Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You know Nick, I have always taken issue that CCP will not let my character look out the station windows and see the ships sitting outside waiting to gank those who undock. How many times I have heard players in station ask, "Is the station clear?", while thinking to myself, "Just look out the windows!"

Also, being in station should not be disconnected from the stargate communications network. If anything, you are at a central hub and should be more connected to it than ever.

But if any player does become disconnected, I think that the entry should remain with an annotation to that effect for all those who were in system at the time of the disconnect.

Line by line, with logic introduced:

You are wrong in every points here. I wont say anything more than that.
Based on previous comments, if you actually could refute logically any of these points, you would have.
This has the impression of "you wish you could refute, but are at a loss".

Again, active players wont be affected by anything with an afk timer. It will only affect those who actually are afk. And those who are afk should gain no benefits or advantages with zero efforts over others ingame at all. PERIOD.
This is hilarious, when you consider it would be an active player who did the shooting in every version of this.
The logic, which you have yet to defeat beyond unfounded statements, is that the ACTIVE cloaked pilot is not KNOWN to be active.
Seriously, how often do you engage in fights that you expect to lose? You may accept loss as a possibility, but you engage thinking you have a serious chance of winning.

Foundation Logic: Most fights in EVE below a fleet sized encounter would probably not take place, if the losing side knew ahead of time they would lose. Pilots avoid fights for exactly that reason, loss of the investment represented by the ship.
Noone expects a guarantee, but at least the expectation of winning is often required.
We deliberately fit ships for fights, hoping to be underestimated by our presumed future opponents. This logic is well established by the pride some have in kill mails, as they are not seen as random results, but of careful planning and effort being rewarded.

Those who disagree to that are peoples who promotes for zero effort gaming with benefits while being afk. Witch is not the purpose of an MMO game to begin with.
What kind of philosophical garbage is this?
The pilot is getting no ISK.
The ASSUMPTION that an opponent will lose income which results in a benefit, through some underwear-gnome chain of events, is seriously flawed.
1 Scare Opponents
2 Opponents stop making ISK
3 ...
4 Profit!

If we look at more reliable models, the so-called AFK player is better off investing in combat ships for his side. These can then cause explosions, which have a definite and verified benefit over time.

Thought for the Day:
There are no AFK cloakers. They are all at their keyboards, devoted to creating the impression that they are absent, in order to get their desired targets to undock.
The concept of them being AFK at all, is nothing more than a cunning public relations attempt, which sometimes results in uncertainty.

You are almost describing a crab trap, used by fisherman.

It has two flaws in it's premise:
1 The intended target can simply turn around and leave. You ARE two systems away, having left this at a location noone was using, for all you know. Unless you saw them as they left grid, you are guessing.
2 How do you KNOW when to return? Unless they are in an amazingly slow to align ship, you are guessing that they will be both active and unguarded, at a specific and limited window of opportunity.

I appreciate the thought and effort you put into presenting this, but I must admit I had been hoping to target other craft.

Battleships and caps, while I guess these could be actively used for ratting, were not what came to mind.

I may be inefficient, but I always did my ratting in a cruiser or battlecruiser, when I did it at all. As mentioned, I usually mined.

I appreciate the input, Lucas.

Andy had been trying to support a point that a means existed to catch PvE ships, making cloaking obsolete. The obsolete nature therefore supporting the logic of it being eliminated by timers and such.

He has provided a method useful in acquiring battleships and caps. I remain unconvinced this makes cloaking obsolete, so I will simply agree to disagree on this aspect.
(I think other ship types should be considered valid targets, which this method does not address)

I already did. I said no. It would complicate fleet battles way too much and give cloakers and unreasonable advantage.

If you want to remove the effect, look to the cause.

If it takes any longer than about 10 seconds from point of entry to see a cloaked vessel, then a cloaker would get a catch every time if he played right.
If the intel could be gathered quicker, then why bother changing it at all? It will have no effect except pissing people off by adding another time wasting mechanic like he hacking changes, or force people to use alts. All of that to have no end effect sounds incredibly pointless.
I somehow feel you hate local intel just because you think it should be different, not because you think it would have any impact. I bet you hate the watchlist too. The sort of it is though that any change they make is going to have a HUGE impact on one side or the other, there's no way around that. Without local fleet battles are going to be crippled, with an instant local, cloakers cry (not usre why, imo cloakers are getting a lot of benefits already, soon to be increasing). CCP need to think damn hard about the consequences before putting in any changes.

I admit that your responses tend to surprise me more often than not, but you do seem to be understanding my intent fairly well. Not saying that cloaking is obsolete, but that afk cloaking is obsolete. I also appreciate your most recent ideas. Well thought out. Could probably find some great improvements with further development, but they do not seem to be directly related to this thread, afk cloaky (cynos).

Is it possible to catch an AB or MWD fit cruiser or battlecruiser that is aligned and prepared and determined to avoid combat? It is so much less likely, and so much less lucrative anyway. I see the benefit of groups of HACs doing anoms, and I do not see any reason why anyone should be able to catch them if they were determined to avoid combat. Then again, if they were in a group and shield tanked for dps and speed, I can't imagine a BLOPS gank being successful regardless of how big it was. If it is just T1 criusers, who cares if you lose one or ten? BC tank like BS and operate very effectively in pvp in groups. So, if you are only concerned with BC and smaller, your primary concern should not be catching them, but staying alive after you engage. Still, cruisers align and move so fast, catching those not interested in pvp is NATURALLY difficult due to the nature of the ship type; there is no issue to address here.

Still shaking my head trying to figure out why anyone would think about trying to deny BC and below access to pve ops in a system. They can't catch them, they can't kill them if they are even a little organized, and they can't stop them from changing systems. If you found a gang that was BC and below, they are likely looking for pvp or baiting for pvp, so you are really just aiming for pvp gangs, not resource denial or pve ops. Do you really think that lone BC is just a solo pve player and not bait? He is likely bait, and he will not likely warp away when you enter local.

The best we have heard from them is two fold:

1. Active players can't convince other active players that they are truly afk for longer than an hour
2. Active players have a slightly higher confidence that those who are not caught by an auto-logoff timer are more likely to be active

Firstly, if an active player can convince me that they are truly afk, I still know that the very next second they could be truly un-afk (active).
Secondly, if I have a slightly higher confidence that you are active, I will still treat you the same as I do every active player, regardless of my confidence level in your activity.

So in both cases, I am at no benefit, except having the peace of mind that truly afk players are not logged in as active players and truly active players are not wasting away their time trying to fool themselves into believing that they are fooling me concerning their activity.