Off grid boosting should not exist

1st argument: "If off grid boosting is no longer possible, then small gangs won't have gang links anymore."

No ****, they were designed to be that way. Bringing a fully fledged fleet booster only makes sense for gangs of a certain size.

Besides stating the obvious, command ships can easily fit a gang link while maintaing good combat strength. You'll just have to make some choices.

Mr. Yamamoto, promoting blobbing since 2012

What really promotes blobbing is the ****** attitude of being averse to combat on an even playing field.

A is a 200-man alliance, and they want to go out for some pew with their matesmatesmates. After 1.5 hours of desperate efforts of forming up, their fleet is 15 pilots, 20 Guardians and a couple of fleet command ships.

B is a 10-man corp, who have been roaming around all this time in their 6-guy "fleet", happily pewing their space enemies in similar gangs, supported by an OGB alt played by the FC who also triples as the scout and logii.

A & B meet, B are happy to engage as the links will improve their chances to get some kills and not get instapwned by the A blob.

Anyway, I'm here to take a closer look at some of the rationalizations. There are roughly:

2nd argument: "Removing off grid boosting will hurt solo and small gang pvp."

The existence of off grid boosting divides the playing field into two groups: those who have an off grid booster and those who don't. The first group is massively advantaged. This is not good for the health of solo and small gang PvP.

Removing the advantage will level the playing field and allow more players to compete on even ground (and that's precisely what some of these off grid boosting alts are afraid of).

I agree, offgrid boosting is a bad mechanic. But your rationale against the 2nd argument is flawed...

The existance of Falcons divides the playing field into two groups...
The existance of RR divides the playing field into two groups...

Most specialty ships divide the field into the haves and have nots, if one side "haves not". The side that doesn't have the specialty ships relied on poor intel when they engaged.

And C decides to blob because it stands no chance against B otherwise, while D decides it would rather stay docked than fight B. This is why B has no choice but to engage blobs because other targets are scarce.

It's the same bullshit as with Falcon alts. Everybody had to have a Falcon alt because everbody else had a Falcon alt. The Falcon alt apologists used the exact same justification too "we need it to fight the blob!".

It's easy, really. Change the price, and rebalance the command ships accordingly. Make it cheaper than a T2 cruiser hull, reduce their defensive capabilies and make them decent offensive ships with on-grid boosting capabilities far better than BC's.

Why not instead of nerfing off-grid boosting, increase the incentive to put them on-grid?

Because between choosing to risk losing the ship and its fleet-wide benefits (for a damnation, that can easily equate to millions of HP on the field across even a small subcap fleet) and not having those benefits go away three seconds into the fight, anyone with a bit of sense will choose the latter.

You'll have to take into consideration that these are prime targets that will be evaporated once the numbers go up. The on-grid benefits would have to be ridiculously large to outweigh that and that completely breaks them at the lower-end of the fleet size spectrum.

brain-barf edit: GǪin fact, in a sense, if you'd want to go that way, the solution would probably have to be rather backwards: you reduce the boost they give overall so that losing one won't make that much difference, but then we immediately go into Gǣso why bring one?Gǥ territory. I suppose you could fix that issue by making them generally appealing to fly for anyone, even the fleet CSes, so that the actual boosters can hide in the crowd of all those other people flying the same ship, only those others have filled up all their highs with tons of weaponry instead of command modules.

I think you are too much focused on actual command ships to do the job.

EVE allows fleet boosts to be fitted on: tier1/2 BCs, CSs, T3s, Carriers and Titans.

If a fleet is that large that they have to fear having their booster exploded instantely, then maybe they should go with less, but safer boosts p.ex on capitals, or better hidden boosts (Try finding the 3 boosting drakes or the boosting T3 in a pile of several hundred without metagaming). The choices are already present in the game, people just don't want to accept the downsides.
Or you could always bring more commandships than the enemy can destroy in reasonable time.


P.S: The same goes for small gangs, if you don't want to risk a T3/CS then boost from a standard BC, get half the boni and be happy with that.

My Rorqual is an off gride booster. So don't touch nothing basterds.

I think you are too much focused on actual command ships to do the job.

EVE allows fleet boosts to be fitted on: tier1/2 BCs, CSs, T3s, Carriers and Titans.

If a fleet is that large that they have to fear having their booster exploded instantely, then maybe they should go with less, but safer boosts p.ex on capitals, or better hidden boosts (Try finding the 3 boosting drakes or the boosting T3 in a pile of several hundred without metagaming). The choices are already present in the game, people just don't want to accept the downsides.
Or you could always bring more commandships than the enemy can destroy in reasonable time.