I didn’t say there weren’t ways to deal with it, lol, but that sort of play and counter-play is what makes good gameplay. The lack of good and active gameplay is why I feel AFK cloaking is a problem.
As several people have said, this is a thread about AFK cloaking. Not how to play in Wormholes.
Although you continue to ignore it, there is still counterplay to cloaky camping. You don’t like it because apparently it’s boring or whatever but that doesn’t discount it. You’re just repeating yourself ad nauseam.
How about you do your ratting in a fleet with friends so you can fight back and make a less interesting target? That’s an active counterplay to your problem by your very own definitions.
@Cade_Windstalker, I think you need to take a step back here.
Forget all the minutia and details of the current nullsec or cloaking meta. Heck, forget Eve altogether.
Let’s say I told you that I designed a multiplayer game. I didn’t tell you much about it, but I did say that one of the biggest issues my players were complaining about was that they were upset that other players could leave their name indefinitely in a chat channel I provided so that the players could communicate with each other. They whined and moaned that it was unfair that the other players could be in the chat channel, but not actually playing the game.
Now, what would you tell me to do? Leave my chat channel alone, but go change my game somehow so that players would stop complaining that other people didn’t log out of the chat channel? Or would you conclude that maybe, just maybe, there is some bigger issue with my social tool that needs attention?
Unfortunately, the free intel provided by local chat has been in the game so long, it is tough to change as the Blackout experiment showed. But anyone looking from the outside is going to quickly identify the issue is with local chat in the context of how conflict works in nulsec, not something to do with a general game mechanic like cloaking. Thus, it is there that the fix is going to be made.
Stop focusing on cloak mechanics, and look to how better gameplay could be created around intel sources in nullsec if you really have a problem with the gameplay of AFK cloaking and want it to be fixed.
Hence the reason this thread is almost 6500 posts long. One person comes in to complain, 5 people reply explaining why the problem is something else. The dance goes round and round until enough people get bored arguing in circles.
I already got bored with this go-round.
This may be the single best explanation of why AFK cloaking is a non-issue from a game mechanics standpoint that I’ve ever read.
Excellently put.
Because there are only a few questionably effective solutions that people have brought forward beyond “be hyper vigilant and aligned” and “have a bunch of friends and a cyno on standby”.
The former still works in the ganker’s favor, since because you’re risking more than he is he only needs to get lucky once to come out ahead of the game, even if we assume that every failure somehow results in his death. Which is unlikely.
For the latter case it’s just bad gameplay. You’re countering someone not playing the game by having a whole bunch of other people also not play the game. Both sides are just sitting around, except one side has to have people paying some amount of attention and the other can be doing jack-all.
I think, if anything, this goes back to our side discussion about user feedback and how things are presented vs the actual problem.
I don’t think the problem is the chat channel, the problem is that this dynamic allows an AFK player to have a small but frustrating impact on the game, effectively getting a “reward” for doing nothing and being at no risk.
This is compounded by one of the most common and effective ways to deal with this being to have other players do almost nothing.
And this is an issue because games should never have an optimal solution where not playing is the optimal solution to a problem. (and yes there’s more nuance to it than that, and probably a few valid exceptions) “Boring” is one of the worst things a game can be because games are, at their core, entertainment.
I’m not focusing on the cloak mechanic, I’m simply arguing that this dynamic is a problem and should, eventually, be fixed.
In fact I’ve said several times over the last several posts that I quite like cloaky ships in general and that my problem with every solution proposed so far has been the knock-on effects those solutions present.
And you’re 100% correct that changing anything to do with Local is a thorny issue precisely because the game has been built up with this mechanic for its entire history. A rework of intel mechanics in Null is another area that might indirectly address this issue, but just like with Cloaking or Null Ratting or basically any other larger system related to this issue there are no small fixes or small reworks here.
I have thought about this, a lot, but nothing I’ve come up with is simple or easy. There have been a bunch of ideas floating around around a Small or Medium structure for Intel in Null, but those cover a ton of ground and often fall short in one way or another.
Not to mention that one of the core problems with structures is that they tend to be designed for a rough group size and if you bring a smaller or larger group than the system is designed for then it can have, um, issues. To put it mildly.
Ideally some kind of setup like this would have active gameplay elements on both sides. Like where a roaming group can deny the locals intel by attacking or otherwise messing with the intel structure, but then you also need some kind of reasonable counter to that as well, and ideally the system would work at least reasonably well whether the controlling party is the smaller or larger faction.
Overall it’s very complicated and I don’t think a solution is going to come whole-cloth from the forums, it’s something that just needs to be pushed as an active problem to CCP so that it can be taken into account while they’re shaking the Null-Sec snowglobe here.
Not even as a “fix AFK cloaking” problem but as a “please create more dynamic encounters between locals and roamers in Null (and by the way about this AFKing thing…)” problem.
And yet you continue to selectively ignore counters and dismiss others because you don’t want to employ them, not because they don’t work.
You still cling to this fabrication that whatever ratting ship is more valuable than the fleet that ganks it; excluding all but a single stealth bomber from consideration which is blatantly dishonest.
I’m tired of this repetitive spiral around the same drain here.
I don’t care if you don’t like or choose to ignore the many solutions. They exist, and those with a firm grip on their sovreignty are actively employing them. As is clearly as evidenced by the existence of this thread cloaking is going nowhere.
Wow. Improper attitude. This is not about EVE becoming a Nanny State. When the cluster gets DDOS’d and everything (multiple times in one day) disconnects, its pretty obvious that “Camper[1-99]” is a bot farm.
If history serves correctly, the reason programs like ISKBoxer and input broadcasting were banned, was due to the use by a person doing the cloaky camping meta on 50 accounts.
I’m really not trying to selectively ignore anything. I’m stating my issues with the existing gameplay. If I’ve missed a counter then please point it out and I’ll either address it or admit that I’m wrong here.
Because in practice that’s pretty much how this works. If you’d like we could work out some kind of equation of value multiplied by risk, but I guarantee you it still comes out in favor of the AFK player and their friends.
Are there cases where the risk doesn’t favor the cloaky player? Absolutely, but they can time their attacks to favor their side, and setting up a situation where it’s always in the cloaked player’s disadvantage requires a massive corp or alliance. Considering CCP and the Null playerbase have been pushing for more people active in Null then I wouldn’t think that this is a desirable feature.
Don’t respond to people who just sling insults. Just report them and move on.
Also there were a lot of reasons input broadcasting was banned, at least in terms of individual use cases. The overall reason was because it allowed a single person to wield the power of a large fleet and complete content on their own that was designed to encourage interaction and cooperation with other players.
It’s not really accurate to say that it was banned specifically because of cloaky camping.
Because they’re only avoiding PVP 99% of the time. He’s probably concerned about that other 1% of the time. Bit too much risk. 
If he can’t stand the heat, he should get out of the kitchen.
As I’ve said, repeatedly, I don’t have a problem with losing ships. If you haven’t noticed I’ve been playing this game since at least 2009. I just think this is a bad mechanic.
If you have a point to make then make it, if you want to sling pointless insults Local Chat is that way ->
The point is there are many ways to counter the problem. You just don’t seem to want to use them.
People keep saying this, and I’ve listed my issues with these counters and why I think they’re either not actually that effective or in some way part of the problem. Again, if there’s more counters that somehow haven’t come up then by all means, bring them up, but “AFK vs AFK” sounds like awful … well I can’t even really call it “gameplay”, and things like simply avoiding the enemy still don’t change the fact that someone is getting something for, effectively, nothing here.
You keep insisting that it is AFK vs AFK when that is not what players are suggesting. You don’t need 20 people idling around waiting for the call. You need 20 people willing and able to drop what they are doing and reship/relog into their combat ships for a response fleet - which is part of ‘owning space’ in nullsec, and handles the entire ‘AFK cloaky camper’ issue - as the camper is only a danger when they pull in their fleet for you to respond to. If you do not have the manpower for that, you do not own your space, and have no business demanding changes to content to make life easier for you in what is supposed to be an area where players establish their own control over systems.
What problem?
Cowardly players is not a game issue, it is a personal issue.
Exactly. Renter trash alliances don’t own their space just because they pay someone to put their name on a system, the AFK player owns the system because the farmers are too weak to deal with even a relatively minor PvP threat.
Only because weak PvE-only alliances allow them to gain something for nothing. Against strong PvP-focused alliances an AFK cloaker gets nothing for nothing. They can sit idle in space all day and nobody can stop them but they don’t gain anything by doing it. The solution here is for renter trash to learn how to PvP, not for CCP to nerf the threat so they can go back to farming.
And I would agree with, and be fine with, that state of affairs if it reflected the actual reality of things.
Most of these drops are over by the time anyone is going to be able to re-ship and warp to either the affected person or a bridge to their system. It simply doesn’t take that long to burn someone down in a PvE fit.
The only exception is if the jumped ship is a Rorqual, because they have the invuln cycle to delay things, but if you’re doing black-ops drops you either avoid ships you can’t kill quickly or you otherwise time and stage things to mitigate that response.
And the killboard records bear this out. Black Ops and cloaky ships in general are extremely successful, rarely actually being successfully killed in their efforts.
And I’m not talking about “renter trash” here. I don’t know if they still do it, but for a long time Goons had an active standby fleet that was literally sitting AFK ready to counter drop anyone who dropped inside their farming systems, and in exchange the people “on-call” got a percentage of the mining and ratting profits for… sitting AFK. One guy I talked to was literally running Incursions on his alt while doing this.
Saying “oh you just need to re-ship” is kinda insulting to every blops group I’ve ever met.
Here’s an idea: be in PvP ships already and on-grid with the targets. There’s no rule that says you have to do PvE as solo farming in a helpless PvE ship, using a fleet of PvP ships instead will deter all but the most determined threats.
Black Ops and cloaky ships in general are extremely successful, rarely actually being successfully killed in their efforts.
Well yes, what else would you expect when there are so many easy renter trash farmers to kill? But that doesn’t change the fact that not being an easy target will convince them to go bother someone else, allowing you to win at the expense of the farmer trash.