It’s impossible to know if he’s botting or just a no-lifer. It’s what I would call a “dick move” to place 30 cloaky Arazus all over an entire region, but it’s not proof that he’s cheating. CCP would have to determine if he’s botting or not.
Also, bit of a tangent here, but mobile observatories are trash and you shouldn’t waste your money on them. Local is the most effective tool you have to counter cloaky ships, not the mobile observatory. If CCTV is in local, then you just don’t play Eve in that system. Dock up, or go somewhere else. Is it lame as hell? Yes. Is it effective? Also yes.
Or you do play, but have a strategy to survive when you do get dropped on.
Look up the fit of the campers.
Less than 3 points of warp core disruption? Try fit a warp core stabilizer
no scram? Try a ship with MJD
no webs? Try an oversized afterburner
not a bomber? Warp off before they can lock you - so fly aligned
or have a counterdrop ready when you notice he is active
Mobile observatories made it possible to check whether a camper is active, which means you can now outplay them (rather than spend a lot of effort to deal with campers that most likely are AFK - which was the case before mobile observatories).
You want me to use a ratting fit that just gets away from the guy? Haha, no. If I am baiting him, then I’m trying to kill him. I’m not going to put myself in a situation where “winning” is me not dying and “losing” is me dying. Baiting is a legit strategy if you fit a scram on your ratting ship and have friends ready to warp in and kill the guy, but if you’re trying to rat for income with a PvE fit in a system where you know a cloaky Arazu is waiting to cyno on top of you, then you’re just serving yourself up as easy content.
I’d at least recommend caution when trying to bait out campers until you know what the targets they’re looking to engage are, and what kind of numbers they’re likely to bring.
We nearly snagged a kill on a leviathan (on top of the hel that was the intended target) earlier this year because the counter-dropper were a bit too hasty and didn’t expect the cloaky camping alliance to have a bomber fleet as back-up.
Just scan down and kill the ship? It’s still in space for 30s when the character dissapears from local and that is why you see it on your dscan.
It’s probably a dedicated person(s) that run these clients on a server, probably with some form of assist that lets them see when a beacon is dropped across many clients (leagal). Hopefully not scripted/automated logout (illeagal, but hard to prove).
The video shows footage of a player dropping a Mobile Observatory in a system with a known cloaky camper. The cloaky camper then logs off within a minute.
The mobile observatory is meant to make it possible to interact with AFK cloaky campers, as it sends out a ping after 10 minutes and every 10 minutes thereafter that has a chance to decloak players who have been cloaked for longer than 15 minutes.
If the cloaky camper was AFK, he could have been caught after a while.
Instead, the cloaky camper logged off within a minute. This either means that the owner of that character was not AFK and was actively monitoring that character (and the dozens of other CCTV eyes characters that cloaky camp other systems).
It would be a pain to actively monitor that many characters as legitimate player. So what the OP is suggesting with this thread is that the camper is using illegal automation to warn him or log his characters out when mobile observatories are dropped in system.
We as players cannot tell for sure, it’s just speculation. I’d say, report them and let CCP figure it out.
If he’s got enough RAM and runs the game in windowed mode, and has more than one monitor on his computer, he would conceivably watch a bunch of screens at once.
If he were a botter, with 30 accounts in the area, it seems like he could attack you instead of running.
Also: aren’t Gilas the preferred ship for botters?
Writing a script to hot drop and then pvp isn’t easy. So bots that are skilled up for cloaky camping, aren’t camping in blops so they can all jump around to each other.
Additionally, Gila is for PVE botting (ie. running anoms), not for cloaky camping.
At this point we might as well call it the Mobile Observatory tax. If you want to rat during FRT hours, you pay 42 million isk per hour per system just to make this guy log out, and you’ll never kill him because the Mobile Observatory is trivially easy to avoid.
I guess it was inevitable that the krabs wouldn’t be satisfied with getting pretty much exactly what they wanted. @Brisc_Rubal told us this would happen.
Good thing is that you can share this tax between all blues in system.
Some people are never satisfied. Immediately when the mobile observatories were introduced people weren’t happy that they couldn’t use these to catch active cloaked players.
I dream of an Eve with interesting counterplay options for dealing with active cloaked players too, preferably ones that don’t break the balance of the game, but the mobile observatory definitely isn’t that, so instead I just stop playing and wait. Unfortunately most crabs aren’t willing to split costs on an observatory, and there’s no point trying to earn isk in a system with hostile cloakies. It’s really not a big deal anyway, since I can do work on my other monitor. CCTV is technically playing within the rules of the game. He plays the game how he wants to play it, so I’ll play the game how I want.
But yeah… I wouldn’t mind some more give and take in the cloaking mechanics. I don’t know how to solve it elegantly, but the current mechanics feel like they could use some improvement. CCTV is just a product of the game mechanics behind cloaking and the fact that Eve is a game that encourages multiboxing. We all know that multiboxing isn’t going to go away, but there is room for more modules to be added that interact with cloaks.
And Shipwreck said the cloaker may be using the same software to ring a bell, giving him a cue to go and manually log out that character to preserve the asset. How is that not the same as the example you quoted?
Dealing with active cloaked players has always been possible, as you can try to bait them into doing what they intend to do: drop on one of your ships to kill it. Present them with a possible kill to draw them out.
Trying to bait players who are most likely AFK is a waste of time, but with AFK cloaked players out of the question because of mobile observatories, baiting is the strategy you’re looking for to deal with active cloaked players.
I understand that you don’t think any offensive actions should ever be taken preemptively against cloaky players unless the cloaky player consents to the PVP encounter. I’m just saying that I don’t agree. It’s okay if we don’t see eye to eye here.
Cloaks would be pointless if you could just undo them.
Didn’t they recently put a time limit on them, though? I’m betting that was to stop long term AFK cloaking. ( So you when you’re being chased you can just cloak up and leave your character online AFK until server reset to get away. )