Cloaked ship decloaking others on SISI. If this is real it will send bombers back to the dustbin. If its due to ISBoxer, just get rid of ISb
— Dirk MacGirk (@dirkmacgirk) October 9, 2014
In CCP Greyscale's dev blog last week on the long distance travel changes, he also mentioned that stealth bombers would receive a rebalance pass in Phoebe. Apparently, as part of that rebalance, cloaked ships will once again decloak each other if they get too close. At least, players are reporting that is currently the case on the Singularity test shard.
A lot of players have complained about the effectiveness of bombers in null security space in the current meta. From the reading I've done, the stealth bomber has dictated that null sec fleet doctrines abandon shield tanked battleships and use almost exclusively armor tanked battleships. Another article written by a member of Goonswarm Federation stated that the CFC switched from its Maelstrom-based Alphafleet to Megathrons because...
"The hull is armor tanked. This is key; ISboxer and cloaking changes made it possible for a single player to do a perfect bombing run with as many accounts as bomb mechanics allow. This alone caused the shift from the Maelstroms of Alphafleet to Megathrons; the smaller signature radius of armor tanked ships gives them much greater survivability against bombs."
These are just two examples of the articles and tweets I've read from people far more knowledgeable than I about null sec PvP pointing out how ISBoxer-controlled stealth bombers are bad for PvP in EVE. But CCP has made its decision on ISBoxer and has included its ruling in its Third Party Policies document. As I stated back in August, if CCP is going to allow the use of ISBoxer, then the devs need to balance the game around players using that software. I even wrote that CCP needed to reverse the change made in Crucible to not have cloaked ships decloak other ships.
No, I'm not taking credit for this change. Members of the CSM have also spoken out about the use of ISBoxer. On the forums, players seem to continuously start threads calling for the banning of ISBoxer. And, in all honesty, taking my advice on PvP is usually a bad bet. But I've seen enough to know that the use of such advanced multi-boxing software can distort the design intentions of the developers.
Honestly, I'm not sure that CCP has the resources to begin an effort to ban ISBoxer from EVE as NCSoft has done from Guild Wars 2 and Wildstar. But if they don't, then the next logical step is to limit the damage that ISBoxer use does to EVE. Making cloaked ships decloak each other is a good start.
