Cloak Inhibitor

There is no such thing!

But I think there should be.

The Problem

Sometimes you hear people complain about "cloaky" campers in null space.  But you don't really respect the problem until you experience it.  A cloaky camper is someone who sits around endlessly in a cloaked ship, occasionally scanning down and attacking anyone they can find, usually by "hot dropping" a fleet on the victim.  This is fine out in the wild, but when one of these cloaky campers sets up shop in one of your alliance's industrial systems, it can disrupt the activities of hundreds of players for hours, days, or longer, bringing an otherwise active industrial system to a near standstill.

You can't scan these people down because they are cloaked.  You can set traps for them, but you'll likely need a fleet to set a proper trap, and much of the time it won't help because the cloaky camper will be largely afk.

The Solution

The goal should be to provide a counter to the problem without making it too easy to do or otherwise breaking people's ability to utilize cloaking.  To that end, I suggest the creation of the Cloak Inhibitor.

The Cloak Inhibitor would be something alliance's or corporations could deploy in their key systems to limit cloaking in those systems.  These could only be put in null space systems and the effects would be system-wide.  You don't want alliances putting these things everywhere, though, so there should be a significant upkeep cost for operating a Cloak Inhibitor.  My thought is that it could be a structure that gets anchored to a POS.  It would have heavy power grid and CPU requirements, possibly requiring a large POS.  Onlining them would take a significant amount of time as well, on the order of 15 minutes, to prevent them from being placed everywhere and then flipped on and off like light switches.   Alliances would be forced to either pay for regular fueling of a dedicated Cloak Inhibitor POS, or would have a time investment when selectively onlining them.

The Cloak Inhibitor would not completely prevent cloaking.  That would be going too far.  Instead, I propose there be 2 new timers that work in combination with active Cloak Inhibitors.   A Cloak Drop Timer, and a Cloak Reactivation Timer.

If you are in a system with an active Cloak Inhibitor and you engage a cloaking device, or if you have a cloaking device engaged when a Cloak Inhibitor is brought online in a system, you get a Cloak Drop Timer.  This would be a timer with a duration of maybe 15 minutes.  Once this timer is up, your cloak automatically drops along with the timer.  If you manually drop cloak before the timer is up, the timer drops immediately.  Either way, when the Cloak Drop timer drops, you get a Cloak Reactivation Timer.

During the period of the Cloak Reactivation Timer, you cannot engage a cloaking device in the system.  The duration would be significant, on the order of maybe 2 to 4 hours.  The duration needs to be long enough to make jumping between alternate characters to avoid the new mechanic impractical.  When the timer drops, you can cloak in the system again, which starts the cycle over.

In addition, the timers will drop and reset when switching systems (but not when logging out and back in).  Someone wishing to abuse the system might try to jump back and forth between systems to keep clearing the timers, but pilots are vulnerable when jumping through null space gates even when fitted with cloaking devices, so I don't think this would be a serious loophole.

End result is alliance's can make cloaky camping far more difficult in key systems.  Pilots in general could no longer afk for extended periods of time in null space, without fear of someone activating a Cloak Inhibitor and decloaking them.  But pilots would still have a guaranteed 15 minutes of cloaking safety in each system.

Ore Reprocessing Table (pre-Mosaic)

Today I bring you a table of minerals you get from the various asteroid ore.  There are already a lot of tables out there that do this, but many of them don't show you the information in the most useful ways, and some of them have glaring errors (like the Evelopedia Advanced Mining page having the Zydrine and Megacyte columns backwards). 

Many tables, the Evelopedia table included, show you the minerals per 100 unit of asteroid.  This is nice, as it's how the game is designed, but it's not the most useful.  Mining ships mine at a rate measured in m3 per unit time.  Therefore, the most useful way to show the minerals acquired is to show it by the same measure, in m3 per unit time.  Therefore, below I have put together a table showing units of mineral per 100 m3 of asteroid.  This makes it much easier to decide what to mine based on what minerals you want or need.  Displayed in this way, it becomes a straight numbers comparison.

UPDATE! CCP is changing the minerals in all the ores with the Mosaic update. These values will no longer be valid after the release of Mosaic.


Minerals Per 100 m3 (prior to Mosaic update)

	Tritanium	Pyerite	Mexallon	Isogen	Nocxium	Zydrine	Megacyte	Morphite
Veldspar	4,150	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Scordite	2,307	1,153	0	0	0	0	0	0
Pyroxeres	1,170	83	167	0	17	0	0	0
Plagioclase	306	609	306	0	0	0	0	0
Omber	142	57	0	142	0	0	0	0
Kernite	112	0	223	112	0	0	0	0
Jaspet	36	61	72	0	36	2	0	0
Hemorphite	60	24	6	20	39	3	0	0
Hedbergite	0	27	0	65	33	3	0	0
Gneiss	256	0	256	48	0	12	0	0
Dark Ochre	1,101	0	0	0	22	11	0	0
Crokite	1,312	0	0	0	17	23	0	0
Spodumain	2,451	311	0	0	0	0	5	0
Bistot	0	1,036	0	0	0	15	7	0
Arkonor	432	0	80	0	0	7	14	0
Mercoxit	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	7

Taking a Bite out of Bumpers

A few of us within the AG community have taken to the idea of engaging "bumper" ships to stop freighter ganking in high security space.  Bumpers, of course, are the ships -- usually Machariels -- that repeatedly bump into freighters to keep them mis-aligned and unable to warp away until either the freighter pilot pays a ransom or a gank fleet arrives to attack the freighter.

Attacking these bumper ships to stop the freighter ganks is usually referred to as "bumper ganking", or "Machariel ganking".  I would like to suggest that we should not use the word "ganking" for this activity.  The word "ganking" suggests a criminal activity, and engaging these bumper ships is more aligned with a police engagement rather than a criminal activity.  For now, perhaps we should just call it "bumper engagement".  I would also like to suggest alternatives to what is usually imagined for this work.

By strict Empire law, attacking a bumper ship in high-security space is a criminal activity.  But this is due to the limitations of the programming and the inability of the programming to take into consideration intent and the inability to respect the spirit of the laws rather than just the letter.

As capsuleers in Eve, we can go further and act in a more intelligent manner than what basic Empire laws can accomplish in ensuring liberty and justice in Eve.  Brave officers within the AG community risk themselves to protect the people.  In this way, these capsuleers, who I today will call officers, are like officers in a police force.  I have thought this from the beginning, as is evident by my use of McGruff the crime dog as a stand in mascot.

This policing need not happen everywhere.  There should be plenty of places and ways in Eve to engage in PvP combat (which I will address in a separate blog entry at a later date).  But as a civilized people, we must draw a line somewhere.  And it almost goes without saying that attacking non-aggressive freighters ferrying cargo through high-security space should be viewed as a criminal activity that the people should not tolerate.  Police officers should respond to such behavior and work to stop it from occurring.

To that end, I would suggest that we review the manner in which we engage bumper ships in high security space.  In the past, there has been a mindset much like criminal ganking -- to sneak up on them, drop attack ships on them without warning, and destroy the bumper ship.  While potentially effective and certainly exciting, it lacks the element of police diplomacy. 

I would like to propose we consider a few changes to this tactic.  In situations where there is sufficient lead time before an impending attack on a freighter, I would propose the following:

1. Issue the bumper a warning.  Something like the following:  "You are engaging in an activity with criminal intent.  Withdraw from this area immediately or we will take action."
2. There is no real need to sneak up on the bumper.  In fact, coordinating an attack may be somewhat easier without trying to drop a fleet right on top of the bumper.  Move your police fleet into position next to the freighter.  It is fine if the bumper pilot sees this happening.
3. If the bumper flees, the engagement was a success.  The attack was stopped and the freighter pilot can continue on his way.  If the bumper persists and continues bumping, the police fleet attacks without the difficulty of attempting to time a warp in. 

Think about it.  Let me know your thoughts.  Share your ideas.  But whatever the case, let us continue to stand united and take a bite out of bumpers.

Most Unlucky Explorer Ever?

Amid growing frustration, today I have to share a short woe is me tale.  Am I the most unlucky Eve explorer ever?

What makes for being unlucky in exploration?  Bad loot?  Getting killed while running sites?  Having sites stolen?  Not me.  How about not being able to get to a site in the first place?  That's me.  Now, I'm not going to steal a site from someone, which means I need to get there first.  In about 9 months of playing Eve, I have still never made it to a site first.  Ever. 

Mind you, exploration is one of my less frequent activities, but I do try it from time to time, and I think I would enjoy the hacking game.  On one hand, the hacking mini-game is kind of dumb. But on the other hand, it's the kind of dumb I would actually enjoy.  I only really know what the hacking mini-game is because I got to do it once in the tutorial missions.

Early on, the problem probably had more to do with being in bad places and at bad times.  Too much competition.  But last night I thought would be my night.  I was finally going to get to do an exploration site.  I was out in a quiet corner of null space, in a system by myself, on the least busy night of the week, and well after midnight U.S. time.  A relic site was in the system.  This was it!  I almost had it scanned down.  Still alone in system.  I get it scanned.  I fly to the site.  I get to the site!  WTF?  Someone was already running the site!  HOW THE $%(%& DID THAT HAPPEN??

I have never been mad in Eve before.  Until now.  Time for me to go find one of those squishy stress balls.  Because I'm going to squish the $#$%&( out of it.