Cloak adjusting.

[Binski]

if cloaks were SRP only theyd also be a damn sight more useful than they have to be when everyone and there pet salamander can have one.

Yes because every new player wants to need a year + on a server with months of back story and millions to drop just to try out the best parts of the mod, a feature that is advertised and rightly draws in new players. No one wants to play vanilla anymore, especially people that already spent years only playing vanilla before finding the server.

I still find it funny the amount of jealousy and butthurt players that don't use these things often have against those that do. I've never faced the harassment or 'abuse' people claim about cloaks, not even as a trader, which is where i'd expect to feel it if I did at all.

Ironically, if they got rid of snubcloaks, I wouldn't cry. They are an insta escape. Every other cloak has enough of a charge margine that if they get cloaked, they simply did it in time, or managed to evade an enemy long enough to succeed. I always thought the 2 second insta disappear for 2 minutes was a bit much. HOWEVER, that wasn't sooooo bad when fuel was not guaranateed to be at every base. There was a time when someone like me had to know where the MOX was sold, and RP'd a little to supply myself from POB's in areas where there was none sold by NPC bases. When cloaking ships were like this, we had even more economy just based around fuel. Why they killed that, I'll never understand, to me that was pure insanity. It was fun having an actual instrumental commodity that wasn't just used for occasional jumps (which are also now ever more rare) and base sieges (which are now extremely rare except core 1s). My point is, I had to think about if I even wanted to cloak in a situation, if i really NEEDED to, or could afford to. There were times i might have only got one full load of mox, and been systems away from more, maybe would have resorted to hfuel temporarily. These things to be considered made cloaking a bit more tedious and fair in application. Again, snub cloaks are pretty much excempt cuz they got 1/1s regardless. And don't get me wrong, i have a snub cloak on my fighter too, but only cuz i know its at least 1 insta escape (most likely) and will definitely get me back to the nearest neutral base to refuel.

So yeah snub battles probably are ridiculous now with cloaks and fuel being everywhere available to anyone with the sufficient rep/ID to dock. I understand that all too well the question 'what if you can't use it to escape?' Does that defeat the point? No not entirely. I actually rarely use my cloak to escape an active battle, more like evasion of a situation altogether. The odd time now I can sneak up on a transport passing by. Not so easy anymore now that we make a sound and have much shorter cloak times.

Unfortunately it seems like there is no perfect system for cloaks. We're playing a game, yet cloaks are based on real life, where if we could, we would certainly use such an advantage to hide or escape. In RL it would effect the outcomes of battles or events, but in a game it effects the entire point of playing. With the exception of the buff the snub cloak received (i guess they figure most people use them if they use any, but no wonder since they're so easy) the rest of the cloaks were already nerfed. I lost over half my possible cloak time. I gladly sacrificed armor for stealth, an option I don't really have anymore, again, something I feel they were INSANE to ditch, the new batteries for cargo thing just makes no sense to me. It was fine as it was, it was the admins that should have been telling players to suck it up and carry on and get better and harder, instead of promising to change them around to suit a minority over some bad apples that can still insta naive players if they want to. Its funny, the allure of cloaks being available to anyone is what drew me in, one of the things anyways, and i'm sure it does to others. They don't emphasise that few cloaks are good to escape, or give you much time to set up an ambush, cuz if you did that, the other player might cry and ragequite (after not spending nearly as much time or effort on their ship).

As to cloak ambushes, well, I still believe that if you RP before you appear, and you give sufficient time for the other person to respond or start moving (to avoid being a stationary easy target) then you're ok. At least they still let us talk cloaked! The haters wanted that taken from us too! If a cloaker RP's properly before an attack, regardless of being invisible, only an inexperienced player will have problems from an ambush. And that's how you get experience, sometimes learning the hard way. I hear cloak ships now myself, and even yesterday dropped RP against an Nomad indie, and they started moving around instead of sitting there chatting. I could still have dropped my surprise attack but they had their fair warning. On this server, you'll never get that perfect insta attack on someone because they've always considered it too much. If the rules are followed, people get the same RP before an attack no matter what, and the real skill becomes, who's able to pay attention enough, with everything you're doing while flying, to be aware of such an impending attack. That's the name of the game right there. Cloak haters and nerfers are either lazy or scared.

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