My marauder literally got hot dropped within 60 seconds of landing on grid.
Here’s the resulting kills mails.
Your move.
I don’t want it to be impossible to cloak in Null. I want it to be difficult to stay cloaked for excessive periods of time with low to zero risk on the cloaker’s behalf.
Either drop or gtfo.
Be it removing the 15 min cloak “invincibility” to observatories, or perhaps giving people the ability to combat probe others in cloak. The difficulty of which can be adjusted as needed.
Just so long as someone can’t sit care free in a hostile system for 2+ hours while watching YouTube on their other monitor.
There is a big difference though.
Someone literally AFK for 10 hours in a deep safe can be decloaked and killed with 99% chance (9 pulses of 40% each) within the duration of a single mobile observatory (i.e. 90 minutes) or 99.99% chance if you drop two. That’s pretty much a guarantee.
Someone who is resetting cloak every 15 minutes will at the very least be watching local and dscan every 15 minutes, which allows them to see your bait. The intention of this player is to look for targets to kill, so all you have to get them out of hiding is to present a nice target for them to kill.
In either case you have a reasonable way to interact with the player.
Your Marauder was hot dropped by players that you knew were hunting. They had been out hunting for 2 hours, like you said yourself, and they were actively hunting. This is the opposite of AFK cloaky camping.
It is difficult to stay cloaked for excessive periods of time. It’s painfully boring to recloak every 15 minutes if you’re cloaked in a system for 8 hours. I couldn’t do it, I would go mad. But if you don’t recloak and pay attention you’re going to lose your ship, because of mobile observatories.
Next, if you want those players to drop, put something out there for them to drop on.
Again, as opposed to AFK cloaky campers the active cloaky campers are actively looking for targets to kill. They want kills.
The hunter was not ‘one character possibly asleep’, but ‘one player looking to provide kills for a fleet of a few dozen others’.
By not giving them anything to drop on, you were wasting the time of their entire fleet.
The space you’re living in is temporarily dangerous and disturbed, so a lot of people cannot do what they want, but so is their group out in space waiting for their hunters to finally spot and catch something worthwhile.
That’s the main difference between AFK camping and active hunting.
Likely if you present them something shiny to kill they will drop. Like in the example of your Marauder.
Have you ever done cloaky gameplay yourself?
Your suggestions heavily interfere with common non-camping cloaking gameplay.
- A bomber wing is bothering your fleet? Combat probe them and kill them.
- An Astero just landed in your bubble camp but cloaked? Just decloak pulse them!
Mobile observatories have been designed really well if I may say so in a way that it minimises the impact on active cloaky gameplay while maximising the chance to catch an AFK cloaky player.
Because of the 15 minute invincibility people can use cloaks as intended to go unnoticed for short periods of time and people can move their supercapitals through hostile space without immediately getting decloaked and probed.
What you want to get nerfed is not AFK cloaky gameplay, what you suggest are nerfs for active cloaks.
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Are new players still asking to mine while watching Netflix or am I missing something?
No, it seems the biggest misunderstanding regarding mobile observatories nowadays is that some people think it is an ineffective anti-cloaking device.
It’s a very effective anti-AFK-cloaking device.
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I think even when ScamCitizen releases in a couple thousand years from now, maybe, people will still complain about AFK cloaked campers.
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I miss when you could just WD the null blocks just to make their lives miserable. Simplified things! 
I like how it works as a it makes players active to pull it off.
You are stupid.
Easily defeated by a macro on a 20 minute timer.
You mean ‘easily defeated by botting’?
Sure, you could cheat, but AFK cloaky camping was legal before. If you get caught for scripting to keep your ship cloaked you risk your entire account now.
That’s a significant difference.
Edit: also wow, necro:
It’s impossible to detect a simple keyboard/mouse script with a random variance. The game client cannot differentiate between a legit “click” and a scripted “click”. Bots can be detected via behaviour patterns and reaction times, scripted actions with such a long period between single, non-variant actions, simply cannot.
I repeat, so you really understand it: CCP cannot detect the difference between a cloaking device deactivated and re-activated manually or automated via a script that basically sends a “mouseclick” to the client every ~14minutes +/- some variance. Not even if that continues over hours and hours each day.
I’m fairly certain CCP could see the difference, if only because a lazy script recloaks every ‘14 minutes plusminus variance’ for far too many hours a day, or even more obviously, regardless of whether a mobile observatory is present.
is no valid proof. CCP would risk a lawsuit over banning someone over “we think he played the game too long and paying attention even while we guarandeed him server access as long as he wants and the server is online if he paid the sub”. They would never do that.
That absolutely doesn’t matter. The cloaker does it to refresh the cloak defense timer so he can tab out and do something else. He will of course do it even if no moobs is present, because 1 minute after he has gone afk one could be anchored… even way outside his dscan range.
mobile obs are utter crap. thats why they aren’t used. check the trade volume in jita, not even more than a handful are traded per day (and much less used). In 2000+ nullsec systems. Or 3000+? Don’t even know…
Trade volume? First, mobile observatories don’t need to be used often to have a healthy impact on the game. Their mere existence is enough.
Ever since their introduction I have no longer seen the massive region-wide 24/7 cloaky camping campaigns that used to exist.
This happens no more. Not at this scale and neither the entire day.
I call that a big success of mobile observatories.
Secondly, I’m pretty sure the mobile observatories used in null are mostly made in null and not imported from Jita, so Jita trade volume isn’t really relevant here.
Thats not the point. The point was that you said “one would risk his account over using a script to make the mobile observatory worthless!”. But he really does not.
Yes, it can be that those who did the camping really totally afk have stopped to do so. And that is a good thing. But the point still stands that using a mobile observatory simply doesn’t help against a good perma-camper who simply wants to wear down the locals attention and tire them out or forcing them to hold up a defense being much more effort than it is for him to keep is one char cloaked.
The amount of effort and risk for both sides is simply greatly imbalanced. I don’t know why we are even arguing about that. The game would be better at all aspects if cloaking would require activity and skill to ensure you can stay cloaked for longer periods of time. Thats why active countermeasures against cloaking devices are a good idea. Tools to put pressure on a cloaked ship, forcing the pilot to react and react quickly and correct to certain threats against his invisibility. It would add depth, tactical gameplay, even fun, adrenaline and reward.
Here are tools to put pressure on a cloaky ship:
- mobile observatory
- combat probes
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Both 100% worthless, as already explained. Want to go another round in that circle?
No need, I don’t think either of us is going to get convinced by the other.
Once upon a time I too advocated changes against AFK cloaky campers. You can see my first posts in this thread. With the introduction of mobile observatories the balance has shifted to a much healthier state in my opinion.
It has shifted towards “paying” 60 million ISK to remove a 40 million CovOps if said CovOps is really afk at the moment of the ping. So statistically you probalby pay more like 100+ million ISK to actually detect someone who is really afk when you anchor that thing. And against someone who happens to be active, you still have zero chance to get him.
Yes, thats bettter than having no chance to even catch long-time-afkers.
It’s still way off being good.
Good enough.
I don’t believe non-AFK cloaky camping is bad or needs to be removed from the game and neither does CCP.
AFK cloaky camping needed a counter and got one.