Inslander Wessette wrote:Delegating fighters is not equal to drone assist as delegating fighters is a unique mechanism .
Removing the mechanism would result in ships like thanatos (dedicated fighter bonus) being even more useless than they already are .
A really easy fix would be not allowing fighter assist within said radius of the POS force field or station .
A more complex and suggested fix would be to have a highslot module that acts like beacon on the ship to which the fighters will home or tether on to .
Whilst the beacon is on the fighters can be delegated .
With the module having said cpu / powergrid values we can easily screen out the ships that fighters can be delegated to . ( frigates and shuttles etc)
The problem with the delegation mechanic is it is incredibly buggy and there still are multiple exploits or "clever use of game mechanics" that you can use to give you a significant advantage while assisting your drones, even if you were prevented from doing it on grid with a station or POS.
1. It's possible to get a Thanatos to "hard-to-probe" status by using another "hard-to-probe" Tengu with Remote ECCM. Spurs on the Thanatos and use of X-Instinct. (By "hard-to-probe" I mean the requirement of a max skilled covert ops character with some virtue implants required to probe the Thanatos/Tengu pair). Which makes it close to invulnerable and outside repercussions for the vast majority of gangs unless they specifically know what you're doing and bring Virtue Implants or an incredibly specific fit tengu into your space (risking more than your carriers net-worth), even then, it's possible for you to be aligned out to a POS with refit to WCS in your cargo in the event you get tackled, and RLML fitted on your booster Tengu, in a cynojammed system, making a black ops drop from multiple bombers and back-up recons (all of which you can scout) the only realistic means for your death. If you lose the Tengu+Thanatos and your implant set it still comes into around 2 billion isk ballpark if thanatos is uninsured. Which given what the other people have to field to have a fairly realistic chance of actually catching and killing you (which isn't guranteed) is marginal.
2. Fighters assigned to ships do not agress the ships using them. Unless CCP manages to bug-fix this aspect, this still makes ridiculous things possible such as fighters assigned to double 1600 plate covert ops, nullified subsystem t3s which sit on a gate with anchored bubbles and never aggress and just put fighters on people, jumping out as soon as they lose their 600,000 EHP to almost complete safety.
3. You can take 1) even further by burning a Confessor/Svipul with 10mn MWD in speed mode to the edge of a deadspace pocket in a complex (or a mission in npc 0.0), then setting up there, bringing your carrier 2-3km into the deadspace pocket and requiring even a snaked linked malediction <30minutes to burn to your thanatos if they probe out the plex, which you can easily just type "07 to ur t00nie" into local when it gets below 1000km on dir scanner and warp out.
4. Delegated fighters still fight while a Carrier is in warp so you can easily just assist your fighters to ships, then engage in a long warp to a friendly POS and your fighters will continue to fight while you're in warp and in complete invulnerability landing in the center of a safe POS when you land.
5. offline POS can be used (as they are done currently, right now with skynet/supers) with passwords entered and ready to go online to bypass CCP's current forcefield exclusion zone mechanics.
The problem isn't so much the ships used. As using a 400k EHP abaddon that never agresses with mwd+mmjd+ecm burst+cloak would still be possible with the beacon mechanic, costing 40 million isk after insurance if it dies, with the very likely possibility that it can escape unless the hostiles have multiple pilots (which you know about in your intel channels, and covert ops cloak capable ships if you see fit to allow the grid to allow it on cruisers). I think the risk should be for the Carrier pilot, not for other ships as it's too easy to mitigate risk on the other ships.