So forums ate my last post, disappoint I am now on second page :(
DIsposible Hero wrote:The problem with all of these ideas is death is cheap; who cares if you permanently mess yourself up? Just kill yourself and you get a shiny new clone, free of any nasty addictions or brain damage your last meatsack may have accumulted. People with a lot of excess isk would just fly around high all the time with +1000000% to all of their stats, and then kill themselves to avoid the "hangover".
Sounds like sandbox to me, you can go for buffs that are expensive, permanent and low risk (implants, good PvP set should set you back around 6 bil), or you could go for buffs that are cheap, temporary, and high risk (reworked boosters that could bork your clone). Or you could go absolutely batshit crazy and go for both, if you are willing to risk borking a multi-billion ISK clone.
Now onto the bulk of the OP
I think this is a fantastic idea, boosters atm are standard fare for PvP cargo bays, this shouldn't really be the case.
There should be almost the same dilemma over whether to use boosters in game as there would be if you were to use drugs IRL.
I'd do this by implementing the system you suggest, being able to stack pills for added effect and bringing in severe consequences if you choose to overdo them such as addictions and withdrawals.
I'd like to tweak the short-term negative aspects of boosters to maybe attempt to emulate drug induced psychosis. Some poorly thought out examples of this could be that while 'high' on drugs your perceptions cannot be trusted like they should, maybe have this represented in game by targets displaying false readouts of remaining HP, or if more intoxicated maybe blues appearing as red on overview (and vica versa), or people showing as flagged when they aren't, or even more intoxication starts to display false ships on overview, or perhaps starts showing that Diemos as a thorax, that Raven as a CNR, that rifter as a Freki.
Customary RL analogy: The guy that's just smashed 4 hits of PCP has near superhuman strength, but he's also incapable of telling friend from foe, or even what is really going on in the world around him.
As you can see, there are many interesting and dynamic penalties that can be applied to the
pilot rather than the ship.
When you get drunk and drive, you don't crash because your car obtains a -30% penalty to steering response, you crash because your perceptions are skewed, your inhibitions are gone, and your response time is shot.
Long term penalties should be focused around addiction, you get addicted you suffer withdrawals without your drug.
withdrawals imo should be mostly in the form of attribute reduction (think of it like a -4 implant)
The other negative I'd like to see, is that stacking drugs should exponentially increase your chance of a fatal overdose (instead of a stacking penalty like mods). Lets pull some numbers out of my arse here and say that popping 3 strong exile should equate to a 50% chance of fatal overdose, when you OD your clone dies in it's ship, you wake up in a clone bay, and your ship is left floating in space as if you ejected.
To balance this out a bit there could maybe be a 0% OD chance on a single dose.
Your clone should obviously be cured of addiction if it dies, but there should probably be some sort of 'detox' booster, like a 2 week treatment program you can go through to ween yourself off the drugs. Make it 10x (another arse number) more costly than the drug itself and you got yourself a great little mechanic.
Gotta say some of the complaints on this thread are asinine, people taking the new form of boosters should be well aware of the risks going in. If someone is stupid enough to totally screw up their char and quit the game, how is that any different to the idiot that pours all his money into a faction ship, takes it to lowsec, gets popped and quits?