Gate Camps and a Little Known Fact.

It is my understanding that the Eve-online servers process nearly everything in about one second intervals.  This is not one second from when you click the module, but every one sec the servers do a process of everything that happens.  Now you may think that this really doesn't matter, but when seconds matter it can mean the difference between life and death.  Seconds couldn't matter more then on a gate camp.  You have seconds to catch your prey or to get away.

How can someone take advantage of the one second processing though?  Why does it matter?  Well did you know you can activate a Covert Ops Cloak and a Microwarp Drive at the same time?  The Microwarp Drive will finish its cycle before it auto-deactivates.  If you are caught on a bubble in null sec; this gives you a chance to haul ass and get out of dodge.

Gate campers can take advantage of the servers as well.  The fact that eve servers only process once a second means that you have a full second to scramble the prey before they re-cloak.  The trick is to get your targeting speed under a sec and be quick with your targeting and scrambling.  This is where things get interesting.  If the gate camper is quick enough then the server will process both events (cloaking and being targeted) at the same time.  It appears that targeting wins.

I guess the way to take advantage of this for gate campers would be to set up their overviews so they can spam target on the first spot in their overview whenever they see gate fire.  This combined with a bit of luck and ungodly fast targeting speed would mean disaster for their prey.

Another worthy note is that organized gate campers have the advantage even without a scout in the next system.  The player jumping into a low or null sec system does NOT have any element of surprise. The gate campers get to see gate fire and see the person in local long before you are done loading.

Let this post serve as a warning.  It is very unlikely that your covert ops hauler is going to get caught by a gate camp, but it is possible.  The only way to really be safe is to scout, scout, and scout some more.