Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I will first state I respect your view.
I do not agree with it, for reasons you covered well enough.

I believe I have two points.

1 Too much space is being held due to being entrenched.
I have nothing against holding space, on a basic level, but when it becomes practical to form mega-alliances with massive blue doughnuts, it stifles too many play options in my view.

2 Blob fleets must never be the best choice for sov area activities, be it the major sov claiming kind, or the small roam sizes involved in effectively consensual mini group fights.
(Consensual, as in anyone paying attention can avoid these by choice, with near trivial effort)

The very logic that defends solo and small group PvE, I firmly believe justifies solo and small group harassment and violence by similar numbers.
That obviously rules out a blob fleet, and makes a roam impractical for serious consideration.

On a side note:
I have been bored enough to take an alt and bounce off a gate camp in the past. They admired my spirit, and donated ISK to me in appreciation.
To me, that gate camp represented something wonderful about this game.... the desire to play with others, and enjoy the experience.
We seem to have lost this attitude in sov null, where PvE avoids playing, and both sides only consider interacting if they have confidence in overwhelming superiority.

I do not want to eliminate blobs.
I see them ranging from useful, to a necessary evil, for simple play around roaming to sov taking grind fests.

They connect to the superficial side of PvP, in that they show up, everyone sees they have arrived, and the defenders choose to engage or avoid as they see fit.
You basic gameplay version of direct frontal assault strategy.

I want something for solo and small group play, like it's PvE counterparts, in sov null.
This thread exists because many players feel justified doing PvE as solo or small group units. These are the only meaningful players who can be threatened by AFK cloaking, so it really comes down to solo and small group details.
After all, once someone pulls together a battle-group, the most often heard complaint seems to be the cloaked player avoiding contact.

The guerrilla player deserves meaningful play here, and to me that means not forcing it to hamstring itself by using details belonging to superficial play.
Details like: Online in hostile space = Active only
But: Online in friendly space = uncertain, could be docked and AFK, or sitting in POS AFK, or actually active.

That would not be balanced, but it would make SOV holding easier.

Really? Well you can't kill them when cloaked unless they made some very poor choices. You can't force them to decloak unless they made the decision to put themselves in harms way.

No one can force them to move systems, no one can even get on grid with them unless they choose to be on a grid with a warpable object, and even then they have to be pretty unlucky to be accidently decloaked.

It does not matter if they are at a safe and cloaked or not.

The discussion is about afk cloaking.

The argument that someone camped under a cloak is harmless is false. A cloaked character can be doing many things. He may not be 100% safe while doing those things, but neither is he vulnerable to being actively hunted. He is not subject to non-consensual PvP.

The reason cloaks are OP is because they can provide the user with absolute safety at will. That potential for absolute safety allows afk cloaking to happen. You cannot argue that a cloaked ship is harmless because it certainly has the potential to be dangerous. That potential to be dangerous combined with the lack of any way to proactively defend against that danger means that he can sit afk and completely untouchable all day long while still degrading the value of that space by forcing everyone that wants to operate there to do so as if they were about to be hotdropped at any moment.

The cloaked ship has a very real and dramatic effect, yet is completely untouchable. You cannot use the argument that he is vulnerable once he does something to negate that affect, because you must take action while he is still cloaked to defend yourself from what he can do.

Other ships with Cynos, or roaming ships that are difficult to catch like interceptors don't enter into that same territory because they cannot simply park and be effective. They must remain active to be effective.

It is you that is moving the goal posts and being dishonest.

If you bothered to read anything I posted, you would already know that the problem with afk cloaking is the cloak, not the afk. If everything is working properly afk gets sorted by enemy aggression, or is supported by active protection.


Uncertainties are not working as intended. You can't assess risk without having an idea of what you face. You don't have to know everything, but the potential of impending attack is important. You need to be able to watch for it, or else risk and reward become arbitrary conditions that do not lend themselves to any kind of meaningful gameplay.

It's fine and fitting that I can be killed. I expect anytime I leave a station to encounter some form of opposition. But it must cut both ways. If you want to attack my space I need to be capable of defending it. That needs to be an active effort on both parties. Neither should be handed a Win button by default.

The cloak represents a Win button. Not for destroying ships, but for destroying the value of a system that is supposed to be protected. Yes, it's supposed to be protected. That's why you bother at all putting your name on it. You are supposed to protect it. I don't mind flying out to fight to do that... But my whole game should not be forced into waiting on someone who does not even have to be at the keyboard to act.

The cloaked ship is not harmless. It represents a danger. To counter that danger requires preperations that are not passive nor afk, and must be in place before the attack takes place. That means an afk pilot has a real and fairly dramatic effect on the system he is camping. That effect may be appropriate if he has to actively maintain that attack and is obliged to defend himself from those that want to disrupt that activity. That the danger is completely arbitrary due to the other sides ability to remain afk in total safety is unbalanced.

That is stupid.

How about we just add a timer to your pod so that at some random point in the future you randomly explode. No rhyme. No reason. You just pop once in a while on a completely arbitrary basis. I bet that sounds super fun, right? So uncertain, it really gets the blood pumping. Too random? How about super-criticals that give a chance to destroy your ship on each shot- hit or miss you explode regardless of damage inflicted. That's got to be fun, right?.

Arbitrary game conditions are not fun. In a game about choices and consequences, it's not fun to have to make meaningful choices in a vacuume of information. I am sure it seems like great fun every time you check the screen from under your cloak, but it's not from the other side.

Cloaks are bad in their current state. They should not be so powerful as to allow an afk pilot to reduce the value of space with impunity. Either the cloaks need to change, or a whole host of other game elements do, assuming you want balanced gameplay.

No, that is BS.

I understand what you are saying, it's just wrong.

Allowing him to camp and have an effect on the system, no matter how small (and in the case of a camped system value lost becomes a little shy of 50% at minimum if you choose to not fly suicidal) while afk and invulnerable to disruption by forces hostile to himself is not adding to anyone's gameplay, except maybe his.

The uncertainty you are looking for is will he catch me, will I catch him. It only works as a fun game mechanic if it goes both ways, or else is a solo activity against the environment. Allowing a player to have an automatic win button against another player is not fun. The way cloaks work makes the decision completely arbitrary... Fly with backup in place, allowing him to drastically reduce the value of the system, or fly solo and hope he is asleep. Completely random either way because it's 100% out of your hands. There is only one intellegent way to make that call, and the situation is weighted so that the PvE pilot takes the lose either way. He can only mitigate loss, there is no win condition.

Conflict would be working as intended. Automatic win is not working as intended, nor fun.

To an extent, I agree. AFK cloaking is a sub-optimal solution, but it is due to the unbalanced nature of local. Which is why I favor an approach that makes local vulnerable and the cloak vulnerable. But not one or the other.

You on the other hand favor just changing one aspect of this problem which will result in further imbalance.

uwatm8?

so what would the issue with making the cloaks require being at your keyboard to operate be?