Assembly Hall

That's genius. I don't know why I didn't think to ask the gang to sit politely on their gate while I warp off to dock, get into a ship with a probe launcher, probe out their alt, take him out and get back to gate for a quick fight.

And, thank you, I know how gang links work. I still think it makes absolutely no sense to promote a meta where it's beneficial to have an alt in a combat ineffective ship sitting in space, at a POS, next to a station or otherwise not being part of the combat that it is providing spreadsheet statistics to.

Finally, I would like to point out that everyone and his mother do not have a POS for staging caps and fleets. Not all space battles are for sovereignty or involve capitals. Many of the better space battles involve fleets of single digit size. Gang sizes keep getting bigger because people keep adding alts and parking them in space.

And why would you want to punish small groups and "solo" players? They are already at a disadvantage to your[1] mindless blob of 50+ f1-f8 droids.

I say keep and even boost offgrid boosting alts, one of the precious few things that help single active players.

[1] "your" doesn't mean you personally.

To do this, then they would have to change the mechanic so you can have multiple people boosting fleet at the same time, even if only one of the boosting is actually taking affect. This is because command ships can and WILL among the first targets in an engagment, so there need to be redundant boosters or else boosting becomes near useless in large fleets.

^This.

What use is that, when the ship has moved 50km away by the time you arrive on grid? You get to interrupt their bonuses for a few seconds while they reposition to a new grid, but then you have to probe them down again and warp to their new location.

Keep warping, little interceptor. You'll catch that fleet booster, if the enemy doesn't lay a trap for you first.

In StarCraft there is a unit called the Arbiter which cloaks all nearby units. The catch is that the Arbiter itself can't be cloaked. So it's a powerful unit, but it has a vulnerability. Then there's the Siege Tank which can hit units far away with a very powerful attack, but to use that attack the Siege Tank must commit to remaining stationary for at least three seconds (time to deploy, fire a shot, then withdraw). For every ability, there is a vulnerability: this is called game balance.

In the case of off-grid boosters, the vulnerability is being probed down. But you have a counter for that which is to be moving quickly and warp off-grid when someone arrives on-grid with you. Your links will deactivate, but only for a few moments. If they persist, you will know what they are flying. If the attacker is flying a cloaky ship they will not be able to catch you while cloaked.

When it comes to on-grid boosters, there is always the option of using grid-fu to stretch the grid in such a way that you can safely boost from hundreds of km away.

Now certainly, Information Warfare and the command ships which support it aren't particularly popular. There are ships with bonuses to repairs which would probably be better off with bonuses to resists (same tank. more EHP), but those are issues that can be addressed at the same time (or even prior to) removing the ability to fleet boost from off-grid.

Anchoring objects off-grid from a POS in order to force the grid around the POS to be smaller (and thus forcing all ships to be well within range of the POS guns) was declared an exploit. No other grid-fu was declared exploitative that I'm aware of.

t3 are supposed to be more specialised, i think if you want a particular bonus only and want it as strong as possible t3 should be the ship you use,

t3 boosting is just the new falcon alt. its a serious amount of bonus you get here. not to mention you can dic nullify it and it makes a great scout too + probes etc.

as for unprobability its still ******* hard to scan down a t3 running eccm, and any discusion about cs balancing isnt really the point here

i just want the old days of flying the claymore back.

With T2 gang links this is only going to get worse; more bonuses at the cost of additional CPU and grid will keep promoting ultra-specialized characters who can fly all of your links on a single platform that is never exposed to any risk.

bumb,
cos links ships are dumb

Not supported, unless the grid mechanics are also dramatically reworked as well... after all, if you're wanting to talk about weird meta stuff that affects combat in counter-intuitive ways, there is NOTHING that does this quite so badly as the grid. If you make any kind of 'on-grid' requirement for command ships, then what happens next is that more people start playing grid-fu, and suddenly all sorts of fights are taking place on ridiculous grids designed to isolate the CS from the battle while still keeping it technically 'on-grid'.