Enough troll feeding for today…
The problem with AFK cloakers is there is currently no way to hunt them and remove them.
You can’t treat a cloaker as AFK, so for all intents and purposes the pilot is dangerous. In null cloakers have the ability to hotdrop which means it’s basically pointless to try and defend against unless you are a very large alliance.
So the amount of effort required to be ready just in case they are not AFK far exceeds the amount of effort required to park up on a skill farm account and leave it. AFK cloakers also hurt small alliances much much more than large alliances due to the lack of firepower/players online to help defend.
All AFK cloaking does is add to the already enormous power gap that large alliances have over small alliances, which is not healthy for the game.
Do we really need to suffocate small alliance income while goons rake in more than the rest of null put together??
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That is an insult. Continuously referring to him by a racial epithet is harassment.
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There are people who will tell you, from experience, that this is wrong and they have been explaining it. this argument is invalid.
What isn’t healthy for the game, are farmers who complain about the jungle they’ve chosen to play in, demanding that it is being made safer for them. They provide nothing and only want to farm in safety. Your argument is invalid, as nothing of value would be lost. Using an alliance filled with farmers as argument for farmers is hilarious.
People, who see themselves as helpless victims, only have themselves to blame. The issue is within them, as proven by everyone who isn’t a victim by default.
Lot’s of things, however 25 cloaky campers?
It may be annoying, intimidating, aggravating, etc. and so harassment within the general sense of the word, all of which is perfectly fine in EVE. If it disrupts the activities of the group it is targeted against, then it may be achieving it’s aim.
It’s not harassment within the EULA though.
It may seem unfair, but it’s just one of the issues to deal with if you want to maintain control of your space. After all, I’m sure your Corp/Alliance doesn’t mind all the benefits you gain from the area you play in. It can’t all be benefit with no limitations.
This is just one of the limitations that have to be managed.
Not at all. You’re trying to define harassment as someone “doing something I don’t like”. That is a dangerous definition of harassment because where do you stop? Your post is harassment because I don’t like it? A cloaky camper who is or pretends to be AFK is in fact doing nothing at all except existing. That is not harassment.
Not my definition. I would never presume to be able to define the word. It’s a dictionary definition and no, ‘doing something I don’t like’ isn’t necessarily part of that, nor what was written.
I’m not sure the opportunity cost argument works perfectly here in the way you’re using it. Isk making tactics in eve require various amounts of effort per account. As the number of accounts rise, some of the isk making techniques incur a real life opportunity cost… the time needed to setup and maintain the accounts you don’t actually use for anything other than isk generation. I have four accounts (including alpha’s)… and for me that’s where the opportunity cost of dealing with more accounts in terms of time spent becomes too great.
I don’t run skill farms… but my understanding is they are among the lowest effort methods of generating isk. I can’t imagine dealing with 25 accounts… but if the effort is minimal enough and the skill farming itself generates enough isk to sub the account and make some minimal profit… I don’t think the opportunity cost of lost isk argument applies as much. The players game time is already set to be a certain amount… and any isk added from other activities on the player’s alt account could be causing less isk earning (or enjoyment) because it takes play time away from his main accounts.
Another factor is that the skill farm accounts have 3 toons. So you could have two set up for PI, Invention, market trading or whatever and just leave a third one for AFK camping.
I’d actually like to discuss this.
If the person is camping AFK… isn’t is pretty close to being without cost?
I’d say the only cost would be the time for that individual toon to travel too and from their camp location (assuming in a cloaky interdicted vessel). The two other toons on the accounts would work the same as if the account were not being used for camping. The camping toon could travel back and forth when needed to their main isk-making location when needed to kick off jobs or collect PI… and good strategies for those could require only a couple of return visits per month. So the main cost would be the time to log in with 25 toons and hit the cloak button after downtime each day.
After that they go AFK… so it’s cost free. While many may choose not to engage in other isk making methods… I’m not sure how much time would be lost if they chose to both make isk and afk camp.
Opportunity cost is always a thing. Always.
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No. Again, there is opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is always there unless you have no other choices. And I don’t mean the other choices are bad or undesirable, simply that there is a single choice.
So for example you prior post that discusses an account with 3 alts. Opportunity still applies. The fact that I can use 2 alts for PI does not remove opportunity cost. In fact, there is opportunity cost there too. That you skilled and are using them for PI means you incur the opportunity cost of the next best option. And there is still the opportunity cost associated with AFK camping that I noted. That you have income does not remove opportunity cost.
You can find the definition of opportunity cost here.
In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost, also known as alternative cost, is the value (not a benefit) of the choice of a best alternative cost while making a decision.
As I noted, so long as you are making a decision–i.e. a choice between two or more choices, then opportunity cost is present.
A choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives; assuming the best choice is made, it is the “cost” incurred by not enjoying the benefit that would have been had by taking the second best available choice.
We satisify the mutually exclusive aspect by noting that if you are AFK camping you are unable to be somewhere else in the game with that character (or any of your other characters). So in your 3 alts on 1 account example, if the person is going to AFK camp 23.5/7 then not only is the opportunity cost the cost of what ever else you could do with that alt, but also the ISK income of the PI alts.
This concept is old. Ben Franklin had a glimmering of the idea with his famous quote, “Time is money.” Frédéric Bastiat gave the first articulation of the concept although he did not name it. It was Friedrich von Wieser, the Austrian economist, who came up with the name.
There are other things you are giving up again. Suppose I have trained my camping alt to also have PI skills. Travelling back and forth now means I have to give up camping…which is an opportunity cost. Second, choosing PI over say invention means I am incurring that opportunity cost as well.
Further, travelling in a cloaked ship is when such ships are most at risk of being destroyed. So with 25 alts there is now a non-trivial probability that one or more of the cloaking ships will be lost.
So, no, after they AFK it is not cost free.
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That was the most idiotic attempt at a reply I’ve ever seen. Lots of words yet didn’t address a single point I made. Congratulations retard.
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Lets not pretend afk cloaking is stopping said player from earning billions and billions. It’s overwhelmingly likely they dont do anything with the account anyway, which is why they afk cloak in the first place, so there is no cost.
Nobody in the game is going to give up large amounts of income to af cloak a system, thats not how players play. That’s just retarded theorycrafting.
What points?
there are no points. everything you wrote is either factually wrong, or based on the idea that people are victims. what you did, though, was proving me right about the irrationality of emotional thinkers, who get angry when someone like me tells them that it is their own fault and no one elses! so you throw around insults, just like the rest of those people who only ever see themselves as victims of all these evil people!
thanks for proving my point. there is no sense in talking to you, as it is a complete waste of time to try being rational. 
have a nice day.
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Which bit is factually wrong?
You can’t treat an afk cloaker as afk?
It’s pointless to try and defend hotdrops as a smaller alliance because you will always get out-escalated?
How about it requires much more effort to remove an afk cloaker than it does to park one up in space? Is that factually wrong too?
Is it not true that afk cloakers affect smaller alliances more than larger alliances? Because larger alliances have more systems, more players and more firepower to defend?
Just because you say thing are factually wrong, does not make it so. It just makes you look like a pathetic debater.
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Of course it is. But as the part you cut out of your quote said… I think the opportunity cost when someone has 25 accounts isn’t what they could do with that account… it’s the time (and isk) earned from their primary isk earning activities. If you play EVE for six hours a day… using your time setting up and maintaining invention/manufacturing may not be as profitable for you as using that six hours on your main.
I hate breaking up quotes… because it makes discussion harder as the thread continues. So I’m just going to answer everything at once.
First, opportunity cost only exists when activities are mutually exclusive. And the cost isn’t the sum of all possible alternatives… it’s the sum if the next highest option (in this case, next highest isk-value option) that could be done.
When discussing someone with a huge number of accounts (25 in this example) the issue you have to look at is the mutually exclusive piece. A player’s ability to mutli-task while playing multiple accounts is going to be limited… as is their available time to play a video game.
So in this scenario, the opportunity cost that exists isn’t what could be earned with the same character. It’s what could be earned with the player’s time and attention.
So, if a player has the ability to play 3 accounts simultaneously without downtime on each account… and they have 4 hours a day to play Eve… they have 12 man hours to allocate to their characters per day. If they have 75 characters (3 toons on 25 accounts) and can fully maximize their isk earnings using just 50 of those 75 characters (meaning the difference between isk earned and opportunity cost in isk forfeited)… then what is the opportunity cost of leaving 22 accounts permanently logged in as AFK cloakers?
I’m pretty certain it would be the isk that would be earned only for the amount of time it takes the player to log in and click the cloak button. Likely a pretty insignificant amount.
It feels like you’re making the mistake of viewing the opportunity cost as a factor of the character… not the player who is playing the character. You’re assuming the player has an infinite capacity, which is unrealistic. Think of it like a capacity utilization rate that is maxed out well before 75 characters.
The actual AFK time (not the time taken to log in and click cloak) would only have opportunity cost if there were a mutally exclusive alternative that was also completely AFK.
Now I suppose you could say that the person had an opportunity cost of not making in-game isk by not playing the game. But that’s a pointless way to look at it as anything in game in terms of isk would never actually be the opportunity cost used for the cost of out of game activity. The best real life job (or next best job if they’re working at the best job) the person could hold would be what was used for opportunity cost… as that would be the way to get the most isk possible for Eve.
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And every single point is being written as if people were victims by default…
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there is no evidence, that an afk cloaker has an alliance behind him, that will hot drop them. he needs to be baited, so it can be found out if he actually has. before that happens, the threat is pureky imaginary.
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there is no need to remove an afk cloaker, who is not a confirmed threat.
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afk cloakers, who aren’t a confirmed threat, do not affect anyone.
An unconfirmed threat is not a threat. the mindset of a victim makes it impossible for said victims to comprehend the fact that, just because he might, doesn’t mean that he will. afk cloakers can be baited, without bleeding isk.
all of this has been addressed in the main thread already. you can keep finding new"points", but as long as you don’t drop the mindset of the victim , who wants to farm in perfect safety in what is supposed to be a dangerous space, there is not a single valid point you can make. history proves that since forever. you just want to farm and damn, it’s good that they don’t let you by doing nothing at all.
confirm the threat first, otherwise you have no ground to speak on.
a man, who isn’t there, who has done nothing, is no reason not to undock. there is no reason to undpck in expensive ships and there is no reason to demand that the only thing that might be a threat should go. and it is, absolutely, the only potential threat you suffer from.
good luck with that mindset.
Magnitude of the cost is not really the issue, the point is it is not costless. Anyone insisting it is simply does not understand opportunity cost, and if you fail to understand opportunity cost, you fail to grasp economics.
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So you admit you were wrong and then go on for dozens of words to attempt to show you weren’t wrong?
The point is that that pilot is pretty much useless from generating ISK/gathering resources aside from being part of an SP farm, and even there you still have to get said pilot to a place where you can extract and sell the injectors.
The point is, that AFK cloaking is not cost free. This is a favorite argument of anti-cloakers and it is quite simply not at all true. To believe this means you must reject a fundamental aspect underlying economics and economic behavior.
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