Peter Dostoevsky
League of Angered Gentlemen
Wrecks In Progress
29
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Posted - 2013.12.03 18:51:00 -
[1] - Quote
Andy Landen wrote:The instant that you click on that client, you would be warped back to your previous location. You would not be able to dscan, ship spin, type text in chat, or do anything else without losing the AFK tag and getting warped back to known space. AFK would truely mean that you were not inputing anything from the keyboard or mouse to the client, including client window activation.
Also, having the AFK tag, you would have been warped to within 1 million km of your previous location to a deadspace location with a decloaking marker, so you would show on dscan. Everyone would know what ship you were in and about where your last location was with a couple of dscans. We could simply choose to operate in locations greater than a couple million kms of you and know that you would not be warped back to our anomalies.
With these mechanics proposals being AFK really would make getting the easy AFK kill much harder, but if we need it to be harder, we can always add a 30s timer before any modules could be activated. Being AFK really shouldn't be an in-game advantage from any perspective. I would add that your local should not show anything while AFK. I prefer a complete logout, but if entering your password again is such a big deal, then we really do need a special place for AFK pilots in their own deadspace corners to think about what they should have done.
Okay, so I'll be relatively nice to ya because I feel bad for you. I respect the leadership in your alliance that I know, and I even respect the line members that I used to fly with and I have no ill will towards you or your people.
Now, this idea is pretty bad because it ruins some other methods of gameplay at the same time. If you determine that someone has been afk by module presses, then you make scanning while cloaked a punishable offense. If you determine that someone is AFK because they aren't moving while cloaked, you punish cloaky camps. If you punish this by checking for interaction with the client you make it so that multiboxers can't ever stop paying attention to a client for a site or two which means that a cloaky orca or a cloaky noctis isn't available. You punish AFK miners that way too, people who just want to make a buck or two in-game while doing their homework or watching a movie.
In short, you never really thought of the ramificatiions of your idea.
Now, on to more of why your idea is wrong.
First of all: most cloaky ships can't target anything for a set amount of time after decloaking. The exception is stealth bombers. The way around this is to decloak in warp, but that means you show up on d-scan and give your prey time to escape.
Also, you are under the impression that the guy who is the danger is the guy who is AFK cloaking. This is wrong for several reasons. The first being that someone AFK is no real danger to you. The second being that there are very few cloaky ships that can be dangerous to a ratter solo, and all of those are highly situational.
What you are actually afraid of is the force projection that is represented by bridging titans and bridging blops. A bridging blops can move a decent sized bomber/recon/tech 3 cloaky fleet to right on top of you from a pretty decent distance away. If you are unlucky, they might even be able to bridge from highsec.
You have to worry about either a large force of fairly squishy ships coming through ("large" being less than 50 reasonably) if they only have a covert cyno. The time to kill is somewhere in the 30 seconds to 2 minutes range for most subcap ratters, and then they just moonwalk out of there, right? You have no way to kill them at all?
Well, that's not true. If you can get a bubble on top of them, or some tackle in there, you might be able to respond and get some kills of your own. You aren't defenseless, and a small covops gang will die to a reasonably competant similar sized conventional gang. At the very least you get a fight and have fun.
Now, you need people that are willing to stick their necks out and help their alliance-mates for this to work. You need people to be active, and you need people to fit sensibly and be able to swap to a pre-made PvP ship on short notice. If this isn't feasible for your alliance then the problem isn't blops bridges, but your alliance.
Now, what if it is a titan that is doing the bridging? Well then, son. you're kind of ******. Titan bridges can move up to 254 people at a time of any subcap class, and they can do it from what is essentially complete safety while POSed up and surrounded by hundreds of friendlies within jump range of their entire capital support fleet.
So yeah, you shouldn't nerf cloaking. It is fine as it stands. If you are really worried about uncounterable fleets coming through a bridge lit by a cloaky, then call to nerf titan bridges. Blops bridges are already pretty well balanced due to fuel usage and fuel bay size and the fact that you can't bridge range-bonused logi through. The few things that are capable of killing you solo and mounting a covops cloak aren't going to kill you quickly if you are flying a sensibly fit ship, and if you can get a bubble on field quickly, you stand a pretty good chance of killing them dead. |