By then they have moved, finished site, etc. But it doesn’t matter as they can see your in local before you even get to that point so they know your active and dock before you even load system. Then if you hang around they use observatory. Anyway most targets take way longer than 15 minutes. What person is going to sit there when they know 100% your there and 100% your active lol.
Anyhow with having to decloak to prove your not afk it’s better to just use a ceptor to come in quick and hope for the best. What little unknown cloaks had to their advantage is gone.
I fail to understand how. If a guy is still finishing to go for the next one or just warps when you enter system, observatory or other mechanics won’t matter anyway, so I don’t get where the rant comes from.
I agree there could be better solutions to tackle afk cloaky camping. I even had a small row about it with Brisc 
because I am of the opinion that non-afk cloaky camping did get some collateral damage (that we will learn to live with). However, it’s also an adequate (not “perfect”) solution for AFK camping. But your idea would throw a real wrench into the active play style of cloaked pilots at a fundamental level. Automatic cap drain (or cloak fuel, or other ship degradation) is just a way of allowing cloaked pilots a very limited time window for their activities. We don’t need more abyssal space, lol.
p.s. I also agree with your remark re: battleship production (if the goal was to influence faction BS prices then they overshot it by including tech1). But let’s not go off on a tangent here.
And also to assume that someone ratting will spend at least 400 mil (when they build observatories themselves) to drop 10 of them for pings every minute for 1:30 h just to be safer during ratting is a huge overstatement.
You can’t sneak if they know your there and know your active.
Then if you wait in somewhere to ambush them (on the off chance they really are that dumb and still rat knowing your there and active, and that they aren’t bait)
you can’t because you might get pinged out of cloak while there because you can’t control the other party and force them to come faster. So you warp off to reset your dumb ping resist and then now you lost your chance.
They don’t need to because they “can”. At any time the threat is there. They only need to drop one if someone hangs out too long.
You’re not supposed to do that for just any cloaky. And 10 of them, perhaps in 1DQ when they expect a bomber fleet showing up, then and only then would it be worth the money.
The mistake is that you expected an anti-cloaking device. It isn’t, and it never was meant as such.
What I would see with this is not limiting this drastically to the point where you have 10 minutes (unless you threw together basic cloak on a ship that should not be cloaky in the first place). Properly cloaky ship with reduced jump cap usage and if I seen right boost to cloaky speed even will still be able to get on grid and have more than enough time to make any adjustments you want, as per Enter the Portal – Black Ops Update | EVE Online
Covert Ops Frigates
- All Covert Ops exploration frigate combat bonuses have been removed
- Added -15% capacitor need to initiate warp level
Helios:
- Added 5% bonus to cloaked velocity
Cheetah:
- Added 5% bonus to cloaked velocity
The person attacking does have full knowledge of how many observatories are in a system and when they go up because they show up on your overview like a cyno beacon. You know exactly how much time and what level of security the defending site is runnig on then. Also some covops ships will now even get a velocity bonus for quicker sneaking as per last announcement.
Doesn’t matter. All useless because you don’t really have stealth. Better to use pretty much anything else for tackle anywhere an observatory can be.
Observatories are not cotton candy machines, and were supposed to give some possibility to defend against being dropped and/or camped constantly. The ease to avoid them, legal from the game standpoint or not, kind of defeats the purpose imo.
Possibility of dropping a module that anchors 10 minutes, then sends out a ping every 10 minutes with 40% chance of uncloaking does not defeat all of cloaking, you’re just going way overboard to the other side showing extremes that simply won’t exist.
so one underlying thought is that non covops cloaks (except t2 cloaks for blops) should not even be possible ? Strange notion.
That blops get a buff has no relation to what you are suggesting, this is not a quid pro quo (although this could be offset against the marauder buffs), but a buff because the viability and use of those ships was in a bad place. I also hope they give the poor Widow a decent trait instead of ECM … Question is if they will see better use now, and my investments in sp finally pay off after 6 years …
Like I said, you expected a remedy against the danger from being hotdropped - which is legitimate gameplay - or camped by an ACTIVE player. What ccp released is clearly against that expectation, for the right reasons. As to the reasons for the changes on covops (explo) ships, perhaps we will learn from an interview ?
You got it. Now you no longer have to wonder if the cloaky in local is active or not. Previously you might gamble that if they were there for a week they likely were AFK and you could rat with them there.
Now you know for sure they are active so you know for sure to go somewhere else or cower in the citadel until they move on. No more gambling required on your part. 100% safe from drops now.
Exactly because before the extra DPS, etc come into play, you have to catch a target.
They increased safety making targets harder to catch, but if a target was caught they would have died anyway. So now they might die 1 second faster than before but they are safer and harder to catch than before.
Another thing about this is these ships are the same ones that have the lock delay after decloaking. Target can easily get away from them so still better to use a bomber even if they buffed velocity of covert ops.
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Thing is, everything in the game seems to have a counter. Gate camps? You get into a shuttle and get passive nullification and instawarp (which is a terrible idea to just shift the passive nullification to just another ship, but it’s a separate topic). They have someone with smarbombs? You take an actively nullified ceptor and run any gate with slightly more tank - waiting 30 sec on other side means you can run both sides of the camp easily.
Thing is, observatories just require 2 button pushes to be rendered useless and you know exactly when your invunerability goes down + have time till the next tick (that you can also check when you enter system and sit next to the observatory and check when exactly it cycled, then you recloak, do 15m of your invunerability + 5 minutes till next cycle that has 40% chance of hitting you). If you get uncloaked, you don’t even show up in whole system, it’s on the grid you are on, so you can take countermeasures to prepare a drop if somoene didn’t dock up when they saw you enter a system.
So cloaking even with this imo missed new deployable is still a saint, no counter tactic (if you want to camp a system, you don’t need to sit on top of the grid with those people to force them into retreating).
Well, if you go especially for fast locking after decloak, you do have rigs for that, so I don’t think it’s a valid point.
Local no longer has a counter. AFK cloaking was the counter to the unlimited free Intel of local. They know you were there but not if you were active. No longer.
So don’t talk about counters because you just make yourself look bad. If you cared about counters you would suggest a Nerf to local when things like observatory get added.
You are misunderstanding the purpose of the mobile observatories.
The mobile observatories are a tool against AFK cloaking.
If a cloaked player is able to press those 2 buttons, he’s actively playing the game and therefore the mobile observatory intentionally does not affect his gameplay much.