Assembly Hall

Just dropping this in: simply restricting boosts to a grid can possibly not deliver desired effect. There's not much help if said booster sits 300 km away from you rather than at the safespot. This can make little difference in big engagements and probably in smaller ones as well.

Unfortunately offgrid boosting is not a gamebreaker. Despite what some people may think. If it was a game breaker there would be teams assigned to it, scrounging up as many ideas and shitcode that they can throw at the problem until something sticks and refine that into something that is workable.

If the problem rates one person (That being said, that person IS Veritas). Then the problem is either nigh unsolvable or quite down the list. From the sound of the quote I would say Boosting mechanics are close to the single thread node problem in terms of difficulty.

Having the command ship on grid 300km off would be a poor choice as it would be quickly chased off or caught and tackled by frigates and other light support burning towards it or simply being slingshotted by a prober. The safest place for on-grid boosters would be with the rest of the fleet, stuffed full of buffering modules and pre-locked by the reppers in the fleet.

If the ship is on grid you can see it and decide if you still want to take the fight. You can't warp 300km away from someone.

bottom line: Forcing ships to be on grid will solve the problem.

It's good to see that after more than a year away from the game and almost a year and a half since the original post this topic is still getting hits. Good that it's getting attention, bad that it's not yet solved.

To those claiming that broken grids and grid-fu mean this problem shouldn't be solved, I say those problems need to be fixed as well -- two wrongs don't make a right, and they certainly don't make a good feature.

And to those claiming that it would dumb down the game if boosters had to choose their links, I counter that it's quite the opposite: requiring a choice makes the game more interesting because you can't have it all. If everyone could have it all, they will and that 'all' will be a sad uniformity.

I tried to keep the original post simple and avoid overly elaborate solutions which should be CCP's domain; but maybe I oversimplified a little. The problem as I see it is that boosters are supposed to be the leaders and they affect (sometimes dramatically) the combat in a very direct way but they are not vulnerable in a realistic scenario (that is, without a probing alt in every system). Currently a booster doesn't have to make choices, just load up on boosters and call it good.

Maybe a better solution than limiting them to a single grid is having some kind of direct visual sensor-range communication to initiate the bonus and then allowing that to "degrade" over time (read: expire after some short time period spent off-grid from the booster). This solves the problem of boosts disappearing when you jump from one system to the next. It solves the problem of splitting a fleet (sometimes the booster will jump with the fleet but not warp so as to bring up links as soon as possible).

Supported, but only on the condition that my semi-related proposal is also reviewed; the lack of availability for some mindlinks has made some them very, very expensive, especially the mining one. This is caused by an utter lack of availability, making some of them as uncommon as an officer module! There needs to be more ways (ie. more missions where they are given as rewards, or to have them drop from deadspace sites) to get these links if those who use them are going to be exposed as this new proposal suggests.

If this were approved, and mindlink availability isn't revised, I fear that mindlinks could become effectively worthless due to excessive cost, used only by the very richest of players.

Signed. I can't believe people are defending OGB links. They are so obviously over powered they are absurd and pure pay to win. No skill involved, just park and forget.

Quick fix: Remove the Command Processor module - the one that allows you to fit extra links to a ship

Bye bye off-grid linky strategic cruisers

Forces all non Fleet Command ships to only have one Warfare Link; If you want more than three bonuses then you need the Leadership chain in place with Command Ships at each level.

well how about dropping the stats on the command modules, then give the fleet boosting command ships a role bonus that would make them 300% more effective when on grid. That would also give the commandship class descriptions more sense.

signed.