Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Yet, if you simply remove the ability to fit a Cyno on a Cloaking ship, the Risk Vs. Reward ratio becomes manageable.

Your cloaking hunters can hang out afk for a year, and the bears take their chances or don't as they choose, without risking the ire of an entire alliance by undocking with someone not blue in system that cannot be affected in any way even by the efforts of an entire alliance to counter him. If they are too scared to risk a single ship, then they deserve to go broke. It isnt reasonable to expect a single ship to somehow tolerate and operate under the threat of an entire alliances guns with no way to counter but to keep an entire alliances's worth of combat wing on call 100% of the time.

Instead allow Cynos on ships that are fast, warp stabilized, and capable of actively evading hunters but not immune to everything while AFK in enemy territory. The combination of a cloak and cyno is just OP. The rest of what a cloak ship can do is fine, but projecting the threat of entire alliances while maintaining 100% inititative is just too much.

So your objective is to be able to catch people in PvE ships which you are unable to do now? I have seen so many people get caught in 0.0 regardless of what you define as perfect intel. I have read your posts, but at the end of the day, you need to HTFU and do what FA and the CFC did when catching IRC ratters, they got loads of kills!

So the two arguments I hear for afk cloakers is they manage botters, and if you just mount an overwhelming fleet when you have one all is well...

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Cloaking as it exists is almsot fine. The afking is the exploit. If an industrialist afk mines... he is accepting risk... afk explorer some thing, afk piloting (aka Otto Pilot) same thing... AFK cloaking... ZERO RISK.

AFK CLOAKING FOR BEGINNERS...

step 1. Right after dt login character fly cloaky ship to desired system and cloak in a safe... time spent 10 minutes...
step 2. Leave computer, log on alt, throw a party, watch some tv.... whatever...
step 3. set alarm for dt to safely log off wait 30 minutes go back to step 1

Total time spent "playing" eve... 15 minutes plus 30 waiting for dt to end.
Total time spent risking ship about 5 minutes... tops
Total time impacting the game play of people actually playing the game and attempting to enjoy themselves and build something for themselves, their corp, their alliance, and for new eden. 23.5 hours.

This is the kind for broken mechanic that plagues nullsec and makes it Dull Sec. Got a cloaky nullsec scarecrow... log off and wait for him to leave, or maybe get on your FW alt and actually get in fights, maybe you indy alt in high sec to get in some building and research. You can't really doanything about the cloaker half the time he isn't even really there, and the other half he is spying around a trolling local fun = 0.

Make it interesting and challenging at least... Cloakers could consume fuel... 30 mins to an hour and they need to jet for a bit to fill up. AFKing becomes a matter of time and luck... no more popping off to watch a movie with your cloaker logged in. How about a POS module that work like a Ping for hunting subs. Ping the system and all cloaks destabalize. Piot has to manually restart the cloak. Limit it to one ping per system per 30 mins- 1 hr. Cloakies will at least have to be there to restart the cloak, and be aware of the last ping time and be prepard for when th next one might come.

Either solution puts the cloaker in command of his own fate, does not nerf cloaking just afk cloaking. Want to cloak and afk ... then you better pray you don't get pinged and the locals have combat probes. An elegeant and superficial fix... (Not a coder, not sure how hard it would be to squeez either solution in th client so I won't say easy). The fuel fix is a little more challenging to avoid being a full on nerf, because it would affect more then just afkers but still a solution non th less.

Again before I get beaten into the floor, I like cloaky ships... I fly many of them and have doe Null Sec and live in a wormhole now... Cloaky is my life, and Ushrakhan is known for its outlandish cloaky fleets... (cloaky vaga for the win) but this mechanic needs some love and real thought in the balancing. If sov space and wormholes are really going to be "Occupied" and "Claimed" then the tools and mechanics need to exsist to make that mean something. If a person in a 40 il fit cheetah with a cloak and cyno can hold hostage a whole Sov system then Sov itself is meaningless. Cloakies should be allowed, but afkcloakies should have to assume some risk if they aren't gonna even watch their ships

I said what I meant Nikk...

AFKing should be risky no matter the activity... If you have something substantive to add feel free

Alacrity

Then you must also address people sitting in an Outpost or a POS.
The risk to a cloaked vessel may seem trivial, but it still is greater than either of those two.

And a player who is not AFK but has zero risk while making ISK sounds like a much larger problem.
Mine or rat, stay aligned, and hit warp the moment a non blue enters system.
Wash, rinse, repeat.

That requires effort and thinking about what you are trying to do.

Personally, I think you nailed it, but there are many here trying to improve on local's intel.
They are already being told, (for zero effort no less), a cloaked vessel is present in their system.
No probes were launched, noone spotted them on the gate, this was the list of pilots in local chat providing this.

And they want that intel to be more solid, not make an effort to determine whether it should be trusted.
They want it done for them, automatically.

Killboards are helpful here, too. If the Mystery Cloaky is part of a black ops group, or is a field-lighter for conventional hotdrops, you can usually find out how much of a threat he represents by searching info on his corp or alliance and seeing when their major PvP activity blocks are.

Once again, not a FLAWLESS solution by any means, but once again, lets you make a pretty good guess as to whether or not Herr Cloakson is going to be dropping his buddies on you. Unless his corp/alliance is combat-active 23.5/7 - then you're pretty much screwed, and stuck in the trap you described above.

I guess with that, we can make all ships scannable if they are fitted some kind of cyno, regardless of the cyno's use. Oh, while we are at it, lets also make all ships with jump drives scannable to even if in so called safe spots, that way we can help limit off this...."100% safe ship" crap that you speak of. And while we are at it, also gives us an ability to hack outpost, and when hacked, it causes all players inside the station to eject from the station regardless of state of activity.

Looking at it from a carebears point of view there are a couple things that need to be boosted to make PvE worth the risk.
Nullsec/Lowsec anomaly sites need to be boosted. Either a raised chance of expeditions or a faction spawn or a slight raise in both.Expeditions are more of a reward I think. A chance of an officer spawn instead of a faction rat in an anomaly would also make things much better for the PvE side.
Radar sites need to give out more t2 rig bpcs in all areas.
Mag sites need to give out more t2 loot in low and null sec.

People that mine need PvP support. It would be nice to just remove pos moon mining and convert just the mining part to barges/exhumers while leaving the production part the same. Then move the current minerals to lowsec and maybe a couple more to highsec. This would no doubt make mining worth it in nullsec and takes t2 production off the automatic atm setup.

Time for an epic frisking...



What about people on safari, people who infiltrate your corp, your alliance or your coalition, you forget them, this is one of the ways to get around blue lists and plenty of kills are got by people doing this.



Local is not an ultimate safety net, there are gaps in coverage, first of all there is the people reporting incoming roams, but clever people log off in uninhabited systems, their objective is to get those who are not paying attention due to no one being reported in local, then we have wormholes openning up in system, look at Verge of Collapse for someone who does this and gets plenty of kills.



The rewards part is all your focussing on, you have ABC minerals in hidden belts, there is your reward, other people have the ability to chew through Hordes at a very fast rate, that is their reward. Rubbish about people in HS being more at risk of suicide ganking, if I am in a Hulk or Mackinaw fitted for yield yes, but in a Skiff fitted for tank no, I mine in a tanked Skiff, no risk. If I move expensive stuff in an industrial I am at risk, if I go over the value of the ships required to gank my freighter/Orca I am at risk, when I undock in my transport ship there is someone there with a fast locking alpha or someone like that on the gate I am at risk. Or if I am in a pimped Tengu with low shields and without hardeners on I am at risk. But in the majority of times I am not at risk, every ship I fly in 0.0 is at risk!!!



And do you honestly think that people will risk very expensive slow lumbering ships without low levels of risk, and I can tell you that I never felt safe in a carrier, be it people using the gaps in intel, or WH's openning up into the system I was in, or someone logged off in the system I was in and no one letting me know, there is always risk. Take that from someone who ratted in his triage fitted carrier with an AFK cloaky in system, because I knew he did not have the backup to take me on at that time, but the risk is that I could be wrong.



If you feel safe in null you are doing it wrong, even with a solid team backing you your not safe because a much more solid team can be after you, you wait to Stain Empire gets fully into gear and if their key players come back, they will show you just how unsafe you are. I have some friends in Unclaimed. and they understand just how much of a threat they are, you are not safe I can assure you having had my own experiences with Stain Empire and the Russian parts of -A- !