Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You're right, there is a reason WHs are uninhabited. For a game that is supposed to be dangerous, most people are unbelievably risk averse. Killboards are a good point as well. Anyone with over an 80% isk efficiency is so scared of losing a ship that they refuse to shoot anyone who has a shot at shooting back. Some of the best fights are when you say "**** it, I probably will die, but lets go anyway". Try it sometime.

You have also yet to say what is so hard about being in a fleet and on comms.

By the way, a local OA should only give local to the alliance that runs it, if an attacker wants local they need to put their own one up.

Sigh..., one issue is that is directly impacts the lessor alliances to a much greater degree, these people are often the ones who will give better roaming fights to others, but they often get strangled by over whelming Capital power or the continuous hot drop from those same people with Capital superiority, be it capitals or large BLOP's fleets. It is not as bad as it was due to the sov changes but it could be better.

I have to ask you, do you want to see systems being used and roaming gangs coming around and actually being met by people willing and able to fight with ships and assets and the cash balance to lose them, do you want to come out of your WH and find people ready to brawl?

Of course you will get some people who will rat until their eyes fall out, but feck them, I found in the alliances that I was in that once people had enough to cover the alliance doctrine ships and paid their plex, they would then be gagging for some one to come in so they could have some fun, it is quite evident that the more shite you have the more likely you are to fight.

I don't like the people who just rat and do not get involved as much as you do, I saw them quite often, but the majority of people I played with were keen to either go on roams and even keener to deal with roams coming into their space. Which is why I want to see space being used and people sitting there with a load of ships and modules ready to kick ass.

No.

You can destroy/disrupt Sonya's suggested sov structure. Tell me how one can disrupt or destroy local in its current form?

No, the current people who want to nerf cloaks have learned not to use the term safety/ratting (even Voidstar's arguments evolved in tihs manner because he saw it was getting him nowhere with anyone except other people who simply want safer ratting). They know that using such terms will pretty much destroy their credibility. Now it is all "it is OP, not balanced, etc." Problem is cloaks are likely quite balanced. As has been discussed many times, cloaking ships are usually not robust, you lose a slot to the cloak, etc.

As for invulnerability...again, that has been discussed to death. A cloaked ship is indeed invulnerable to attack*. But at the same time...everyone else in that system is invulnerable to the cloaked ship. And once that cloaked ship decides to attack and drops his cloak...he is no longer invulnerable either.

And finally, this is all rather beside the point. It is beside the point because you are not discussing AFK cloakers, but ATK cloakers. You are basically picking up the Xcom line of argument and saying, "We need to nerf cloaks." Cloaks are fine. Local...that is really the issue. Local is, IMO, antithetical to the very spirit of the game.

And guess what, it is quite possible that the OA will accomplish the goals you are aiming at. Finding a cloaked ship that spends too much time in one spot. Removing local. The replacement intel will not give back local in its entirety--i.e. the parts of local you get back will likely depend on how you fit it. And I don't buy the cyno argument. I have been in fights where the other side cynoed in on us and we took the fight. Often they had the numbers, but an inferior fleet composition. And once again, the discussion of cynos is irrelevant here as it is and AFK cloaking thread FFS. No player who is AFK has ever lit a cyno. Ever. AFK and cyno should only be used in a sentence when responding to somebody who says AFK cloaking is a problem because of cynos.

*Okay, not completely, if you are dumb and cloak after warping to a POCO at 50 there is a non-zero probability you could be decloaked and killed, but forget that and lets assume somebody at a well situated safe spot and go with the very reasonable approximation of zero probability of being decloaked.

Putting all the things that Dracvlad wants together we end up with the defenders getting local as it is while the attacker does not, the defenders getting cynos while the attacker does not and the defender being able to scan down cloaked ships.


Thats one hell of a one sided situation.

All you wind up with is ratters with yet more safety and less pvp.

You don't want cynos on these cloaking ships so that instantly gived the advantage to ratters that generally always fit a cyno to their ships. You want local gone for attacks but kept for defenders which makes it very hard to catch anything, you want cloakers to be scannable/probable/countered which means you wipe out the only counter to local which will still be there with your plan.

Its a **** plan that will only benefit ratters. Lets face it you are demanding all of these changes to nerf something that can't move, cant target and cant interact with anything. If not for local you would have no idea they were even there, hence why you never hear anyone complaining about cloaky camping in wormholes.

You can already counter AFK cloaking simply by having a standing fleet.

Yes, XCom's invulnerability module made a good case- this is true. As did his point that cloaked ships do indeed add value- although not in the form of ISK.

Don't get me wrong- I'm all for this Observatory Array; there is just one thing you and I do not agree on it seems, something you keep bringing to the table and, while not entirely without merit, it has its own problems.

You say the thread is about AFK cloaking. That an AFK cloaker cannot do "Struff (tm)" because he's, you know, cloaked and AFK.

This is where we kind of disagree: to me, an AFK cloaker is someone who's been cloaked since like forever in your system. Could be half a day, could be weeks- there is obviously no upper limit to how long is 'too long'. Jerghul tried to get the ball rolling by limiting it to 5 hours, and this was apparently unacceptable on principle-- even though personally, I thought it was a good exercise to see where a 'regular cloaker' ends and an AFK cloaker begins. But I digress.

Now, to you, the AFK Cloaker is no longer an AFK cloaker as soon as he drops his cloak or resumes gameplay ATK. I find this to be in error. It's like saying a burglar becomes a visitor once he's in your living room because "the door was already open", becomes a pedestrian when he makes off with your TV set because he's not in the act of breaking and entering at those exact moments in time.

To me, the AFK cloaker remains an AFK cloaker even when he resumes play after 10 days of AFKness, even when he drops cloak and engages: it is still an AFK cloaker! Why? Because there is no way for anyone else but him to know he's AFK or not. And merely because that cloak dropped 5 seconds ago and you're now scrambled and webbed, doesn't make it any less of a cloaker attack.

Can you follow my line of reasoning in this? The thread is not merely discussing the presence of a cloaked, unpiloted ship -- if that were the case you'd be quite right to point out it doesn't do anything and it totally harmless. But we know this to be false. What said cloaked ship does after the pilot gets home, after it tackles something, is very much within the context of this debate! The fact that it's been sitting there for five hours or more makes it an AFK cloaker; and until the residents can assert that it is or is not AFK (as Dracvlad suggested by flagging it inactive) they damn well ought to treat is as an ATK ship.

Similarly, everybody knows you need to drop cloak to take point; but that doesn't justify excluding that part of the process from discussion about cloaked ships.

Arguing semantics and technicalities to obfuscate the obvious truths and space lawyering in general are nasty highsec habits we probably should not indulge in in nullsec-- most if not all of us are already treating the subject with consideration and find it quite difficult enough as it is. One might say "you can't gather intel when you're not looking at your screen, ergo no value was added" and we'd say "just because he's not at his keyboard doesn't proof he's not at his screen" and we'd go on and on and on; so for clarity's sake, can we agree that anything that's been cloaked in a system for an extended period of time is an AFK cloaker?

He may even have been at the controls all along, checking up on market orders or doing PI- who's to say for certain? The moment you start treating it as being AFK you make your first mistake: it should be treated as a piloted cloaky hunter at all time, and therefore it should be discussed as such. No?

Your problem starts and ends with the way null sov use local as an Intel tool. It is the only reason you even know someone is cloaked in your system. The problem isn't the clocking device which sees no complaints from any other area of space. If you want to deal with afk cloaking being used to try and get kills then nerf local.

While it is one sided if the OA only shows its information to those who anchor it, I would hope that the fitting choices will not give you back local in its current form. That is, depending on how you fit it you'll get "some" of local back. And one fitting option will let you find a cloaked ship.

For finding a cloaked ship it should have some sort of delay. Like you can't start probing until some condition is met, say the cloaked ship has not activated its warp drive for 10 minutes or something like that. Thus, and active ATK cloaker warping to safe's/perch spots/etc. would be fine. And since the probing won't work the reasonable conclusion is that the is indeed ATK...which with the probing ability given how one fits the OA should have been the default belief anyways. Hell, that is the default belief now even with AFK cloaking and now way to find them.

You literally wipe your a*s with this thread and bash any idea anyone suggests just to prove this point? It sounds more like you have a very targeted audience that you rather are not fond of. Farming in null is what you have complacency against. Not the actual cloaking mechanics. This is quite literally the most backhanded attempt to force everyone to think like you, that nullsec farming needs nerfed. Go complain about that in a different thread and let people that want to change cloaking have there discussion in piece.

In fact there are plenty of tools preventing players from farming in any given location. AFK cloaking is the worst of them all, defending it from any standpoint shows the ill intent of anyone that wants change. Surprise attacks on income activity's in a very narrow group of players in null space which sums up to about at most 100 or so players in the AFK cloak impacted systems. Why would anyone want to force this target audience to not have there farming done with even 1% less risk with any change? whats the whole obsession that this group of players might get an overwhelming buff to there activity to literally s**t all over every idea in this thread? Why even bother, what would actually change in EvE if AFK cloaking went away? 100 players would earn 10% more ISK then there usual income in the neighboring systems they usually farm in?