Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Because people like you have delicious tears.

Stop complaining, stop feeding them content and they will stop. Yes, posts like yours on threads like this are content.

Here is my thinking...

People often come into this thread and make the following statement:

AFK cloaking is a broken (unfair, bad, exploit, harassment, etc.) mechanic because lots of people go to the trouble to get a system and plunk down a TCU, IHUB, and so forth. Then to have one guy come along and ruin it, it just wrong!!!

To which my query is....where are all those "lots of people" that helped secure the system in the first place. Were they all needed for just 1 solo defender? Or did you take on an opposing fleet of "lots of people"?

We all know the answer.

But in either case, if 1 guy cloaked and AFK can ruin your life in NS....maybe NS is not for you. You can't coordinate for ratting, mining, etc.? You can't use something like a cloaky ship yourself to set up bounces and perches to get through gates, do PI, and get out to your POS to do whatever? Really?

You managed to get 100, 200, 300 guys to coordinate to take the system and you can't get 10 in fleet to rat? Suddenly NS is all about solo?

WTF. No really, Whisky Tango Foxtrot? Did you all fall out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down? Twice?

And the nonsense answers....well they'll just drop more people on us. Then bring more people yourself. Seriously, whenever I did BLOPs there was one maybe two guys out hunting (note: HUNTING, not AFK) 1 guy with the PIG and the rest of, say 5-6 on the PIG waiting to bridge in the event we caught something. And that was in the good old pre-fatigue days.

So, we have had cynos and jump drives nerfed (twice technically), yet here we have people crying, "One more NERF!!!!!! One more NERRFFF and it will be balanced!!!!" We have CCP strongly indicating that local is going to go and will be replaced with the OA which will allow for hunting cloaked ships...and yet the whiners are still here. And their whines are basically of the form....

CCP, I don't want to deal with this on my own with my friends, so can you please make it so I don't have to. Thanks, 'k bye.

There is a great many ways the problem could be resolved that would be fair and equitable to all.

First you would have to break the concrete surrounding the wits of those who think it's fair and equitable now, and convince the Devs that there actually is a problem. Apparently endless streams of people pointing it out cannot make it past that first hurdle, largely because the Devs come from the ranks of the very same folks who enjoy one sided predatory pvp.

There is no way forward.

Because you are totally safe from them.

Before your post...you might want to think about that for however long it takes you to realize I'm right.

Oh heck, I'll give you a hint, I am only "safe" so long as a I am cloaked...at a safe spot....get the idea yet?

Totally safe... Yep... Right up until you aren't... In a game that demands PvE playstyles be proactive in their defense, with the only actual defense being not to allow an enemy on grid.

I mean... Sure. It's cool that the hunter can set up his defense against being hunted right back a week in advance, proof against any and all attempts to do to him what he is doing to others. No imbalance there at all... Since he just wants to harvest a PvE player.

Yep, at which point the cloaker is no longer safe either. Thanks for making my point Mike.

My complaint has never been about my own safety per se. It's about having the option to go on the offensive.

You want to shake your tail in front of a hunter and see if he bites, go ahead. If that's what turns you on, that's your thing.

I don't agree that the unchallenged retention of 100% combat initiative resting on one side is fair or equitable. He can hunt me, I should be able to hunt him. Period. The day the OA deliver on the promise to make cloaks scannable I will call it fair, with or without changes to local.

The whole 'cloaks are harmless' is complete bunk. If it were true, they wouldn't be used that way and no one would complain. It's a powerful ability and is in no way offset by the drawbacks currently placed on it. Initiative is a real thing, and it's pretty important or 99.9999999% of all EvE PvP would not revolve around getting the drop on the other guy. Being able to retain that initiative completely without effort on an unlimited time frame is not balanced in an objective sense. Only in the world of entitled gank bears crying that they can't defeat an alliances worth of Intel channels and hours of preperation in getting to a remote system, taking advantage of diplomatic efforts and military control of an area, constant vigilance and flight discipline just by logging in and roaming around solo is it balanced.

If it's all just a myth, why not allow him to be hunted? How about we create a new module that projects a force field that allows a ship using it to be just as invulnerable while being immobile, but allows such a ship to be readily monitored, and then allow cloaks to be scanned with skill and effort? Thus we save the titans, allow for bio breaks, but don't allow hunting or force projection from an invulnerable position. I am sure that idea will be met with derision and the observation of why should we bother when cloaks do it already, in a smokescreen effort to downplay the power and severity of the unbreakable advantage the cloak grants.

And what do you want?

Apparently to log in and shoot somebody. You want to be able to sit in utter safety deep in enemy territory, threatening any activities in the area, unchallenged and unchallengable until you decide the time is right. It's perfectly fine to disrupt the play of others, but let's not have any of that disruption while you are hunting. You and you alone are the only determinor of who can disrupt you.

You don't want to have to breach defenses getting there, that were established over many man hours of effort by whole alliances worth of people. Only you are entitled to the fruits of your labor, the difficulty of fitting a single trivial module. The time and effort of others is meaningless so long as it results in you getting what you want without effort.

You get 24/7 free and zero effort safety deep in enemy territory while defying the effort of potentially thousands of players trying to stop you... All by fitting one trivial cost module and pressing a button.

At least watching local, using and maintaining Intel channels requires active participation in the game. Far more than you are willing to put forth to maintain your safety. Entitled is what it's called when you don't do anything at all for your reward. The guys watching local, watching and maintaining Intel and practicing proper flight discipline so they have the opportunity to escape you are putting out orders of magnitude more effort than you ever will activating that cloak each morning before leaving your pc for the day.

That's a change to local, and has very little, if anything, to do with cloaks. Feel free to start that thread and discuss the issue in the appropriate spot. If you could be hunted while cloaked, that would not change the dynamic of how it interacts with local, except you would not be left in 100% safety with exactly zero effort of any kind being required. The same is true if local was changed at the same time. As soon as it becomes possible people will take steps to find and hunt them, regardless of local detecting them.

Look at wormholes. Despite the lack of local operating as it does everywhere else, you are hardly safe in wormhole space without a cloak.

In fact, every time you ask for local to be exchanged for cloak vulnerability, you should just pack up and go live in a wormhole and enjoy both no local and perfect invulnerability while cloaked at the same time. I would guess you won't like it though, because there are even fewer available soft targets.

Long ago some halfwit decided to link cloaks and local as some sort of equivalent game concept in a hamhanded defense of a ludicrously unbalanced stealth mechanic. We have been stuck at an impasse since then because the problem with cloaks is glaring and obvious yet the gank bear playstyle is held as holy and inviolate.

Introduce a reasonable mechanic for extended safety outside of a friendly station (save the titans!) that actually somehow meshes with core EVE gameplay concepts of risking everything in space, and make cloaks into a real and balanced stealth mechanic with an actual counter. Neither thing has to touch on local at all, though either or both could.

But gank bears don't want change unless it puts the game even further into their corner. They can't see that the reason they can't get targets to risk a confrontation is due to imbalanced game mechanics giving them every advantage already, so the *only* real defense is simply not to fight at all. Keep sliding things away from your intended prey and eventually they just won't play at all, because it's a game and not real life.

No, that is the point of cloaks. That hunting him is hard even impossible in certain circumstances. The circumstances where it is impossible is also where you are safe too.

And there is symmetry here. If I am at a safe and cloaked...I am not hunting you. And you are not hunting me. If I choose to hunt you then I am no longer absolutely safe. I have to go through an acceleration gate, warp into an anomaly, etc. And in the end I have to decloak and engage at which point I too can be engaged.