of effort, he should get the kill, while ignoring the fact that the target can also put in the effort to avoid it, and thus should be given the opportunity to escape.

There's a lot of this "yeah but if they X, then I can;t catch them". Tough. That's the way it works. If someone plays better than you, they win. That's how these games work. If you try the same tactic over and over again you are unlikely to get a varied levels of success.
There's so much whining that cloakers are so hard done by because local gives them up, but when you boil it down it comes back to the same point. If a player plays better than you you can't intercept them in a covops ship. Since a covops ship is not designed to intercept targets, that's no surprise. You want to change the game to give covops a huge advantage over any other type of combat ship. Why should they automatically be the best by bypassing a game mechanic?

WOW. All this and you still miss the point.
WE DON'T DISAGREE that local is used for intel.
What we are saying is that REMOVING LOCAL gives cloakers TOO MUCH BENEFIT. I don't know how that's so hard to understand. Yo uare saying that right now, if we pay attention, and are quick on the buttons, we can escape due to local. Your solution is to stop us doing that, meaning that regardless of if we are or are not paying attention, we must die if you use a cloaked ship.
How can you POSSIBLY suggest that and be completely blind to how it would make all other combat vessels entirely pointless in roaming PvP?

And the counter to this alleged too much benefit is simply limiting the benefit.

Give defense pilots a way to use effort equal to the efforts being made against them, and have the better effort win.

Would you accept that as a starting point?

Nothing else assumed or implied, simply: would you accept that?

You would still get burnt pretty quick. It's pretty hard for people to not arouse suspicions like this, and most alliances would give someone the boot to be sure. Awoxing is not as easy to maintain in a null alliance as it is in a small corp.

Of course. If I've set my ship up to be able to MJD, I'm watching my available intel like a hawk, and I'm prepared to leave the moment I'm at risk, of course I'll get away. If I couldn't then there would be a serious balance issue there. If no matter what I did, I had to get caught, then the only method of escaping would be the overuse of warp stabs and an agile ship. That shouldn't be required on every fit, as it would destroy diversity.
Enough people die every day in null to show there's not a problem catching targets. You can put every single one down to user error and ignore it, but when will you be happy? Seems to me you'll only be happy when you can guarantee your ability to catch ships in null, which would mean you are heavily overpowered.

Yes, you are saying make local a chat channel, then add an intel tool.
See above - this intel tool would either be too good and you'd be back whining about it, or it would be delayed and useless.

The only "nerf cloaks" I've seen is the part that allows cloaks to be scannable, which would be pointless if cloakers simply kept moving. Even AFK cloakers you'd not be able to find if they set themselves moving. It's a one sided change and only the cloakers would benefit. You can bang on about how much intel they'd lose if you want, but we all know it's rubbish. cloakers don't use local until they arrive in system, and even that tells them nothing about where their targets are located. d-scan tells them that.