Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Actually cloaks do have direct counters. You can turn them off, stop them working with range and stop them working with lock.

Umm... How exactly do you get into range of a ship using a cloak?

I mean, yeah, if you are really lucky *and* the cloaking guy is really stupid you can trip over someone who is cloaked. Or if you are really fast with a fast locking ship and you see him arrive on grid at a gate that forced him to decloak.

The only time a ship with a cloak is in danger is when the cloak cannot be used. Those circumstances are entirely the choice of the cloaked ships pilot and nothing short of inconceivable luck combined with monumental pilot error would ever compromise an afk camp that way.

Cloaks used for other purposes are more at risk, I have freely conceded that point. They also involve active play and would be impacted very little if they had to remain as vigilant for probes as everyone else, especially if the probes are clearly indentifiable as a type that can see cloaks, and can only be used from ships of equivalent strength as the cov ops line.

Just being able to get on grid with a cloaked ship is no guarantee of success finding the thing. An active and moving ship would still be difficult to catch.

There is plenty of room to bring nuanced balance. It does not have to be either immunity or insta-popped by probe.

When local starts only working for just one side, you might have a point. As local works the same for everyone, everywhere except wormholes, you don't.

This is just going back to things that have been discussed endlessly. Local and cloaks do not, have not and never will have equivalence with local, structures, or stations. They are all completely different aspects of the game and do not relate, bolster or counter eachother in any meaningful way.

Mags, normally you have good points that don't need to stretch to reach some sort of validity. Claiming that locking a cloaked ship is a counter to the cloak is something that the newest scrub might try to claim. Speaking of decloaking a ship with proximity in a thread about AFK cloaked campers is disingenuous at best, even if technically possible.

Yes, I know Lucas, I said as much. One always fool proof way is to go to the OA in question and see its state, but that means you may be at risk if that OA is feeding you false intel because a group of hostiles have set up shop in there and kill you when you get in system.




Sure, but as has been amply demonstrated to the point they simply facts, the current intel method is:

1. Invulnerable...even more so than a cloaked ship.
2. Provides a distinct advantage to pilots already in a given system in the form of advanced warning.

Changing how intel works is something CCP is going to do. This is also a fact. The OA is going to be an intel tool. Keeping local and providing even more enhanced intel vai the OA could be bad in that it makes NS even safer....and thus more boring, depending on your perspective.



Sure, "stupid" automated systems are easy. However, people are amazing at spotting patterns which is why replacing analysts with machines is not going to be happening any time soon. Yes, for simple reporting purposes you can replace the person with a machine, but if you are trying to determine certain more subtle aspects of the data then automated processes could fail and do so spectacularly.

For example, I periodically work with data on street lights. Most street lights series exhibit stable behavior--i.e. the number of lamps is not increasing over time. Some series do change over time. Ideally, I'd like to separate those series that grow from those that do not. Since I can assume there will be little or not growth in the "flat" series, I can cut my work down considerably by focusing just on those that are growing (or declining).

One method to do this is to do the following:

d-lamps = # of lamps at the beginning of the series - # of lamps at the end of the series.

if d-lamps = 0, the series is flat, otherwise it is not.

Now let me introduce a wrinkle. The billing system handles rate changes by pro-rating on the rate. That is, when there is a rate change that is not on the first of the month, then the number of lamps will be double counted in that month. If that happens then d-lamps > 0 can happen although it is a false due to an idiosyncrasy of the billing system. Next step is to program in all the rate changes that occured that were not on the first. Great problem sloved? Not necessarily, sometimes there can be massive re-bills which can again introduce a false d-lamps > 0. Another problem, a migration from one rate schedule to another which again can lead to d-lamps being > 0 or even d-lamps < 0. Finally, you can have a one time change in the number of lamps of a given series. Is this indicative of growth? Yes, of a sort, but from a forecasting point a single increase over a number of years is something you are unlikely to assume will keep happening. The more reasonable forecast is to assume the new number of lamps will persist going forward. But in this case you'll have d-lamps > 0 or d-lamps < 0.

In short, trying to automate the process to separate series that are not growing, or where growth is intermittent from those where growth is on-going is not straight forward nor easy. However, a person can spot these things in an instant....but when you have several hundred different lamps series it becomes a burdensome and tedious job to do such sorting.



Then why doesn't the Imperium just open up everything to everybody? Allies, hostiles, etc.? Clearly data is withheld and compartmentalized. I don't need to know alot of what goes on in the Imperium, so nobody tells me. That way I wont inadvertently let something slip, or if I become disillusioned start supplying information to hostiles on purpose. To the extent that some of that functionality can be built into aspects of the game, great. Now a corporation, alliance or even a coalition will have choices to make and with those choices come costs...and that could drive some new meta and content.

Bzzt wrong! If you are in system, local provides you with an early warning of me entering the system and with the freedom to act. It does not provide me the same benefit, I'll see you in local...but I will not have loaded grid meaning that while you are aligning out...I'm staring at the warp/jump tunnel effect.

Thus, you are wrong and Mag's is right.

Mike you are quite simply wrong. You get advanced warning from local. Whether you are aligned or not, it does not matter you get advanced warning. Thus local is "not the same for everybody". You are just being a passive aggressive whiny butt instead of admitting that you get an advantage. You sit there and truculently stamp your foot that such advantage is your right and that it was the intent of the Devs when there is in fact zero evidence to support your position. I on the other hand have provided quotes from Devs to support my position, yet when asked to support your positions with quotes you can't. You instead rely on reading intent into other people's comments as opposed to a plain english quote.

Going to an OA won't guarantee death. I'm sure a covops cloak will still allow you to be undetected long enough to know whether it's working. Bigger groups like ours though would just use alt trickery. Oh look, I can't see my intel alt, intel is down.


1. Mechanics themselves are invulnerable. You can't attack my skill queue either. Suggesting that mechanics should always be replaced with something vulnerable is a fundamental misunderstanding of game design. For most players the downsides to local intel being reworked would be far higher than the upsides. Only a small subset of players would enjoy it.
2. It's supposed to. You're supposed to have the advantage by already being there. It's what allows people to perform other actions which aren't directly PvP related. Removing that is simply a way to remove the majority of PvE and further solidify large groups like the Imperium who can afford a better intel mechanic.

They very well may do, that doesn't mean it's a good idea. they've just replaced the sov mechanic with a new one that is so boring it appears to have actually accelerated the decline in active players. Nuking local would simply be a reason for even more people to move back to highsec and get bored until their sub lapses. I'm not going to say CCP won't do it as they've proven time and again they aren't the best decision makers, but I'll say with confidence that it would be bad for the health of the game.


It's only difficult if you have bad developers. If you have all of the data for an individual to spot these things then you have all of the data for the system to spot them too and you certainly are able at a minimum to provide the data to an individual that makes identification simple, which is what you are talking about here. Think about it, you're able to identify these things because you've been given the relevant data and spared the burden of seeing every single lamp.

Intel systems work the same way. Even a simple system will filter and sort the incoming data providing an individual with a small enough subset that they can make an instant decision. At no point will a large group say "oh my gosh, I have too much data to make a decision".

We pretty much do. You can google our pos passwords, the public hears all of our plans an announcements at the same time line members do, and getting into our alliances is as simple as applying. We're not going to waste time actively telling outsiders everything, but there's very little that can't be found with relative ease.

Actually Lucas, all of your arguments seem to have the same fulcrum for leverage.

A bigger group can place more effort.

While technically possible, it still comes down to individual players needing to take the initiative, and perform these efforts.
When two of them duplicate the same task, one of them has wasted their time. The needed results have already been provided by the other.

The fact that they would NEED to make the effort, and human nature affects large groups as much as small, changes everything.

You don't duplicate the other guy's task, unless you want to look like a useless time waster.
Supplying intel after everyone already has it, is a perfect example.

So, the big group suffers from an additional burden, the assumption that someone else is handling something, and you don't need to worry about it.
Many times you will be right, someone else is handling it. But not always, and not always in the time frame it is needed.

A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link. And big groups have long chains.

Bigger groups, working together in coordination and focus, will always accomplish more.
It's just a fact of life.

And yet, mistakes happen.

I like the idea, that a big group can also take more opportunities to make dumb mistakes, and make more dumb mistakes than the smaller group.

And, do try to remember, you MAY be part of a single large group of players.
You do NOT, however, have a numerical advantage over the collective multitude of smaller groups that may be interested in harassing you.

They just need to believe it can be done, and that they can have fun doing it.

Us small groups... we really like big targets.

Absolutely, but making a mechanic more tedious to work with doesn't make for better gameplay. In addition, punishing players who are trying to play one way is bad. Lets face it, you don't want to be hidden from local so you can fight a PvP player, you want to be hidden from local so you can chew through PvE players who don't get away in time. I'm all for more rewarding gameplay going to those who take more risks, I'm no so much in favour of giving already risk averse players (like perpetual nullified cloakers) even more ability to catch weak targets.

We may not have the advantage over the number of people who want to attack us, but we certainly do over the people who are willing to. Most people against us want to just whine about how many people we have and how mechanics should be changed so that they can single-handedly defeat whole alliances. The day that all of these carebears realise that if they worked together they'd wildly outnumber us will be a very interesting day indeed. But I won't hold my breath.