@Will Flanagan Hey, as a player who has for a long time been on both ends of ganks, and who does PvP regularly (though I will admit I'm not the best at it by any means haha) I have some serious concerns regarding drag disabling boost. Allow me to elaborate.
First of all: Ganking
It's not secret that FDev are keen on protecting players from ganks. While I generally disagree with that, taking a more EVE Online-like "You consent to being killed the second you undock" approach to elite, this change will make evading a gank nearly impossible, even for veteran Pvpers.
This is because the best way to evade a gank used to be to keep your flight vector unpredictable by boosting away from it, with the fast acceleration that the boost provided allowing this. This way your agressor would have a very hard time hitting you, especially considering one would usually use heat sinks or run silent in order to be untargetable.
In addition to making you harder to hit, this would almost guarantee you could avoid the infamous FSD disabling missiles. Be it the PowerPlay version (usually called groms by the community) or otherwise.
However, with this change, it will be nigh impossible to dodge those missiles, impossible even, in a big ship. Add that extra time on target to the severely diminished evasion that not being able to boost provides, and this will mean basically any ganker will be able to eliminate their target with ease.
Now for PvP:
There has been recently a rise in the so called "reverski" meta. This is boosting backwards while hitting your enemy from far away. This gets to be very annoying, and boring, if you can't catch up to the other.
With drag pack hounds being an easy, almost guaranteed even, way to apply the effect, this will only make this meta even more efficient, as your opponent will now
definetly not be able to catch up.
Aside from this, it will also (as I have before mentioned) severely impact evasion. It used to be that evading the shots of your opponents was one of the hardest, but most rewarding, aspects of a PvP fight. This ability will be almost entirely removed if you get hit by drag, which I can guarantee everyone will be running after this update hits.
I urge you to not go through with this particular change to the drag experimental. It will ruin the game for several people, and while the rest of this update is very exciting, and the bug fixes a big step in the right direction, I'm afraid this single change will ruin the whole thing. Please let this be known as the update where FDev really started to fix the many important bugs in the game, not the one where they did that and also ruined any sort of PvP.