Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I don't expect a lot of support for this, but I feel I should at least try.

I believe the issue of "AFK cloaking" is a symptom of a far greater problem - Namely, the fact that, as far as actual stealth mechanics go, cloaking in Eve isn't actually that stealthy.

Typically, stealth implies that your presence is unknown. In most cases, the primary benefit of stealth is not simply that your opponents can't see you, but that your opponents don't even know you're there. In most real scenarios, once you are known to exist, you've already lost your main advantage, even if you haven't been actively found. You can be hunted. People can take actions to protect themselves from espionage.

Now contrast this with Eve. In Eve, even if you're cloaked, people know you're there as soon as you enter a system. That's the primary advantage of stealth gone. But it gets worse - Even when people know you're there, they can't actually hunt you down. The fact that your presence is known does not actually make you any weaker. That's the primary disadvantage of stealth gone. So to recap:


Typical stealth environment:
Unknown to your enemy
Once your presence is known, you can be actively hunted

Eve stealth:
Known to your enemy
You can not be actively hunted


Stealth in Eve is not stealth. It's a quasi-invulnerability field that can only be dispelled under certain circumstances. Not only is it infuriating to those who would seek to hunt cloakers, but the primary benefit of stealth is nowhere to be found. I feel we can do better than this. What I propose is not a simple nerf here or buff there, but a reworking of cloaking to make it into an actual stealth system.

Because all of these changes are highly interdependent, please reserve judgement until you have absorbed all of them, and consider them as a whole, not simply on their individual merits.


The Changes:

Part 1) Remake Cloaking into an actual stealth mechanic:

a) Being cloaked removes you from local.
b) Jump gates do not decloak you on proximity.
c) Using a jump gate whilst cloaked does so silently - The gate does not fire on either side.
d) You can, upon landing in a system, activate your cloak directly from your post-jump cloaked state.

Reasoning:
a) is required for you to actually be a stealth agent. It's impossible to act in stealth if your presence is implicitly known. b), c) and d) are all designed to let you travel between systems without notifying those who may be observing a jump gate.


Part 2) Allow people to hunt cloaked users:

a) Introduce a decloaking module. Effectively a special-case smartbomb with an extreme radius. Give it a significant cooldown and cap usage. Should probably go in a high slot. Upon hitting a cloaked ship, it should not simply uncover the cloaked ship, but also severely cripple them for a duration. At the very least, disable their warp capabilities.
b) Introduce stealth-hunting probes. Literally, probes which can detect stealthed ships. Requires an expanded probe launcher. Detects not only cloaked ships, but also ships which have recently decloaked.

Reasoning:
a) is obvious enough. If you know there's a cloaked person nearby, you should be able to expose them. However, it should not be something that can simply be spammed. Its use should be designed so that it is used primarily when you know there is a cloaked person in the vicinity. It should cripple cloaked ship to avoid an explicit escape. An exposed ship should be vulnerable. b) is for more broad-case detection. Something which is used to sweep large areas. Where the decloaking module is used to expose stealth agents, the probes should be used to discover if there are any stealth agents to begin with.



That's it. They're not exceptionally complex ideas. They're not meant to be. But I feel they solve the major problems of cloaking in Eve. AFK cloakers would lose their teeth, actual stealth and intel gathering would receive a significant boost, and the paranoid could defend themselves.

Or we could just stick with the quasi-invulnerability systems whose primary uses are blockade running and psychological warfare. It's all good.

i'll say it again:

AFK cloaking is a legitimate metagaming tactic. If you don't like metagaming, EVE isn't the game for you.

Removing cloaked ships from local makes them overpowered. Simple as that. They will allow you to do recon with absolute impunity - adding the ability to JUMP GATES while cloaked takes this even further.

Sorry, my bad, I forget that not all Eve players are native English speakers.

"Interdependent" means "Two or more things which depend on each other". To depend on something means to need or rely on that something. When two things are interdependent, that means that each relies on the other, so you can't just have one by itself.

When I said in my post that my suggestions were interdependent, what I meant was that they all relied on each other. Any one of them on their own would be broken for reasons so obvious that I don't even need to elaborate on them.

I hope that clears things up.


Well, I obviously lack the ability to comprehend every possible effect of the changes I suggested. That's why I posted it here and not in the assembly hall. I assume you've thought of a particularly bad disruption to existing gameplay that would come out of these changes?

I suspect that you simply have no idea what you are talking about. Your gamebreaking ideas "interdependently" screw nullsec over and give cloaked ships impunity. "Oh, this anti-cloaking mod has a 300km range? Alright, I'll park my scouting ship 350km off." The only meaningful change is the removal of cloaked ships from local, which removes their metagaming potential, but gives them too much impunity for recon ops.

Oh and this "anti cloak pulse" would just be a massive nerf to bombers, which are the most effective anti-blobbing tool available to small groups. Thanks, you've made our Maelstrom blob unstoppable by anything short of titans!

All great ideas, Black Dranzer.

I would also add that if the cov ops pilot ever de-cloaks, or talks in local, they remain in local until they warp out of the system.