Its crap

I hopped onto a FW chara just to see if i could launch a OB on some poor fools for the hell of it last night

The battles are not advertised in EVE and tbh i can see why they are not because everyone in that system may turn up and not to launch an OB but to kill a FW dude who may show up, on the flip side its like a plex so it would encorage battles in EVE but the only problems is that no ship size limit

My main problem is that when you are at a district and connected you have no idea whats happening and if the game is even on, ther is no markers to say how many clones are left and what the MCC is at in shields/armor along with game timer

Ther is no enough information out espc when at the battle, you cannot see who is fighting for who or whatever and when someone wants a OB all that happens is a merc pic pop up as a target and you fire instead of the launch codes like at fanfest last year i think

There needs to be an incentive for Eve FW pilots to bother with it, otherwise why show up at all? OB needs to be worth LP for eve pilots. Award LP for damage done/people killed. That will get some pilots attentions and start getting some true crossplatform action going.

The mechanic is a little rough around the edges for sure. And EVE-side players need to get organized in order to pull it off with the right amount of security. But provided the resources are utilized it is not hard to coordinate.

We have no real EVE-side support but prefer the (supposed) greater challenge FW battles are suppose to provide and of course the ability to effectively queue-sync multiple Squads in battle. So unfortunately our incorporation of the mode creates a bit of unpredictablity for EVE-side FW players. But that is war right?

Anyway, we did an off the cuff OB with a couple of friends of a corp member. We were not even using the in-game comms. He was just on Skype with them and we were lucky enough to get into a battle on the Minmatar side. He told them where we were fighting and they were in orbit a couple minutes after the battle started. We got of one successful OB. It was all very impromptu so I think with real logistics it would not take much to utilize everything with ease.

However, to your point, they were not prepared to defend themselves and before the battle was over they lost a ship or two. More importantly though is OB's from EVE-players are not really game-changers. Precision Strikes, while less powerful, can generally get the job done. Hopefully, they will work this out better and with the connection of the two economies someday, FW corps with no Dust side support can hire folks like us to fight for whatever their cause is. We just want the ISK...they can keep their ideals