It will help CCP get their login numbers down - which should relieve stress on their servers.
You joke, but I’ve said that before. CCP seems to be doing just fine on 20/30k players. That’s why I asked somewhere, how low can the numbers go and still keep the lights on? And with fewer large battles, there’s fewer new players without the advertisement that those battles brought. And on top of that, you have less problems with tdi as well. 
Farmers are the future!
I think a lot depends on the objective of the structure too. Success can only be measured by knowing what it’s supposed to do. A ratter and a pvper are not going to see eye to eye because they want totally different things.
People like me expect it to be only targeting AFK players and are frustrated with CCP for not acknowledging why it happens in the first place and dealing with that at the same time. Personally I wouldn’t have a problem with dealing with afk cloaking at all if the standard response to a hostile in local wasn’t to hide in the station until they get bored and leave.
On the flip side, some of the ratters want to make cloaking effectively useless to prevent a hostile sitting in their space any period of time preventing them from making money. Time is money and they just want to avoid losing any ships and for hostiles to go away so they can get back to work.
They’re completely different philosophies
Like Xeux though, I don’t see this doing much other than killing cloaky camping. Remaining cloaked is going to be a lot of effort to do long term and unless your objective is stopping the other side making money, it’s got no upside because kills will be even harder to come by too.
What the structure appears to be intended to do is make cloaking a short-term activity but without changes to local, that’s of virtually no use to hunters. I just don’t see many people bothering with it, but I could be wrong.
Cloaking can be just as long-term as it is now, it just cannot be done both AFK and without danger once these Mobile Observatories are live. It can be done without danger or can be done AFK, just not both.
This is the only part where I’m not sure. If it is worth it, then I think we will see (or not see as the case may be) cloak bots. I don’t see why someone cant come up with one. But others with more knowledge on that subject would have to chime in. If it’s not worth it, then null has it’s monkey off it’s back.
Cloaky campers are very visible as their intention is to be a name in local.
Cloaky camping bots would be very easily spotted as it is simply impossible to be online all day avoiding all mobile observatories.
I doubt people are going to risk their hunting cyno alts to be an afk threat in local by running a ‘cloak bot’, but in theory it is possible that some people will be doing it. I just think it’s very unlikely.
To the reaction below: rookie ship cannot light covops cyno or use covops cloak. Useless for AFK cloaky botting.
VPN, rookie ship, something, something.
Like I said above, I have no idea how hard it is to program a bot so I’m just guessing here. But if I could and would hurt another corp/alliance, I think someone will try just to see if they can make it work. You forget what brings in the demographics this game does, the challenge! Some of the players who inhabit/inhibit (depending on your point of view) are very dedicated to breaking the game. Gridfoo is a good example.
All it needs is a cloak. If no one sees it when it logs on, no one will know what it is…
It’s clearly designed to make it an effort to do long-term though. I’m not saying you can’t. But unless it is scripted or somebody really is motivated and got little else going on in their lives, they just won’t.
Short-term use on the other hand is more or less unaffected. It’s just a waste of time because of local.
This, whole-heartedly - if this change was to be accompanied by something offsetting it, there’d be a lot less complaining from Team Camper. It would, of course, leave Team Supercapital utterly shafted.
It just feels like the situation has arrived at the brick wall. The buying power of ISK fell, bounties remained the same and the ratter has to put in more hours ratting. Long-range intel improved with ESS and bounty income fell, so they have to spend even more hours ratting.
We’re at a situation where there is no easy, quick fix without a comprehensive solution. Since ratting is known to be boring, we have the overprop/drone meta and the best way to deal with a roaming gang is to go AFK and wait them out - then resume activity.
It really feels like it’s a snipe at a low-hanging fruit - people are dissatisfied with scarcity and the industry changes. This change will, certainly, be highly praised by a large group of people - and comparatively, the collateral damage will be pretty low.
What do you possibly need to offset it? You get instant intell via Ess, When you enter system you stop their income, if they arent paying attention you kill them. You get to steal 35% of their income via ESS, if they defend you get a fight the thing you should actually be looking for.
Ratters get a 50m tax and a 30-50 minute session in a scan boat.
Man you cloaky hunters want everything. This coming from someone who has done lots of cloaky hunting.
ESS is garbage. It might be interesting but there are so many dumb arbitrary arena anti-sandbox limitations CCP put on it that there is no reason to bother with it. As for the intel aspect, I prefer there to be less passive intel and more fog of war. Get rid of ESS’s intel and nerf local.
Because local shows the enemy in a system before it even loads on their end, you have easy reaction time. Then on top of that, you know they are active when they enter. The Observatory keeps you knowing that they are active. The only “flaw” in local was that you knew they were there but not that they were active. The observatory takes away this flaw, making local even more powerful. You know 100% where someone is, and you can know 100% if they are active or not. So yes, there needs to be a nerf in some fashion to local to offset the huge advantage that the krabs will have with the observatory.
it is lol to keep hearing the krabs say this. It might be so if ONE ratter used the observatory 24/7, but in reality they woulndn’t need to use it all the time because of the threat of deploying one. Not only that, multiple krabs in the same system gain the benefit of a single observatory, so the cost can be reduced on a per person basis.
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I’d personally be glad to see more ships in space ratting, creating more content. more people in more expensive ships creating better content. You’ll get the odd person not paying attention. Sorry if you are not getting pve ships served up on a silver platter.
Can a mining bot be changed to drop one these?
Granting pretty much perfect safety is not going to create more content or cause there to be better content.
That’s not what I am asking for. I am asking for both sides to have to do something active to get intel, just as Krabs want cloaking to be active and not afk. AKA balance imagine that. Yes I know you like your free 24/7 intel that you do nothing for that lets you have the isk faucet “served on a silver platter”. Krabs complain about “AFK cloaking” but then happily are fine with their free unlimited intel.
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Alongside the ratting meta of “Drones out and netflix on”
(…let’s face it, a lot of us have done it and the amount of Ishtars/Vexors not lost to roaming gangs is a wonderful testimony to the power of local.)
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unless CCP change the dbm, then no… null sov farming is dead as is.
(no wonder ey, its been coninuesly nerfed for over a year now, with no end in sight)
the real isk making and the real blingy ships/targets are found in incursions and wh.
I’m complaining that it’s so easily undetectable and exploitable.
And tbh, the item is against CCP stated goals/ and missions about a “vibrant fair game where player actions matter” … so I think it’s a stupid half-measure, that isn’t changing cloak campers, only the meta around it.
But yeah I suppose it’s considered bad “to ‘bite’ the hand that feeds you”, but still… A lot of people tend to see “not agreeing” as biting. I don’t see it like that, I’m thinking I give them feedback on this item.
I for one will not be using this item as you thou, I will simply log off.
well duh, same as now. with the cloaky afk camping.
Everyone knows the way to get juicy covops/blops targets is thru blue scouting…
Btw, dont blame me because cov-ops"hunting" isn’t working as intended…
Blame ccp that has installed the Dynamic bounty modifiers that put every krabb in a t1 bs or Ishtar.
it would not break cloaky gameplay, it would change cloaky gameplay INSIDE of SOV NULL.
rofl, as i said before:
when I do explo, I have a “route” / pipe between x amount of systems, I scan everything down, I move on… then I do the actual hacking on my way back. No one has said you can’t be doing that between two refueling points.
I also sometimes scan the next site while I’m hacking cans.
no one has said you can’t d-scan while probe-scan the sites - uncloaked.
(you don’t need to be in cloak for your prbescan to work, as you seem to think)
and for the record, if anyone is “hunting explorers”, they will be using core probes, not combat probes.
the attack will happen on the explo site while you hack
Yeah, because hunters haven’t gotten the memo from ccp that sov sull pve players aren’t “rich” anymore.
as the players are more scarse and fly t1 bs and t2 cruisers only as there is no roi for bigger ships.
you simply need to change hunting grounds. stop blaming other players for not wanting to engage you… you should adapt to the changing universe. = change hunting grounds to wh.
fyi, the observatory are live now. They are 60-100m a pice. they cannot anchor within range of a station and they have 30k hp.
so … yes Cloaky afk camping can still be done afk without danger.
no its not.
you can also adapt to this in various ways that let your blop eyes be AFK , you just need to pass the “roaming kill observatory” torch within a fleet of yours.
the 1000% uncatchable way is having a webcam from another computer scan your overview, and alarm when it sees pixels in the right formation… aka “mobile observatory”
the 999% uncatchable way is having the same be done with software - and eve clients launched in a virtual machine.
etc etc etc…
And so, this is what our feedback was worth gentlemen - not even a response of “We don’t like you, go away”.
Having been hunting for years - this has been the case before ESS.
Before the anomaly rebalance.
Before the…
Okay, honestly, before my time as a hunter so that’s like pre-2013?
When I say “it’s impossible to be online all day avoiding all mobile observatories” I mean legally impossible.
As of today, if someone is afk cloaked in your system 24/7 and is avoiding all mobile observatory decloaks, he’s using a script/bot to avoid the decloaks or is sharing his account, so report him and let CCP deal with it.