Player Features and Ideas Discussion

i think my idea was inded to make the cyno tactic obselete in that the cloaker would have to uncloak and wait a bit somewhere. leting players that accualy are active att the keyboard and indeed do use directional scan and if he see a cov ops ship he would then know that a fleet might be incoming, he could then either get back to safety or send in his own fleet, depending on what options the defender accualy have. if he was a bot he would still die due to not being att the keyboard and accualy making sure he is safe. the cloaker would ofcourse uncloak somewhere safe. and if he then noticed probes on dscan he could cloak back up and flee. meaning that both sides would be ready for an assault. instead of the attacker being the one that controls apsolutely everything.

if you wherent fit for pvp but for pve. would you do a pvp fight?
i sure as hell would not. i would try to get a pvp fit ship instead.
also, removing local would not make players feel safer. it would make them feel even less safe.
(how can i be sure there isent someone outside the station ready to hotdrop my ass the exact moment i undock?)
small groups wont stand a chance against big groups with tons of titans.
im trying to come up with a way to make it so that both sides accualy might have a chance. instead of the attacker with the fleet that got 10 times the amount of people the smaller group have.

and how is the small group suposed to do anything if there is no local? the problem is that the smaller group wont stand a chance against a bigger group. wich is the reason why people hide when afk cloakers apear. they know that no matter what they do they cant win. and geting rid of local is no no way gonna encorage anyone to do anything.

you have a point in that smaller groups could take down bigger groups with suprice attacks. but how can you be so sure that goons and such wont use it to no end to go after easy kills? small groups that wish to grow wont stand a chance cause they will be taken down before they even get a leg to stand on.

On point one you're provably wrong. This assumes that all players can do three things all the time, which they can't, namely, that they pay attention perfectly, that they utilize the most rational practices (i.e. ratting aligned, using correct fits etc,) and that they react to situations optimally- which they don't. Which brings me to the proof: look at a killboard. Ratters and industrialists (even insta-align travelceptors) get caught in null every day, even in places, such as near the ends of dead end pipes, where statements like yours dictate it should be impossible.

Secondly, I'm not asking for risk do disappear. The risk index that you mention in nullsec swings far away from that of highsec, even without cloakies to consider. When you consider the time loss (this depends on where you live of course) and average losses incurred during activities, null PVE isn't really as profitable as some people here seem to believe for most players. Not everyone is ratting in a nyx or four smartbombing napocs in a quiet system.



This is a big statement here. Your last sentence here is putting words in my mouth I've never said. I don't want them to go away, I just want a limiting factor placed on the indefiniteness of cloaks. Back to the first sentence, you're right; it might take equal or greater numbers to beat a group, but- and this is important, with a cloaked camper you can not only know exactly what you need to 'win' an encounter, but you can initiate it when you're most likely to win. That's simply too much initiative to put in the hands of an aggressor.

Fourth, and this is kind of out there, but you're not safe even in highsec. I'm not trying to sound like a jerk over any of this, but you're not meant to be safe anywhere in EVE, highsec being no exception. I think though that afk cloaking is an issue that should have been dealt with during power projection changes (as that's what it's a fulcrum for) because they destabilized the balance of risk/reward too much. Like power projection, they need to be brought in line enough so that they're still used, but not as ubiquitous.

1
I never claimed everyone played perfectly.
I said I could do a successful avoidance reliably, if I was prepared.
You can describe as many kill mails as you want. All that proves is that local gave them the warning, by adding in a non-friendly name, and they were not prepared to act on it.
It's a two part process, and local chat never fails to do it's part flawlessly.
That leaves the player.
They are not playing against the hostile, not yet.
They are playing against the clock. Knowing that under ideal circumstances, the hostile has to align and warp, travel in warp, and land on grid, all at the same point in time when their name first appears in local.
NOTHING a hostile does can remove those precious seconds of reaction time the PvE pilot has, allowing them to hit warp to a safe location.
All you are arguing on at this stage, is that a hostile has a chance to meet their target, IF the target screws up first.

2
Agreed, null is not a printing press for ISKies, but it is still more return on investment than high sec.
And quite arguably, in many circumstances, high sec can be far more dangerous compared to friendly sov null.

3
You are correct, I did draw a conclusion which may not have been appropriate.
In the event a cloak becomes limited, the operator will either be aware of this, and leave, OR actually be AFK when their cloak fails, and become a kill mail.
You want a limiting factor placed on the indefiniteness of cloaks. Under simplest terms, that means a timer which would expire, require resetting, something which could only be accomplished by a non AFK player.
THAT would then be enough to tell you that the name in local is, in fact, not AFK, but alert enough to monitor their ship, and quite possibly stalk possible targets around the system.

4
A cloaked player only represents a potential risk.
More to my point, they are the only counter to the ships which form the backbone of many alliances economic power.
Without the ISK generation, and in many cases ore and other dropped loot, they cannot sustain replacement of fighting ships.
This creates a new way to destroy your opponent's fighting ability, by starving it out of existence.
Now, in a more competitive aspect, these ships would actually not need to AFK cloak. They would show up, get their fill of kills, and be off.
AND / OR, maybe the defending players would kill them.
Either way, the path for resolution would be faster, but without the psychological drama it currently has.

Mags enjoys this part, so I respectfully submit that this is already a balanced and functioning part of the game, requiring no changes.

You are repeating this empty argument again, even though it was refuted few pages back. But ok, lets waste few dozens of words to state what's obvious and what was already mentioned in this thread.

You see, I could take your wording and use it – as is – in whatever I'm currently arguing about null. Or I could replace “null” with “low-sec” and here I have an omnipotent argument against changes in low-sec. Don't like d-scan changes to recons? Go take this template add "low-sec" after "null" and you are done. Perhaps you aren't satisfied with bubble mechanics? Here you have a ready-made argument, no need to change even a letter.
Why is this argument so omnipotent (read: devoid of merit)? Because there is nothing in it but two obvious truths about pretty much every game out there:
- if you have >40,000 players at peak hours, statistics say many dozens will screw-up, this way or the other, and will end up on a kill board,
- humans aren't perfect; they may not react optimally, they may not pay attention, etc.

Does this mean no balance change should ever be made to any game? For you know: what's written above is statistics and basic truths about human attention. They hold whatever game and whatever balance changes you are considering...

So what brought us to this fallacy?

Balancing game is about weighting certain mechanics against other mechanics on the basis of their merits. Its not about denying the need for changes by invoking the law of truly large numbers – and that is what Bullet is doing here(*). Its also not about denying the need for changes by invoking shortcoming of human attention. Whatever stupid mistake you imagine, its likely to be happen dozens of times daily, because – you see – a lot of players are logging in every day. What do these basic statistical facts tell us about d-scan, recons, cloaking, jump fatigue or sov mechanics? Not much. Not much indeed. Because they simply aren't arguments in a balance debate.

I pointed this out before, albeit within two sentences – which seemed more than enough, given how pathetic the argument is in the first place. But hey... we're wasting words in this thread, aren't we?

(*) Of course Bullet is invoking that law in a very one-sided way. One could easily say that there couldn't possibly be any balance issues behind afk cloaking, when so many asteroids are mined every day. So why we are reading this fallacy one way but not the other way? ... Because some players will never accept any possibility that the game mechanics may let them be ganked. We know that since like... page 10.



Yes you are asking for risk to disappear by advocating a change that make local a perfect early warning tool. And please don't repeat again how 40,000 players will still generate kills or how someone may not pay attention while ratting. You are confusing risk with ineptitude.

Its the only counter to the insta intel that is local.

They require something to be in local to jump to, the second their cyno ship enters local the are seen.

AFK cloaking is the only thing that can counter local intel.

kill boards show, people have found a way around it without AFK cloaking. Not that I wouldn't love to see it gone, but definitely not as a solo change.