Oh yea I forgot about this part as well. There are always people who complain. Again, it depends on how widespread the complaints are. I’m not sure if there is a way to see, but even in this mega thread of 6377 posts, spanning many years, I’d bet there aren’t more than 100 distinct posters. and I think that is high. For a game that has averaged over 25k players daily that is not a situation of widespread complaints.
You are absolutely correct. A ship that is AFK cloaking does so at virtually zero risk and stands to gain some reward for that zero risk, which on the surface seems like it breaks risk vs reward.
But here is the problem with that assessment: the reward gained by the AFK cloaker is not based in any way on game mechanics.
AFK cloaking only works because of human psychology. Players are afraid of the cloaked hostile in local, so they dock up or move to another system. But those outcomes are not caused by said cloaked hostile in local, they are the reaction to the cloaked hostile in local.
How can you justify a change in game mechanics specifically to accommodate human psychology?
Let me give you another example. Back when I was a wardeccing asshat, I would occasionally dock up in the home station of a war target corp and go AFK all day. This had roughly the same effect as AFK cloaking in nullsec; my intended targets stayed docked up and I inflicted real ISK damage to them (in terms of lost income) with zero risk to myself. Should that behavior be disallowed? If this behavior is acceptable, then how can AFK cloaking not be acceptable?
AFK cloaking is metagaming. It’s playing head games with people, and you can’t patch the human brain.
1 Like
It represents where most of the risk is concentrated though, and the “problem” in question. In most cases if the bomber actually manages to call in help, secure tackle, ect, then the ship targeted is going to die because the bomber gets to pick its timing and target and the target has no such power.
Also as previously mentioned, unless the gankers have screwed up pretty badly, there’s a good chance that any ship targeted is going to be dead before help shows up.
The only method I’ve seen or heard of successfully mitigate this to any significant extent is that utilized by the major power blocks. You have a bunch of people, or their alts, sitting AFK on a Citadel as “on-call” ships so that if anyone lights a cyno they can respond immediately and maybe actually save something. This requires a massive expense in resources on the defending party’s side and is terrible boring gameplay. It basically requires that one person not playing the game at all be countered by a bunch of people barely playing the game.
This isn’t “argumentum ad populum”, it’s one of the core principles of game design. If someone’s making a complaint then that means there is a problem for that player. This doesn’t mean that enough people complaining automatically means they’re right or that the solution they’re pushing for should automatically be implemented (that would actually be argumentum ad populum), but it does mean that the complaint should be treated as real by the designers of the game.
We already know CCP are doing this, the problem is one of solutions, not “is this a problem”.
I think either your definition of “easy” is off, or you have some super secret tactic that no one else has figured out, because a quick poke around zKill says that every Blackops group kills a lot more than they lose.
Because it’s not the same? This isn’t difficult here.
As the AFK cloaky I just need the game running on my computer and my cloak active. I can then walk away, go to sleep, ect. As far as the enemy is concerned the threat exists whether I’m at my computer or not because they have no way of knowing if the person is AFK or not.
From the responding side they need actual people actually at their keyboards to respond to the potential threat the entire time. Those folks can’t AFK. They can’t play the game, but they need to be able to respond quickly.
This argument is ridiculous. A competent Black Ops fleet, with or without AFK cloaking, isn’t going to be easily pinned down. This sort of hit-and-run tactic is exactly what BLOPS are good at. Jump in, burn down the target, gone in 5 minutes.
Fair, but my point wasn’t really about the “station” part, just the “being aligned” which disqualifies Rorquals, most other mining in fact, any PvE that can’t be done fighting aligned, ect.
Yes, but the reality is also that players perceive this to be a problem. The viable tactics are frustrating, boring, or price out anyone in a group size below “Large” even if they can easily respond to conventional roaming gangs and want to PvP.
Yup, and this illustrates a key difference between a valid complaint and an invalid one. HS Ganking has counterplay, it has gameplay around it, and it involves actually playing the game.
“AFK Cloaky Camping” on the other hand involves a lot of not playing the game. On both sides.
Don’t haul more than can be profitably ganked, or haul in a fast ship with a cloak, lots of tank, ect, and you’re effectively countering camping and ganking in HS.
Cloaking camping… well, you can have a Titan bridge and a bunch of ships, sitting semi-AFK, ready to drop sitting in another system. Don’t have all that? Welp, crap. Sucks to be you.
I’ve been playing since 2009 mate, and yes I do follow the history of the game, its changes, and CCP’s stated rationales for those…
Like when they removed insurance from ganking ships, explicitly to balance risk vs reward for haulers and gankers.
Or when they added Jump Fatigue to balance risk vs reward around force projection. Since having to worry that someone was going to hot drop you from across null sec wasn’t something they felt was a reasonable risk.
Or when CCP rebalanced Null Sec Anomalies because the reward was vastly out-weighing any risks involved at the time.
Or basically every PvE change in the history of the game, which have all been about balancing risk and reward.
Yes, in that it’s not supposed to be where risk and reward correlate directly in any kind of linear relationship. Nor are they ever supposed to be perfectly balanced.
But also no, in that a high reward action is supposed to also come with a high risk, and some risk is always supposed to come with some reward.
The whole reason this thread still exists, and why CCP haven’t just dismissed changes to cloaking out of hand, and have in fact said that they’ve looked at various options throughout the years, is because the dynamics here are not balanced.
Which, weirdly, is related to the part of your statement above I agree with. If it wasn’t skewed towards reward then no one would live in Null, just like no one would haul or do industry or mine if they were always constantly being ganked.
Yup, and if you read further down you’ll note where I say that not everyone who complains is correct, however CCP have stated, repeatedly, that they agree there are some problems here. They just don’t have good solutions.
Oh certainly, this is a fairly niche problem and it’s not exactly pressing. If it was a big enough problem CCP would have dropped a nerf hammer somewhere to resolve it instead of sorta slowly nibbling around the edges but never actually touching cloaky gameplay.
Because game mechanics are all about human psychology and basically always have been. Mario was literally tuned so that his jump “felt right” to the play testers. Drop rates are tuned to key into human psychology, as are basically all other risk, reward, and interaction mechanics in any game you play.
Not all of this is done scientifically, in fact most of it is done by feel, but to dismiss changing a game because of “human psychology” is to miss one of the fundamentals of game design. All of this is human psychology
Human machine interfacing (i.e. things like UIs, Mario jump heights, etc.) is an entirely different topic. In that regard, yes, human psychology and physiology must absolutely be taken into account. If playing a game is difficult or uncomfortable because it’s not designed with people in mind, that’s a serious problem.
But the “game” of AFK cloaking doesn’t happen on a machine. It happens entirely in the head of the people the AFK cloaker is trying to interfere with; there is no in-game causal link between what the AFK cloaker is doing (or not doing) and what other people in the same system are doing (or not doing).
You are so nice, I could never be that nice.
I mean lets face it.
He is Piss His Pants Terrified and wants a game change 
But even worse than that is the root goal of wanting to have his own private system but unwilling to fight for it. So Anti-EVE.
1 Like
Citation needed. I certainly don’t have a perfect memory but I cannot recall an official CCP statement that AFK cloaking is an actual problem they would like to address.
Additionally this thread still exists, because someone inevitably posts within the 90 day auto lock timeframe, and that CCP moves other threads here. I can’t think of any other topic that gets closed so fast and sent here to die.
@Cade_Windstalker “the whole reason this thread still exists” is because cowards and whiny babies like you constantly come in to cry about it because they don’t know what they’re talking about or because they’re entitled (sometimes both). So instead of spamming the forums with garbage, we collect it all here in the trash bin to keep the rest of the forums clean.
Eventually, they either quit (good for the game because less whiny crybabies) or they accept that cloaking is fine (also good for the game). This is why you see short bursts of activity here from one or two people for a week or so, before they stop (either from quitting or accepting).
You are no different.
The interaction is entirely mediated by game mechanics though. If you gave people a way to actively counter someone cloaked and AFK in their system the frustration would suddenly have an outlet and the combination of mechanics would no longer be a problem to the majority of people.
The presence or lack of mechanics and counter play is the link.
Nah, I said before I don’t particularly have skin in this game. I don’t play in null these days, I just think this is a bad mechanic.
I’ve also been playing this game long enough to be pretty un-phased by anything the game or forums can spit out. Hence why I’m here wading through this old cess-pit once again.
Sadly I don’t have a citation for you, I just remember it coming up a few years ago in a Q&A at Fanfest and CCP Rise said that it was something that kept coming up. I think he said something about “after work at the bar” or similar.
The only other similar topic used to be ECM, though that one didn’t come up quite often enough to get a mega-thread like this one. The old one of these was actually a sticky post as well.
I mean, I don’t have a problem with cloaking. Some of my favorite ships are cloakies. I have a problem with any behavior that could be described as “AFK ______” having any substantive impact on any game.
I think most people stop posting in this thread because there’s folks like you here who are, to put it delicately, not terribly polite to debate with and that makes it hard to have any kind of productive conversation.
You are, of course, welcome to post whatever you like within the rules of the forums, but I do wish you’d be a little more polite in your disagreement. After all, it’s only a game, no need to get so worked up over a disagreement in game design.
I am curious though, would you be so vehemently defending AFK cloaking if it going away was contingent on some kind of more active mechanic that similarly favored offensive ganking?
By the way, you can actually see stats for the thread up at the top, including “frequent posters” and total unique users. 422 people have posted in this thread since it started, and one guy accounts for over 10% of the total posts on his own.
Complete BS. It requires people to be on comms. That’s all.
It’s not a core principle of game design. It’s not a core principle of software design period. There are many reasons why a user may complain about something. Not all of them are valid. Not all of them are a priority. Not all of them would lead to an improvement if changed.
If you’re gonna talk software design (games or otherwise) you need to come prepared and complete. Because you’re not even wrong.
Proving my point that they’re safe because they’re unopposed. Their success is not a problem. The lack of opposition is the problem.
The problem then is fear. Not actual risk. Nor is an AFK player getting any “reward”. You don’t need to know when they’re active, you only need to be prepared for it.
Many different methods to achieve this have been posted.
Same with any standing fleet. They absolutely can be playing the game. They absolutely can employ their own AFK cloakers in the system, too.
All you need is active voice comms and you can respond quickly. You can also make it very hard for the cloaked cyno to even catch you.
And yeah. You need active players to actively defend the space you claim to own. This is working as intended.
More than enough time to respond. And you can still deny them an engagement and not let them drop on you.
Total BS. Not only can a rorqual be aligned, it can be aligned and at speed while in the belt without issue. It’s nobody else’s fault if you don’t know how to fit a ship to do this. It’s easier on a Rorqual than a Hulk, and a Hulk can be aligned at instant warp speed for the entire time it takes to mine any given asteroid.
[[quote=“Cade_Windstalker, post:6533, topic:4731”]
Cloaking camping… well, you can have a Titan bridge and a bunch of ships, sitting semi-AFK, ready to drop sitting in another system. Don’t have all that? Welp, crap. Sucks to be you.
[/quote]
You can have a blops fleet, a titan bridge, a cyno alt or cyno beacon. Alts on standby in-system. You can not get tackled so you don’t need any of those things.
At that time when cloaky campers existed.
These are not comparable examples.
The best loot in a fantasy MMO is not handed to players simply for logging in. Many players would say that felt good to them if it happened. Loot is far more often designed to exploit reward feedback in players than to create healthy gameplay.
Players, and software users in general, are not designers. They don’t dictate design through what they like. Features are tuned against focus groups to refine a design not to dictate it and making players happy (especially small minorities of players) is not necessarily of benefit to the game.
It’s kind of a thing in Human Centered Design that you don’t ask the customer what they want. You design what they need based on their requirements (which you gather, not them) and then you refine it with their feedback.
A similar loop is required for good game design. People complain for a number of reasons, and the real cause is often not the issue they self report. Self reporting issues is prone to misunderstanding, lack of knowledge, user error, and intentional misdirection because the user doesn’t want to admit their real motives and believes they can achieve their goal by promoting a more acceptable “problem” with the same supposed solution.
1 Like
You’d have a whole new crop of problems because you’re not the only residents of New Eden and you’re fixing your “problem” by creating new problems for someone else.
As has been laboriously established there is counter play and you just don’t like it because you have decided it’s too boring or expensive or bothersome.
2 Likes
You forgot the can’t bot part…
1 Like
Oh neat!
so 422 people. Let’s just say its a clean 50/50 (i doubt it but its a start). So 211 people complaining over the last 3 ish years. I have no idea how many subs there are in EVE but lets just use 20k average daily. It may even be low over the last 3 years but I’m being generous towards the complainers.
So if I do my maths right, that’s like 1% of the daily players who were annoyed enough to actually come to the forums and complain about this issue.
So let’s even be more generous. Many players are HS players, so let’s just round up to say 10% of null players are frustrated enough to come to the forums and complain about afk cloaking.
So yea, let’s take cloaks, which arguably work perfectly fine in most of EVE, and rework them to “fix” one arguably minor playstyle (AFK cloaking in 0.0) to address a tiny minority of players complaining about it…
Cause you know with CCP, whatever fix they try will in no way break cloaking for the other 99% of players where it is working as intended.
/thread
5 Likes
This doesn’t counter my point… being “on comms” isn’t playing the game either. The point is that those people and accounts can’t be off doing other things because then they won’t be ready to counter-drop people.
Which is true, but this particular issue has been complained about pretty consistently for years, which combined with the lack of good counter-arguments for the gameplay in question (which amount to “it’s fine, stop whining, you just want to never lose ships”) is a pretty good indicator.
And yes, that’s a core principle, the key there is that just because every complaint is valid doesn’t mean every complaint needs responding to, or responding to immediately.
I do this for a living, and I think you missed a word there somewhere because your sentence makes no sense as written.
Are you saying that Goonswarm aren’t opposing drops? Because there’s goon kills on there.
This isn’t a case of “not opposing them” this is a case of “did not have a chance to fight back”.
I’ve seen these alleged methods. They’ve been posted for years. Every one I’ve seen either makes ridiculously favorable assumptions, is hideously boring to implement in practice, or just doesn’t work in anything but someone’s pipe dream.
If you have one that actually works and isn’t just “have more guys on standby than they have in their drop fleet” then by all means, post it.
Sitting parked in space on a Bridging Titan isn’t really playing the game, it’s sitting logged in and doing something else.
This basically means Null becomes “bring alts or GTFO” and while I definitely think alts need to be accounted for in game design they shouldn’t be required for it.
I’m curious what you’re doing where this is enough time to respond if your people don’t have a bunch of accounts just sitting AFK waiting for an emergency cyno call.
Yes? And?
Go re-read what I’ve posted, at no time have I ever claimed that cloaky campers exist in every system or completely shut down all activity all the time.
I feel like some of you are putting words in my mouth I didn’t even come close to saying here.
Yes, and in this case the feedback is “this mechanic doesn’t feel good” not “delete cloakies from the game”. The latter is the (ridiculous) user request, the former is what can actually be gleaned from the combined feedback.
Are there people complaining about AFK cloaking with disingenuous intentions? Absolutely. I’m personally not one of them though, and I’ve spent enough time in this game and talked to enough different people to know that this isn’t a particularly fun set of mechanics here.
It’s frustrating to deal with, it lacks clear counter play or things one can actively do to address it.
In comparison you have the similar situation in Wormhole Space, which has existed as a core part of its gameplay since its inception, where the cloaked player has to take active effort to even determine if there’s anyone else in the hole with them, and then take detectable action to find the other player(s) and do anything to them. On top of that neither side can just Cyno in reinforcements, so escalation is predictable without being uncommon.
Yes, I’ve said this already. What I was proposing was a thought experiment, where there is some magical fix that only impacts that situation and nothing else.
I’ve never said this problem has an easy solution. In fact I flat out said that I don’t think CCP have touched it precisely because all the obvious solutions, including basically every one I’ve seen proposed in this thread, have some kind of knock-on effects. And some of them have been truly terrible ideas. I’m simply arguing that this is a problem and bad gameplay, and should be fixed.
Personally I think it should be done in a way that promotes more conflict, not less, but in a more interesting way so that you don’t need a massive force to “counter” the potential threat posed by a single guy AFK in a Manticore.
This is actually closer to accurate than you think, but not for the reason you think. I’ve seen reports on engagement from other games years back and it’s something like 1% of players that actually come to forums and post at all.
Also monthly uniques would be a better metric of comparison, but that’s beside the point.
So, I don’t think you’ve noticed, but I’m not actually arguing for any of this.
My single point here is that this is bad gameplay and should, at some point, be addressed. I don’t really care how, and I actually fully agree that it should have as minimal an impact as possible on other gameplay. Especially other cloaky gameplay.
I quite like my cloaky ships and I’d very much like for them to not get borked.
I just think that the whole “AFK cloaky” dynamic is a bad one, it’s a problem, and if possible CCP should address it, but not at the expense of other valid gameplay.
I’ll take a stab at that.
Problem: The ‘all seeing eye’ of local is providing too much information and resulting in it being necessary to utilize an AFK play-style (Cloakie Camping) in order to catch people in Zero Sec.
Now, i am no nerf-cloak supporter, but I do think that AFK-Cloaking does not make good or enjoyable gameplay. This is my opinion, and others may disagree.
My thoughts behind my idea were:
I want a cloaked vessel to be invisible to locals. (so AFK cloaking is not necessary - and so botters can’t use local to auto safety)
To balance that there must be a reason to uncloak at times (so residents have a chance to figure out someone is there)
Nerfing Cloak is not acceptable (captcha is death, fuel and whatnot just ruins all other cloak playstyles)
Anyway, you asked, so thats what i was thinking.
For anyone not knowing which idea i am talking about, its back in the thread:
1 Like
And yet they’re in use every day.
You should try life in wormhole space for a while.
I point you back to my hisec wardec example. By your reasoning, I shouldn’t be allowed to dock in hisec because my war targets have no way to counter my presence in the system.
AFK cloaking is just like AFK docking.
So local is the problem and removing blackout was a failure.
Ah, that makes sense then. I disagree, but thank you for the link and the information.
Quoting these two together because they share key differences from AFK cloaking in Null.
The biggest one being that you can’t call in reinforcements from nowhere and therefore someone docked up in local isn’t much of a threat. In High Sec there’s no way to jump reinforcements into a system from nowhere, and in Wormhole Space you need probes to even know if someone else is active in space, let alone where they are, and then you have hole control on top of that.
In Null an AFK cloaked player can come back to their keyboard, often find anyone active in system without probes, and call in friends from low-sec or a Null system without anyone else in it without any warning.