to me yours doesn’t matter, now what? How far from keyboard is afk?
Cloak is overpowered, guns are overpowered, citadels are overpowered, watching gates is overpowered, listening to sounds.. don’t even start me on that XD everything is OP beyond imagination XD Look for a different game maybe?
Yes, eve is heavily reliant on cloaks, break it (you won’t let it f***ig go a second earlier) and you’ll break the game completely. You whined and moaned about afk-cloaking for 20 years, CCP finally caved and provided you a tool against it, now you’re whining about (non-afk) cloaking. Completely predictable back then, totally laughable now.
While I only experimented with cloaking in null, this just might be the best way to be the pain in the arse I used to be to null? I f I can shut down a couple of key sys just by being an active cloaker they can’t find while I watch vids and chk in on time, they’re never going to catch me.
There is not the slightest evidence that basically riskless longterm cloaking is fundamentally nessessary for the game to work.
Also no one wants to ‘break it’, just adding counterplay methods to it that actually reward player skill - both in detection and evasion - instead of the current rather inefficient ‘pay ISK’ method that isn’t even available everywhere.
If you can’t see that and instead just throw unrelated made-up things into the discussion to create the illusion to have some actual arguments thats totally on you.
how do you “shut down” a system just by being there? Gates won’t let you go? Stations shut their doors? Citadels go offline? Guns on other ships? No, only cautious crabs will dock up, thats it, but they might reship into something else and start hunting you. You don’t shut down anything.
What kind of “citation” could I provide? We talk opinions. You won’t be able to back yourself up by citing anything and I won’t be either. No scouting or penetrating of big blocks’ space means they have the upper hand more than ever in anything. Much of solo/small scale action in their space relies on cloak, if covert warfare was no longer possible were a game breaking change to me. Gather a big-*ss fleet and chase every daring intruder out by sheer, skull-crushing numbers.
gtho you guys are pathetic whiners who won’t stop whining no matter what. You pretended to be anti-afk-cloak crowd back then, now you have a tool against afk-cloaking yet that is not enough.. totally surprising.
AI mining bots tend to dock up in a sys that has an unknown threat. Any active player will be left alone for me to track and target. I can find you in two sweeps of probes and you would probably never even see them, I can do it so fast. Usually, I just scan for the best sites because that’s where you will be. Easy targets to find even if I can’t pop them fast before reinforcements arrive, I break their gameplay. Do that for hours or days as it would be in my case and I could cause a significant decrease in revenue for said sys. I’m not looking for profit. I already have that.
I am not scared of any cloaking ship. I live in WHs and every second ship here is cloaky and I wouldn’t even see in local if one is there or not. But here comes the main difference: the cloaky ships here would actually need to fight me and had a good chance to lose that engagement.
The cloaky ships in Nullsec only need to open a cyno and bring the curbstomp gang in. Nobody is “scared of a cloaky ship”. People just don’t want to be killed via a magic teleporter that beams a whole blob right on top of them within a handful of seconds.
Again, your personal attacks only weaken your position. Please try harder. If you really really try, maybe you can fumble something like a little argument together, which we can discuss.
What range of default total durations were you thinking of? And how far should a player be able to push it through fitting choices?
For now the idea has a major flaw, as covert ops cloaks have the main advantage over regular cloaks that it allows warping… but warping requires capacitor which as result of your suggestion doesn’t regenerate so covert ops ships run out of juice after a couple of warps and cannot position themselves for a bombing run or stalk a hostile unseen even for short periods of time involving warps. This removes the main benefit of covert cloaks. Nothing that cannot be solved with a ‘warp while covert cloaked costs no capacitor’ bonus or something like that though, so let’s assume this can be fixed.
How long do you think a simple unmodded bomber should be able to stay cloaked without surfacing?
Well, I’d think about one hour unmodded perma cloaking, if you put in T2 semiconductor rigs and a cap battery you can boost that like x2.5, so like 2hour 30min, starting from full capacitor to empty. That means in a normal bomber you would probably want to refresh your cap after like 40 minutes at most, in a cap-buffed one after around 2 hours. But I am really open to discussion here and even leave it to CCP to come up with own specifications.
Or you go the other way round and leave it at 1 hour, but fit a Capacitor Booster which means you can warp to a safe, decloak, boost cap up to maxium and be back in cloak after like 20 seconds. Ready for the next hour. And you can repeat that for quite a lot of hours until you run out of capboosters.
Or you fit for cap recharge, using one long warp to actuall recharge most of your cap and warp cloaked back to your lurking postion once per hour.
The point is: the longer you wait cloaked, the less remaining cap for a fight you will have, so you have to make the strategical decision of how much cap buffer you want to have to reliably lurk for a prolonged time without cap-loss hurting you too much (fitting = strategical decisions) or how often and when to “surface” to boost/recharge your capacitor back to maximum for another round of lurking (surfacing = tactical decisions).
Your hint about multiple repositions eating up capacitor can indeed be adressed by a role bonus for covert ships like “95% reduced capacitor use for initiating warp while cloaked” or something like that.
It would keep cloaking for longer durations possible and still allow players an easy break from the game to cloak for up to an hour or longer with the right fit. And as regular cloaky player I don’t think recloaking after that much time is a big issue that it impacts regular gameplay much.
So, little impact on legit active cloaky strategies yet it does put an end to cloaking campaigns with zero input at all, by giving players a maximum amount of time they have cloaked before you resurface.
This leaves a few more questions I have:
How would this new design work alongside mobile observatories? I guess both mechanics will have their own purpose, where such a new cloak drain puts a predictable maximum amount of time on cloaking (which can be alarm-clocked) while a mobile observatory removes predictability for the cloaked ship by allowing players to actively try disable the cloak earlier than that.
How would the capacitor drain rate be determined? Do ships with higher base capacitor get longer cloak time, allowing players to camp longer in bigger ships? Or would the drain rate be a percentage of the base capacitor, which punishes higher base capacitor ships with higher drain rates and less effect from the same cap boosters?
What about players who move extra large ships through space under a regular cloak, who run into issues with stacked blue timers of up to half an hour? Veilguard boosters allow such strategies to work even against mobile observatories, but a draining cloak could be problematic if for point 2 the drain rate is a percentage of base cap.
I think the idea of capacitor slowly draining when a ship is cloaked is a nice elegant solution to make cloaks not last indefinitely but also give players the tools to increase or refresh cloak duration if needed with cap batteries and cap boosters.
And it also opens up the possibility of different cloak drain rates per cloak type, adding value to faction cloaks.
Well you know I am not a fan of the current MoOb Design. Too expensive for a real slim chance to actually catch someone. Even for the sole purpose of “should only prevent long-term real-afk cloaking” it’s simply too expensive. The replacement of a Covops or Bomber or Prospect with a cyno is almost 2x cheaper than deploying a single Mobile Observatory. And if the player happens to notice it, your chances shrink to straight zero and you have wasted ~50 million ISK.
I’d like a complete redesign of them, but thats another topic…
Can be both, I am open for ideas here. A flat “percentage” would be a very simple design, with boni to ships designed for cloaky operations (aka all covert-ships and BlackOps) to give them an advantage in use (aka prolonged cloaking times).
I wouldn’t call it “punishing” for bigger ships, it’s just a thing of physics that a larger cloaking field also needs more capacitor.
The problem wit a fixed drain rate in cap/sek would be other imbalances, for example Amarr ships with bigger capacitors could cloak significantly longer than minmatar or Caldari ships. I ike a flat design more and then giving boni to those ships that require a reasonable exception.
Hmm. Yes that needs to be adressed. I could imagine a special “Capital Cloaking Device” that counters the capdrain (Lore: Capital Capacitor Generators are so strong, that they can feed a cloaking field and still recharge) can only be fitted on Caps/Supercaps.
Basic concept for capacitor recharge penalties:
Subcap Cloaks: -100% (0% recharge rate while cloaked)
Capital Cloak T1: -25% (75% recharge rate while cloaked)
Capital Cloak T2: -20% (80% recharge rate while cloaked)
Capital Cloak Faction: -10% (90% recharge rate while cloaked)
Capital Cloak Officer: -5% to -0% (95 to 100% recharge rate while cloaked), depending on Officer
You will notice that this follows the same system as the MWD Capacitor penalty.
I know you don’t like them, but I do think they’ve got a place in the game as the only way to catch an inattentive cloaked player. I’ve successfully (and unsuccessfully) used these things and have once been fun bait when used against our fleet, and I think they add to the game’s tools and make cloaked gameplay more interactive, even if they are indeed expensive.
I think they’ll still have a role as way to interact with cloaked players even with a new upper limit to cloak duration based on draining.
I see what you mean.
But a downside is that by taking a flat percentage of base cap means that batteries or cap boosters (which add a fixed amount of cap) would have a lower impact on ships with relatively higher base capacitors like Amarr ships. So either Amarr ships get to be the best, or the worst depending on drain mechanic choices.
I’m not sure which is the best choice.
Interesting idea, but I wonder if that new ‘capital-sized cloak module’ wouldn’t be too niche. I mean, it’s rare for capital ships to use cloaks. An entirely new cloak for capital ships just to fix this feels a bit odd. I guess it’s a solution, but I’d love a simpler solution.
Maybe just add ‘can regenerate capacitor under cloak’ to the Veilguard booster.
Oh sure, since I like player interaction opportunities, I just wished they were either cheaper or more expensive but rescoopable at the end of their 10-ping-chain.
I am an Amarr only roleplayer and since Amarr ships are quite good in the meta currently, I’d think they could take that hit.
I mean, on Capital Ships the higher Capacitor Recharge on them would already be benefitial to even things up and for the subcaps, the rather small differences won’t really matter that much. Maybe Amarrs would need a CapBooster more to go from zero to 100, but you don’t always have to do that and they have more free cargo since they don’t need to store ammo anyway (note: It’s mostly the laserboats that have increased capacitor amounts to compensate a bit for the cap-usage fo their weapon system).
We have all kind of these modules in the game. ZPMEs, Higgs Anchors, Entosis Links and whatnot… single module working only for a single purpose. It’s basically nothing else than a capital sized module for capital sized ships, like MWDs, Plates or other stuff.