Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Some love em, some hate em with a passion, but cloakers in Eve serve a purpose: recon and surveillance. But they tend to turn into a hassle, namely 24/7 afk cloakers waiting on a 2nd account for a kill shot. I happen to love playing cloakers and hate those afk guys with a passion, which led me to think a bit about how the later ones could be dealt with without destroying the entire cloaking concept. Now that we have downtime anyways, I'd like to share these ideas.

There are several concepts on how to deal with cloakers, reaching from fuel-based ideas, special anti-cloaker probes to anti-cloaker doomsdays, expressing the various degrees of hate against them. Now Eve happens to be a place where possibilities are eventually exploited if they are just lucrative enough, and some players tend to have an impressive amount of money and nothing to spent it on. The same fact invalidates all ideas that are purely based on the availability of a certain thing to counter cloakers (e.g. very expensive items, fuel, upkeep, bling bling, you name it).

On the other hand a cloaking device serves a purpose, that is being able to fly into dangerous space unharmed and stay there for a while. And whenever an alliance likes to spy on another alliance, this ability is extremely valuable. A solution therefore should not destroy this primary purpose of a cloaking device, otherwise it becomes completely pointless to even fit it. This rules out ideas that reliably negate cloaking devices like probes, anti-cloaking ships or the "Doomsday of Revelation" (tm).

And finally Eve is a place where risk means potential fortune, therefore an active player taking a risk should have a chance to be awarded for it, or die a horrible death in a nifty explosion. In other words: the big issue is not the cloaking device or a player flying around cloaked, but the guy that sits 24/7 afk in his ship on a second account till there is an absolute guaranteed kill available, therefore negating the risk while annoying the hell out of everyone in the system. A solution therefore should target the afk guys and not the active players.


Summarizing these ideas an anti-cloking mechanic needs to:

• Must not destroy the primary purpose of cloaking.
• Be limited in use in general and not based on a ressource.
• Needs to work chance-based and never get close to 100%. Chance must be tied to the potential gain.
• Needs to give an active player a chance to counter the effect, while be a guaranteed death for the afk guy.

My final idea is this infrastructure upgrade:
Luminescent Ionic upgade
(Strategic upgrade module)
Description: Activating this module will cause a spread of ionized particles to be send throughout the system which react with a noticeable glow if they come in contact with a ship's shield systems. This allows scanners and probes to be able to detect ships to a much higher degree and even allow to be able to detect cloaked ships.

Effect: When activated gives a 10% increase to combat scan probe strength per strategic level of the system used in and causes all ships to glow (causing an effect like if a shield booster is used), therefore making it possible to scan for cloaked ships. The effect lasts for 10 minutes and can be reactivated only after a cooldown based on the strategic level of the system (12h/6h/4h/2h/1h).

There is as well an upkeep cost associated with this upgrade and there will be no notification to ships if it is used. A cloaked ship under the effect of this upgrade will still be cloaked and cannot be targeted, but it will be visible and a bracket will be displayed around the ship if it is in visual range.


Let's take two scenarios:
1. An afk player is on his safe-spot flying downwards at 300 m/s waiting for someone to wander in his trap. If the module is active the player probably won't notice the faint glow on his shields and continue to be afk. In the meantime other players have launched their scan probes, find the ship, warp to it, search around for the cloaky bracket,approach it and shoot it down.

2. An active player sits in his ship and does whatever an active cloaker does. When the upgrade is activated, the player might notice the glow of his shields and knows that there are now people scanning for him, he is practically visible. He can counter this by warping around safe-spots in hope that the scanning ships are not fast enough to find his safe-spots and wait for him the next time he warps to them. If the player doesn't notice the glow, he can still see the sudden increase of combat scanner probes on the scanner and react accordingly. If the player doesn't look at that and doesn't notice the glow, his last chance is to notice that someone just warped to his safe spot (usually a few km behind if the cloaky is moving) and approaches his location. If the player tries to leave the system, he still has to get through a potential gate camp that will see him and will be able to uncloak and then kill him.

As this upgrade will only be available in inhabited systems and tied to the strategic level (thus how long it is inhabited), most parts of the universe will not tamper with cloakers, or in other words: only systems where recon is valuable will be dangerous. In addition a smart and active cloaker will know that there is such an upgrade and will be able to counter the effect, however it will be dangerous and some might explode when they warp on their safe-spot the second time and a fleet is already waiting for them. Once the effect wears off, the cloker has 50 minutes to do whatever he wants, till the hunt starts again.

I think this will solve the issue with afk cloakers and give sovereignty holders a reasonable but fair tool against cloaking ships as well as some other strategic benefits.

Actually had to check that on Google.

Of course a well established alliance in 0.0 hardly has any issues with cloakers, they either cyno-drop them or run in groups big enough so that a single cloaker is no issue. However CCP wants to encourage players to go into 0.0 space even if they are not in a 100 ppl alliance. If you do not have the ressources and/or time to be active with 20+ players all the time, cloakers are a serious issue and drove people out of 0.0 on their own not only once.

Once they loose their first ships and after brainstorming come to the conclusion that their only weapon against a cloaker is a bait, there are several possible scenarios:

• They bait the cloaker, kill him, and he comes back because he has enough money/is paid by another alliance.
• They bait the cloaker, but he drops a cyno and his 20 friends on them killing everyone.
• They realize that the cloaker is not taking the bait and only hunts lonley mining ships/industrials when he is absolutely sure that they are no bait.

As a matter of fact if you cannot do anything in 0.0 you have a great risk without any income, therefore nullifying the reason to go into 0.0. And a single enemy should not be able to drive an alliance out of their space while being mostly afk.

That would be of course technically trivial to do, however it would for once provide an out-of-game solution (although an effective one), which would be kind of a break of the current game mechanics, and for second: my G15 keyboard is capable of repeatedly causing input while I am afk if I want to, so this solution would eventually turn into a war between CCP and hackers and turn out be become even more complicated than initially planned.

f*ck off, if we need anything at all thats no more afk cloak whines.
cloaking is fine, afk cloaking is fine, GTFO of nullsec if you cant deal with them.

Sorry, I totally fail to see the breaking of game mechincs by my suggestion. Please elaborate, for my curisouity?



I will refer you to this line in my OP: This won't stop the most determined of cloaking harassment

You are 100% correct. And I left 0.0 and will likely never return because of brokenness like this.

As I said, I don't do null anymore. It's a waste of time, just lose money trying to operate in null. High sec incursions is where the money is at anyway and quite safe from people who've nothing better to do than blow up mining barges.

How about a 14au (some radius) sov. Pos module that is fueled with stront (a large amount) like tower two day cycle reinforce quantity once activated pulses and decloaks ANY ship for a few seconds. If afk the pilot would not reactivate cloak.

have to agree with you

14AU? Good Grief! Why set the presedent for any player driven module to be able to impact ships nearly system wide? If your POS is close enough (14AU certainly is close to anything - especially since every POS will have one) to a gate what luck! you now have a chance to auto decloak blockaide runners approaching a gate. Didn't CCP have to nerf Titan AOE once because it was too large?... why allow this? No, I don't think the idea is a good one.

Again the only idea that makes sense as far as afk cloaking is concerned is removing the cloaked from local.