Player Features and Ideas Discussion

+1 great idea!


This would create excellent strategic choice, having to choose between military systems and those of farming!

It might be interesting to put discover-able text on the hardware itself:
Property of Vogon Constructor Fleet. Free Poetry readings upon request.

Or subvert them. This might be asking a bit much, but could there be a hacking option? False intel would, IMO, create lots of content.

Oddly enough, I don't. I have argued that removing the risk posed by AFK cloaking alone is probably not a good thing (inflation), but above is not ideal in that the profitability issue should hinge on player actions and not just anchoring something.

People are posting, "Oh active play is awesome!!! Its great the OA will promote it!!! Lets anchor something so we don't have to actively play!!" Errr...WTF?

I don't think I've seen anyone actually propose this. Even if a structure makes a cloaked ship vulnerable to attack you still need to actually hunt him down and attack him, and as anyone who has ever tried to catch a vanilla regular Frigate in Low Sec can attest catching a pilot who is actively evading you is not easy.

Unless the OA is going to have an attached Death-Ray that zaps all cloaky pilots in system I don't think there's any worries about this not generating active gameplay.

I don't think that they need to be able to directly interfere with structures any more so than other players so long as whatever counter-play the OA allows isn't just a blanket ban on cloaking within the system. If it's some kind of ping or whatever then the player can still remain hard to catch and mostly undetected.

Thus they still have an impact, but are required to be active in order for that to happen, as opposed to current gameplay which is mostly passive observation of one sort or another, excluding bombers which is probably where the base-line should be drawn. "What's the greatest level of counter-play we can implement that still leaves Bomber gameplay fun and mostly in-tact?" Heck, maybe some of these changes could be offset by bringing back the cloakies don't decloak each other change? Though it was always fun to decloak an enemy cloaky with mine...

Shut up Nikk...you are making way too much sense being reasonable. C'mon cloaking is a broken...errr AFK cloaking is a broken mechanic.

The PvE player is still at the same amount of risk as before unless he chooses to go out and actively hunt down the cloaked pilot.

Also if you'll look at the dev blog under the OA you'll note:



So this is already something CCP are considering, and it's likely that means they see the current state of cloaky gameplay as problem.

Not really. We can, with the exception of Wormholes, already determine if a player is in local. If he doesn't show up on D-Scan or probes then we know he's cloaked. Therefore there must be some additional functionality here that lets you further detect and interfere with a cloaked player, which logically means some way to threaten that cloaked player. Also CCP talked about a couple of these ideas in their Fanfest presentation. As the man with the french accent says, "details to be specified"

The extent of that hasn't been defined, but I'm not speculating on what that's going to be so much as suggesting ideas and brainstorming.

Also while rat bounties are the largest ISK faucet in Eve there's been no indication that CCP is currently concerned about the amount of ISK coming from this source. If you have some evidence that they're concerned about this then please link it.

Either way it's unlikely that something that interferes with cloaky gameplay will significantly change the productivity of Null, since players are still perfectly capable of actively interfering with ratting and other productive (as opposed to destructive) activities, they just have to actually risk their ship and risk retaliation to do so.

So, first off, interesting post from SoniClover there.

That said, I stand by my point in that I don't think the effects from changes to cloaking mechanics are going to be terribly significant to the game as a whole. AFK cloaking gets a lot of discussion but the amount of it actually going on in the game is relatively small by all accounts. Part of this is because so much ISK production in Null happens in Alliance havens, which tend to be at the center of various empires and largely out of range of harassment.

It's certainly possible that it could push more people out into Null but since that's a long term goal of CCP's I doubt they would view that as a negative.

Also I certainly never said CCP don't follow those stats. I'm familiar with the various ISK faucets and their magnitude, and I pay a lot of attention to Eve stats. My base assumptions simply lead me to believe that a change to this sort of activity won't have a major impact on overall income.

Also if you listen to the Fanfest presentations the one on structures specifically calls out AFK cloaking, to cheers from the audience, so I would say that some sort of nerf or counter to the practice is definitely coming. It's inactive and risk-free gameplay with a tangible in-game effect and CCP has been on something of a wrecking spree for those sorts of gameplay types. Economic concerns are not the only ones to take into account here after all.

As for Local, we've seen nothing to suggest that at all. The last thing we heard on Local was years ago and was a firm "no, we're not changing Local". This may change along with the various OA features, but so far it doesn't seem like the default features of Local are going away.

Also no one said anything about putting a cloaky player on the defensive all the time, just that there should be some counter play to cloaking, which currently doesn't exist