Hi there CCCP.We all know u don,t play much the game,but we do, so can you improve mobile observatory ,this ■■■■ deployable was here for a while and is useless as dead stick.
1.Cost to high
2.Easy overcome
3.Very low decloak probability
4.Should,t be able to cloak for longer or at all
5.Cycles faster,because it takes sometimes up to 5 cycles to decloak at least ones…time ineficent
what is your target? an AFK’er or someone who is actually cloaked in your system?
It functions exactly as intended. It’s sole purpose is to expose and make vulnerable afk campers not to counter active players who are camping. Cry less.
That device was introduced against AFK cloakers by player demand. This is the purpose and for that purpose it is exactly working as intended.
But you have a misconception about the nature of cloakers as do many. A lot discussion went in that most cloakers are in fact not AFK, but nobody wanted to listen. Now it turns out that your “AFK cloaker” is in fact no “AFK cloaker”, but an active cloaker.
Who would have guessed that?
It is just the same common misconception if you think certain behavior has to be a bot or if any fleet you see has to be a multiboxer and of course all multiboxers use input broadcasting.
Jumping to unfounded conclusions is the problem here.
Mobile observatories were added to specifically counter AFK cloaked campers. Or written out: these cloaked players are away from keyboard.
In the past it used to be a strategy to leave your ship cloaked in hostile space while you were asleep or at work to make them scared or to get them used to your name in local with zero possibilities for them to do something about it.
Mobile observatories stop that strategy well.
You may have a misconception that mobile observatories are meant as a counter against any cloaked player. This is wrong. As you may have noticed, mobile observatories are not very effective against cloaked players who are near their PC to pay attention.
They shouldn’t be too cheap or someone would drop 10 of them to nearly guarantee a decloak on a non-covops cloaked ship of an active player the moment their cloak stabilization drops.
50 million may sound expensive to catch a cloaked frigate, but some cloaked ships are well worth dropping 10 at that price, like a cloaked supercarrier or titan moving through space.
I think the price of a mobile observatory should be around the current cost of a cheap Covert frigate, definitely not too far below.
That’s the whole point.
Mobile observatories are meant to be easily overcome for non-AFK players.
These deployables are meant to counter the old strategy of ‘leaving your ship cloaked in system while you are off to work/to bed’. And they work really well against such players.
With a decloak chance of 40% per cycle and 9 cycles total you are looking at a combined decloak probability against an AFK target of 99.0% for a single mobile observatory. 99.99% with two.
Maybe it’s me, but I would call 99.0% a very high decloak probability.
Pointless, an AFK player will not be there to recloak.
An active player can indeed recloak, but the mobile observatories are designed to have a very low or minimal impact on active cloaked players, so it only makes sense that the ping doesn’t disable cloak for a long time.
That’s on purpose.
An active cloaked player may not be there in one system for the 1.5 hours it takes for the mobile observatory to do 9 pings. An AFK cloaked player who left their ship in space while they’re asleep won’t go anywhere in those 1.5 hours.
The long duration and time between cycles are a good way to minimize the impact on active cloaked players while having 99% effectiveness against an AFK one.
Mobile observatories do what they’re intended to do very well.
Many people just assume the purpose of mobile observatories is something completely different.
I agree, it should be removed from the game. It was a concession to crybabies whining about afk cloakers, but as always, crybabies are impossible to sate and so here we are, demanding ever more.
Your second paragraph is wrong imo. It’s not that most campers weren’t afk. Most of them were indeed afk before the mobile obs was introduced. That game play though has now died and the ones that remain are more active as it should be.
hey CCCP glad to see u here i know u dont ever undock but I do so you can now improve the gnaking in highsecs epsecially this is great stuff and miners is useless so i help them to die
There is still a way to be afk while camping. Tools like SMT can detect when cloaking is deativated.
With a small script its easy to get this message and send a F1 to the game. So after a few seconds the ship is cloaked again.
We did try to get cloaky camper many times. We even tried it up to 48 hours with rotation people. We did decloak him, but only for a few seconds. not enough time to scan him down.
There’s an audio warning when your ship is forcibly decloaked.
Literally all you have to do is listen for that sound, alt-tab, and hit F1.
Have you tried getting good, and to stop blaming bots for someone being better at Eve than you are.
This is called “cheating” and is entirely unrelated to the functionality of the mobile observatory.
I agree with your points, but a discussion about it is completely pointless. MoObs do aboslutely nothing, the process of re-cloaking and thus renewing the cloak stabilzation timer has just been automated after their implementation. Using them is a complete waste of time and resources with the very slight chance to catch one dummy every 10 attempts.
However, don’t even try to argue, most people simply deny the existance of widespread macro use in cases where it is pretty much undetectable for CCP (which a re-cloaking macro is a pretty good example of). I can stay 23h 55min totally untouchable cloaked in any system I want and don’t even need to be at the computer, no biggie. And neither CCP could read in the logs that I am afk nor the locals could do anything about it. A macro being able to do that isn’t even 20 lines long and any dumbass can build it with less than an hour of research via google. 
They could introduce a CAPTCHA that someone has to complete in order to recloak. Maybe something like “rotate the Thrasher so it is facing the Venture” or “click all images containing a Coercer”.
They could. Or they could change the MoOb mechanic to be actually useful. Plenty of suggestions have been made to change the cloak&wait game into some interesting cat&mouse with some tactical depth and useful strategies to come out on top for both sides.
That person is cheating, report them to CCP if you observe such behaviour.
How would you know this? This is impossible to prove.
From my experience i was never AFK during cloaking neither were the cloakers in my systems. Because if you got lazy and assumed they were AFK, then you were about to moan your shiploss as next thing to do. And that was also the perceived problem. People were thinking and/or proposing those cloakers were AFK. They were only seemingly AFK while no opportunity was given or to scan out routines, structures and possibilities.
If that in fact were true that indeed they were AFK - which they weren’t - then it is funny that the whiners got their possibility of decloaking and thereby caused to have proven active killers in their systems while as you tell this wasn’t the case back then with AFK cloakers, since those were AFK in your opinion.
In that case whining truely backfired for the whiners.
And what shall they do? You can’t detect a macro that just does very simple actions, delayed by small random amounts of “reaction time pretending”. You can only detect bots that do complex things with inhuman consistency. Thats the point. Someone simply re-cloaking at random times to renew the cloak stabilization or re-cloaking after being decloaked by a ping will always say he did it manually. And CPP has not the slightest chance to prove that isn’t true. So they won’t take any action against it.
That is what you people don’t (want to) understand. Perma-afk cloaking is absolutely easy and absolutely undetectable for CCP because the pattern of actions just isn’t complex enough to distinguish a bot from a human who pays attention.
And that is why MoObs are a 100% useless, except for the one rare dummy you catch in a year.
It seems there’s another misunderstanding.
Mobile observatories are a tool players can use as counter against AFK cloaked players.
Mobile observatories are a game mechanic to counter a legitimate playstyle.
Cheating, breaking the EULA by scripting or botting is not a legitimate playstyle and does not require in-game tools to counter them.
Unlike legitimate cloaky campers, it is not up to players to counter cheaters.
It is up to CCP to catch and ban cheaters.
Mobile observatories aren’t meant to counter cheaters, that’s what we have a report button for; If you suspect someone is cheating you can help CCP by reporting the suspected player.
That’s up to CCP to determine whether someone is cheating. They have a whole lot more information than I do so I’m not going to do their job.
But a good starting place for CCP is when they get a bunch of reports of “this player has been recloaking consistently for the past 24 hours”.
TL;DR: Mobile observatories do not counter cheaters, and they’re not meant to. Report cheaters instead.
thats what I meant. The discussion is totally pointless, because you argue from an “ideal, legal point of view”, totally ignoring realities.
Thats why I won’t invest any more time into that. The thing is completely useless because all it’s effects are being circumvented already. And because of that reality, CCP should either change or remove them. In their current form they have no use in the game and thus are an example of bad design.
We need to balance the game around the cheaters?
That’s utterly ridiculous.
Could CCP do more about banning botters? Sure, but balancing the game around them is just dumb. You do nothing but punish those not cheating in your tantrum to punish people you imagine are botting.
We’ve found a bot, may we burn it?
