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So, let's talk about Cloaking Devices...
tobar26th
Member Posts: 799 Arc User
I know this has come up hundreds of times in the general feedback forums, but I figure with a new expansion, and a whole new faction using them it's worth bringing up fresh.
Some time ago, well over the one year period, and possibly even two years now, Klingons could cloak, they could hail their enemies, throw taunts at them, pick up loot, and all was well with the world. Cloaks made sense.
Sometime after that a patch was born, and with this patch the cloaks were adjusted, now when your bridge officer speaks to you, you accidentally decloak. Your transporters can now no longer beam through your cloak to pick up those provisions you looted. Enemies no longer need scan for you, they simply wait for you to speak.
Now there's been a lot of forum rage of this - I know I've closed, merged, modded more threads than I can recall on the topic. The answer has always been that it's working as intended, and is not actually a bug.
That's fine.
So let's talk about intentions. If we assume that it's intended to work how it is, we must now ask 'why', and 'should this be how it is meant to work'?
I can't see a logical reason that we should decloak for every interaction in game. I honestly don't believe the Dev's answer that it's intended and not a bug, therefore I'm going to throw it out there - this is Star Trek's first full blown expansion, it's biggest, most unprecedented update - fix this situation. Put some serious Dev hours into it, we were once told it would take manually updating every map in the game - I say let's do it, but back the launch a day or two if needs be, but let's sort this travesty out.
And if it's working as intended? Let's change the intention - the Cloaking Device is meant to be a weapon for subterfuge, something to allow the KDF and the RR to sneak around, creep up on their enemies, and generally go all cloak and dagger. It should not be required to have players drop their cloak to do simple things like chat with their bridge officers or pick up a weapons battery. Particularly when you're building a new faction who's play style relies heavily on cloaking.
So - let's hear it, would you rather wait a touch longer to have this sorted out?
Some time ago, well over the one year period, and possibly even two years now, Klingons could cloak, they could hail their enemies, throw taunts at them, pick up loot, and all was well with the world. Cloaks made sense.
Sometime after that a patch was born, and with this patch the cloaks were adjusted, now when your bridge officer speaks to you, you accidentally decloak. Your transporters can now no longer beam through your cloak to pick up those provisions you looted. Enemies no longer need scan for you, they simply wait for you to speak.
Now there's been a lot of forum rage of this - I know I've closed, merged, modded more threads than I can recall on the topic. The answer has always been that it's working as intended, and is not actually a bug.
That's fine.
So let's talk about intentions. If we assume that it's intended to work how it is, we must now ask 'why', and 'should this be how it is meant to work'?
I can't see a logical reason that we should decloak for every interaction in game. I honestly don't believe the Dev's answer that it's intended and not a bug, therefore I'm going to throw it out there - this is Star Trek's first full blown expansion, it's biggest, most unprecedented update - fix this situation. Put some serious Dev hours into it, we were once told it would take manually updating every map in the game - I say let's do it, but back the launch a day or two if needs be, but let's sort this travesty out.
And if it's working as intended? Let's change the intention - the Cloaking Device is meant to be a weapon for subterfuge, something to allow the KDF and the RR to sneak around, creep up on their enemies, and generally go all cloak and dagger. It should not be required to have players drop their cloak to do simple things like chat with their bridge officers or pick up a weapons battery. Particularly when you're building a new faction who's play style relies heavily on cloaking.
So - let's hear it, would you rather wait a touch longer to have this sorted out?
Post edited by tobar26th on
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See that's much my thought, it's not that I hate the issue, but the cooldown coming in after being interrupted is a swine. If I decloak when hailed I could live with it, if I had a clear cooldown afterwards.
The thing is, people dont like popups. This game does way too much popups etc. Even worse, standard the option is to fully stop ones ship as soon as a pop up comes up (Good thing you can disable at least THAT part)
So first popups and things being thrown in your face is annoying as hell, now unintended decloak is even worse, and is even more annoying.
For Kerrat, alot of PvPers go there, you wanna hang out in kerrat, some people do that mission with the borg cubes and stuff and at some point your getting a window or a small notification and whoop, uncloaked.
Its at least as annoying as the forced respawn in kerrat, which should imo also be fixed.
Kerrat should get a total revamp.
Ship maneuvring should come first, u wanna keep flying to wherever you want to, without any boundries, or anything that can come in your way. That kinda stuff should always get 2nd priority, and we want smaller notifactions somewhere in the screen which doesnt bother us so much
I don't really have a huge issue with requiring the dropping of the cloak to pick up items/use the transporter. Obviously you can't have the cloak and use shields or weapons (under most conditions).
Communications is the most tricky situation. Obviously you shouldn't decloak to talk to your bridge officers, but should you decloak to communicate outside? I don't know.
It doesn't make sense to me, for example, that you can remain undetectable and hail someone to taunt them. That doesn't make sense to me. It might be different if you're hailing, say, fleet command, but just general hailing is problematic.
In that respect, I think the issue is not so much with the idea of what exactly triggers a decloak, but that the entire cloaking/detection mechanic seems like it needs to use a lot of work.
What I would say, though, is two things should ultimately be changed:
1. Certain things should decrease your stealth rating, but not actually require decloaking. An increase in speed, hailing a contact, etc, should all damage your stealth.
2. Certain things should not be possible until you decloak. That is to say, they should not turn off your cloak if you do them, but you can't do them until you turn off your cloak- much like how firing weapons under cloak works now. Firing weapons, using transporters, etc.
Only certain things should forcibly trigger a decloak: certain types of special weapons (like say an antiproton sweep) and 'scripted circumstances'. Just deciding to answer a hail should never forcibly decloak you. At the worst, it just shouldn't happen unless you decloak.
I feel like the stealth mechanic is right now a significant hodgepodge.
It's claimed that the current "fix" results in intentional decloaking, but more often than not, the decloakings still make no story sense. Even less sense for Romulans who are always shown to spend great deals of time cloaked, gathering lots of scan data and observations. That appears to be impossible in STO.
It's not just cloak that suffers. Others are finding that cooldowns like the Singularity reset with cut scenes and at other odd times.
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I have been annoyed by this bug/design flaw/"totally working as intended dude" as well, but I can't remember ever failing a PvE mission because of it. Ever.
I would like to see it changed. But to be honest it would be very low on my list of overall priorities of things to be worked on. Fix the Exchange so I can search certain things by faction, clean up all the tailor bugs, help me keep from getting stuck on top of a cactus in the Romulan desert, fix the chat window bleed over between fleets, make the Transphasic Cluster Torpedo actually shoot when it is supposed to shoot, and a dozen other things that actually bother me a lot more. Then if there's time, come back to this.
It's bothersome, but there are much more bothersome issues about. Just in my opinion, of course.
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I would happily wait a few days to have a changes made to resolve this issue
Meh, I go from the TV series, whereby they could hail while cloaked.
This is kind of the point I'm making - that's a very poor excuse, when it was just a case of having broken the KDF I kinda got that, but when you're building a whole new faction based around cloaking? It's simply no longer acceptable.
I thought about that when someone mentioned it earlier in the thread, but to be honest I can't imagine when it would ever matter as NPCs don't seem to worry about cloak detection, and you can't hail Player Characters
Well, whether it makes sense or not, as far as I can recall, there has never been any indication from canon sources that a ship's hail can be used to determine a ship's location precisely enough to get a target lock, and there are actually quite a few scenes, in various bits of Trek, of cloaked vessels having ship-to-ship communications. If you remember the Chang v Kirk ship battle from Star Trek VI, there is even a scene of exactly what you're describing - Chang taunting Kirk (with Shakespeare quotes, IIRC) whilst fighting him in a cloaked vessel.
As far as this game goes, though, I can see why, purely for gameplay reasons, the devs want to make it so that any actual interaction, like looting, might require a decloak, but the decision to even have that happen due to popup boxes and simply hailing someone seems totally bizarre and ludicrous to me.
It seems like Battle Cloak for Romulans is supposed to be part of a strategy that makes up the lower power they get due to the singularity core, to alpha strike over and over, but if that is the case there certainly needs to be adjustments to how it works, and how the rest of the game interacts with it.
There have definitely been circumstances where you can hail someone while cloaked, but at the same time, given that cloak seems to have heavy EMCON foundations, this doesn't make a great deal of sense.
Which is why I don't think that you should be forced to decloak- I just think it should result in damage to your stealth rating of some indeterminate amount.
In the same vein as going fast: have ships gone fast under cloak? Definitely. But at the same time, going fast makes you easier to detect, even under cloak. Moving at full impulse shouldn't drop your cloak, but it should make you easier to detect.
Basically, the cloak mechanic should actually force you to sneak.
Romulan cloak only suffered if they went above warp six, it makes no sense for the cloak to suffer at any impulse speed. Additionally, they have had years to improve their cloak beyond that, so those limitations have probably been remedied/improved.
What exactly are we talking about when we say "hail"? Chatting with other players in the chat window or "hails" in episodes and missions? Regardless, I agree that we have seen several instances of vessels hailing other vessels while cloaked without being detected. In fact, the only time I recall a cloaked vessel being detected through their communications was admiral janeway in endgame... though technically her ship was "stealthed" not cloaked, and it was stationary, and she intentionally maintained a long conversation so as to allow the borg queen to locate her, beam her out, assimilate her, and infect the collective.
I think the reason why they don't allow one to scan objects while cloaked is that klingons could easily do the first part of kerrat without having to engage probes or spheres because they could just do that whole part cloaked and they probably felt that advantage was a little too great.
The cloak replaces the shields (Uses the same emitters IIRC) and creates interference with the transporters.
As for the Bridge officer thing, yeah totally. Your conn officer giving you an update should not break cloak.
It's total TRIBBLE that interacting with someone who is no more than ten feet from you, in the same room, should force the cloak to drop.
This isn't a damn Subamarine, we're not being pinged and tracked with echophones. We;re talking about a sophisticated device that bends light and various forms of radiation around the object its affecting, rendering it invisible to sight and sensors.
I'm actually going to go with "no." I've been living with this for so long with the KDF that I really don't care any more. My standards are so low that I'm just happy these ships have the "battle cloak" (which makes some kind of sense) rather than the "standard cloak" (which has a restriction that makes no sense.)
This game has a huge amount of things that don't make sense if you think about them too hard, or at all, in-universe or out.
Why does a Gorn shooting at me mean I can't use my warp drive? Why are there no ships with more than four weapons in a direction? Why can't I point my bow "up" or "down" (leading to ridiculous spiral courses whenever I need to change "elevation")? Why can't a guided missile hit something at more than a 90 degree angle from their launcher?
Ultimately, I decided to just shut up and play the game.
Absolutely, let us hope the dev team fixes this.
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But what kind of maps SHOULD be fixed? That is the better question.
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The only specific example that bothers me is hailing someone who's out there looking for you specifically; anything else I imagine is to vague to be particularly obvious.
Scanning is one of those events that, at least in general, requires some violations of EMCON protocols. The Romulan ship in "The Pegasus" didn't keep its cloak up while scanning the asteroid field, despite that it would have been a significant strategic advantage. Similarly, in the two episodes where we hear the most about actual cloaking mechanics- The Search II and Face of the Enemy- it is repeatedly emphasized how important it is to avoid high energy operations that would leak through the cloaking device. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that using high energy active sensors ultimately defeats the purpose of the cloaking device by radiating enough energy that someone can track it.
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IF thats the case then it should be simple to fix as the mechanic that broke the original mechanic didn't touch every map.
Also, MES doesn't drop on comms, does it ? Perhaps fixing the cloak would entail a redesign of the entire mechanic from scratch. But just remember STO doesn't copy other games cloak mechanic nor canon use of the cloak, the cloaking device in STO is a unique device mechanic found ONLY in this game, and DS says it's working the way HE wants it to work. He is the J.J.Abrams of the ST gaming world.
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The defiant wasn't designed to cloak, so it would make sense that it would be easier to detect than other ships that had been designed with that technology in mind. Additionally, as you said, the ship was within 300 meters, which is well within one kilometer at which most cloaked ships in the game also show up. When the defiant was detected, the romulan subcommander onboard said cloaked ships moving at warp speeds give off a slight subspace variance and suggested that after dropping out of warp "they would find nothing." However, the jem'hadar bugs swept the area "with some kind of antiproton scan." read: antiproton sweep, which is a cloak revealing skill in this game taken from the jem'hadar. Additionally, miles states that the defiant's power signature is unusually high for a ship of its size and so they cut main power as the cloak may not be masking everything, again, indicating that defiant was not designed for cloak.
I believe in nemesis that the scimitar's cloaking device was unique in that it gave off no tetryons or antiprotons, the typical means of detecting cloaks. Whether the cloak was a reman improvement or simply a romulan advancement in cloaking technology that was used aboard the scimitar, now that the romulans have scimitars, it would be logical to assume that they also have this improved cloaking technology if it came from the remans removing the tetryon factor. They didn't state what speed the mysterious energy signatures were moving at, but if the ships were moving faster than warp 6, that could have been the reason, or the sheer number of ships in a relatively concentrated area, or more importantly, it was a combined romulan/cardasian fleet, so cardasian ships, again, ships not designed for cloak, were using cloaking devices and that could have accounted for an even greater tetryon particle presence. Also, when miles was called to ops about the readings, he said he had no idea what they were, he'd never seen anything like it, which would again lead me to believe that the strange readings were not a typical way of detecting a cloak, and were quite possibly caused by the interaction of romulan cloaks with cardasian technology.
I would assume that maintaining an open com channel with someone who's specifically looking for you could leave one open to being located, however, brief hails/conversations shouldn't put one in danger, nor should receiving a hail that one simply listens to but does not respond. Additionally, I'm sure there's some technobable that could be used to explain why, "Damn it captain, they're routing their communications through the *technical this* preventing the *technical that* from being detectable!"
Agreed, while under cloak, intensive scanning should definitely be an issue, but I think passive and lower sensors shouldn't be a problem. I can't think of any specific examples with references, but I seem to recall several instances of non cloaking federation ships scanning things "gently" as it were so as not to alert the enemy to their presence, so i would assume that being cloaked on top of gentle scanning would allow one to have some use of the sensors without risking detection.
Regardless of all that, for the sake of gameplay, it wouldn't work out so well if one could do most things while cloaked, for example, the entire first half of kerrat while cloaked.
No, the reverse. Something in messaging (in the programming sense) related to events/triggers/popups got changed game-wide. It can be 'overridden' on a map by map basis.
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Sounds to me 'messaging' should be fixed then.
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I do believe that they have tried to fix it, but have failed, so now it is working as intended.
I think that picking up a drop should drop the cloak. I also think that a popup or again, any interaction that I have engaged on willingly, should also decloak the ship.
BUT, a popup that I did not click on to engage, or one of the fly text messages where your bridge officer tells you something, should never, ever decloak you.
Unless I physically click on an interaction, my ship should never decloak.
Heh, the current state of the cloaking mechanics makes me think of how different and short Kirk and Changs battle would have been if their cloak worked like ours do.
Chang: "I can see you, Kirk."
Kirk: "Chang."
Chang: "Can you see me?"
Kirk: "Why yes, yes I can. You uncloaked the moment you started talking... Fire!"
Chang: *facepalm*
This is how things feel with the mechanic as is, its laughable at best atm. There are many who don't even bother with the cloaking because of this and even with the up coming Romulans they've used the tag line "They are the masters of cloaking technology" yet the game play focus and selling point seems to be more on the singularity powers then the cloaking itself. Thats some Tal Shiar level of misdirection there, at least they got that right...