It’s a Tuesday in EVE Online, and that means we get a new patch! Patches can range from the completely mundane to game-changing mechanics that break everything. This patch is closer to the latter than the former, especially if you read what people are saying about it on the r/eve subreddit (advice: don’t go read it.)
https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/patch-notes-version-19-05
The notes can be found at the link above, but today I’m gonna talk about the biggest change. I’ll quote the relevant parts:
Structures & Deployables:
Introduced a new mobile deployable: the ‘Mobile Observatory’.
When deployed, these new mobile observatories, will “ping” the entire solar system periodically with a chance to decloak cloaked ships that do not have a cloak stabilization buff active.
Modules:
All cloaking device modules now grant the ship a temporary buff, “Cloak stablization”. This temporary buff will prevent being decloaked from the new mobile observatories introduced in this update.
The duration of the buff is 15 minutes, and can be re-applied to the full duration again by simply activating your cloak module again.
People generally have one of three feelings with a major game mechanic change like this:
- I hate this patch and I hate CCP and I hate this game and I’m quitting forever (they never do.)
- I love this patch!
- Meh. Doesn’t affect me so I don’t care.
I’m personally a #2. I love this patch. One of my least favorite things in EVE Online are those damned cloaky campers. Cloaky camping is non-interactive gameplay that affects the game with zero counterplay. Let me briefly describe cloaky camping in case you don’t know what it is. You get in a ship with a cloak (and possibly other stuff, like a Covert Ops Cyno,) you get into a system, and you.. just… sit there. You don’t even have to do anything. The people in that system will see you in local, and that’s good enough to affect their behavior. Even if you have no intention on dropping on someone, even if you don’t have a cyno, even if you’re completely away from your computer, you’re influencing the actions of the people in that system. This is not good gameplay. Just the THREAD that you might do something is good enough.
It sucks and it’s stupid.
If you’re an active cloaker and you’re hunting for targets, this patch doesn’t change a thing for you. It really only affects people who are doing the AFK cloak thing. I’m 100% in favor of this. I’m excited to see how this change plays out in the coming weeks. I’ll write a post and let you know how it goes.
Also, I know this change affects other types of gameplay that don’t involve AFK cloaky camping, but I’m a #3 for those 😉