Bot control is a ball in the devs court. Mechanics shouldn’t be designed for (or justified with) their impact on players being able to catch cheaters.
rightly so. It was bad from the beginning and should have been tweaked quickly to make cloaky warfare an active, challenging and demanding thing. Which means, people should have options to “hunt” cloakies. And no, that doesn’t mean dropping a 70M deployable and “hope”. I mean “active hunting”, with probes or scanners that give rough estimates about the position but don’t allow locking or approaching directly. But narrowing him down, more and more and if he doesn’t move carefully or warp out in time, he will be caught at some point. Counteroptions by gameplay, not by forcing them to waste money (which will be 100% worthless if the cloaker just has a 15minute stopwatch running).
Thats not what “cloaky camping” is. BLOPs hunters are fine, I know how much that can demand if you want to be good at it. The issue is people having cloaky chars for hours or even days in a system to force the locals to hold a shield up all the time. Without much effort. Just waiting for the mone moment where they slip and then make a quick kill.
Ship rebalance 2.1 To have a ship, you need fuel. And fuel is mined from ore and ice, and then in reactions it turns into fuel.
Capsuleer rebalance 2.1. You need to get food, water, and eat. It will be just right to bring back walking around the stations - to go to the canteen!
Mining rebalance 2.1 So that pilots have a chance to fight in nulls (who live in high sectors) Ores contain elements from moons with a small percentage, etc. So that they can build ships and give a spanking to those who live in nulls. Otherwise, they can’t be driven out of there. (Think for yourself, 10 friends came to the game - and what can they do to an alliance that has been sitting there for decades) Google Translate
Fuel Req is actually just inconvenient and will lead to frustration when using the module. You’d have to share your cargospace for fuel with all the other stuff you need, or the Devs would need to give cloak-bonused ships extra bays… It’s another thing to check before undocking so you don’t accidentally fly without fuel… no, I don’t like it.
What I do like is active countermeasures that makes cloaking and hunting cloakies a cat&mouse game, an active task for both sides: The hunters have tools to put pressure on the cloaky and the cloaky has to watch carefully and evade or remove these tools so they can’t successfully catch him.
From the discussions in the topic I like the most:
rework of MoObs, shorter ping rates, rescoopable, lower price - but limits that prevent mass-anchorings to ping permanently. A viable solution would be:
– a MoOb uses the surface of the Sun as reflective bell like we use the atmosphere for broadcasting systems (lore/tech explanation). So it can only be anchored on the warpin spot to the star and only one can be anchored at any time per system. This means, as soon as the hunters are anchoring a MoOb, the cloaky will also know where it is. They will have to permanently protect it or the cloaky can remove it pretty easy with a T3 or Bomber. HP can be designed very low so even a solo cloaky has a chance to take the MoOb out with a few volleys and escape if the owner doesn’t pay full attention or has a RR-ship ready to keep it alive.
– Anchoring time is 5 minutes, after which 5 Pings are made every 5 Minutes with a 50/50 chance to decloak all ships in the system, total duration 30 minutes. After that it can be scooped back in.
– Cost like 30 Mio. ISK.
– Can of course be used as a bait for the cloaky. Or being used by the cloaky to trigger an escalation by attacking it and having more backup than the owners thought.
Active decloak charges/modules for specialized ships like HICs or Dictors that can issue a range-limited “ping” (like 20km for an Interdictor / 25km for a HIC) which removes cloak for just a second but doesn’t make him lockable. So you can see the ship that is nearby for a second if the ping hits it and you can send a fast ship to burn towards the location and try to decloak him manually - or at least force him to warp off or position himself outside of that ping range, making it harder to sneak up to targets and just light a Cyno right on top of them.
– An Interdiction Sphere Launcher could hold 10 “decloak” charges, then needs a reload
– A HIC gets a special module that does cost another HighSlot and can ping once every minute in a 25km radius
“Surveillance Probes” for the Expanded Probe Launcher that can detect cloaked ships, but the result has a minimum deviation of 20-25km. Which means you could scan for Cloakies, but you won’t see which type of ship it is and if you warp to the result you will land between 20 and 25 off the exact position, you can never directly warp “on top” of someone and decloak him with that. But you could bring fast ships and some drones, starburst and try for manual decloaks if the cloaky doesn’t move or warp away.
– These probes would have a limited max-radius of 16AU, so you would have to do multiple scans to sweep an entire system and only the smallest setting will return a warpable result. So if the cloaky warps around if he sees those probes, you probably won’t find him with them since you would need at least 3 sweeps to pin him down, but if he doesn’t move, he is in trouble very soon.
All 3 mechanics wouldn’t work while “Cloak Defense” timer is active, but that one is actually lowered to 1 minute. So you can’t use any of them against someone who just cloaked up, he will always have the chance to warp away under cloak or do a cloak/mwd. But after that minute is up, he better pays attention.
All 3 would allow to put real pressure on someone who wants to try staying around cloked for longer periods of time, especially when used in combination → Probe him, warp a dictor, ping-decloak to see him, burn in for manual decloak. People could get really skillful and specialize in hunting cloakies. On the other side, a skilled cloaky pilot will know exactly how to evade those attempts and will still be able to stay alive for quite some time as long as he stays active.
I live in a wh. Necessary all the time means life. You fools forget there are others who play the game actively and continuous requests for lazy play have already killed the game enough…
As an explorer, cloaky hauler and someone who enjoys active bomber gameplay, did some solo cloaky hunting and also regular blops gameplay I assure you your suggestion destroys all those playstyles.
