Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You lack an important point in that argument. Local is not unbalanced even in the absence of cloaked ships. It functions identically in every area of the game except wormholes, yet the "protection" it provides varies from area to area.

What you are really trying to balance is the effort expended by masses of players sustained over long stretches of time. Without the effort of fleets clearing space and insuring that threats are driven off, local is useless. You need look no further than any high sec mission hub to see local rendered absolutely impotent as an Intel tool of any kind.

While stealth gameplay can be fun, no single low cost (of any kind) module should be indefinitely and passively undoing the countless manhours of active effort that was required to make that space "safe".

These mechanics should be driving fights. Active effort to neutralize the intruder should be able to overcome the passive effort of park and go afk for the next 12 hours. Simply training a few days and installing a low cost module in a utility high should not provide you with immunity to nonconsensual PvP for the rest of the day or until you decide to participate again.

The issue is AFK cloaking not cloaking as such, I am in a system, I am the only one of my group there, I check the Eve map, two people in system, I leave the station and do a D-scan, I find no one on D-scan so its either a cloaky or a Force Recon ships, I do a combat probe check, find nothing, so its a cloaky. I leave a badger next to a POCO, it does not get attacked, hmm likely to be AFK.

Local makes no difference at all to AFK cloaking!

Except this is precisely the thing I disagree with you about.

You speak of being in 'open' space.

But I, I speak of being in space, PERIOD. POS, in space... Outpost, in space....
Having the only relatively safe means of avoiding non-consensual combat belong to the SOV holders?
That goes beyond being an advantage, that identifies being fully entrenched.
Certain systems cannot be reached, deep into the blue doughnut, without meaningful time and effort.
Specifically, more than can be mustered within a single session while facing opposition to your efforts.
If you need a sov claiming blob in order to threaten assets deeper than this point, you force the game into a blob or gtfo mentality.

It already has this, up to a point, and it is not healthy to force such a limited playstyle as the only one with meaningful chances of success.

The outpost and POS clearly define the exception to the rule, as you would describe it about vulnerability to non-consensual combat.

If we need to diminish the threat non-covert cloaks offer, then it needs to be along the lines of people disregarding cloaked ships as a threat, not hunting them directly.
Anything else would create a token defense force, capable of reinforcing the blue doughnut beyond current norms.


You should have more intel on the activities in foreign systems, than knowledge of covert craft behavior on so intimate a level.
It makes more sense to deprive non-covert cloaks of intel awareness, than it does to deprive them of the secrecy of their activities.

SOV holding should be far more difficult than claiming it in the first place, and right now that is not how the game is coming across.
We are too stable.


Strikingly well put.

It has been stated by CCP, that emergent gameplay is often unexpected in the patterns it takes.
CCP has never hesitated to curb or block any behavior that left the bounds of what they considered acceptable.

The fact that they have left this system intact as long as they have, speaks volumes about it's acceptable balance in their view.

Local has everything to do with it. Local is letting you know that the person is there, regardless of the player's state(IE if he afk or not)

This is one more reason why Local and Cloaking is balance... They both don't care about the state of the player. They are both simply doing their jobs.

1. Local's original purpose was for social interaction. This is not specific to either hostile or allied forces, as local originally did NOT identify standings. You either knew the difference by other means, or you had to guess.

Standings were added, in a move guided towards the lesser of two evils. One group of players had simply created a mod that allowed them to know standings almost immediately upon name appearance in local, and CCP felt this needed to be balanced out.

Honestly, the game was better before we knew this freely, in my opinion. Emergent gameplay forced the issue onto us.

2. Keeping space safe, particularly by means of using leverage so a significantly smaller group can stop or delay a larger one...
This sums up the argument against cloaks effectively.
The threat claimed against cloaks is specifically that a large group will be brought in to overwhelm local residents, resulting in said residents getting safe instead of experiencing this risk.

3. Agreed, but I put forth it represents an overstated balance, often called a stalemate since it cannot be resolved proactively.
As a function of balance, you do not expect to have balanced resolution without tweaking both sides in the issue.
Blob or gtfo should never be best practice for threatening sov, even if it is the only path for claiming it.

4. It is your opinion that POS & outposts are the only intended means to safely AFK in the game.
I do not agree with this, since it goes against promoting conflict in sov space, by making a hostile presence chillingly difficult to maintain.

We are not logging in to hug it out in our blue doughnuts, but to visit the red doughnuts with fresh deliveries of munitions.

I agree being AFK should be mutually exclusive to being seen as a threat, and add that being known as present while cloaked is detrimental to gameplay as well.

An AFK flag would wind up abused. The guy would just park near whatever he wanted to camp and hang till he saw something. This would limit the tactic but not remove afk gameplay.

The answer is to poke a hole in the absolute immunity of the cloak itself. Promote active gameplay by allowing it to be actively countered like every other thing in space. Some of new structures may do this, as well as altering local.

@Nikki

1-Local always assisted in driving conflict and bringing hunters to their prey. You don't need a visible list of who is in system to have a working chat client for social interaction. Practically every chat client in the universe has a /who_all function that would list everyone in the upon request, only CCP decided to make that list visible at all times. This made quick assessment of who was in system at all times, more or less a situational awareness tool. It got more powerful when they added standings, but as you pointed out that was already happening anyway. This was not some oversight on their part, it was an intentional game feature.

2- I don't advocate keeping space totally safe, but I do believe in that home field advantage. As I said, cloaks that allowed day trips and active roams would be balanced and completely in keeping with EVE's core concepts. The unbalancing factor of cloaks is the completely passive and eternal perfection of that cloak. It requires no upkeep, and has no weakness to spur the user into any sort of action or even to require any awareness of his surrounding to keep safe. That is not in keeping with EVEs core concepts.

3- Local does not need a balance, and active effort toward a goal should be rewarded- including the securing of home space. Cloaks could be made so as to require continuing effort on the part of the pilot to stay safe without creating the stalemate that we have now, while still allowing penetration into enemy territory and disruption of any activities. Bear in mind that PvE activities are supposed to be active endeavors as well, and any means of automating those activities through botting is punishable. The disruption of those ongoing active endeavors should not be an eternal and perfect passive module.

4- Outposts certainly, as they are stations. I can concede POS, but even so they require much effort and cost to aquire and maintain. At a minimum matching that level of security away from home space should be extremely resource and effort intensive, not passive, perfect and eternal. Acquiring that level of security itself promotes conflict. It's the carrot. No space is absolutely safe (unless you are cloaked), but achieving relatively reliable safety is why you fight for SOV in the first place. When you start talking about wars on the scale of massive space empires, there is no reason why you should not have to work your way in from the edges instead of simply jumping to the middle and staying there until doomsday if you so choose. Again, cloaks that allow for penetration of enemy space are to be expected---but cloaks that allow for effortless eternal camps in enemy space are over the top.

I disagree that simply knowing hostiles are near is detrimental. Perhaps if PvE activities were not designed to be specifically massively disadvantaged against PvP type ships we could see eye to eye on this, but so long as players are asked to play near helpless prey unless actively guarded from harm the game needs to allow for the creation of reliably protected areas.

Truly, while you walk a path from a different direction, we end up with at least this view in common at the end of it.
I believe we agree on this keystone aspect of this situation.

I would go so far as to say, at it's core, many types of PvE do not mesh well enough with the rest of the game to be considered inviolate.
I think it is time mining and ratting, at the very least, should be reconsidered in terms with acting as an obstruction to player interaction.
That they should effectively be this mutually exclusive, seems an unintended result to me.

1- Both sides perceive a loss. Local isn't helping the defender win, just mitigate his loss. He wants to PvE. He can't so long as hostile is present because of how the game is made. In the mean time, ideally the hostile is now facing defense fleets and enjoying content as prey himself at this point. He achieved the goal of disrupting PvE activities, but should not be able to do do so forever unchallenged.

2- Cloaks do not balance local. Local is an environmental condition of the game, equal to all and thus not in need of a balance. What you are challenging is the concerted and active effort of potentially hundreds of players with a module that has next to no cost to train for, fit, or run.

3. Local is currently balanced. It does not require cloaks to be balanced. Cloaks are a separate issue with a poor gameplay implementation.

4. Unless there is a real chance of bringing non-consensual PvP to a cloaked ship, then that ship is absolutely safe. The only time a ship with a cloak is vulnerable is when it chooses to be, which is not in keeping with the core concept of EVE.

You only get trapped into a loop because you don't actually address my arguments, you just repeat your older assertion.

1- The attacker has all the initiative. He wastes his time or not as he chooses. If his goal is a fight he can engage the defense fleet no doubt coming his way, or move on and find another opponent more to his liking. The defender looses out no matter what. He is denied his chosen gameplay, and if caught looses even more. There is absolutely nothing worth his ship in that field that would justify staying even a split second longer while threatened by hostile forces. There's a whole other discussion here about improving PvE, changing tackle mechanics, and a whole host of other things that would create more fights and a more enjoyable time for all involved.

2- Local cannot be balanced. It's a game condition. Take a trip to high sec and watch how protective local is. You are balancing the effort of keeping it clear of hostiles, which requires a ton of active player effort to maintain. No one is being outsmarted by the cloak, it's just a broken and often abused mechanic.

3- Local is balanced by providing it's information to all. It's purpose is to lubricate player interactions by informing everyone of everyone elses presence. The fact that you get hunted if you are a hostile to the SOV holders of a given patch of space is intended.

4- There is no chance of a cloaked ship to be non-consensually PvP'd unless the pilot chooses to put himself at risk. He has no reason but his own to move from his camp. I don't ignore it, I simply recognize that there is no way to force that ship to move and become vulnerable. I have no problem with that mechanic over short periods of time, but the current mechanic of free and eternal safety is not balanced.

5- That's a fine question, on one they themselves refuse to comment on. In general I live with not knowing, and I don't start these discussions. I do bring my opinion to them, and would love to actually get an answer to that very concern.

The local problem can be solved easily. Its just to bad that both camps are leaning on the same crutch, and are unwilling to let it go.