So I’ve been thinking, CCP has nerfed the VNI, and they try to stop AFK ratters, they keep nerfing ships. But literally, the one thing they have to do is disable drone autoagress and AFK ratting is impossible without botting. Why don’t they?
Because they tried and in turn also turned off drone aggro when you are already actively shooting a thing, which did not just affect PVE but also PVP. This made it harder for actual players to do their things while it literally had no impact on bots that can mimic player input behavior on top of that. So, all this change did was it made it harder for actual players to enjoy the game while also having unintended repercussions and unexpected behaviors from the game itself that they could not or did not want to fix to make this work as expected. Typical #CCPQualityCodig.
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You could kill AFK PvE and dramatically reduce how high multiboxers can scale their fleets by getting rid of automatic drone agro and autotarget missiles. But players complained when CCP tried. Some claimed that it was a QoL issue, and that it increased clicks. Others complained because they wanted the ability to earn semi-passively. And so CCP relented.
Also, the fact that cheaters could still cheat doesn’t mean that it was a bad idea. It would have dramatically reduced how much in-game currency was being printed, which would have positively impacted inflation and everyone’s purchasing power. And the only players who would have had their enjoyment of the game seriously impacted would have been boxers and afk’ers -which different people may or may not have sympathy for. Personally, I’m a multiboxer, and I supported the decison. I really like multiboxing, but it’s people like me that are responsible for the majority of unsustainable economic activity that’s going on in the game. But it’s a tragedy of the commons situation. Why should I voluntarily stop if other people are just going to keep doing it?
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Pardon me for being neither and still being massively impacted by this because I use drones as auxiliary DPS for my ship to get small things destroyed while I take care of big things. I would have been fine with the removal of drone auto-aggro if they had not killed auto-aggro on ships that I am already shooting or just started shooting with my turrets. Requiring me to press more buttons just so that some afk-gameplay could be killed is ridiculous.
Yes, that is a a good point. They didn’t need to prevent drones from focus firing on things people were manually firing at. Personally, I don’t find pressing F to be a big deal (I already do it), but yeah, why did they do that? What purpose did it serve to get rid of the drone aggression that doesn’t allow AFK’ers and multiboxers to do their thing?
Maybe if they had been smarter about it, there would have been less blow back, and the changes wouldn’t have been rolled back. But here we are.
If only. And every time I say something like this, I get called out as toxic and too negative. 
Doesn’t matter what CCP does, there’s always blowback mostly in the form of incoherent whining.
I make extensive use of drones and only run one account, I’d be completely fine if they removed auto aggro.
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You’re not the typical ever player. Most of us run multiple and they’ve already tried this change. It did nothing to stop bots and it ■■■■■■ over players so it got reversed and won’t be back
Indeed they tried but found out that it also disabled drone assist and drones following offensive mods which was unintended.
This wasn’t a big deal but it was used as an excuse by the afk farmers to argue the changes back and CCP said they’d have another go, possibly involving a drone mechanics overhaul, in the future.
I know i keep saying it, but some players want the game to remain unhealthy.
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This has nothing to do with unhealthy. It is simply unreasonable that a drone should not attack something that I am already shooting, specially if it’s set to aggressive. This is simply bad programming all around. I have already pressed a button to attack something. Why should I be required to press yet another button to make drones attack that – by their settings – they should attack anyway.
It is a completely different, not comparable scenario from drone boats that rely on drones attacking on their own and not shoot or ewar trigger them on the targets. If only CCP had put actual coding and development effort into this feature to make it work as intended and expected, only the stupid people would have cried out that actually want to see the game remain in a certain way. Most other people would have applauded CCP for actually doing their job and not messing up and causing collateral damage because of sheer laziness and incompetence.
So remove the setting.
When i have more than one weapon system, e.g. turrets and missiles, i have to activate each one.
If i have turrets and a target painter, i have to activate each one.
Webs and scrams.
It seems reasonable, to me, that drones be activated as a grouped weapon on each individual target like every other grouped weapon and targeted module.
But hopefully CCP will sort the whole thing out if/when they redo drone mechanics.
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Says that guy who is too lazy to literally press another single button for their drones.
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There is already too many button clicks. I have to take breaks from playing the game because my fingers hurt from clicking. If you make this game more clicky…you will have less humans playing this game and more bots. Just Ban the Botters…and stop destroying the game for the humans.
Please…
Stop wrecking the game for humans.
You know who the botters are.
Seriously.
This isn’t about botters. It’s about reducing afk play.
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This is not about removing AFK gameplay if I am already actively pressing buttons.
Drones are not simple missile launchers or turrets. They are independent weapon systems that are supposed to be capable of doing something on their own. Making them completely dumb bricks in space that need a command for literally anything is beyond strawman argumentation. With that logic, they should also never come back to your ship after their target was killed. You’d have to give them the explicit command to return and orbit. This logic is absurd. And it’s this kind of absurd logic and argument that makes CCP do the stupidest things and chestbeat themselves about how cool they are.
If CCP wants to kill AFK gameplay, they can do that. Drone boats need to activate an offensive module or send the command to attack if they don’t have an offensive module. But if you already activated an offensive module, you are not AFK playing. You are already actively telling that weapon system to do something.
■■■■ that. The afk ones are the easiest to catch.
Why are you people so determined to dictate how people play this damn game? If I want to orbit an asteroid for 2 hours while my drones shoot ■■■■ (like we’ve done for 10+years) that’s my business. If you want to make people more alert at the screen form a fleet and go chase them.
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they disabled auto agro and people cried a lot
btw the tale that the PVP guys didn’t like it is totally exaggerated
pvp guys control the drones manually as far as i know
auto agro in pvp get you killed
Because it was overused in null ratting with ishtars and VNI’s.
It’s obviously not just your business.
Maybe they were once. But things can change. We’ll see what CCP have in store for them.
Ok. I see your confusion.
This right here was what CCP tried to do (we think). However, it appears that both drone auto-aggro and drones following weapons activation/drone assist are inherently linked.
I really hope that this was only what they wanted to fix and that they really did not want to remove every single bit of autonomy from drones. It is just sad that this glaring issue was not detected during testing, or worse that it was detected and willfully ignored. So much justifiably angry responses could have been avoided if this issue had not made it to TQ.