Warfare & Tactics

I just spent the last ~6 months or so maxing out my main character to fleet boost my pvp alt. That's 6 months of paying for an account to train skills that added nothing to that character's abilities. IF off grid boosting was nerfed, I would seriously hope they would offer reimbursement. Many people are going to be pissed off about all of the effort they put into obtaining these characters if they are suddenly made far less useful.

If people would just put in a little of their own effort they could easily obtain their own fleet booster, but instead they opt to cry on the forums. Why is that? Oh, that's right...because it takes a massive amount of time, isk, resources, and effort to obtain and continue to use a fleet booster. If it did not, they would already have one. Just save the rivoting tale about how you are "too honorable" to use a fleet booster and that's why you don't..

Yes, hold on good sir while I send my probing alt after your boosting alt then we can honorably duel. After all if I don't parlay for this opportunity to probe your booster alt I will be guilty of being lazy.

Off-grid boosting is still a ******** mechanic. It was ******** before tech III and became even more so after tech III.

I fly commands. I want them on grid. To be part of the battle. Not to become an alt account you sneak into a system and ss etc. or sit at a pos. It's more fun flying a logi anyway, but anything beats getting told to safe up and run links without seeing the battle.

As for "but they can get probed ~~" Difficult to do and anyway, so what. They are not getting shot at, neuted, bubbled, pointed or being part of the battle. Yet they are having a major impact on that battle. It is just stupid the way it has been since tech III command subsystem came into the game.

As for Nosrevibus's solution I can agree that command processors should be removed from the game. Removing the command processor will make more people train leadership and fill roles that formerly might only be filled by one ridiculous fit. That is a good thing. But I don't agree that that module is the source of the blob problem. People simply blob. They will blob with a new booster structure, i.e more booster ships within the fleet. Taking away the one uber booster ship will not end the blob.

edit- and lol at but but then you must reimburse me for training an alt to do only this off-grid boosting. the game changes. supercarriers no longer squash everything. supercarrier pilots not worthy of sp reimbursement and neither is a boosting tech III alt. CCP did not sign a contract to preserve your exploitation (i.e. not exploiting) of a flawed game mechanic. When they fix what they made to function as they wish it to you can stomp off in a huff or live with it. Because, they are saying off-grid is not what they want. No amount of crying will make an off-grid booster ship any more "intended."

Because fitting gang links to your other ships is forbidden ? Because Claymores and Lokis are terrible kiting ships ? Why ?

Now, let's assume that you are a 40m SP main, and those 20m SP are part of your skillset.

You can fly a trilink CS and be useful on grid, or you can fly a onelink Tech III and also be useful on grid.

Mind you, i have seen groups who do that and put them to good use.

However, letting your or anyone elses random 20m SP alt take over that role is more powerful and will as such continue to profile. Should the mains get their SP back then, as you suggest for the alts?

Those alts not on grid that will gladly pay 300 or 500m for the ship and another 200m for the mindlinks, to keep the demand up and faucet that style of gameplay in the same manner Supers were considered a problem a while back.

That is part of Diesel's issues as well...



Realize that the supply without any outlet only lead to a raised demand through popularisation. Prices have a tendency to sky-rocket then. The demand is pumped up by "safe" alts and growing numbers where bonuses apply to more people (ie., larger gangs don't have to pay more for more boosts unless they grow beyond the fleet structure - so blobs happily invest in boosters in the same manner they invest in other specialist ships next to cheap mainline platforms). It's cost-effective.

In that sense your claim could be answered in two different ways: 1) It's a powerful booster, it shouldn't really be "free". Like most other things that give you specialist advantages in the game (techy ships, implants, drugs and faction modules), it's rarely cost-effective, or not meant to be. 2) Prior to the sky-rocketing the whole thing was largely balanced to the gangs you'd run them with. Run them with Tech I and they were reasonably priced specialist support next to cheaper mainline ships for all scales. Prices now hurt small gangs way more. They were also largely balanced to other techy options. Run them with HACs and you'd pay marginally more for your booster (10-25%), not the 200% difference you see today, which is also why you're not seeing more Claymores next to Vaga-Cyna nano-oriented small gangs.

As always, this discussion is about numbers (blobs) not being balanced, and the extremes people go through to sustain themselves in the face of that. OBG is an equalizer by the same premise Titans are. When are CCP going to realize that it's time to counter-balance numbers and restore balance between all scales? When come the compensation for "nano"?

The rest of your post i largely agree with.

Don't get me wrong, i still don't see a problem with "OGB" as an option - it just need not be a superior one.

I, just like some of you, am torn between questions revolving around "the greater good".

The use of a siege/triage/industrial core is nothing like a ganglink..

The ganglinks give additional boosts, the siege/triage/industrial core only activate a function. Other than a little safety there is no reason not to sit a rorq in your hidden belt providing gang links, if your using the industrial core in a belt you're very bad.

Unfortunately the grid is far too small and unstable to be able to do it any other way, scatter a few wrecks and bubbles about and it goes skew-width.

The warfare mods not working in a pos makes sense, after all, other weapon mods are infective in a pos.

Perhaps it's not a weapon system in definition, dunno.

TIII ships seem better than TII ships, quite versatile. So I have no comment on the boosting Loki thing.

Why so emotional?

" **** you " isn't a valid argument.

and how does a cloaked booster work since he cannot run any mods aide the cloak

You can't let T2 battlecruisers in a major without letting battleships in. To be honest it's kinda broken letting T2 BC's in because a major is the only one limited to BC and lower. T2 BC's would be king of majors if they were suddenly allowed and battleships were not. It also would make the t1 BC hulls far less desireable for FW.

Anyway about OGB... its fine. Working as intended (for those who put the effort into having one).

The same arguments were often used by proponents of Falcon alts back in the day - it allows us to fight outnumbered. Yet in space what you would see is people using them to blob more safely. For every guy who would use it to fight superior numbers, there would be ten gankers who use falcon alts to insure that when they're trying to blob a small gang or a soloer that they can't possibly shoot back.

Bottom line is that having a free HG snakeset + free faction point & web on your otherwise T1 ships with the only really expensive ship being out of direct fighting is broken - the reward is far too high compared to the risk of using a T3 alt. It will go away, eventually, just like the old Falcon did, and nothing disastrous will happen.