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AFK Cloaking™: Ideas, Discussion, and Proposals

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Nikk Narrel
Moonlit Bonsai
#2541 - 2015-07-29 14:31:06 UTC
Mike Voidstar wrote:
Arya Regnar wrote:
Nullbears still cry over the lack of complete 100% safetly I see...

They always dock up when you enter local and the only counter to that is cloaky camping.

You cant have counter to both unless you also fix local.


And why do you need a counter to people getting into a station? That's absurd.

If you drive them into a station, you won. The longer they stay in station, the more damage you inflict on them and their alliance.

This is very likely how the devs view this, and why they have left it intact so long.

And while they may be too absorbed in their individual views to recognize this fact, both sides are actually pushing for one common detail.
Well, both sides who propose changes at least.

Resolution.

The PvE player, while they are unwilling to face apparent overwhelming odds, still wants to play. Many, if not indeed most, are willing to fight the hostile to get back to playing.

The cloaked hostile, who in many cases is a player resigned to settling for this tactic, is also a player who would be more than just willing to accept a faster resolution.
But that means it must not be a one sided resolution, with the PvE player hitting an I-WIN button that lets them simply flush out the cloaked player from the system.

Neither side is entitled to a peaceful grind, or risk free operation.

We'll know when we have the right answer, when both sides have risk that the opposing side can acknowledge.
Ideally, more people will play on both sides of this fence, so they have a more seasoned perspective.

Upgrading Local to Eliminate All AFK Influence What if Local Chat changed, Hunting the Cloaked...
Rende Crow
State War Academy
Caldari State
#2542 - 2015-07-29 16:24:39 UTC
Arya Regnar wrote:
Nullbears still cry over the lack of complete 100% safetly I see...

They always dock up when you enter local and the only counter to that is cloaky camping.

You cant have counter to both unless you also fix local.



Lets see..... At the very least I am out ratting in a 600 million isk ship and have another 200 million of implants installed. You, the pvper, have no implants installed and a 10 million isk ship. The risk vs reward of fighting you is simply not worth it. Best case I get a 10 million kill mail, worst case I lose almost a billion. Since we all know you probably have another ten friends waiting to jump into the system and kill me, that worst case scenario happens the majority of the time if I fight you.

Of course I am going to dock up! But you have a counter to that! You can catch me before I do. I on the other hand have no counter to getting you out of cloak.
Nikk Narrel
Moonlit Bonsai
#2543 - 2015-07-29 17:07:14 UTC
Rende Crow wrote:
Arya Regnar wrote:
Nullbears still cry over the lack of complete 100% safetly I see...

They always dock up when you enter local and the only counter to that is cloaky camping.

You cant have counter to both unless you also fix local.



Lets see..... At the very least I am out ratting in a 600 million isk ship and have another 200 million of implants installed. You, the pvper, have no implants installed and a 10 million isk ship. The risk vs reward of fighting you is simply not worth it. Best case I get a 10 million kill mail, worst case I lose almost a billion. Since we all know you probably have another ten friends waiting to jump into the system and kill me, that worst case scenario happens the majority of the time if I fight you.

Of course I am going to dock up! But you have a counter to that! You can catch me before I do. I on the other hand have no counter to getting you out of cloak.

On the one hand, you claim to be concerned about the difference in value between your ship and theirs.

I can see there is a wide gap in difference between the two.
Equally clearly, it is obvious that you are not worried about that cheaper ship. You are worried about being attacked by the real threats. A set of ships likely worth significantly more, possibly even more than your ship.

A set of ships not present, when you decide about undocking.
Which really makes a lot of sense, as you would not undock in the PvE ship if you DID see their names listed in local.

And, they are aware of this. They know they have effectively zero chance of shooting at you, when you know they are going to be present.

So, put yourself in their tactical position: How do they manage to get a meaningful chance to shoot at your ship?

If your answer works out to be never, or that they should simply give up hope, think about how safe you are asking to be.

We want to encourage player interaction, and this is falling short of that mark.

Upgrading Local to Eliminate All AFK Influence What if Local Chat changed, Hunting the Cloaked...
Gilgamesh BoShudda
Run and Gun
#2544 - 2015-07-29 18:08:23 UTC  |  Edited by: Gilgamesh BoShudda
Give cloaks a cycle time. Say 5, 10, 15 minutes or whatever. Then give them a cool-down, 1 or 2 minutes, something like that. That would allow players to effectively but somewhat challengingly be able to hunt ships while cloaked. It would make afk cloaking very difficult as during the cool-down timer the ship would be vulnerable to probing. You could even make it so fitting a cloak to your ship makes it easier to scan you down.
Nikk Narrel
Moonlit Bonsai
#2545 - 2015-07-29 19:03:01 UTC
Gilgamesh BoShudda wrote:
Give cloaks a cycle time. Say 5, 10, 15 minutes or whatever. Then give them a cool-down, 1 or 2 minutes, something like that. That would allow players to effectively but somewhat challengingly be able to hunt ships while cloaked. It would make afk cloaking very difficult as during the cool-down timer the ship would be vulnerable to probing. You could even make it so fitting a cloak to your ship makes it easier to scan you down.

I want to say that you have good intentions.

Your idea would make cloaks a liability whenever they were fitted.
Between existing penalties and benefits made meaningless by timers and ease of scanning, guerrilla warfare dependent on cloaks would be thoroughly compromised.

Try to consider, that cloaks must still be a desirable path for gameplay after any changes. Your idea makes them effectively worthless.

Upgrading Local to Eliminate All AFK Influence What if Local Chat changed, Hunting the Cloaked...
Rende Crow
State War Academy
Caldari State
#2546 - 2015-07-29 22:03:25 UTC  |  Edited by: Rende Crow
Nikk Narrel wrote:
Gilgamesh BoShudda wrote:
Give cloaks a cycle time. Say 5, 10, 15 minutes or whatever. Then give them a cool-down, 1 or 2 minutes, something like that. That would allow players to effectively but somewhat challengingly be able to hunt ships while cloaked. It would make afk cloaking very difficult as during the cool-down timer the ship would be vulnerable to probing. You could even make it so fitting a cloak to your ship makes it easier to scan you down.

I want to say that you have good intentions.

Your idea would make cloaks a liability whenever they were fitted.
Between existing penalties and benefits made meaningless by timers and ease of scanning, guerrilla warfare dependent on cloaks would be thoroughly compromised.

Try to consider, that cloaks must still be a desirable path for gameplay after any changes. Your idea makes them effectively worthless.



You got to be kidding me! How would a short CD period on cloaking make it worthless?

Lets say you are scanable once every 30 minutes. You can still sit around in cloak and scan down things, you can still gather local intel, and you can still harass the people who are ratting by making them dock up. Then once every 30 minutes when your cloak falls off all you would have to do is warp around the solar system a few times and it is pretty unlikely that they will catch you before you re-engage the cloak. However it at least gives people a chance to counter the cloak harassment.

The ONLY game style a short CD would make worthless is AFK harassing. Players would no longer be able to park a ship in a null sec ratting area and keep all the ratters docked up for days at a time. And lets be honest here, an afk player is not a threat, BUT... how do the ratters in their billion isk ships know that cloaked player is truly afk? They don't. And that is how AFK cloaked players keep ratters docked up for days.

I agree 100% that this is a sandbox game and that there are very few rules.... but... I feel that it should not be valid gameplay to harass active players while being AFK from the game. I really think that is griefing.
Nikk Narrel
Moonlit Bonsai
#2547 - 2015-07-29 22:39:33 UTC
Rende Crow wrote:
Nikk Narrel wrote:

I want to say that you have good intentions.

Your idea would make cloaks a liability whenever they were fitted.
Between existing penalties and benefits made meaningless by timers and ease of scanning, guerrilla warfare dependent on cloaks would be thoroughly compromised.

Try to consider, that cloaks must still be a desirable path for gameplay after any changes. Your idea makes them effectively worthless.



You got to be kidding me! How would a short CD period on cloaking make it worthless?

Lets say you are scanable once every 30 minutes. You can still sit around in cloak and scan down things, you can still gather local intel, and you can still harass the people who are ratting by making them dock up. Then once every 30 minutes when your cloak falls off all you would have to do is warp around the solar system a few times and it is pretty unlikely that they won't catch you before you re-engage the cloak. However it at least gives people a chance to counter the cloak harassment.

The ONLY game style a short CD would make worthless is AFK harassing. Players would no longer be able to park a ship in a null sec ratting area and keep all the ratters docked up for days at a time. And lets be honest here, an afk player is not a threat, BUT... how do the ratters in their billion isk ships know that cloaked player is truly afk? They don't. And that is how AFK cloaked players keep ratters docked up for days.

I agree 100% that this is a sandbox game and that there are very few rules.... but... I feel that it should not be valid gameplay to harass active players while being AFK from the game. I really think that is griefing.

So, you are thinking cloaks exist simply to AFK cloak.

I would like to let you know, that this module is highly valued in many areas, which I believe you may not be considering.

The cloaked vessel is instrumental in gathering intel. This can take a considerable amount of time, and needing to constantly reset it is quite comparable to expecting PvP players to sit around guarding PvE.
It sounds fine at first, but after you try it for a while, it get's tedious and frustrating.

Cloaked shipping is central to the wormhole experience. Do not even start to tell a dedicated WH player that you will mess with their cloaks.

Cloaked play is highly valued, when brute force protection is not an option for play. You learn to hide your supply ship, so you can slip through places unnoticed. Good luck crawling through a large bubble before that timer expires, especially once they realize they just have to slow you down enough.

Bombers.

Upgrading Local to Eliminate All AFK Influence What if Local Chat changed, Hunting the Cloaked...
Rende Crow
State War Academy
Caldari State
#2548 - 2015-07-29 23:51:30 UTC
All I am trying to say is that it is bad game design that an inactive player can sit cloaked afk for days at a time and harass active players. Maybe cloaking is not the problem. Maybe they just need to add a logout timer to the game that boots people after an hour of no activity.
Teckos Pech
Hogyoku
Goonswarm Federation
#2549 - 2015-07-30 04:22:55 UTC
Rende Crow wrote:
Arya Regnar wrote:
Nullbears still cry over the lack of complete 100% safetly I see...

They always dock up when you enter local and the only counter to that is cloaky camping.

You cant have counter to both unless you also fix local.



Lets see..... At the very least I am out ratting in a 600 million isk ship and have another 200 million of implants installed. You, the pvper, have no implants installed and a 10 million isk ship. The risk vs reward of fighting you is simply not worth it. Best case I get a 10 million kill mail, worst case I lose almost a billion. Since we all know you probably have another ten friends waiting to jump into the system and kill me, that worst case scenario happens the majority of the time if I fight you.

Of course I am going to dock up! But you have a counter to that! You can catch me before I do. I on the other hand have no counter to getting you out of cloak.


The missing component here is how often do you rat without being killed. If you are pulling in say, 50 million ISK, and it takes 30 hours before you are killed on average, you are way, way ahead of the game. Or, cry me a river. Roll

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."--Friedrich August von Hayek

8 Golden Rules for EVE Online
Teckos Pech
Hogyoku
Goonswarm Federation
#2550 - 2015-07-30 04:27:18 UTC
Rende Crow wrote:
All I am trying to say is that it is bad game design that an inactive player can sit cloaked afk for days at a time and harass active players. Maybe cloaking is not the problem. Maybe they just need to add a logout timer to the game that boots people after an hour of no activity.


1. It is not harassment, at least not in the sense of the rules.
2. You are only aware of the presence of the cloaked player because of one thing and one thing only.
3. Change that one thing in the right way and AFK cloaking disappears.
4. No need for a log out timer.

Looking at the future, you will have a way to find cloaked ships. But at the same time I maintain that local (that one thing from 2 above) also has to change. If Mike is right no player should be safe with virtually no effort...then you do not deserve such awesome intel for no effort and that is impervious to attack. So hopefully, the "new local" will require some degree of effort and will be vulnerable to attack.

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."--Friedrich August von Hayek

8 Golden Rules for EVE Online
Mike Voidstar
Voidstar Free Flight Foundation
#2551 - 2015-07-30 05:08:21 UTC
Teckos Pech wrote:
Rende Crow wrote:
Arya Regnar wrote:
Nullbears still cry over the lack of complete 100% safetly I see...

They always dock up when you enter local and the only counter to that is cloaky camping.

You cant have counter to both unless you also fix local.



Lets see..... At the very least I am out ratting in a 600 million isk ship and have another 200 million of implants installed. You, the pvper, have no implants installed and a 10 million isk ship. The risk vs reward of fighting you is simply not worth it. Best case I get a 10 million kill mail, worst case I lose almost a billion. Since we all know you probably have another ten friends waiting to jump into the system and kill me, that worst case scenario happens the majority of the time if I fight you.

Of course I am going to dock up! But you have a counter to that! You can catch me before I do. I on the other hand have no counter to getting you out of cloak.


The missing component here is how often do you rat without being killed. If you are pulling in say, 50 million ISK, and it takes 30 hours before you are killed on average, you are way, way ahead of the game. Or, cry me a river. Roll


Just like to point out that your numbers equate to 1.5 Bill ISK. That's not way ahead of the game, for some ratters, especially those doing some of the more intense content that is not much above breaking even.

Now consider your *counter* is to keep a response fleet on standby every second of those 30 hours, presumably paid out of the proceeds from the content you are doing. At minimum that means your 50 million/hour just dropped by nearly half- assuming they are helping, and your "response fleet" is one guy. Make it 2 guys and now you may as well go do level 4s in high sec.

The reverse situation allows the camper to keep up the threat, but he only needs his buddies on standby when they actually intend to attack.

It would certainly be nice if I could see names in local and PvP fit a ship to face them.... But 99 times out of 100 they just endlessly cloak. They don't even have the dignity of the PvE pilots reason of having a ship unsuited for combat- they came for trouble and hid when it showed up.
Rende Crow
State War Academy
Caldari State
#2552 - 2015-07-30 06:13:28 UTC
Teckos Pech wrote:


1. It is not harassment, at least not in the sense of the rules.


1. It is most certainly harassment. Sitting in a cloaked ship makes people who are ratting dock up 99% of the time and refuse to undock. Sitting in a cloaked ship for days usually prevents ratting for days. It is griefing. Just because CCP does not acknowledge the harassment does not make it any less true.

Teckos Pech wrote:

2. You are only aware of the presence of the cloaked player because of one thing and one thing only.
3. Change that one thing in the right way and AFK cloaking disappears.
4. No need for a log out timer.


Local chat is not the problem. Get rid of it, and everyone will find some other way to know the instant an unfriendly player enters the system. Everyone will still dock up, and you will still sit in the system forever in an afk cloaked ship. Changing local does not fix this game balance issue.

And yes, cloaks that can be maintained indefinitely is a game balance issue.
Teckos Pech
Hogyoku
Goonswarm Federation
#2553 - 2015-07-30 07:21:50 UTC
Rende Crow wrote:
Teckos Pech wrote:


1. It is not harassment, at least not in the sense of the rules.


1. It is most certainly harassment. Sitting in a cloaked ship makes people who are ratting dock up 99% of the time and refuse to undock. Sitting in a cloaked ship for days usually prevents ratting for days. It is griefing. Just because CCP does not acknowledge the harassment does not make it any less true.

Teckos Pech wrote:

2. You are only aware of the presence of the cloaked player because of one thing and one thing only.
3. Change that one thing in the right way and AFK cloaking disappears.
4. No need for a log out timer.


Local chat is not the problem. Get rid of it, and everyone will find some other way to know the instant an unfriendly player enters the system. Everyone will still dock up, and you will still sit in the system forever in an afk cloaked ship. Changing local does not fix this game balance issue.

And yes, cloaks that can be maintained indefinitely is a game balance issue.


Harassment, in game, is where a player targets you, specifically, and follows you from system to system. AFK cloaking fails this test as an AFK player cannot follow you, or anyone. So, based on this, by definition, AFK cloaking is not harassment.

Further, it is not griefing. Griefing usually entails something along the lines of ganking players in starter systems. Since an AFK cloaking player cannot gank anyone, it is, again by definition, not griefing.

CCP has confirmed this implicitly and I'm sure if I looked excplicitly.

Local, is intdeed part of the problem. How do you know an AFK cloaked player is there? Because of local chat. No local chat...no AFK cloaking. Without local working as it does now, how would you know a player is cloaked in system? Probes? Nope. D-Scan? Nope. Local, well we already changed that, so nope. So, prey tell how exactly would you know if local is delayed or removed would you know a player has been there for hours cloaked at a safe? Explain the in game mechanic you'd use, or the player based methods.

Seriously, if you are going to participate in this discussion you might want to learn the rudimentary aspects of it first.

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."--Friedrich August von Hayek

8 Golden Rules for EVE Online
Mike Voidstar
Voidstar Free Flight Foundation
#2554 - 2015-07-30 09:10:21 UTC
Yeah, it's not harassment or griefing. You could make an argument for legal harassment, but that is allowed as part of warfare.

Devs have said little on atk cloaking specifically. One argument against how cloaks work can be inferred from the dev reasons concerning the AAR. Unlike the ASB they would not let the AAR be cap free because they don't like mechanics that are not vulnerable to disruption from other players. With more motivation Fozzies quote on that could be found. They have not fixed the asb, which is also arguably pretty broken though it runs out of ammo fast, but you can still fit more than one and effectively eliminate its other drawback.

Cloaks are pretty much immune to player disruption as well, unless someone is right there when you turn it on and they get lucky.
SFM Hobb3s
Perkone
Caldari State
#2555 - 2015-07-30 14:19:53 UTC
I strongly suspect we will soon see a mechanics change allowing to decloak hostile ships in owned sovereign systems. CCP's whole theme of Aegis Sov is to reward the residents actively living in and defending systems, as opposed to the AFK empires of old. AFK cloaking falls under that category. Active cloaky campers will still be a thing, and will be supported in the new mechanic, but AFK cloaking will be punished.

Will we see more content because of changes like this? I would argue yes. In the short term, you will have AFK cloaky campers die left and right, but that will quickly change as they adapt to become active.

The long-term benefit is better. More people will be undocked doing PVE. In my mind, more people being undocked means more chances for combat.
Nikk Narrel
Moonlit Bonsai
#2556 - 2015-07-30 15:06:33 UTC  |  Edited by: Nikk Narrel
SFM Hobb3s wrote:
I strongly suspect we will soon see a mechanics change allowing to decloak hostile ships in owned sovereign systems. CCP's whole theme of Aegis Sov is to reward the residents actively living in and defending systems, as opposed to the AFK empires of old. AFK cloaking falls under that category. Active cloaky campers will still be a thing, and will be supported in the new mechanic, but AFK cloaking will be punished.

I would say this should demand more from both sides, not simply be SOV owners cheering a decision exclusively to their benefit.
Active owners is more than a few guys doing PvE, it implies support beyond the basic PvP on call for fleets.

In other words, while it is possible that AFK cloaked camping might be gone, the opportunity for shooting must also be replaced with something of comparable value.
Otherwise, the cloaked players simply go away, and only blobs remain as the go-to solution for sov activity.

SFM Hobb3s wrote:
Will we see more content because of changes like this? I would argue yes. In the short term, you will have AFK cloaky campers die left and right, but that will quickly change as they adapt to become active.

On the surface this seems to benefit everyone but cloaked guerrilla hostiles.
With such a demonstrable increase in risk for cloaked play, a comparable increase must reasonably exist for their preferred targets.

That, or make counting coup a thing, where these cloaked 'content creators' are rewarded simply for reaching the inside of a blue doughnut, and are subjected to these increased risks as a balance.

They MUST have a reason to go into hostile territory, beyond charitable donation of kill mails to their opponents.

SFM Hobb3s wrote:
The long-term benefit is better. More people will be undocked doing PVE. In my mind, more people being undocked means more chances for combat.

And that is the fulcrum of this whole mess.

More chances for combat, as you put it.
Now, HOW do we get PvE pilots to engage in combat, instead of simply docking up or reshipping as they do now?

Upgrading Local to Eliminate All AFK Influence What if Local Chat changed, Hunting the Cloaked...
Rende Crow
State War Academy
Caldari State
#2557 - 2015-07-30 16:21:19 UTC  |  Edited by: Rende Crow
Teckos Pech wrote:


Local, is intdeed part of the problem. How do you know an AFK cloaked player is there? Because of local chat. No local chat...no AFK cloaking. Without local working as it does now, how would you know a player is cloaked in system? Probes? Nope. D-Scan? Nope. Local, well we already changed that, so nope. So, prey tell how exactly would you know if local is delayed or removed would you know a player has been there for hours cloaked at a safe? Explain the in game mechanic you'd use, or the player based methods.



Ok, so get rid of local and make it impossible to know if cloakers are out there (sarcasim).... but wait.... what is going to prevent null from becoming uninhabitable when every small gang and their mom starts cruising through SOV space in their cloaked ships? And before you say, WH space does it, WH space is fundamentally different due to no permanent entrances and way fewer people inhabiting it.

I get the feeling you don't understand game balance very well. So right back at you in your own words:

Teckos Pech wrote:
Seriously, if you are going to participate in this discussion you might want to learn the rudimentary aspects of it first.
Rende Crow
State War Academy
Caldari State
#2558 - 2015-07-30 16:25:30 UTC
Nikk Narrel wrote:

Now, HOW do we get PvE pilots to engage in combat, instead of simply docking up or reshipping as they do now?


Since the majority of Eve combat is usually a small gang I can be relativity sure that if I engage that 1 neutral in my system in my billion isk ship, then another 10 will show up to kill me. Simply put, pvp does not favor people ratting in null and as it is right now, it is suicide to stay out of the base and fight.
Mike Voidstar
Voidstar Free Flight Foundation
#2559 - 2015-07-30 16:37:17 UTC
Nikk Narrel wrote:
.
Now, HOW do we get PvE pilots to engage in combat, instead of simply docking up or reshipping as they do now?



With many PvE activities you won't at any price. Some of those ships can't even fit weapons at all.

I don't think there should be a focus on preventing people from reshipping. You want combat, then it is reasonable to expect your opponent to go for a combat ship.

Defenseless ships should never have been the focus of PvP.
Nikk Narrel
Moonlit Bonsai
#2560 - 2015-07-30 17:03:23 UTC
Mike Voidstar wrote:
Nikk Narrel wrote:
.
Now, HOW do we get PvE pilots to engage in combat, instead of simply docking up or reshipping as they do now?



With many PvE activities you won't at any price. Some of those ships can't even fit weapons at all.

I don't think there should be a focus on preventing people from reshipping. You want combat, then it is reasonable to expect your opponent to go for a combat ship.

Defenseless ships should never have been the focus of PvP.

Defenseless, in this context, is a relative term.
You need something to compare it to, in order to have meaning.

A ratting ship? Hardly defenseless, they are designed to grind through NPC opponents.
If being considered here, it suggests a hostile outside the range of NPC targets being involved.
(Different weapon types, and vulnerabilities)

Mining ships have their own quirks, and many are expected to avoid combat.

By contrast, comparing a covert craft to a frontline PvP ship gives similar results. The covert craft is relatively defenseless against enough of these to warrant their avoidance.
So, the cloaked craft keep away for quite similar reasons to the PvE shipping.

The expectation that such relatively defenseless ships should be the focus of PvP... seems misplaced.

If neither the PvE shipping or the covert craft can be reasonably expected to slug it out, pushing them into greater vulnerability would appear to be a bad idea.

Upgrading Local to Eliminate All AFK Influence What if Local Chat changed, Hunting the Cloaked...