Assembly Hall

Possibility of getting dropped on = cloaker not AFK

Gathering intel = cloaker not AFK


Once again a nullbear wants to nerf all cloakes under the premis of 'AFK is bad' to make zero security space safer for himself.

I expect to get trolled bad for this one, but how about this, the efficiency of a cloak with a cyno onboard is affected so that it will give a top skilled scanner the ability to scan it down within 20 km using special probes.

You already do,

Catch them at gates,
Set traps

Sorry, I can't fix stupid and as coy and cute as some responses attempt to be, they are well still stupid.
so Respectfully I incline to disagree.
If I enter a system and someone is there cloaked and remains so for more than an hour I should have an option to interact with said person and not just leave system.
Sorry if that pisses in your cheerios by denying you the ability to sit with a an alt cloaked in a system to extort isk from the locals.

I understand your frustration and also your irritation with people coming up with the responses that they do, Mag's and I have had an exchange on this subject before and all he wants to do is remove local, which seems to make sense to him and others. I replied to them that this was stupid due to game balance issues based around cyno delivered force projection, they disagree, and in fact I see their point in that if someone is watching local and gets aligned they are impossible to catch, but there are gaps which is why you see many people getting ganked. With the changes to Interceptors in terms of bubbles and the warp speed acceleration I forsee more people getting caught which hopefully will reduce the number of people who do AFK cloaking, if what they say is true that AFK cloaky camping is due to the inability to catch someone due to local, then logically there will be a reduction, I await that possibility with interest.

Another thing they mention from their side of the equation people go AFK sitting in stations and at POS's and I can see their point on that. But they are doing it not to intereact with someone, more to do with not bothering to log off, but it again has an interaction in that the person coming in system to engage has no idea if they are active or not. I know that myself as I have recently started camping.

One time I tried to explain the data supplied by the Map and on Dotlan made it very easy for people to vector on to active people, especially now with Dotlan doing a NPC kill Delta, check it out I am using it, my point being that if they remove local then remove all of that, this was ignored by all and what was amusing was one chap, who I rather like who mines did not see any issue in keeping that data as it did not affect him, however his killing of NPC ships in belts would get noticed and of course the industry index.

On balance I have had less impact from cloaky campers because I can play when I want, I am retired and as a result I can pick and chose when I rat, which makes me an immensely irritating target, again another reason why I don't get war decced.

I do wish that the other side of this argument would be a bit less smug at times, a prime example is Baalldor above, but sometimes you have to get into their head to see what their reasons are, I hope you can see that even though they can be a bit crass they do have some issues. To be blunt like they have with you, they have at times got up my nose, because they also seek to shut you up by replying in such a way to make you lose your temper, I like many have fallen for that too, but they have at times been fun to spar with, especially when they can be seen to be hyprocrites on this subject, however that still does not help you..

At the end of the day however I look at that person who is AFK cloaky camping withoujt any attempt to kill anything as being lame, I have killed some, my favourite was a Goon Tengu which I baited in a Badger Mk II, but then again he was actually killing things, Noctis and industrials. And this is the key to it, you have to act in such a way that they have to do something to prove that they are there and able to impact you. There are various strategies to do that as you are aware. That being said if they have camped your system for weeks and done nothing then they are truly lame as players. and if he is one of those please email me privately with his name.

Perhaps a good idea will be to create a database of these types of lame AFK cloaky characters so other people can share the details of their activities so that we can work out whether they are linked to someone with capabilities or not.

The conflict we are seeing is due to the fact you have two camps. You have the ones that play the game and work with in the mechanics and game play, and the ones that do not like the game play and mechanics’ and try to change them through means of technical proposals.

The crowd that plays within the system already, thrives and understands the mechanics, will explain in terms of practical game play and experience. Less technical more experienced. They also believe that this what they pay to play, and this is how they like to play a game with the play style and mechanics already in place.

The crowd that does not thrive under the current game play and mechanics want to change it with mechanics and forgoes the acquisition of experience. More Technical but less experienced. They too also pay for this game, but they have a different view on how it should be played and due to the fact they pay money to play, it should be changed to suit their game play.

This is an insight that I have not considered. I would find this acceptable as long as the new way of getting Intel was as efficient is as local.
one way to do this is by Concord transponders. all ships fitted with a pod have them as that is how Concord tracks, allows gate access ect. what do you think if the current d scan mechanic that scans the system gives you Pilot transponders in system.
this would not give ship types or location just the pilot in system. to update this information you would have to re scan.
with a system like that then you could have local chat where only those who spoke showed in local chat.
we could then include a scan mechanic that tracked the transponders cloaked or not allowing to scan ships down.
by this method it would still be difficult by sig radius and wot not to track a moving ship. cloaked or not as it is now with un cloaked ships. However a stationary target would be found.

I am just shooting from the hip here but this could answer several proposals. the vigilant should not have issue as the only change would be to tap de scan every so often to get an up date.
the down side is it would take more that scouts would have to be more active. I do not have a problem with this. although I know this may be troll fodder for thinking so.

I am glad to see that you prefer the status quo, then we have something in common then. The OP has however quite rightly pointed out that there is currently no way to interact with AFK cloakies, there is no paper rock or scissors with them and this is the issue, not anything to do with being able to or not operate within the current structure, his view is that there is no possibility to interact with the cloaky in system with in game mechanics.

Now take your mind back to an earlier period when the trick was to get into a Sanctum and stop it from despawning, this was used against people with a single Sanctum, I remenber waiting until we were pretty sure that the cloaker was AFK and we went through the Sanctum with multiple interceptors with drones assigned to a pattern and we could not de-cloak him The reason I suggested that we make it so a top skilled prober with specific probes can get a 20km fix on them if they have a cyno onboard is part of the intelligence game and adds risk to those wishing to apply force projection, you have that benefit then have an added risk and if he does not then he won't show up at all and that changes the risk equation and people can chose to take that risk, thefeore making the camper more likely to prove himself as a threat.

The issue with local is that without local people will have to mash D-scan continiously, and I have to say this is not fun, I used to do it in NPC 0.0 when I operated in a contested system in Stain for 6 months, and while I can do it its one of the reasons I have never bothered with WH space, though my main reason is the lack of security in terms of your ships in a corp POS. Its a pain to do it, a serious pain, but if CCP would have something that did it for you then I would be OK with it. However if local goes so should all that juicy vectoring information on the star map and Dotlan, because that makes it too damn easy to find active people, because to be blunt the balance needs to be right between the hunter and the hunted.

It is a difficult one, that is for certain...

Its the ability to 'see' the AFK cloaker in local, not the use of a cloak which is causing the problem here. If a cloaker dropped from local (and was denied local as a balance) then it would not be possible to 'AFK Cloak' 23.5 hours a day' to cause players to 'drop their guard'.

A cloaked vessel would have to be active to do anything.

(cyno mechanics may have to be addressed here, I don't have enough experience with them to make a suggestion, apart from tie cyno lighting with the cloak drop targeting delay???)

Ok lets take it another way, I am coming in a system that has conquerable stations.

You have 15 pilots in system, I want to track them down and kill them, how do I go about doing this if you have 'x' number of pilots in station and AFK?

There should be a way from me, to hunt them down and kill them.

Should I then, have an option of hacking the station, pushing the eject button and have them sucked out in space so I have the ability to engage them?