As fun as these threads are there is one basic truth. There has been an AFK cloaking thread going since the dawn of cloaking. Even going back to the old forums.
Thousands of post over probably a decade. CCP has actively closed or merged other threads into the main AFK thread.
What haven’t they done? Anything to the mechanic. Now there could be many reasons why. They might want to do something but don’t know what. However it has been at least a decade with nothing.
On the other end it could be they are fine with the meta as is. Given the other things they have done with the game, even going back to the origins of the game I personally believe this is closer to the real feeling CCP has on the subject.
By all means continue with the conversation, just don’t hold your breath that anything will be changed.
Because there’s probably a thousand accounts (real money) for ccp that do almost nothing other than log in, cloak somewhere, and represent a potential threat. It’s always been a cold calculus to let it continue or face loosing those accounts.
No. The reason CCP doesn’t do anything is that CCP doesn’t care about RMT botters and renter trash. They can spam a ton of whine threads about how it isn’t fair that AFK cloaking can reduce their farming income, but CCP doesn’t give a **** about them and is not listening. The only reason the thread remains open is that if CCP ever closed it the farmer trash would promptly start a new one to continue whining.
I’m sure many would have a problem with that too, botters or not.
Why CCP dont just investigate all accounts that are on 23/7 with a mass temp ban for starters if they are found to be botting or grieving, I dont understand. To much work I guess. Would cut into the next great expansion… ha. Next expansion of skins for sale.
Sure but only because they have gotten used to it being a certain way.
Still I go back to my original assertion. Does it make sense that a covert ops pilot is essentially thwarted by showing up in local? It goes against the whole concept of stealth.
Even from a lore perspective. If the communications network is run by concord, why do they even bother to provide communications outside of NPC null? In Player SOV space communications should be made available by the players (some structure or something) and it could be disrupted etc.
Yes i understand that but it would still be a place to start for CCP to find botters and griefers if they cared to.
This also goes back to my previous idea of having an afk disconnect to avoid some of this.
If you are purposely staying logged in to cloak camp local 23/7 to mess with various farmers I would call that griefing, bots or not.
If you are ratting or mining 23/7 I think it’s safe to assume you could be a botter. Sure some may just leave their accounts on but there would be obvious moments of inactivity with an honest player.
Afk disconnect would help with some of the OPs issues. It also would make finding botters far easier as most people dont stay up 24/7/7 unless they are tweakers. Even tweakers sleep sometimes so it would still make it easier to spot people using some method to keep an account online.
You would call it that, but you would be wrong. Griefing involves specifically targeting a player to ruin their game experience outside of normal game interactions. Using long-term cloaking as a strategy to mitigate the effectiveness of an intel tool and set up PvP kills is a normal game interaction well within the scope of game actions taken by a player for their own benefit rather than to ruin another player’s experience. And the targets of AFK cloaking are always free to counter it, they simply prefer to whine on the forums because they hate the existence of PvP.
Nothing in my posts suggests that farming should be 100% safe. Nor do i have a problem with war strategies. At least the comment above yours was a solid rebuttal, even if I disagree with how griefing was defined for the game.
It really isn’t griefing to attack/disrupt/target your opponents means of production. We really are all suppose to be fighting over the limited resources of New Eden in a struggle for power and dominance. It’s kinda the point of the game.
And yes, local chat serves as a perfect proximity detector that provides 100% safety to anyone who relies on it. The way gate/jumping/warping mechanics worki n Eve, you can always retreat to safety before someone can get on grid with you if you are paying attention to local chat. The only viable strategy to counter that perfect proximity detector is AFK cloaking where you send “false” info to the people relying on it, in hopes they either dock up and do not collect resources, or undock anyway without their perfect 100% security blanket.
In the latter case, you as the AFK cloaker still have to be not be AFK and put yourself at risk to do anything to disrupt your opponent’s resource gathering once they call your initial bluff.
I get the argument that this maybe isn’t the most fun mechanic for some and perhaps could use some counter-counter-play, but I can’t see how it comes anywhere close to “griefing”. Putting a name in local chat isn’t “griefing”. It does nothing to the other player’s experience, other than partially nullify one intel source that wasn’t even intended to be an intel source in the first place.
It all just points to the perfect and free intel provided by local chat being a completely overpowered and oppressive intel tool. Docking up when a non-blue appears in local is so powerful, disrupting that easy and effective strategy elicits copious amounts of tears from farmers upset their favourite defensive tool doesn’t work anymore. There are 10+ years of such posts on these forums, as well as the example of the Blackout from last summer.
CCP can and should rework how intel works in nullsec and give more play and counter-play to both hunters and farmers. But that isn’t going to be by just making cloaking worse for everyone so that local chat is more resistant to disruption, and the farmer more able to rely on what was intended to be purely a social to avoid fights.
If anything, the Blackout experiment points to CCP moving in the direction of limiting intel, not providing more reliable intel for free.
Sorry.
P.S., Come on ISDs, do we really need this obvious AFK cloaking thread existing outside the designated zone for this discussion?
