(thanks to Teckos Pech for collecting links on cloak changes topics in one post)
10 years ago somewhere in the older old forum
Edited by: Major Stallion on 27/03/2007 12:49:23
I do feel that its a bit stupid that you can cloak at will and sit in a system all day without being found or without risk of engaging the enemy.
There needs to be something implemented to allow for the finding of cloakers with scan probes.
One way to level out the advantages gained by cloaking should be to require fuel (in the form of some sort of ice product, probably liquid ozone). Cloakers can sit in a system indefinetly without a single fear.
The argument that still exists is “what about the T2 cloaking devices” (because they allow warping without uncloaking). Why not introduce a probe that can scan specifically for cloaked signal emissions? The fact that a cloaked player will almost never be found is silly. Eve is about risk vs. reward. The cloaker sitting in a system is a very low risk with an INCREDIBLY high reward (low risk: not getting found, high reward: valuable intelligence on fleet movements during war time)
Maybe my idea isnt the RIGHT way to fix cloaking, so if you have ideas or feedback, post it here. Try and be as constructive as possible, flaming only makes you look immature
I. Defenition
AFK cloaky camping / AFK cloaking - pvp activity which assumes using long periods of inactivity with activated cloaking device to
- create a threat of attack at any moment
- attack at a convenient moment and in favourable conditions
sometimes, a cyno is used to drop more forces on field
AFK - away from keyboard
ATK - at the keyboard
II. CCP, CSM
CCP Falcon Community Manager (21 Sep 2017)
This thread is starting to go wildly off topic, and is starting to get close to being locked.
Cut it out with the personal attacks and trolling, otherwise this topic is closed, and any future threads on it will be treat the same.
Simple response:
There are no plans to address AFK cloaking at this time.
The fact of the matter is that if there is someone you feel is AFK cloaking in the system that you live in, you have a choice to undock and go about your business or not.
If you decide not to, that’s your decision and you’ve chosen to mitigate the risk of being attacked in space by not being in space.
You’re never 100% safe in EVE Online whether you’re in space or in station. You’re always subject to potential player interaction in one way or another. This is the reality and the nature of a single shard sandbox mmo that’s driven by player interaction and PvP.
I’ve sent PMs to a few people in this thread with a friendly reminder to keep things cordial. The next stage is to start issuing warnings and suspensions from posting.
Please keep this thread civil and above board. Remember the forum rules.
(Main AFK cloaky thread - #363 by CCP_Falcon)
Observatory arrays
Dedicated to intelligence gathering.
Service module possibilities: Being able to increase, decrease or block Star Map filters in the solar systems they’re deployed, act as solar system wide D-scan blockers, disrupt ship intelligence in the solar system, take over player tracking capabilities from NPC agents or be able to affect or pinpoint cloak users. We are considering basing their effectiveness through a network coverage (like cell phones) so that a single one may not be that useful, but maintaining a bunch of them in space could give a significant advantage.
(https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/back-into-the-structure/)
Q: Cloaky AFK campers? My people log in, see the cloaky camper and log out. They can’t play. This is botting!
A: No it is not botting. They are not killing you while they are afk. We do want interesting game play around cloaking and hunting cloakers. We know that there is a psychological thing going on with people more then anything else. Wormholers function fine with cloaky campers.
(Note: This thing went into a rather long back and forth over cloaky camping)
A: We’d like to replace local with a better set of intel tools for Sov holders.
(Eve Vegas 2014 - General Game Design)
Fozzie’s comment:
“AFK cloaking is an entirely social form of power. To me, it is the equivalent of posting on the forums until someone stops ratting.”
(146 Minutes | Interstellar Privateer)
CCP Fozzie:
Will there ever be a way to avoid showing up in local?
Potentially. It’s not something that is going to be an easy solution, but I can say that we don’t like the fact that local chat is so powerful as an intelligence tool as well as a chat but replacing it is something that’s going to be a pretty large project because it is such a valuable way of gaining intelligence right now. We don’t want to take it away without providing some other way to find out with some other act of gameplay who is in the system with you – or at least some of the people that are in the system with you. So, we don’t think it’d be a good thing to just tear it out and not put anything back in to replace it but we also aren’t fully happy with the way it is right now. It is something that we would definitely like to change.
(https://indecisivenoob.blogspot.ru/2013/12/the-local-channel-finally-ccp-breaks.html)
CCP Fozzie wrote:
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.
(Source: EVE Down Under #97 @ 1h12m. SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds file not found)
CSM concerns: Any disruption must involve activity (AFK cloaking is lame). Problems with static objectives include hitpoints, timezoning, and min-maxing (if I want to steal your moon-go, I’ll do it at 4AM when you are not around).
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/csm/CSM_CCP_Meetings-part-3_15-17_12_2010.pdf)
III. Pros (forums compilation)
- AFK can’t hurt you
- There is countermeasures (intel channels, d-scan, local and your corpmates)
- Cloaks are already balanced.
- People go AFK cloaked because they are forced to by the local player list.
- You shouldn’t always know if someone is there or not
IV. Cons (forums compilation)
- cloaking ships are a bit overpowered, because there is no way to counter them
- defenders need much more man-hours to kill camper than camper spend (ATK) on hunting someone
- unbalanced risk/reward
- low risk - a cheap cloaky cyno frigate threaten an entire system
- high rewards - interrupting system operations, looting bling ships
- tends to disrupt others gameplay experience
- Countermeasures (intel channels, d-scan, local and your corpmates) don’t work
- AFK people are bad, m’key
- the problem is the power projection they represent.
V. Proposals (forums compilation)
-
Force decloaking
- POS/Citadel module
- Ship module
- Special bomb
- In system
- In range
- In grid
- With warmup
- With cooldown
- With fuel
- With ammo
- For a time
- With power (in points) which should be greater than cloak power (in points), similar to warp core stabilizers and warp dis
- Multiuser game “3 pilots stay still around system and it’s causing the decloaking of ships in that system”
-
Forbid cloaking
- … see “Force decloaking”
-
Scanning cloaked ship
- Using POS/Citadel/Ship module
- Using special Ship
- With mechanics similar to current scan
- Creates scannable anomalies on cloaked ships coordinates (timeout before creating)
- More easily if ship is cloaked more than X hours
- Approximate result coordinates and super special way to detect exact coordinates
- Command link that increases the scan strength or whatever of combat probes to make finding and dealing with them more doable.
- With mechanics different from current scan
- Tracks all ships coordinates including cloaked, it is possible warp to any ship with 15km scattering
- Sonar-type triangulating module to hunt down cloakies (d-scan?)
- D-scan
- “Cloak Agents” would help you find the co-ordinates
-
Forbid continuous work
- Fuel
- Capacitor draining
- Stop cap regeneration & little consumption
- Big consumption
- Overheat cloak device
- Cloak device knocks from time to time and doesn’t hide ship.
- Anti-AFK mini-game (moving 3-4 sliders, to match a random pattern every 20-25mins)
- Cloak device works N minutes (possible with breaks) and should be reactivated
- Manually
- Visiting POS/Citadel/Station
- After at least K minutes
-
Cyno related changes
- POS/Citadel module Super Cyno Jammer - every cyno start working like wormhole (collapses when too many ships have passed through, max ship mass)
- Mobile grid cyno jammer. Prevents a cyno field generator from activating within 500km of it (Already exists, 100km)
- Mobile cyno mask. Redirects ships jumping to a cyno in the system to land at the mask. Multiple masks present the possibility of landing at any of the masks with equal probability for each ship
-
Local chat related changes
- Icon next to a player when he’s afk
- Make chat constellation-wide
-
Penalty for using cloak device
- Target locking, and high slot modules require delay of 60s for activation after decloak
-
Additional game mechanics (uses in combination with smth)
- Core shutdown which makes ship immobile and imposable for scan and takes some time for starting core
- Cloaked ship appears in the visible spectrum. The cloaked ship could not be targeted only manually approached.
-
Redesign whole thing
- Local does not record player onto “local” until after decloak, blackops can use covert ops cloak and light covert cyno uncloaked, cloaked ships can be scanned, regular cyno may not be fitted with any covert ops cloak and covert ops bridge
- Make cloaks disconnect the player activating the cloak from local chat. The Local window would disappear for the player.
