You are going to lose so many wormholers… I guess its time for a new game huh?
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this has nothing to do with WH, so why would WH get upset? Cause they can’t AFK cloak Camp in Null?
What bad thing has CCP iterated on in the last year?
Iv been waiting for this! great news!
but why can’t it be used in wh space?
this absolutely is the best place to use it!
we have no counter to afk cloaky seeders
please please please let this deployable be used in wormholes!
good job so far ccp loving all the fixers you are doing to this game. your not blizzard that’s for sure. but thanks for all the cool new updates.
Definitely no. WH space is the only space in EVE where being covert makes sense.
I would be content to set to for 10 minutes of cloak immunity so it’s not complete coverage of the 15 minutes weapons/aggression timer that’s incurred when activating the Null or Pochven filaments.
Here, I thought botting was a problem that CCP was trying to deal with, not protect. The main people who this will benefit are nullsec ratting botters. People often put cloaky campers in known botting systems to help combat them, as bots read local in order to determine if it is safe for the bot to rat.
Now we are going to see major botting areas covered with these observatories so they can bot in peace. PLEASE CCP, DO NOT DO THIS! We are doing our best to combat bots out here. Do not combat us!!!
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I don’t like these changes!
One of the most important things in the Art of Hunting is “waiting”… and “masking your presence” during that waiting period. The very basis of Covert Operations is to stay “always” hidden until the right time to kill. So if a hunter needs to decloak-and-recloak every 15 minutes to reset the cloaking stability timer, there is a window time where he exposes himself to his prey, which will give considerable time to his prey to escape before he do the kill. That is a big disadvantage for active hunters too, not just for AFK campers!
Warping out of the prey’s Dscan range before doing the decloak-and-recloak is not a solution to this. The hunter does not simply wait during that time… he also patiently and consistently observes his prey. He needs to do this because he needs to know when is the “right time” to kill. So if he warps out, just to reset the timer, he will lose so much time to observe his prey. Who knows, the right time to kill could be during those times when he warped out.
And in a small-area system, hunters have very small space where they can safely decloak-and-recloak without detection. Some systems are even too small that staying near the Sun and doing Dscans will let players scan everything in that system. And this is even harder if the prey is warping constantly from one place to another.
So as I said, these new changes do not just have a huge effect on AFK campers, but they also have a considerable effect on active hunters.
My suggestion, if your goal is to avoid AFK cloaky camping, then please do it only for AFK cloaky camping, not for active cloaky hunters.
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Happily 
A key aspect to my gameplay is positioning. The human mechanics of low sec differ in that most of the time people don’t dock up the second you enter the system meaning that you have time to find a target and get into position.
My preferred hull is a cloaky brawling set up and my targets of choice are typically ratters or solo fw plexers flying kitey ships so if I can jump them up close I’m good. Trouble is getting the brawl, chasing a gila doing 1500m/s when you’re cloaked isn’t an option so you have to predict where your target’s going to be and intercept them, all the while avoiding the myriad things trying to decloak you.
Usually I can do that within 5 minutes but some of the best kills I’ve got took much longer and that’s all time on grid. Someone running snakes and orbiting at 40km or changing things up often can take a lot of predicting, repositioning several times until it works. It’s slow, patient, inefficient gameplay but it’s hella fun because it brings the skills of both pilots into play. If the target’s too predictable I’ll get them, if I’m too slow they finish the site and warp off, if I drop cloak in the wrong spot they warp off or kite me to death if they have a point (it happens).
With this change, if someone, perhaps entirely unrelated to the pilot I’m hunting, drops one of these in system while I’m getting into position there’s now a chance that I lose cloak and my prey disappears into the distance (or worse). My only counter to that is to warp off grid and refresh my cloak. That’s at least a minute off grid, more if I want to be out of dscan range, by the time I land back on grid my target could be anywhere.
Most of the time, 15 minutes is enough to get the job done, but sometimes it isn’t. My time on grid shouldn’t be limited by passive aoe events beyond my control.
Having spent a lot time just stalking my prey, this is a concern. Maybe at least a 1/2 hr?
Nothing stopping you from taking a ADM 6 system if you bring enough dudes. If you do not have enough dudes that is not the fault of CCP.
My understanding is that you cannot be decloaked in that 15 minute timer.
They iterated on a ton of stuff, as I noted. After launch they’ve tweaked the ESS and DBS just off the top of my head. Before leaving SISI, they made a bunch of changes to nullification, for example. All after getting player feedback.
This is just something you’ll have to be prepared for, but I doubt sincerely that one of these guys is going to drop one of these just in case you’re there hunting him. Do you think it’s realistic to assume that these guys are always going to have one of these on them when they’re plexing?
I am in space 3000m from a corpmate. I am in a stabber with 189m sig radius and the corpmates cobat probe strength is 65. The mobile observatory decloaked me but the corpmate cannot see me with sister combat scanner probes.
The decloak works, but scanning is broken.
I know there is a strong desire to create balance, but unless the mobile observatory has a significant impact on cloak reactivation and sig bloom, a simple pixel reader and keyboard macro will defeat this deployable easily.
Good effort, but its a painful dissapointment./
I looked at this initially and said " what another thing to have to relearn… what is the point of having these skills" then I remember ccp giveth… ccp taketh away. So that is the initial knee jerk reaction. Upon thought and comment reading and trying to get more information, I cant say this is the worst thing ccp has done. I can see this is legitimate use, and for everything there should always be the possibility of a counter. It is that way in real life. I wouldn’t like this is W space if I lived in W space. but in null, yes. The only problem that I currently have now post knee jerk reaction is, From what I can tell multiple observatories, even being pricyish set up spaced apart at different times will give too many possibilities to be de cloaked I think. staggered pings from multiple units I think will be problematic. Limit this to one per system and I think this is great, or limit it’s range if it will be multiples. I also imagine that the way it works will potentially be changed before it is deployed to the live server, so don’t hate till it is live. discuss, explain your point, and in general just wait and see how it all shakes out when it comes live.
Getting upset about something that hasn’t changed on the live server yet doesn’t get you anywhere. and man is the community maturing? I didn’t see anyone saying they were going to unsub in a fit of impotent rage? lol
So basically you sub to be able to hunt while cloaked or escape from others and ccp just basically tells us no well give prey the chance to detect you system wide or you get detected while trying to evade not really feeling this nerf to cloaking up CCP some of the changes you guys are making are absolute garbage for the game…
For over THREE YEARS have i been waiting to combat Perma cloakers, after buckets of tears and countless nights unslept, have my prayers been answered!!!
Finally, I can combat those suckers with 30 accounts cloaked safely and untouchable.
THANK YOU CCP, FOR ONE OF MY MOST ANTICIPATED UPDATES.
That’s breaking the EULA. CCP can’t design the game around what players may do to break the EULA.
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Hey shouldn’t this be in the pinned cloaky camper thread
considering this is a new thing added to the game, no.
Sure, its not a perfect fix for that; but that’s really something done outside the game so…
I don’t really cloaky camp and never been much of an issue for me really anyway but I like that this is some sort of physical counter to something rather than a straight nerf and unlike the recent planned nullification changes it makes some sense.
Though some form of storyline and event stuff behind its making would make the game a little more alive lore/rp wise…