Cloak Inhibitor

There is no such thing!

But I think there should be.

The Problem

Sometimes you hear people complain about "cloaky" campers in null space.  But you don't really respect the problem until you experience it.  A cloaky camper is someone who sits around endlessly in a cloaked ship, occasionally scanning down and attacking anyone they can find, usually by "hot dropping" a fleet on the victim.  This is fine out in the wild, but when one of these cloaky campers sets up shop in one of your alliance's industrial systems, it can disrupt the activities of hundreds of players for hours, days, or longer, bringing an otherwise active industrial system to a near standstill.

You can't scan these people down because they are cloaked.  You can set traps for them, but you'll likely need a fleet to set a proper trap, and much of the time it won't help because the cloaky camper will be largely afk.

The Solution

The goal should be to provide a counter to the problem without making it too easy to do or otherwise breaking people's ability to utilize cloaking.  To that end, I suggest the creation of the Cloak Inhibitor.

The Cloak Inhibitor would be something alliance's or corporations could deploy in their key systems to limit cloaking in those systems.  These could only be put in null space systems and the effects would be system-wide.  You don't want alliances putting these things everywhere, though, so there should be a significant upkeep cost for operating a Cloak Inhibitor.  My thought is that it could be a structure that gets anchored to a POS.  It would have heavy power grid and CPU requirements, possibly requiring a large POS.  Onlining them would take a significant amount of time as well, on the order of 15 minutes, to prevent them from being placed everywhere and then flipped on and off like light switches.   Alliances would be forced to either pay for regular fueling of a dedicated Cloak Inhibitor POS, or would have a time investment when selectively onlining them.

The Cloak Inhibitor would not completely prevent cloaking.  That would be going too far.  Instead, I propose there be 2 new timers that work in combination with active Cloak Inhibitors.   A Cloak Drop Timer, and a Cloak Reactivation Timer.

If you are in a system with an active Cloak Inhibitor and you engage a cloaking device, or if you have a cloaking device engaged when a Cloak Inhibitor is brought online in a system, you get a Cloak Drop Timer.  This would be a timer with a duration of maybe 15 minutes.  Once this timer is up, your cloak automatically drops along with the timer.  If you manually drop cloak before the timer is up, the timer drops immediately.  Either way, when the Cloak Drop timer drops, you get a Cloak Reactivation Timer.

During the period of the Cloak Reactivation Timer, you cannot engage a cloaking device in the system.  The duration would be significant, on the order of maybe 2 to 4 hours.  The duration needs to be long enough to make jumping between alternate characters to avoid the new mechanic impractical.  When the timer drops, you can cloak in the system again, which starts the cycle over.

In addition, the timers will drop and reset when switching systems (but not when logging out and back in).  Someone wishing to abuse the system might try to jump back and forth between systems to keep clearing the timers, but pilots are vulnerable when jumping through null space gates even when fitted with cloaking devices, so I don't think this would be a serious loophole.

End result is alliance's can make cloaky camping far more difficult in key systems.  Pilots in general could no longer afk for extended periods of time in null space, without fear of someone activating a Cloak Inhibitor and decloaking them.  But pilots would still have a guaranteed 15 minutes of cloaking safety in each system.