It is usually just some new guy (e,g., @Ridley_Rohan ) coming along thinking he has suddenly come up with something new, but it is just the same tired old crap that has been seen in about 12,000 posts (counting the previous forum).
Already been suggested like…oh…say 8 years ago?
@Ralph_King-Griffin posted this within the first 10 posts of this thread. I believe he got it from someone named Paikis.
This thread comes up on almost a weekly basis. In fact, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a nerf cloaking thread in the first 2 pages on this forum section. Almost every single one of them goes like this:
- OP posts a post with a new (lol) idea that always boils down to some variation of the following:
“There’s a big meanie who is sitting in my system and not doing anything, but I don’t know where he is and I can’t ever just go next door. I can’t find said meanie and even though I know that he’s probably at work and poses no threat at all, I wont do anything in my system that I absolutely can’t leave ever because he might not be at work and I might lose a ship. CCP please stop the meanie from being able to do nothing to me because he’s probably at work”- Thread gets trolled because its been done literally to death. This horse has been beaten so hard and so often that it’s little more than a memory of a memory of a red smear on the grass, and yet it STILL WONT DIE! In fact it’s been done so many times that this particular horse is now undead; even if it does die, it will still be remembered and parodied.
- Someone comes along and suggests that AFK cloakers can’t hurt you, because they are, by their very definition, AFK. No one ever lost a ship to someone who ISN’T PLAYING THE GAME.
- Someone else comes along and points out that while the cloaker might be AFK, he might not be, and so we have Schrodinger’s Hot Dropper. The cyno pilot who might be AFK… but he might not be as well, and you will only know for sure when he decloaks, points and lights his candle. (Yes, I know this isn’t how the cat works)
- Someone else comes along and suggests that you use bait and setup a TARP. Or have a defence fleet on standby. Heaven forbid you have to actually fight to defend your space.
- A further person comes along and suggests that the problem isn’t cloaking AFK in your system that you can’t possibly leave ever, but that you KNOW that the person is AFK in your system… and perhaps local should be removed because free 100% accurate intel is probably not the best thing in the game and if you didn’t know that the big meanie was in your system, you wouldn’t be worried about leaving the undock/POS.
- Then another person pokes their head in and complains that local is 100% NEEDED because D-Scan and probing are such bad mechanics, and IF YOU TAKE MY LOCAL AWAY IM QUITTING FOREVER AND NO YOU CAN’T HAVE MY STUFF!
- Someone asks if they can have 7’s stuff.
We end up with another thread which goes on for pages and pages between complains about local, defence fleets, inability to just go next door, people who aren’t playing the game but are playing the meta, lots of bickering and in the end nothing gets solved. CCP wont remove cloaking because it would mess with waaay too many things and it creates content (which is a good thing) by removing content (which is a bad thing) but they can’t really think of any way to do it without a complete overhaul of the local and scanning systems.
Now that I’ve had this entire thread’s conversation, can we just let it die? Please?
asking this is like: Asking to nerf others players gameplay in favor for other players gameplay.
I made that point precisely on the previous forums…and probably here too.
Forumcamping 
Well, I did take an extended break…then I come back and see 98 replies…all in this thread. And I…cannot…resist…
admit it. your forum cloacking device is broken because of too long use. warp back to the stupid ratter thread and fix the device
@Dance_Discofox So this old toon still alive in the forum. nice.
you’re right. sorry @ Teckos Pech
Yawn…nothing new. Just another variation on other ideas that have been suggested. Timers have a long and storied history in regard to this topic.
Here, you can do some reading.
https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/topic/216699/
Yes, that thread was started by me over 7 years ago before you were even in game.
Here is when ISD finally decided to create a main thread to contain these bad ideas to make it easier to monitor. Note they reference my original thread collecting many of these ideas.
No. I am not going to look through 204 pages of posts to verify YOUR claim.
My question was simple but in 2 parts.
I will divide it up for you since you missed the vital second part.
No. You are. I can see only three possible reasons for you even posting here at this point and they all lead back to hubris.
You are intentionally deraling the thread. (Perhaps because you are terrified an idea here will be picked up. (Something I find very unlikely)). All intentional trolls suffer from hubris.
You don’t care about the state of the thread but are just posting because you have some sort of belief your input is valuable and needed. Hubris.
You sincerely believe this whole thing is a race where people only post to “win” by being the first to post an original idea. And someone who believes that everything is a contest is someone who suffers from hubris. You can’t just “talk” with such people in the room. Everything said is viewed as some sort of challenge, and right and wrong don’t matter, just who walked out feeling psychologically superior, hubris intact.
Its not that I care that I was the first person to come up with the acronym/ proposed lore of ECS. I don’t. All I cared to do was prove your contention wrong. See, I was not claiming any of the ideas behind it were 100 percent original. I never did, because it just doesn’t matter. This is not a patent office. If the only thing I did in this IDEA SECTION was give an idea a name or a beginning of a back story, that’s quite enough. This is an IDEA SECTION, and if you have half a brain and have been following along as you say, you know the mission statement of this IDEA SECTION and you are actively thwarting it.
Hubris. I don’t want you to take me seriously. I don’t care if you do. You can just exit this thread and never come back to even read it or any idea I post here. Seriously. I think this thread would benefit greatly for your absence.
But of course, it would take an adult to stop reading something they claim is just useless repetition.
It is well past time for you to grow up.
I don’t know that I would say we ‘almost got observation arrays’. When you look at the original dev blog that announced the intent to replace POSes with a new structure system (Upwells), it was all very high-level and ‘these are some ideas we are kicking around for our new structures’, not a list of ‘these things are absolutely happening’:
Before we move forward, we would like to make it clear the changes listed below are ideas and highly theoretical. Those are not set in stone or fixed, we are telling our plans to you, our players, months in advance to initiate feedback and spark interest. Also please remember that concept art is just that, concept.
(This is the same structure concept discussion that brought up player-owned stargates - and we certainly don’t have those now, yet I don’t hear anyone saying we ‘almost got player-owned stargates!’)
Observatory array
Dedicated to intelligence gathering.
- Service module possibilities: Being able to increase, decrease or block Star Map filters in the solar systems they’re deployed, act as solar system wide D-scan blockers, disrupt ship intelligence in the solar system, take over player tracking capabilities from NPC agents or be able to affect or pinpoint cloak users. We are considering basing their effectiveness through a network coverage (like cell phones) so that a single one may not be that useful, but maintaining a bunch of them in space could give a significant advantage.
- Rigs possibilities: anything affecting the duration or effectiveness of what’s mentioned above.
CCP then promptly asked for feedback on potential effects of Observatory Arrays, and the same issues discussed in this thread were discussed there. And that thread only got 33 pages of posts in 15-ish months - clearly people have since gotten more vocal about the discussion.
It is worth noting that as recently as 2017 CCP Rise indicated that while Observatory Arrays and other Sov structures were still in development, the specific abilities were still majorly in the air and CCP had not finalized their abilities - and that the earliest we would see anything in the way of deployment would be 2018.
Extra fun note: Observatory Array BPs/Structures exist in the production EVE database, but they have never been launched for use on either Sisi or TQ - they are simply reference objects with very little data attached to them.
That too. Fair enough. What really bothers me is acting like its pure silly madness but look who was seriously talking about it and likely came up with significant aspects of the idea at least, and consider why that was.
Just because it never happened does not mean every single aspect of the discussion you can imagine is now just plain stupid or crazy. But we have people who speak as if that’s so.
Next.
Some of the concept art in that dev blog looks bad assed. Hopefully some of those drawings are still kicking around somewhere in CCP and show up in whatever they make next.
Right. As I’ve said before, knock it off with the not following rules. I’ve issued warnings and other things earlier for it, and this is the last warning I’ll issue before it gets escalated further. Follow the rules, play nice, all that jazz.
The point was for you to go to the first page and see all the bad ideas that have been suggested and note that your idea is…one of them.
I really don’t care what you call it. It is a timer. Been suggested and the problems pointed out ad nauseum.
There is nothing to derail. Your idea has been suggested before. Many times.
An original idea would be exceedingly welcomed. But you simply aren’t up to the task.
Can you just call it a timer instead of this insipid ECS? At least that way anyone coming to the thread knows what it is?
Timers have never persuaded anyone let alone CCP, so whatever.
You mean me, @Scipio_Artelius and others several years ago. Gee thanks. 
We haven’t gotten Observation Arrays…yet. We still might. Granted it has been awhile, but perhaps CCP’s attitude is more like Scipio’s and mine…that the current situation is not horrible, so they push it off.
I’m assuming (probably wrongly) that there are some technical hurdles with the legacy code that have blocked them from implementing them how they would like to, until more of the older systems in the code are rewritten.
CCP Seagull first mentioned them at Fanfest in 2014 and the idea was pretty universally liked, although CCP never really provided much detail. As they’ve said, they’ve continued to work on different aspects of it over the years, but here we are coming up on 7 years later in April, and they aren’t in the game, when the roadmap from 2014 is pretty much done now.