Suggestion: 1. Cloak take fuel-constant consumption to cloak, making use of re-fueling, deterring long term cloaky campers, use of more strategic cloak camping.
Suggestion: 2. Adding fatigue to cloaking modules like the covert ops cloak where you gain “jump” or cloak fatigue that increases when you de-cloak allowing people to counter your movements.
Note: add counter to cloaky campers and blops, Adding both of these would give all players chances to counter and decide strategically, plus make content more constant for intentional or accidental covert cynos.
Just make Mobile Observatories rescoopable and the whole problem is solved. Atm the costs are absolutely not worth the insanely low chance to actually catch someone with them.
Cloaky Camper appears → the locals have to be attentive all the time and prepare to be ambushed.
MobO is dopped → the cloakers have to do the same or get snacked.
If the cloaky camper is truly AFK, then the Observatory works.
If the cloaky camper is not AFK, then the Observatory will not work.
@Plagis You should really learn to search a forum for your suggestion before you post it. This is “Cloaky Camper Whine Thread #8,435,897,241.” None of your suggestions are new, and have all been addressed in the eight and a half billionish nearly identical threads.
This topic has been addressed to the point the horse’s remains have desiccated, turned to dust, and blown away on the wind. You’re just pounding sand at this point.
I do not understand what the problem with cloaky campers is. They are only active in space that is meant to be DANGEROUS. They make this space a TINY bit more dangerous from the normally very safe conditions. So, you can’t just rat in your Isthar willy-nilly? Cool. Have a cloaky recon near you and bait the campers. The killboard tells you exactly what they are doing. If they are just soloing, you can easily deter them from engaging you with a few nasty surprises for them. If they drop stuff, get buddies and counterdrop them.
It is really striking how people keep arguing that areas of space that are meant to be DANGEROUS should not be dangerous because it’s inconvenient.
I’ve been solo cloaky-camping certain areas null sec areas for over a year now and people either dock up and never return when I am around, or they just keep doing what they are doing because they know I am not after their Isthars but other things, or they prepare traps and stalk me like I stalk them. It’s enjoyable and exciting. Too bad that most people don’t do that or give up too soon.
We can also just destroy the MOOB. This is particularly hilarious when they try to defend it but are not prepared to adequately do so. I recently snatched one under the nose of 2 Lokis trying to catch me.
Totally fine, congratulations, that is how the reaction of a camper to a MobO should look like.
So we can agree that MobOs being non-rescoopable isn’t really nessessary and just lead to the current status that they are a) rarely used and b) almost never successful, not even talking about being remotely cost-efficient given their price-tag? I mean, you can re-scoop a Mobile Depot, you can re-scoop a Mobile Tractor Unit, you can re-scoop Mobile Bubbles. Imho all mobile deployment structures should be rescoopable if you can manage to protect them during their service time.
No, because then I’d have to agree with your false premise that there’s a problem with cloaky camping, which there is not.
The reason your observatories appear to not work is because your cloaky camper is not AFK, but actually playing the game. If they were AFK, then the observatory would work and you’d get your kill. The problem never was cloaky campers, but the ones who would log on after DT and cloak until next DT. The Observatories make it so you can’t go to work and expect to still be cloaked when you come back, that’s all they are and all they were ever intended to be.
Ever stopped to figure that the camper isn’t the problem, but your aversion to risk in a game all about risk mitigation?
I can’t remember having asked you, but thanks for your opinion.
Not sure what you talk about, I don’t live in 0.0. Where I live there isn’t even a local and 90% of the stuff that hunts for targets is cloaky here, so either I pay attention or I die. Nothing that is done carelessly or afk survives for long and nobody who is “risk averse” would make any profits here in the long run. I see the issue simply from a game-balance perspective and don’t think the current design is a very good one. Disagree with that all day long, I’m fine with that.
They are not successful because campers are rarely AFK. MOOBs are only useful against AFK campers (They got me once with one. I was not afk, but not looking at EVE for a while, and didn’t hear the decloak alarm). Since MOOBs were introduced, camping has become a much more active activity. You can’t blame the campers for adapting to the changes that PVErs wanted in order to combat campers.
MOOBs are not like Depots, they are like the Mobile Dscan Inhibitor or Concord Beacon, cyno inhib or cyno beacon. Not scoopable.
However, if CCP made all of them scoopable, they would have to increase cost a lot because it would be too easy to have a ready and cheap, several use cyno or cyno inhib or MOOB.
That has more to do with some aspects of reality we like to ignore too easily: First, as you said the decloak makes a noticable sound, so it is absolutely no issue to leave a cloaker cloaked for hours while having the EVE client completely ignored in the background. Turn the volume high enough and you don’t need to pay active attention any more, you will be notified if a MoOb decloaks you and you will have enough tme to just just recloak, change your location and be safe again. And then you even have the information that they actively try to decloak you. While they have wasted 60M, still don’t know if you are active or not because they can’t know if the MoOb ping simply wasn’t successful or you have recloaked quickly while being on a spot outside their Dscan range.
You can use other accounts or even playing other games all day long, watching movies, cleaning the room, doing home-office, eating or whatever. That is not actively paying attention. And still no MoOb has a chance to detect you since you only need to react if the decloak sound plays (and you can turn that one pretty loud).
The second thing is, we may like it or not, automation. I can absolutely go to work, having a cloaky camper sitting somewhere and a simple keyboard macro running that decloaks and re-cloaks my ship every 10 minutes (+/- some random seconds). It will constantly refresh my Cloak Stabilization and no MoOb will ever be successful. Now you can argue that this would be against the rules, but given the fact how easy and absolutely undetectable it is (because it doesn’t is enough activity to provide a pattern that you could analyze), we have to consider it balance-wise, because one thing we know for sure: the players in EVE will do all kinds of exploits, bots and other shenanigans if they are easy to use and have a high probability to get away with it. We know that for 100% sure because that is the reason people are still botting, which is simply and undenyable fact. There is not a single reason people wouldn’t use such a simple thing like a macro to easily tire-out the attention of their targets in the long run to make their attack/drop successful in the end with little risk of being countered.
Now on the opposite, the CynoGenerator on your cloaked ship means an immense threat to all people in local and the mechanic described above makes it incredibly easy for you to just “tire them out”. At some point they will begin to do their stuff again, at some point ther reinforcements will dissolve, their attention will drop - nobody can’t keep up a coordinated defense for hours and hours not even knowing if you will do something or not. This is a huge disbalance: The effort to protect is magnitudes higher than the effort to threaten. And that all those nonsense solution like “bait them into a trap” won’t work 99% of the time is clearly shown at zKill: BOs and their entrepeneur have a 98% efficiency rating in kills/losses, so “baiting them” is a) tiresome and b) most likely not working out.
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I would agree to that, because I like tactical decisions that do play your way if you are good/successful (in this case: able to protect your Deployable during it’s working time). I also like streamliked mechanics, aka a simple rule for all Deployables (thats why I am against an RF-timer for Mobile Depots for example): All of them should be vulnerable to attacks if left unattended, having an adequate cost for their benefit and being recoverable if one manages to protect them.
Let’s be honest here, even if a cloaky player wasn’t AFK, and was somehow actually at the keyboard 24 hours a day, you’d still whine about it because you still couldn’t catch them. 99.99999% of the time when a thread about cloaky camping pops up, it’s not about being AFK, it’s about being able to be cloaked, period.
You people have what is known as “pixel fear”. You are so scared to death to undock, simply because there is a single unknown in your system. I find that quite hilarious. Scared to death to undock…in a PvP game.
Because I honestly care to make EVE a better game for many players. Mainly by removing unnessessary exceptions, making rules of engagement easy to understand and providing efficient counters for all activities. Right now MoObs are not an efficient counter to cloaky ships threatening local activities with hotdrops or ambushes, you can see that in the usage- and success-ratings. Making them rescoopable would hurt no one (not even the cloaky campers), since their ways of countering them would stay exactly the same: recloak/reposition or destrying the MoOb). But it would streamline the rules for deployables by removing one exception and would encourage their use to promote more active gameplay for both sides. A nerf in HP or cost increase would of course be acceptible to make the use actually risky or at least an investment (which could be recovered by a successful protection).
That’s just it. You’re trying to make suggestions “to make EVE a better game” without understanding what EvE is as a game.
You don’t even understand the difference between cloaky camping and AFK cloaky camping. Observatories are tools to fight AFK camping, not the entirely valid tactic of cloaky camping as a whole.
I also question your ability to balance a three legged stool on a level slab. You cannot properly balance a system you do not understand.
I absolutely do understand the difference, I just don’t agree with your opinion that the status of cloaky camping is in good balance right now. Because I know how easy it is to “camp” even for incredible large amounts of time with barely any risk and investment and how tiresome it is on the other hand to constantly keep protection efforts up for the same amount of time. I’d like to shift that balance more towards a game of constant cat’n’mouse where both sides have active tools to force the other side on their toes if they want to keep playing it.
But, I am obviously not surprised that resistance comes from those who claim to “know what EVE is about” (let me translate: grabbing easykills by hotdropping a superior fleet onto a few ratters/miners. I mean, the cloaky campers are not there for a fight that would require any skill, right? )
No worries, your personal attacks, mocking and insults on anyone you disagree with and your expressed self-superiority are part of your presence since you have appeared at these forums, glad to see you living up to my expectations.
Funny how this only seems to apply to you and three others, isn’t it? Almost like you bring this upon yourselves.
Nah, that couldn’t be it, right? Nothing bad that ever happens to you is your fault, always someone else that did it to you.
Tell me this, if you know so much about this topic, how does Cloak Stabilization factor into an Observatory decloaking you? This should be a simple enough question if you’re actually interested in the balance of cloaky camping.
This is particularly hilarious when they try to defend it but are not prepared to adequately do so. I recently snatched one under the nose of 2 Lokis trying to catch me.
