EVE General Discussion

This is how things ended up in Asheron's Call also. All players started using a full set of clothing buffs, resistance buffs, and attribute buffs. So the devs developed all the new PvE content balanced with that in mind. So if you wanted to do PvE, you needed to have all buffs, and you had to rebuff every 30 minutes. And if you wanted to do PvP you needed them as well or you stood no chance. Net effect = giant PITA and lots of down time. No fun at all.

EVE is nowhere near as bad as this of course. But you can already see some areas of PvE where boosts have become pretty much mandatory due to the min-maxing of the players - hisec incursions for example.

People keep mentioning combat probes. What am I supposed to do in hisec? Against say... a player who has an OGB alt and steals my loot in an exploration site? I can't probe their OGB and kill it in hisec. Must I have an OGB alt too then? Or do I need to start running sites with 2x DPS characters to overpower them before they can make full use of their OGB? EVE already has its running joke of "30k accounts online = 15k actual players online". We don't need more alts.

Then there is the actual gameplay of the boosting character. A Command Ship fit for fighting on grid while running one link may be fun. But players love to min-max, so boosting ships usually end up good at boosting and nothing else. This makes them only acceptable as alts.

So... how about a compromise? Only one link allowed on a boosting ship, your sig radius blows up like a MWD when you're running it, and you can't use boosts in hisec.

Hmm... I wonder... what if every active link gives you +100 to your signature radius? This would make you easier to scan down the more links you have running. Would this alone be enough to force OGB alts into becoming on-grid mains? Choosing to run only 1 or 2 links along with a rack of guns/missiles?

But yeah, still need to be banned from hisec.

No, it wouldn't be enough on it's own.

In lowsec a lot of people already sit their links alts on stations and gates. They usually don't have a lot of tank if T3 (but a lot of Command ships are used for links too), but if you shoot them you draw sentry gun fire.

Increasing their sig radius will just put more of them on gates and stations.

That can be easily dealt with by aligning, shooting, warping off and then back again. If they are still there, kill them. But if the player is alert, they'll just move the ship anyway.

But it does nothing for highsec and only makes a difference in nullsec.

Combat probes are good in nullsec, less useful in lowsec because the links ships are relatively easy to find and only useful in highsec if you are willing to suicide gank and the links ship is not on a station (which it most probably is).

We usually send an alt in a rookie ship to shoot the links ship (lowsec roams). When engaged in a fight, the links pilot often doesn't even notice it's just a rookie ship and instantly docks or jumps. Sometimes half their fleet warps to try to protect the links, separating their ships. Doesn't always work, but it works enough to be useful for us.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, congratulations, you have now killed on grid links. Because you have just bloated on grid link sigs making them vastly easier to kill and lock.

Also there is no reason to ban links from High Sec. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to use links in high sec, just the situation of the neutral OGB needs addressing is all.

Lastly making them not auto cycle is not engaging gameplay. Try doing an hour of gameplay with your guns auto cycle turned off and see how enjoyable it is.

you know another terrible mechanic - drag bubbles... just saying..

Are the belts over crowded or something? I fail to see what's ridiculous for a ship (the orca) which is designed to not only boost fleets but haul the ore they mine/the ships to mine said ore with, be on grid with there mining fleet. That sounds like precisely where it was designed to/should be?

As to off grid warfare links, they are a plague that deserves to be removed entirely - however until such time as this happens people need to stop whining about them and just deal with it. They exist, they are annoying, but it's not the end of the world.

@ All the OGB users out there who continue to argue that they use/need them because others use/need them, therefore they are needed/shouldn't be removed, etc. It is completely asinine to believe that is even remotely a relevant reason to keep them in game, and the frequency of that argument makes my head hurt.

The vast majority of the OGB users I run into are not only terrible, and lose a hell of a lot more fights than they really should, but will rarely take fights even when they have the obvious advantage (not just referring to the links, but numerical as well.) Meanwhile the rest (the minority,) of OGB users, have sufficient knowledge, and player skill that they don't need the OGB's but are so used to them, that it has become a crutch they can't do without.

I've heard some very talented players (whom I met before they had there very own shiny OGB's) that would at one point jump at a "good fight" without the OGB's, cringe at the thought of taking the same fight it without there OGB's. Or, in the absence of, would now simply upship to the point where the people they are trying to get a "good fight" from just look at them and wisely bugger off. I've come to think of it as reverse blue balling. It sounds painful, and I can't think of any reason to do this to yourself other than exactly what people keep saying about link users, they have indeed become the risk averse scrubs they so loathe.

A final PS - please, don't try and blah blah about the risk involved when fighting vastly outnumbered therefore you need links, most of you are flying kiting doctrines in these cases and frankly the risk is basically zero unless you do something stupid, like stop moving.

Whoever compares OGB to boosters forgot two things. First, boosters have a chance of drawbacks and can affect your travel in empire space. Second, boosters don't rely on how many EVE clients you can run at once.

The only problem I see with OGB is that it's silently enforcing a standard.

I played another game that did something similar - buffslaves.
If you wanted to farm efficiently, you needed buffslaves. You didn't need to party with a buffing class because you had buffslaves. If you wanted to solo, buffslaves.
They became mandatory for nearly every activity of the game and it became a huge problem for various reason.

Eventually, the devs made the decision to disallow multi-clienting and buffslaves became a luxury of having more than 1 PC in the house but it didn't solve the problem.

OGB obviously doesn't prevent certain hulls from joining fleets but it is enforcing a standard.

Ahaaaa.

Coming back to the multi-clienting part of this might be interesting discussion...

There is problem.

Become willing and able.

Problem is no more.

Eve 101 :D