im really sorry for the confusion this has caused.
What i really meant was: Group
As in group the remote shield boosters & remote armor repairs like we can group guns.
Instead of having the entire row of 8 remote shield boosters & having to click / press keybinds 8 times, we could have a possibility to group them as we wish and press fewer buttons.
4 groups x 2 remote shield boosters - 4 buttons to press, easy to spread the repairs
The original wrong text:
Hello,
Can we please get the possibility to stack the Remote shield booster & remote armor repair, just like the guns are stacked?
I know very well what you are meaning, just not sure if it is a good idea. I think we’d need some counter-logi adjustment then. It would be so easy to multibox logi ships then…
We can have nice things. We just need to be careful if a nice thing has the possibility to break a lot of other things that are currently working well.
People (mass)multiboxing ships that are easy to control but add a lot of power to a fleet is a real concern as long as multiboxing is allowed in this game.
Unlike dps ships it rarely is a good idea to focus fire the repairers at all times.
Sometimes during a fleet, sure! Just not during the entire session.
Having the modules unstacked allows me to top up multiple people, allows me to conserve capacitor by using only as many repairers as needed and allows me to deactivate a few of my repairers each time in preparation for the upcoming enemy target switch without fully stopping to repair their previous target.
In other words using this feature would be a pretty big downside that heavily restricts the skill ceiling of a good logi pilot.
At the same time reducing logistics to a single button reduces the skill floor for a bad or inattentive logi pilot who now only needs to click a single button. While this may seem a help for newbies (who now won’t learn the nuances of better logi piloting) it mostly helps multiboxers.
In case of cap transfer also allows a ship to escape if the boosters are cycled through gradually instead of applying at once to counteract cap warfare, especially if the boosted ship tries to enter warp; or doing the opposite: draining the target, preventing module use and escaping into warp.
You cannot stop a ship from warping by neutralizing it’s capacitor. I tested that multiple times. You can only shorten the distance it will be able wo warp, but it can always escape.
Oh right, I keep forgetting that albeit it would be the logical way for it to work, but due to server ticks it is not. Apparently already had this discussed earlier:
Yeah, for an active single-boxing logi pilot, stacking the modules would be counterproductive and probably lessen the efficiency. Once you begin to multibox 2, you’d definitely perform better with stacked modules tho. Which exactly is the high risk of such a change. Where almost everyone today begins to lose efficiency with each additional client he wants to fly a logistics ship on, with stacked modules one could probably play 4-5 ships at nearly 100% efficiency if he sets up his client windows well enough.
This is a huge shift in multibox performance of these ships.
However, while thinking about it I had another idea: What if we apply the normal stacking penalty that already is in the game if someone is acktually stacking modules?
This would allow people to make a tactical decision - give up some performance for more convenience (and the potential to fly more ships). But still allows a concentrated single-boxer to outperform a lazy multiboxer.
Lets look at a typical 4+2 Guardian setup: 4 Remote Repairers + 2 Cap transfers.
With max skills and fleetboost from a max-skill Absolution including Mindlink, you can give out (T2 Large Remote Repairers): 4x 110 HP/sek = 440 HP/sek
Now if you would stack the 4 reppers to 2x2, having only 2 buttons to manage, the second module in each stack would be stacking penalized down to 86.9% of its normal effect. That means you could now rep (110+95.59=205.59) x2 = 411.18 HP/sek at a higher convenience.
If you’d stack all 4 into a single button you’d have: 110 + 95.95 + 62.81 + 31.13 = 299.53 HP/sek.
That means: Halving your modules to manage would lower your efficiency by 6.55%. Quarter the modules to click from 4 to 1 reduces your effiency by 31.925%.
I think it’s better to just keep things as they are.
What you suggest allows people to stack characters more effectively and then you add a diminishing returns on top of that, to cancel a part of the effectiveness out.
In the end it still supports multiboxing at a larger scale with less effort than it does now, without helping the player flying a single ship. I think that’s a bad change for the game.
It’s not about usefulnes, it’s about game balance. A Logistic ship is a way higher force multiplier than a DPS ship. That means if you buff Logistic ships in a way that makes them much easier to fly and multibox, you can ruin the entire PvP balance of the game.
Before making changes, you always have to consider if the benefits outweight the drawbacks and I am not certain they do in this case. More comfort is fine, but a good balance of ships (which currently is in a pretty good shape, better then for many other years) is simply more important.
If so, then you would have seeen that my argument is longer than just ‘I would not use it’.
The problem of this feature is that it as I wrote above introduces yet another tool that disproportionally helps multiboxers but does little to help a single character pilot.
In fact a good single character logi pilot would be hindered by it.
In other words it shifts the balance further in favour of multiboxing, and that is the opposite direction I think this game should go.
