Assembly Hall

Really, this is your well thought out idea?????

Well played sir!

Oh my, new ideas regarding cloaking.

Oh wait.

The horse is dead, you can stop beating it now.

No actually, they wanted them removed. CCP just took their time in doing it.

CCP also wants to do something about cloaking. And local. And that entire bloody intel spectrum.

I did not expect this thread to garner support, mainly because it A) Makes cloaking better, which scares the people who hate AFK cloaking, and B) It makes it possible to detect cloakers, which scares the people who love AFK cloaking. It's a balanced solution that pisses off both camps. My proposal is basically "remove local" combined with "allow cloakers to be probed". It's far more balanced than either solution on its own, but that doesn't matter, because people are self absorbed and don't like compromise.

Do you remember what it was that actually got Learning Skills fixed? It was a person in authority basically getting sick of seeing all the topics and then going up to somebody and saying "hey, you, fix it now because I'm paying you". The problem is not resources. The problem is not designs. The problem is not convincing CCP that it's an issue that needs dealing with. The problem is PRIORITY. This entire clusterfuck could be fixed in the next patch if somebody in authority mandated it. But nobody in authority is mandating it. So it isn't getting dealt with.

I made this thread for two reasons. 1) Query public response to compromise (which went about as well as I expected), and 2), to contribute to the growing pool of complaints so that maybe somebody in authority will stumble across the thread and get pissed enough to actually finally say the word to get this stupid thing dealt with.

Honestly, I don't care what CCP does to cloaking, because I know whatever it is, it'll be better thought out and more balanced than anything most people on this forum could propose.

I just want to see it get done.

The extent of it is a couple of mutters at fanfast panels, mostly. It's not as explicit as "AFK cloaking is bad", so much as a non-commital "Cloaking is something we want to take a look at".


Thing is, intel and stealth are implicitly intertwined. You can't cleanly separate them.


Your presumptions are understandable, but highly inaccurate. I'm concerned with cloaking as a whole. Stealth in Eve poorly implemented, and I take issue with it. The reason you think this is about AFK cloaking is because it would be physically impossible to make a thread about cloaking and have it not touch on AFK cloaking in some way, shape, manner or form. I do believe my implementation would "fix" AFK cloaking, but that's not why I pieced it together.

I probably would've made an intel-related proposal, but A) I'm not qualified to do it, because my knowledge on intel gathering is disparate at best, and B) Such a proposal would necessitate widespread changes, and people are generally bad at thinking holistically. If you write a list of a dozen interconnected changes, people will take one or two of those changes, isolate them, and then tell you why your idea sucks whilst ignoring how those two changes interact with the other ten.


Accurate, if inelegant. I do believe my ideas have merit on their own; I'm not just here to spam. But that's part of the bigger picture.

Could you elaborate on this?

Okay, having read the response and thought about it, I think the suggestions in the OP are too much. It gives too much to the cloaked ship. I think there should be a small chance to see the cloaked ship wihtout a new mechanice (scan probes, etc.) and that could be something like keeping cloaks and the jump cloak as they are now.

Basically,

-You wont show in local until you deactivate your jump cloak.
-You will be removed from local once you activate your own cloaking device (if you have one).
-Given the two above you at least be visible for a very short amount of time jumping in and out of a system.

Thus, if the pilot ratting in a system is not paying attention his risk factor just went up. If he went AFK even while at a POS, his risk factor just went up. And so forth.

At the same time I also like the idea that the cloaked ship cannot view local as well. Now he has to use Dscan and warp around--i.e. work for his intel.

And in addition a way of finding cloaked ships in system should be introduced. Be it with scan probes, a module whatever. Thus, if a guy is ratting and warps to a POS to go take a leak and is nervous somebody may have come in system and is waiting to "do bad things to him"™ then he'll have to re-scan the system. Just as the cloaker no longer gets quicky intel without some risk, neither does the ratter.

Nikk's suggestions cover most of this, IIRC. The OP is moving somewhat in that direction, but is not comprehensive enough and IMO, gives too much to cloaks.

Note that with the above the idea of AFK cloaking is pointless, even without some way of finding the cloaked vessel. Since you don't show up in local, you can't have any impact. Adding in a way to detect cloaked ships will introduce risk to AFK cloaking as well further discouraging it, at least for long periods of time.

Devs have said for a long time that AFK cloaking is not good gameplay. Maybe someday they'll do something about it.