EVE General Discussion

Quality thread, + 1 for OP.


You missed two other important points, one of them being already repeatedly mentioned by other posters in this thread.

1. It didn't work with Logi and ECM either
Being on grid, targetable and attackable is a serious handicap for any force multiplier. Logis and electronic warfare ships already suffer from this rather unfortunate condition and subsequently found themselves primaried in fleets. The mere fact that those ships were vulnerable led to nobody using them anymore. Ever.
Seriously, shall our beloved booster ships become as obsolete as Logis and ECM ?

2. It will hurt small gangs
Now this is the big one. Every player knows that CCP hates nothing more than small gangs and every single balancing attempt by them had the one and only purpose of hurting small gangs.
The assumption that a 200 man fleet should be able to curbstomp a 10 man elite peeveepee fleet is simply ridiculous and sadly shows how detached CCP have become from reality. Under realistic conditions, the smaller fleet should always have an advantage over the larger one.

You're cute. The problem isn't 200 vs 10 that's the problem. It's 15 vs 12 and two kills in it feels more like 40 vs 10 due to the overwhelming effectiveness of gang links. Gang link strength is the core culprit here, and bringing them on grid won't solve that.

-Liang

Ed: BTW, I should be clear here. Delete gang mods. All of them.

OK, serious proposal, without any sarcasm and trolling:
How about they just remove the boosting role from Command ships and t3 altogether and keep it exclusive to the t1 battlecruisers? Plenty of them are used, so it wouldn't be easy for the enemy to quickly find the booster and kill it.
Change the fleet mechanics so that there could be multiple boosters and distribute the links between your regular battlecruisers (since they can only support one single link per ship).
As a nice side effect, T1 BC bonus to ganglinks isn't as horribly overpowered than on t2 or t3 versions.

If more numbers cant beat smaller numbers then OGB is not the problem. It comes down to the pilots and the ships they are in. You should better analyze the fight if thats the issue.

Next....

You assumed that it was the 12 that lost their boosters. In reality, the 15 can feel like it's 10 vs 40 just as easily if they're the ones that suddenly lost their links. Again, the problem here is the overwhelming strength of gang mods.

-Liang

Lets be extremely logical:

More is better
2 is larger than 1
2 cross beams holds more weight than 1
2 guns is better than 1
2 dps is greater than 1 dps
2 logis is better than 1 logi


Explain to me why 12 ships cannot destroy 10 ships?

If boosts were so effective how come during the alliance tournament fights, the fleets with the boosted ships never won?

i wouldn't be completely against this, even if i am turning my orca pilot in to an OGB as we speak.

Your reading comprehension is absolutely terrible. You're trying to make it out like it's 20 vs 10 when the proposed problem is 12 beating 15 as though it were 40 vs 10. As to why fleets with boosted ships never won in the AT... well, confirming that AT PVP is exactly like TQ PVP. That's why kite setups work so well in the AT and suck so bad on TQ.

-Liang

Unfortunately, being able to probe down a booster alt means nothing if the warp-in is 20k km from the actual ship. Effectively, a booster alt can be 100% safe for at least an hour (and usually much longer).

Nicely done OP.

To address some points made further down in the thread.



1: The larger force (if properly outfitted) is better able to defend all of their ships in a stand up fight. Boosting has nothing to do with it. An effective smaller force will not be engaging them in a stand up fight.

2: You are assuming a stand up fight again, which is not likely to happen.

3: It won't often matter if there are back up boosting ships present, they won't be the primary target of a smaller gang. If they are present, they are a wasted asset unless the fight has already gone horribly wrong for the larger group.

Personally I'd like to see command link sub systems for Tech 3 cruisers also provide or allow for making the cruiser very difficult to catch and damage effectively via speed and sig radius enhancements (or work very well with subsystems that enhance those properties).

If this happened large fleets would come to depend on the more heavily tanked Command Ships as their on grid booster of choice (better boost bonuses, have more of them flown to offset the fact that each ship is limited in how many types of boost it can provide, better able to take advantage of logistics chains), and small hit and run fleets use Tech 3 cruisers for the job (not quite as good of boosts, but fewer of them needed, able to easily keep at range from the fight and very hard to catch or apply damage to).

This paradigm should become the "classic" usage of on grid boosting vessels.