Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I've thought for a while now that long term cloaking should consume some kind of fuel (and if I had my way that fuel would be illegal in high sec,) however that was before the input automation ban - isboxer bomber wings were one of the reasons I took a break. As things are right now the thing that concerns me about cloaky combat ships are they favour the predator a little too much in my opinion (and also the idle who don't have to pee into a bucket when in fleet like I do.) We surely want pilots on grid not docked up in fear of a hotdrop.

I propose that there should be a cloaky frigate that can light a cyno (not covert cyno - there are other ships already for that,) be immune from appearing in local, but cannot do anything else. I approve of getting fleets to face off, but I've lived through noob PvP tutorial fleets being abandoned because of the risk of skilled cloaked bombers hanging about looking for noob tears (OT that poor FC later on in the week had 20 odd noobs NOT shooting the primary - or anything. "Guys will you shoot the nado" he says after calling it primary a number of times, and nothing happens until someone pipes up "what's a nado I can't see one on my overview?" FC says while facepalming "the Tornado guys, shoot the ******* Tornado! ")

I think there should be a penalty to sig radius too on anything coming through a cyno briefly.

In any case, being afk undocked should leave you vulnerable whether you are cloaked or not. I support those who are proposing a hunter killer destroyer or something similar.

I have always proposed that people who complain about cloakers (afk or otherwise since you never know) need to GTFO of 0.0 and move into empire. There they will find a lot of players and may get ganked by someone and cry more about it.

If you cant get a gang up to trap said cloaker if he isn't afk with your bait ratting ship you are in a fail alliance and should leave it.

EVE is a game of PVP be it in game or physiological or meta. Get used to it bro.

What my purposed counter to cloaky campers while not affecting non cloakies to much would be to release multiple kinds of deplogables.

What I mean is make a scan probe that can only dscan cloakies and have a better scan str then normal probes, this will give u there location but will unlikely Declan them upon warping there, at this point you have a bomb like ammo that will act like a bomb but instead of deal damage it will Decloak anything within a 15 km range of the probe, it acts like a bomb so it shoots out of ur ship and explodes after a set time, I believe this to be a great idea

*BzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZ*



OH!

As much as I despise local for it's 100% risk and effort free intel, and would love its abolition, I don't think that local is the problem in regards to cloaking. Cynos are the problem. Specifically their instantaneous nature. If there was a delay before the cyno became jump-to-able I don't think there'd be an issue as defenders would actually have a chance to react.

AFK cloaking is pretty OK right now. But if you want to have the things which you talk about in your CSM Minutes you will need to make it possible to counter it. Maybe some sort of system wide cloak breaker or something.

CCP already has you covered. No one can activate any other module while cloaked.

While cloaked in a safe and afk, they might as well just be docked up for all that they can actually hurt you.

Now, if you're suggesting that CCP should ever make any mechanical change based on how some people choose to react to the metagame... then you're completely wrong.

They would adept in what kind of sense? By doing nothing? In a WH a small corp is able to ignore a camper by working together. In 0.0 a camper enables the possible entry to a bigger entity. So even if you have the members to kill a small fleet, you do not have enough for the BOps or other bridged gang. Which makes an AFK cloaky camper just harassment, which is uncounterable nor avoidable, like in a WH environment.

I am in love with EVE because it is complex chess, even so some parties end up more like rugby with every player having a baseball bat. Still, there should be a way to make it safer by teamwork, like in WH. But in 0.0 it is not possible if you are 10-30 people (4-6 simultanly online).

I don't care how it could be achieved to make it harder for a cloaky to harass a group without any risk of losing the used ship, but i would embrace it.

The only problem I have with afk cloaking is that cloakers are safe for an indefinate period of time after they've cloaked up. That's it.

So far all that I've seen you do is try to piggy back a nerf local thread on top of a 'let's exam cloaking' thread and tell me I'm missing the point. I'll retort the same because I don't think you're making the connection between risk and reward as a part of player's behavior. Cloakers stand to lose next to nothing while gleaning intel at least as, and possibly much more valuable than even the intel available from local, watchlisting, or locator agents.

Breaking it all down most of the intelligence gathering methods in this game are moderate to zero risk activities, and even those that come with some risk usually don't incur substantial loss if the intel op somehow falls apart, such as a scouting interceptor being caught by a gatecamp or even a cloaky alt derping it and warping on top of a hostile pos and decloaking on a can or some other foolishness. Does this need to be changed? Maybe, I'll come back to it in a couple of paragraphs.

The difference though from the above mentioned intel tools, and why cloaking can be viewed somewhat seperately, is that a cloaked alt gives the attacker an opportunity to discern the intent, composition, and vulnerability of an opponent, completely at his own leisure and the ability to strike at the time of his choosing. The quality of the intelligence and window of opportunity provided by a cloaked alt is simply too large relative to the risk he places himself in.

Even if local was nerfed in K-space, cloaked alts would remain powerful tools; they're not just an implement of psychological warfare like you're trying to spin it. They would still provide all of the benefits I mentioned above, and would be handicapped by the loss of local to exactly the same degree that all of the other residents of that system were. The loss of local could also remove the metagame activity of baiting a cyno ship, as the presence of a known hot dropper and expensive black ops ships is a powerful incentive to entice aggression; but it is to some extent (though not entirely) predicated on knowledge of the presence of the hotdropper.

In w-space right now can they provide a virtually permanent foothold in a system, though in reality their strength is somewhat diminished by not being able to cyno in friendly ships- they have to utilize probes (revealing at a minimum their presence) and defenders must enter through a wormhole, giving defenders at least a few moments to scramble a response. It's not a lot of time, but in combination with bubbles and careful observation defenders at least have much more time to react than many null players can expect.

In NPC space a player has other tools available that don't require local or even a cloaked alt, namely the stations themselves. Even without a guest list a player simply needs to undock and d-scan, there's a risk that someone may see him undock or catch him on d-scan, but the window of opportunity is short and only scales with time spent in space and the number of players in system- even so it's such a low hanging fruit who's purpose overlaps the cloaky alt that it's strong enough to virtually exclude it. Cloaked alts are still useful, but NPC stations themselves are incredibly powerful and for certain activities, much more powerful than a POS or an outpost.

I do agree that all intelligence gathering tools should have the quality of the intelligence they provide correlated to the risk associated with the particular practice. I don't agree though that cloaking is intrinsically linked to local or even other forms of intel. It's a powerful and widespread enough tool that it deserves special-case attention and a degree of segregation from local.

I like the idea the thread is Sicky, Though some form of crowd sourcing drill down data base would be nice to discuss a topic..

Anyways I always loved the U boat or Ping idea. Though on the other hind I would love to see an increase of power to the cloaker - The ability to to use another modual to cloak from local as well.

This would mean a U boat would have to search system to find a target to try to find. Allowing the Cloaker to set up a trap waiting for some one to come into his web.

In the hunt for submarines you never if one was near by untill it fired it's first torpedo unless you had spent the resources to bring in the U-Boat to detect . Even then if the Sub was powered down in the right spot it might be able to go undetected.

I would love anomolies even asterioud belts be areas were a cloaker could make it more difficult for U-Boats to find the cloaker. The asteriod belts could have the astriods move. so orbiting or staying still in the astriod belt could eventually mean you would get decloaked by a moving astriod. Oh the cat and mouse games, especially with wardecks and highsec.

The jumping into a system and suddenly popping up in local may require a special ship or modual that delays popping up in local. Maybe a Cloak tackler ship. Meant to tackle, but can't carry a cyno. This ship would be launched with the U-Boat ship.