Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Think of the expression 'Catch 22'

Local listed players so that we would see each other, and chat.
EVE is a social game on many levels, and this allowed us to make first contact with new potential friends.
When this is all it did, noone had a pressing need to want local delayed, as it was not yet being used for intel.
(If you saw a name you thought was hostile, you might look it up, but it ultimately was not a big deal back then)

Jump forward in time.
One alliance figures out how to use a third party application that quickly identifies whether a new name in local was hostile.
Suddenly local becomes a reliable early warning system, since the name appears for residents before the newly arrived player can even finish loading the system.
CCP determines that it is more practical to just give everyone this ability to immediately know standings, rather than simply try to block that one group. (It may not have even been possible to block them, for practical reasons)

Since the ability to use local gained the effective value of intel, it's use became relied upon as the go-to for warning of hostiles in the immediate system at a glance.

Having value as intel, it would now cause player outrage, if it were to lose that value as intel.

because then noone would pvp roam in anything else

Well here is one, people are leaving game, as they fell they have no alternative to make isk to continue playing. I know of a handful that have actually left that think this mechanic is being used as an exploit to harass people. I agree also, as that is exactly what it is used for, to slowly drive people out of a system.

But here is the funny part. Less people playing, less people to harass ingame for campers. Less money for CPP, which spells demise of the game. And i know the trolls can not wrap there heads around this, which is the funniest part of it all.

If it wasnt for local he wouldnt spend hours sitting in your system waiting for you to feel safe.

this has everything to do with local chat.

without local all industrial activity goes to high sec as hulk is literally falling apart when you just look at it. mac is just about the same and skiff still pack little punch and has no chance on it own with anything bigger than a cruiser, tho it is the only that might survive lon enough for help to arrive if it up against an individual or maybe 2.

but then lets say you took away local this makes BLOPS way the hell overpowered. no notice no defence short of being in the middle of a fleet defending you. you just made people sit in belts with miners and do nothing else.

you just made sure MY JF, F, RORQ, never leave the pos or warp anywhere other than POS/STATION, they have becomes too easy to catch.

in WH you might get some chance to warp something out before everything lands on grid.

you remove local you just forced people to camp and watch gates to make sure nothing has come though

you made the game boring for a large number of individuals. who now have to sit there permanently. or on shifts. just watching the screen.

This has probably been stated since.. frankly, I'm not reading 66 pages but..

You can't hide if you're putting out any kind of noise in real life so let's look at real life cloakers.. submarines..

Movement in EVE is already highly unrealistic, almost immersion breaking compared to more realistic games like, say Vendetta.. trying to involve detection involving this would be a bad idea, even though it's part of how we find subs in real life who are basically doing the cloaky trick.

So we're left with signal noise.

You are putting out a signal to connect to local, or any channels at all. Especially if you talk in any of them. While communication with your friends can be round aboutly done with voice options outside of the game, there's no reason to allow cloakers to see any chat channels at all.

Cloakers should not be able to send signals to anything. They already can't with drones is my understanding (which is why I never trained to use cloaking on ANY of my characters), but you still can with probes and you can interact with things as long as you're between that 2.5 and 2 kilometer zone of interaction and oh the noez mah cloak dropped!

These should not be things you can do. I know this deals with more than afk miners but really.. it's the most logical way of handling it. You're putting out electronic noise, lots of signals, which others should be able to pick up on.

Either make it so they CAN'T do these things, or that if they are (and give them the option to turn channels back on, ect, but have them default to off), that there are powerful signal receiver modules which can detect ships doing this. Make them less effective than normal means of hunting a ship down which isn't cloaked, but it gives you the option of finding someone who isn't completely running silent with zero intel on the outside world.

I always felt cloaking in game should play out more like submarine warfare anyways. =)

"These hostiles are cloaking, because they determined the effort to bypass your defenses required it, and they wanted to hunt something of economic value."

again how exactly? afk cloaki camping a system for weeks on end just forces people to move, as trying to defend against a hotdropper takes drastic measures, especially when your defending a mining fleet thats about as fragile as a paper baloon.

this is not hunting this is being a troll

like its been stated AFK cloak camping hasn't hurt anyone because all activity in system dies or moves elsewhere as doing otherwise is suicide.

I have been saying since the beginning of this thread that this mentality is false. You can not use this as a valid argument for your side when you know that removing local would create a HUGE imbalance in the game overall and it would destroy null.

If local didnt advertise my presence so blatently, id be much less inclined to sit in a system for upto a week in an attempt to numb my targets to my presence, and much more inclined to actively roam and hunt.

Under the current system, actively hunting puts me at a disadvantage because everyone can see me and knows i am active. My best hopes of getting the jump on my enemy is to appear inactive. So i hang around in a system for days, apparently doing nothing.

And THAT is what everyone else here is saying, You're just adding in a whole bunch of nonsense about non-consensual pvp and vapid notions of how null and cloaky camping works.

Currently xxPizzaxx has deployed to npc delve. They have roughly a dozen cloaky camping alts with covops cynos sitting in any system of notable activity. Those alts are not manned 24/7, but they are online, in space 23.5/7. In their staging system, the attacking force is online, in space, cloaked up. They have scouts 1 jump out in every direction. This is an operation of roughly 50 toons.
These guys are able to strike targets because there is no viable method to counter their hotdrops. Everyone knows what a trap looks like, and it's just a waiting game to see who gets bored and logs off first. The problem is that the cloaky campers don't have to log off, they can just get up from the computer and leave their toons logged in, an no one is the wiser.

The activities that are available in null don't support a defensive fleet protecting the miners in order to keep the campers at bay, so it's a completely unfeasible course of action.

So for anyone who is smart enough to avoid losses, the game is effectively halted, because the campers don't want to fight, they just want to gank. This is what the majority of campers want.

So your "unintended consequence" is the most boring possible outcome in this situation, and it keeps happening. Something needs to be done to allow the tables to be turned on cloakers more often (during active gameplay), instead of just making it easier to find unsuspecting targets. Because that's not a fight. That's a gank. Yesterday I had the wonderful opportunity to kill a vexor navy issue with a gang that wasn't even cloaky, just because he wasn't paying attention to local. Everyone else docked/possed up. Was the gameplay exciting? No. Would it have been different if we could cloak? No. Would we have made everyone's gameplay crappier by sitting in system for hours on end, waiting for them to come out so we could gank them? No.

This is the reality of cloaky camping. It's a ****** mechanic, just like stagnant sov. The solution isn't to make the stalemate even more stale, but to add in a new element that allows for more action instead of just reaction. Delaying local or even removing it is a shortsighted tactic at best, especially with the modes of travel available in nullsec. All that would do is make people less likely to risk ships. I'm not sure if you know this, but most people don't like their ships getting blown up for nothing.

If you put in a way to hunt cloakers, then you have actually created something for both hunters and prey to actively do. Then it would only take 1 person to engage 1 camper. That sounds like a reasonable balance. If you further restrict it to an on-grid function, then you ensure that the activity still requires a higher degree of vigilance by the defenders.

I would argue that this would actually create more content because cloakers would no longer be able to just wait for a weak target of opportunity, but would have to prepare themselves for a higher rate of failure, or even prepare a strong counter to the defenders. The defenders, by feeling that they are safer would be more willing to risk ships and shiny things, as well as log in for more activity when they feel they have a chance to defend themselves.

Area suppression would still be possible, but it would take more effort on the part of the attackers than simply logging in a bunch of alts and leaving them cloaked up in space.

I'm not advocating an absolute defense against cloaking. Not even remotely. I am advocating a way to engage more players in actually engaging in active gameplay. Cloaking is an important tactical and strategic element in Eve, and I would be absolutely horrified if we made it require cap or have some sort of a refresh button. That would be absolutely (cloaky) game-breaking.

Any "solutions" involving removing local would just make for a more stagnant and empty nullsec environment. Targets would dry up because people don't like living under constant threat. That is why most players live in high-sec right now. Think about the actual effects. Sure, people who love ganking would be able to pounce on people more often - for the first while. But is that guy who lost 2 paladins this week able to replace them faster than he loses them? Or will he just give up and go do incursions? Or even unsubscribe, because there's nothing else that's interesting?

You might say "good riddance" or "htfu" or "he didn't deserve sov anyways". But then who is going to hold sov? All the hunters? And how will they make enough to pay their sov bills every month? Especially since they can't rat or mine due to other bored bands of roamers running around, looking for ganks?

Living in null is already difficult enough. You can see that simply from the population distribution of Eve. Making it harder won't make the game better for anyone in the long term.