Player Features and Ideas Discussion

They are vulnerable because they make themselves vulnerable. I'ave already gone over the problem with idiot freighter pilots who behave very much like risk seekers. In fact, those dodos are indeed looking to engage in a fight they can't win. Overload their freighter, no scout no webber, no watch list, no tank, and not enough buddies in game to come bail them out. Sounds like a recipe for disaster...but hey...lets make them super safe right?

And yep, I prefer to pick the fight I can win. However, if I end up in one I can't and didn't "pick it" I don't come whining here like a little girl crying for nerfs.

The no effort you blather on about is only after effort has been expended getting to the target system. You ignore all that effort of going through hostile systems, possibly hostile gate camps.

Much like your foolishness in the bumping thread. Ignore that freighter pilots who are being bumped were not expending hardly any effort, but my god they must be safe too!

Face it Mike, you are the champion of lazy and inept play.

One more time. I have never once inflicted loss on someone while cloaked. The only loss is an imaginary one you are perceiving in your mind. Nothing stops you from doing what you do when someone is cloaked. You are the one saying cloaked ships cause loss. They don't.

Cloaks were designed to be 100% safe from the get go, provided you stay 2k away from everyone else. Yes, in a PvP-centered game, PvE players have no god given right to min/max their setup for maximum PvP.

Let me ask one more time (since you ignored this question multiple times as well)

What makes you think you have the god given right to PvE in a min/maxed PvE ship 100% of the time?

Personally the vast majority of what I do in EVE is PvE (look at my killboard, and look at the lack of regular kills). That being said, I have gone days without PvE-ing once due to the current neighbors, the risk, etc. Why? Because (unlike you) I actually understand what game I am playing.

Cidanel,

I would argue that there is a loss for the ratters. If they cannot rat or rat as effectively then their income stream has been decreased and that is a loss of sorts.

However, that AFK cloaking alt is also suffering a similar loss. If I park an AFK cloaking alt in a system I can't use him for anything else. There IS an opportunity cost there no matter how much Mike tries to argue there is not. This is one reason I have almost never AFK cloaked. I don't like having my characters tied up with unproductive/un-fun activities. I have 3 alts who could AFK cloak. Heck they could AFK cloak in a covert ops with a covert ops cyno...but they can also make me decent amounts of ISK...which they cannot do 45 jumps from our space.

Mike likes to dismiss these considerations with a wave of his hands though. But they are just as valid a "loss" as he is complaining about. So yes, Mike is incurring a loss...and increased cost if you will. But so is the player who is AFK cloaking.

So you don't need to disprove Mike's claims of a loss...accept them and point out that he is being a hypocrite.

I didn't say there isn't an opportunity cost for the camper in camping.

That cost is trivial, as the character doing the camping need not be excessively skilled and capable of doing anything else. The skills to get a cov-ops with a cyno into space are not exactly money makers. Unless you are ransoming space back to the local residents which blows your opportunity cost argument out- but whether they pay isn't in your control.

Your continued fixation on emergent factors is still misplaced, especially in this discussion. The fact that something has come about through emergent factors is not in and of itself a reason to let bad gameplay stand. In the freighter argument the devs made balance changes that were nullified by emergence. The response is to continue to develop the game, not just give up on balance.

No one has said to roll back damage done through emergence either. The fall of BOB was a massive dbag move but completely legal at the time it was done. Developing better controls so that it doesn't happen every other week is acceptable and does not mean we should roll back what was done.

PvE do not have the right to operate in complete safety 100% of the time... And they don't. You can and do disrupt that safety at any time. You do so from 100% safety yourself however, so what's your justification?

Trivial is pretty much the same as zero. If I have 4 characters each one making P1s for robotics, and a 5th making robotics we are talking at least a billion ISK a month if not more. If I am doing invention it is kinda hard if one of my invention alts is 30+ jumps away.

Also, I never said that emergent game play shouldn't be nerfed, you, however, have said precisely the opposite, that because it was not intended it should be nerfed. That was precisely your position in the freighter bumping thread,



So no cloaks are used to deny resource acquisition and possibly set up BLOPs attacks. But nope, unintended emergence = bad and must be nerfed.

The BoB thing does not need a mechanics change, it needs the people in the executor corp to purge members who are inactive. That's it. Had that been done, then BoB might still be around. Being lazy and/or stupid should never, ever be a defense in this game that necessitates a nerf.

Yeah, and maybe it is time for CCP to stop. This is the basis of the "just one more nerf and it will balanced" statements. And considering you can avoid the problems simply by having a scout...no need to nerf it, just fly smarter.

Emergent behavior that has counters is NOT a problem no matter how much you complain and whine.

There is no problem if you use a scout, fit webs on your scout, don't over load your freighter, and put some tank on it. It is only when you don't do all of these reasonable things that you end up getting bumped and ganked.

And when it comes to AFK cloaking the most obvious solution is to move over one system. Just that simple thing will tell you a heck of alot. But you aren't happy reducing your risk...instead you want to shift your risk over onto another player instead of dealing with it yourself.

How is what I said a lie. The penalty for starting fights in Highsec is an aggression timer. I don't care that the freighters were attacked, just that the method being used does not carry the penalty for starting a fight.

It's not really the thread for it, but you still seem kind of chapped over a discussion that was closed because some of our professional forum warriors didn't like it and decided to petition it on grounds of 'running it's course'.

It's not about how stupid the freighter pilot is. It's just how things are advertised as working. No matter how stupid he may be he has a right to the expectation that the rules work as advertised. That timer does absolutely nothing to make him even slightly safer than he is now. The freighter could not mount guns anyway, he would still need either an escort or a white knight to save him-- all of which are true now.

If the attacks on shipping were considered to be out of hand, which they apparently were as dev time was put into making changes to reduce it, and then those changes were nullified leaving the original problem, then some change is still advocated. The astronomically tiny chance of some white knight shooting or webbing a passing bumper during the events cannot have anywhere near the impact halving CONCORD response times were meant too. All it does is put some risk on the one ship in in those events not exposed to any.

Moving over one system is one of the options I keep listing--- AKA, Don't play in that space. It's not an effective solution because it still leaves the space devalued (all the way down to 100% at that point), and some areas have afk camps in every system for several jumps in any direction, because of the trival costs and effort required to set up the camps... and nothing stops the camper from just following if he bothers to check.

It does not matter why I want a particular system any more than it matters why he wants to camp a particular system. The intent in the game design of generating conflict has been fulfilled, and now there needs to be a way to actually force a confrontation if everyone is going to stay in the space. He doesn't have to explode any more than I do, but he should still be forced to be as active if he wants to stay there, or leave as the PVE pilot did if he does not want a fight.

There are many 'perceived problems' in the game. There are many more perceived problems in real life. One might want to remember it is a game and the rules need to be simple enough to allow for creative use of them. We're not all lawyers, nor do we intend to be.

Me, I like to think in terms of "opportunity" and frankly I'd rather see a fix for the the ongoing connection issues than yet another rebalance or introduction of new countermodules to counter the counter. If that made sense at all.

So, any new system you guys advocate ought to be simple. Dropping local and regaining it through anchorable structures, or dedicated scanprobes with false positives and all that, might be too elaborate to ask for. It's a common problem in software development: there's always the "perfect solution", and then there's the "practical, reasonably quick" fix. Besides, if EvE were a "perfect world", it would be a boring oasis of peace. Yuck.

If I were you, I'd shoot for a quick fix -- and that quick fix could be something wholly out-of-the-box by making sure ships can't be both Interdiction nullified AND Cloaky at the same time. (move them to the same subsystem, pick & choose?). What would this accomplish, you ask? Glad you asked. It would make setting up the cloaky camp a living hell in protected space. Cloaky campers aren't supposed to be 20 jumps into hostile territory; once they get there, you have already failed at protecting your space.

If you didn't even try to stop them dead in their tracks, I wouldn't consider it protected space and you deserve everything you've got coming. Currently however, cloaky nullified T3s (and cloaky interceptors for that matter), have no trouble at all getting there. So maybe, that's a little too easy.

But that's what it all comes down to, isn't it? Protecting your space. Working under the assumption "backup fleets are bad because that would cut into your profit margin", isn't entirely true now, is it? That backup fleet might do gatecamping nearby, doesn't even want a percentage of your ISK -- they're just buddies on comms ready to bail you out. You don't pay them, nor do they log in to babysit the ratters. They're probably doing their own stuff and happen to be in the neighbourhood when needed.

Again, the cloaky camper is ONLY a problem when you're alone in the dark. Why are you out there alone? Why don't you use the NPC backup fleet known as Concord to save you? Why do you insist on being in nullsec on your own?? I think that's a good question and it's not been answered to satisfaction. I was here mainly because of "too easy offgrid boosters" --- the cloaky nullified T3s. It's a nuisance, but it's nothing more than that. You make it sound like a life-threatening situation at which point I have to wonder ... should I picture an out-of-the-way system with no alliance, nobody online except you and the cloaky camper? In that case, the ancient rules apply: survival of the fittest. The suggestion has been offered, so assuming you at least *tried* that before continuing the argument: how did that work? Now that you're using the many suggestions offered throughout this thread, do you still perceive a problem? Or can you think of it as a nuisance and crack a little smile knowing you're making money while somebody else is wasting a toon not making any and not finding the targets he was looking for?

I'm really *really* starting to wonder just how protected your space actually is. Truthful, I think there's nobody home but you; so the question "what right do you have to claim all that richess" still stands.

Brokk,

Fair point, as far as it goes.

Now... What about a smaller entitiy without hundreds, or even just dozens, or even just 20 people online to run those defense fleets.

Suppose a cloaked camper sneaks in during a time when few if any of the local residents are online, sets up his camp... What then?

Few complex systems work perfectly all the time. What's more likely---one guy with his cloak makes it in (hardly requires nullification to get through camps with a cloak), or that a smaller entitiy fails to set up perfect defenses at all times.

Of course, that's the point, it would be a boring game if everyone was perfect all the time. We fight it out and strange things happen. Except for the cloaked campers, who only ever see risk when, where and how they choose.