As someone who plays an intel faction for fun (The Directive), you tend to walk a very fine line with metagaming.
As an example: I see a bunch of Fae players in New Tokyo with Auxo and Entity in the player list. So I log my Directive spy ship and go spy on them, collecting intel for myself and The Directive. Is that construed as metagaming? In my mind it's very close if not metagaming flat-out. I saw them on the character list, I went there cloaked to listen into what they're talking about and then reported it to someone. Intel factions should only operate in one of two facets:
When hired by an external faction/agency to run intel/surveillance on a faction for the means of collecting data.
When visible in open space and collecting suspicious ships locations or conversations.
Anything beyond this could be construed as metagaming unless you stumbled upon some ships whilst flying around under cloak. This has happened to me a couple of times, but I felt like it could be construed as metagaming so I didn't keep the information I heard.
Being intel within the confines of Discovery is a tricky business. It's difficult, if not impossible, to balance properly.
However, on the flip side, I will say the cloaks are fairly balanced alongside the scanners. If I want to scan you from a range where my cloak won't be detected, I only have a 5k range that I can do that and still remain undetected. There have been times where I've tried to scan ships and have had to get up to 6k away and risk being detected within the 4k range of the cloak detector. Makes for some fun RP when I'm hired to do recon and surveillance on certain parties.
Felt I'd give my two cents on this considering I have a lot of run RPing intel agents.
