Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Initially, as the idea was presented, I rather liked it. I see a lot of dissent here though.

The part I liked was the pinging idea, though I think it needs to be balanced a great deal.

Here's how I would make it work, based on the OPs idea.

Make them specific probes with small scan ranges of 0.125 to 1 AU, so they only become practical to use when attempting to locate cloakers within a relatively small area. This also eliminates the restriction against afk cloaking for the most part, as ships may move to a reasonable distnce from any celestial and be virtually immune to any attempts to locate them outside of very determined individuals.

Change the message to a literal ping. Pop-ups are boring and mostly annoying reminders that serve to sever players from immersion.

Modify the probe cycle to 20 seconds or higher. Nobody wants to wait a minute to recycle their probes for fear of falling asleep while they're at it. Final probe cycle time is still dependent on skills of course.

Require a minimum number of probes to overlap the area which guards the cloaked vessel. Perhaps 3 or 4.

Prevent the probes from disrupting the cloak. It can be argued that there is a mass limit on what will effectively decloak a ship, and probes fall under that requirement. Nobody needs to be decloaked by a probe anyway.

Finally, only a pilot with max. probing skills and best equipment should be able to find a cloaked vessel by this method, and then only if they really are good. This eliminates casual decloaks by just anyone from occuring, and restricts the task to only those with the hardware and skill to do so. Location of a cloaked vessel only gives a result of a warp point within the vicinity of the last known position, as of the completed cycle of the probes. It may be anywhere from 20-30 kms off target, or even more.


This results in a limitation: cloaking is still only subject to the same rules for decloaking that have always applied.

Plenty of time is offered for pilots to become aware of the problem and leave the area, provided they are paying attention.

Intel gathering is a reward in itself; it shouldn't come without at least a little risk.

And of course, your idea is the epitome of balance.

Would you care to answer the question yet?

You mean the question whose answer is "if a cloaker doesn't show up in local, then he can't AFK cloak"? That one? Because that's certainly not used to push for a change which will make cloaks overpowered, no sirree.

Lets see if I can get all of the relevant info right, and it is basicly this: Cloak is not the cause of afk, and leave WH-space alone.
If we manage to come up with an idea that excludes these two major factors you might potentially agree.

One solution I can see then is. If a player does not give any inputs to the game in a set amount of time then that player will be timed out. Regardless of where said player is located, i.e. space or station.

There, cloak is untouched and wh-space is left alone.

@Twylla:

Mines were removed for a very good reason. Also, do you really want that cloaker to come into your system and start laying mines in every belt, anom, sig (s)he can find while you are logged off?
You think AFK cloakers are bad? Wait until the AFK mine-layers start flooding the system.

I like to try to find solutions to problems instead of bickering over the old ones . Even if the solution is not what was first introduced. That last objection seems to be the fall back to if all else fails, I've seen it been used in one of my older ideas aswell.
But then petitioning for botting might be easier aswell since very few people can play for 23 hours straight. So it might even solve that problem too!

It's not like you can't pick them up on a D-scan and snipe them. Furthermore, I'd think they'd need to be deployable by something with a serious cargo bay.

Sometimes old ideas are just ahead of their time. Real militaries dust off old concepts all the time and shine them up if they solve a problem.

They adjusted Supers hit points and drone ability. Fairly significant but nowhere near as detrimental to those caps as making cloaking a complete waste of time. Now if they removed supers doomsday weapon i'd concur.

I do count on however the sheer volume of cloak users, far greater than super pilots, shooting statues in jita. And for me on a personal level if I were screwed over i'd close my account. I may have if I had a super but i'm not oblivious to the difference between stat adjustment in a honest sense and making cloaking a logisitcs ridden waste of combat ability for the sake of risk averse players wanting absolute safety to farm null sec.

And i'm feeling real secure and comfortable in what I know of the EVE community and the devs that cloaking is going to stay just a viable and worthwhile to use as it is at present.

I don't think so.