Yes, its very minimal. You seem to be making some weird assumption that im trying to get rid of cloaking or cloaky camping completely. I have absolutely no problem if i’m actively being hunted in system. I can defend myself just fine.
I want to get rid of AFK cloakers. If youre not playing the game, just frikkin’ log off. That slow scanner probe would only affect those and leave normal gameplay pretty much unchanged. (need to be either afk or fallen asleep on your keyboard to get caught by a probe with few minute scan time)
Except that it completely breaks WH space. The whole allure of WH space is you can traverse it completely hidden. Where being cloaked actually means true stealth since you don’t show in local. That is far from minimal.
You mentioned this before. I still have no clue how it would actually break WH’s. You can dodge those probes in wormholes too just fine since they would be visible on dscan. (heck, make them even visible on solarsystem map for extra clarity)
By launching those slow probes in wormhole space, you only would announce yourself to other occupants (that are not actually afk or asleep)
The simple fact that I can launch a probe that will essentially “shine a light” on the system and let me know who is hiding in there with me breaks the entire concept of WH space.
My suggestion was that you could “shine light” to small part of the system (probe would have limited scan radius). You would have to actively probe the system over several scans to get the whole picture. (making them trivial to dodge by non afk player)
Now if the AFK issue was big enough to warrant breaking WH gameplay, that could be an argument. But that goes back to my original contention. You need to show it’s a big enough issue to warrant your “fix”, which you haven’t.
I dont quite get what you refer with one or 5 probes… Again, I ask you how would it break WH gameplay? If you keep repeating it doesnt make it actually true.
And i don’t have to show you anything. If I feel its an issue, i can make my argument for it. Devs can decide if it warrant changes that was suggested.
So one time I got an orca stuck on the wrong side of a WH. Stuck in a C4. It ultimately took me scanning through 4 WH’s to get back to k-space (which was LS). On two occasions I had highly motivated locals hunting for me. As an orca can’t warp cloaked I mostly had to hide until they gave up. I couldn’t safely log off, as they kept active combat probes, ready to catch me as soon as I e-warped away from a log off.
One group kept at it for at least 2 hours.
So you are saying in a situation like that I couldn’t even go afk for 15 min to go take a s**t cause your probes would probably light me up in that time?
The point is there are legit defensive uses for extended “afk” cloaking. Especially when you are caught in hostile territory in a ship not designed to fight.
So it boils down to how risky it should be to go take a dump in hostile space…
How risky it is to be afk for short periods of time can be adjusted by probe scan time and scan radius. Increase scan time, decrease radius to reduce chances of hostiles getting a lock on you (needing multiple slow cans). Which is right balance for that risk, i dont know.
I keep a single probe on grid with my mining fleet and now it’s impossible for a scout to get a workable warp-in point on my grid for their friends waiting in the next system.
So you’ve basically killed WH PvP with a single change.
You’re not a programmer.
This isn’t how programming works.
Why would “show cloaked ships” even be an existing variable? Do you know how this could even be implemented or what it might mean for the object classes and interfaces involved to achieve this?
This is fallacious. It’s called argumentum ad populam, or appeal to popularity. It doesn’t mean there’s a real problem to fix here.
Which means your “huge frikkin threads” argument is even less valid.
The decade long history of this debate should be a good indicator here. To paraphrase an old adage:
“Given enough time, indecision becomes decision”
See what I mean?
It would be a mistake to presume this implementation is in any way comparable to your suggestion as you don’t have any idea how the implementation is designed.
No it doesn’t leave normal gameplay unchanged. It screws over the gameplay of like 2600 star systems and that’s just to start.
And this is why you shouldn’t be making suggestions. You don’t know enough of the game to understand the ramifications for gameplay outside your little bubble.
Except being AFK or long term cloaked in a wormhole is essential. There’s not always somewhere to dock up, the safelogging timer will get you killed. Wormhole players also need to be able to safely step away from the keyboard. A concerted hunting effort means being cloaked in a safespot for a very long time, often in a ship that can’t warp cloaked.
If you’re hunting someone in WH space they can probably see your interdictors on D-scan anyway. Generally speaking only one side of the hunter–prey equation is relying on a cloak.
Except this is wrong because you’re not considering other applications. I only need to put these probes on the wormholes connections into my system and on grid with me and now I’m approaching perfect safety for my mining and ratting ops. So you’ve done significant damage to wormhole PvP.
No. I need to operate for potentially days at a time in a fractured wormhole system where I can’t anchor any kind of structure for safety and if there are hostiles I cannot log out without getting caught by combat probes during the safelog timer.
Long term/afk cloaking is a requirement in WH gameplay.
The fact that the devs haven’t done anything to prevent AFK cloaking shows that AFK cloaking is not something they consider a problem. Do you genuinely think that over a decade of this topic showing up hasn’t been enough time for it to be ‘fixed’ if it is actually a problem/broken? Just look at all the other things they have ‘fixed’ in that time - even if the solutions are not perfect (by a long shot!) they tried something. AFK cloaking? Zero changes.
Might not been perfectly clear on this but you got the idea bit wrong. You could not leave probes hanging around in the area. Instead you launch the probe, it takes few minutes to finish the scan and when finished it shows cloaked ships in the are at that moment and then the probe vanishes. So if something cloaky warps in after that its not visible on the scan anymore.
And WH space just became that way (mostly thanks to cloaking making it too safe). As far as i recall, it was never intended by devs to be occupied long periods of time (if i remember correctly, there was some dev posts being bit amazed that players can actually settle in these systems).
At the moment situation is that youre in this extremely dangerous and hostile place. You press one single button and the space becomes perfectly safe. Same in hostile nullsec. Press one button and guys owning the space can do absolutely nothing to you.
And i have been going to wormholes for extended periods of time as an alpha many many times and survived (theres no cloaking as alpha clone). I simply used herons that are next to impossible to combat probe down. Theres a way to do that, youre just too reliant on broken game mehanic.
I’m lucky. Downtime is when I have my morning coffee. I spent a couple of months working out of a cloaked orca with my 3 accts in a useless C2 that nobody wanted. Then I poped a station. I have to admit, I would like to be able to dock with it in the future.
The problem here is that those “PvP Defenses” amount to a bunch of people sitting AFK ready to respond.
The rest of those things mostly don’t really matter or apply here, unless by that you mean “never fly anything more expensive than a T1 battleship ratting” which seems a bit ridiculous. There are entire classes of ship with hulls more expensive than that.
Sure, in theory. In practice, not so much. Which is why Black Ops as a class sit at 90% efficiency, and a lot of those losses are incredibly stupid ones. Like high sec war losses. The Black Ops player has all the decision making power here, they can pick a time or place when risk is minimal, and they have more tools to avoid risk than the responding force has to persecute an attack against them.
Yes, but those are still things the player can actively do. Fit their ship differently, adjust what’s in their cargo, ect. Those are, in comparison to this, active decisions.
And yeah, there are plenty of stupid people. I expect the KB for Niarja should attest to that plenty over the next few weeks. I don’t have any issue with that.
Because the cost/benefit on that is terrible. If I were to play that way then I’d lose more ISK in lost efficiency than I would if I lost a PvE ship. Thus the gameplay and incentives push toward this state of affairs.
It’s going to take a battleship more than 10 seconds to lock a stealth bomber in most fits. And yeah, but if the target warps out then that SB isn’t at any risk either, and they only need to be a little slow in reacting once to lose their ship to the Blops Gang, and if everyone just warps out then the bomber has effectively unlimited chances.
Kills your efficiency a lot of the time because you need to stay within range of spawns. Also means you need to change direction off of align, which creates a potential window of opportunity for an attacker.
I don’t really get why people think this, since bots are actually better able to react to this stuff than most players. A bot doesn’t lose concentration and it reacts much faster than a player in most cases.
Plus most botters use cheap as ____ ships because they don’t have to care too much about efficiency per time.
Only if you get caught. The first step is don’t get caught. I haven’t lost a PVE ship in years. I’ve been jumped plenty of times but I’ve gotten away every time.
Yea maybe you ship down temporarily to something that aligns faster.
One thing I still don’t get. And it goes back to my other questions (which nobody will answer). If your system has an afk cloaker in it, why not move next door? Or 2 systems over? Most SOV owners hold more than one system.
Yeah, but this isn’t particularly fun or satisfying either, and as I said later on in that same post, the cloaker only needs to get lucky once.
Basically? Because if you’re one of only a few ships in the system it’s probably because you want less competition for sites, or you’re renting your space, or the cloaker just follows you.