while i do see your point it’s something that does have counters.
in any case, if they’re AFK, they can’t hurt you.
Wright you are young padawan, but without the industrialists that mine, research and produce, there are no ships and modules to have a fleet ready for a fight, grinding for isk allows you to aquire those ships and mods needed for fights. I know to understand the mechanics behind the simple PVP. There is no ingame npc that sells ships, mods or rigs, only players, i hope u understand how it works.
I fully agree, build your fleet, learn tactics, make content in game. When u have your fleet, cyno it in a region and fight like a mann, and if you have a tiny bit of pvp skills everybody will have fun. Do not only log a few accounts, cloak them and from time to time look if there is any miner that u can kill, that is not pvp, that is asaulting an old women to take the purse, it is a shame.
Industrialists can have protection fleets to deter afk cloakers from being a bother to you. You are not entitled to mine in peace in null sec. This is not what this space is made for. You live in an area of space that is YOURS and YOU are responsible for your safety.
I also engage in a bit of camping. When people want to do stuff where I am active, they either:
- ignore me because they know I don’t look for them. I do not care for Ishtars or somesuch and mostly not even for moon miners, unless they
- drop a MOOB to drive me away, which only increases the likelihood that I stay because of easy kills or more vexation because I am not as AFK as it seems
- they move on and wait for a time when I am not present or unlikely to respond (which is easy to figure out thanks to ZKILL and observing my usual online times
- They try to hunt me down and bait me
- which usually happens in combination with a protection fleet for their PVE activities, which is either too strong for me to engage (in that case, they can just do what they want to do), or I can skirmish them and they need to work a bit harder to keep me away.
All of this is what makes Null Sec the area of space it is supposed to be.
This is null sec for you. Just don’t be that old lady. Be the group of tough looking neighborhood militia guys to dissuade the wannabe lone mobster.
Funny anecdote: I am currently in a system with an active R64 moonpull. The guy, literally 1 player with 20 chars, has a Rorq with a dozen Hulks AND a HAW Navy Dread as defense on the moon. What did he do when I moved into system? Instead of carrying on mining and trusting his own defenses and alliance’s response efforts, he immediately warped to safety, started smack talking in local and then did totally stupid things with his alts. In the end, it cost him an exhumer and he logged off.
This guy was not an old lady, he was a stupid wannabe vigilante, who runs with his tail under his legs at the first sight of trouble.Stupid should not be supported by gameplay clutches and handholding of the sort that you demand.
2 Likes
In my opinion, maybe i am wrong, if a mobile observatory lives 1 hour 40 mins, pings every 10 mins and has a 40% chance to decloak, than cloaking device sould have a 40% chance to deactivate, every 10 mins and there should be a cloaking fatigue of 30 mins or so. Again, this is imo and maybe i am wrong.
You are wrong. This would prevent active cloaking as well, which is not the intended purpose of this deployable. You could even prevent cloaking entirely by dropping several MOOBs, which would be completely unbalanced.
Someone who is ‘forever cloaked and AFK’ will easily get decloaked by a mobile observatory.
A single mobile observatory pings 9 times with 40% chance each, which means they have a (1-0.6)^9 = 0.01 chance to still be cloaked after a single mobile observatory. A 99% chance to decloak them with one observatory, or 99.99% chance with two of them. This is pretty much a guaranteed decloak.
The “permanently cloaked” player is no longer a thing in EVE since the introduction of the mobile observatory, anyone who leaves their ship in space 24/7 while they go to bed or go to work will likely come back to see their ship destroyed, which was a good change to the game.
This doesn’t mean that the balance of cloaky camping is entirely fair now.
There are two main issues I still see with the balance of cloaky camping:
- Deadspace ESS grids.
- Third party tools.
1 - Deadspace ESS grids
Some cloaky camper is in system and has been for an hour. You deploy an expensive mobile observatory and manage to decloak them, but they turn out to be in a part of space you cannot warp to and have like 10 minutes extra to recloak while you try to burn over to their spot in space.
This abuse of game mechanics is easily fixed, but requires some changes by CCP:
- delete deadspace grid in front of the ESS gate, and
- disable cloaks behind the ESS gate
Easy fix, now cloaky players cannot abuse the ESS to cloaky camp.
2 - Third party tools
There are tools you can download that read your game logs and chat logs to provide intel. This is legal, but not balanced, in my opinion.
These tools can send a warning to a player who is cloaky camping on 10 accounts that one of their characters just got decloaked, so that cloaky campers can still safely camp without paying attention.
That’s broken, in my opinion.
The solution to this is harder, as reading game logs client side is easily done so even if it were made ‘illegal’ people could easily cheat.
One unorthodox solution I can think of is: do not tell a client that their ship got decloaked by a mobile observatory.
No client knowledge means no logs and no third party tool to help. You would still be flying in space with your cloak ‘active’ according to your client, but suddenly someone can warps to your location as if you weren’t cloaked, because you are in fact not cloaked.
An active player who is paying attention could spot that, a semi-AFK cloaky camper relying on third party tools to warn them of decloaks is going to get caught.
Sounds like a good fix to me.
To conclude
I hope CCP can iterate on the cloaky camping balance and deal with these two ways cloaky campers are getting around mobile observatories.
‘Forever cloaked and AFK’ is not possible, but with some nasty deadspace tricks and third party tools it’s still too easy to camp systems.
4 Likes
Yeah, it’s already bad enough that you cannot tell if you are cloaked or not as an active player at the moment. Not being able to tell that on purpose sounds like a really great idea.
I am way more partial to increasing the cost for MOOBs but making them recoverable. If they cost 100M, it would incentivize campers to kill them instead of just resetting their cloaks (I know I would because I already destroy them whenever I can), and making them recoverable after every pulse or every 30 minutes (shouldn’t be at the end of their active time because it is so long), locals would potentially be more willing to use them. Naturally, you’d need to limit them to 1 per system because swamping the system with 10 recoverable MOOBs is not good gameplay.
1 Like
More expensive but recoverable mobile observatories are not a bad idea if only a small limited number can be deployed in a system.
I like it.
It creates more opportunities to fight cloakies as they are tempted to destroy the deployable to deny you the chance of picking it back up, and the increased cost keeps it risky to deploy one.
It just won’t do anything against players who use third party tool warnings, which I think is still a big issue.
1 Like
“Build a wall”…
Removing cloak is a interesting idea 
Sure - just so long as we can make gate-camping a thing of the past.
Removing the Bubbles is an interesting idea too. 
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I don’t know if the cloaking needs some kind of nerf or not. I don’t live in null, but in one of my favorite books, cloaked ships would become visible if struck by EMP pulse or nearby explosion.
I don’t know how bomb launcher works, but something like that interacting with cloaking could be healthy.
The op is frustrated, thats why the uses phrases like “forever afk”. You and I know that he isn’t afraid of the truly afk cloaker but afraid of the fact that he can basically not tell if the cloaker is afk or not and the fact that this cloaker can get from “afk” to “hunting” any moment without any sign. And can then instantly cyno in a whole fleet on top of whatever target he choses. But I understand that it is very easy to target such exaggerated complaints and then make it look like he had no point at all. I think that cheap argumentation and I believe it only clouds the fact that there truly is a reason for these constant complaints. And it is not that “people are just greedy/lazy/entitled” - because I am absolutely not and I clearly can see their problem.
My point isn’t that I want to remove cloakies. My point is that I want to equal out the effort for both sides. If the defensive side is required to hold a shield up the entire time to be safe, the offensive side should be required tho hold up a spear the entire time. Which basically means
- the Cloak Stabilization timer should be reduced to 1 minute, applying the same rule PvPers repeat like a mantra in every other situation “if you want to go afk, even for a minute, dock your ship or log out!” - THAT is exactly what they tell everybody who ever gets shot and complains he was “just at the door for a minute”. Cloakies shouldn’t be an exception here.
- MoObs should be rescoopable but limited to 1 at a time in any star system (increase costs maybe, @Gerard_Amatin and @Dyver_Phycad have talked about that already, the idea is good and I support it fully). I would just add that the location should be limited to the Star’s grid and a clear message should appear in local if one is anchored. Also it should create a warpable beacon for everyone to see and use. This gives an opportunity and motivation to fight over it or ambush it if the locals can’t/won’t protect it properly. A Bomber or T3 doesn’t need long to kill one.
- MoObs ping faster, like every 5 minutes, need 5 minutes to anchor up so after 5 Pings (all in all 30minutes) they automatically unanchor and can be scooped again. Each ping should be a coinflip of 50/50 to hit any active cloaking device in the system
- when hit by such a ping, the cloaking device is set on a 1 minute delay before reactivation is possible. Which means the defenders now have a chance to combatscan, force him to warp and really be active and on his toes. After he survived this minute, he has breathing room for 4 minutes until the next ping might hit im.
All that poses no threat to a really active hunter. He will be able to do his job as he can do now and he will be able to evade the defender’s efforts with a very very high probability. So the core gameplay of going on a hunt with cloaky ships isn’t affected at all. But those changes make sure nobody can put a char in a system and posing a (cyno)threat with minimal effort for hours, always risking a lot less and doing a lot less than he requires from the locals to do “to be somewhat safe”.
5 Likes
i still prefer the blackouts event, right now the prey can just take a look at the local list and dock up as soon you enter it
it’s null sec, concord don’t have reach there, they shouldn’t be able to have structure for that ( lore thing )
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You don’t care about that, you just don’t want possible targets get away from you in WH space.