Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Counter-drop means you have a fleet on standby you are dividing your profits with. That brings the profit well below high sec values, and that should be obviously unacceptable. While you can fit a cyno mithout crippling yourself with most builds, asking a handful of people to sit around doing nothing while you play is unacceptable. The largest entities are capable of this sort of thing as standards, but smaller outfits are not. In general, unless you are further compromising your fit below profitable levels you probably won't survive anyway, even if your attackers are also destroyed, meaning you still lost your ship, still are losing time to reshipling, and thus you didn't win anything the PvE guy values. It's more loss than just not playing would have been, which is why people stay docked. It's not fear of loss, it's just mitigation. If they enjoyed PvP more, they would likely not be doing whatever it was they were doing that was primarily PvE.

Baiting is an entirely different. Bait ships for the most part are not profitable above high sec levels, nor intended to be. Someone baiting is pretending to do PvE, and any profits are completely secondary. They are in fact hunting, and all PvE consideration is right out the window.

So... For PvE guy it is pure loss across the board. For other guys it's a mixed bag. However, since campers aren't hunting other hunters, the balance of the camp vs. The PvE boat is the primary consideration.

Perhaps it is the wording, but you refer to exerting a force in game, as if it were a deliberate act under the full control of a character, who is specifically notable for not interacting in this context.

YOU may be of the opinion that this is the exclusive responsibility of the silent cloaked player, but the facts do not support this.

The truth is, that whether the PvE player chooses to stay docked up, undocks to PvE or bait, or simply plays in another location entirely... the PvE player is the sole determiner of their own actions.

It is a CHOICE, whether they regard the unseen cloaked vessel as a threat, and furthermore whether that threat is something they need to react to.

The cloaked player is not consulted in this, the only detail even indicating their presence being a listing in a chat channel.
They could even be docked in an Outpost, a leftover presence from a past sov that never undocked in order to retain presence.

What's the sig radius of a cloaked ship?

The mechanics do not currently exist for this yet.. mayhap it can get tied in with structures.. going into an idle mode might trigger the local surveillance array, forcing cloak campers (that put into their bio pay me to leave) to go to a system without one of these.

Again, you are assigning the power to the cloaked player.

Think of it like this, when Pavlov was feeding his dogs, he would always ring a bell.
The dogs began to associate the sound of the bell, with the presence of food, to the point where Pavlov could make the dogs salivate by just ringing the bell, even when he did NOT bring the food.

It is called a conditioned reflex.

When PvE players assume the presence of overwhelming force to be present, simply because they see the name listed in local, they are exhibiting a conditioned reflex.
They have not seen this force.
They have no direct evidence it is an imminent threat.
They just saw a name in local, with standings they came to associate with hostile actions against them.

The hostile doesn't need to bring the force to back up the expectations of other players.
He just needs trained players who will react to his presence, as if he had all the proof on display.

Fight the training. Overcome the programmed reaction.
By reacting this way, you are performing tricks for a stranger, and I doubt we need to explain how foolish this seems.

If we assume the presence of overwhelming force, then it also extends to directions which we cannot reliably anticipate.

Best strategy, unless you have a group ready to support baiting, is IMHO to use cheap / disposable ships.

It is always a gamble on the hostile's part, whether to attack, and seeing a low value target makes them doubt the action is worth it.

A high skilled char in a low cost ship can be quite profitable.

I'm sure it's already been said, but how about deployables and anchorables that have a set radius that they can ping to pick up cloaked ships?

AFK cloakers or bio break cloakers that aren't near anything (are in deep safes) won't be bothered, cloaking in most situations remains as it is now, but areas of systems can be made "safer". Make it where it also has a set time between pings (like 300/150/60/30 seconds) could even add gameplay of cloaked scouts figuring out where the weaknesses are so they can grab a quick peek of an area - you know, like those Star Trek episodes where they figure out shield frequency of an enemy ship to beam in through "holes" created.

Anchorables would use fuel (so they can't be set and forget) but have a range of several AUs based on tech level, deployables would be more localized, having ranges similar to (but perhaps somewhat larger than) bubbles, on the 10-40km order.

As a person that likes cloaky things, I think this is a far better solution than simply dumping Local OR doing things like making cloaks drain fuel/cap. This sort of thing would create a lot more gameplay options like checkpoints or advanced scouting, while not killing the capability to cloak entirely. Paired with bubbles, this would allow friendly space to create safe zones - for example, imagine a 5 AU cloak breaking bubble centered on a belt with bubbles on the ends so that a cloaky ship warping there would be sucked into the bubbles (away from the miners), and then decloaked so that their appearance is known. This would include hot dropping fleets, being dragged far enough off grid for mining fleets or ratting pilots to warp off if they didn't want to engage.

Paired with all the new types of anchorable and deployable structures, something like this could be used as part of player deployed structure complexes at points of interest around systems.

...then again, perhaps I like this proposal most of all because it lends itself well to said player structure complexes - maybe I'm the only one that ever played the X-Wing/TIE Fighter games (where some missions have you fly patrol around a station or platform) or that thinks we players should be able to build bases like the NPCs can with various structures set up in logical, militarily advantageous formations?

.

Anyway, it's just a thought.

(Granted, I think Local IS part of the problem, but if we do away with Local, we need things like this to restore the capability of players to establish regions/areas of control. Ultimately, that IS the problem in Eve - other than bubbles at gates, there really isn't a way for players to establish areas of control that they can dictate the situation in without the enemy being able to drop on them within seconds with no notice or ability to mount a defense.)

You not only believe in yourself, but are buying into the hype around your presence as if it were proven fact.

First, YOU know you are only a threat while you are directly present at your game client.
Your so-called red alliance, seems to be treating you as a far greater threat than you actually are.

They clearly have not considered your recent lack of kills, or likely your previous timing of kills to even consider when you would normally be active.
This suggests they are disorganized, and circumstantially low effort in support of decision making.

Your killing of belt rats seems trivial, as they won't know the results being any different from those left by other PvE players.

Face it, you aren't the reason they quit grinding ISK, you are simply the convenient excuse they use to not engage in work-like behavior that most probably never wanted to do anyhow.
Grinding ISK is not a goal for many players, but an obstacle to that goal.

Oh no, a red in local chat, better swap over to my other alt, and hang with my buddies. Curses, foiled again.

Nik, you are not really suggesting that those folks fly out in miners and ratting fits with a hostile in system, are you?
It's not buying hype, he has measurable impact on those systems while afk. I certainly would not trust killboard stats of such a pilot, people have tons of alts, and alts are often traded around in larger groups, so that info can't be trusted.

You might enjoy flying suicidal, in which case you can personally ignore and/or hide local and fly both blind and stupid, but most will not do so.

He is actively engaged in PvP with multiple enemies while afk, successfully. He can do that because the tool he is using has no counter that enables any sort of win condition for his enemies at all. Even without getting kills he can see the damaging results of his actions. With those falling indexes he is doing damage that will outlast his presence.

The least that needs to happen is a method of engaging him to combat that effect. This isn't a local problem. Without local it would be the same after he made his first few kills. Falling profits would deter activity and the enemy leaves the area where their ships keep getting hit. Until cloaks can be hunted there is no balance in the system except that the devs said it was ok so long as it was disrupting isk making.

Yeah, that is not a balanced solution, affecting only one side in this equation.

An equation, which by dev fiat or otherwise, is deemed to be in balance.

It sounds more like an attempt to punish people who play differently than you do, as you likely do not expect this change to affect you directly.

It also sounds like you are trying to promote the idea that the devs are wrong, and this is not balanced.

I would agree, but this hands extreme advantage exclusively to sov holders.
Do sov holders have the advantage without this? Overwhelmingly yes.

The ability to be AFK in an online game is a sacred cow.
Whether it is by parking in a station, a POS, OR by using a cloak.
These three options need to be changed as a group, or not at all.

But why?
The station, and POS, are effectively exclusive to the SOV holder.
Regardless of other options present in the rest of the game, the ability to be AFK in space itself has not been demonstrated to be a balanced aspect intended to be exclusive to the sov holders.

So, should a cloaked ship be considered a threat?
Only to a comparable degree that those in a POS or station would be.

This excessive perception of cloaks as a threat, speaks primarily to unbalanced intel being relied on.

If we should decide we need effort free intel, then it needs to be both more inclusive of details, as well as vulnerable to jamming and other effects.
Our current solution meets neither of these details, so puts an awkward twist into the game.