Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If 0.0 space have to be risky for everyone else, then cloakers shouldn't come out without any risks.

I can agree that the cloakers WILL have it a little more safer than others, but being totally safe as they are now isn't right.

They are only totally safe in a very limited context.

BTW thinking about Eve Vegas and the AFK cloaking thing, I don't think it really means what alot of the anti-AFK cloaking community thinks it means...at least not necessarily.

The response is that CCP would like to see something along the lines of a "cat-and-mouse" kind of play.

For there to be "cat-and-mouse" then you have to have active cloakers, not AFK cloakers.

Now it could be CCP will use some sort of AFK auto-logoff...or they could do something else to make AFK pointless...like having a cloaked ship disappear from local and add in some sort of ability to scan down cloaked ships.

It also makes it so that cloakers would no longer be 100% safe...especially if they went AFK. And without having to log off semi-afk players in the process.

Andy,

Getting back to your idea (i.e. not mine, but your idea expressed here).

What about replacing 3 with some sort of method of scanning down cloaked ships. As I noted earlier it would pretty much get us to the same place:

Case 1: Guy is AFK and you scan for him and he does not move, thus AFK. You scan for him, get a warp in and decloak him and he still does not respond, almost surely AFK.

Case 2: You scan for him, but after several scans you realize he is hopping safes. Not AFK.

In case 1 you can assure yourself of safety while ratting/PvEing by killing him and sending him home via Pod express. In case 2 he is not AFK and wouldn't have gotten an AFK tag with the AFK Flag/Warp to Deadspace option.

This way if a guy wants to sit in station and listen to the station sounds all day (hey people do weird **** sometimes) or just sit in space an enjoy looking at the background...they can. But the notion of AFK camping will pretty much go the way of the dodo.

So I'm assuming there is a reason....

You are correct that with some scanning effort, it is possible to determine AFK cloaky behavior based on their ability to evade, but I am extremely slow to supporting the scanning or decloaking of cloaked ships for the mere reason that it could easily represent a massive nerf to a very important class of ships. Any development in a potentially cloak-breaking direction has got to be given a lot of roam for doubt.

I am racking my brain right now about how cloak scanning mechanisms could proceed without hurting the cloak. My best idea is that perhaps a cloak could have a residual build-up which enables scans over time. A ship cloaked for greater than 15 minutes total on the same grid can be scanned by a cloak probe. The next fifteen minutes builds up the cloak residual so that it becomes easier and easier to gain a warpable lock. After 30 minutes of cumulative cloaked time on a specific grid, the ship becomes as easy to scan as if the cloak were not engaged. The cloak probes would be as strong as regular combat probes and could scan everything that a regular combat probe could scan. Cloaky ships merely passing through a system would not be affected at all and no advantage would go to any gatecampers unless they could manage to keep the cloaky ship on grid for more than 15 minutes cloaked; that would be a lot of large bubbles.

I cannot support any effort to enable seeing cloakies on the overview while cloaked or targeting them to decloak them, unless this function could only be performed by a ship while the covert ops cloak was activated and only within 10 km of the cloaked ship. Even then, I would have to consider the effects of such a mechanic much more thoroughly.

Or... they are just going to give certain ships the ability to hunt cloakers. I'd place bets on them not removing them from local, since they would become unstoppably OP.

If you can hunt cloaked ships, and also be made aware of their presence in local, you have just trivialized cloaking.

You can balance this one of two ways.

1. Do not display cloaked ships in local.
1a. Possibly limiting this to ships using the covert ops cloak, others showing up in local.

2. Un-nerf the DPS and tanking ability of cloaking. If it takes a high slot to cloak, then it should take a high slot to hunt a cloak.
Balance can be as simple as demanding equal effort from each side.
If a special ship needs no module to hunt with, then requiring a module to cloak becomes an additional burden. The hunting ship would need a nerf to compensate, such as weak tank or DPS, to prevent it being the FOTM.

This is really tweak intensive, and would not be simple, but it could be less game breaking than imposing log-off timers or overheating controls on cloaks.

In your opinion, sure.
In my opinion, if cloak ships can't be seen in local, you've just OPed cloaks.
If cloakers were not shown in local they would be the most OP ship class in the game. They are already one of the best types of ships to be, so giving them such a unique benefit as that would be dumb. And while it would probably take a high slot, remember most covops ships have an extra high anyway, 2 in the case of bombers.

If they took a single class of ship, assault frigs for example, and gave them the ability to hunt cloakers, I personally don;t think it would be the end of the world. Much like any normal ship now, cloakers would just have to keep on the move. They wouldn't suddenly be useless all because one type of ship can find them. They would still not show up on d-scan, warp cloaked and be able to use covert cynos and bridges. You act like if a single ship could hunt cloaked pilots and they remained in local, that cloaking would be ended forever. Dramatic much?

All cloaked ships minus possibly the bomber and black ops are now obsolete for anything that isn't hotdroping. The only thing going for covops ships in normal space is their ability to move around relatively unhindered. If you remove that without giving them the ability to at least not have their presence announced in local then you are better served in a combat recon. Hell, interceptors are already better at hunting and scouting normal space than covops, they can't be bubbled, are faster, and better in a firefight than covops ships anyway.

Also your assertion that covops have extra high slots is false, the only ships that this is the case for is bombers, all the other ships actually have the same or usually less high slots than the other ships in their class (or even the hull they are based on), in addition to being weaker in combat.

Seriously, remove cloaked ships from local, prevent said cloaked ships from using local while cloaked, and I'll even take it a step further and don't let them have their on board scanner either. Make them used probes to find their targets.

And lastly, we'll go with your idea and give assault frigates some module that will let them find cloaked ships.

At no point did I say they were useless Also the only covert ships that are "common" is bombers, Which oddly enough, are starting to lose out to crows after the patch.

I'll be the first to admit that bombers are in a pretty good place right now, but it's a precarious position and wouldn't take much to totally ruin them.

This is pretty pointless as anyone that has a fleet on standby is going to have their own cyno already.