Part of the problem with uplinks is that as a concept, they are incredibly powerful.

A lot of games have deployable equipment that can allow a player to respawn at a point of their choosing. Dust is the only one I've played that allows your whole team to use them too. It's like allowing a meta 1 frigate in Eve to drop Cyno's where ever they want.

They've also negated the need for vehicle transport, an important and completely wasted opportunity to give vehicles another role in the game. Why should CCP devekop a Medium Light Troop Transport for the game when a speed tanked scout can get most, if not all of your team there much quicker?

It's also by now an established legacy tactic after two years to use these OP Deployables as a Dust equivilant of the Eve Blob, a very efficient and effective means to win. Which is why players can get a little heated about possible change. We've seen that many, many times on these here forums.

As much as I would personally like to, we can't just remove them from the game outright. But they do need curtailing a little.

Now my own personal preferance is the Spawn Grenade idea, where only 1 or 2 spawns would be allowed to happen on each link but the logi could carry a lot of them, meaning they become less drop and forget and have to actively managed instead, keeping the tourists out of logi work.

I really would like to see the overall power of the uplink reduced. I like the idea of carrying more links but having less overall active on the field. I have to agree that uplinks have largely marginalized the transport role of vehicles.

I don't think limiting links to just squads is really a good way to go though. I would rather their balance be adjusted in a way that makes them less overpowering even if they are available to the whole team to spawn on.

Many serious fights really just boil down to who can spam the most links and which team is the best at killing those links.

I like uplinks the way they are. They don't need any nerfs but +1 to max carried or deployable could be useful
Also colour of your links should be different

I think that Drop Uplinks should be handeled similar to Cloaks in that the logi should get a bandwidth bonus in using them, while the bandwidth requirements make them pretty much unusable to other classes.

This way it will help the logi shine, while making it so we don't have every suit type having their own Drop Uplink fitting.

My sense of things in order.

#1 is somewhat subjective how many "a lot" of something is has a deeply contextual element and what it is contrasted with matters fundamentally. For my ISK spawn camping is far too plentiful within Dust 514 even in the current game state and further bottle-necking possible spawn locations without first being able to prevent a further spike in the negative behavior of spawn camping is not a positive step for the health of the game. I would rather see more spawn options than less; the addition of possible sky spawns, the improvement of CRUs, and mCRUs etc.

#2 - Bugs should be fixed. Misuse of bugs to make a game asset behave outside of its intended effect is problematic and should be eliminated.

#3 - Logi play with links is often more passive and less dynamic than would be ideal, improving this situation by making uplinks more granular seems like a soundly positive step for the health of the game.

The CPM proposed awhile back, and I still fully endorse, the idea of reducing spawns per link to 5 (initially the thought was 1 however there were some tech limits server side which made that less than ideal) and scale max carried (not max active) upward to keep total payload at present levels. This change would require a more active role from players to keep an uplink present but would allow those who are not using links in a passive 'fire and forget' manner to better conserve and deploy their resources as a single flux would not longer wipe out 25 spawns worth of link. On balance it is a win-win.

If after such a change uplinks are deemed to be too potent (based on in game metrics) then the next step would be to scale up their CPU/PG costs so that fewer fits could run them thus raising their opportunity cost. BW costs can also be tuned up or down as needed for proper polish.

Most importantly approaching this or any change with an iterative rather than sweeping methodology is key to avoiding the (all too frequent) mistakes of Dust past. The current Dust Dev team as done a bang up job of this and we should make every effort to support the continuing use of an iterative approach to Dust.

0.02 ISK
Cross

No? Currently spawns are already down on uplinks and its simple to drop them yes but unless you invest time and isk placing them out of reach they are destroyed rapidly if found, this is not broken, I really think that it is something thought up by people who don't carry fluxes, are trying to spawn camp or just don't care what lengths people need to go to to get near indestructible links. It is difficult and you need to know your maps, that said it is just as easy to camp those ones and to destroy them even though they are nigh indestructible, extreme measures sure but they took extreme measures to put them there in the first place. Credit for them being in good locations should be rewarded with a good amount of spawns not a reduction nerf again.

Continue fixing the terrain so that you cannot glitch out links is a better answer. It is foolhardy to blame a perfectly good asset for a problem created by bad texturing.