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Jester’s Trek: REMF
There’s been a ton of chit-chat on the various blogs lately about link alts, off-grid boosting, and boosting in general. Virtually every major EVE blogger has covered the topic from Kirith Kodachi to Poetic Stanziel to freakin’ TeaDaze, for Heaven’s sake. You’d be hard-pressed to find a blogger that hasn’t covered it.
Well, except me. I haven’t covered it yet.
Here’s another example where I demonstrate my unflinching ability to believe two incompatible things at once.
But let’s start with the clear-cut case: off-grid boosting. Off-grid boosting — in general — is a cancer on EVE that should be destroyed. There’s only one tiny little insignificant baby detail: it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference if it were. And that’s due to the highly variable definition of the word “grid”. Grid manipulation, the so-called “grid fu”, has been a part of EVE for years. There’s even a dedicated manual defining how to do it. In point of fact, I seriously doubt CCP’s ability — were they to abolish off-grid boosting — to get on-grid boosting to work properly in every case. It certainly doesn’t work every single time today!
The simple fact is that EVE’s grids are too easily manipulated and it’s too easy for them to simply break for no discernible reason. We’ve all encountered seriously broken grids in our travels. Off-grid boosting might very well be the only practical solution to a problem that we all know is there, but just try not to acknowledge or talk about.
I am completely in favor of eliminating the practice of boosting from within a POS shield. I suspect this practice is a one reason why CCP is trying to back away from POSes having shields. That said, there should be a home field advantage conferred to pilots in a system with friendly Leadership pilots available. I’d solve the problem by creating a new set of POS modules that would confer lesser versions of the current link bonuses as long as the Leadership pilot was using Starbase Defense Management skill to operate those modules. People who live in a system and are willing to defend that system should get a tangible reward for doing so.
And sure, if off-grid boosting could be abolished and on-grid boosting made near-100% reliable, I’d also be completely in favor of that.
But you people whining that you think it’s going to make a difference should reconsider, because it won’t. The only thing that’s going to happen is that the off-grid booster will appear on your overview and keep his or her travels to the extreme end of the “grid”, even assuming that the “grid” isn’t a heavily-manipulated mess set up beforehand to keep the “on-grid” booster safe from you. Gate camps and the like, in particular, aren’t going to change at all. There will be a booster, and he’ll be too far away for you to do anything about. Just be prepared to see a Loki or Tengu or Legion 200km (or 300km, or 500km) away doing its thing.
And because that’s true, the crusade against off-grid boosting usually morphs into a crusade indicating that all boosting is over-powered.
And it’s here that I have to part ways with the crusade… mostly. It’s kind of entertaining for me because most of the people who claim boosting is over-powered can’t do it themselves. As a result, they have no concept of the sacrifices that have to be made for boosting to work. Let’s start with the basic one: a good boost pilot has to devote several million SP to the requisite skills. These are skills that have virtually nothing in common, attribute-wise, with any other skills in the game.
I understand the sacrifices because I do have boost pilots, two of them. One of them is Ripard himself.(1) Ripard has something like 12 million SP devoted to Leadership skills, and another several million devoted to the associated ship and racial subsystem skills to put them into play. Most of those skills rely on the Charisma stat, which almost everyone reading this right now has set to its minimum value. Training these skills took a year. I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but I can’t. Because I’m not. I spent a year of my life training these skills.
I invite you to contemplate that for a while because that year’s worth of training is why there aren’t more boost pilots in New Eden. A lot of people see that implacable granite wall of time in front of them, shudder, back away…
…and then they immediately start to claim that those skills are over-powered.
Even beyond that, though, link ships are extremely expensive and all but completely useless for anything else. I spend a lot of time flying Claymores and Damnations and Sleipnirs and link Lokis and link Tengus and lots and lots of battle cruisers with a single link installed. You can take it from me: once you fit a link or two to most of them, those ships are no longer (with the exception of the Sleipnir) viable combat ships or (with the exception of the Damnation) viable tanky ships. They’re all but useless for DPS and the number of kill-mails you’ll get in a link ship is half that you’ll get in anything else… assuming you get any at all.
If your FC identifies a link ship in the fleet you’re fighting, except for a few special cases, he’ll almost immediately relegate it to the very bottom of the threat list.
If the ships are over-powered, then why aren’t they destroyed immediately when they are identified? Where does all this hate come from? That’s easy. A single link is responsible: the Skirmish Warfare Link – Interdiction Maneuvers link in both T1 and T2 varieties. It kind of makes me smile. Even in EVE, people are inherently biased against tactics that they regard as “unfair”. Getting blobbed is unfair. Getting tricked into attacking bait is unfair. Getting hot-dropped is unfair.
And getting pointed and webbed by a non-bonused ship from 40 or 50 kilometers away is unfair.
EVE players hate to lose ships and the entire reason for the existence of the Interdiction Maneuvers link is to make it more likely that EVE players will lose ships. The hate is therefore totally understandable. Here’s the part where I simultaneously believe two incompatible things at once: I don’t think boosting is over-powered. But I do think that particular link is over-powered. A Loki with an T2 Interdiction link makes it possible for the crudest battle cruiser pilot to keep a target pointed at more than 36km even before over-heating. The ship and link confer more than a 50% bonus to point range. It’s more than double the bonus that’s applied to the same battle cruiser from fitting a 120 million ISK Republic Fleet Warp Disruptor.
Very few people care because a ship’s sensors are stronger, or that they get a few more percentage points to shield or armor resistance, or that their signature radius is much smaller. But I myself nailed a Hawk with a Drake the other day that should in any kind of fair universe have been able to get away from me. He should have been able to burn out of my point range. He couldn’t because I could keep him pointed at 42 kilometers which gave myself and a bunch of other crude BCs enough time to burn him down.
So yeah, that’s a bit over-powered. So dial that back somewhat, and eliminate POS boosting and I think much of the rage around this topic would die down. If off-grid boosting is somehow removed, the rest of you should still get busy training scanning skills. You’re still going to need them when the booster is “on grid” with you, motoring away at its top speed hundreds of kilometers away.
But if CCP gets out their typical nerf sledgehammer for this, then I want a year of my life back. 
(1) The other is strictly a high-sec pilot that I used to use to boost mission- and incursion-runners. But I don’t usually hear too much rage about this use of boosts.
Link ships are almost ALWAYS primaried. Vultures, Claymores, and Damnations are some of the first ones down. Of course, if you're in a fleet of Tengus with a tengus booster…well, that makes it a bit harder to identifiy who's boosting.
I'll point out the myriad of kill reports where the booster ship is primaried off the field (granted, in a lot of cases because it's an FC alt).
If im in an armour fleet and you manage to kill my damnation through reps, A) we deserve it and B ) we never had a hope of saving anything else anyway
Ok, maybe the damnation was a bad example, but Claymores and Vultures are usually the first to go in shield fleets. In armor fleets, it's usually the Lokis and Legions, although, they're not always boosters….
The shield ships do suffer survivability though they do keep considerable maneuverability over armour. IMO they need to make the specialized command ships more effective than tech3s at least as badly as they need to fix pos/ off grid boosting.
My only concern is boosting for Mining fleets. I have no problem removing the boosting for pvp fleets but having a deployed Rorq on a mining belt is just not viable.
its simple… no pain = no gain
if the booster doesnt risk his ship on grid.. he shouldnt benefit from the bonuses
CCP better not touch OGB's until they fix the goddamned Wing Commanders so they finally get the correct boosts… c'on now Wing commander has been bugged for how many years now? WTF is it about the wing position thatis such a bitch for CCP's DEVs to address?
Maybe it has never been touched because CCP DEVs never occupy the WC position & don't know how to command a fleet so think its umimportant?
If they can't get this one little thing corrrect I doubt they'll get the off & on grid boosts nerfed w/o serious bugs TBH
CCP said once that it was "intentional" for wing commanders to not get bonuses.
Riiiggghhhtttt…
IF! IF! CCP wanted to remove off grid boosting the way to "fix" it would be to do an Aura system. So instead of boosts going out to all in system, boosts go to all within 250km (max targeting range) of the ship. This fixes grid issues by taking the grid out of the equation altogether. The Aura could be a color based "bubble" that is visually seen by all. Being color based you could see, at a glace, the type of link being run. For example, a red bubble would be an armor link, a blue bubble for shield, a yellow one for skirmish and so on. All CCP would need to do would be to use the current bubble animation for warp disruption field bubbles (the ones from hictors) and add a color to it.
This would literally fix the entire problem in one go.
On the second note, the skirmish links are FINE, just as he said, these skills TAKE YEARS to complete and thats JUST FOR THE LEADERSHIP. Thats not to mention the months it takes to get into the command ship or the Tech 3. So in terms to boosting power, LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE!
(I too have a fleet boosting toon of my own that took forever to train)
Couldn't the POS-boosting be solved by implementing the same code that keeps you from activating cloaks and cycling smartbombs and bombs launchers while inside the forcefield?
Hopefully if they nerf the combat boosts, they leave the industry boosts alone. No one's going to take a Rorqual out to the belt / grav site to mine with them, or at least no one will go into indy mode like that… Then again, it might make Orcas more favorable in nulsec again…
Conferming Jester is a cancer of EVE andd shouldd be destroyed for utter cod shit.
i wonder if its viable to make there be a RANGE to boosting….boosts are only effective to ships within……300km of the booster…i dont boost, i have leadership V for fighters and thats about it. i know nothing of boosting…but a range limitation seems to me to fix offgrid boostings….
I love it how all the rage over off grid boosting, how ever no one seems to want to address the retaliative uselessness of all Galante boosts… lol
Make the bonuses scale with distance, like falloff. The closer the command vessel is to the ships he is applying bonuses to, the stronger they are. That way, Keres that are chasing down a target as it tries running away will get further and further from the command link "bubble" and the point range will decrease.
Then command ships could be given stronger bonuses, but T3s can be given more range (thus more flexibility)
As long as a T3 booster, is better at boosting than a dedicated command ship, CCP need to work on fixing "something". You can be in a booster loki, 6 full weeks faster than you can be in a semi decent Claymore, and even then the loki is better at boosting than the Claymore (rank 1 skill affects bonus on t3, vs a rank 8 on Claymore). The only benefit the dedicated commands have is the ability to fit more than 3 links (I have a claymore at the moment with 8xT2 links fitted). It's completely useless for anything other than boosting.
Remove the ability to hide in pos shields, fine, I don't have an issue with that, but insisting on being on grid is stupid.
If ongrid boosting becomes essential, then give the new destroyers a t2 variant that gets the same bonuses as current command ships at around 1/6th the build cost. (max of 3 links however)
maybe boost amount should be a function of the distance from boosting ship to fleet member. At some point there should be a falloff calculation for buffs like there is for ammo. anything over 250KM should be zero, grid size be damned.
OMG – Editor(s) – would u mind stop posting the same article teaser about Jester? It realy reads the same every time …. please concentrate on the content of his posts (supposed you were readingvit actually) ….
on-grid boosting at beyond 150km is easily defeated by probing/warp to zero. This is why the boosting ships are often either hiding at close range in a mix of similiar/same ships or sitting safely at a POS. Off-grid links could be countered the same way, so long as they aren't sitting safely behind a POS shield. Probe, warp, kill. -1 boosting Loki. People might start putting links on cheap BCs. Or maybe not.
Off-grid links could be countered the same way, so long as they aren't sitting safely behind a POS shield. Probe, warp, kill. -1 boosting Loki. People might start putting links on cheap BCs. Or maybe not.