No, you once again stubbornly refuse to get it. Get rid of this ridiculous obsession with abstract principles like “you need to press a button or it isn’t fair” and look at the practical effects of your proposal.
Does it increase PvP interaction in any meaningful way? No. A cloaked player can still easily evade pursuit by warping between safespots faster than you can locate them. From the point of view of the pursuers the resulting gameplay will be exactly identical to what you can currently do: drop probes and then spam “scan” as fast as possible until you get tired of pressing the button. It’s a pointless waste of developer time on the level of removing auto-repeat from modules so that you are no longer 100% guaranteed to fire your guns until you run out of charges and have to use skill to keep them firing at maximum effectiveness. No meaningful gameplay depth is added, only additional buttons to press.
Does it increase safety for RMT farmers? Yes. Your proposal makes it impossible to keep your name in local when you go AFK, increasing the accuracy of local as an intel tool and therefore increasing safety and profitability for RMTers who depend on a “dock when there is a non-blue in local, farm at all other times” strategy. You can now guarantee that any name in local is an active (potential) threat, and once a threat goes AFK and ceases to be a threat they disappear from local and inform you that it is safe to resume farming. And, most importantly, this all works in a way that the bot can recognize so you can completely automate the process.
So, we have you lobbying for a change that does nothing to improve PvP gameplay but gives a massive buff to RMT botters. No matter how many times you claim it’s about principles of risk for everyone the simple fact is that this supposed principle is nothing more than a pretense of legitimacy for your real goal of buffing RMTers.
someone not even in space with you might enjoy their gameplay without you there to personally ruin it for them.
Yet again you ignore my explicit statements that it’s not about me personally. In fact, I don’t even bother with AFK cloaking personally. What is a problem is that nullsec farming is extremely profitable, making hundreds of millions of ISK per hour, potentially billions for the most effective farmers. And yet, despite this immense profitability, the risk of loss is essentially zero. The NPCs are passive loot containers that are only a meaningful threat to newbies who don’t belong in nullsec yet, and the PvP risks are easily avoided by basic use of local. If you farm in nullsec for an entire year you will make a huge amount of money, but unless you are incompetent renter trash you will probably never lose a single ship. The worst consequence you can suffer is being forced to dock for a while and not farm until the threat leaves.
And what is even worse about this situation is that the ISK generation is purely an ISK faucet. This is not a redistribution of existing wealth like manufacturing (potentially 100% safe and AFK) is, where the total ISK supply remains constant and only moves between players. ISK is generated out of nothing for the bounty payments. When farming is allowed to be risk-free and extremely efficient the ISK supply increases at an immense rate, driving inflation and distorting the economy.
So, what is the only counter to this, to introduce some level of risk to farming? Keeping a potential threat in local 23/7 so that local is no longer a viable intel tool. The farmer must either permanently abandon their farming and produce zero ISK or accept a degree of risk by abandoning the use of local. Smart players undock because smart play can reduce the loss rate to significantly less than their farming income, stupid players get camped into station and cry on the forums. It doesn’t matter who does the camping or killing, but it must be possible to do so.