Jita Park Speakers Corner

To the op - How do they attack you while cloaked, afk and apparently playing another game? That's a true skill.

As a scanner/explorer I get nervous when people talk about nerfing cloaks and 'afk' cloakers. Mainly because when I'm scanning and hacking I don't have time to reassure everyone in local that I'm not there to kill them (because my ship can't). Cloaking is the only defense explorers have, even in fleets, you lock us we're usually dead soon after.

Also until you can prove that they are afk and not simply 1) ignoring you 2) busy with other things or 3) not constantly looking at local because their fleet has lookouts, then just stop assuming they are afk.

Oh noez, CONCORD dropped on my under 10 million isk destroyer! Whatever shall I do?!

Oh yeah, blap your 200+ million mining barge on my way down. If you are one of those people who fits deadspace and faction mods to tank your Hulk, I might have even made a day's worth of mining profit off you.

100% chance of the feds showing up to blap me means I can quantify the exact risk of losing my ship in a gank, so yes, it most certainly exists.

I think there is a very slight issue. I am about 3 months in to Nullsec and agree that AFK cloakies can be a pain. I also agree that using cloakies can be a very good tactic in shutting down mining, PvE, and exploration operations. I have been on the giving and recieving end of this. So, what we have is a good tactic for shutting down "carebear" operations but no real useful tactic (that I'm aware of) for stopping such tactics.

What I love about eve is there is always something that can kill something else effectively. A Ying to the Yang so to speak. While I don't think the "cloaky issue" will kill eve in the slightest, I do think there needs to be a danger, HOWEVER MINOR AND SLIGHT IT MAY BE, to a cloaky bomber sitting in a system for hours. The idea from the original post that a cloak runs off of a fuel or ammo isn't a horrible idea. PvP all day and you tend to have to run back for ammo at some point. The solution to running out of ammo or fuel is perhaps a cloaky hauler running ammo back and forth. That way a carebear operation can still be shut down, but it has to be a team effort to do so. One person with two accounts could still do it, but at a greater effort.

Cloaky camper is a non-issue.

The real point is that you should either:

1) be able to evade or deal with whatever pops out of that covert cyno, if and when it goes up

2) afford losing your spaceships if you cannot

You guys whining about AFK cloaked players ... What would you do if CCP ever did implement the suggestion that cloaked ships no longer show up in local? Would you ever undock if you realized there could be a dozen or more cloaked ships out there just waiting to pounce?


For the clueless (OP included): Nullsec is not safe. Nullsec never was safe. Nullsec is never going to be safe. People can and will shoot you in Nullsec, and they are supposed to do this. Your "landlord" can't protect you against the random gangs, only against full-scale assaults on the system. Protect yourself, or leave.

Hisec is where you go if you want minimal, if any, chance of people shooting at you.

Asking for Nullsec to be safe only results in people laughing at you. And so they should.

The last comment I saw from CCP about cloaking AFK or otherwise was "working as intended". I'd post the link but it has been a long while and I'm having trouble locating it. Apologies for that.

In fact AFK cloaking seems to be doing a fairly good impression of being dead subject from CCPs side as far as I can see. I am lead to believe this by the fact that AFK cloaking threads tend to be shut down almost as quickly as they are opened as redundant and that there hasn't even been a throw away comment by a dev on the subject one way or another in years.

Perhaps if the average AFK cloaking thread wasn't someone whining about how they and their corps moved to Nullsec and suddenly they can't undock and their revenue stream is being impacted by a single individual sat in local it might gain more traction as a subject.

If people are prepared to allow someone watching Netflix or PvPing on another account to keep them bottled in station they should really take a long hard look at the type of space they moved to and why rather than crying to CCP.

I fell asleep at a gate & woke to the sounds of my ship being destroyed, didn't even have time to warp my pod out, lost it too. (Sleep, even at the keyboard is all the same as AFK)

And, there are combat probes that show who's where, right?

And if "they" are AFK, I warp right on past them, they can't react fast enough to point or lock me, right? (unless I warp into a bubble, I can warp past anyone, yes?)

They will never have to decloak. They just need to gather more heavy water from your tears.

What about having the right to go afk for an entire day, just to prevent the enemy from mining/ratting? What can the enemy do?

"Cloaked neutral! Reship to pvp! Keep warping to belts all day, maybe we catch him!" Or just sit in station. Or mine, and accept the fact that you will lose a ship. Friends protecting you? What's more boring - mining, or sitting in a pvp ship watching someone mine?

I won't renew my subscription because all EVE isk generating activities are totally boring. Other than that - yes it's a fun game.
And - there are also cloaky campers, I can do nothing about, no matter the size of the fleet I am in. Cloaked neutral = dock and wait. Or, reship to pvp and wait. Or move to another system, and repeat the same stuff.

"Why don't you kill the camper? Do pvp or go to high sec!!". Well - he's cloaked...