What losses are you talking about? Unless you suck at EVE you are always flying in PvP-capable ships, bringing guards, flying in fleets, etc, regardless of the presence or absence of a cloaked ship in your system. It’s just basic PvE defense 101. If you are incapable of doing this as standard procedure then you do not own the space you occupy, you merely carebear and pray nothing bigger shows up to hurt you.
The real problem here is lazy nullsec carebears who feel entitled to farm PvE content at maximum ISK/hour efficiency without paying any attention to their safety, and basic counters like “always be in a PvP-capable ship” are considered an unacceptable burden.
Oh so many apologies for not playing the sandbox game in the way that YOU dictate.
If you had bothered to read, which I know may be a challenge, you would surely have noticed that the basic premise is that the value of the space is set by what you can earn from it.
While actually achieving that maximum isn’t ever going to be a 100% situation and that is readily accepted by all and sundry, what would be balanced is a situation where those that are attacking you by bringing down that value were themselves vulnerable in some way to counter attack. Currently there isn’t, and all the pro-afk pilots have spent years fapping to the idiotic idea that because local makes it hard to catch competent PvE pilots (news flash, them docking up also cost them time and money, you got a small victory there) that you should be handed a 100% safe way to continue inflicting those damages indefinitely.
When one player (given by 7+ systems getting a neut all logging in within a minute of each other) he is running a lot of accounts that need to be plexed. But you would contend that he isn’t being paid to do that? That he is just a troll perhaps?
That one player comes back and plays one day for an hour, brings in a cyno and 20 friends, the next day he doesn’t play and the third he comes back every 2 hours, 3 days later he is active cloaky. Gets total control of engagement, using well described psychology in various forms, whether is inconsistent rewards (think gambling leading to more gambling, because pvp fit, or pve fit, no ship survives a 20-40 man fleet, especially since they know what your running, control engagement range and time).
the “solution” offered is to what? have guards? sitting for the four hours you want to play? not making anything? perhaps you pay them. now they are there but still bored, because the camper still controls the engagement 100%. He cant get a big enough fleet or the right ships, that’s ok, he can come back in 2hour or 7 hours or 3 days from now.
Siege mentality. Getting hammered by artillery. It doesn’t honestly do much to a prepared posistion, but it rattles soldiers, the constant bombardment and harassment. It harms moral. In game terms, it makes people leave, quit, find something else to do.
That’s bad on numerous levels. Less content, less subscriptions, etc. It is harmful to the game.
Not asking for 100% safe! Null is supposed to be dangerous. Cloaky camping has no counter, has no defense, is retardedly powerful economic warfare tool requiring almost no investment. Cloaky camping IS just as close to 100% safe as you can get in eve. THAT IS THE PROBLEM.
Numerous fixed have been proposed that would still allow it, All the features of current cloaking, including camping for intel or hot drops. Just without it being viable for weeks and months, slowly draining players of assets or corps/alliances of players.
Please, explain why cloaky camping should be 100% safe pvp.
And here’s your problem: you’re framing it as “this space has value that I am entitled to, and AFK cloakers are reducing that value”. The actual answer is “this space starts with zero value and I am entitled to nothing but a swift death, and any profit I make is because I actively work to get it”. An AFK cloaker does not reduce the value of your space because no such value ever existed to be reduced. If you are incapable of collecting PvE income despite the presence of an AFK cloaker then you have not earned the right to profit from your space, or even call that space your own.
Good. People should leave because of this. The whole point of nullsec is that the siege mentality is the default. At any time you are attempting to exploit the resources you have conquered you are in danger of dying and losing everything. Only the strong, the ones who can exploit those resources despite the burden of constantly being in danger, get to profit from nullsec. The weak are sent back to highsec where they can farm in near-perfect safety with none of that siege mentality. Perhaps if you feel that nullsec is too psychologically draining you are not meant to be there, and should stay in highsec?
No it does not. PLEX have absolutely nothing to do with this. Nothing. You keep bringing this up, but it simply unrelated in any way at all. I don’t even understand why you are focused on this. I say, “Opportunity cost.” And you reply with, “The oceans have salt water.” A complete non-sequitur.
No, you can’t. Restarting planets, yes, but not emptying them and moving the materials to your production planet. Haven’t you done PI? Holy crap. To do something beyond restarting your planets, like emptying them you’d have to fly out of hostile space, do your PI, then fly back…and that whole time…you would not be AFK camping. PI and AFK cloaking are mutually exclusive.
Then they are mutually exclusive, and they are not passive in that they require at least some effort. Thank you for proving my point.
No it doesn’t. I have an account with 2 alts, one for AFK camping the other for say invention. I have to stop AFK camping to do invention. If I don’t stop AFK camping I cannot do invention. They are mutually exclusive. Even if I have a second account, opportunity cost is still present as I could both accounts to make ISK. And what in the feck is “the Use takes no time”? What activity in the game takes no time? Nothing. You are dealing with a scenario that simply does not exist.
Yes, you are not guaranteed a given income stream. Get over or get out. That’s it.
There’s the exit…go, leave. If you can’t defend your space you don’t deserve it and that means protecting it from an asymmetrical threat. Funny, alliances can hold space for months even years and do not fold like a house of cards to these All Powerful Cloakers and their supposed I Win Button.
Man…I hate having to hand what might look like a point to Mike, but…
Suppose you have to fly around in a group of 4 pilots doing anomalies. The ISK you make per hour will be less than the ISK you’d make in a dedicated fit. So, by having to do this you lose out on that income…it is a kind of loss. Mike is correct in that one.
However, nobody is assured of having a given income stream in game. You try to achieve a given income stream, and if the effort to reward ratio becomes too low you switch to another activity. Basically a type of cost-benefit calculus.
What Mike is agitating for is a way to shift the cost-benefit calculus in his favor by nerfing cloaks. That’s it, that’s all of it.
I have 3 accounts. Some people have more. That somebody has a large number accounts does not mean they are PLEXing them. They might be, but then that could be because they have even more accounts and are using them earn ISK to PLEX enough accounts.
And even if they are being paid by another entity to camp your systems…so what? So long as it is an in-game transaction who cares. No rules being violated anywhere at all.
There are no in-game rewards that accrue to the camping character. What they might get is some satisfaction if you rage in local, the periodic kill or the like. But when it comes to ISK or resources they get pretty much nothing…unless you were foolish enough to undock in a blinged out ALOD style ship.
No. Get into a standing fleet. Get on comms. Rat in a group if you have too. Get into PvP fit ships with a group and run the anomalies, or mine. A decent well prepared alliance should not be having a huge proble with covert ops droppers. If you are…then look to the alliance and why they are not dealing with the problem.
Wat? You aren’t being hammered by artillery you are being scared by an avatar in local while the actual player is out watching a movie. I have outlined how you can get an idea if the player is ATK or AFK here.
If you can’t handle a guy cloaked and not at his keyboard…you probably won’t be long in the game anyways.
Sure it does. Maybe you should go try an alliance that manages to generate lots of ratting ISK and lots of ore in NS. Have you looked at how much ISK and ore is being generated in Delve? You can see it in the monthly economic reports.
Dozens of proposals have been made over the years. Dozens. I know I had a thread on the old forums that collected the proposals, there were 2 pages of horrible ideas.
Because I can’t do anything while I am cloaked except scare you via local.
And here’s your problem: you’re framing it as “this space has value that I am entitled to, and AFK cloakers are reducing that value”. The actual answer is “this space starts with zero value and I am entitled to nothing but a swift death, and any profit I make is because I actively work to get it”. An AFK cloaker does not reduce the value of your space because no such value ever existed to be reduced. If you are incapable of collecting PvE income despite the presence of an AFK cloaker then you have not earned the right to profit from your space, or even call that space your own.
While your “Git Hard” sentiment plays well with the mouth breathers, it’s not exactly a logically supported position.
The profits to be gained from a system are there as a conflict driver. It’s a perfectly valid thing to do to exploit your space for gains in ISK and materials. The upper limit of which is obviously set by how much you can achieve without interference. It’s understood that this won’t be possible all the time (because conflict driver), but that assumes there’s some way to fight to achieve that maximum. Otherwise they may as well just reduce the rewards if that’s what the game really needs.
The equivalent would be if I could fit a module on my ship that destroys small amounts of ISK directly from your wallet continuously. You aren’t allowed to confront me about it in any way, you just get to set the rate of loss, with lower loss rates carrying higher penalties in other areas that ultimately translate into even more lost ISK.
No one is saying that anyone is entitled to that maximum amount. They just want the opportunity to apply effort to achieve it, or to at least require effort on the part of the enemy to inflict the loss.
There is so much wrong with how you are presenting opportunity cost here you have to be doing it intentionally to mislead people.
Some of what you are doing is redefining alt to only mean the other 2 characters on a single account. As you can only have one online, that’s not really applicable in any way to the conversation or what the vast majority mean when they say ‘alt’. The most common use is to have multiple accounts running concurrently.
Another part of what you are doing is snapshotting the instant you created one account as if it was the total picture, ignoring any instances where costs were recovered.
If a single player could somehow only have a single account with only a single toon online at any given time, your use of opportunity cost would be accurate.
The Opportunity consists of 2 elements, Access to the Game, and Time to play it.
While I will accept that initially training an AFK cloak capable pilot and getting it into position represents a minor cost, it is so small as to be effectively zero for the purpose of this discussion because everyone playing the game in any fashion has those costs to greater or lesser degree, and in this case the degree is very much lesser than most others, especially in comparison to the opponents you are affecting.
A single Plex buys Access to the game. AFK cloaking, beyond initial setup requires effectively zero time. Everyone has to log in and push at least one button, this isn’t an amount of effort worth considering. If this was not the case, and you could not have a concurrent alt, you could argue that whatever actually does make the most reliable income in game is your opportunity cost as it would then be a mutually exclusive condition.
However, since you can have an alt in game concurrently with your AFK camper, and the camper takes effectively zero time to manage, then your only opportunity cost was the price of the Acces, because at that point you no longer have to make an either/or choice- it’s “I spent a plex to do this, and now I can do this other as well as much as I like”. It does not matter how much the afk camper account could make because you can only play 100% of the uptime in the game and the AFK camper doesn’t take any of it leaving you free to do anything else you like for the price of another account- One Plex. Find a way to make any ISK at all with the AFK camper account, and the price drops by that much pro-rated by the amount of management time you spent setting that up, assuming you didn’t negotiate a fee for doing the camp to someone with the alt, for instance. Time not spent on the AFK cloak account cannot be charged to opportunity.
No one is saying that anyone is entitled to that maximum amount. They just want the opportunity to apply effort to achieve it, or to at least require effort on the part of the enemy to inflict the loss.
No, you are not entitled to any of it at all.
The entire premise of the game is being able to fight for it though. Cloaks allow you to just soak it away unchallenged with no possibility of a fight.
You can sit in a PVE fit completely safe. 100% untouchable.
That guy you are crying about has access to no additional mechanics you don’t also have access too.
However, as you point out, the entire premise of the game is the ability to fight. So don’t worry about the cloaky camper. He’ll bring a fight when he’s ready, then knock yourself out. You’ll be part of the real game at that point, just like you express it as.
I mean sure… Its not like he’s inflicting losses from a 100% completely unassailable position already, immune in every way to any sort of counter attack. Oh wait, he is.
I should just have to wait, incurring losses for days or weeks or even months, until such time that he thinks he can win and decides to attack.
That’s totally fair. Oh wait, it’s not.
It destroys the entire premise of the game, making the conflict driver worthless and removing the reward entirely from the risk/reward equation for trying to engage him at all. If it’s not possible to even attempt to recover those losses, (and the whole game is about fighting over such things) then for all the people who enjoy that playstyle (the vast majority of players) the game becomes pointless to play.
It’s balanced because a Dev said so, but it’s in all ways a bad, toxic mechanic that provides nothing in the way of enjoyable game play except to people with disposable income for an alt account who enjoy poking others to make them squeal.
In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost, also known as alternative cost, is the value (not a benefit) of the choice of a best alternative cost while making a decision. A choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives; assuming the best choice is made, it is the “cost” incurred by not enjoying the benefit that would have been had by taking the second best available choice.[1] The New Oxford American Dictionary defines it as “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.” Opportunity cost is a key concept in economics, and has been described as expressing “the basic relationship between scarcity and choice.”[2] The notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in attempts to ensure that scarce resources are used efficiently.[3] Thus, opportunity costs are not restricted to monetary or financial costs: the real cost of output forgone, lost time, pleasure or any other benefit that provides utility should also be considered an opportunity cost.
Opportunity cost refers to a benefit that a person could have received, but gave up, to take another course of action. Stated differently, an opportunity cost represents an alternative given up when a decision is made. This cost is, therefore, most relevant for two mutually exclusive events. In investing, it is the difference in return between a chosen investment and one that is necessarily passed up.
Everything I have written is consistent with both definitions. When you are making a decision the net benefit of the next best option is your opportunity cost.
Here, let me provide an example:
Suppose you have 1,000 ISK to invest. You earn 100 ISK on that investment or a 10% rate of return (i.e. you get back your 1,000 ISK plus 100 ISK, so your total “revenues” are 1,100 ISK). Suppose you had another option for that ISK and it turns out you would have earned 200 ISK, or a 20% rate of return, had you picked that option. Now an accountant would say you made a profit of 100 ISK. An economist would say, “No, you lost 100 ISK, because once you add in opportunity cost you are down 100 ISK.”
That is, to the economist, profits are:
Revenues - accounting costs - opportunity cost.
Revenues are pretty straight forward the money you receive. Accounting costs are the costs you pay for your inputs. For example for invention it would be minerals, the T2 component inputs, job installation costs, etc. The opportunity cost is what else could you have done to earn ISK in with your time that you would have chosen had you not chose to do invention. If it is missions and for that time period you would have made 200 million ISK then you’d calculate your profits as:
Revenues - accounting costs - 200 million ISK.
If this number is negative you should consider switching over to missions. If it is zero you should be indifferent between the two.
This is standard text book view of opportunity cost.
Whatever “second best” option you do not pick is your opportunity cost. Notice that PLEX is nowhere in there. Notice that what other people are doing is nowhere in there.
Bravo Sierra. You might see it as small, but the value of things is subjective. What you consider of great value another person my see no value in at all. This is why Thomas Kinkade paintings sell…alot of people see them as pretty much vulgar trash, but others see them as having great value. Value is subjective. So for you to say “Oh it is zero, therefore it can be ignored” is you projecting your subjective valuation on to everyone else. It is extremely arrogant.
And because everyone has to make choices over what to train does not suddenly make opportunity cost in terms of training choices go away. That is just patent nonsense. That is like saying, “Since we all have to spend money on food, food expenditures should be be considered a cost of living.” That is just complete nonsense. I don’t know how else to make you see this. It is like saying “Water is wet.” And then you reply, “No, it isn’t wet, because it is wet for everyone.” It is just nonsense.
Again, this is wrong. Yes, I can do this. But I could also be using that alt that is camping to also make ISK. Suppose I have an alt AFK camping and an alt I am running missions with. I could take the AFK camping alt and also mine with him while I run missions with the alt. The opportuntiy cost is the benefit from mining. So there is still opportunity cost.
The point is, if one is going to AFK camp 24/7 which is the usual whine, that camping comes with foregone benefits of using that alt to do something else which is of value to the player.
There is always opportunity cost. It never goes away unless you have absolutely no choices at all. If you have to choose between X and Y and you pick Y then the opportunity cost is the (net) benefit of X. If all you have is X then there is no opportunity cost because there was no choice.
So if you want to argue that there is zero opportuntiy cost you have to argue that there is literally nothing else that player can do with that character other than AFK camp. And if that is case…then the player is going to AFK camp because he has no other choice. And if you take that away form him, then he will stop playing the game.
And if the complaint is AFK camping is driving away players and the AFK player has no choices but to AFK camp then if we nerf it out of existence then you are…driving away players form the game. You are doing what you claim you want to stop.
Oh…and this part,
Setting aside the fact you are wrong, this is still a…wait for it…wait…wait…a cost.
Can we stop arguing about AFK camping being costless. This is cost, at the very least, so AFK camping is not costless.
Scipio’s position actually results in conflict though. Your’s does not because you simply refuse to fight…which makes your claim of wanting to fight disingenuous at best.
It won’t stop goons for a couple of reasons. First their size insulates them from the negative effects of loss. For them, unless it’s a massive and sustained loss no one but an accountant would care. Secondly, it’s not a loss that can be multiplied by the enemy- one camp or ten the effect is much the same, and goons have the numbers to fully exploit their systems even if they lose a bit of efficiency doing it.
I have conceded there is a small cost to the camp, specifically the price of the plex that allows the account access to the game. Your agenda driven view of debate hampers your ability to gracefully accept a point in your favor. However, that cost cannot be accounted for than any higher than a plex because at that point you can concurrently do anything you want and the ark camper account ceases to accrue additional costs due to the decision to atk camp. You could use the account to make isk, but you could also use the other account to do so, and you cannot be active on both accounts concurrently- time spent inputting commands on one is idle on all others. If your idle time is 100% then your costs are simply the plex alone.
You must be keeping the haymakers busy building all those strawmen when you continuously do things like take an argument concerning relative investment and try to say it’s about opportunity cost. Of course your twisted and incorrectly applied determination of that cost is the best thing you have going right now since you won’t accept any point that does not support your platform without adjustment. That must be hard, having so much ego tied up in an unsupportable position.
Any entity living in nullsec should be able to survive a loss every now and then. You are not supposed to do PVE in total safety.
What Goons do differently compared to others is not due to their size, but due to them having established ways to deal with a cloaky camper effectively.
This just demonstrates my point about carebears being entitled and lazy. Your entire framing of this situation is that the AFK cloaker is causing you losses, as if they’re taking away something (maximum ISK/hour farming) that you already possessed. But that’s not how it works in nullsec. You own nothing. You are entitled to nothing. You start at zero, and if you manage to overcome the obstacles, including AFK cloakers, you get some profit. But the AFK cloaker is not causing you any losses, you never had that ISK in the first place.
