Assembly Hall

I'll leave it to ISD team, please delete this useless attempts to educate too.

The part where he can't activate any modules while cloaked.

Besides, afk gameplay is not exactly "penalized" in a lot of situations in EVE unless it's done so by the players. AFK mining is only bad because other people will gank you, for example.

A player who is afk cannot hurt you. This is not a problem.

A player who is at his keyboard is legitimately hunting you. This is not a problem either.

The only "problem" is that people feel entitled to have zero uncertainty, to not have to make a judgement call. Which is, to be quite frank, tough ****.

Let's look into the problem from another level.

What makes you vulnerable to covops hunters? Three things combined:

1. You can't fight back.
2. Hunters can easily track you and land in a close proximity to you whilst staying cloaked and without having to use any special tools, e.g. probes.
3. You are not aware of where exactly the hunter is located at this very moment and what is he doing.

Those who propose changes to how the cloak functions are addressing the third point. However, this is actually a minor issue compared to others. A pvp vessel (or a bunch of them) disrupts moneymaking activities; having the cloak, not having it. It doesn't really help knowing where this vessel/fleet is and what it is. You can try to fight back but odds are you will end up being hotdropped by a larger force.

First two points can be dealt with using the current mechanics. There are tactical and strategical solutions.

First point. The tactical solution: use ships that are able to fight back. Pretty much any cruiser size vessel equipped with 10MN MWD and weaponry that is effective in close range is able to fight back against most covert cyno ships. Stealth bombers can insta lock you upon exiting the cloak, but they are stationary (due to cyno) paper-thin frigates that can easily be popped. Force recons can't be killed that easily, but they have a reasonable recalibration time plus the time they need to lock a cruiser. You have more than enough time to overburn MWD and get out of cyno's point range.

The strategical solution is the one members of GSF enjoy. :) No, it's not about having a large friendly fleet ready to help you. This is an option when you want to punish a shiny black ops fleet once, but it's an extremely ineffective way to protect ratters in long run. What I'm talking about is afktars that are cheap, effective and reimbursable, so you don't really care about losing them every now and then. You can argue that you don't want to join those big coalitions. Well, the game is designed so you need to prove yourself worth of some isk faucets. And to prove yourself worth you need to either be an extremely good playeror to join to a large force. This is how EVE is, and whether it is right or wrong is not this topic's subject.

Second point. The tactical solution: move around. All covops gankers can confirm that it is very hard to catch a ship that is constantly moving with high enough speed and unpredictable trajectory. A cloaked ship has a limited speed and needs to avoid wrecks and other objects. Again, a 100MN AB/10MN MWD cruiser is what you need. Make bookmarks around the system you are ratting in and warp to them first and then to an anomaly at a random range instead of warping directly from anomaly to anomaly. If you use an immobile ship to run anomalies - you just ask to be ganked, and it's not the cloak mechanics to blame.

The strategical solution is to switch from belts/anomalies to some other isk-making activity, but it's not really relevant in this discussion.

tl;dr use the current game mechanics to deal with either the first or the second point, and nasty afk cloakers will not be a problem for you. No need to change the way the cloak works.

Intel channel are useless without local, since people moving though a set of systems would be invisible. Without removing power projection, the only thing that removing local would do is kill off PvE, since nobody would sit around in a ship that wouldn't be able to fight back, able to be dropped on in a heartbeat. Even the interceptor change nuked a massive amount of interest in doing anything non-combat in null, since it's so easy to get tackled now. Removing local would be the final nail in the coffin. The only reason to be in null after that would be PvP, which would be dominated by whichever group can drop the most on people quickly. The quality of ratting and mining in any given area would become entirely irrelevant, since nobody in their right mind would want to be a PvE pilot in that environment. Hell, even I'd start running around nuking ratters, and I'm an indy pilot.

When you talk about these type of changes, your problem is and always has been that you don't take into account the fact that people's behaviours would change. You treat it as both the hunted and the hunters would act exactly the same as they do now. That's not the case. The hunted would be exposed to increased risk and decrease activity, which the hunters would use the advantage of invisibility to increase activity.

I have removed a rule breaking post and those quoting it.

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Some of my own quotes have been restored to original, for the purposes of context.

I see no reason why you would expect a false positive.
When on grid to your scout, who can just as easily be sitting on an exit bottleneck, that icon showing it's either blue or green is not hard to notice.
If you miss the ID, for whatever reason, alert your downstream post to verify friendly.

ALSO: In all seriousness, why wouldn't a friendly pilot simply announce their presence when passing through?
Most changes at least leave local in some delayed form, and that assumes the friendly is not answering unknown reports in the intel channel by volunteering that they were passing through.

Bonus point, why shouldn't a solid alliance have an advantage by having better quality intel?


You always needed those people.
They simply need to undock, or leave the safety of the POS shields.
Unless it is a central hub for travel, most systems have only one or two possible gates expecting traffic.
If they were docked or hiding inside the shields, they had no way of knowing travel direction before.

Seriously, you are implying players close enough to be aware of gate flare, but unable to notice if the other guy cloaked up or showed on grid as hostile.
Unless your allies hide from you ...?


Point one, if the effort is too much, you are not cut out for the responsibility.
Point two: like a gate camp, someone in your alliance should be willing to step up. Perhaps they have a second account they can PvE with.
Null is built around team effort, and whoever does it better should expect better results.



Oh, I think you missed another change here.
If the risk increases, so does the reward.

In addition, your claims that people will be making a career out of doing things, (that they are implied to not like).
Let me point out how mining is so immersive, that people are documented quite often as being AFK while performing it.
How ratting has people min maxxing their ship fits so they can get it over faster, even despite how this compromises them towards PvP concerns.

Ultimately, anything described as a means to grind ISK, is like this career you have mentioned.
You may have noticed the other threads that suggest ways to make them less tedious, perhaps.

Next post!

Because it's hassle. Do you want to have to type in local every time you jump? EVE Online is a game. A game. Do you understand what a game is? It's something you play for fun, not to give you work to do between work.

No, you didn't need those people. People who happen to be about post in intel, and that is all. With the change you suggest, those people would become a requirement, and they couldn't be doing their own thing, they would have to be employed solely to run intel.

No. Point 1, it's a game. You are suggesting they remove fun from a game. You are smoking something special if you think a game developer is going to seriously consider taking fun out of a game so people are forced into "responsibility".
Point 2. And it's still a game. I really don't get how you don't understand what games are made for. You can't honestly expect people to "step up" and treat the game as a job to be able to progress in the game.

If reward in null was scaled up, you would never hear the end of the complaints from highsec. You'd also run into the issue where a group is able to game the system to earn the rewards with minimal risk (like what happens rights now) further creating an imbalance. And the majority of people would have too much increased risk, meaning that the level of reward is irrelevant. Basically null would only be populated by the most hardcore isk generators and thousands upon thousands of gankers looking for easy kills (since let's face the truth, your suggested change is only going to be positive for that single group of people).

And yes. PVE is pretty boring and is due a lot of improvements. That doesn't mean adding risk to it makes it any less boring. All that does is mean you do the same thing but risk losing it all a lot more often.

By perhaps 1 ship? Yes, I'm sure the hotdroppers will cry themselves to sleep over 1 additional ship in exchange for near invisibility. It's clear what you want from this change, easy kills. You don't hide your intentions very well. But please, proceed to tell me I'm wrong and that's not at all what you want.
And PvE ships are soft targets. That's a well known fact. That's why people gank them. You don't have to be fail fit for a PvE ship to stand no chance against a PvP ship. And the intel channels may show absolutely nothing, since there's not going to be a fraction of the population in null if your suggestion went through.

And I'd like to see more people of all types in null. that's why I don't support ludicrous ideas like yours which would effectively make null empty. Why don't you just head off to WH space where you can have what you want and stop trying to nuke the fun out of the game. You might consider EVE your career, but most of us don't.

Lol?
So everything you posted was fact then? Just carefully disguised as your opinions.


But you aren't talking about "more effort". You are talking about making it so that someone has to sit staring at a gate in order for their friends to play a game. There's a difference between making a game more challenging, and making it tedious.

Totally and utterly disagree. Your premise here is that chess is inherently more fun and rewarding than checkers, which is not the case. They are two different games, both of which can be equally fun and rewarding depending on taste.

Not to mention, you're not talking about chess and checkers, your talking about chess and wall staring. If you changed chess so that each side had to have someone sit staring at a wall, you'd have a hard time finding people to do that part for fun.

I don't think you are the person that gets to decide what type of person sov null is and isn't for. Until CCP employs you to make such calls, you're just a peon like the rest of us.

And again, it's not to do with working as a group. You want to force people to perform dull, tedious tasks to replace a current game mechanic so it's easier for gankers to come in and destroy null players, thus increasing risk. There are other ways to increase risk which don't involve players being required to turn EVE into a career.

Who said they aren't interested in group play? All I've said is that the current risk to reward ratios in null and high sec keep them playing in highsec, and that nullsec is underpopulated. It would be nice for people to be able to make the move into nullsec without feeling like they will instantly lose everything if they try. Sure, players that don't want anything to do with anyone else probably won't like nullsec, but then no change short of adding concord would encourage them to move. I'm talking about moving people who are borderline. What you are talking about is creating gank heaven and nuking the current population into oblivion, forcing null into a state of "PvP only".

Maintaining a post is beyond the possibility of being part of this game since it's boring as sin. Nobody wants to pay a sub to sit around doing nowt. Have you ever even remotely been involved in game design? Pointless mechanics with no gameplay aren't a good idea.

Where did I suggest that?

Erm, no, persistent effort isn't the problem, but it has to be gameplay. A mechanic that has no gameplay put in just so people like you can feel that null sec players are having to work harder has no place.

And you can't build mechanics based around multiboxing. Multiboxing is not a requirement of the game, so they have to treat all characters as individual players and build mechanics for that. Otherwise they risk blocking out all players who don't multibox.

This is obviously going to go on for all eternity, since you are dead set on your idea of tuning null into wormholes with force projection being something amazing, so I'm going to leave this here. Hopefully CCP aren't silly enough to blindly follow ideas like this which would ruin nullsec in the blink of an eye.