Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Wrong again. Yes, everyone faces risk when warping and jumping...but that means your claims of invulnerability are not true. They are only true when cloaked at a safe.

Second, warping at range does not work if there are bubbles, and most gate camps make use of those.

And safer does not mean immune to PvP.

Nice of you to finally admit it.

I'm quite willing to do away with AFK cloaking...just not alone because any nerf to AFK cloaking invariably is a nerf to cloaks in general and there are far more uses for cloaks than just AFK cloaking.

I have never advocated simply removing local.

As I said, the issue is not just fixing AFK cloaking, but a nerf to cloaks in general which is unfair to people who use cloaks, but do not AFK cloak. I have also suggested having alternate intel tools to local as well, specifically through the Observatory Array (OA) coming with the structure revamp.

And there is still the issue of how long before one can be scanned. As I noted sometimes a cloaked ship may have to spend considerable time slow boating into position or around and obstacle....is if fair to those players to nerf their game? They are not AFK cloaking. So yes, finding a guy AFK for a long period of time is reasonable and I'd also like to see local become vulnerable to attack. Take something...give something. Give cloaked ships some interesting new options/types of play and send AFK cloaking into the history books.

After 10-20 minutes of staying cloaked on a system, a special anomaly should appear on the last position of the afk cloaker . This anomaly should have a persistent name,refresh every 10-20 minutes and can be scanned with combat probes .
Even if the afk cloaker moves in space, based on 2 scans, you can predict his trajectory .
As afk cloaking is a job used by many pilots, they could use module(s) specific to the ship race to make the combat probes job harder .

Sorry for my poor english .

an hour is too long. you have to keep in mind there are many many players in ever that only have 1 t o2 hours of average gameplay.
making things take longer will just keep them logging off.
the ideas I have for making it scannable, if a cloaky is indeed active he can still move and does not have to move far. you still have to decloak to lock him. ever probe a moving object? by the time you warp and land you are still a minimum of 20 km away.
also to my idea the only "Nerf" to cloaking is that you can be actively scanned, presumably with specialized modules or probes and skills, the tradeoff offered is that to know you are in system one has to actively look to see your beacon in system and if in an undeveloped system you will not show at all unless somone is probing for you.
The idea here is to promote active gameplay, we need to do it in a timely manner as well. not everyone has all day to sit at the computer for hours on end.

Ironically, a good solution to this for normal cloaks, might be to simply let them show up on the overview for the local grid, but remain unscannable.
They would need to be off grid from any threat in order to be safely AFK, their location safely a needle in a haystack.
This would necessitate either rebalancing, or an exception on grid with gates, since even use of normal cloaks has become accepted in sneaking there.

For covert cloaks, I suspect something of a cyno re-balance is at key issue.
Seriously, noone is actually afraid of that cloaked ship itself, but what it could hot drop....

The flaw in that thinking is that it means any group wishing to use their space for PvE do not even have the right to challenge for the privilege.

PvE is done in ships that *will* lose in a stand up fight with almost anything intended for combat. They are designed by CCP, or else forced into fits by the mechanics, to rely on evasion. They are not intended to face combat and survive.

The only reasonable tactic is to keep the space they operate in clear, or put them away and defend the space. It is not reasonable to ask a ship that relies on evasion for survival to operate in the presence of hostiles.

It does not matter if the pilot in question is AFK. You cannot operate under best case scenario assumptions. You must operate under the assumption that the pilot will return to his keyboard and become hostile- that's not even worst case, just normal for EVE. As tackle mechanics are absolute, and there is absolutely **** all you can do about it once caught in 99.9999% of PvE fits, allowing a non-friendly on grid with you is a death sentence. *Your entire defense must be in place before a hostile is in the system*. If you are in nearly any effective PvE fit when a hostile is active in system you need to be in warp towards safety within seconds or you may as well self destruct yourself for all the chance of you surviving an encounter you have. That is just how the game is designed. PvE is intentionally penned into soft targets for PvP pilots.

Now... That means you either have a combat fleet on standby the entire time you are doing anything PvE, or the system is clear and you don't stay in space if that changes.

So yeah, the cloaked guy in system is a problem for a solo PvE operator. It's not just psychological, it's the circumventing of his only reasonably effective defense option.

So do we just say that PvE cannot operate solo? Fair enough... But the same should be true of PvP as well then. Which once again leaves us with broken cloaks since they enable solo hunting deep in enemy territory, and blobbing as everyone's only legitimate option for any kind of play.

Active effort should trump passive effort. If someone wants to clear cloaked ships from space they should be able to do that. If the cloaks are AFK, then they should not be if they intended to live.... Just like every body else. Cloaks, or any other module or even ship, should assist a playstyle not be the entirety of it.

But so long as the game is designed such that a class of player solely exists to provide content as unchallenging targets to the rest of the players- and it's a dedicated design goal that they must remain that way at all times despite any efforts taken to contrary- then the game as a whole is terminally ill. It's not just cloaks that are broken, it's the devs themselves... And that kind of rigged game is simply not fun.

@Nikk I have talked about that before, and agree.

However it still begins with the basic assumption that the PvE pilot looses by default, which to my mind is still wrong. Blowing up the 'thing' what ever it is, should take substancial time to allow for a response and the ability to prevent the loss being unchallenged.

For miners I had once thought of the idea of a deployable mineral compactor. Basically advanced jetcan mining, you put your minerals into the compactor and it forms an object in space that is sized so that it fills the volume of a decently fit industrial, which is scoopable and can be reprocessed in a station or re-mined back into standard ore, or shot and destroyed. The block of condensed ore would take a good bit of time to destroy, and would not be easily stolen unless the thieves showed with their own miners or industrial.

Just one idea of a way to work it. Definitely requires polishing at the very least.

This. I honestly don't see how it's difficult for people to watch local/refit to a combat ship/move systems when in null. Sov null is already the safest part of EVE, and we want to make it even safer by nerfing cloaking?

The problem isn't AFK cloaking, the problem is ratters/miners in null who refuse to join a standing defense fleet/refuse to join voicecomms so that they can call for backup if pointed, and yet still want to ISK benefits of living in null.

No, I don't think it necessarily requires the PvE pilot to lose by default.

If we can make them into managers, rather than direct equipment operators, then the whole thing adopts a more practical dynamic.

Put the PvE pilot into a ship which is comparable to the expected cloaked vessel, in fighting ability.
Take hot dropping off the table. It can even be as simple as the mining equipment itself acts as a jamming device, while active.

Play it safe, and sacrifice the mining rig, or play it bold, and defend it. Chances of winning should be balanced so that player skill and ship fitting are the determining factors.

* PvE in a PvP fit
* move systems
* scan down a hole/go exploring
* work on trades
* take an alt to the camper's home system and **** with them
* keep PvE-ing, but with friends/alts ready to save you

Why, exactly are you sitting around doing nothing just because there is someone cloaked in your system?