Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'm pretty sure mining and manufacturing do not count as PvE.

How do you AFK rat, anyway?

Simple, you sit in a station AFK and you have someone pay you for the privelage of ratting in your system

You are all bent out of shape over players using drones in anoms that are so low they pose no threat to the drones or an AFK ship?

Anyone can make more AFK (while logged off entirely) doing PI or Research.

What an odd thing to be concerned about.

This part of your arguement is pure fallacy, the only person who can deny you content is you.

Sorry, but did you actually read my post? I said "cloak campers", not "AFK cloakers".

AFK cloakers don't hunt anyone. Cloak campers do hunt people and then stop being cloakers when they're ready to make the kill.

I have removed some rule breaking posts and those quoting them. This time I let a lot of edge cases stay.
Please people, keep it on topic and above all civil!

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The posts are all still archived, even the ISDs can't get a hold of those.

A) Any ship once tackled is in real trouble whether or not there is a cyno. This is because players in null usually tend to work together when PvPing while the PvE pilots do not. Also, the PvP pilots don't usually do "fair". PvP in null is unfair, brutal and fast. In short, if you get tackled you are probably dead.

B) No idea and you have none either. Only CCP could answer that kind of a question. Null PvPers will kill anything they can get a lock on including noob ships.

C) First off he wouldn't be a PvE player at that point anymore would he. And it depends on a number of previous factors you skip...like you always do. Here is one of the biggest factors:

What is the chance a cloaked ship entering system has of catching the PvE ship?

Don't worry its rhetorical (i.e. I'll answer it for you since getting a straight answer is pretty damn hard from you lot). The chances are extremely low. Well below 5%, and probably below 1%. If we go with 2% and we look at 100 instances of where a hostile comes into your ratting system, chances of one or more ganks occurring, about 59.7%. In those 100 trials your expected loss with a billion isk ship is 600 million isk. Now, the question is how much ratting could you have gotten done in that time period? Probably more that 600 million isk worth. If a hostile comes through say 1/hour then that is around 100 hours of ratting and if you clear 40 million an hour, then you are looking at 40,000,000*100 = 4,000,000,000 for an expected loss of 600 million. Not bad at all.

Of course, an AFK cloaker changes all of that. Now you don't know if he is active or not. Most likely not, but if he is and you start ratting, then he'll have a much easier time sneaking up on you. The guy entering system, you know he is active and you have a few seconds advanced warning before he can even align out. But with the "AFK" cloaker he could be within 5,000 meters before you know he is there and that is probably way, way too late (note the quotes around "AFK" it is to signify the uncertainty as to the player's actual status). The above calculus no longer works in this case. You have no way of coming up with probabilities as to whether or not the player is AFK or not except for subjective ones based on your own experience. When in a state of ignorance one possible starting point is what (Bayesian) statisticians call an uninformative prior probability. Now in this case you'd assign a 0.5 chance the pilot is not AFK. Now if you have 100 trials, your chances of 1 or more ganks is essentially 1--i.e. 100%. In fact, your chances of 40 or more ganks, assuming you undock, is still pretty high about 97%. So staying docked (if that is the only system you can rat in) is sensible.

So AFK cloaking basically is a way of throwing some sand into the gears for the PvE pilot. By doing it you take a guy who would over a period of time make a few billion isk to making...nothing. Is it content denial? Yeah, it is if you limit yourself just to PvE...that is the point...resource denial....denial. Keeping someone from something. Is it bad for the game? I don't think so, this is a sandbox game where the emphasis is on emergent game play--i.e. players working within the game structure to come up with ways to do various things. In this case, it is to cause damage to an enemy indirectly. Totally and 100% valid.

Also, there is a game balance issue here. Remember all that discussion about inflation? Remove AFK cloaking alone and you will have a higher rate of inflation, 100%. Absolutely no doubt. At all. So, if inflation really is near and dear to Andy's heart simply removing AFK cloaking with no other check on PvE income via rat bounties....bad thing.

So, no changes to local...no changes to AFK cloaking. And to be abso-freaking-lutely clear here an AFK tag...that is a mother freaking buff to local. So, no to the freaking AFK tag no matter how it works. And no to a freaking log off timer either unless you address the game balance issue above. If you can't...then buzz off.

Let me also explain the inflation comment above, thanks to Eve Search I see some had some issue with this.....

Basically, inflation occurs when the growth rate of money in an economy is faster than the growth rate of real goods and services (I hope I don't have to explain the elementary concept of real goods and services...oh heck....these are actual goods and services. A car is a real good.) Oh, and it was Andy that found that awesome quote attributed to Mankiw, Abel and Bernanke (definitely experts on macro economics and monetary theory to be sure).

Now, suppose we come up with a way to remove AFK cloaking but do nothing to add additional constraints on ratting. Income from bounties will go up. This is an extremely reasonable inference given that no more AFK cloaking means ratters can actually spend more time ratting and earning more isk via bounties. That isk via bounties means there is now an increase growth rate of isk in the game. Now going back to the statement, inflation is a result of having a growth rate of money faster than the growth rate of real goods and service, we can see that if the New Eden economy already has a positive rate of inflation removing AFK cloaking will absolutely have to result in more inflation due to the higher isk incomes from ratting bounties.

To the extent that CCP and players care about the inflation rate, AFK cloaking is something that keeps the inflation rate lower than it otherwise would be.

For this to not be the case, AFK cloaking has to result in absolutely no disruption of ratting at all. If this is true, then why are we going on about AFK cloaking if it has zero impact on people's ratting. Instead we see people going on and on on these forums with thread after thread about the horribleness of AFK cloaking.

So the answer has to be: no AFK cloaking ----> higher rate of inflation. With out any doubt what so ever. Otherwise the is zero problems with AFK cloaking. Everyone who complains about it, has complained about it or will complain about is is a liar...because it if it does not increase the rate of inflation, it must not be denying content or reducing ratting incomes.

But not at anwhere near the rate that it injects raw isk into the system.