Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I rather like lowsec. I'd probably live there if I weren't so absentminded and distracted all the time. There's a lot of stuff you have to always keep an eye on in lowsec if you don't want to become someone else's killmail.

Local channel is your counter to cloaks, and you will always know they are there with local. Besides afk cloaked ships are not dangerous, only active cloak ships are! If you see a person in local and they aren't on d-scan you know they are cloaked and you should make sure that you have someone to help you if they decide to show up. Frankly Local alone is enough to put cloakers in their place, and if you live somewhere where people can kill you...than you should have something capable of giving you a scare ormaking you break a sweat, its supposed to be dangerous in low and null. The only people who can even honestly complain that cloaked ships are OP is those in WHs where local gives you nothing, but in WH space cloaks are an appreciated danger that makes WHs properly dangerous and scary. So all you low and null bears who hate cloak ships need to suck it up, if it bothers you too much move back to hi sec.

Features & Ideas: We Whip Our Dead Horses Back and Forth™

This joke was probably not funny the first time I said it.

How about when someone who's flying a cloaked ship comes into your system and goes AFK the local chat channel disappears from everyone in system's clients?

This would solve your issue of AFK cloakers as you'd know darned well that there was actually an AFK cloaker in your system whilst also removing the free intel you get from local at the same time.

I believe this would balance the situation. You gain intel and lose intel. Balance.

What do you guys think?

What, and face unacceptable risk? You sir are just being totally outlandish!

I think this is the point where they suggest wormhole is safer because noone drops carriers onto them, or uses covert cynos somehow....

Because, when you're ratting or mining, that is what worries you.... someone dropping supers on you...

Thing with W-space is, ISK is literally dripping off the walls there. Which means risk vs. reward ratio is good: you make obscene amount of money at the cost of lack of local. If you're good at managing losses and profits from sleeper drops you'll actually end up in the green anyway. Why?

Simple: W-Space income is based on components exclusive to it. Their price is regulated by supply and demand, they're used to build T3 cruisers that are in high demand.

Price of loss remains the same in null/low, but there's less money to be earned. Money from ratting in nullsec does not come from drops, but from rat bounties regulated by CCP. If you simply ramp up the risk, null will just become unprofitable (it already barely is at times. The only market-based commodities are faction/deadspace/officer modules and exploration drops, the latter crashed in value because the risk was lowered to the point everyone rushed after them. The market was literally flooded.) and people will start farming ISK using hisec alts. (They already do with FW alts.)

Where's AFK cloaking in this? Everywhere. Targets for those people (black ops groups especially, gotta love a good ratter kill.) are ratters. Not even dedicated carebears - fleet grunts when they're not in a brawl and earning money will do nicely.

When hostiles enter the system, you always have a choice. POS/Dock/Safe or risking it and dscan-mashing. Maybe it's a pod, maybe a shuttle - or maybe, indeed, a pesky Arazu about to light a cyno. Most people will choose the former, and wisely - there isn't enough incentive to risk your ship.

So a hunter ship has to either move along or resort to AFK cloaking. Hope the other side is ballsy or desperate enough to risk it.

How to "fix" it? You can't by fixing cloak or local. Just can't.

- "no local null" does not work. It's big space, much bigger than wormholes, with fixed connections and local makes spotting fleets possible. Scouts report, fleets change course, fights happen. All is good.
- "no cloak null" won't work either. To put it short, removing (or nerfing to the point of effective removal) this entire element of the game (and a branch of specialization) would be like shoveling a third of the sand from the sandbox because someone peed on it and is now crying.

To "fix" it, CCP would have to look at the profitability of nullsec anomalies and income generated that way. I wish them luck on that endevour, because it sure as hell isn't easy.

Technically you could scout the surrounding systems that are in bridge range. For example, if I were ratting in DBRN in Fountain I'd look in a subset of systems in Aridia and Solitude (I doubt somebody would bring in a hostile titan into Fountain). I'd also check the in-game map to see if there are pilots building up in those systems.

You could do the same for BLOPs, but the number of systems does get larger and they can move around.

So technically such a fleet is scoutable. One could argue it is unreasonable to be looking for a BLOPs gang, but I'd argue if you have one in your space, finding them and trying to evict them is part and parcel of owning sov. Or you could opt to forgo such a tactic, but then complaining about it is rather absurd. You've made a choice, now live with it.

That's a possibility (although it invalidates one of the bonuses of the force recon).

There's a 30 second reactivation delay on lighting a cyno after your cyno shuts off. Perhaps have the cloak trigger the reactivation delay on the cyno, too...

I don't know what the best solution is, but it's important to recognize that afk cloaking complaints are generally akin to whining about the mouse in the room with elephants, when there shouldn't be elephants in the room to begin with!

There is truth in those words. Most null sex players don't want to see some of it but it is not a simple, one-part problem... which means the solution isn't going to be simple either.

Although it is funny, "45 people have to dock up because of one afk cloaker". I love that quote. NS isn't quite as rough and bad-arse as we are led to believe?