Player Features and Ideas Discussion

edited because realized using a smartbomb as is in high sec has some BIG ticket drawbacks... so instead, if you use the improved smartbomb in high sec, the onboard safety system will null out the damage causing part and it will only send out a nondamaging grav wave... unless you turn off the safety system, and thus will suffer the concequences if it hits someone that is not an enemy.

AS I SAY AGAIN!!! THE AFK CLOAKING BIT IN MY TITLE WAS A JOKE AGAINST CAREBEARS WHO WHINE ABOUT AFK CLOAKERS BREAKING THE GAME WHEN THEY DO NOTHING BUT SIT IN ONE SPOT WITHOUT EVEN SITTING AT THEIR KEYBOARD!!!

FIRST: CCP makes smartbombs able to be used anywhere including high sec, without concordoken, as they are weak, pathetic, near useless as anything more than anti missle ships or doing depth charge runs to try and find a cloaky.

SECOND: CCP... LEAVES THE DAMAGE AMOUNT ALONE and quadruples the range of the AOE... BUT... it makes it a tiered distance system. TIER 1 AOE distance is original range as it is now with full damage. TIER 2 AOE range is 75% damage. TIER 3 AOE range is 50% damage. And TIER 4 AOE range is 25% damage.

This means that the closer you are the more damage your target takes, and the further away the less damage your target takes.

Now what does this do for the cloak whining carebears?

It gives them something to combat the so called "AFK cloaker" without doing ANYTHING at all to the cloaks themselves, it forces them to take an ACTIVE role in their defense. And it makes it more challenging and more fun to be able to zip in close to a fleet of carebears under cloak, harass them, and not get smashed by the smartbombers depth charging.

Think about it... what is really so fun about being cloaked and scouting a bunch of carebears in high sec right now? Almost nothing. If we give them a means to actively defend against us cloakers WITHOUT changing cloaking dynamics or breaking one of the most awesome game mechanics in eve ever to be devised, wouldn't that be at least a little bit more fun?

If the whiny carebears can actively kill us while we sit cloaked, and they get off their butts and stop station spinning and actually go on the offensive... think about the adrenaline rush you will get running from them while still staying in observation range.

And please don't come back at me with that "smartbombs are too powerful for high sec" crap. No one uses smartbombs BECAUSE they are weak and pathetic. They are only useful right now as missle swarm fly swatters (and they fail at that even) and for depth charging cloakers (and they are too short ranged to be effective for that too).

That's the beauty of it... if the cloaker is goofed enough to stick around in one spot then he deserves to get fleet hot dropped on.

But if the cloaker moves only a little bit and takes a vantage point that is NOT right on top of the point where he/she warpped in, then it makes it that much harder to find the cloaker. But any SMART fleet commander will send their depth charge wing out along the reciprocals to actively HUNT the cloaker.

It's just like fleets nowadays hunting for submarines, they drive their boats around in a circular or grid pattern and drop thousnads of depth charges while listening to sonar. It is nowhere NEAR guaranteed to find said sub but there is about a 15% chance of either finding and driving off or even killing said sub.

Cloakers are like submarines and carebears are like the depth charge launching fleet. They must actively...

HUNT...

The submarine a.k.a. the cloaker if they want to get rid of him.

Her point was that if you are in a safe spot, there is no way anyone would ever find you. Totally impossible.

So basically this doesn't do anything...not that anything needs to be done. AFK coaking is fine.

Smartbombs are still used in lowsec to kill frigates / shuttles / pods on gates.

If you could use smartbombs in highsec without having to worry about concord, you can be absolutely 100% sure there would be several battleships sitting on every gate, killing all the small stuff they can.

It would be fun, actually. But bad. Very bad.

I agree 100% that afk cloaking is fine and should be left alone. And if you are in a safe spot, you are correct, this does nothing.

The reference to afk cloaking in my title was a joke, poking fun at the whiny crybaby carebears who refuse to google what AFK means and still complain that it breaks the game.

What this is actually more for is the carebear fleet actively in the zone, actually PLAYING the game instead of POS spinning, and a cloaker pops onto the actual grid they are on. As they have no means of knowing if the cloaker is on gridnor just in local, this will give them the illusion of safety and a degree of being able to find a cloaker (albeit a very slim 1% chance given the vastness of space and the size of the grid and if the cloak pilot is flying around or not).

This will not break any game mechanics, Lord knows I want cloaking to stay exactly as is because it is so awesome, but the carebears are a tad correct in saying that there needs to be some kind of counter.

I see this as creating a new dynamic in that the carebears can now actively hunttheir prey and find them. In high sec, no cloaker blood will be spilled unless EITHER PARTY actually chooses to fire on the other. In high sec the smartbomb will cause no damage unless it is made to do so by the pilot and the pilot will suffer the appropriate consequences.

The best thing.

Bump.

first post edited.

Yes, altered the original idea to not cause damage in high sec UNLESS you force it to. YOU CHOOSE whether it causes damage or not, and you suffer the consequences of poor decision making.

Not a new idea. And still not a good one.

It buffs gate camps, nerfs cloaking hunters that require close range (Proteus, Pilgrim, etc) but won't affect "long range" ones, and won't do anything against a cloaking ship slow boating in a random direction at a safespot in the middle of a system.

i think you are missing the bit about your new 64 times the original volume smart bomb a gate campers and pipe bombers wet dream. now a tanked cyno warps to your mining fleet and drops 20 BS all with massive ranged smartbombs and wipes out the mining fleet without even needing to target them.
smart bombing gate camps are already a big enough problem without your attempt to buff them to ludicrous levels.
also the fleets sitting 20 km off trade stations will be gone because who wouldn't warp in a smart bombing fleet to wipe them all out in one go. concord or no concord.
People scared of afk cloakers are most certainly not going to benefit from these items as they can't undock if a neutral is within 3 jumps of their system.