Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Ok, so to try and disrupt your ISK/resource acquistion I have to not just incur the costs of moving 1 cloaking alt into your ratting system, but now I have to do it with N alts? Who are not cloaked...so you can shoot fish in a barrel? Do I understand this method?



And your second method is more AWOXing?!?! Which will necessitate cycling through alts as well either with additional accounts or biomassing.

Yeah, these are totally reasonable counters to local.

GMAMFB.

Cloaks do not require a counter, any more than local does.

Neither should be affecting players actively operating as PvE or PvP.

Buuuut... we let the basic cloaks have functionality, even limited.

And Cynos mixing with cloaks, as a proactive attack strategy, is a thing.

And, of course, local was upgraded over the years to include not just spoofable names, but unspoofable standings, which could replace effort driven intel by making it unnecessary.
Who cares if that is Bob11 or Bob1l, they are both blue, so no worries.

The dumbing down elements need to go from both sides, or not at all.
They guy who has to work harder is always at a disadvantage.
Neither side has that burden right now.

Kind of off topic as that would not be and AFK cloaked ship.



Alliances put in little effort aside from invasions. Their primary weapon is boredom. Dock up, bore the other guys until they leave.



Would you just stop this. They are not infallible nor invulnerable. Cloaked ships often die when changing systems.

Also, its ironic that it is people who are in renter alliances or not even in a null alliance that complain the most about this.

For the love of God...

Yes, if I go AFK at a safe and cloaked I am safe.

If I am active and decide to attack I am no longer safe nor am I invulnerable.



Or whenever they decloak. Once they decloak then they are vulnerable.



You just said it wasn't. You really like having your cake and eating it too. Seems you do it pretty much all the time.



You are conflating lots of things here.

If you just sit there uncloaked and go AFK you will get killed, but then that isn't the issue here is it? The people who are opposed to changing just cloaks also are opposed to changing just local, so you are being dishonest saying people are whining about local. This has been pointed out to you before.

1. The PvE player can sit in a POS or outpost, and be equally immune to PvP.
The cloaking mechanic has specific and limited opportunities to threaten with, and all involve dropping their immunity to PvP.
Even if that only exists long enough for them to start cycling a cyno, which in the majority of cases is the real issue here.
The docked and / or shielded pilot also represents a threat, as the cloaked player cannot be certain when, or from which potential POS or outpost, the threat will emerge from.

2. Well, I must admit, most complaints seem to revolve around a lack of warning about when the cloaked player will become known as active, such knowledge often being presented as a result of an encounter.

If you want to debate the AFK protected status of cloaks, please offer something of comparable value to exchange.
Something, perhaps, that plausibly compromises POS or Outpost safety for AFK pilots on a comparable level.
Being in hostile space is something to be encouraged, as that is more likely to produce content than being in friendly space.
Cloaks make this behavior more practical, on a sustainable level.

3. Rewritten to make a point:
You are not entitled to shoot at Cloaked pilots, just allowed to do so if you catch them. No where is it claimed that they should have to sit still for you to do that.

People should be no more afraid of a cloaked pilot, than they are one sitting behind POS shields, or docked in an outpost.

POS are not available to all, they are available to those with standings. Further, you can anchor a POS without having sov.

And yeah, cloaks degrade the benefits of owning sov...wow...shocking. Working as intended IMO. Way back in they day we did this once. Our mission was to camp known transfer points in a hostile entities space. We did it with cloaked ships. The idea was to make them less certain about undocking expensive assets to move other assets to the front line. Sometimes some of us were AFK, other times we were not. We also had people in different time zones to help mess things up for them. I say again, working as intended.

Local is not balanced and your counters stink. Local conveys an automatic home field advantage without any possibility of a counter. There is nothing any player can do about this benefit that gives you an advantage when scooting to safety. Couple that with intel channels and local becomes quite powerful.

And all I want is for you (and me, and everyone else) is to have to work for your intel and to balance things we remove the ability to AFK cloak. Say, after 20 minutes a cloaked ship will become scannable unless it warps. Plenty of time to go take a dump, answer the phone, or some other nonsense, but not enough to terrorize and "lock down and entire system" . And if he does sit too long go send him home via pod express.

And you are completely safe in a POS too. Yes, yes until it gets blown up. But with a cloak I am only safe so long as I am at a safe and cloaked--i.e. harmless and stuck in 1 system. There are trade offs here.

As for leaving a station, please you get a timer where you are literally invulnerable. Undock in a throw-away ship (e.g. a noob ship) see if the undock is clear otherwise re-dock before your timer is up.

And weren't you the one whining about guarantees with regards to shooting PvE pilots, now here you are whining YOU don't have a guarantee...pot meet kettle.

The cloak only guarantees safety if you stay in 1 system at safes. Geee..that is absolutely horrible!!! If I want to severely limit my play, I can remain 100% safe. Yeah, cloaks are so amazingly unbalanced.

Nobody cares about AFK camping and local in HS. Most people will blithely undock and go on about their business. Hell HS players are often so clueless they'll waltz their freighters right into Jita even when a Burn Jita event has been on the forums and other websites for weeks. Samething when Hulkaggedon was a thing as well. People would undock mining ships warp into the belts and die....even thought the event was talked about all over the place. So your attempt to conflate the issue is noted.

And why shouldn't a cloak be effective while AFK. If I go AFK with modules on...they stay on, yes? Why not a cloak? Oh it makes it so you can't shoot me...well I'm AFK and my cloak is on, I can't shoot you either...seems pretty balanced to me. Oh...you don't like uncertainty. Well too bad, welcome to Eve.

As for AWOXing where exactly did I discount the dangers? Maybe before you get on your high horse about reading being fundamental you should train your own skills a bit first.

People in POS shields do not present any realistic opportunity to actively hunt them and bring PvP to them. They only become vulnerable when the pilot wishes. They are immune to the non-consensual PvP the Hunters are so eager to bring to others. It's the ultimate expression of dishing it out but not wanting to take it.

Edit:
To be perfectly clear about local and HS, if CCP disabled it tomorrow as an experiment, my guess is only half of the HS population would notice and most of those would be NS alts.

No you don't a cloaked ship cannot know how another ship is fitted, nor does he know if he has friend waiting on the other end of a cyno or not and which type of fleet he has. If you drop a pvper that's mining chances are he has a cyno, if you drop someone that's a miner chances are you wont.

It's the same amount of risk from both sides.

I find your points are avoiding obvious corollaries.

You say that the cloaked player decides when an encounter happens, and does so based on the target's allies being online, etc.

I must point out, a willingness to engage on the cloaked player's part, has yet to cause a target to log-in, undock, or otherwise expose themselves, as a response.
That cloaked player may find the ideal two hour window, for an encounter on a target, based on your described points.
Now, unless the target is in a corp that is mostly inactive when they are active, such an occurance should be rare, and limited to targets that simply lack foresight. You don't pop into null with a hostile, and no expectation of backup.

If you are in a corp or alliance with different hours than your own, null may not be a good idea to work in.

Now, the PvE player, seeing the hostile, has full capability to do the same research.
They can see when the cloaked player is expected to be active, etc etc.

As a secondary tactic, the PvE pilot can go active at inconsistent points. It is a meaningful probability that the hostile will require some time to activate a force, and prepare a jump deployment.
If the PvE player routinely docks back up in less time than the hostile needs, his support forces will begin to lose faith in their comrade's calls to action, since they keep getting shut down.

Want to make a cloaked hostile go insane? At random times, get some buddies together in exhumers, and bop around the likely observed places for PvE activity. Then immediately dock back up.
This trains them to expect a narrow window of target presence, so they can get used to the idea of preparing a response that only uses forces which can be ready at a moments notice.
The hostile will want to catch you, if they are paying attention, and will know they have to act fast or miss the opportunity.

You are controlling when the encounter happens.
You can notify allies ahead of time, and prepare a strike force when that hostile is likely to be active. (You did that research, so have a good idea when to expect a reaction)

A good plan is like poetry.

So does a non cloaked ship, you look at kill boards and you can see the hot droppers habits.

Oh but they have a choice to not point the ships they kill? So does the bait, the bait has the choice to bait all day long the same has the cloaked ship.

The risk is exactly the same.