Not to derail this thread but isn’t that exactly what the Higgs rigs were made for?
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I have no strong opinions on this.
A couple of things i noticed reading the thread were 1) folk are talking about having to recloak every 15 minutes. by my math its every 20minutes. if the immunity timer is 15 and the observatory is pinging every 10minutes then there is an overlap. the two arnt synced up. and 2) everyone seems to be talking about this like its a guarenteed decloak. Its not right? its RNG so hunters could take a gamble on the 40%. exciting.
I do feel like this should have some scope to be modified through ship roles or boosters or something. Like in my head it makes no sense that a cov ops ship is the same amount of vulnerable to these things as any random space junk with a cloak fitted. I mean thats the ships role right…covert.
Taking the gamble makes no sense in most cloaky fleet contexts. If one person in a cloaky fleet gets decloaked, the entire fleet gets decloaked. Even one person getting hit by a decloak ping will ■■■■ up an entire bombing squad.
Further when it comes to the more expensive ships like nano supers, dreads, blops etc, why wouldn’t you drop 10 decloakers? They’re 40 mil a pop and you’re hunting a 2.5 to 60 billion ship.
Nothing much to contribute here, which is probably useful feedback in itself. I am firmly on the cloaked side of this equation and this seems fine and balanced.
Let’s sum up cloak usecases. (Gathered from this thread)
- AFK cloak camping. Moderate disruption. As intended.
- Active cloaked-hunting on grid with target. Major disruption.
- Ninja-capitals. Moderate to major disruption. (At least 30 min of cloak stabilization required)
- Bomberruns. Moderate disruption.
- Blackops runs. Moderate to major disruption.
- Cloaked supply ships (on alt-pilots). Major disruption.
- Emergent AFK (like phone call from parents). Major disruption. (At least 1 hour of cloak required)
I suggest increasing cloak stabilization timer to 1 hour. This will drop disruption level for most cases to minor or lower while keeping AFK cloak camping disruption level moderate.
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Being chance based is irrelevant. The point is you could be decloaked and therefore have to be prepared to be decloaked
I’m not sure what adding chance to the algorithm adds of value. It just feels like a badly thought out way for CCP to say they didn’t go too far even though the reality will be negligible difference to cloakers.
I would have hoped CCP would have learned from how badly ECM has worked over the years to stay away from chance based mechanisms but c’est la vie
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CCP finally realizing krabs are overfarmed after experimenting with blackouts and MESS would be a good day.
- AFK cloak camping. Bots barely disrupted.
- Active cloaked-hunting on grid with target. Very minor disruption.
- Ninja-capitals. Much needed moderate disruption. (making something so big not visible from a few km never made sense anyway).
- Bomberruns. Minor disruption to an overpowered activity. (yes I used to do that, too easy imo)
- Cloaked supply ships (on alt-pilots). Major disruption. (should’ve never been a thing)
- Emergent AFK (like phone call from parents). No disruption if you can just log off like you should. Otherwise, Minor disruption (you can still keep your eye on one module when parents call).
Cloak stabilization should start at 10 minutes when entering system and reduced to 1-5 minutes subsequently. If you need more afk time, you should log off.
You are not wrong.
This is a relatively weak solution to the problem and isn’t going to make the laziest of the krabs happy in practice. It is expensive, still requires 10, 20, 30 or even 40 minutes to work depending on how lucky you are, and they still have to undock and risk something. Once they are baited once or twice by hunters “pretending” to be AFK and get wrecked, they will be back on the forums or reddit complaining.
It is however still a significant buff to organized groups as it will effectively delete AFK camping of the sort used in active campaigns to lower ADMs and the like. Nullsec ratting for these folks has been whacked twice with the DBS and the ESS recently, so perhaps some buff to safety is in order, but really this really does highlight now how overpowered local chat is as a proximity detector and removes the last counter to that.
I hope CCP does address this properly in the future and try to bring some play and counterplay back to this hunting which has been min/maxed and nerfed into irrelevance. I think though they missed an opportunity to start this now. Why not release a counter deployable that interferes with local at the same time?
Like, a Mobile Communications Jammer that is the exact mirror of this Observatory - same cost, same deploy time, same EHP and last the same time but instead of disrupting cloaks, it turns off local after 10 minutes. Ratters can undock and go shoot the thing if they want their free intel back, or they can dock up for a few hours. There, some nod to balance and an active way to mess with the easy and free intel of local chat.
But back to the main point - don’t expect this to stop the whining. Just like the One More Nerf™ phenomenon of highsec ganking, the trash tier ratters will quickly find that they aren’t perfectly safe and claim that the cloaking is still not balanced because they could still die or this thing is useless. This deployable takes too much time, isn’t infallible (actually is easily dodged by someone with dedication and a great way to bait an overconfident ratter), and has a significant cost. It will stop industrial AFK cloaking (and I’m not sure that is a great idea overall to make turtling easier, but I guess we’ll see), but it also isn’t going to make nullsec as safe as many seem to believe.
3 Likes
- they can anchor more than one.
- if you cloak 4 minutes and 59 seconds after it activated then it could decloak you 1 second after your 15 minutes. Since you can’t control what the enemy does you have to assume worst case scenario as a possibility when planning.
0:00 you
4:59 it
5:00 you
9:59 it
5:01 you
10:00 it pings and your immune
10:00 you
14:59 it
15:00 your timer is up
19:59 it
15:01 your timer is still up
20:00 it pings and can decloak you
This is if one is in system. With more the odds are even greater that the ping aligns with your timer.
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I think The impact of this change will be on players who log into a system, cloak, and go AFK. They will be “unmasked” and you will have plenty of time to scan them down, destroy them, and get back to Krabing.
LOL you don’t say…
There is nothing wrong with people defending their play style. There is also nothing wrong with other people pointing out that the change is a poor job, for the sake of fairness and balance and w/e. That does not prevent me from being impartial, I believe I’ve done the same on other occasion for subjects that did not involve my own play style. In the latter case I do not accept high collateral damage, and will call out on it. But you’re right, I happen to love flying cloaky ships. Does that make me a suspect now ? And then you will say I or anyone else has no right to defend their play style ?
There is however something odd about mordicus defending a fix that 1) does not fix without causing more collateral than it fixes and 2) is clearly the lesser of a number of other evils you’ve seen presented. I’m afraid it’s not enough.
We don’t have to accept the least amount of dev time spent, dear CSM rep, which seems to be the main point of your defense. We simply want a real, targeted solution. If that means more dev time, then that is what is needed, and you can either tell them, or they will hear via other channels. A few suggestions in this thread are for better than the current deployment that we will be fed by gavage. Stuff on Sisi can have its numbers changed around a bit, but the concept is fixed.
Not at all, unless the Olmeca episode affected you that much, and even then with some reserve ? My accusation would be that the CSM rep is falling out of his role, as in “apologetic” and “refusing to listen to genuine concerns”.
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Why bother to tell us? You don’t listen to a goddamn thing any of us tell you anyway. We’re only customers, after all…
I’ll just leave this here, to whoever said that bots wouldn’t work around this…
Feature isn’t even live yet, and botting software has already adapted. How cool is that.
3 Likes
This is useless. Someone who dedicates a character or multiple characters to a single purpose of AFK Cloaky camping. Can just simply use a clicker bot with a 11-15 minute random click on the cloak and then a 16-18 sec random click again to reactivate on repeat. And the Observatory is defeated. No one will ever be able to tell if its a player or a bot with such large variety of randomness.
By adding a full passive deployable to decloak players.
2 Likes
So basically CCP just tried to kill a mosquito with a nuke. Mosquito successfully dodged it and the nuke then promptly destroyed everything around for massive collateral damage…
4 Likes
So what? Botting is already a bannable offense. If you suspect a bot (maybe easier to figure out now if that cloaker in system is able to actually stick around all day) you can report them. Since the bot has to interact more to stay cloaked CCP may be able to more easily identify and ban them.
I just don’t see using “well they will just use a rule breaking bot” as a valid excuse against any feature.
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And yet Jita/Amarr and wahtever trade station is full of spamming bots that neverget banned. Because of a simple random value can defeat any logic ccp uses to catch this behaviour.
30 sec intervals every time is easily detectable
28-34 random interval is not detectable
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The final nail, in a classic game meta, the transformation is almost complete.
I know.
Obviously i cannot expect CCP to relay to us how they plan on countering this, even though it might seem simple to us. However, I, like others on this thread, still think that a “passive” solution to a “passive” problem isn’t ideal insofar as bots are concerned. Anything that is passive or has a pattern can be adapted by bots.
I see others still pushing for more active solutions (such as dedicated hulls/modules with special probes that do the same thing as the MOOB).