Originally by: t'raq mardon

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Cloaking is completely uncounterable and this is made apparent by players turning on their T1 cloak in a system and walking away from the computer for the rest of the day, or in all likelihood having a macro log on and turn on the cloak. This is a broken mechanic and not at all what was intended for cloaks. I feel relatively confident saying that CCP did not intend to create an avenue for AFK game play. Some ideas for fixes are...

A POS mod: This mod would decloak any cloaked ship in system. To avoid it being used to decloak ships trying to break gate camps it should have a warm up timer and should only be able to be used a few times a day, or even only once per day.

Cloaking device cycle timer: Having cloaking devices turn off after every cycle and making the cycle time extremely long, 1 hour base and additional time for skills or longer. This would only curb AFK cloaking mildly since you would still be able to go AFK for an extended amount but it would make a huge difference.

Cloaking Ammo: Model cloaking devices after weapon turrets, giving them a special cloaking ammo. This way someone cloaked off a gate gathering intel only has to leave for long enough to reload every few hours. Making the "ammo" .01M3 would allow the players to carry large quantities of it for extended operations.

Special scan probes: Creating special probes that are capable of scanning down cloaked ships. This could even come with its own a new ship class specifically for locating cloaked ships. Would make cloaking much more risky, but might be interesting. The scanning process would have to be significantly slowed in some way to avoid completely nerfing cloaks

Again, these are all only ideas! They are not exactly what i think should be implemented but instead are rough ideas that need to be shaped and refined.


Also, I'm not saying that cloaks should be completely nerfed. As it stands, using a cloaking device makes you completely invulnerable. You should still be in SOME danger, even when cloaked. The fact that you can cloak and walk away from the computer confidently knowing you will not lose your ship, even if you dont return for the rest of the day, is wrong. There should be enough danger while in space that walking away from the computer for hours on end has a reasonable amount of risk associated with it. In my opinion, you should be able to cloak and be safe for a short period of time, 30-60 min, before needing to do something to subvert the hostiles trying to find you. But at a minimum, a player should have to have some sort of interaction with the client to stay cloaked, even if that is only having to "reload" every few hours.

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