Main AFK cloaky thread

Aristok_Sol_Khan · February 18, 2020, 6:18am

–REPOSTING HERE because salty children equated this with spam–

The cloaky camping meta is extraordinarily dull gameplay and can’t be all that much fun for anyone involved. People will do it because it makes tactical and strategic sense to do it, whether it’s getting easy kills in an overwhelmingly asymmetric fight at the time and place of their choosing or strategically reducing ADMs by suppressing economic activity. But in order to do it someone should have to be at their computer and paying attention to Eve .

Cloaky campers are the ultimate AFKers.

It is simply unreasonable that an entire system should be impacted all day by some dude who logs in, cloaks up, and then leaves for work. People should not be able to PVP while asleep, playing another game, or watching Netflix.

Some possible solutions:

Implement a non-repeating cycle time on covops cloaks, so cloaky campers at least have to be at their keyboard periodically to manually cycle their cloak off-on before it cycles off. It could be 30 minutes, 45 minutes, or even an hour. But the pilot should be able to be asleep at the wheel or off at work.
Make covert ops cloaking devices use a fuel, perhaps liquid ozone. It could use fuel at a rate that would allow someone to remain cloaked for a sufficient duration to do actual covert ops, but not go to a day job. Maybe there is a reload time that would leave the pilot vulnerable for 60 seconds or so, then they’re safe for another 30/45/60/90 minutes or so.
A module for fortizars that does a system-wide burst de-cloaking ships. If a camper is at their keyboard, they simply recloak. If not, they can scanned down and killed. Maybe the module uses a significant amount of strontium or can only be fired once per hour.

To be clear, I think cloaky camping is totally legit gameplay. It can be a great way to put pressure on an adversary’s economy and get some kills. But the campers should actually have to be at their computer attended to Eve .

inb4 “But miners and ratters are AFK!” No, they aren’t. With the exception of maybe Orca mining in blue highsec, miners and ratters have to interact with the game quite a bit. They must constantly watch local, cycle targets, swap ammo/crystals, reposition their ships, shift cargo, return cargo, control drones, deal with rats, etc. Cloaky campers are often literally AFK .

Aristok_Sol_Khan · February 18, 2020, 6:23am

lol. You sound like a 17-year old edgelord. Probably joined up with a giant alliance and figured you won the game.

Merin_Ryskin · February 18, 2020, 6:29am

Stop lying. In your own words:

The only way to defend against it is to be formed against it, i.e., not ratting/mining.

Do you seriously not see the problem?

Nope. You claim to be against AFK cloaking, and yet you complain about a scenario where 12 active players engage in PvP. The only “problem” I see is that you don’t like that you have to be prepared to defend yourself at all times and don’t get advance warning that a threat is incoming, which means you don’t get the ISK per hour that you feel entitled to.

–REPOSTING HERE because salty children equated this with spam–

I’m sure CCP’s moderators will appreciate being called “salty children”…

The simple fact here is that AFK cloaking is not going to change. This thread exists for the sole purpose of being a trash can to hold all of the anti-cloaking whines and prevent the forum from being cluttered with a bunch of redundant threads. CCP has explicitly stated that cloaking will not be nerfed without also nerfing local.

Black_Pedro · February 18, 2020, 7:36am

I’m legitimately confused here.

Logging in, cloaking up and wandering away from your computer isn’t PvP. You are literally doing nothing but putting your name in local chat, and perhaps adding an insignificant amount of server load. Nothing happens in the game universe except that your name populates the chat channels you are part of, including local chat.

And further, it seems perfectly reasonable that people intent on competing with you would want to engage in this behaviour. I mean, how else would they counter the perfect, free and instant intel provided by the proximity sensor local chat is? There is no other in-game counter to this intel other than sending it fake signals by remaining AFK cloaked.

By all means, please suggest a new way gameplay around proximity detection in nullsec might work. But just asking to have your proximity sensor buffed to near infallibility with no trade-offs smacks of pure self-interest. Why should you effectively be made safer? Is nullsec too dangerous or something?

Salt_Foambreaker · February 18, 2020, 3:48pm

This is not WoW, AFK is not illegal in EVE and requires no balance or punishment.
An AFK player cannot spy on you, he is AFK right?
Being AFRAID to UNDOCK, aka Pixel Fear, aka Pixel Cowardice, is not something that can be fixed with code.
Originally the tie between local and cloakers was a JOKE, “you wouldn’t know he was there if we removed local”.

/thread
/topic

Salt_Foambreaker · February 18, 2020, 5:02pm

This is not a design goal, this is not how you play EVE.

EVE is not about waiting until a system is empty then farming.

You are doing it wrong and no matter how much you might THINK it makes sense, it only makes sense to you because you are doing it wrong.

Salt_Foambreaker · February 18, 2020, 10:59pm

The solution is to add an @Annoying_Red_Dot to local next to names that are cloaked.

Jint_Hikaru · February 19, 2020, 8:01am

Any type of ‘cloak fuel’ is a serious nerf to active cloak players. As someone stated above if limits how far they can roam or for how long they can stalk their targets. Also cap requirements and cycling, mean that you are limited for how long you can stalk a target, or plan your attack.

If you really truly want to be rid of AFK Cloaking, then you need to remove cloaked vessels from local. If they don’t show up, they cant scare you. However this does mean that active cloakers wont show up, so this needs to be balanced with a drawback…

Cloak removes players from local (and denies them Local)
If they break cloak for any amount of time they stay in local for a minimum 30 sec then drop out again when they reactivate cloak…

This makes cloaks really cloakie, still gives other players Local… Makes it pointless to AFK cloak, and makes it so people have to work to both actively hunt while cloaked and pay attention while ratting.

Now, the Covert-ops cloaker has to make themselves visible/detectable to gain intel on the local system. He can warp from belt to belt, but if he wants to probe, or check on the local channel (even dscan) to see how many & where people are in system, then he must break cloak. This gives the residents the time to spot him, if they are paying attention.

This 30s visibility in Local between cloaks would also activate when jumping into the system, between coming through the gate and activation your cloak module. Defenders of a system should really watch whats going on around them and they will be able to notice a cloaker is coming in, and act accordingly.

Here we make:
AFK-Cloaking pointless
Active Cloakers can catch botters
Even system defenders can use cloaks to hide their defense ships.

Anyway, the idea will be shot down by the null-bears, and Botters. They want all cloaks nerfed on the pretext that AFK is bad mkay!

Merin_Ryskin · February 19, 2020, 4:28pm

That wouldn’t do anything because you still wouldn’t be able to log out without showing up in local and then showing up again when you log in. To remove AFK cloaking you need to remove local entirely.

Jint_Hikaru · February 20, 2020, 11:30am

This is one of the big parts of my idea. Why should you know a Cloaked vessel is there… its a Cloaked Vessel, you should have no clue its in system. LOCAL is just too powerful as an intel tool.

The rest of your post seems to be saying people should defend there system in case someone is cloaked and active. WHich i agree with.

With my idea people should keep an eye out to look for spikes in local, an enemy logging in and cloaking , if he pops up again maybe he has dropped cloak to scan you down, maybe he is usung D-scan… you have to keep your eyes open.

The big problem is that the ratters dont want to work to defend their system, any unknown appears in local and they run to safety… even bots will do this. Takin cloaked vessels out of local means they do not need to AFK to mitigate the local-intel.

It also makes AFK CLoak usless, you are not showing up in local so you are not having any affect on the people in system.

Only when you start to be active, and dropping cloak to scan etc, then the locals have a chance as spotting that you are out there, and can plan accordingly.

Dont forget - the local residents can keep their deffense fleet cloaked so any attackers dont know the size of their force etc.

Salt_Foambreaker · February 20, 2020, 4:25pm

This is a long winded version of Pixel Fear,

It’s an end user issue, not a code issue.

People who are afraid to undock in null unless they are alone in the system should be in high sec. That is the solution.

Jint_Hikaru · February 21, 2020, 9:36am

Salt, I couldn’t agree with you more here! The amount of people in this thread who cry that “its their system, they rent it” and “why should they have a deffense force up 24/7” etc.

I just happen to think that parking a cloaked vessel AFK in a system isnt a good gameplay solution.

Which is why I have tried to consider a way to make cloaks more cloaky, but give the locals a chance to see when an active cloaker is operating in the system.

z0ra_Berg · February 21, 2020, 12:57pm

Has CCP already addressed all these concerns made by you RMTers? No? Damn, what a shame! Some day they will, I’m sure! Some day!

In the mean time, to make sure they really know that you’re having issues, you should keep posting another two, maybe three thousand posts. I’m sure it’s just that. They’re just not aware of your issues. They might have just accidentially overlooked the last 5800 from this thread and the ten thousand from all the other cloaky threads before that.

Salt_Foambreaker · February 21, 2020, 2:56pm

It is not a solution or a problem, it is only a whine.

Teckos_Pech · February 22, 2020, 9:02am

Good thing nobody here nor at CCP thinks your views matter.

Cripes but this thread has just become the ultimate whine thread. If you aren’t out there ratting while your AFK cloaker is sleeping, at work or out eating dinner…literally GTFO.

Solstice_Projekt · February 22, 2020, 4:21pm

■■■■ Farmers!

Jint_Hikaru · February 24, 2020, 9:21am

Did you guys even read my proposal? I am not a farmer whining about an AFK Cloaker, I would actually prefer for cloakers to be more cloaked, not appearing in local.

Hillbert_Alexis · March 10, 2020, 2:06am

You first kiddo. And take your gang of forums script bots with you.

You truly don’t practice what is preached by yourself and others here.

Being afraid of injecting a little risk into being cloaked makes you no different than the simple highsec player.

Don’t be afraid of risk, this is eve. Don’t be like foambreaker, don’t be afraid (and cover it up by projecting)

Could work, but I would love an option that gives a hunter a tool to find them in addtion to such a change.

Sadly they really don’t. the several common posters here are indistinguishable from chatbots.

Merin_Ryskin · March 10, 2020, 2:54am

This is not about adding risk, because no additional risk will ever be added. AFK players will simply log off and remain immune to attack. The only effect of your proposed “risk” would be to make local more effective as a way for RMT botters and bot-like players to avoid PvP.

Please stop repeating the same old lie that you are adding risk to cloaking and want to generate PvP engagements.

Bronson_Hughes · March 10, 2020, 6:11pm

Whether it is a “good” gameplay solution or not is subjective, but regardless of that it is an effective gameplay solution, at least against the right targets.

People don’t do it because they’re bored or they’re stupid, they do it because it works.

It works because certain players in nullsec refuse to undock when there is a hostile or neutral in system. This is not a direct result of game mechanics, it is a result of human psychology.

The problem isn’t that people can cloak for indefinite periods of time. The problem isn’t even local providing perfect intel. The problem is that some players are afraid to undock when Local isn’t blue.

As long as players are subject to pixel fear, AFK cloaking will be an effective tactic. And since CCP hasn’t yet figured out how to patch human psychology, I feel pretty comfortable in saying, as I’ve said for years now, that AFK cloaking isn’t going anywhere.