This! when I enter a system and flocks of ishtars are running to their structures to tether, I usually cloak up and do something else like some daydream of bathing in their tears
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Just make Mobile Observatories function like Mobile Depots, ie: they last for 30 days after deployment. If it goes into reinforced mode it stops functioning.
Then you get an unplayable situation where decloak pings happen every second instead of once every 10 minutes:
If you want to essentially remove cloaks from the game, sure, itās a good idea to have mobile observatories last longer and have a reinforcement timer.
Personally I think the current situation is healthier: Mobile Observatories exist so people are pretty much guaranteed to lose their ship if someone wants it dead when they leave it cloaked overnight in a system, but on the other hand cloaks are still a strong defensive tool.
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You mean that if the 100 peeps in null logged off all there botting alts lol
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Isnt eve a PVP based game ? So why should all the ratters and Botters be allowed to rat and bot without risk. Oh wait its nullbears again.
Guess i get in my cloaky camper and go afk again
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This canāt be stressed enough.
In theory, you can already do that and just launch 10 moobs for a ping every minute. However, this would incur an appropriate cost for the increased hassle towards campers.
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Exactly.
People forget to ask themselves the question āhow would EVE players abuse thisā any time they come up with a suggestion.
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If all that itās needed for is to tackle something and then open a covops cyno, itās going to be more like 35m isk.
Are nullers so out of content now that they bring a 24 member fleet to drop on an ishtar?
Back when I still was in null, the hunter would have solo-ed that ishtar in hope that he gets something more appropriate for a 24 blops fleet in response to killing the ishtar. But then, it would also have been multiple players operating the blops, not just one nerd and his alts, and the hunter wouldnāt have stayed in one system for long if wrecking ishtar failed to provoke a response.
With 25 alts, you can biomass your hunter and skill extract/inject a new toon into a bomber with covops cyno every second day. With the recent MCT deals, you can do it every day. Nice new zkill with nothing on it.
Having to invest 60+ m isk to wreck a 35m afk troll isnāt efficient.
Which means odds that he can remain cloaked despite you having dumped 65m isk to decloak him are lower then the odds he wasnāt there in the first place and local was buggy again.
Of cause, the later situation can be workarounded by subscribing an additional toon and leaving it at a locator agent.
True bots compare the isk price of an ishtar fit they lose if it gets blopsed to the estimated lack of income they if they dock up, and stay on grid if losing an isthar is more profitable then not continuing to crab with the rest of the fleet.
Itās the player operated crabs that are scared, and itās player alliances that are worried enough about their alliance zkill that they ask members to dock when neutrals come into local.
A player that needs to cloaky camp a system for days until he feels safe enough to try dropping his 24 blops alts is not a carebear?
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I prefer if the mobile observatories decloak 100%, once on deployment, and then every 10 minutes. As it is, the chance is 40%. Whatās the point of 40%?
āIt shouldnāt possible for a smaller and cheaper ship to kill my bigger and more expensive oneā. Same energy.
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Thank you. Finally someone who understands.
These topics are so crazy to read, most people donāt even realize how stuck they are in their bubble of uncreativity, stuck to the boring, unchallenging, time-wasting, vet- & blobfavouring gameplay we have right now. Always crying that āthis would break the gameā āthat would break the gameā āthis cannot be doneā āthat cannot be doneā and being so wrong over and over again.
It reminds me of the discussions we had around the 2000s when fine-tuning StarCraft and Diablo II, it was ridiculous what people argued for outright crap mechanics (which equals the cloaky-camping of EVE today) and when Blizzard finally changed it (sometimes it took years to do so) exactly nothing bad happened. People realized it actually was an improvement (and would have been right from the start) and a few weeks later absolutely nobody wished to return for the previous version.
Iāll keep saying what I think on the matter: This current cloakymechanic (together with Cynos of course) is bad as hell and could use improvements towards a more active gameplay on both sides. Options for people to put active pressure on cloaked ships which forces the cloaky to be really active himself trying to evade their tools. And no, I donāt mean 1 click every 14 minutes to recharge the cloak defense, I mean the real threat of being found and decloaked within a few minutes by gameplay actions of the opponents if not paying constant attention, evading their actions and knowing how to react.
And @Gerard_Amatin ,rest assured, all fears of stuff ābeing abusedā can be adressed. Of course the goal is not to enable to defenders to ājust drop 100 MoObs to have a ping every few secondsā. 
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It absolutely isnāt, but really, I am not in the mood to explain such basics. Your example asks for āimpossibilitiesā, I only ask for ābalanceā. That difference is fundamental.
Somewhat relatedā¦ whatās the take on filaments with respect to cloaking?
The one talking about how his ship shouldnāt be killed by a smaller cheaper one, is also talking about balance. Ship balance.
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Moving goalpost? In your first example you talked about āshould not be possibleā. That is not a wish for balance.
The point of 40% is I assume to keep mobile observatories as an anti-AFK cloaky tool, rather than a anti-cloak tool in general.
After all, mobile observatories havenāt been added as an anti-cloak tool, but as an anti-AFK cloak tool. CCP made sure that these deployables have a low impact on active cloaking gameplay.
As result of the 40% chance based ping you wonāt reliably decloak and bother cloaked enemies at any ping, but over the course of the full 9 pings of a mobile observatory you have a combined 99% chance to decloak the enemy ship per mobile observatory if the target is AFK.
This chance based ping makes mobile observatories an excellent tool against AFK cloaked players.
Often when people complain about mobile observatories being ineffective itās because these players do not understand the intended target of mobile observatories: AFK players who leave their ship overnight in a hostile system, not cloaky campers who pay a minimum amount of attention.
No ?
Being AFK makes the threat non immediate, just as much as being in system but not visible and ATK.
Letā be clear : if it was not making them a threat, they would not be here. They do that precisely because it makes them a threat.
And you can also rat in a corvete and the cost is recovered after 0 site.
What an argument.
No ? He just need to use a timer to recloak each of his toon mid-warp to another safe ā¦ safely.
And remain AFK the rest of the time.
And when he is active, and his alts ready to jump, he can hunt.
depends on the price of the item.
Depends on what is needed. You donāt need to bridge ALL the fleet all the time.
iron maiden in the actIV was death of barbs 
Or are you talking about the bowazon seeking arrows that were invisible if spawned from more than 2 screens ?
Donāt feed the troll. He knows that heās making a strawman, but canāt stop itself from making gross exageration that would need you more energy to explain that he used to make his troll.
Just ignore it.
If the player is able to recloak mid-warp and be AFK āthe rest of the timeā this player is clearly not asleep or at work.
Yes, I realise that āAFKā is a scale and that being away from your keyboard for 10 minutes could also be considered AFK.
Mobile observatories however are designed to be effective against players who are AFK for well over an hour, not against players who click once every 10 minutes.
The issue is, that being a threat to people should require to be active all the time you are a threat.
I think, maybe the cloak should not make you probe scan immune. They should only provide d-scan immunity (like covert cruiser), AND target immunity on grid (which is why, target recalibration and range limit) , but would still require you to be active least you can be probed down and your trajectory can be guess with several passes, and you then can be hunted.
Please tell me why my idea is stupid 
(Iām sure it is, just I donāt know why)
Interesting idea, but it wouldnāt be balanced.
If cloaked ships can be probed, it wonāt need āseveral passesā in all situations. You will often be able to immediately warp to them.
The most obvious situation is where you see a ship on your current grid cloak up, or you know there are cloaked ships trying to position themselves. You do one pass with combat probes and youāre on top of the cloaked ship, decloaking them. Cloaks would cease to be useful in that case, which disables a lot of cloaked combat like bomber squads.
Another situation is where youāre trying to move a capital ship through hostile space. Capital ships are notoriously easy to probe with their enormous signature size so their only defence during such a trip is to use a cloak while waiting for the jump timer to tick down and the capacitor to tick up until they can take the next jump. If cloaks didnāt defend those capital ships against hostile probes, thereās no way to travel through space where you donāt have structures already.
Fun fact, the max red jump timer of capital ships of 30 minutes is problematically long compared to the 15 minute cloak hardening time. Because of that, people could easily catch a moving capital ships by dropping multiple mobile observatories. After all, 60 million ISK may be expensive, but is suddenly very cheap when you can drop a bunch of them to catch a multi-billion supercapital ship.
Luckily CCP also added a booster to increase the cloak hardening time specifically for this purpose: the Strong Veilguard Booster.
When people ask for the āremoval of cloak hardeningā they forget details like that.
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