Don't touch my socket

There are good wormholes to stalk in and there are bad ones. The bad ones are populated by big corps that do a lot of pvp and would destroy my little fleet without an effort. In fact, any corp that focuses strongly on pvp, even the small one, can be my end. Big pve corps can too ruin my day by overwhelming with numbers. Thus I try to find a nice quiet system with a small corp that operates in my timezone, preferably with a nice loss history as proof they are using shiny ships for their pve fix. I have been stalking one such corp for almost a week now.

It all looked perfect. Corp was Russian and activity matched my timezone. They had nice Marauder losses in their recent history. System was clean of anomalies and only handful of signatures were present at the time. All points of a perfect target have been checked and yet, I had no opportunities to gank anything.

Locals would login and just sit at their tower or more often than not, login for a short time and log out. Anomalies spawned slowly and they were left alone or cleared during my working hours. It was rather annoying, so naturally I started scouting neighboring wormholes a bit more frequently. On one such checks I spot Stratios.

He warps to an empty space in the system. Judging from overlay scanner, it doesn't look like a signature, but then again, it may not be that accurate. I wait for the thing that Stratioses (Stratioi?) do - to cloak up, but he never does. I narrow down his position and have a good idea where he is at.

Whatever he is doing I am growing impatient. He is in the middle of the system and there's no celestial out of range to launch my probes. I say screw it and drop probes and send them out of the system as fast as I can. Stratios is still on scan. Good. With new fool-proof d-scan, I position combat probes and do a quick ninja scan.

I get a hit and warp at 10 to see what's up. I did not get any signature hits so that felt weird. I find him floating in the middle of nowhere. I don't know what is his game. Doesn't feel like a bait. Regardless his reasons, I decloak and grab him. I assume sound of aggression wakes the pilot up and I get neuted, but not scrammed. I had a few close calls when I lost tackle of the Stratios. Proteus is really useless against neuts. Scrambler does not take much cap so you can cycle it even when sucked dry, but there are short moments when you lose your tackle. Those short moments are all that's needed for a capable pilot. If he was aligned he would have escaped, but now, with my Dominix fleet arrived, he was not going anywhere. Stratios explodes and pod warps clear. After the fight was over local lit up.

Stratios pilot was very surprised. He was certain he was cloaked, but I explained him that he was not and he has been sitting there from beginning without disappearing even for a moment. I know because I was there, actively checking the d-scan.

We talked a little bit more about EVE's connectivity problems. While I doubt cloak failure was caused by the servers, I do feel the socket closure problem. I had it happen myself, but not to extent to get annoyed by it. In my line of work random socket closures would literally kill my play style.