Off Grid Boosters:Training to the Nerf

With Brain In A Box now here (at least phase 1) and a bit of a tinfoil scare on booster nerfing, I have another skill queue screencap to post.  This time I'm not sure that I'll say I'll be sad if what I'm training gets nerfed.  But lets step back and look at this.

Yes, I have an alt account training up to be a booster.  The obvious joke when I started was that as soon as I finished training him the nerf hammer would come down on off grid boosters.  While that hasn't actually happened yet, certainly the writing appears to be on the wall.  There was a mess of tinfoil when the Parallax patch notes came out and it appeared that booster modules were going to be subject to stacking penalties on the ship level.  In this interpretations, your Skirmish module bonuses would stack with the nanofiber on your ship.  The patch notes were clarified to only being the basic Leadership skills and explicitly not modules.

I don't think anyone thinks that off-grid boosters are going to be too long for this world though.  CCP has consistently said they wanted these gone, and that the only reason they were still around was legacy code.  With legacy code now being cut down left and right, we can hope that OGBs will be on the list.  AFK and nigh-AFK boosters may soon be a thing of the past.

Yes, that means my booster alt as well.  So what to do if my booster is going to have to actually be on the field?  The logical thing seems to be to route the training over towards Command Ships.  I am not used to running two accounts, so an Eos with drones I can assist over to my main seems to make the most sense.  It certainly is a lot more risk to put that ship on the field, but I have to say that the risk is appropriate to the benefits of the boosts.

There's a possible throwback style to this training too.  I recall that people were quite happy with the ability of command ships to handle PVE, potentially including low-level WH PVE and maybe even L4 missions.  That would give me another ISK-making option if I ever didn't feel like jumping into PVP on my main.  Alternatively as a duo they two could probably run quite a few types of PVE.  Downside being my main's connection to FW, of course.

Another option would certainly be to rush to the character bazaar and try to offload the character.  A brief lookaround looks like the character might break 10B ISK in value, though I expect that value might get harder and harder to reach as more people process what the Brain in a Box and other advances might mean. The two courses of action aren't necessarily all that different either - I expect Command Ships will increasingly be a required skill for saleable booster alts.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of the masses of link alts as we move to a post-OGB world.  I'm not an expert here, so I'll be watching for long-time users of these to start chiming in to get some ideas.