This isn't really required, but it's the least onerous way to discourage very close placement of uplinks.

It's basically a stacking penalty like the others we are familiar with. Two uplinks close together increases the spawn time on each by a small fraction, a third a bit more, and the fourth even more. That would throttle the arrival rate of mercs to just a little under what it would be if you had only the one uplink. The stacking penalty should never make the total time for a squad to spawn than if there was one link as stacking penalties never make adding another module actually hurt your stat. That is, adding another damage modifier doesn't reduce your damage, it just adds only a little bit.

The penalty would come in the form of lowering in the spawn time of a single merc.

If we had the ability to destroy blue uplinks i would agree with this.

People who are unawares of the changes, trolling or just being jerks would totally take advantage of this.. unless you always lock your squad and don't allow randoms in there how else would you prevent this from happening to your squad?

Unintended consequences/workarounds: placement of only one or two well placed uplinks still allows full speed respawning and still protects the resupply line.

Wait, you JUST said it won't alter the spawn rate!
If there is no waiting on an uplink, then the respawn rate of ten uplinks is the same as one. So this proposal won't do what you want.

I have played Domination with objective spawning. The difference is that you can't flux or destroy the letter with an OB.

I have also placed numerous uplinks on and around an objective and had the enemy roll my team and destroy every last one of them both with and without an OB. Uplinks won't save an out played team, even on the bridge which is probably the most subject to uplink use.

Wait a second...you mean to tell me, all other things equal, superior logistical support wins games? My mind is blown. It's as if Dust 514 is trying to be a unique, creative, and complex game where more than pew-pew matters. Why would CCP do such a thing?! I mean, shouldn't all shooters be exactly the same--a showcase for great marksman to kill everyone with lesser weapon skills like fish in a barrel? All of these incredibly meaningful and effective contributions by support players must be removed, CCP! We must maintain the rich tradition of mindless, assault-oriented dominance and this paradigm must never be challenged! It is the only way, the one true path. All praise be to assault players!

1) The problem I have with the GÇ£reduce spawn time for stacked uplinksGÇ¥ solution is that people like the one described above donGÇÖt give a sh!t. They are not doing that for strategic reasons, they are farming WP. They will just keep on spamming uplinks all over the place, dropping their militia hives right on top of my ADV/PRO ones all day (or they may do it to awox, too). A stacking penalty wonGÇÖt even cross their minds.

2) Similarly the draconian hard caps that have been proposed will end up hurting strategically-minded players like Skihids (or myself) and our teams. I spend at least 30% of each battle running around like a madman trying to place uplinks where they either are or will soon be needed so that my squadmates can concentrate on killing. (Plus another 1 or 2 as fallback position(s) if we get overrun and need a rally point, but I digress). If I can only place 2 uplinks total, then suddenly everyone is going to have to carry them, and most of them have not invested the SP to get good ones nor will or should they invest the time and effort to put them in the best locations. ThatGÇÖs what a logistics player is for! (Or a good scout, IGÇÖd love to run some scout fits but damn they are made of paper and balsa wood.)

1) Making a radius for uplinks makes sense. You canGÇÖt drop them within, I dunno, letGÇÖs randomly pick 10-20m of eachother for the sake of argument. The way to implement this would either be:
- One of them pops (IGÇÖd vote that the lower tier link does)
- The new one sits there dead and maybe activates if the original one is destroyed or otherwise disappears.

2) If you instituted caps, it would have to be done in a way that does not penalize people who actually play logistics GÇ£properlyGÇ¥ (bad term, I know), meaning those who actually think about where they drop this stuff. This way, only those people who take the time and SP to really specialize would have the ability to drop a lot of links. The result would be probably a small decrease in the total number of uplinks dropped but a significant increase in the intelligence of their placement. I've proposed this before: A way to implement this would be making the equivalent of a weapon proficiency skill, but for equipment, so you could have, say, 1 link active total at level 0 proficiency, 2 at level one, and maybe 6 or so at level 5.