What impact will Ghost booster have?

Day 3,045, 11:11 Published in Latvia Latvia by Tr3LoS

Today Plato announced the Ghost Booster, which at least is aknowledging, that the strength/rank system has gotten way out of hand.
Simply put, what this booster does, is add 30% of the Q7 hit made by the strongest player who has fought in that battle on your round/side/division to your Q7 hit.

Before I start, I would love to give Plato huge props – the explanation he gave on this update is definately easy to understand for what is supposed to be the target audience of this update – the new players.

There is one extremely important thing though – Ghost booster can not be activated in battles of your citizenship country

This is a freaking huge deal. I do understand the reasoning to some extenct. If you are citizen of Serbia or Greece, where lives owners of two of the highest Q7 hits – SerbianLegenda and F@nis, you could rake in some serious cash. My Q7 hit of 124 966 damage is less than 30% of what these guys make per hit, so these additional 30% for most players is like additional 100% damage booster. Of course additional TP damage(and cc earnings from it) could be bad, and this update has some crippling effects on overall balance, but it does bring some good and interesting things too. Lets have a look.

Lets start with minusies

Dictatorship battles

Dictatorship battles, while aren`t giving you TP money, still are considered battles of your citizenship country. Example – country x is being attacked by a hostile MTO attempt by country y. From what I understood, by the current rules, the defenders(citizens of country x) will not be able to activate the Ghost boosters because of citizenship restrictions, while the attackers will be able to add one third of the damage the strongest player on their side makes. That is a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge disadvantage. For example the dictatorship coup in Hungary made by Romanian military unit Nemesis half year ago 100% would have succeed if they had access to Ghost boosters back then.

I hope admins can clarify things regarding dictatorship/revollution coups, but curently this thing looks extremely bad.

Further devaluation of damage

Battalion 10 tank without damage booster is dealing the same ammount of damage per hit as equal strength Titan*** with 100% damage booster on. That is a huge gap. And on top of that, now these guys will be able to add another 30% to their Q7 hit. Of course one booster is only for 1 minute, but every 10 days you can unleash 10 minute frenzy with 5x DAB on.

COs becoming even more expensive

Like it or not, this thing has became a fundamental part of battles and „strategy” when planning them. There is no doubt that most players will hoard these boosters for some truly epic battles, when COs are extremely high. But COs in these types of battles will become more than 30% expensive. Current 126k additional damage via Ghost booster is 30% only for the owner of this Q7 hit – SerbianLegenda. For me(115k stength Titan😉, it would be more than 100% additional damage, while for player with 60k strength it can even go up to 4x his initial damage etc. Most of these top tanks are quite automated and are always involved in epic battles, so good luck to Zdlemmy and Colin Lantrip.

The neutral an the pluses

This does bring an interesting dynamic to battle planning. That one Q7 hit of the major tank can have a bigger overall impact on the battle than additional 10cc/m on CO. Allies and organized military units now are much more valuable, since only foreigners have the ability to use the Ghost booster on battles.

I`m sure we`ll see TOP military units „exchanging favours”(fighting in battles with Ghost boosters) quite often. I`m also sure that on extremely important battles, having an ally who is willing and able to welcome your soldiers so they can use their Ghost boosters will be hotter commodity than gold.

There are some additional things, like BH stealers having a huge advantage over „natives” in battles and possibly easier to achieve epic battles, but that is not that important. And then there could be a problem with D1 multies having influental enough damage to change the outcome of a battle.

In conclusion

The good thing is that admins are at least aknowledging this problem. Wheather or not battling overinflated Q7 hits by overinflating Q7 hits even more is good and bad, feel free to decide. Personally I would love to see better long term solutions – this looks more of a quick fix. But hey, there aren`t enough new players to make a risk of shaking this boat, so I guess this solution is quite ok... at least for now. What I would like is to see them allow to use these boosters on citizenship battles also.