Suggestion: Cloaking devices

[Haste]

Just get rid of them or redesign them entirely around ambushing. Only let people cloak up and remain cloaked if their ship is (nearly) stationary. Make it take a while to cloak so that it's unfeasible to use them to escape from a fight. Once they're up, though, they should probably last either a very long time or forever.

None of the factions that have permanent cloaks have truly benefited from them either. I'm in two. The only result of having them is that people simply don't bother trying to interact with you. K'Hara, Wilde or Aoi ships on the player list? They're probably cloaked. They'll probably not show up to do anything but shoot the crap out of an unsuspecting player and then cloak up again. Result: Fewer interactions, while we already have too few on this server thanks to its huge universe and small player base.

I would redesign Jump Drives while we're at it. Design them, again, around ambushing. Let just about any ship create a short-lived (let's say it lasts 15 minutes to an hour) "Jump Beacon" by scanning an area with a hyperspace survey scanner.
This jump beacon would then let a ship with a jumping device jump right on top of it (possibly destroying the jump beacon so it's only one-use). Jumps would only take about a minute to charge, but starting a jump would drop your shields and any kind of hull damage (including, say, a CD) would cancel the jump. Bam. Players can surprise-jump their ships into large fleet battles, but can't use them to repeatedly escape.

This would probably require some flhook magic, however, and I'm not sure if the dev team still has an flhook wizard.

Oh, and yes, the jump beacon thing sounds a bit like cynosural fields in Eve. This may or may not have to do with me playing this game.

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