Cloaked Scouting Redux

This is an old issue, one that has been discussed many times, and it did seem that CCP was going to do something about it, but it appears to have fallen off the priority cliff.

Cloaked scouting in low-sec is bad for the game. It most affects small corps and low sp characters who are unable to venture into low-sec space without running into the unavoidable cloaked scouts.

It should be noted that this isn’t quite the same as say, cloaked camping, these characters aren’t hunters lying in wait for prey, they are most often afk, and most often using some kind of automated reporting method to post information to private corporation web pages. If they are using automated d-scan reporting, it’s also illegal.

Many “fixes” have been suggested, a very simple one would be to grant active combat scanning with probes the ability to locate cloaked ships. Another suggestion from a corp mate was a tweak on that idea which was to suggest that after being cloaked for a certain amount of time, say 20 minutes, your cloaking device would begin to leak radiation, which would then make it scannable using active combat probe scanning.

Whatever solution is chosen, the root of the problem is that this is an activity which has serious in game tactical and strategic consequences, about which players can do absolutely nothing. We just had an announcement from CCP about botting, well this is a related issue which has been discussed, and for which action has been promised for a very long time, and it is past time that those promises were kept.