Originally by: Vitelius

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This is a serious issue which hasn't been addressed properly although there has been talk about it for god knows how long.

The underlying problems are:

• Regular cloaking devices (non-covert ops cloaks) and the mechanics that dictate that a cloaked ship is impossible to scan down.


• Aggro timer when engaging anything. Currently we have the 15 minute aggro timer when you engage a player ship and log off but aggroing NPC ships is not taken into account, this being a major issue when a person spontaneously logs off


• Spontaneous logoffs when being aggressed by NPCs, like mentioned above

The issue with non-covops cloaking devices has been raised many times already and it has been acknowledged, yet nothing has been made to correct it. At the same time scanning mechanics have been completely revamped, scanning out ships is now more time consuming than ever before while a simple module like a prototype cloaking device can effectively make you invulnerable. Effectively what this means is that in a supposedly harsh environment of 0.0 a player can simply warp off and cloak using a non-covops cloak before anything can catch it. A battleship with a prototype cloak can warp off an asteroid belt and cloak (and therefore become invulnerable) before ANY ship can warp in to the belt and tackle the battleship. I'm fine with being slow and having crappy reactions but when catching a battleship on a belt 1,000,000 km off the gate you're jumping in from with an interceptor is considered impossible there must be something fundamentally wrong.

The biggest problem of course is the non-human factor in most of the forementioned cases. The player is using a macro/bot of some kind and therefore can react way before a human on the other side can react. Even this I can still accept but the fact that they do this AND then use a fundamentally flawed mod like the prototype cloak to become invulnerable is just unacceptable. The other variant that we've seen is that the player simply logs off as soon as another player enters the system and with no proper aggro timer present from shooting NPCs the player is impossible to catch, especially after making ship scanning even harder than what it used to be.

Summarizing the post, scanning has been made more time consuming than before while no aggro/logoff/cloaking mechanics have been altered. This has been unbalanced for a long time and is even more unbalanced now. The biggest problem I see here is the macros and the current mechanics that make these macros possible and profitable to use. This has to change, either by seriously affecting the penalties of fitting a non-covert ops cloak, making the non-covert cloaks finally scannable or by changing the logoff/aggro mechanics. Something just has to be done.

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