Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It has been established, that playing EVE involves meta gaming.

That means you can be considered to legitimately affect the game by being on voice comms alone, with no EVE client running at all.
That means you can be running the EVE client, but not paying attention to it, as many boosters do in friendly sov null. (It helps PvE output for mining and other activities)
It obviously means you can be actively interacting with your game client, regardless of whether players reacting to your presence are aware of your activities. (They can assume you are AFK all they want, buying and selling on the market is legit gaming)

Assuming players are being driven away from EVE by this, simply goes too far.
You are actually claiming some players cannot handle tactics used by other players, despite going into the no-holds barred section of a self proclaimed sandbox game.

To quote my grandmother, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen".

Emotional?
Is that how you rationalize my not agreeing with your views?


By the numbers, then:

1
Part A: You are not required to be active. Being logged into the game does not equal playing it, and being logged out of the game does not equal being inactive in it. EVE is not designed to be that simple.
Part B: Whether others are aware you are active, or not, is not your problem. It is most specifically their problem, especially if they modify their actions based upon assumptions regarding your presence.
Part C: The defending players in this context are already aware that a hostile name is present in their system, at no cost of effort or ISK. Should this intel be boosted to also include activity indicators, this gives even more information.
This will shift game balance towards risk reduction in sov null, assuming that AFK Cloaking tactics are influential.
(Frequent testimony in this thread claims that AFK Cloaking is responsible for decision making on their part)

2
You seem to draw the conclusion that uncertainty of a threat, is equal to certainty when regarding decision making.
From that, you seem to have concluded that sustained uncertainty should be blocked from game play.
I don't recall the module description for cloaks mentioning paranoia, but maybe it should list it as a side effect.

3
Logically, this would result in only consensual targets being offered, if your idea was successful.
After all, having been warned that the unseen hostile was active, it would be within the players choice whether to expose themselves, as well as what they were flying out of their available ships.

4
You believe AWOX'ing should also be limited by game design.
You may have missed it, but this game has bragged about awoxer potential as a selling point.

CCP If you want to be sensible understand that cloaks as they work now are not so much the issue, its the fact that people can be logged on while not playing and they do this for area denial, the simple and best way to deal with this is to have a flag on their character in local to indicate that this character has not done anything for an hour, as soon as that player who has been inactive for an hour or more does anything in game (see refinement below) there is a notification feed indicating that he is now active and the inactive flag removed. Its simple and you reward people for actually playing rather than those that do not.

This should only apply to people cloaked in hisec, lowsec and 0.0, not in WH's.

I would refine my suggestion further my making the use of D-scan, or warping as flagging the cloaky camper as active to all the people in the system using the Notification Feed, this can of course be toggled on or off so as to not impact major battles.

Probes would be covered by the one hour timer as they would have expired.

The suggestion is simple and elegant just like adding a tick box to corp to enable concord protection against Awoxers in 10 day wonder accounts.

Key points to note in my suggestion, this gets to the heart of the issue that annoys so many players who have been camped by people with 23.5/24 and 7/7 coverage by being logged in while they are at work and sleeping, by doing this people wanting to camp a system will have to actually get people behind the keyboard to play the game which is a really important thing to do if you move to occupancy type sov.

CCP you did the change to deal with awoxing in hisec which had a negative affect on new player retention, this change will also benefit player retention and revitalise 0.0 space.

This is the important part, because its an improvement to the current mechanisms but was never intended by me to be a complete protection, in other words it can be gamed or used by someone actively playing the game which is the important part and an hour is a reasonable amount of time to give in terms of uncertainty.

But the D-scan use and warping was what removed the inactive flag and did a Notification Feed, CCP wcould use other metrics to assess if the player wa inactive in addition to that to set the inactive flag.

Don't forget that I am also suggesting this in conjunction of the changes to Sov which may be occupancy based, though it does stand on its own in my opinion.

And when you say dumbed down, there is nothing dumber than logging in a toon and then heading off to work or to bed. There needs to be more people in 0.0 as a whole and this will help.

But I appreciate you thinking it through, because your suggestion on having new space without local in a previous thread was something that I hope CCP does and I respected you for that suggestion a lot.

First off as soon as you get a camper you gain as much intel as possible, you try to see what ship he had been reported in, you check the age and likely skill points, you check past kills and with who, you then work out who he may be working with and whether it will be a Titan bridge or someone using a carrier which certainly seems less in fashion in sov 0.0, or BLOP's which is very likely if they have the likely level of SP. If you are using caps then you have to assess the use of supers.

The scale can be a single guy in a cloaked frigate to being camped by PL or NCDOT backed up potentially by their full capacity as happened to me last year.

With a camper I always probed just in case and now with ships that have D-scan immunity its a must.

I can tell you that I have operated in systems with campers in them, I have killed a number of campers that had only themselves to attack with, I have also operated while being camped by a major alliance as I knew that they did not have the capacity to attack what we had on field. Or I have dropped down to cheap small ships to do something regardless.

I never intended it to be total security, as per 4., I knew full well that smart players would camp a certain location and they would use the flag to their benefit, but they are active and that is the important bit.

It was never to remove camping, but its to make it so that people cannot mindlessly park a toon in a system 23.5/24 7/7 and win Eve, if you want to camp someone you have to do it with active people, that is all I am interested in.

Whats the goal of this thread?

I have seen everything from.....

Nothing needs to be done
Remove local
Blow up PVE ships
Delay local
Make null into WH space
Hunt cloak with ships, probes, sov basic structures, or a flying spaghetti monster
Etc etc etc

So whats the goal? More PVP, safer miner, a combination of both?

What little experience I have with cloak players that decide to camp a system. They are normally trolling the residents. They are there to **** off the locals, grab a few kills and be a general annoyance.

Not shocked that some null sec players want to kick these people in the nuts. It's like when you were a kid and your brother would put his finger an inch from your face and kept yelling, "Not touching you, not touching you." You couldnt punch him cause mom would get mad but damn you really wanted to.

All I do is trade the market. I fly shuttles for the most part. But I cant blame the PVE players for not wanting to lose their 100mil isk ships to a 10 mil isk destroyer.

But then again I can see the PVP side to. I mean how frustrating is it to get blue balled all the time when you go hunting.

Personally I vote for making it harder for someone to just sit inactive in a system cloaked. How to do that? No clue. Let CCP figure that out.

Though if I were to go with an idea. I like the idea of fuel being part of the cloak. Though the fuel should be exotic dancers and sandwiches. Cause who is going to float in space without entertainment or food. Oh and maybe some beer.

Help me out with your reasoning.

Let's say Bob the miner is avoiding undocking, because he sees a name in local which scares him.

Will this affect him?

If not him, who should we expect to react differently, and why.

My direction has always been more along the lines of this.

Typical cloaking ship, (able to run the gauntlet and get past competent gate camps and patrols), is less capable of fighting than the typical PvP ship.
This can be due to genuine reduced capacity, or simply being wildly more expensive, or even both.
(Those combat recons still can't use covert cloaks, even though d-scan won't see them, so they aren't being blops-dropped or getting past many gate camps like their covert buddies)

The typical PvE ship, if not a miner, can simply be fit towards PvP defenses and damage.
(It may not be the ideal hull for PvP, but it can be made to work well enough here)

Mining ships, are limited if considering fighting here, but I can put together a procurer that I would be happy to go knocking heads with.

I want the covert shipping to square off against the PvE craft.
Leave the PvP defenders and the cyno behind.

It may just be something stuck on my wish-list, but I sure would love to see that become the practical direction taken.

I wish I could say that it was as simple as a missed detail.

The truth is, the PvE players within some areas of sov null, have grown accustomed to operating with certainty of their safe status.
They know noone is about to shoot at them, because no hostile, or even neutral, name is in local chat.
If one should arrive, they expect the hostile name to either leave, or feel their aggressive nature is confirmed by their continued presence.
"See? He would not still be here, unless he wanted to hot drop us... better stay safed up"

BY CONTRAST:
In high sec, a ganker is often neutral, and ignored because so many other neutrals are present. You discover their hostility when they begin shooting.
In low sec, players expect hostiles are a common presence, and often mistrust neutrals as being hostiles who simply have not started shooting them yet. Operating in low requires players to expect encounters, and prepare accordingly.

For fairly obvious reasons, an AFK Cloaking tactic is meaningless in high sec, as well as low sec, because there is no expectation of safety on the same level as null residents may be accustomed to.

Probably been said before, but I'm not patient enough to go through a 45 page threadnaught to find it:

Disallow capacitor recharge for cloaked ships, and make the mechanics of cloaking devices create a very slight capacitor drain relative to hull size while active - targeted for a 45 minute to 90 minute capacitor lifespan for most cloaked ships.

This achieves the following:

- An active pilot can periodically decloak to recover capacitor and maintain the safety of their cloak.
- AFK cloakers will periodically be visible on dscan and exposed to probes, providing a chance to turn the situation into an actual contest of pilot skills.
- Supers that currently rely on their cloak to get out of sticky situations will be at considerably increased risk
- Provides a strong incentive to log off rather than indefinitely cloaking.
- Increases the perceived threat posed by a cloaked ship (you'd know the pilot's been active recently)
- Eliminates a particularly annoying form of griefing.
- Encourages active, engaging gameplay.
- Maintains the ability to cloak up for brief time for RL emergencies, bathroom, food, phone calls, etc.