Warfare & Tactics

Good changes.

I'm still hopeful they may come on grid eventually. The quote about the development above plus this from the OP in the recent thread look like they still want to do it (eventually). Remember that the best way to get more subscribers is to have good game play:

"For years one of the most hotly discussed issues surrounding warfare links is their ability to apply bonuses to fleet members anywhere in the same solar system. We will not be changing this aspect of the feature in Odyssey 1.1. There are some serious technical hurdles to adjusting this aspect of the features, which are being worked on as we speak but for which we are not currently ready to announce an ETA."

Anyway, they are doing good things with jump clone timers too so I'm in a good mood!

I of course can't speak for anyone but myself, I just like to log into eve blow some stuff up. I find it decently challenging and get rewarded with the occasional adrenaline rush. Rarely do I have time for organized fleets.

There are a few reasons why ccp's refusal to deal with ogbs makes it much easier to do other things with my time.

1) AltBoosters = Pay to win: Implants and boosters cost isk. (In game currency) They do not require the pay out of real money. Paying for a second account to sit in safe spot in a booster ship does cost real money. Accordingly no matter how much experience I have gained in the market or other isk making in eve that won't matter. I need to pay the extra 15 dollars to get god mode.

I have lots of isk due to learning how to play the game. This has lead to me having 4 clones with pirate implants one set with improved learning implants and another with hg talons. All have various other implants for slots 7-10. I have made as much money from experimenting/learning drugs in eve as i have lost from using them. The ingame economy is a huge boon to eve and learning how to "play" it is a big part of the game.

Play to win with a booster alt pretty much destroys that. That bothers me but I have to say that the extra 15 dollars a month is not in itself prohibitive for me. The other problem is:

2) Alt boosters make the game no fun to play. I think there are 2 general reasons for this.

A) It ruins the immersion. I am not like the mittani where I forget who I am in real life and start thinking I am cearain. But when I am flying around space I do have at least some modicum of immersion that I am a character in a game flying a spaceship. However when i am multiboxing 2 different characters that is completely shot. Completely shot. I am then not a character in a game flying a spaceship, I am a nerd upstairs trying to outspreadsheet other nerds.

B) There is an important difference between a game being challenging and a game just being tedious. Booster alts do not make eve challenging they make it tedious. Finding safespots in all the systems and dragging an alt around everywhere on your roam is not challenging. Any cretin can do that. But it is tedious. Is eve supposed to always be won by the person who can withstand the most tedium?

Drugs and implants are bought with ingame currency and thus are balanced by that currency. If you think implants are risk free enough to spend 2.5 billion on a set, ok. use them. I do in low sec and think getting a set should be a goal of new low sec pvpers. Same if you think spending 5 mill isk on a booster that last up to an hour. Having isk to use is part of the game. People *learn* how to make/save isk in eve its a great part of the single shard game and economy.

Using implants and drugs doesn't make the game tedious and it doesn't ruin the immersion of the game either. Booster alts do make it tedious.

Living in a wormhole, where it really is Alts Online, I can say I disagree with Cearain's arguments about immersion, yet I understand. I am TF, in game, and represent myself as such. My alt is like my familiar I summon, or a Wizard's Eye spell to reduce the tedium of constantly reshipping between DPS and scouting.

However, I will agree that pushing a booster alt around and leaving that alt in a saespot has nothing whatsoever to do with immersive gameplay, even if you can get past the alt-tabbing or the leaving the scout idling while I put my hard-earnt and hard-ratted on the line in mano-amano or gang-a-gang PVP. The difference is, I'm on one OR the other - never just one, leaving the other to cool its heels in a POS and give me instant win.

For the wormholer of reasonable means, an alt is always at risk, and always doing something important, even if it is keeping a billion ISK hauler loss off your corp's killboards and making hedion Unviersity look like a bunch of idiots.

But Fozzie how hard can it be to make links increase sig radius? A change like that, such that one wouldn't be able to engage in the stupidity of ss'd tech III boosting, does not seem difficult to code or implement. Do that and give the command subsystems better defensive stats, and the tech IIIs will come on grid naturally. No need to worry about constant distance checks clogging the processing power of the servers or whatever the problems are associated with an area of effect mechanism for links.

edit - the changes you've been proposing will not end the ss'd link running that messes up particularly small scale engagements in fw or wherever.

This is fair. But we're talking about nullies, so chances are they won't be touched.

Perhaps reduce sensor strength instead of increase sig radius.

If you increse the signature radius on link ships, they are harder to hit when ongrid, we don't want that.
If you decrease the sensor strenght, they can be jammed with ease while ongrid, and thus make even less DPS. we don't want that.

I like scanning down booster, please don't take that away from me :) And it's now easier then ever.
Even if you can't scan him down, doploying probes near him can force him to cloak.

The big deal is, you want to punish people for bringing links on grid with a combat ship.

If you fly with 3 BCs, two of them have links but crippled sensor strength, 2/3 of your DPS will be jammed out by EC-300 drones or a single griffin.

But if you use an alt and sit him close to a station or pos shield, where he is safe, you don't care about your sensor strength. So it will weaken on grid links and thus give station hugging alts an advantage. Same with big fleets, they don't care that much if one ship is jammed out.

What the big deal with scanning? You need like 2x V skills and 4 imps.
Scanning down links is one of the things that gets my heat racing. My hand always shaking from the adrenalin while the last scan cycle @ 0.50 AU is running.

It's not about the killmails, totally not. At all.

You can put one link on a BCs and still habe enough grid/cpu for a normal combat fitting.
So it's not like a logi.
I'm not talking about a ship with 5 link on it. I'm talking about ongrid link ships in a small scale scenario where ships often have different roles at once.

I already told you:


Your solution makes it harder to have a useful link ship on grid.
I rather put one link down on my offgrid booster and but yet another ECCM on it to counter your proposed changed that have crippled ship in grid.

You can already scan down offgrid booster with ~3 cycles. Less if you know he is very close to a celestial.