Cloaking is simply (still) too powerful in EVE, as there really isn’t a viable counter to it. As things currently stand, a cloaky hunter can have a profound impact on other people’s in-game experience with very little effort. It’s a very one-sided, controlling mechanic. For all you RTS fans, think about it in terms of actions-per-minute: The cloaky pilot drops probes off scan, then sits and waits cloaked off your station, or within jump range of a gate. The cloaky pilot can operate with ease throughout the entire system, while you, the hunted, must spam your d-scan button every 5 seconds scanning for combats. And am I expected to deploy mobile cyno inhibs, mobile scan inhibs (30km range? seriously?) & mobile observatories in every single area/system I visit? Not practical. Not useful. Not very “mobile” either, if you ask me.
And if you’re solo pvping? Might as well dock up, especially if you can’t fit a cyno on your ship (ie most pvp ships). You can’t counterdrop them, you can’t avoid him in space, and you can’t protect yourself if you actually want to keep “playing the game”. When that cloaky cyno comes in, for all intent and purposes, the game just stops for you, as they now have the massive invisible blops cannon pointed right at your head. There’s minimal counters to these super-buffered, low DPS, cyno/tackle t3cruisers and haulers roaming around: Keep range, ecm alt?, cyno alt to counter?, or just avoid them?
The fixes:
Cyno disruption module. Turns off the target ship’s cyno. Prevents targeted ship from lighting cyno.
Cloaked ships appear as scannable anomalies in space. No cloak is perfect. No weapon is without it’s flaws.
D-scan reveals cloaked ship as “unknown ship” or [unknown]… doesn’t matter what it says. You just know that “something” is there, but you just can’t see it. No limitations here. You can use the d-scanner to narrow down their location as you would with any other ship.
You can hear cloaked ships come out of warp near you.
Those little particles on stargates that trail out to you when you warp to it? They will trail out toward cloaked ships coming out of warp near that gate.
Long story short, you’ll never catch a cloaked ship in your system anyway. Even if I show up as an “anomaly” and you can scan that “anomaly”, by the time you’ve scanned me down I’ve already warped away and you’re back to square one…
You people have been whining about cloaks for 19 years now. CCP fixed them, and that still wasn’t enough. You tend to forget that cloaks aren’t only used in low sec, null, and wormholes. There are many uses for it in high sec as well.
Again, none of what you listed will do any good. All I have to do is burn to the sun at zero, cloak up, and even if I just sit there and let you scan me down, you still can’t warp to me. The game will drop you out of warp a minimum of 5,000 km from the sun. You would literally never be able to find me or reach me, not even with everything you listed. I could sit there uncloaked and you would still have to manually burn 5,000 km to reach me, at which point I wait until you are 1,000 km out, cloak up, and warp away again. Cloaks exist for a reason. Deal with it…
Cloaking is indeed a poweful tool, but has various counters.
Give cloaky PvP a try yourself to get a better idea of the limits and counterplay.
As someone who has done cloaky PvE (exploration), cloaky solo and group PvP as well as hunting enemy cloaky campers, I feel like cloaky gameplay has been really balanced and fun ever since the introduction of mobile observatories.
For years there has been a debate about AFK cloaky gameplay, where people complained about the lack of effort that goes into shutting down systems with an AFK cloaky camper and that it is disproportionate effort to try counter that strategy by baiting the camper as the campers were usually not paying attention to your bait at all because they weren’t at their computer most of the day.
No longer is that the case. If you see a cloaky player you can bait them into a fight and you can be sure they notice your bait, because if they don’t notice it they won’t notice the mobile observatories either that get them decloaked and killed.
