Main AFK cloaky thread

Again, the point of this thread is to be a trash can. Before this thread existed to consolidate everything there would usually be multiple active threads from farmers and RMT botters whining about how they can’t have 100% safe farming. So now every time one appears it gets dumped in here and ignored.

Yep, I noticed that too. Some threads with controversial topics get collated and dumped in here to be out of the way.

Wadiest Yong, I think that since you have not declared that you will defend the idea to your psychological death, they feel robbed of the opportunity to attack you unto your psychological death, and so will seek your psychological death as vengeance for it.

You can’t just have an idea and we can’t just talk calmly about it. What are you, some kind of hippie or something? Some kind of commie? Wipe that smile off your face! Some of these guys have lost ships and stuff.

I think they do too. But even that I don’t care about. And neither do most of these negative nancy’s either even when they scream their favorite borrowed mantra “But its a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist!”. We just want to kick around some ideas, and these unnamed others just want to kick some people in the teeth, cause, you know, they lost ships and stuff.

Citation needed.

Imagine if you just said “But X above had the exact same idea”. And that will be fun because I bet I will come back with “Yeah, but he didn’t say this, this, this or this in relation to it.”

Who gives a crap if it gets repeated anyway? No one. The basis of the extreme negativity is about being a troll and literally nothing else.

And its impossible someone might go over it again and come up with a way to make something work that was previously thought not to work right?

Bah. These pixels are not threatening anyone. I don’t buy that that is what any of this negativity is about.

Read this thread…

I don’t. However at the same time don’t be surprised when the counter arguments end up sounding the same.

@Wadiest_Yong had an idea. I even countered that I had proposed an idea along the same vein as his before. Being he seems reasonable we seemed to come to an agreement. Amazing how that works.

Other people sometimes come up with just a bad idea. That’s ok, we all come up with stinkers from time to time. But rather than be intellectually honest they dig in their heels and defend it to the death.

You came up with a poorly thought out idea, with consequences that honestly could get CCP into even legal hot water, but rather than realize that you just keep fighting for it.

Oh hello, we got a real live one this time! :rofl:

*popcorn*

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Hey, that’s my line! Ok, I haven’t used in a while. :beers:

“Somebody already said that” is NOT a counter-argument!!! Have you actually lost the plot or are you just trying to get me to?

That’s a cop out for three reasons 1) you are making the claim, therefore the burden of proof is on you and 2) I may interpret what was said differently and 3) you may have misinterpreted what I said as being the same when it isn’t.

“Along the same vein” is NOT “the same”.

This often depends on the tone of the speaker and if they bothered to explain. Posting “Wow your idea is idiotic, stupid and crazy.” (end of post) is pretty much guaranteed to get the exact response you just complained about. But of course, that was the intent, wasn’t it?

I came up with two whole separate packages of several ideas. You point to one and say its “all poorly thought out”. Man, I don’t know where the hell you think we are, but this is not a CCP board room and I am not a Dev about to implement anything. Take a pill. There is zero need for me take painstaking steps to ensure my idea is well thought out enough to satisfy your misgivings (which I ALSO think are poorly thought out). Just freaking relax and discuss.

And I am NOT fighting for my idea. I am trying to work with it while defending myself from some seriously trollish and needless attacks.

That’s not the experience above though.

When a question is asked, the first reaction is to troll and neddlessly attack. It’s a vicious cycle and definitely looks like an emotional connection to the ideas, which hasn’t led to any reasonable discussion.

Irrelevant. Pulling this snippet out of context of course destroyed the context, and point. The point being that we had an interaction and rationally came to some agreement. Something that you and I clearly will not achieve.

To that end, fly safe.

We did. The discussion was “these ideas are terrible and poorly thought out”. If you don’t want to improve them then that’s where the discussion ends, all that needs to be said about them has been said.

False. One new idea can completely flip everything on its head. The forums are not the place to be so hard headed and demanding about all this.

Consider the fact that it was well known monoplanes were more efficient and faster on paper long before biplanes were dominant in WWI. And it was known that speed advantage was the best one to have. But given construction methods of the time, biplanes were much more structurally sound, monoplanes prone to breakage, and therefore, biplanes were better in combat. From there their agility was used to great effect, with lack speed compensated for by getting altitude to swoop down on opponents.

But all it took was better construction methods (particularly those which replaced the canvas and wood with metals in a light but strong way) and boom, the combat biplane was finished.

It was also known that aircraft carriers would be hugely effective, but early attempts were disasters to the point that people suggesting them looked like idiots, well, to idiots anyway.

Same with VTOL craft. A great idea that has taken ages to develop.

Kamikaze worked great at first. But the Japanese leadership were too stupid to rethink and see that what worked great at first was not working at all anymore.

In short, you give up too damn easy. Especially considering none of us get paid or even college credit for any of this. Damn. All we can expect here is abuse.

If everyone involved in the Battle Eye project were so negative, it never would have gotten off the ground. We have discussed using software to thwart AFK detection. We have touched on botting as well. I wonder how these people would handle it? Oh, I know. Read this thread and declare every angle has been looked at, its an impossible task and shrug! Yeah right.

Blackout has been mentioned and here is some commentary on that with a graph. Go ahead and watch the whole video about cheating, but lets see who can keep this in their head up until posting…I support not a damn thing said in the video, particularly from the host. If you have a problem with anything there, pin it on them and not me.

About 8:00 we see that ratting massively dropped across the board. Cheating dropped from 16 to 5 percent. But its clear the ones hurt the most between legit ratters and cheaters were non-cheaters. Look at that nosedive.

Blackout seems at this point to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

Indeed.

There is no simple “solution” here to improve the AFK cloaking meta. The root of the problem is how powerful local chat is as an intel tool, but you can’t just remove it either. Conversely, you can just simplistically nerf cloaks or you will have the opposite problem of making the tool even more powerful and oppressive by removing the only viable counter. As CCP Fozzie once said:

It’s very important that it be possible to disrupt peoples’ money-making in nullsec, and AFK cloaking is one of the most effective ways. We’re not worried about cloaked ships being overpowered because cloaked ships do very little DPS.

But we understand it has a pretty big psychological effect. We would like to make some changes…it may not be the changes people are expecting, though. For instance, I can tell you that AFK cloaking is not an issue in wormhole space and there are pretty good reasons for that.

So you are stuck then with the status quo we’ve had for a decade-and-a-half. The only way to improve this is to make multiple changes both lessening the intel power of local chat and then providing some way for active players to dislodge perma-campers (an anti-cloak structure?). But this requires developer resources to do correctly as the Blackout showed an easy solution isn’t going to cut it.

I guess CCP will get there eventually. The current situation is fine and workable, and while it could be improved to give “owners” more agency without giving them more safety, it’s not like the game doesn’t work just fine now. Maybe we’ll get those Observatory Arrays that could do both some day, but until then both hunters will have to deal with the instant, free intel of local, and residents the ability of their opponents to sit their cloak subverting that intel tool.

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I gave you a thumbs up for an insightful and constructive post, but you are not the only one to utter this phrase or a variant of and I am pretty sure there is a conflict. I believe nothing that comes immediately after that phrase is truly “the only way”. You won’t find me using the phrase cause its just basically never true.

Well, this is the place to provide that idea that both provides a way for sov holders to do something to dislodge a perma-cloaker while not allowing them to use local chat to make themselves 100% safe, and at the same time not screwing all the other users of cloaks everywhere else.

Almost 7000 posts and such an idea has yet to be seen. Anything that might work that has appeared here requires several different changes to keep nullsec balanced. Maybe the revamped ESS is one of the first steps in that direction however.

Hopefully a new idea would come along. But AFK cloaking is somewhat effective, though it seems easy enough to add an AFK pilot to a whitelist on a bot script and get right back to farming. Seems a small price to pay for a botter to find out if someone is in the system AFK, and if they lose a botting ship then they can deal with the AFK person or leave. If a bot leaves that’s a good thing right?

For everyone else it’s all part of the game. Do I undock and run a site when there is someone else in system? You can get an idea from Zkill what a person may be flying, or what they are doing. As an example it looks like you enjoy popping pirates along with Concord in Hi-sec. With that info a player then has to make a decision whether it’s worth the risk to undock. @Daichi_Yamato already explained how he handles it. It is annoying? Maybe. But it’s part of the game.

Then to expand on your idea if you don’t respond in time while cloaked, and CCP determines because of that you are AFK, how about you are warped away and logged off just as you do when you safe log. Simple and easy. Still completely unneeded though.

I’ve done the same thing. Sometimes because the pilots flew/were flying ships bigger/faster/bigger & meaner than mine. I can’t say I wasted time evading them though because when I logged on to Eve I knew I wasn’t playing on my own private server and that other players play style involved hunting me down and podding me back to Hek. (Or wherever my clone is now)

I AFK cloak sometimes and I’m playing the game. I’m playing the game in the same way a player docked up in a station is playing the game. When I roam nullsec I don’t have docking rights in a lot of sysytems (most of them actually). I can fly around and d-scan the system to see who is there, check upwell structures to see if people are in them, but I can’t dock in a station to see which players are there. So through a process of elimination & intel gathering - which takes away from my ISK earning time - I can determine to some degree what players may be undocked and cloaked. Then I can make a decision on whether I want to scan or run a site or do I activate my cloak and walk away as if I was docked in a station.
You see for my play style and for other explorers play style a cloak is our “station”. Maybe I don’t want to log off. Maybe I can’t because there are potential hunters in the system who could scan down my spot, and either jump me before I log off or be waiting for me when I log back on. Yes there are people who are that good and quick.
And way to go for running around nullsec for two weeks unharmed. It’s a great way to learn to be safe. You should take off the training wheels (AKA Local ) and wander around WH space for a couple of weeks. As I’ve said before, nullsec is like a vacation to the beach because of local chat.

Because of Local I know exactly how many and who is in the system with me. Through a process of elimination (aka Gameplay) I can determine where and possibly what they are flying. Anyone I can’t account for is either in a station or cloaked. If they’re cloaked they potentially keep me from doing whatever it is I wanted to do in that system.
My choices then become:
A) Go about my business in the system and deal with whatever/whoever shows up
B) Go to another system with less or no pilots
C) All of the above
An AFK cloaker has had no effect on my decision as far as I know. If I can’t account for a pilot in system I treat them as a “cloaky bastard” and act accordingly. I don’t care if they are AFK or not. Twice in the last week I’ve left systems with 4 Sansha relic sites and just one other person in system. But I didn’t know where they were and they had lots of explorer kills. Maybe they were AFK. Maybe not. I was guaranteed one thing when I logged into Eve. People will shoot you…act accordingly.

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7000 :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I don’t see how it makes them 100 percent safe. When a new person enters local you don’t get a ping or other sort of audible alarm. You don’t even get a flashing background. They are just there and if you were not paying fairly close attention, you don’t get the memo.

Best thing is if you know them and have them in your contacts with bad standings, then you get a red or orange box. Its the best heads up you get and you may not have them in contacts.

Are you saying that an AFK timer for cloaks will screw all the other cloak users? If so I have to tell you, as a cloak user, I won’t feel screwed. I will feel inconvenienced.

Within the constraints you have laid out, maybe? But I don’t agree with your constraints.