Cue the AFK Campers

It’s been about a week since the last blog post and, to be perfectly honest, it’s been boring as hell from an industrial perspective. The market has been totally dead, and nearly my entire inventory (even the missiles) sat. My prices weren’t the problem, nor my selection, etc. It was just a dead week. Why? Theories abound. Spring break. Warmer weather (somewhere). Natural cycles. Or perhaps the afk campers in my constellation nearly all week drove people away, to play Eve in other systems and other regions. I know that’s what I did.

All of the missiles built this week, roughly 200,000 of them, were hauled to Amarr or Jita and sold there for a decent profit. The Orca was completed a few hours ago, and Kym will be able to fly it next week, but that pretty much concludes the highlights in North Provi. Aside from flying back to check on stuff, I hung out in Gallente highsec grinding distribution and storyline missions, mined highsec ice, and did other such boring things. And after a week of that, I’m bored. These campers need to leave.

Reds coming and going into the home system are one thing, and a part of nullsec life. Interceptor gangs, gate camps, and the like are all fine by me. Hotdroppers suck, but they’re part of the game too. What drives me crazy are people who come to the system, cloak up, and leave. They go afk for quite literally the entire day. There is nothing anybody can do about it either. No game mechanic exists to uncloak these people. It ruins the experience for players, and there is absolutely no recourse. Is that really what CCP wants? Somebody going afk for hours at a time, with literally no way for folks to do anything about it? I realize this is a tired topic, but it’s been at the forefront of my mind while playing Eve this week. These people suck. In every other part of the game, there is some sort of recourse for dealing with people. Not this situation though. That needs to change.

Cloaking as a game mechanic isn’t bad. There are valid uses for it. Sitting AFK for an entire day isn’t one of them. Aren’t folks in Eve supposed to hate AFK-ers? The highsec miners, the autopiloting freighters, the drone-assist PvP fleets, and everyone else who undocks, goes into space, and walks away? Why do the cloaky AFK-ers get a free pass when the miners, and everybody else, don’t? It’s been described as a form of botting, of shutting down the ability of people to play the game- and this is the important part- with nothing that anybody can do about it.

That’s gotta change. And it’s really a simple, simple change. First, put a timer on the cloak. Make it an hour. Or two. Whatever. At the end of that timer, the ship stays cloaked. However, it can be scanned down by a T2 Destroyer. Not the Light Interdictor hulls, but a new shiptype. Call it whatever you’d like. A hunter-killer of sorts. It’d be based off of the other racial destroyer hulls, like the Algos, etc. Let it be the sole ship that can fit a new probe launcher, one that can launch probes that’ll find cloaked ships whose timers have run out. Problem solved. People won’t be able to AFK for the whole day any more. I suspect these ships would sell quickly, too. Which will give me something new to build. I think they would be quite popular.

If you like this idea, share the blog! Tell others! It's the player base that drives change in Eve, after all.