Some love em, some hate em with a passion, but cloakers in Eve serve a purpose: recon and surveillance. But they tend to turn into a hassle, namely 24/7 afk cloakers waiting on a 2nd account for a kill shot. I happen to love playing cloakers and hate those afk guys with a passion, which led me to think a bit about how the later ones could be dealt with without destroying the entire cloaking concept. Now that we have downtime anyways, I'd like to share these ideas.

There are several concepts on how to deal with cloakers, reaching from fuel-based ideas, special anti-cloaker probes to anti-cloaker doomsdays, expressing the various degrees of hate against them. Now Eve happens to be a place where possibilities are eventually exploited if they are just lucrative enough, and some players tend to have an impressive amount of money and nothing to spent it on. The same fact invalidates all ideas that are purely based on the availability of a certain thing to counter cloakers (e.g. very expensive items, fuel, upkeep, bling bling, you name it).

On the other hand a cloaking device serves a purpose, that is being able to fly into dangerous space unharmed and stay there for a while. And whenever an alliance likes to spy on another alliance, this ability is extremely valuable. A solution therefore should not destroy this primary purpose of a cloaking device, otherwise it becomes completely pointless to even fit it. This rules out ideas that reliably negate cloaking devices like probes, anti-cloaking ships or the "Doomsday of Revelation" (tm).

And finally Eve is a place where risk means potential fortune, therefore an active player taking a risk should have a chance to be awarded for it, or die a horrible death in a nifty explosion. In other words: the big issue is not the cloaking device or a player flying around cloaked, but the guy that sits 24/7 afk in his ship on a second account till there is an absolute guaranteed kill available, therefore negating the risk while annoying the hell out of everyone in the system. A solution therefore should target the afk guys and not the active players.


Summarizing these ideas an anti-cloking mechanic needs to:

• Must not destroy the primary purpose of cloaking.
• Be limited in use in general and not based on a ressource.
• Needs to work chance-based and never get close to 100%. Chance must be tied to the potential gain.
• Needs to give an active player a chance to counter the effect, while be a guaranteed death for the afk guy.

My final idea is this infrastructure upgrade:
Luminescent Ionic upgade
(Strategic upgrade module)
Description: Activating this module will cause a spread of ionized particles to be send throughout the system which react with a noticeable glow if they come in contact with a ship's shield systems. This allows scanners and probes to be able to detect ships to a much higher degree and even allow to be able to detect cloaked ships.

Effect: When activated gives a 10% increase to combat scan probe strength per strategic level of the system used in and causes all ships to glow (causing an effect like if a shield booster is used), therefore making it possible to scan for cloaked ships. The effect lasts for 10 minutes and can be reactivated only after a cooldown based on the strategic level of the system (12h/6h/4h/2h/1h).

There is as well an upkeep cost associated with this upgrade and there will be no notification to ships if it is used. A cloaked ship under the effect of this upgrade will still be cloaked and cannot be targeted, but it will be visible and a bracket will be displayed around the ship if it is in visual range.


Let's take two scenarios:
1. An afk player is on his safe-spot flying downwards at 300 m/s waiting for someone to wander in his trap. If the module is active the player probably won't notice the faint glow on his shields and continue to be afk. In the meantime other players have launched their scan probes, find the ship, warp to it, search around for the cloaky bracket,approach it and shoot it down.

2. An active player sits in his ship and does whatever an active cloaker does. When the upgrade is activated, the player might notice the glow of his shields and knows that there are now people scanning for him, he is practically visible. He can counter this by warping around safe-spots in hope that the scanning ships are not fast enough to find his safe-spots and wait for him the next time he warps to them. If the player doesn't notice the glow, he can still see the sudden increase of combat scanner probes on the scanner and react accordingly. If the player doesn't look at that and doesn't notice the glow, his last chance is to notice that someone just warped to his safe spot (usually a few km behind if the cloaky is moving) and approaches his location. If the player tries to leave the system, he still has to get through a potential gate camp that will see him and will be able to uncloak and then kill him.

As this upgrade will only be available in inhabited systems and tied to the strategic level (thus how long it is inhabited), most parts of the universe will not tamper with cloakers, or in other words: only systems where recon is valuable will be dangerous. In addition a smart and active cloaker will know that there is such an upgrade and will be able to counter the effect, however it will be dangerous and some might explode when they warp on their safe-spot the second time and a fleet is already waiting for them. Once the effect wears off, the cloker has 50 minutes to do whatever he wants, till the hunt starts again.

I think this will solve the issue with afk cloakers and give sovereignty holders a reasonable but fair tool against cloaking ships as well as some other strategic benefits.