think of it lore-wise. Cloaking allows the refraction of light making you "invisible". Now if you move,light refracts in all kinds of directions making you blue!

In all seriousness though you can't be fully invisible. Yes yes I know we're in a space age shooter that allows us to fire plasma and lasers but its physically impossible to be fully invisible

They only needed it because people weren't using it as it's suppose to. People would rather run around skip letters just to kill dudes. Before the nerf, I saw heavies hacking letters while cloaked scouts slayed. Now that it's nerfed, I act see scouts hacking **** while assault suits and heavies do the dirty work. The nerf was the right thing to do.

and yet the majority of the player base runs cloaked scouts

This particular point is fairly controversial from the feedback that I've gathered, Sam. One recurrent idea is that the scout effect reportedly turns up very differently depending on your television, and of course your distance from the screen.

I play a few feet away from a computer monitor myself. My experience in the past has been that seeing a cloaked person, and seeing them well enough to kill them, are wildly different metrics. During the bad ole' days without the cloak delay I would often see a cloaked scout's "shimmer", but the visual distortion was enough to make it pretty darn difficult to kill that guy if he just zig-zagged while running away. This part of the experience fueled my frustration, really, since I had essentially out-maneuvered the scout player by identifying his location before he had killed me.

My cloak advocacy reached its peak when the mechanism got touted as an alternative for covering open ground unnoticed by tanks and semi-distant enemies. The predator-style play it inspired before the nerf was terrible.

Your entire point revolves around the fact that you can't be invisible and sneak up on people to kill them, which is a b!tch move in the first place!

Boo hoo dude, do you hear that? It's the whambulance and its coming for your crybaby emergency!

(P.S. Everyone cries about remote explosives being too op but they've been nerfed to hell and back but all the cloaks scouts cry they can't sneak up on you invisible and kill you which is worse than RE's)

It's not always obvious. I've had scouts running up to me wearing a cloak, started shooting at them, they strafe and then they're gone! Then splat, I'm dead. Nobody should be able to hide in a shadow and then splat mercs.

It depends on your tv and your eyes. I see things differently depending on the size of my tv (and if it's hd) and find it harder to spot scouts if I'm sat more than 1m away from it (which I rarely do).

If the scout is running in bright light, it's more obvious to me. But even then I struggle. Most of the time when I snipe a cloaked scout it's because they've been shield/armour tanking and not profile dampening at all, so still have a red chevron above their head, which makes them much less sneaky!