I offer this for discussion. I’ve now run into several gate camps that have about 10 people who drop and disconnect 100s of drones to create effectively a de-cloaking bubble. This auto-decloaks cloaky ships due to <2000m proximity.
I deem this a certain exploit. Please note that I specifically differentiate this from a ~100 person gate camp using connected drones (this is OK). This to me is different. It’s the “seeding” of 100s of drones by the few players that I would consider an explicit exploit.
Thank you in advance for the discussion and feedback.
I am pretty neutral on this. It’s pretty clever. It’s using simple mechanics that we all use when we leave drones behind. I personally file this under a tactic of fair play. I can’t force myself to see this as an exploit; more power to people who want to catch blockade runners and anything else.
What if they put 100 cargo containers down? Or other deployable? Why drones? People have been putting stuff down to disrupt cloaks since the start of cloaking. Some fields aren’t as huge as others. I just see this as a disability of relying on cloaks to do everything. It’s fair play in my book and this can be countered by literally taking another route? If that is a valid argument?
Just my thoughts on this as a person who spends more time in a crane than my own incursion kronos XD
Another thing I should add is that it creates a fair amount of lag. I’m not talking 10 people, 50 drones (or even 100 drones). I’m talking 5 people and then literally 100s and if 1000 drones.
Just look around for a blank path double click in space towards it overheat mwd 1 cycle and cloak boom you are out of decloaking range and you cloak before they can target you and you can laugh at them in local which is always a + or you can just mwd back to gate and crash either way works.
Worst thing you can do is try warp off as usual and spam cloak.
It does not work like that. You land and there is a drone within 2000m from you. And it’s like that for 10-20km at a time. I don’t have issues with gate camps - they make Eve fun. I have issues with 5-10 players seeding 1000 drones - I consider this an exploit which lags the game and bypasses a mechanic. But perhaps I’m in the minority on this?
Report them. I’ve read on the forums (probably the old ones) that causing lag / server instability with such spam might get GM attention and also a potential warning. Worth a try.
Btw any even half decent gatecamper uses frozen corpses anyway which most people have hidden on their overview. These drone spammers sound like amateurs who also lack fine taste.
Containers disappear after 2 hours and you can only jettison something once per 2 minutes which makes creating de-cloaking bubble really hard. Drones are slightly faster to drop and they disappear in like week+ unless someone picks them up. As for deployables, those cannot be put at 20km from gate which is the distance the ship that jumped appears. So drones are the best choice.
This is being done since I remember, but it is pretty uncommon strategy as it requires significant effort. So I am pretty sure that CCP knows about that and they don’t consider it exploit. Whatever you or I think about it is irrelevant. But for me, cloaky ships should not be 100% safe so it is good that we can counter them at least this way.
If you see a sphere like that, you can report it as EULA breaking abuse for causing lag. If it happens repeatedly, CCP supposedly takes more drastic actions against the perpetrators than just clearing the grid.
Frozen corpses being celestials can be jettisoned without creating a cargo container thus can mass jettison them.
They are cheap to get you can even create them yourself with some time investment if you can’t reach a hisec system to buy them en masse.
They only last two hours as most celestials (like containers themselves or wrecks) but are fast and easy to scoop back up (and are pretty small, only 2 m3 each) just have to keep track of time.
Most people don’t have them on overview so will do their cloak+mwd trick as usual instead of something with a better chance of succeeding and probably will not even realize their cloaking didn’t work until it’s too late.
So the only downside is the 2 hour lifetime but the benefit of mass jettisoning them and that most people will not be aware of their presence far outweighs that imo and it’s pretty easy to scoop them back up anyway.
You may not do anything that interferes with the ability of other EVE Online subscribers to enjoy the game or web site in accordance with its rules. This includes, but is not limited to, making inappropriate use of any public channels within the game and/or intentionally creating excessive latency (lag) by dumping cargo containers, corpses or other items in the game world.
Now that there are so many cloaky nullified ships that are nearly impossible to catch it seems reasonable that there should be some methods available to have even a remote chance of catching the target, which on top of being cloaky nullified usually has a very short align time. Many of these targets can simply burn back to the gate if they think they’re not able to safely warp. Also if you do the math, to cover perfectly the entire shell where someone could appear around the gate when decloaking, plus a larger area around it to cover as they burn away from the gate takes not only a lot of drones but good placement. Time consuming and people seem to appear wherever a weakness in the shell is. (Can’t prove what determines where someone spawns is it random or determined by what is already there? Who knows?) We tried the drone blob a few times but don’t bother as it didn’t seem to be worth it for the relatively minor gain.
I don’t see the problem especially because after all that setup they do to have a small increase in chance to catch the target, the target (if they wouldn’t have been caught anyway without the drone blob) still can most of the time get away or can simply go another route and avoid the gate altogether.
They are not creating lag. They are creating an obstacles that prevents cloaking. Peoples aren’t dying there because lag, that is just their excuse for losing.
Decloak objects (cans, abandoned drones, etc) on gate camp bubbles. What are the true practices of you GMs regarding this? is there a rule of thumb how much is too much?
It is too much when our systems and procedures indicates so. Sorry, can’t be more specific
I know this isn’t helpful at all, so let’s put it this way:
As to the tactic itself, it is ok if you drop some drones or containers and position them in a way to disturb ships coming from particular directions. You won’t need that many drones or containers for that. But if you are thinking about covering whole gate from each possible direction with a mass of drones or containers, then this is not the way to do it as you would require hundreds of drones and that may cause lag.
I hope this makes sense, but feel free to ask for a clarification, if needed.
These drone spammers sound like amateurs who also lack fine taste. 
