EVE General Discussion

As a vague concept without any specifics, this sounds like a bad idea to me. Will be interesting to see what details (if any) ever make it as far as the playerbase.

The counters to cloaky's are thus:

They're either flying wet paper bags or impotent where DPS is needed with few exceptions. They can't do anything while cloaked. In most cases, solo, if they uncloak they're quickly dispatched. They can't recloak when targeted and can be decloaked within 2km any object save other cloaked cloaky's.

Under current mechanics, adding a ship specifically designed to find and kill them will pretty much render them useless. And you can be sure that there will be 5 at each gate camp and double that in each fortress system.

The easiest way to keep claoks as powerful as they are, but to stop long term AFK cloaking (IE log in, go to enemy system, cloak and then go to work for 8 hours) is to simply have the cloak have a very long cycle time (like an hour or two or something) and not be able to auto repeat. It would need to not run the whole cycle when deactivated though, so you can still uncloak, shoot folks and recloak again in fairly short time, like a 5 second minimum reactivation delay.

This would allow for enemy system disruption, as long as you are actually playing the game and not gone to the pub.... The tactic is valid and valuable, but as I have ever said, if you want to have any effect in game (even purely psychological) you need to actually be playing the game, not away from your computer for half a day.

Its a hard thing to stop the afk abuse of claoks but still keep the power of cloaking ships.

y u tink smart n no spam no cuntr or ys counter y u no has ters bot wil has fun breaking dat system tho

That does sounds like the logical solution to our non-existing problem though, kudos for for that!

Still, bombers need a buff, not nerf.

I don't think we should change any cloaking mechanics at all, local is the problem that causes afk cloaking, not the cloaking devices themselves. I have however come up with a theory that I would not mind being in the game as a comprimise to any change in local.

Lets keep to the true nature of the cloak. When someone goes deep, it's very difficult to even detect faint signatures. Also whats all this crap about cloaks being detectable only after a certain period of time... that goes against everything that the cloak is.

TL:DR Cloaks are vulnerable when the pilot is active, and near other pilots.

Set up a system where Cloaking systems have a specific strength lets say that regular cloaks have strength 1 and covops have strength 2. The cloaking skill will add 5% per level to your cloaking strength. Ok now every action that the pilot that is cloaked takes reduces there cloak strength, I.E. d-scanning -0.1; warping -1.0; etc.

Now things that the Cloaky hunter can do, any cloak is effected by your sensor strength (thats right eccm) and it's cloaking strength is effected directly when they are with in 30 KM of your position with a falloff of 30 KM. That means that ships with high sensor strengths can see cloaked ships and target them, but the ships will not decloak until the targeting resolves.

Any value of cloaking strength between 1 and 0 will increase your signature radius directly, for example if my cloaking strength is 0.5 and my base Sig Radius is 40, my effective Sig Radius will be 20 therefore visible to d-scan but the cloak still hides me visually. If your cloaking value falls below 0 you are visible to everyone who's effects make your cloaking strength below 0.

As a final note I will say that it requires capacitor to recharge the cloaking strength, so ships can stay in close proximity without detection for a time, and if there capacitor dries up they have the potential to be decloaked, or detected.

People still should be able to cloak up in a safe and be safe, that was one of the original ideas for cloaking and it should remain. Active pilots should be aware that they can be detected when active, this alone will create a cat and mouse situation because now the cloaker will have to keep track of strength values and potential capture, while the noncloaked will be able to take steps to potentially find any ambushers.

It certainly would be more exciting for me as an afk cloaker, but I only support this idea if local is modified.

You may not be afraid of a single manticore, you brave man, but you should see the nullbears run for cover as soon as one is reported in intel. A guy in my alliance parked a Manti in one of N3MESIS' ratting systems and they ended up docking all their carriers and ratting ships until he left about a day later. "Don't rat if there are neuts in local" is pretty much the mantra of every nullsec alliance.

Remove local already, it worked in WH space fine, you nullbears don't need that intel.

Sounds fine. Using a cloak is far too easy.

I like this idea.

As for local, I have a simple solution: make it optional. Allow people to close the local channel. This removes themselves from being found through local... but they can't see how many people are in local. It's a tradeoff.

The thought of losing my afk advantage in my bomber disturbs me, however, all of those afk botting tengu just sitting there...