Because i’m bored to see players claoked in systems all the time with the impossible way to scan them down even with mobile observatory if they aren’t afk i want to suggest these changes.
Make cloaking devices generate a small amount of heat (it will damage only this modules and not the entire high slot rack) that damage the module itself. Player will need to repair it with nanite paste before it will get destroyed.
Other and last suggestion is to give a 15 minutes timer on players decloaked by mobile observatory during he cannot use the cloaking device. Timer will not disappear if docked or with changing system.
inb4 “if they are afk they are no threat!” 
btw, you don’t need any complex damaging- or timing-mechanics. If CCP would simply make Mobile Observatories rescoopable and lower them in cost instead of costing you ~70M ISK just for playing the “guess if the cloaker is really afk” game. People would use them to force the cloakers onto their toes until they give up, just like the cloakers do it to the locals with the always present cyno-threat. Fair game in my eyes.
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That isn’t a good enough excuse.
Also, cloaked ships can be decloaked.
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He said whet they aren’t afk…
That said they simply can’t hurt you if they are cloaked
If they are not afk, you can just bait them into attacking you to decloak them. If they attack, you can counter them. If they don’t, you can PVE just like normal.
Why do cloaks need more counters?
Tell me, you dislike it that cloaked players are in your systems. Would you like it if uncloaked hostile players are in your systems instead who kill you any time you undock?
What would you do when uncloaked players are in your system? Group up and fight them?
Well, luckily that’s the same solution you have to cloaked players! Group up and fight them.
Those cloaked players are likely looking for easy targets to kill. Present them an ‘easy target’ and make them regret taking the bait.
Cloaks are not the problem.
Why are you laughing?
Because thats insanely naive. Those cloakycampers know what they are doing. They know how to blueball you long enough that all the guys in your “counterfleet” have no patience any more to just wait for nothing to happen and wasting their online time. For hours and hours and hours. And at some point the moment comes when you won’t find people any more willing to wait and thats the moment they open the cyno, bridge in their BlackOps gang, kill what you have on Grid within a minute and before you can even ping “halp halp hapl!!!” in your intel all your stuff in gone, along with the Cloakers. BlackOps have a 99% win Ratio for a reason, if it would be so easy to bait them, nobody would use them.
But good luck, it doesn’t work for the majority of the game, maybe it works for you if you just believe in these “theoretical counters” pretty hard.
I never said it’s easy to bait a blops gang.
It’s indeed a challenge, but you can find who they’re hunting from, where they’re staging from and how many people they have there if you know how zkillboard, dotlan and locator agents work.
And I was under the impression that we’re talking about an active cloaky hunter.
If the cloaky isn’t active but is camping for ‘hours and hours and hours’ it’s very possible they aren’t paying attention that time, which means you have a different form of counterplay in the form of mobile observatories to catch them.
(please ask why I am laughing again)
No, not interested.
I know why, and you should too. All that stuff is purely theoretical. The point is, that the mere presence of a CloakyCamper forces you to do a LOT of effort to secure your operations. Like a REALLY LOT. Forming a potential counterfleet, checking killboards (which won’t give you much information if they use a char that don’t have much of a killboardhistory), checking dozens of systems (BO jumprange yaaaayy) for their potential staging, dropping a MOBO for 70M which won’t be successful in 99% of all cases, so it’s mostly waste. And all that, for the realistic chance that the guy in local is pretty much alone and just want to tire out your attention, make your people getting used to his presence and becoming careless. The point is, you cannot know what they will do, when they will do it or if they will do anything at all.
And all that while they have do do literally nothing but investing a cloaky bomber or Covops to tire you. Make you wait. Waste your time. Pressure your patience. Preventing you from doing other, lucrative things because your “counterfleet” simply binds manpower and attention. Until you get sloppy (what will always will happen sooner or later) and they headshot you before you can get help.
The amount of pressure a cloaky camper can put on the locals and the amount of pressure the locals can put on the camper are not in balance. Fixing MOBOs to be rescoopable and a lot cheaper would solve that. It would force the campers to pay permanent attention to MOBO pings, because people would actually use them more often. Right now, it does cost more to just drop a MOBO (not even talking about catching someone with it) than it does cost the campers to send a CovOps/Bomber.
A cloaky character with a covert cyno will have no killboard history only once. It’s also enough of a SP investment that people generally don’t make new ones for regular cloaky gameplay.
A locator agent on a character they often drop with likely tells you their staging in 8 minutes.
While blops jump range is large, blops groups that have hunters camping for hours generally do need a staging system to organize their drops from which is either an NPC station or structure.
Only a roaming blops group wouldn’t have a regular staging that you can find like that, but those roaming blops groups will be actively hunting while their players are waiting for kills, i.e. they won’t be cloaky camping for hours.
This guy in the cloaky bomber will have to pay attention at least, because they do get caught by mobile observatories otherwise. Spending 65M to catch a 50M ship doesn’t sound like a good trade, except you seriously piss off the cloaky camper and have cleared the system for everyone to use.
Try not to drop them on people who are paying attention.
A mobile observatory has a literal 99% success rate on people who are AFK for the full duration of the observatory, with success rate only going down when they do pay some attention. If someone is camping you for many hours a day, chances are big they aren’t paying attention all that time.
The biggest complaint about mobile observatories I see is from people who don’t understand the purpose of mobile observatories: to counter AFK cloaky players.
They’re not meant against non-AFK cloaky players so if you suspect a cloaky isn’t AFK then don’t waste a mobile observatory. Correctly using mobile observatories for the right situation will improve your success rate a lot.
With your success rate of 1% it sounds like you almost always use them in the wrong situation.
You have no idea. I once had an Alt in such a Hotdropping Corp and they have Omega Chars running with MCTs just for that purpose of breeding new Cynochars (Extract and Biomass or sell them later), and they can switch them out every week if they want. These people are filthy rich and they don’t care a single bit to put some LSIs into a fresh or newbie-looking char to plan an OP.
Also anytime you BLOPs a Marauder, an Orca, a Rorqal, a Porpose you don’t have to aggress with the Cynochar, he can safely stay off the killmail.
Even IF you find a killboard entry and then run a locator agent, what then? Travel there and look how many people are in local? You realize these guys probably have multiple “Hunters” on the way and you still can’t know if they will drop you if you bait. So go on, form your “counterfleet” and waste the whole evening waiting for nothing to happen. They aren’t dumb. They know your staging system as well. As I already said: They know what they are doing and they win 99% of their engagements for a reason. They don’t bite as easy as you try to make it look. Because it isn’t.
It doesn’t sound like a good trade because it isn’t one. Because that guy isn’t “seriously pissed off”, he will just come back 20 minutes later in a fresh Bomber, knowing he has already make you spend 20M more than him. It’s a business for him.
Lol. You can’t know that.
You still don’t realize how they work, do you? They aren’t “completely afk”, they are semi-afk. Doing other tings, multiboxing multiple accounts. They will realize when they get decloaked, but until then the account requres zero attention. Some even have scripts running that decloak+cloak them randomly every 12-14 minutes to refresh the CloakStabilization timer. Is that illegal? Yes. Does anyone care? No. Because CCP can’t detect it with the random delay. They have literally no way to tell if the module was decativated manually or automatically. Some others use OCR software that simply checks the color of a single pixel and that color changes when the ship decloaks, so they get an audio alert and can manually cloak again. As I said, you are totally naive believing that 99% BO win rate is a concidence. Successfully baiting them is extremely rare and actually require you to be part of a group that has a huge emergency escalation potential. Because no one is guaranteeing you that they don’t just attack you to make you drop your counterfleet, because they want to kill that one with their reinforcements.
But, you maybe can answer a simple question: IF you can kill a cloakycamper with a MOBO decloak, he really was afk and not paying attention. Why does he deserve to have made you spend a guaranteed 70M for it? What would be game breaking or hurtful if the locals could kill some truly afk guy and then rescoop the MOBO? Nothing. It woud just make sure that the odds are even. Both can get away with zero costs if they are careful. Nobody can rest assured the other side has a guaranteed cost. Both can pressure each other equally. Against the pro hotdroppers that are using thirdparty tools it won’t help much anyway, it would just make it a bit less imbalanced.
This reminds me of a group that did cloaky camp our space with a massive amount of cloaky characters not long after mobile observatories were added.
Those guys went from AFK cloaking before mobile observatories to cheating their cloaking campaign after mobile observatories: they scripted their decloak and cloak times. On dscan it was obvious and with a couple of combat probes you could catch them after a few of such recloaks.
Someone in our alliance spent time catching many of them, made a video with evidence and sent it to CCP. Got them all banned.
CCP does care.
You want me to think of game breaking things you could do with rescoopable mobile observatories?
What if a cloaky is in your system. For example a capital ship moving through jumped in and cloaked.
You drop a hundred mobile observatories to bypass the chance based decloak ping and ensure they get decloaked the moment their cloak hardening timer is gone.
That’s how you break mobile observatories by making them rescoopable: you turn them into a tool against active cloaky players with no real cost, because you can just scoop them all again after.
Mobile observatories are carefully designed to have very little impact on active cloaky gameplay and only impact AFK cloaking. Making them rescoopable goes against that design.
No, you don’t. Active campers have a 15min cloak stabilization. They don’t need to care for MOBOs, all they need to do is to re-cloak after being decloaked by a ping. Or just do it manually to refresh that timer. Active campers aren’t hurt at all.
And, nice story, but I am really interested how you make “video evidence” of someone using scripted cloaking. Really. You can’t see the difference unless you have a webcam monitoring the guys client.
Players don’t need to prove it, but they can give enough evidence that makes the report very believable so that CCP can look into it.
CCP can prove it.
Please enlighten me, how. A theoretical explanation would suffice. The script simulates a mouseclick or keypress, nothing more. For the serverlog, its 100% exactly the same. There is zero difference of what CCP can see if I press the button every 12-14 minutes or if a script does it.