Anti-cloaker response:
But then I have to constantly be d-scanning all the time. I don’t know when he’ll decloak and it might only be for less than a minute!!
We need a button put into citadels that when “pushed” sends out a system wide decloaking pulse!!!
/Anti-cloaker response.
You cannot move the needle with these folks. To them it is still AFK cloaking. A face in local that frightens them from undocking…even if they can see when the person is most likely to be active.
Yeah, I guess it would only be fair if the leak rate was affected by tidi as well. If it requires a refuel after, say, 8 hours of normal gameplay it shouldn’t affect a fight that has been going for 24 hours at max tidi.
Too bad, if they’re too lazy to use the tools they’re given to spot an afk cloaker prepare for a cyno, they deserve to die.
My problem is that currently we have no such tools and that the counterplay against afk cloaky campers requires as much effort as the counterplay against active cloaky camping, which is disproportional in my opinion.
You still can’t really tell the AFK cloaker is about to cyno based on their refuling, tho. They can refuel hours before they plan to cyno, - because it’s all about mind games in the first place.
Sure! But you know that they can only cyno within a time window after their last refuel. And that gives you information how much preparations you should take: should you have a fleet on direct standby, or should you just be on the lookout for a refuel?
An AFK cloaky camper cannot just come back from work and immediately light a cyno, they’ll need to do some preparations (refuel, possibly wait a couple of minutes/hours to lower awareness again), so it adds more effort to the AFK cloaky playstyle too. AFK cloaky camping will still be possible, but the amount of effort required on both sides will be more proportionate.
Except you still have to research their active times and monitor for signs of when they refuel, which is no less work (and arguably is more work, since you now have to dedicate effort to searching for them during the windows you think the might decloak for refueling) than in the current state of affairs. Is there a tiny new window of potential opportunity for the locals? Yes. Is it a meaningful change in their opportunities to locate an mitigate a camper? Not really.
I get it. They’re AFK, but you are acting as if they are actually there. You are putting in the effort and they aren’t.
So you don’t mind putting in the effort to counter them if they aren’t there? Is that correct?
If yes, then just go about your life as if they are there. If no one drops, everything is peachy. If something drops, then you are prepared as you can be, but they still may win. Or you do.
I guess my point is if you act like they are always “actually” there, and you do not have any problems mounting a defense while you are krabbing/mining then what does it matter if they are at the keyboard or not?
I spend a lot of time in wormholes, and I just assume there is someone looking over my shoulder at all times. It would be a lot easier for me if I didn’t have to warp around a system checking structures and d-scanning like a madman before warping to a relic site. But I accept it as what needs to be done if I want to safely hack relic sites. I know it’s apples and oranges, but I don’t see why you can’t adopt the same mindset.
I think any fix needs to address only AFK cloaky camping. The cyno fuel idea is good in that it doesn’t touch cloaks, but as @Teckos_Pech it doesn’t solve the problem of AFK camping to the point that a majority of the complainers would like.
I don’t know…
True, but my point is that this requires disproportionate effort on my part to not die stupid avoidable deaths, while the other part isn’t actually even required to look at their screen most of the day.
With the cyno fuel idea I want to add more effort to AFK cloakers (they now need to re-fuel first after their AFK time) and less effort for the defenders (visible signs that the AFK cloaker is able to cyno again, giving an attentive player the ability to get defences ready only in the hours it matters) which adds more interactive gameplay on both sides and importantly brings back the required effort for both sides more in balance.
There’s a majority of complainers at both extremes of this discussion and you’ll never satisfy all of them. People want to rat and cloak AFK and no change will be good for both of them.
My proposed solution would solve the main issue I have with afk cloaky camping, namely cynoing in a fleet at any time of the day with a low effort character that’s in system 24/7, but keeps afk cloaking an option and makes it more engaging, interactive and does so while barely impacting non-afk cloaked gameplay. Hopefully this is good enough for many of the more reasonable complainers.
Fuel trucks.
When I lived in a wh, I made a few bm’s by warping to anoms that were in odd locations and hard to d-san most of the time. I left an undocked/offline alt there to chk the sys before logging in any other toons. If I could do something like that in null, then I could just fly to one of those spots to refuel and no one would be the wiser.
Correct.
But now you’re giving multiple signs that you’re refuelling: 1. You’re logging in with that fuel truck which shows up in local, unless you leave it cloaked in system all day as well and 2. you need to uncloak both ships to drag fuel from one to the other, which shows up on dscan. It may be outside dscan range of any visible ships, but allows counterplay nonetheless.
Also, this would double the amount of accounts required for afk cloaky camping a system. Not a bad change either.
But they are already to lazy to employ any type of counter play it seems.
The lazy ones, yes.
The ones who aren’t lazy and complain about the lack of proportionate counterplay methods may enjoy these new counterplay methods. Right now the counterplay against AFK cloaky campers is exactly the same as against non-AFK cloaky campers, that isn’t really proportionate.
I se it as… There is a afk cloakey camper in the sys 24/7. No active player plays for 24 hrs except in rare cases. All the defenders need is a defense fleet during the time their mining. If the corp/alliance is large enough to have miners on 24/7, then they should have the defense as well to cover them.
Null is high rewards for high risk.
What new counterplay methods? Lucking into being within scan distance of the ship when it refuels?
Assuming the camper is actually refueling when they need to vs when it is convenient for them to do so, and most likely to cause heartburn, is a major leap. You’re only solving a single AFK cloak camp scenario (the person who goes AFK and is unable to be ATK again in X period of time before the fuel runs out). Heatmaps from several 23/7 cloaky camper KBs have been shared, and there is enough variety in their active times that even a leak rate estimated at a set interval of expected AFK cloaking (lets go with 6 hours here just for argument sake) may very well not make a difference for that camper’s planning.
And it takes next to no time to switch fuel over. Now you have 2 afk in sys. The locals will crap their pants. I wouldn’t even fuel the cyno ship to avoid the leak, just wait till its worth it.
Seeing the refuel on dscan, seeing two cloaky campers in system as a sign that they have a cyno up, vs one in system all day which cannot get a cyno up. Catching the refuel ships on gates when they need to refuel the entire constellation’s cloaky campers, finding the secret fuel stash in space… Lots of extra interactions because of this cyno fuel.
Yep. So now the locals know they can go more safely in the other system where only 1 afk is in system all day, because that guy must have ran out of fuel so can only engage solo. And your cloaky campers will need twice as many accounts to cover a region, or rather, they can cover only half as much ground, which allows locals more space to avoid afk campers.
The active campers won’t be affected though, those can jump gates. 
You probaly wont see it happen.
Will become the norm, they don’t have to be a cyno/fuel truck to fill diapers.
My morning coffee is waiting for dt to end, but that’s just me of course.
I only have to worry about one to refuel.
There wont be any.
I dont see that happening, but again, thats just me.
That works for me because it now only affects the bots.
That also works for me. I have the acct’s to do it.
All I want is to hurt the bots. Null working under an umbrella has been the norm for how long now?
Glad you do. I can imagine logging in 10 cloaky campers every downtime, but if I have to also refuel them all daily it may put a halt on the amount of afk cloaky cyno campers a single player is willing to handle.
I’m not sure what you mean here. Could you explain?
If you really want to hurt the bots, you don’t need cyno fuel or afk cloaky camping. Report them and let CCP deal with it.
Also, I guess bots aren’t that hard to kill solo either, and solo afk cloaky camping isn’t affected by my suggestion at all. 
You’ve never actually tried to hunt a bot, have you, because this is EXACTLY the type of stuff naive people say about killing bots solo.
Correct, I have not yet tried killing bots so my guess may be off.
Compared to killing a non-bot, how is killing a bot different? I would guess ‘faster response, more predictable, less adaptable’, which means that it should be easier to kill a bot provided you can catch one. Am I wrong?
Anyway, my suggestion doesn’t have much to do with bots. You can still hunt them solo after days of afk cloaking. And in my opinion reporting bots is more useful than killing them.