Assembly Hall

TL;DR: Giving remote assisters a full 60s timer for assisting an aggressed pilot will lead to stranded (and often dead) logistics pilots in lowsec and 0.0. Having the assisting pilot inherit the gate/station aggression timer of the assisted pilot avoids this issue while still preventing logistics ships from playing gate/station games by themselves.

As was originally pointed out, having remote assistance give a full 60s gate/station timer massively breaks logistics (and RRBS) gangs in lowsec and nullsec. Since the original thread got locked due to its age, I'm reposting here to raise awareness of this issue among those who might not have caught wind of it originally, and also due to some of the statements made surrounding the Crimewatch talk at FanFest 2012, which seem to imply <.tinfoilhat>that remote assistance WILL receive the full timer instead of inheriting the timer of the assisted pilot<./tinfoilhat>.

(Made-up, but plausible) example of this:
You're in a 30-man AHAC/logi gang heading down from LS to roam down the mainpipe in Curse. Your skirmisher spots a 20-man close range BC gang with Scimi support in Jorund, with bubbles anchored on the Doril gate. Your FC says "yeah, we'll engage, we think we can beat them with numbers here," so your gang jumps in and engages the hostile gang after they jump on your skirmisher. After a few minutes of fighting with the enemy gang, local spikes as the BC gang's 40-odd reinforcements arrive from further down the pipe. Your FC decides that the time is ripe to disengage, so everyone in your gang deaggresses and starts back to the gate.

As it currently stands, the logis can simply burn back and jump out with the rest of the fleet. If the logis got a 60s timer for remote assistance, though, it'd continually propagate back and forth between the logis via RR and cap transfer modules, leaving them unable to tank or jump through the gate for a full 60s after the rest of the fleet is able to deaggress and they stop their remote repairs and capacitor chain. This leaves them with two options: try to scamper out of the bubbles and make it to a safe in Jorund, which leaves them split from the rest of the gang they are supposed to be supporting, or do nothing and bite it because of broken game mechanics. However, if remote assistance gives the timer of the assisstee instead of a full 60 second timer, then the logistics in this case would drop timer at the same time as the main fleet and be able to jump back to Doril with everybody else, instead of being stranded on the battlefield without any good options to deal with the situation in front of them.

Good to hear! I'm glad that I can stuff my tinfoil hat off in a hangar somewhere, then.