Hi!
In my opinion Mobile Observatory - as a solution against cloacky campers - doesn’t work effectively, it should need some changes, upgrade. What I mean:
Why do you think mobile observatories require these changes?
In what way is it not effective for it’s intended purpose of catching AFK cloaky campers?
Keep in mind that these items exist as deterrent against AFK cloaky camping, not cloaky camping in general.
I agree that the price at 60m ISK isn’t cheap, but worth it to catch someone who is leaving their bomber or recon in a system all day.
The price shouldn’t become much lower, because if these deployables were too cheap people would deploy massive amounts of them to hinder enemy cloaky combat strategies, like when enemies are trying to set up bombing runs on your fleet.
Use of mobile observatories against active cloaked ship strategies is not the intention of these deployables, so I think it’s good that the price is high enough that people don’t deploy dozens of them whenever a cloaked ship enters their space.
The decloak chance at 40% appears on the low side, at first glance.
However, keep in mind that it pings 9 times over it’s entire lifetime, which means that the chance an AFK cloaky camper does not get decloaked at all by a single mobile observatory is 0.6^9 = 0.01. In other words, you have a 99% decloak chance to catch the person who left their Arazu in system while they went to bed. And if you add a second mobile observatory you get a 99.99% chance to catch a camper who is truly AFK.
Seems high enough to me!
Why though?
I do not see why the ping interval needs to be shortened. I agree that there needs to be a balance here between ‘too short’ and ‘too long’.
If the ping interval is ‘too long’, cloaky camping without paying attention for shorter times becomes viable. Right now the entire lifetime of a single mobile observatory is 100 minutes, if I recall correctly, during which you have a 99% chance to decloak the person. If the pings are spread out too much, someone could go away for an hour with a reasonable chance not to be decloaked. Pings too long = bad.
If the ping interval on the other hand is ‘too short’, this mobile observatory starts interfering with regular non-AFK cloaky gameplay too much. Bombers, explorers, T3Cs all can have their own reasons to be cloaked and active, during a fight for example, but these mobile observatories would interfere with that with the decloak pulses. These deployables are not meant to interfere with legitimate cloaky gameplay, but if the pings happen too frequently it could become a weapon against active bomber fleets, or to catch travelling capital ships. In fact, the latter is already a problem, which is why CCP added a cloak hardening booster specifically for that situation.
I think a 10 minute timer is short enough, why do you think it should happen more often?
This does not seem very descriptive.
I do not see why mobile observatories need an upgrade at all, to be honest. It’s one of the more useful deployables that does exactly what it’s supposed to do, which is to allow players to counter AFK cloaky camping.
In my experience mobile observatories are both fun to play with and play against.
Mobile observatories removed the frustration of being unable to counter AFK cloaky campers and opened a whole lot of interaction possibilities ranging from ‘catch the cloaky camper’ to ‘pretend to be a decloaked cloaky camper and kill whoever is coming for a free kill’. Having been on both sides of this interaction, I think it’s a fun and effective deployable.
I agree that mobile observatories should be cheaper. Atm the cost its a bit to high for my taste. Imo 30 mil/observatory would be optimal. Balance of not to spamable but price low enough to actually use it more often than just for the one moment someone camps the system my corp wants to do our corpmining in.
What I also would like to see is: that the Skills to anchor such a thing should be lowered. In my opinion. I’ve ran into some Moments where my group wanted to decloack someone but then had to figur out who had anchoring 3 to place that thing as its not a skill thats usually trained. (btw why can’t alphas place that thing it does not make much sense to me why they shouldn’t be able to do that.)
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