Player Features and Ideas Discussion

1. To quote Mags’, how do you know there is an AFK cloaker in system?

2. Under the current mechanics, I’d prefer to keep cloaks as they are. Given a choice between the current mechanics and another set of mechanics I’d be in favor of dealing with both the interrelated issues of local and AFK cloaking.

Cloaks are supposed to offer a degree of stealth, so no.

If either side is given genuine cause to stop playing, the game will suffer.

And I don't mean more difficult play, I mean where the best one side or the other can expect is to simply be a moving target, with no hope of out performing their opponent.

Time is definitely a factor.

I also include the lack of typical vulnerability currently enjoyed by PvE, in this context.
If you only had an hour, and they could easily wait you out, you are nothing more than a glorified target for them to hunt.
(Hunt, as in, catch you entering and leaving)

Would these new signatures be visible on the overview, in space or only via probes?

Some of it would depend on the specifics of how the OA works. However, I would make the signatures visible only by probes, preferably only by probes launched by a covert/recon/black ops type ship, maybe to include the Sisters line. Other than that the better scans would come from interacting with the OA, or OA network.

I could see odd shenanigans occurring by hiding out near one of these wigs yourself, potentially fooling the unobservant into thinking there is nothing else there, or dropping the scan inhibitor deployable on a few of them to muddy waters and buy some time.

Depending on the number of sigs and the scanning skills of the pilot you could potentially evade a lone hunter forever watching for probes and with some preperation of multiple safes. Multiple hunters will clear the sigs faster, and probably force you to leave or explode after a while.

By resetting the clock, you create the vague proof of non-AFK status.
You give them intel that you did something that resett the clock, before it expired.
Intel they did not have, until at least an hour had passed with your continued presence.

The uncertainty that encourages PvE players to undock, is greatly diminished by this, if not dispelled completely.

In a perverse twist, the PvE player needs enough confidence in that hostile being AFK, to consider activity.
In other words, they need to believe the thing they complain about, (AFK Cloaking), is really what is happening.
If they truly believe the hostile is attentively watching, and playing, then they consider the risk too great to act.

Kind of a catch 22.
They want the hostile to be active, even though that defines the conditions for their inactivity.

Oh, I get that Nikk, but AFK cloaking is highly likely to go away. In its place will hopefully be a vulnerable intel system. So if people turtle up it can be damaged/destroyed or subverted somehow. As you know my personal favorite is some sort of hacking...maybe the person who hacks the OA can set it so hostiles show up as blue in the new "local". If you click on them you'll see they are not. If they are on grid with you, you'll see they are not. But just being lazy and looking at the display could lead to bad things. Just an idea.

You fixed nothing.

On the cloak side, you ruined the use of the module for everything. While making them huntable with a dedicated hunting ship impacts all cloaking use to one degree or another, it does not put a hard limit on them or impose something that can't be accounted for with some effort and adjustment. Right now they are way to safe, but that does not mean we should just make them arbitrarily shut off after a while. Activity should be limited by other player actions, not random mechanics.

On the other side, you changed little to nothing. You still have an unhuntable hostile lurking in system, blueballing most other activity. Since you cannot take any action against them until they run out of cap at some point, your solution has a guy with probes in system just scanning over and over waiting for the cloak to drop. If the cap use is severe enough that the cloak drops every 10 min or so, you have destroyed all cloaking, and if the interval is too long no one will bother trying because clicking scan every few seconds for an hour or two is stupid.

What you need is a way where cloaks enable hunting options not otherwise available, while not completely immunizing a cloaked ship from the repercussions of inhabiting hostile space. Thus you have interesting competitive play to prosecute or resolve a conflict rather than an automatic win via endless blueball on one or both sides of the fight.

While I understand there is quite a lot to read, the conversation has moved a bit from the OP.

My preferred solution involves allowing cloaks to be scanned by specialized combat probes, preferably only useable by the covert line of ships and anything with a scanning bonus.

They would show up as a 'localized Anomaly'. Each system would spawn a number of localized anomolies as false positives, each lasting no more than 2 hours, and numerous enough that there would always be one despawning and a new one created every 10-15 minutes. The false positives would have some random space garbage or something, and looting/destroyijg/whatever would despawn the Sig, though it would not change its respawn, so you don't clear them and have them all bunched up.

With just a lone ship with decent scanning skills you could eliminate each anomoly one by one until you found the cloakers grid. If the cloaked camper is stationary your odds of landing on him are pretty good. If he's active and looking for probes and such, he can move, warp away, etc.

Multiple hunters will clear the sigs fairly quickly. I am not opposed to other ideas for locating an on grid cloak, from it being a secondary function of the specialized probe launcher to some new kind of ewar or whatever. Just getting on grid with people warping to zero on you is a huge step in the right direction.

Assuming the OA is useful, I further suggested that a single OA automatically recorded all local anomalies as they appeared, and time stamped each. Any anomaly older than 2 hours is someone cloaked, and you can use that info to make educated guesses about any others. If the cloaker just arrived you check newer sigs, for instance. The discussion on OA suggested they get better with multiples, and my suggestion was that an OA network actually be able to plot movement of the localized anomalies, so a moving anomaly is your target, and it can be more effectively hunted with the additional info.

That setup allows for an active pilot a chance at evasion where his safety is not assured, yet he is unlikely to be immediately uncovered and can evade if he is active and on the ball.