Assembly Hall

Removing local chat and (AFK) cloaking - Two subjects that have been done to death. Let's waste some time discussing a combined solution that CCP will never implement!

a) Enforce constellational chat as local is now. All players online in a constellation show inside this channel, but there is no indication of which system they are in. Players also show in Local as they do now, with one exception...

b) Any player with an active cloaking device is removed from Local. They cannot be seen there, and in turn cannot see anyone else there themselves.
Should the player be decloaked they return to the Local channel as normal.

c) Introduce at least one method for identifying or forcibly decloaking any cloaked ships. I'm keeping this intentionally vague as it will be a key balance issue, but possible methods include:

• Re-purpose Supercarrier ECM burst into anti-cloak pulse.
• Add a similar module for other ships - such as the Rorqual - to encourage it to be on-grid during mining ops.
• Starbase modules that can be manually controlled to emit an anti-cloak pulse within a given range (could require sov upgrade to use).
• New scan probes that will confirm the existence of a cloaked ship within a relatively small area, without giving away the exact location.

The idea behind all this is that it's still entirely possible to rack up the sneaky kills with clever use of your cloaking device, but a savvy player will still have various options to use before making themself vulnerable. Some of the suggestions at the end are deliberately intended to play on the risk/reward aspect of EVE - such as putting out capital ships to reduce the risk to smaller ones, while still facing risk themselves.

This part is bad. What you're doing is nerfing the **** out of wormholes (for those things that could be used in wormholes) or setting a precedent for the nerfing the **** out of wormholes by breaking cloaks and the ability to remain in a system unknown and unseen gathering vital intel. The probes... horrible idea for that very reason. The other three... any sort of cloak-breaker introduced sets the precedent for adding or expanding in the future, which could spill over where it's not needed.

Simply by not seeing the cloaked vessel in local you've eliminated the whole "AFK cloak scares me" thing. Big thread in Features and Ideas already on that concept.

This part is also bad. We don't need to make cloaked ships overpowered, and thus depopulate nullsec further than it already has.

Ok, make cloaking remove you from local, so that if you jump into a system, occupants get a brief flash of you in local, then everyone sits around in the intel channel wondering "are they still here?" after you cloak and are invisible to them on grid, warping around and exploring the system with impunity.

Or make local constellation wide, then when someone gets ganked out of nowhere, everyone sits around in the intel channel wondering "are they still here, can we form a gang to kill/bait them, wait, are they still here for us to even do that?" (don't rat when a red is in the constellation could be an answer to this).

Or remove local altogether so no-one knows what the hell is going on, anywhere, outside of someone elses misfortune reported in the intel chan for others to read about.

Part of me sort of wants this so i could play with it, but it would turn eve into a game of marco polo.

1) Stop posting.
2) Stop posting.
3) Stop posting.

Yes, please make covops overpowered.

This is exactly why I posted the thread for discussion - to get another view and get people to raise issues with the ideas suggested. I honestly hadn't considered the implications for wormholes. Of course there's no reason for that to be an issue. Local in wormholes would stay as it is now, this change should only affect regular space.
Cloak-breaker or cloak-finders could also be very easily restricted too. The Supercarrier and sov-based POS mod ideas are obviously impossible to use in wormholes. Mods or special scan probes can be made unusable in the same way as cyno gens.


I disagree. The main effect should be 'always scared', as you never know if a system you jump into already has a cloaker. I think this will lead to alot more conflict in EVE in general, as people who don't take care when moving around will quickly be caught out.

Another facet of the change is that it rebalances the concept that cloaked people can have an effect on a system simply by being present in it. This is especially evident in the case of stealth bombers camping jumpbridges, who can choose to when to engage, do so already aligned out, and are very hard to trap unless they make a mistake.
By removing these bombers from local and stopping them from seeing whats coming, it adds more opportunities for them to be surprised.

This for the most part.

The solution is just change local to WHS style...done.

No ones going to give a crap about the status of a cloaked ship because you won't even see the damn thing in local.

This bull#### business of removing cloaked ships from local and them not seeing local is utter tripe...whomever came up with it originally needs to be drawn...quartered..tarred..feathered...and shot.... and not necessarily in that order. (And for the record...the OP isn't the first one who brought it up...this is the 10th time I've seen this crap)

TLDR - REMOVE LOCAL - ALL ELSE IS NON-RELEVANT

That would be me. Please be gentle on the quartering.

The idea was to find a middle ground regarding removing local and breaking cloaks which wouldn't affect wormholes (where there's already no issues). The idea of cloaked vessels truly disappearing would also end the "afk cloak" threads.

I'd prefer things be left alone and people grow some balls and stop whining because they're afraid of the person that's not at his computer, but in lieu of some of the horrible "break cloak" ideas that people were spewing out there (which would break wormholes by making them safer than high sec) I suggested that.

Yes *force* the 93% of eve subscribers to play in a way that only 7% actually chose to play. That will be great for subscription numbers.