Nope I’m perfectly happy with cyno’s the way they are. My problem is with the lack of counterplay involved with covert cloaks specifically. As well as local, passive mining/ratting, passive gameplay in general tbh.
Cyno’s have to hold still once lit and take perpetration on behalf of a team (or well prepared player) to actually make use of it. So nope, no problem at all.
Normal cloaks require you to stay on a single grid with many reduced stats. These are defensive in nature, or can be used to spring traps, but they themselves come with many aspects that render the host ship gimped.
Covert cloaks and the hulls that use them, remove such penalties as well as targeting delay making them designed for hunting purposes. They have no fuel cost, they have no capacitor cost, no way of detecting or disabling outside of a gatecamp if you can mange the decloak, nor do they have any drawbacks to fitting them in any way. No reasonable person can’t see how going from one cloak to the other doesn’t seem unbalanced in any way. Even if you don’t take issue with cloaky camping itself, you should agree more should be expected on the side of the cloaked ship in exchange for this power and maneuverability.
Anyway, I never said the tools CCP gives us should be limited to single uses. I am saying that each of those uses need to be taken into account when it comes to balance and opportunities for counter play. I was just pointing out that their initial intention was for entirely offensive gameplay, which is why at the start they should have included a counterplay mechanic - at the time cloak specific probes would have been fine. Things have evolved since then that such an option would work, but would destroy other aspects they themselves have created which is undesirable. But that doesn’t mean other options can’t be created to deal with the problem directly while leaving other aspects relatively unharmed.
Nah, the pro cloak crowd is big on emergent gameplay when it benefits their argument.
On the other hand, they are dead set against it (Local was never intended to be an intel tool and thus must be countered with invulnerable campers) when it doesn’t.
Not sure what that dev was smoking when he said it though. The local roster was clearly intended to be used to see who was in system with you.
Nonsense. The counterplay is to fly a ship that beats a cloaking ship, which should be easy as all covert ops ships are weaker than their non-cloaking counterparts. Stop being a weak victim and you have countered the cloak entirely. All the cloaked ship can do is hide in a safespot until they give up and move on.
The issue with local is not about what was “intended”, it’s that local provides effectively 100% safety to RMTers and renter trash, allowing them to farm the most profitable PvE content in the game with negligible risk of loss. Emergent gameplay that didn’t break risk vs. reward and allow RMTers to operate with minimal fear of attack would not be a problem.
Not sure what that dev was smoking when he said it though. The local roster was clearly intended to be used to see who was in system with you.
Nope, wrong again. The devs have explicitly stated that the original idea for local was that it was purely a chat channel, with the member list telling you who is available to talk to. They didn’t foresee at all how powerful it would be as an intel tool, or how RMTers would use it for defense.
You mean “Nonsense, the counter play is just to let them spy on you, because non-consensual interaction is only for the poor mooks who thought PvE was a legitimate playstyle in a sandbox game.”
Interesting. If only there was a way they could fix that then. Seems like in the past decade and a half some dev would have gone in and pushed the button that turns local through out the whole game to ‘delayed’ mode, or just removed the roster and left the chatbox in place like nearly every other game in the history of MMO’s, you know, in the 4 or 5 facelifts the UI has received over the years.
It’s almost like the roster is intended to be there. Weird right?
One day you will explain how you get 100% safety from a chat channel. It’s almost as if there was another element to it… some action the player has to take. Something that you are skipping over because it does not mesh well with your narrative. Some aspect of the game that rewards intelligent play…
What could that be I wonder…
Because if you sit still in space and fail to respond to hostiles coming into the system you make it seem like the chatbox somehow eradicates the hostiles all by it’s lonesome. There just has to be more to it though, because the killboards are full of ships destroyed in areas where that chatbox is in full affect.
Yeah and ships capable of fitting covert ops cloaks are as or more powerful than their counterparts, right? Except they aren’t. The ability to fit covert ops cloaks in the first place comes with severe penalties built into the hull and unlike with normal cloaks that every ship can fit, these penalties don’t disappear just because you’re not fitting a covops cloak.
Spying from a distance without ever engaging is barely worth of the label “interaction”. And none of your proposals add a reasonable chance of removing a spy. They’re either ineffective (and therefore a waste of developer time) or instantly remove all of those spies with a single click of a button. Neither is acceptable.
Interesting. If only there was a way they could fix that then. Seems like in the past decade and a half some dev would have gone in and pushed the button that turns local through out the whole game to ‘delayed’ mode, or just removed the roster and left the chatbox in place like nearly every other game in the history of MMO’s, you know, in the 4 or 5 facelifts the UI has received over the years.
It’s almost like the roster is intended to be there. Weird right?
JFC. Local’s current uses were not foreseen, but why are you assuming that the developers were committed to removing all unforeseen outcomes? The fact that the developers concluded that the unforeseen result was ok and left local as-is doesn’t mean that they knew about that use and intended it to be that way at the beginning.
One day you will explain how you get 100% safety from a chat channel
Because anyone who is capable of basic EVE gameplay at the level required to successfully PvE in nullsec can effortlessly use local to get 100% safety. If a non-blue name is present dock. If a non-blue name is not present RMT. Talking about the fact that you could fail to use local effectively makes about as much sense as arguing that RMT farming is not safe because you could press the self destruct button and lose your ship. We don’t balance mechanics based on the assumption that the player is a ****ing idiot.
Or, to put it in a context that you understand, the level of “effort” required to use local is on par with an AFK cloaking “nerf” that requires you to click “remain cloaked” once per 24 hours. Yes, technically a button is being pressed, but don’t pretend that either of these situations involve real effort or skill.
There just has to be more to it though, because the killboards are full of ships destroyed in areas where that chatbox is in full affect.
People fail and die, because many people are incompetent. Competent players do not lose ships in nullsec PvE unless they voluntarily accept the risk of undocking with a potential threat in local (the reason AFK cloaking is necessary to counter local). I can’t say 100% for sure that I’ve never lost a PvE ship in nullsec despite all of the PvE farming I’ve done, but only because I can’t remember all the way back to the beginning. I’m pretty certain though that I’ve lost more ships to NPCs than to other players.
Bombers are literally the highest damage frigates in the game. They still have a T2 tank, they only pop easy because they’re a frigate, but they bring the damage exceeding that of most cruisers. That’s not a weakness. So unless you want to compare a bomber to an assault frigate they are far from being “weaker to their counterparts.” You need context buddy, it’s really easy to just say x is weak cuz I say so.
Recons are literally designed around bringing the highest amount of utility to a fight. They suffer in the tank department but typically have enough mid/lows to cover for this at expense of that utiilty. They also bring with them a T2 tank, so again, unless you’re comparing recon to HACs they aren’t really weaker. They simply don’t fill the role of front line dps, they are utility/control ships.
These penalties are not really pentalties when compared to their true counterparts (their T1 hull) rather than across the T2 line where you are then trying to compare glass cannon/utility to front line dps ships which are expected to take a beating. If you had a bomber with the agility, tank, and ADC from an assault frigate it would be broken. Same thing goes for recons. They have different roles so of course their stats will vary, that doesn’t make them weak. But it does make for a nice fake argument for people like yourself who wish to ignore a facet of this game that needs some added counterplay to encourage active gameplay.
Or are you afraid that that risk adverse AFK VNI is going to suddenly hunt you down kill you when you’re cloaked up and at work?
Why would he do that? He knows he could be hotdropped any second when he attempts engageing the cloaker.
You guys need to realize that no one is going to believe that those afraid of the cyno will magically attack the guy who has the cyno. As people are unwilling to attempt to bait him (he might actually not have a cyno, you know!), any and all arguments regarding “hunting him down” are nothing but absurd.
All you want is that people keep talking about it, because you know it helps you. People like Teckos are selfish enough to just keep posting despite them knowing that it only serves you.
Not only are they afraid of that very thing, their logic is so twisted that they have convinced themselves that it would be detrimental to the game. They are AFK camping for the good of all EVE! They must remain invulnerable for great justice!
Nonsense. The ratters are never ready. If they ever were, they would not need to complain. They do, d’uh, so this again is just you trying to weasel around the fact that you created a contradiction.
There is only one thing for certain:
You will stay camped.
Forever.
There is not a smuck of a chance that you will ever get what you want. Not. A. Single. One.
You love using that word to try and justify why the game should work the way you want it to. But you want to make sure that YOU are the one who gets to decide whether consent is given or not.
Cloaks give that power of non-consent to the other guy, and you don’t consent to having your consent taken away like that…
They’re literally glass cannons. And no, they don’t have a t2 tank. They don’t have any tank at all. You only have to look their way and they pop, so wtf are you talking about?
All that damage is also the result of fitting battleship-sized weapons, which come with all the usual drawbacks. Paper dps may be high, but the application is complete ■■■■ to anything that’s smaller than a slow battlecruiser.
How about you compare force recons (the covert ops cloak ones) to their combat recon counterparts (the non-cloak ones), instead of picking a completely different class of ships?
If the point you wanted to make is that you’re a clueless whiner, then you succeeded. In every other case, not so much.
Why can’t you guys realize, Cloaks are a fix… they don’t need to be fixed. They are the counter to always being a target in space. If you make ways to locate them, you’re defeating the purpose.
You guys also need to realize that there would be no tears over boogeymen if Local wasn’t such a flawless source of Intel. If their name didn’t pop up the instant they jumped into the system, you wouldn’t be running to hide under the nearest Citadel skirt until the Stranger Danger goes away.
I wish I had the multitude of CCP quotes that literally state that when you undock you are not meant to be safe.
This is a load of crap that has been dealt with many times. It’s a lazy excuse simply because the intel goes both ways. And I have personally said multiple times that there should be a way to disrupt local as well. But to say cloaks are their “counter” is ignorant at best to what it means to be a counter. It’s actually abuse of local by making someone who is known to be undocked be perceived as a constant unknown threat.
If local didn’t exist this game honestly wouldn’t likely exist anymore. But lets say the game did still exist, all you’d see is alts on gates giving the exact same intel local does. And if you didn’t see someone leave, you’d assume they were still there. Just like in wormholes. The difference is the people who play in null didn’t sign up for WH life. And if it was forced upon them most would leave. If you don’t believe me look back a few months what happened when chat channels were broken. We saw the lowest login numbers in all of eve history.
EDIT- I am gonna stop responding though simply because it wont ever accomplish anything (that goes for all of us truthfully). We all know both parties are fairly set in their ways and nothing talked about here will actually be considered by those that matter. Even thought I find myself more in the middle because I see a problem with both that need to be corrected, I don’t see these two problems being tied together. It’s that stubborn way of thinking that is preventing either actually being looked at for a proper balance pass by CCP for fear of backlash from both parties.
Really? What about those using a cloak then? Oh right. That only ever goes one way.
The worst part is you are right. Local and Cloaks are both problems, but they are only tangentially related to eachother. Of course, once the anti-cloak people get here and post one of the same bad ideas that usually get posted they educate themselves. The Pro-cloakers just double down on the same old BS.
You get unique posters new to the argument on the anti-cloak side practically daily. Enough that this thread was created and we still get new threads on the subject all the time.
You got the same batch of pro-cloak folks trying to shout them down for a decade, who then claim the other side is a minority despite the body of evidence that the reverse is true.
Nope. They are very closely related to each other, because AFK cloaking exists for the sole purpose of countering local. Remove local and nobody will ever AFK cloak again.
You get unique posters new to the argument on the anti-cloak side practically daily.
Because there’s always a constant supply of people who don’t belong in EVE trying to play. They show up expecting WoW with spaceships, find out that EVE is a PvP game where they can be killed at any time, make a rant thread or two whining about how unfair it is that they can’t farm everything at maximum efficiency 23/7 like they did in WoW, and eventually ragequit and go back to WoW.
Meanwhile the vast majority of people who understand how EVE works and are fine with things being as they are now have no incentive to post about it. So you only see the few of us who are stubbornly dedicated to shooting down RMTer/carebear whine posts.
I have no idea if this has been suggested, as I can’t read through 3300 posts.
Anyway, when cloaked, the cloaker doesn’t have access to local. In other words, he cannot see who is in local and who isn’t.
Alternative 1. The uncloaked also cannot see cloakers in local. So it’s mutual - neither can see each other in local.
Alternative 2. Similar to being in a wormhole, whoever speaks in local - cloaked or uncloaked -
chooses to announce his presence to anyone, cloaked or uncloaked.
There’s your solution. Local is a chat channel, not an intel tool. AFK cloaking promptly disappears from the game because there is no more need for it.