Not the gate jump cloak but the cloaking done with cloak modules:
From what I understand, as soon as you hit the cloak button you disappear from other player’s viewpoint even though your cloak animation is just starting and you slowly dissolve away.
Likewise, as soon as you de-cloak you are visible to other players even though the cloak animation gives you the impression that you are still invisible as your ship slowly reassembles.
That 1-2 second gap can mean life and death when it comes to insta-locks.
So while the animation looks cool, it is very misleading and should be changed to reflect what is actually going on from other player’s viewpoint.
Am I mistaken on this?
Seems I have spent hours trying to perfect the cloak-MWD trick, but I cant be certain as it seems Ive been locked on while I was reappearing (from my viewpoint). So I was clearly visible to other players even though my ship was just reappearing from my viewpoint.
You appear or disappear immediately. There is no transition period except for the sake of eye candy. As soon as you punch the cloak button, you are fully cloaked. As soon as you hit it again, you are fully visible.
For the MWD trick, you break the gate cloak by aligning and immediately cloak up with as little or no delay as possible. Then activate your MWD. (You can do this just after cloaking, but wait too long and it won’t work anymore.) Just before the MWD cycle ends, you de-cloak and spam ‘warp’ to your destination with no delay until you are satisfied you are in warp or not going to be able to. If you do it properly, there should be very little chance to lock you. Depending on lag and latency, and your opponent’s lock time, or if they have a ship on grid to decloak you, etc, though, you can still get caught.
Actually, when you cloak you don’t disappear immediately. You will remain visible (but unlockable) for a few seconds, this is what allows people to burn towards you and attempt a decloak.
The fastest anyone can be told you’ve cloaked is the time it takes for you to transmit the command to CCP plus the time it takes for CCP to transmit the effect to the observer, but the effect is as immediate as the technical limitations will allow. For whatever duration an observer knows your apparent position because of this unavoidable discrepancy, they can issue an approach command on your position in that interval.
A Leopard doesn’t enter warp before the gate cloak drops, it just looks like it does; it becomes visible and targetable on the overview the moment (±1s) any action that causes the decloak animation to trigger occurs. It works the same way in reverse when you activate a cloak.
I remember how it worked in the past.
Back then, when you hit cloak, you were gone.
At some point in the last few years they’ve changed something.
Last time I’ve checked through a second set of eyes I was still visible while warping off, while cloaking.
This conflicts with my experience from about 6 months ago while hauling in a blockade runner with a friend to scout ahead. They were amazed that I only appeared for the very smallest fraction of a second.
It seems either a very recent change, or the situation is more complicated and depends on additional factors. …or my friend’s eyes/honesty need checked.
Trying to confirm for myself is rather difficult because corporate policy disallows simultaneous logins, and I have no additional characters trained with which to check, anyway. I will have to take your word for it that something is afoot.
It can be that it was just a bug and they’ve fixed it again.
I did write “Last I’ve checked”. I guess I should have added “some years ago”.
Good if they fixed that again, becuase it was possible to tell the direction the cloaked ship warped to. That’s kind of a game breaker considering you’re cloaked.
It usually pays to have doubt and double check. I am cautious of trying to fact check you, of all people, regarding game mechanics. That what I observed and what you observed seem to contradict is as far as I’m willing to go in that field.
Next time, I will have my friend keep a sharper eye on me to see what he can see, though I guess knowing that people can’t see me today won’t make me as confident people can’t see me tomorrow or couldn’t see me yesterday now that I know of the discrepancy. So it goes.
In an Astero, he was able to pinpoint exactly where I warped to, even though the ship was cloaked. I only got to do one test with a ship that aligns very quickly. Probably safe to say you’re right, at least for ships that warp and cloak on/near the same server tick.
