Assembly Hall

An Overview of the Topic

Its common knowledge that players in game use the threat of hotdrops to disrupt other players activities in game. While I don't disagree with the tactic itself the ease of use and power of the cynosaural generator is overwhelmingly imbalanced.

In the last few months I have been involved in the Hub-Zero Project, a drive by some players to create a NRDS area in Stain. In that time the area we have set up operations has become somewhat of a mecca for cyno alts permacloaking in systems. We have had up to 7 at once in the 4 main systems we use.

Recently I had to petition one of them for following me around, for being abusive and harassing and calling me a pedophile, insinuating that I am watching child porn and other pretty foul comments.

We have had multiple blops drop on exploration cheetahs doing relic sites.

What I am proposing in this thread is not the elimination of cynosaural fields but an adjustment to make them less of a griefing / harassment tool and more of what they should have been intended to be, a logistical tool.



The Problem

The issues of cynosaural field generators can be summed up using the following points:

1. They are too easy to train - it takes 5 days of training to be able to fit one.

2. They are too cheap to deploy - you can fit one on an Ibis. It costs a couple of hundred isk to generate a field to bridge in 250 ships.

3. They are too easy to fit. They can be fitted easily on a newbie ship, can be fitted on virtually any ship in game. You can fit one on an arazu and tank the arazu to have 50k ehp quite easily.

4. They cannot be countered with any of the usual mods in game, such as ECM.

5. They do not follow the normal rules around deployment. They ignore the cloaking recalibration delay that most offensive modules are required to follow (because they were likely not seen as offensive modules when they were developed).

6.

Description of the IBIS without cynosaural field generator:

Development
The Caldari Ibis rookie ship is a small but stout vessel that fits admirably well as a cargo hauler or small-scale miner. Its reliability makes it a good choice for novice ship captains.


Description of hte IBIS with cynosaural field generator:

Development
The Caldari Ibis rookie ship is a small but stout vessel that fits admirably well as a cargo hauler, small-scale miner or agile fleet carrier capable of holding 36 trillion m3 of ships and their pilots. Covert pilot cloaking hides the pilots contained in its hanger bay from showing up in local. Its reliability makes it a good choice for novice ship captains.



The solution:

Cynosaural field generators should have two modes.

Mode 1: Untargetted activation. 30 second delay on activation reducing by 20% per level of Cyno Field theory (minimum 5 s. Removal of beacons - beacons were put in before easy scanning was implemented and as such were a counter to people dropping cyno's in impossible to get to safes. They are no longer necessary when you can scan down a ship in 30 seconds or less. Not affected by ECM.

Mode 2: Targetted activation. Follow the usual rules of targeted offensive modules. Affected by ECM.

Vote if you would like to see this.