too lazy to open with the “every afk cloaking thread goes like…” quote, but to point out i wish to deal the killing blow to this undead horse and be on my way.
so yea, if someone is afk cloaking in a safespot in deadspace, my suggestion is not really gonna help fix that problem. tbh that isn’t this thread.
What this thread is really about is giving a fighting chance to the paranoid bloke who thinks they’re being stalked by some covops guy whilst mining/whatever.
my suggestion involves development of a counter module(s) that could be used, if used correctly, to spot a cloaked hunter.
Sensor blast/ping: this module covers a wide range on grid but requires a considerable amount of cap to use. it acts as a survey scanner but with higher intensity, and any cloaked ships show up as “cloaked/hidden object/ship” on overview, along with last pinged distance. ship at 30km? you gtfo.
EM blast: this may be harder to implement due to the apparent OPness. essentially, this is a kind of smartbomb that acts like a ship on ship flashbang. forces decloak of all ships, drops all targets, prevents new targets from locking for 5 seconds, and completely drains cap of the user. textbook naval flashbang imo.
so if all it takes is some random decloaking to push you into an anxiety attack, you could feel better if you had one of the two modules.
should probably point out this is written by a wormholer… so, yea.
No, that would require asset loading and could potentially be detected by 3rd party software, also obligatory… eve has sound…?
As for the suggestion here, I’ve made an argument before that the entire sensor / scanning / dscan system in eve could use a total revamp in order to make it more interesting and cohesive. Right now, hotkeying and pulsing 360 dscan every other second will in theory keep you safe in scansites, unless someone is already there camping / waiting for prey. As for small scale cloak detection, I doubt well see that any time soon; but we might get a structure that may do something like the EM blast systemwide on a sizeable cooldown.
Remember though, the cloaky camper thing is much more than just an afk’er; it is potentially a cyno and an intel gatherer. Also it may decloak and kill that guy whos hauling his industrial over to the other system for building. This pandoras cloak effect is what people are scared of; also if you are doing PvE, even a bad PvP’er could probably take you out.
This thread comes up on almost a weekly basis. In fact, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a nerf cloaking thread in the first 2 pages on this forum section. Almost every single one of them goes like this:
OP posts a post with a new (lol) idea that always boils down to some variation of the following:
“There’s a big meanie who is sitting in my system and not doing anything, but I don’t know where he is and I can’t ever just go next door. I can’t find said meanie and even though I know that he’s probably at work and poses no threat at all, I wont do anything in my system that I absolutely can’t leave ever because he might not be at work and I might lose a ship. CCP please stop the meanie from being able to do nothing to me because he’s probably at work”
Thread gets trolled because its been done literally to death. This horse has been beaten so hard and so often that it’s little more than a memory of a memory of a red smear on the grass, and yet it STILL WONT DIE! In fact it’s been done so many times that this particular horse is now undead; even if it does die, it will still be remembered and parodied.
Someone comes along and suggests that AFK cloakers can’t hurt you, because they are, by their very definition, AFK. No one ever lost a ship to someone who ISN’T PLAYING THE GAME.
Someone else comes along and points out that while the cloaker might be AFK, he might not be, and so we have Schrodinger’s Hot Dropper. The cyno pilot who might be AFK… but he might not be as well, and you will only know for sure when he decloaks, points and lights his candle. (Yes, I know this isn’t how the cat works)
Someone else comes along and suggests that you use bait and setup a TARP. Or have a defence fleet on standby. Heaven forbid you have to actually fight to defend your space.
A further person comes along and suggests that the problem isn’t cloaking AFK in your system that you can’t possibly leave ever, but that you KNOW that the person is AFK in your system… and perhaps local should be removed because free 100% accurate intel is probably not the best thing in the game and if you didn’t know that the big meanie was in your system, you wouldn’t be worried about leaving the undock/POS.
Then another person pokes their head in and complains that local is 100% NEEDED because D-Scan and probing are such bad mechanics, and IF YOU TAKE MY LOCAL AWAY IM QUITTING FOREVER AND NO YOU CAN’T HAVE MY STUFF!
Someone asks if they can have 7’s stuff.
We end up with another thread which goes on for pages and pages between complains about local, defence fleets, inability to just go next door, people who aren’t playing the game but are playing the meta, lots of bickering and in the end nothing gets solved. CCP wont remove cloaking because it would mess with waaay too many things and it creates content (which is a good thing) by removing content (which is a bad thing) but they can’t really think of any way to do it without a complete overhaul of the local and scanning systems.
Now that I’ve had this entire thread’s conversation, can we just let it die? Please?
a “Decloak” module or “detection” module is completely irrelevant to the black ops game play.
The current Covert Ops meta (aside from the hunting BlinGu, arguably) is built around surprise combat on the aggressors terms. Massive damage, swift retreat.
The point here is to harrass and demoralize enemy forces. To attack without warning, decimate a single target or targets, and leave. These tactics are NOT capable of sustaining a large scale assault, and are very easily countered when an enemy expects them and properly prepares for the eventuality. This thread and ALL the other threads about it prove that the black ops and covert ops mechanics are working.
thank you for the confirmation.
If you want some pointers on how to counter people like Bombers Bar or other Black Ops groups, look at zKill and ask those who actually manage to decimate these types of fleets what they did, rather than ask CCP for a “Make Eve Easy” button.
An ECM-styled burst module that has a chance of momentarily disrupting the cloak long enough to see the blip on your screen but not lock (sub-one second timers here) and confirm the cloaker is within spitting distance? Timers also can’t be stacked on top of each other, multiple bursts have zero cumulative effect and a new decloak timer cannot be placed on the cloaked ship until it returns to being fully cloaked.
Maybe break it up into a series of modules, the burst jammer itself, a range buff module, a cycle reduction module, and a decloak chance buff module, all with stacking penalties. Preferably make them all mid slot items so getting bonuses to everything becomes a balancing game and precludes fitting a lot of general utility modules.
All in all, it would be useless enough to only be fitable on ships owned by paranoiacs willing to throttle their fits and dedicated cloak-sniffers, and unwieldy enough that its only use in PvP would be defensive whether used by a solo miner or a full fleet.
@Claevyan@Scipio_Artelius something like the sensor burst module is only going to make both sides in the position of thought. one of the reasons people want a cloak NERF is because when your in wormhole space specifically, all you have is dscan to identify anyone else floating about the system. cloaks are undetectable. you can be invisible to the entire system with a covops cloak, making any wormholer contemplate the schrodinger’s paradox of whether or not someone is in your system. the blast module specifically, if i wasn’t clear enough, have a long range and ability to detect cloaked entities (a vague representation on your overview, mind.) but for that tradeoff requires a considerable amount of cap as well as a long, single cycle time. you also would need to time this module rigth, because your pretty much dead if you detect them within scram/distruptor ramge, maybe even drone range if you want to use this module on something small. so back to the meta, you basically level the playing field for each side being able to psych each other out.
technically, having a cloak makes it easier to shoot you in the grand scheme of things, back to wormholes again, you could be mining a rock or hacking a container that is 20+km away from the warp in point, and even if you didn’t see them on dscan first, you see them warp on grid, giving you plenty of time to warp off, instead of using a covops cloak, which unless you get lucky with your dscan timing, your too late to do anything once they decloak.
Once they decloak, every ship except a bomber has a 4-6 second recalibration delay, then the normal locking time on top of that. This means for most instances there will be 6 to 10 seconds between decloaking and locking you, assuming the cloaked ship doesn’t make any mistake whatsoever.
@Lukett_MyDabb - I can understand what you are saying but to a wormholer, this is completely irrelevant. One of the reasons I, and my entire alliance, lives in Wormholes is BECAUSE of this level of Game play.
Now, if you approach this from a “Let’s remove local from Null Sec and give the care bears a little something-something to compensate their loss” OK now we might be able to discuss this. But for wormholes? Um, no. We don’t want it. We don’t need it.
Make the module, make it capital ships only, or restrict it to space with a Sov Flag.
