Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If he is AFK he is not going to be chosing his time and place of attack.

Comparing to a cloak to an outpost, in the context that outpost dwellers cannot see what is outside... does nothing more than point out an obvious flaw in outpost design.
Seriously.

It breaks immersion to assume this technological wonder lacks the intel equivalent of a window.
Even a POS allows you to know what is on your grid.
Yes, I agree the ability to dock back up balances this somewhat.
You effectively can stick your head out and take a peek, knowing that you can't be popped before you can safely get back inside.

And a cloaked player, in current terms and context, is a glaringly obvious presence in hostile sov.

You first have to create his opportunity, before he can take the initiative to use it.
That means, you need to leave your protection, be it your own cloak, a POS or an outpost.

It has to be a mutual step towards the encounter, before it can happen.
It just happens, that whoever drops their protection last, also chooses the time of the event by doing this.

If the PvE player stays docked / cloaked / behind POS shields, then they equally have chose the time of the encounter.
That time is 'Delayed till all players decides otherwise'.

If the cloaked player dropped their cloak, and sat exposed and waiting, then the PvE player would be the one with the initiative.
It is ironic that the PvE player often would never know the ball was in their court, being unwilling to find this out due to expectations of risk.

Again, the idea that cloaks have any equivalence to structures is false. They are completely different game systems, with the structures requiring far, far more effort to deploy, far more expense to both erect and maintain, and represent a fair chunk of resources that is at risk and can't be made safe. The idea that a cloak should grant anything even approaching the same safety, much less surpass it, is just ludicrous. I agree that you should be able to look out stations. I would be fine with a delay to get back into one, honestly.

But even ignoring the false comparison, the local resident has to remain completely inneffective to be safe. He isn't projecting threat to anyone's space, he isn't setting up a drop on an unsuspecting victim, he isn't gathering Intel on enemy forces. He is immobile, in some cases blind, his location is known, if he begins to act it is clearly visible and he actually is as harmless as the cloaked character is claimed to be.

Except for station services or manufacturing, there is nothing a POS or outpost gets you in terms of safety that a cloak does not do both better and cheaper.

This idea has some thought behind it, but it has a couple of fatal flaws.

1. It places the burden of proof onto the cloaked player.
They MUST prove they are active, or else risk being popped after the pulse allows them to be located.

2. It still ignores the issue as it exists upstream from this debate.
Cloaking should be a meaningless threat, no more than just another hostile player in the system. And ironically, it is.
Here is what isolates this:

A. Non cloaked ships typically are unable to penetrate the red doughnut, (blue to it's residents).
This often leaves cloaked ships as the only possible hostiles not stopped by patrols / roams and gate camps.

B. PvE players scram when ANYTHING hostile shows up. It is simply a consequence of point A, that these are usually cloaked ships.
And, for reasons similar to why they managed to reach the red doughnut system in the first place, it is no easier to remove them than it was to prevent such access.
It is usually harder, since they can avoid the bottlenecks travel forces on them, like gates.

Stopping hostiles from reaching the system altogether is not usually suggested.
At least not directly. That would be bad for player generated content.

But, if the cloaking player's expectation is that chances of success on the initial entry won't be worth the effort, this kills everything else.
You can end up with the same result.

Do you really believe this load of bullcrap?

Are you safe when docked or when a cloak is active at a safe? Yes.
Can you activate a module while docked or when cloaked at a safe? No.

Seems there is some equivalency.

First, you can not use price as a balancing formula, because first, if it can be built, then it can be obtain for no price off the market, because you know, alliances and stuff... Second the number of ships cloak protects is one... 1...uno.

number of ships a pos can protect..... Hundreds, maybe even a thousand or two thousand before things start to get weird. Also, unlike a cloak ship, which if caught, will be popped, a pos has a reinforce timer.

stations, the number of ships they can protect is unlimited, and in sov, you can deny people access to that station that you don't like.

The reason why it /cheaper/ as you say, is because the number of ships that a cloak can /protect/ is infinitely smaller then a pos or station.

Please, quote the whole thing. You are trying to cherry pick the part you like and ignore the fundamental differences between a structure and a ship module.

Structures are expensive, at risk, require constant maintenance (necessitating shipping traffick which is also risky), and have known fixed points in space that can be camped to attack traffick. They require much effort and resources to put up, keep up, and keep active. A comparison between structures and a module is completely absurd, more so when the module is safer.

The cloaked ship is effective while cloaked, or this conversation would not exist. As discussed a hostile in system requires preperations and constant active vigilance from multiple players in order to not be flying idiotic. In effect it automatically and with no chance of being opposed allows a single character to reduce the value of the space it chooses to camp by almost half, at the very least. That should not be the work of a completely passive module with low fitting cost. They should not be so safe as to allow for unlimited safety while afk.

The cloak offers higher safety with more options than any structure, with less cost and no meaningful trade-off.

Absurd as you find it to be, the fact that disrupting intelligence by filling space with lots of uncloaked ships is possible proves that even local itself is more vulnerable than a cloaked pilot. It would require an alliance sized effort, similar in scale to what is making local useful in the first place, but that is what we call balance folks.

Your definition here is arbitrary.

It could be said, with equal factual support, that all ships online in EVE are in space.
This could be easily visible, and exposed for all to see.
OR, that could be safely docked in an outpost, sitting confidently behind POS shields, or quietly sitting concealed by a cloak.

The fact that ships behind POS shields are invulnerable to attack, without the POS being dealt with first?
Accepted.

The fact that ships docked inside an outpost are effectively not even in the game, for all hostile intents and purposes?
Accepted.

I can see you are trying to make a point about ships exposed in space, but first everyone would need to accept where you draw that line here.

But, I must disagree with your judgement regarding cloaked ships, in your claim that they do not belong in the same category as Outpost and POS items.

To be effective at projecting threat and cutting the value of space in half he need only be in system.

It's possible to be completely safe and doing whatever he wants while cloaked, within the limitations of staying cloaked. That means he can go and gather intel, setup for surprise attacks, and play with probes,. It's not that hard to warp in at any distance other than zero, with very minimal chance of being decloaked, but that's if he feels like doing something else.

I've used cloaks too. I understand their limitations. It's you who is being dishonest by pretending that they are so vulnerable at all times because the pilot can choose to make himself vulnerable. Truth is the pilot chooses to make himself vulnerable or not, and he has the option of flying as risky as he chooses while forcing anyone not docked to to fly as if he was about to launch a hotdrop at any second.

You can report me for being off topic if you wish, but the problem with AFK camping isn't the AFK, it's the cloak that makes the guy so unbreakably safe that he can go AFK with impunity. That was established long ago as the conversation evolved. I don't have an issue with the other uses a cloak can be put to, but the unbreakable safety of the cloak is the point of issue in this conversation.

Cloaked ships die when they can't cloak. They choose that situation, it cannot be forced upon them by any outside agency.

The problem with the cloaked camper is that he can project the threat of the hotdrop, collect info, etc... In complete safety. He cannot move in complete safety, but he can do so with a far degree more security than anyone else, and once in place cannot be forced to do anything- he retains complete initiative. The few situations where the camper was not in complete safety were when he chose to take some action, and at that point he isn't afk, and beyond the scope of the thread, though even in most of those circumstances he is so secure that unless he makes some error he can return to being afk with impunity.

Any action he takes is completely of his own volition.

@Nikk I understand you don't want to accept that structures and modules are completely different levels of play, with no equivalence between them, and we aren't going to see eye to eye. Doing so invalidates completely the argument of the other. Even ignoring that, however it's hard to say that cloaks are balanced with them, given the effort that goes into acquiring and maintaining them vs. The complete triviality and greater security of the cloak.

The cloak is just a bad game mechanism, and the fixes to the problems it's both introducing and being used to counter need better and deeper solutions based in some kind of engaging gameplay. You can break local if you like, but it will wind up being replaced with something similar. There will always be a few people willing to go to huge extremes to put their name on something, but if you make it impossible to own space in anything more than name then you remove what litttle point there is to even trying. At that point you may as well reconfigure the servers to run Battlefield.