So is a pilot in a pod or a shuttle, but we're still allowed to hunt and kill them.

Because in contrast to you we dont fly phukkin drakes. The worth of our ships go into multiple billions.

Local channel is your counter to cloaks, and you will always know they are there with local. Besides afk cloaked ships are not dangerous, only active cloak ships are! If you see a person in local and they aren't on d-scan you know they are cloaked and you should make sure that you have someone to help you if they decide to show up. Frankly Local alone is enough to put cloakers in their place, and if you live somewhere where people can kill you...than you should have something capable of giving you a scare ormaking you break a sweat, its supposed to be dangerous in low and null. The only people who can even honestly complain that cloaked ships are OP is those in WHs where local gives you nothing, but in WH space cloaks are an appreciated danger that makes WHs properly dangerous and scary. So all you low and null bears who hate cloak ships need to suck it up, if it bothers you too much move back to hi sec.

How about when someone who's flying a cloaked ship comes into your system and goes AFK the local chat channel disappears from everyone in system's clients?

This would solve your issue of AFK cloakers as you'd know darned well that there was actually an AFK cloaker in your system whilst also removing the free intel you get from local at the same time.

I believe this would balance the situation. You gain intel and lose intel. Balance.

What do you guys think?

What, and face unacceptable risk? You sir are just being totally outlandish!

But they'd know that there was an afk cloaky in system which is what they're after! What risk would it then be any more than being in a wormhole? The WH denizens seem perfectly happy with the situation they have so why not "solve" the afk cloaky "problem" some people perceive in this balanced and fair approach?



I'm being shuper sherious.

There is this thing called 'afk camping' and two sides to the coin. First things first, it's within the rules of the game, it isn't cheating nor bug-using or what so ever. Cloaky modules are part of this game and have a right to exist. They make sense! So what's all the fuss about anyways? Well, being a system owner/renter in this game is also part of this game. You invest time, money and manpower to raise the military and industrial level and make this game running by producing, ratting, mining.

It's astounding that all someone (jerk) has to do, in order to destroy other players gameplay, is to sit in a cloaky ship at a savespot and leave his computer for good without even bothering about getting caught. This can't be the idea of this game. You might say: 'Well why dont you kill them when entering the system?' Because, there is a time for the game and there is a tme for real life and you can't have a guarded system 24/7.

Let's see what we got so far. Cloaky modules make sense and should definitly provide a high amount of savety to a cloaked pilot. Especially bombers, cover-ops and black-ops. On the other hand, having a computer running an alt in a cloaky ship with a cyno field gen fitted and nobody taking care of that alt. After days of not even looking how your cloaky alt is doing, you then suddenly decide to just hotdrop a whole fleet.

The way I see it, the problem isn't the cloak camping but the 'away from keyboard' claok camping. The solution therefore would be a game feature that doesnt destroy the savtey aspect of cloak modules but forces people to continously watch out for their cloaked alts in order for not getting caught and killed. If you dont watch for your alt, you then lose your ship and pod.

The newly added hacking minigame and a vague memory of a star trek sequal from many years ago when I used to watch those things, brought this idea of an scanning minigame to my mind. When scanning for cloaked ships in star trek you still had some fuzzy signatures which when reajusting your probe settings became more clear the more you ajusted them. So how about having to ajust some frequencies (ship signatures) everytime you hit the scan button (the smaller the probe radius the smaller the frequency scal gets) and get closer to the pinpointing? And how about if its different for any shiptype, which means if you already know what ship you're scanning for makes it easier because you have to ajust your scan for ladar (minmatar), radar (amarr), gravimetric (caldari) or magnetrometric (gallente) or maybe even bs, bc, frig, etc. The cloak pilot on the other hand should then be able to reajust his frequencies somehow or just plain by switching his cloaking device off and on again. This would make sure he can't leave his ship for good at some savespot and just go afk. Using a bot to reajust frequencies would then clearly be against the rules of the game.

Regards, M.L.

To summarize my points:
1.) AFK cloaking itself is not an issue. It's the ability to hotdrop an unscoutable fleet right on top of you that is unbalancing.
2.) AFK cloaking is the counter-action to the imbalanced intel tool known as local. Inhibiting afk cloaking without addressing the elephant (local chat) in the room is inappropriate and wrong!

To summarize my points:
1.) AFK cloaking itself is not an issue. It's the ability to hotdrop an unscoutable fleet right on top of you that is unbalancing.
2.) AFK cloaking is the counter-action to the imbalanced intel tool known as local. Inhibiting afk cloaking without addressing the elephant (local chat) in the room is inappropriate and wrong!

Technically you could scout the surrounding systems that are in bridge range. For example, if I were ratting in DBRN in Fountain I'd look in a subset of systems in Aridia and Solitude (I doubt somebody would bring in a hostile titan into Fountain). I'd also check the in-game map to see if there are pilots building up in those systems.

You could do the same for BLOPs, but the number of systems does get larger and they can move around.

So technically such a fleet is scoutable. One could argue it is unreasonable to be looking for a BLOPs gang, but I'd argue if you have one in your space, finding them and trying to evict them is part and parcel of owning sov. Or you could opt to forgo such a tactic, but then complaining about it is rather absurd. You've made a choice, now live with it.

Solution to 1) Stop any ship with a cov ops cloak from using a non cov-ops cyno. Now you can either get hot dropped by a cov ops fleet of paper thin ships which is fine or you can see the ship warping to you prior to being hot dropped. No more cov-ops cloaked ships sidling up to you and popping a titan bridge for a large fleet of combat ships. If you get caught, you weren't paying attention.

While you are "technically" right, this is anything but pragmatic!

The number of systems in bridge range of just about any system in EvE is 100-200 systems in total. While there are certain "areas" that far more likely, especially if you are deep within sov territory, it's tedious and unrealistic to monitor even the 10 most likely systems while you are out and about.

To summarize my points:
1.) AFK cloaking itself is not an issue. It's the ability to hotdrop an unscoutable fleet right on top of you that is unbalancing.
2.) AFK cloaking is the counter-action to the imbalanced intel tool known as local. Inhibiting afk cloaking without addressing the elephant (local chat) in the room is inappropriate and wrong!

True, but for a Titan, I don't think it will be moving around from system to system. The more likely case, it will have a POS and use that system. For regions with Sov, the Titan will most likely be outside the Sov systems (using the Fountain example, that limits the systems to some in Aridia, Solitude and Fountain core). So that puts it at 25ish or so systems. Much more doable than 100-200.

The BLOPs gang is considerably more difficul in that they can move around much more easily. This is where reporting hostiles in intel channels come in. Which is not unlike what Nikk, Mags and others have been talking about; intel you have to work for.

And to some extent this is beside the point since if you have an active BLOPs gang, you most likely have an active hunter and not an AFK cloaky. Granted, the hunter may have been AFK cloaking before the BLOPs gang goes active, but as others have pointed out this is due to the nature of local.

The solution to this, from my perspective, is not that complicated.

It simply requires players to adapt instead of complain.

Remove the absolute nature of local intel, and it becomes practical and balanced to remove the absolute nature of undetectable cloaking.

I agree the detection probe is an often suggested idea, but I see it as unbalanced due to the requirements for cloaking being much higher than the requirements for detecting same.

Effort to detect and effort to go undetected must be comparable in order for a balanced experience all around.

Sounds like cloaking and local is already balanced then. If to change one puts them out of balance then doesnt that mean they are in balance. We don't want CCP to rebalance something in balance...

The truth is you never know which 5 minutes out of the 23 hours is there a full gang on a titan - even with cap backup. So the beautiful advices of being 'careful' don't really apply, the advantage is with the cloaker, they engage when they're sure.
And I never understood the phobia with local - I assume people just like to troll, I really don't believe people would actually prefer to press d-scan 5000 times in a 4-5 hour gaming session just to farm a half ship's worth of isk one can loose several times in that time frame (not that d-scan actually helps against cyno anyway).
Afk camping is not ok. Maybe local isn't ok, but with current game mechanics I don't know what would people do without it. For the same reason I never understood people living in wormholes either, do people use bots to prevent tendinitis from clicking dscan or they just do whatever they do and lose average of 5 ships every day?

I recently joined a wh corp. There is no local. Sometimes people are in our system cloaked. One time, I was doing PI on an alt and I got pointed by a neut in a cov ops frig. You want to know what I did? I let my corp mates know what was happening, where it was happening, and who was doing it. You know what they did? They helped me. My hauler survived the ordeal. It was super awesome. True story.

Shhh, don't spoil the bear's belief that cloaks are all powerful...

Why just the other day I nearly destroyed all of Eve with my cloaking device.

High sec PvE enthusiasts learned how to play in null without additional risk, and this was balanced by the reward indexes for this activity dropping to levels comparable to high sec.(*)

Effectively, they brought the rewards with them when they brought the play style.

It's astounding that all someone (jerk) has to do, in order to destroy other players gameplay, is to sit in a cloaky ship at a savespot and leave his computer for good without even bothering about getting caught.