CCP: Need to change how Cloak works

Currently you can not cloak while being target locked.

This must to be changed.

It is well established in sci fi lore and genre that cloaking while under attack is allowed, and indeed a viable legitimate strategy.

Start Trek introduced the idea of a “cloak”. And throughout all the TV shows and movies it was well shown a ship can cloak when under attack. Even other stories that use their own cloaking technologies show this as well.

I don’t think it changes anything unfair in the game. Predators already have great advantages. This helps even the field.

Thank you.

This is not Star Trek though so this setting can have its own rules about how cloaking works. Also there is game balance which is more important than theme.

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Obviously. I just put that in as a reference, particularly since it’s true that everything in sci fi related to “cloak” originated with Trek.

And I don’t see how this impacts “balance”.

If a ship has just a prototype cloak, so they break the lock. They can’t attack with cloaked (I’m ok with that; Also part of sci fi lore). Best they can do is crawl away at 5% sublight.

Pretty much the same for the improved cloak except at 25% speed.

Covert ops cloak only fits a few ships so that doesn’t tip any “balance” one way or another.

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No. This will have greatly negative effects on the game, up to the point where we could not have any fights .

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TLDR; New player wants get out of fight free card…

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should have been around in the old days…just log off …but that was fixed

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I see no logical reason why just being targeted prevents a cloak from working.

Oh, will you stop giving them ideas ?

inb4 in a NES store near you for only $13.99 USD :stuck_out_tongue:

CCP needs to put a downvote button.

Based on what scifi lore? because the only one where that is possible is Startrek. Others use other mean of achieving the same effect but can still be seen if you simply look out the window. once locked your locked. Stargate just copied Startrek in that regards and generally went insane where even shuttles could cloak using a zero point module.

I would rate the general EVE universe to be behind in tech and EVE lore around power consumption makes me think that cloaking in EVE is not actually cloaking. If I remember correctly it was more of a radar cloak then actual cloaking. So once your locked your locked. Remember what you see outside your ship is based on what your ship can see. So if something blocks your radar, to you and your ship he appears invisible. Same concept as reducing your EM/IR output with minimal systems being online. That last part comes from EVE lore. I am basin that of stuff I read back in 2010 when you could download apps containing short stories and EVE lore.

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Regardless of what other sci-fi media wants to do, this is Eve Online, we don’t care much for what other sci-fi stuff does.

Being able to cloak while being targeted would be game-breakingly OP unless it was only possible under extremely specific circumstances, instead of being available anytime as you have suggested here.

It’d essentially allow any ship with a cloak fitted to completely escape any fight that’s not happening within 2km (decloaking/no-cloaking range) essentially rendering it invulnerable. It’d be useless to kite a cloaky ship so you’d have to brawl it at 0, and I can already hear the blaster Proteuses and blaster/HAM Tengus laughing maniacally at the prospect that they don’t have to take a fight that isn’t at 0.

This also presents extremely OP buffs to literally anything else using a cloak. Blockade Runner decloaked by a Sabre? Unless that Sabre doesnt overshoot, it cloaks right back up. T1 Industrial? Again, unless you’re at 0 you’re not catching it. The list goes on and on if you wanna find more situations where being able to cloak while targeted leads to game breaking results.

TL;DR: This would be ludicrously OP. Just because Star Trek or some other space franchise has their science working a certain way, doesn’t mean ■■■■. This is Eve Online, we don’t care about other stuff, we just care about this game and its balance.

And I see no logical reason why cloaking could even exist.

I will tell you this though…standard target locks in this game are NOT passive. They are active target locks. That means some sort of beam(s) is directed right at the locked ship.

Now, we could just assume that those directed beams prevent the necessary electromagnetic conditions for the cloak to spool up and do that inherently. Or we could assume that a feature of all target lock beam arrays is a separate beam that is specifically made to disable the very sensitive nature of cloaking and especially attempts to initiate a cloak.

After all, close proximity to an object is enough to disrupt a fully booted cloak. How hard would it be to prevent someone initiating the cloak then?

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Uhm, no.

Invisibility as a concept predates science fiction entirely - lots of folk tales and mythology contain methods of being hidden from others while being able to observe them, literally in some cases via an ‘invisibility cloak’ garment. In science fiction, to the best of ky knowledge, this concept debuted in the early 1930’s in The Invisible Man. Star Trek is only responsible for the term ‘cloaking device’, not the underlying concept of being cloaked from observation.

Therefor, your argument that any cloaking methods must follow Star Trek lore because Star Trek came first is rendered moot since the premise is wrong in the first place. Nevermind all the other issues with it as a concept, your basis for argument is ‘it originated here and thus has to be this way’, which is not accurate.

For those complaining about balance, that issue is quite easily solved. Just introduce a cool down time to the initiation of a cloak where no active module will work for a time, say 30 seconds or even more. Oh, you got decloaked after 20 seconds? I hope you are insured!

Even as a pure “get out of a fight free card”, where people cloak and just run, I don’t think it will be that great, except perhaps for covert ops. For one thing I think that many will die for hitting the cloak a tad too late. For another it won’t work if anything, especially the opponent, is too near. And upon seeing the cloak, the opponent can rush the area to get a decloak and then pop the ship easy if that cooldown timer I mentioned earlier is there.

But if it is found to be OP for covert ops, as in, they actually get kills more often than they run away from fights, then warp could be disabled for any ship that cloaks up with a weapons timer.

It could well be set up in a way that its risky, yet, induces a lot of people to die for trying it…thinking its such an awesome manuever for whatever reason…then finding out too late that its not that simple…and why would it be simple? It could lead to a lot of unintended, but still fair, deaths.

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That’s because cloaking doesn’t exist, it’s fiction. Do you know how Dscan works? Is it passive or active scanning? Do you know how targeting mechanisms work and how they would affect the the field that is cloaking the targeted ship? Do you know what the cloaking field is even made out of?
Say it’s just bending light around your ship but someone’s targeting system isn’t based on light, or is able to actively interfere with whatever the cloaking device does.
On the fiction end of things and as others have pointed out, this isn’t star trek, it’s the world’s largest collection of science fiction ever. Does it use ideas from other fictional sources, yep, it does. It also uses some hard science but in the long run since cloaking doesn’t exist what’s important is that everything in Eve needs balance to function. If someone can simply press a button to prevent people from shooting them there’s going to be a problem. Everything in Eve needs some form of counter measure (except fedos and meat popsicles).
Eve has a thing in it called a “unit of lag” I fit these into my ships to cause other players to have network issues and disconnect, or to overheat their video card drastically reducing their frame rate. Everyone hates it when I arrive in a system because at the moment there’s no way to stop it and it makes playing kind of suck. CCP is currently trying to nerf this thing to to restore ballance. It’s not going well because they really love when everyone is having a rotten time and can’t find a way to fix the problem with out making people happy.
See what I mean about fiction?

I find your “arguments” so compelling that I don’t think anything else needs to be said. You may rest assured CCP will do as you requested as soon as they see this thread.

It amazes me that others might disagree or would try to convince you of the contrary. Ignore them, they don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m glad there are players in this game like you that know better than them.

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You really gave sarcasm a hard work out. Sarcasm is going to need at least a week’s rest to recuperate. Even then, It might retain a limp!

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What do you mean sarcasm?

The way cloak works in EvE is clearly wrong if it’s not the same as in the Star Trek movies. How may nobody have realised this until now? What was CCP thinking when they decided to do things the way they did?

Good thing we have players like the OP that noticed it and let us all know so CCP fixes this ASAP.

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