Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You would happily mine in your venture with an untold amount of reds in your system watching everything that you do and engage you at will, but you wouldn't operate under a NRDS system with a neutral mining next to you????

I guess you like the certainty of reds blowing you mining ship to bits as opposed to the uncertainty of neutral who follows the NRDS rules.

Calling them "AFK cloakers" is wrong. Just because they appear inactive doesn't mean they are AFK. AFK cloakers do not add to the game by "creating uncertainty", that's just ********. AFK cloakers create a certainty, operate solo in a mining barge or PvE ship where they are and you will soon enough find out what that certainty is.

And if your intel system isn't up to the task of telling if a hostile is logged off in your home system or has left your system, you need a new intel system.

The rest of your agument has so many holes in it I don't know where to begin



First point isn't valid, people still do roaming gangs in null sec, though generally HAC gangs aren't done because HACs haven't been buffed yet. I see reds try to get into the system all the time, just because my system is well defended doesn't mean local needs a nerf to make it more dangerous.

Second point is pretty meaningless too, although I can see where you are coming from, you live in a WH, WHs are hard work but have higher rewards. I live in Null sec, security still needs to be done, reds still need to be kept out.



EvE harsh and unsafe, wish it was for cloaky campers, come on, how is EvE unsafe when people can go AFK in hostile space for days with zero risk



Does it offend you that people fly officer fit pirate faction ships in null sec. I have yet to see one complaint about someone losing a ship here let alone a overfitted one.

Read the content of the thread, not just the title, most the discussion is about game balance, or lack of it when it comes to someone sitting AFK cloaked for days.

For someone to lose a PvE ship or mining barge to PvP usually requires a mistake, one faction on this thread sees this as being too safe, so local should be nerfed and miners and PvEers should lose ships at random.

The other faction, me included just wants to see an end to reds being online in hostile space cloaked for 23 hours a day, every day, until they get bored of getting no kills.

Deliberate mischaracterisation doesn't get you anywhere, bro. We're not after "easy" targets, we're after targets, period. For the fiftieth time, the current mechanics don't just provide PVErs with overpowered intel, it works for PVPers too. Local makes it trivial to avoid PVP if you don't want it, for everyone. It's not uncommon for a small gang or solo PVPer to see another PVPer or group - who would without a doubt crush him - jump into system and cause him to react the same way - get safe.

As for you wanting "hard targets", I don't quite understand how that statement correlates with trying to pile up more and more advantages for yourself.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out Andy.

Funny how you have such a limited set of options to adapt to this situation.

Some risk is fine, local delay would be something, or even local gone would be an improvement. But the way it is now, you fight to get sov, fight to keep it, fight to keep it as blue as possible and at the end of your day when you need to refit ships or buy stuff (for 100-1000% more money than hisec) you can't afford jack cause theres a neut camped in every system as soon as the development index ticks up.

Obvious.
Camping is caused by two factors, the need, and the availability, both created by Local.


Perversely, by blocking perfectly all efforts to engage pilots short of pilot error or carelessness, local establishes itself as the source of intel needing to be devalued, which is exactly what so-called cloaky camping does.

Without Local, the awareness needed to influence pilot behavior does not exist.
They do not see the cloaked ship on an overview, the cloaked pilot does not communicate. The cloaked pilot, if effective, is not even expected to be paying any attention, and is considered probably AFK. Without Local, this cannot exist on these levels.


Because when effective risk drops to levels where it can be demonstrated as being less dangerous for null pilots than similar activities in high sec, the expectations for reward also drop below the levels in high sec. Game balance is not sustainable otherwise.


Player interaction.
By being present, even diminished here by being known in advance as a potential threat, the cloaked pilot is the only sustainable form of threat not easily avoided.

A game where shooting equals risk, and you can always avoid being shot, equals you can always avoid risk.
At the very least, this avoidance needs to come at a price.



That is an absolute statement, in a game where absolutes do not exist on that level.

Some pilots may go elsewhere. Since it is unlikely for them to find less effective risk with the character in question, they are unlikely to use that character.
If they use a different character, the context changes beyond the scope of being relevant to this discussion.

You can say that you aren't after easy targets all you want, but when you say

we must assume that you are talking about easy targets again. So yes, YOU ARE


As for me wanting hard targets, all I meant was a preference for engaging pvp ships and fleets that are more than interested in engaging me in combat instead of trying so hard to catch the easy-to kill, low-risk-to-my-side-loosing-much-if-anything pve targets. Preventing a cloak from being online while a cyno is online, or allowing mobile grid-wide cyno jammers still allows me to engage pvp ships which want to fight me.

Added:

Whining about not being able to catch "the local ratter." Let everyone note, that the covetous greed to gank the high value pve asset stops at nothing, including attacks on local. Find the targets that want to engage you. Give people a good reason to want to fight you and they will come .. in their pvp ships .. or does that scare you too much? .. just asking. Are you a pvper? Or just a whiner that can't figure out how to attack their sov, their supply lines, their jump bridge network, etc. in such a way as to get them to WANT to fight you?

When you look at who is really whining, it is the player who says, "They won't fight me and I don't know how to attack anything of value to make them want to fight me. Waa. They just warp away all the time. Waa." I hope you get the point. You want fights? Then figure out what to do to get people to come out and challenge what you are doing! Maybe propose to CCP for more benefits to sov that need defending. Cuz if it needs defending, they people want to fight you.

Nikk, I just took the part of the quote that was true. I had no intention of implying that it was in context, as I referenced it.



Take away that cyno from the cloaky camper. Cloak on, fine, cyno off. Let the prey deal with just his unscannable ship for as long as he chooses to camp. They might not notice his friends jump to the neighboring system. Or let him offline his cloak and online the cyno. Now he is a danger, but people may not have noticed that he is scannable and thus vulnerable .. except for the unlimited number of friends parked at the Titan.

Or maybe we just add a mobile cyno disruption bubble that extends to an entire grid. The stealth bomber could warp in and get point, but he would need a friend to come in quick to support him, or to light the cyno off grid and bring in support. Or he could just realize that frigates are naturally squishy and bring in something much bigger with an inherently better tank.

So many options. And most are much better than this whiny rant about local not letting you catch pve prey so easily and with relatively little risk. Give the mobile cyno disruption bubble idea a chance. Consider other options that don't just focus on getting you easier access to the easy pve prey who won't fight you and neglect targeting real pvp defense targets.

And you are very focused on hotdropping pve assets.
And yes, hotdropping will still happen where it is allowed no matter what "other means" are available.

You are not looking at the root reason for AFK cloaking. Not even close. It isn't that I just want to hang out in system XYZ-123 for ***** and giggles. I'm there to, if it is hostile, to kill people. That's it.

Now, I can rush in there, load grid and try to warp to some celestial, anomaly, etc. hoping to catch a ratter or some other poor schlub. Problem is with local and intel channels the residents of system XYZ-123 have plenty of warning to get safe before I have much chance to even load grid.

So...now what is my option? Camp the system. Set up a safe, activate cloak, go "AFK". Do it for a looooonnnnnngggg time. So long that eventually, the residents go, "Oh, that's Teckos he is always there and you can ignore him." After they start doing that and when I notice, I am no longer AFK, I'm watching them, learning, and when the time is right, springing a trap on them.

Why? Because, given current game mechanics--i.e. local and intel channels--that is about the only way to catch someone and kill them.

Is this they way I'd like it to be? No. I'd like to have a chance to do it the way I initially described, I jump into the system, load grid and warp to wherever I think I have a chance of catching somebody. Not certainty, not near certainty. I'd like null to be a place where people want to go to "get rich" either via mining, ratting, PI, doing something with towers, etc. I'd like people to invest in their systems, even some crappy ones that could be used to make decent isk. Doesn't have to be great isk, but better (and hopefully more interesting) than running Damsel in Distress for the 459th time.

So yeah, I have an idea of what null could be like, where even some of the lower quality systems are used. People are doing stuff and sometimes gangs come through with the intent of killing people. The people who hold sov in that system will want to protect what they have so they'll have to respond to that gang that is rolling through their space. If it isn't the people actively using it, then the PvP pilots. I'd like this kind of thing to be frequent enough so that a defense fleet isn't a boring grinding activity, but something that is likely to result in fights. And the defenders with JBs, POS, titans, and so forth should have the edge. Getting around the gang and coming at them from a direction that is not expected.

But aside from moon mining, ratting and grav sites, and a few other options not much goes on in null. Okay, you can run some decent missions in Stain, and maybe other NPC space has okay missions, but for the most part most systems in null are empty with people only passing through in their cloaky-nullified T3s.

Null is, for the most part boring boring boring.



A local defense fleet wont form for a single cloaky ship. Even a single pilot running around in your system will likely take awhile for a defense fleet to form. You might get more if you have a fleet of 25-30 HACs backed up with logi support and you make a real effort to **** in people's cheerios such as going to a major system and bubbling the undock for awhile and shooting station services. Then you bugger off to another system to annoy them.



No. AFK cloaking is far, far older than this suggests. AFK cloaking is not a result of any nerf but the result of local which is just about as old as the game itself. And the get safe when a hostile enters system is nothing new nor controversial. Nobody is saying that is bad game play, but that this type of game play with the current mechanics makes for boring game play...and thus bad game play. AFK cloaking is boring game play. It is bad game play. But without it null would be too safe. Most of the people you are arguing with want to change things so we don't have bad game play--i.e. ultra safe as well as boring game play.

No matter how much this is said, AFK cloaking is NOT the result of local, but instead is the result of being able to hotdrop people who take the risk that the cloaker is afk. Local is the only reason that people move to null sec to use their pve assets. Without local, there would be very few pve targets in null and probably no pvp targets in null except for a few with cynos and fleets waiting on Titans.

Since I am all for solutions that work for everyone AND make sense, I will propose a third idea:

Proposal: Cynos are connected to sov AND capitals are allowed to jump through stargates again. If you have blue standings with the sov holder then you can light a cyno. If not, then you have to move your capital in the old fashion way, through gates. This would solve so many issues, including all my issues with cloaky cyno ships. IMHO, this is the best idea I have created on this issue so far.