You can’t actaully AFK rat with FoF or smartbombs. FoF will empty their clips before you are done opening your first beer without resuming fire and smartbomb are only used in sites cleared way too fast anyway.
As for orbitting, will you also prevent orbiting a can? What about a depot? What about a MTU? Any other relatively fast deployable? That’s starting to be a lot of exceptions.
In my mind, anything you can do whilst paying more attention to netflix than to the game is “afk”. I know it’s not “walk away from the computer” AFK, but it’s afk enough that it shouldn’t be happening.
Smartbombing is certainly an edge case taht I would be more than happy to say is not afk.
As said…
While a can is not strictly counted as a deployable, it can certainly be added to that list, of now 3 classes of structures.
You do realize at some point people might just orbit their own drones and it actually might work right?
Might work yes, until aggro inevitably kills their drone. It does happen, even now. The ship isn’t lost however and drones are dirt cheap, so it isn’t a deterrent. If you’re orbiting a drone and it goes pop, your ship stops.
Honestly, I think it needs to be a combined solution. No single fix will work.
Making drones not auto-aggress rats (but do auto-aggress players) would certainly fix the issue of afk drone ratting. Making it not possible to orbit structures will make it harder for other ships with FOF launchers to do it. Yes, they have to reload, but it’s still very easy to watch netflix whilst occasionally re-activating your launchers.
I rep my drones on the field but then I cannot do this afk.
You know that’s not how orbiting works, right? Try to orbit a npc, kill it, and your ship will continue zipping along in its last direction, not stop. Approach and Keep at range stop you when their target is destroyed, orbiting just sends you in a straight line.
Right. And in a speed tanked ship, how quickly will you finish that site?
No clue. My interest in this discussion is how it would affect drones, which I heavily use, although I don’t rat.
Requiring ships to orbit their drones just seems like an awful solution. It is a major change to navigation, for little actual improvement to afk-ratting. Drones not automatically aggro’ing rats (but still players) would be a much cleaner fix.
Increasing NPC threat to drones would have major consequences to other uses of drones (hence my interest in this discussion), decreasing navigation options would be much to far reaching. Neither of those are game improvements.
There is already an obvious solution with little trade-offs. Suggesting worse solutions doesn’t really make much sense. All we need now is to see if CCP considers afk-drone-ratting to be a problem worth fixing, which hopefully they do.
As a carrier ratter I do get annoyed about Vexor/VNI/Ishtar afking in a site but it isn’t as big of an issue as you think. Carriers do not afk anymore; their fighters only act on commands.
If a vexor, or any variant, is afking in a site then they are expecting to lose their ship when a neutral comes into system. If that happens then the already low income they’re getting just got paused and they lost the value of the ship. Sure they won’t get popped every day but it comes with risks.
In my area it’s a taboo to afk rat. We get dropped by super carriers and blops so any form of AFK in space is expecting loss. I think, right now, afk ratting is fair enough for the reward/risk. Though… I do despise it.
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