Warfare & Tactics

Off grid boosts are off grid; at a safe, at a gate, at a station undock, etc
"Solo" pilots roam with them so they just safe it up, turn on boosts and **** on your plex

The OGB only needs to be undocked in system with the links running to boost the frig.

If the boost ship is off scan you dont know if the frig is boosted or not.

point being fights appear solo but are boosted - ofc if you see a frig and a loki and a tengu on scan but only the frig is at your plex gate - if theres not that many in local its pretty safe to assume its being boosted out the ass

I see. I assumed 'off grid' meant 200km not 20AU!

What a game breaker! So there's no way to tell?

Yes, it is a game breaker.

You can tell by having extreme situational awareness. Scan the system completely with the directional scanner, know what comes into the system, know what each person in local is flying. Even then they can be out of scan range in the larger systems and/or simply stay cloaked until the fight starts.
The only way you can be 100% sure is if you can eliminate every pilot in local, if you know they are definitely not a booster alt.

It is not true that there is no true solo. Alot of pilots fly without boosts and you can definitely still get "fair" fights. However it is also true that some of those pilots that are advertised/advertise themselves as elite (solo) PvPers fly everywhere with boosts. It's a sad thing for sure.

I was hoping they were going to remove off-grid boosting with the summer update, but no word yet ...


+1

This is not a solution to the problem of off-grid boosting. It's a solution to the perceived injustice people feel done to them when they loose in a fight that seems balanced, but becomes unbalanced due to the influence of a booster alt. If their loss mail shows the booster character then they lost 2v1 instead of a 1v1.

CCP has mentioned in passing that they don't like the way off-grid boosting works. It may get "fixed", nerfed in the summer patch,

Boosted ships get ridiculous bonuses.

CCP said they wanted to do away with ogb. But then they gave some vague mention of "technical difficulties." They gave no description of the technical difficulty nor did they indicate if anyone was specifically assigned to fix this issue. If they said something since then, I am not aware.

Some suspect they like the income from all the alt accounts people need to be competitive. I think they realize this issue is making the game much worse on the whole, and creating the impression that eve is only for people who like to multibox alts.

The proposal to force them on grid is one of the most upvoted proposals in assembly hall. Unfortunately csms of late have been above to visiting the assembly hall. (one of the reasons I expect a low voter turnout) I am not sure if any of the incoming csms have pushed this issue.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=10444&find=unread

Give it an upvote if you want.

Putting boosters on the killmail would at least make the killmails less misleading.

No they can't boost cloaked. But they can boost behind a pos shield.

Most solo pvpers I know don't gimp their fit with a combat scanner. I imagine some do but those solo pvpers are mostly looking to gank carebears and industrials. On this forum people are generally fighting other pvp ships. Crime & punishment will have more of that sort of pvp I would think.


Beyond that, I don't know. Scanning mining and pi are things I have no desire to do in eve. But I have heard to scan down many t3s you needs speacial implants - but i don't really know.

Basically if you see ships (Frigates) going more than 5000m/s (especially over longer period of time) or over 7000m/s (for a short time) then they are offgrid boosted with high probability. For Cruisers it's the same, just subtract 2000m/s from above numbers.

It has gotten worse with T3's, the general proliferation of high SP characters and the simple fact that these booster alts are more and more advertised.

Call it what you want, but it's a broken mechanic that needs to be fixed in one way or another. People put up with alot of stuff in this game. It doesn't mean they're not happy when it gets improved.

They can also boost with a covert ops cloak. and...

-On station (dock up if anyone aggresses); in lowsec they take sentry fire and a sec hit as well.
-On gate (Jump, cloak up if aggressed); aggressor also takes sentry fire and sec hit.
-In a safespot with ECCM running (Need a max-skilled scanner with all the bells and whistles plus a virtue set to scan them down)