Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Actually, I must disagree with the details on this.

First, your conclusion of our intent.
I do NOT want to ignore all the intel and defense fleets. I want to make them earn their opportunities to stop me, no less than I must earn any opportunity to get past them and reach a targeted system.

I do NOT get a free heads up about hostile presence on the other side of a gate, when it would benefit me by letting me know in time to react and abort my attempt.
I find out after the fact.

Local DOES give the existing residents a free heads up about incoming new arrivals, with proven enough time to react and abort their continued presence in potentially risky areas. I have enough time to warp safely away, assuming I was not either AFK or stupid.

The only thing I ask, is that in exchange for any meaningful counter to a cloaked presence, the initial awareness of such a presence should demand some form of proactive effort on the part of the opposing player.
In other words, they are not being told freely. They either activated some form of scan, or a vulnerable source relayed the data.
(Said vulnerable source needing proactive efforts to verify continued existence, if not actual maintenance)

You take the proactive effort, and push it so far out that it becomes a straw man argument.

As I stated yesterday:

Intel channels are just fine. They can be as good as player effort makes them, which is exactly what I salute as good design.

As for local not telling you what is on the other side of a gate, it doesn't do that directly.
What it DOES do, is tell you about someone before they effectively finish arriving through the gate on this side.

Local does not bring PvP to me whether I want it or not. I can avoid it precisely because of local.
Being able to choose a target, and having that target possess the ability to say no, means it is a consensual PvP environment.

And right now, (in this context), both PvE and cloaked ships can always say no.
And here we are debating requests to take that ability away from just one side, because they use cloaks.

1. Hard to say if it was against their will.
In this context, they were either AFK, (the will was to eat a sandwich or use the toilet), or simply failed to prepare.
(The will then being an expectation that safety was not an issue)

2. If you mean by invoking consensual PvP, or are referring to catching someone jumping through at a gate where local doesn't help them be warned of an ambush, yes.
2a. Picking a crowded system, based on an expectation that some residents won't pay attention to local... There is an irony.
So, you are OK suggesting that a player should need to scroll a list on a regular basis, in order to spot a threat.
But not push a scan button. I think your heart is in the right place, but you may not have realized what you ended up saying...

3. Toggle on an automatic repeating scan button, less demanding than mining lasers or a shield booster. This is not like d-scan is currently, which is on demand per scan.
Or seeing if that deployable / vulnerable asset is still intact. That would be a once per session thing, since it would be warning you before you would need to check it again.


What are the four primary forms for PvP to occur?
Consensual, where both sides are present by deliberate choice.

Gate grab, where you were ambushed, thanks in part to not having enough intel about the opposing players in order to get passed them.

AFK is self explanatory, and really reflects being foolish or unprepared.

Unprepared... you had enough opportunity and intel to avoid PvP, but you either did not prepare a strategy or fit a ship able to use it.

As you willingly point out next, these are rare / fringe events, which cannot be relied on.

As other debates concede under such context, designing a game around rare probability events is not a good practice.


This assumes you can expect to be satisfied with players who either choose to fight you, or were unprepared to avoid you.

Only a roam undocks with the expectation that they will be happy with this.
They don't know what type of ship or ships will face them. They are the in-game version of trick-or-treaters, expecting to be rewarded for knocking on the door and being dressed up.

The guerrilla, by contrast, is using avoidance to evade brute defenses, with a specific range of targets they are prepared to engage. The limit to their target range speaks most of all to the sacrifices made in order to bypass those defenses.
The idea that they should not play like this, goes against game philosophy. Blocking a play style is anti-sandbox.

Guerrilla style tactics are always most effective against targets which are least prepared to counter them.
That fits the interior of the blue doughnuts, which are hardened against blobs and roams.

No, I don't. You guys keep repeating it like a mantra as if saying it a thousand times makes it true. Had you read below my (deliberately controversial) opening line you would have found the answer to your question.

- the free intel Local provides is one thing, and apparently up to debate;
- the INVULNERABILITY of the Cloak is another matter entirely.

You can argue the one enhances / influences the other but my point, if you allow me to make it, is that they are two separate topics of discussion. This will probably be one of my last contributions to this thread as we're apparently doomed to do a full cirklejerk every 6 pages; yet I will leave you with 2 cases to illustrate:

Free Intel (aka "Local")
take that away and you wouldn't NEED your cloak. You'd just go out in T3 destroyers or assault frigs & roam. Might be a good thing, depending on where you stand. But it has nothing - repeat nothing to do with the way a cloaking device works.

The Invulnerable Cloak
same case I made in the post apparently no one read below line 1: I know you're there. I saw a gateflash, I saw you on grid for a brief second, then you were gone. I don't need local to tell me. Assuming that because of ___reasons___ I *know* you're there, you're still invulnerable. With or without local.


Removing local augments the usefulness of ALL combat ships, not only the cloaked ones.
Fixing the invulnerability of the cloak on the other hand, only affects the UNMANNED (AFK) cloaked vessels. Why you ask? Because several posts ago I already made my case for either name-specific scanning or gradually deteriorating scan immunity the longer you stay put.


I have tried and presented arguments, cases, reasonable compromises and in the end you resort to statements such as "I didn't read it but you're still wrong. And also: LOCAL". Well ... apparently I'm not convinced. Please do stick around and convince me that removing your name off the local list somehow addresses ANYTHING I said. Does it make cloaky ships less invulnerable? No, it doesn't. The ONLY thing removing local does, is removing the psychological potential going AFK while being invulnerable has in some regions of space.

This potential, however, has again nothing to do with the cloaking device outside of Sov null. In NPC null for example, RandomNub can just sit in a station. All day. Until he suddenly decides to undock and blow you up. How is this any different than AFK cloaking? It's not.


I have clearly established local allows for AFK / ambush warfare with or without cloak. There is also the fact (and it's not even open to debate because it is a plain and simple fact) a vessel, once cloaked, cannot be engaged no matter what you do. Addressing one does nothing to the other, and therefore your argument is invalid. No matter how many times people have repeated it over the past 133 pages. You can think me a troll, you can choose not to comment on anything below the opening sentence, yet your rebuttal does nothing to convince me otherwise.

With that, I rest my case. I shall be following the discussing in silence (mostly) from now on.

I have written absolutely nothing to support your contention here, that I want to be able to penetrate deep into enemy space and ignore intel and defense fleets. You cannot provide a single quote from me that would support this.

I have said I want to be able to attack the intel infrastructure. I favor two methods. Method 1 a direct attack using the entosis link. This would send out an alliance wide e-mail that your stuff is under attack. So your assertion I want to be able to by-pass intel infrastructure is just flat out wrong. Stunningly wrong.

The second method is some sort of hacking option to disable/subvert the intel infrastructure. Again, this would not be automatic, but would depend on, at the very least, skills the player has learned. Failure at the hacking would send an alliance wide notification that your stuff was just attacked. Success means that that OA is bypassed or subverted without a warning to you. The details would remain to be determined—i.e., if I have to hack every OA I come across then the probability of “penetrating deep into enemy territory” becomes increasingly unlikely. If the probability is constant for each OA and is denoted p, then the probability of passing N OA’s successfully is p^N which gets progressively smaller, and even for fairly large values of P gets small pretty quick. For example, even with a 90% chance of success with 10 OAs is just under 35%, which means you’d have a 65% chance of knowing I was somewhere in your territory, if not knowing exactly where. And of course before you get your panties all in a knot about 35%/65% I just pulled those numbers from my ass, they are there to show how quickly that probability of multiple successes will decrease. For example, using another base probability, say 80%, then the chance of successfully hacking 10 OAs is just under 11%.

So your position is based on an assumption that simply is not true. Given that the assumption is not true, your conclusions are immediately suspect.

Further, local does convey advantages and for those already in system local conveys and undeniable advantage. That you keep ignoring this underscores you own inability to be honest in this discussion. Which makes your attempts to call into questions my motives even more amusing.

And I never said that intel is not necessary for the game. What I have been objecting to is your intel tool being completely impervious to any form of disruption other than the very activity you want to ban.

In short Mike, you are being so amazingly dishonest.

Under the current mechanics the reason you know a player is cloaked in your system is due to local. If local was not there and I was cloaked you'd have no way to know I was there.

AFK cloaking only works because of local and cloaks. Both are necessary for AFK cloaking.

Now, simply taking away local is too much.

Making cloaks less effective at avoiding detection given the all seeing nature of local and its indestructible nature is also not balanced.

So, we retain local, and make it vulnerable to attack. Cloaks become detectable. AFK cloaking goes away, and we have all sorts of new possibilities for emergent game play.

Working as intended.

Dev 1: Hey guys! Lets design a cloak in such a way that one cloaked person can disrupt life in a home system of dozens of players for weeks at a time with no counter.

Dev 2: Sounds like a plan!!!


I really don't think the devs intended cloaking to be used in this way.

Because it is obvious, trivial even. No local no issue with AFK cloaking. That is why w-space pilots never complain about AFK cloaking.

It is not my problem you can't see this obvious connection.