Patch When? #1 - Dev Diary - Cloaks

[Aingar]

Art by @Kauket

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Hello! This and more upcoming Patch When posts are intended as a sort of preview for the new patch features, hopefully dropping the number of posts asking stuff questions like "Why is my cloak randomly going off?", "Why are my Jump Drive coordinates from 2015 not working?" or "Why did my BC randomly die while still at 20% HP?"


Well, today we are going over the first thing on the menu:

Spoiler

CLOAKS

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The cloaks by their very nature are intended to make other players unable to interact with the cloaked player. While this still holds true in their newer version, it is very much not as drastic as it used to be. This cloak rework involves quite a number of changes aimed at making them less about butt-cloaking (you know who you are) and annoying people with that annoying bleep that you can't get rid of without a piece of specialised equipment. They now involve some decision making and (limited) counterplay.

Requirements simplification:

Cloaks will no longer use storage space to determine if a ship is capable of using it, leading to some weird outliers. They will be simply be hard-locked to specific ship classes:

• Cloak Mk1 - Fighters, Bombers, Freighters
  
• Cloak Mk2 - Gunboats, Cruisers
  
• Cloak Mk2 adv. - Battlecruisers, Battleships
  
• Cloak Mk3 - Transports
  

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Means of Detection:

Easily one of the most impactful changes: Cloaks now go offline if a non-grouped player gets within a certain radius of you. The radius of the detection is currently as follows for human cloaks (obviously subject to change):

• Cloak Mk1 - 1500m
  
• Cloak Mk2 - 3000m
  
• Cloak Mk2 adv. - 4500m
  
• Cloak Mk3 - 3000m
  

Here we can see a sneaky Outcast being detected by a random Zoner passing by. This does mean that the very concept of butt-cloaking is going away for good, as while you CAN get into a superior position using cloaks, you can't just unload your cerbs/siege guns on an enemy that just so happened not to have a Cloak Disruptor on them.



"But wait, didn't you say 'non-grouped players'? What about them?" - Excellent question! The answer is that they receive a sound notification very similar to the cloak alert that currently graces our ears. Except we just use the cloak sounds instead.



Yes, now we can cancel that otolaryngologist appointment! Moving on, we have:

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Fuel Usage:

Now we get to the second big change: Cloaks no longer have a static lifespan upon activation. Instead, they work similarly to how invisibility cloak worked in Crysis games: Standing still lets you conserve your batteries for a LONG time, roughly an hour, whereas running (cruising) drains your reserves drastically, and using a TL drops the cloak lifespan to single-digit seconds. The way it works behind the scenes is we're using a quadratic formula, where X is the ship's speed:

fuelUsage = ax^2 + bx + c

Most cloaks are set in a way where standing still on a full bank lasts you 60 minutes, impulse(+thruster for mk1) lasts you 20-25, and cruising lasts you below 10 minutes. That way you have to decide if you want to traverse a larger distance, but moving at a lower speed, or if you want to sprint, but compromise your ability to maintain the cloak for longer.

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The Bugfixes:

Sadly, the Fun Police also found out about the changes being made and demanded a fix for the semi-transparency bug, so it had to go. Goodnight, sweet prince. The bugfix for missiles tracking cloaked ships is also coming back after being reverted shortly after deploying a few months back.

Some of you may have noticed how I only talked about human cloaks. Alien cloaks have separate 'stats' to them, but you'll have to wait until the patch to see for yourself what quirks hey might have!

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Hope you enjoyed this first instalment in the series! Next one on the list is Docking Bays, coming Very Soon™!
* Sooner than the patch, I swear

[MeisterHaku]

A Great way to shorten the time until the patch goes live. Keep up the good work.

[jammi]

I appreciate that the changes were intended to prevent the incredibly boring tactic of heavy ships rolling up on smaller ones while invisible, and then opening up at point-blank, but this also seems to largely eliminate cloaks as an escape tool.

Particularly for transports, cloaks were an extremely expensive investment that could give you a fighting chance if cornered by a cruiser or similar nasty where there'd normally be no chance of survival.

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News article library, feedback and content requests.

[Lusitano]

Particularly for transports, cloaks were an extremely expensive investment that could give you a fighting chance if cornered by a cruiser or similar nasty where there'd normally be no chance of survival.

i do agree on this! for example the only defence that my ZBT, that rarely use to be honest, is the cloak, and now a rat or something like that, simply can be camping on a jumphole/gate and ... i mean .. why? there are already the cloack disrupters ... i mean ... why? and look at that range ... honestly ... why messing with something that was ok, that that was even one counter to it, and now ... to be honest never saw someone complain about it .. except for buttcloaking! i don't use cloaks on my main trader because of the cargo size is small, and many times is flying on house space, and cops and anvy don't like to see that equip ... fair enough ... but for some big transports, that go around hostile space, for example, no chance for survival on a hostile encounter, the only way to have some safety is the cloak and now you are ruin it. i'm already imagining the pob owners that produce this time equip ... yep .. sales are going down!

[Lusitano]

and another thing, i have one freighter that i use for exploration events, that has a cloaking device, one mk2 and in a few weeks it will be useless ... thank you!!

[The_Godslayer]

Some of you may have noticed how I only talked about human cloaks. Alien cloaks have separate 'stats' to them, but you'll have to wait until the patch to see for yourself what quirks hey might have!

I'm beginning to notice a trend in recent development, and it looks a lot like quad razor ishtars and vhfs only.

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I'll do something about my superiority complex when I cease to be superior.

"Whatever happened to catchin' a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whoopin and gettin' your shoes, coat, and your hat tooken?"

[Spectre]

On the one hand, change can be the spice that's needed to keep things interesting, though it really is an argument on just how subjective 'interesting' is here.

On the other, I really feel like a lot of the specifics need to be reconsidered. For one, the ranges on each cloak's auto-disable are frankly just not practical. None of the classes mentioned save for battleships (barely) have weapons that can even reach the ranges where their cloaks would be disabled at, which should at the minimum be a guideline for where these cloaks would be disabled at.
For two, and in line with Jammi, all it'd take to keep someone from cloaking up and getting away is for a fighter to stick inside that range, even if no one has a CD or cloak disruptor. There wouldn't be any point to mounting a cloak after implementing this save for RP or flying through less-than-friendly space.

I get the general idea, but I think this needs more time in the cooker, frankly.

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#BringBackTheCommonwealth

=CR=-----IN|G
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A plurality is not a majority, and a majority is not everybody.

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Spec's RP Consortium
V-3X | CV-Montu | Fort Murray
Unum pro Omnibus, Omnes pro Uno

Your signature grew too big, I helped downscale it. ~Vex
Your adjustment grew too big, I helped downscale it. ~Spectre

[Serpentis]

Well, this is unfortunate, I was just thinking of upgrading and getting a cloak for my transport. Guess not. I'd say the ranges of cloaks need to be a lot lower to be honest, I mean, you don't even need a cloak disruptor now to screw with cloaks.
Other than that, nicely done with some previews before the patch!

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Abadan and the Arcadia | Sergei, The lost | Feedback Thread

[Haste]

I think we're overselling 'escape cloaks' a little bit here. If you round down the chance to escape combat with a cloak, currently, I'd say you'd end up with a solid 0%. Between the charge times, it being extremely obvious with how long someone's shield stays down, and needing little more than one CD hit to cancel the whole process, it really is a small miracle whenever someone successfully cloaks away from an encounter.

I will say that the idea behind the range restrictions and resulting removal of "buttcloaking" is for us to be able to make other aspects of cloaks better. Being able to cloak a full hour on a snub for ambushing purposes (or anything else where slow flight / being stationary is viable) is a pretty big buff. Of course, Battleships aren't gaining nearly as much here. At slow speeds, cloaks do last a good while longer on average than they do on live.

Looking at the ranges and current weapon ranges (in the test build) I can see us dropping the decloak ranges a little. Though, I will say, I don't really intend for cloaks to allow players to auto-win an engagement by being able to just open up on lighter ships from medium/close range -- that's not exactly what I view as "fun" or "healthy" PvP so I have no interest in enabling it.

Reducing charge times is also on the table, although capital ship shields have a much longer cooldown period in the new build (and are much stronger, but those are details better left to a different post) so we'd have to be careful to not make it too easy to get out with a cloak either (it's pretty hard to notice someone charging if their shield isn't a giveaway, and having to constantly spam the scan hotkey isn't very fun). I'd urge people to remember that there's more changing in this patch than just cloaks, and Battlecruisers can easily end up over 4k removed from one another in a duel.

Quite frankly, though, Aingar and I already agreed a day or two ago that at the end of the day, these cloak changes are a step in the right direction, but to truly make cloaks a fun and interesting part of the game they do need more changes. I'd like to see cloaks that are intended to work mid-combat without a focus on escaping, for example, but with a focus on "evasion". That however requires a half dozen extra restrictions to be placed on them (just cloak next to a lane, hit F3, poof), so we'll have to give that some more thought and it'll definitely not be ready for this patch.

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Edit: One more thing to note, as I forgot: perhaps the biggest buff to cloaks this patch is an indirect one, as work on missiles and countermeasures has made CMs both less powerful (lower ammo counts) and less essential for surviving missile attacks (missiles no longer have turn rates in the multiple hundreds of degrees per second). While that isn't a change to cloaks per say, it makes the opportunity cost of mounting one much smaller, which helps make them worth considering.

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[Slimalou]

I think we're overselling 'escape cloaks' a little bit here. If you round down the chance to escape combat with a cloak, currently, I'd say you'd end up with a solid 0%. Between the charge times, it being extremely obvious with how long someone's shield stays down, and needing little more than one CD hit to cancel the whole process, it really is a small miracle whenever someone successfully cloaks away from an encounter.

So a fix to this would be nerfing CDs so they can't disrupt cloaking. I mean its a cruse disrupter, the way it is now its a everything disrupter...