Player Features and Ideas Discussion

A ship that is aligned at full speed enters warp instantly, and even a battleship can align and accelerate into warp within ~15 seconds. And there is no way you can locate your prey (by probes or d-scan), warp to them, get into tackle range (remember, we don't suck at EVE, so the carebear is well off the warp-in point), get a lock, and activate a warp disruptor within 15 seconds. It's simply not possible. The only way you're going to kill a PvE ship is if the PvE player voluntarily deactivates their invulnerability and accepts the possibility of a fight. You know, kind of like how a cloaked ship is invulnerable until the cloak player voluntarily deactivates their invulnerability and accepts the possibility of a fight.

As for killboard evidence, I don't deny the fact that there are plenty of stupid and/or lazy players in EVE who get caught in 0.0 PvE. However, the solution is for those players to learn to stop sucking at EVE, not for CCP to coddle them and nerf the threats they face. They already have plenty of tools for staying alive.



Why is it so hard for you to understand that PvE ships will not be in space? Once you enter local they're gone, docked and 100% invulnerable. The only targets you can hunt are the carebears who suck at life in 0.0 and expect to farm PvE content like it's highsec.



And that lock is something you pay a heavy price for. Cloaked ships fall into two categories:

1) "Normal" ships with a cloak fitted. These ships sacrifice a high slot, a non-trivial amount of CPU, and suffer a major lock time penalty just for fitting a cloak. And they don't get the ability to warp while cloaked, so they'll be visible on d-scan well before they can threaten you and you'll have plenty of time to escape if you don't want to fight them. This cloak is virtually worthless for hunting, and the major users are actually carebears, for cloaking in a safespot and the MWD/cloak trick at gatecamps.

2) Covert ops ships. These ships cloaking at its full power, but pay for it in their other stats. Less DPS, less tank, less speed, weaker drones/utility highs/etc. A covert ops capable ship will lose a straight-up fight to pretty much anything in their own class, and it isn't even close. The ONLY virtue they have is the ability to hunt with cloaking tactics. Take the effectiveness of that away and you kill the entire class, as there is no longer any reason to take them over interceptors/HACs/etc.

and your problem is people aren't playing the way you want, so you're calling for a massive nerf to cloaks instead of realizing not everyone plays the same way you do.

The system isn't lopsided or broken. A cloaked ship can't target anyone, can't pre-heat modules, can't earn ISK. That's the balance. You're giving people who already have 100% safety (PvE-ers in sov null) an even easier way to earn ISK while watching netflix. Why is that a good idea?

Additionally, hunting cloaked ships screws a lot of other playstyles. I have a character that hasn't docked since november. I have never AFK cloaky camped anyone with him, but his playstyle is gone with your suggestion. nerfing cloaked ships is a death toll to nomadic lifestyles.

I already have, you've just ignored it for some reason. The time to warp out to a station when a potential threat appears in local is significantly less than the time required to locate a target, warp to the grid with them, get into range (since they're not stupid and sitting on the warp-in point at 0km), and get them tackled. The only way to catch a target is if they voluntarily forfeit their 100% safety, much like a cloaked ship must voluntarily decloak before it can be engaged.

Or if they are afk, or tackled by npc's, stuck on a rock... If you are claiming 100% safety, then none of that should be an issue.

Even in that worst-case scenario it's almost 100%. NPC tackle should be instantly killed as soon as it spawns, and you shouldn't be anywhere near rocks. So maybe there's a tiny window of vulnerability now and then where a hostile could come in at the exact perfect moment and catch you, but it's not really a relevant threat. The vast majority of PvE losses are people who weren't paying attention and/or willingly took the risk of staying active with a potential threat in system.



There really isn't a middle ground. Remember what I said about anti-cloak methods being either ineffective or automatic? Well, pick how long it should take to find a cloaked ship:

If it's fairly long (minutes/hours) then it accomplishes nothing* but adding more buttons to press. The cloaked ship can easily dodge the attempt to find them by staying mobile and occasionally warping to a new location. You've made them press a few more buttons, and you've made the anti-cloaking side spend some time training skills and spend slots on the new modules, but you're still not going to do more than slightly inconvenience the cloaked ship. You will never successfully catch them.

If it's fairly short (immediate to maybe a minute or two at most) you'll catch a cloaked ship, but the cloak becomes useless. The cloaked ship will be forced to constantly evade and be unable to accomplish its mission, and faces a constant threat of being decloaked and killed. And at that point there's very little reason to take a fragile and low-DPS covops ship instead of a much more powerful conventional ship.


*We don't count "removing AFK cloakers so terrible players can PvP safely" as a benefit. The only people who are threatened by AFK cloaking are pathetic failures who should be ganked until they ragequit.

Ok, enough of this thing where you argue that it's theoretically possible to nerf cloaks without over-nerfing them but never explain how. No more going on about "it's not binary" without proof. Post your proposed mechanic for cloak detection, including details on things like time/resource costs/etc, and we'll see how reasonable it is. I'm betting that it will fall into one of my two categories, but who knows, you could prove me wrong.

The thread is over 400 pages long. If you can't post your solution, complete with specific details, then you don't have a solution. And your "it can be interesting and not black and white and not an over-nerf" claims is, to put it politely, garbage.

The gist of a proposal involving false positives:

Scanner module exclusive to covops, or a ship equivalent to a covops, that allows for the detection of cloaked signatures. Warp coordinates from this scanner are randomized within a certain distance so as to make it extremely unlikely to decloak a ship by warping to zero.

Each solar system continuously generates a number of false signatures (space debris or something), each lasting up to an hour or so, but staggered so that old signatures are eliminated and new signatures are up every few minutes. The debris can be destroyed early and easily. New false signatures will spawn within a few minutes of the ending of an older one so that without intensive effort there will always be a generally stable amount of noise on the scan.

Cloaked ships will have identical signatures to these false signatures. Cycling the cloak off and on will reset the randomly generated ID of the signature.

That gets you on grid, the first and greatest problem of how cloaks currently work.

My preferred solution for actually finding a cloaked ship on grid is a deployable that makes cloaked ships visible (perhaps as a shimmer or other effect) and targetable in space, but does not put them on the overview. While the cloak is active it grants a large boost to the signature of the ship so that it takes substantial time to target. How noticeable the cloak is will likely depend on the area.


With this it's possible to eliminate false positives until you find the ship, but doing so efficiently will require multiple people. Staying cloaked long term is more risky if someone is actively watching, as you can watch the false positives despawn and a signature that lasts too long is a ship, unless the pilot is actively taking the risk to reset his cloak. However, barring bad luck a cloaked ship will not be found quickly, let alone instantly, unless several scanning ships are working together to check all the signatures in the system.

Making a ship visible on grid but not to the overview allows calculated risk for the cloaking pilot while still rewarding attentive pilots the chance to find spys if the deployable is set up in advance. Between the set up time of the deployable and increased target time once you find a ship, cloaking pilots have ample time and warning to evade or engage on their own terms, without giving them an unbreakable lock on initiating an encounter.

Watching local while being aligned doing PvE in sov null is 100% safety.