I was told by a customer service representative to bring my suggestion here:
I experience disconnections at least once a day, net is stable and does not go down, but I probably end up losing a gecko once a week via this as my main activity is ratting.
Would it not be better and cut down customer service response times and the volumes they deal with, if a mechanic for unresponsive clients or disconnections removed aggro from drones? I know they are often scooped, but I fly a Nestor and the fast align time for the auto-dc often means all my drones are left on grid and the aggro switches from me onto the main DPS dealer (gecko).
This is my first post on the forums, not sure if I’m doing this correctly, just trying to help.
Sometimes the drones do come back, that’s fine, but I run a Nestor and if the drones are like 40km away, the Nestor aligns so fast not even the light drones make it back.
Somewhere between you and the EVE servers is a connection that apparently isn’t reliable. That’s probably not EVE’s fault and probably is not your fault either. But it’s there nonetheless.
What you can do is anticipate on this less than reliable connection towards the EVE server. Change your playstyle to be less affected by the disconnects, by using another weapon system, cheaper drones or a ship that aligns slower than a Nestor.
Just annoying that I cannot play how I want to play… I don’t think it would be too much to implement a code that says “If drone not attacked and DC detected, drone gains immunity” so people can’t exploit a fake DC when their drones are taking damage. Ag, I don’t know
I understand the frustration, but I could immediately see a way to exploit the drone immunity: a Rorqual about to get their excavator drones stolen or killed could temporarily DC to save them.
Yep! If they get outside a certain range (350km?) they lose connection and can be scooped up. Using command destroyers to boosh excavator drones away to that range to steal them used to be a thing.
So far CCP has refunded all my geckos lost, I am sure they have access to logs that determine my ship was in no threat of imminent destruction and there was no untoward reason for a DC. It does take a week usually for them to answer me and I just felt there is probably something that could be done to lessen the burden on support and still keep my drones intact when there are no variables detected that could constitute the attempt to abuse a mechanic.
There are other ways to increase your DPS without using the most expensive drone in the game. Again, if this is an issue for you, you need to adapt. Use different drones, yours more drone damage amplifiers (or get faction ones), or switch away from a drone based ship entirely.
There are plenty of ways to solve this problem on your end that won’t require development time that is unlikely to come.
True, but it will take 60 days of skill training to get into a marauders or 30 days of training to get the right Large Weapon V to shift into a BS that can put out the same damage as my drone skills are maxed, I also have the fighter skills all at 4, but I think fighters are much easier to replace than a gecko… It will take time to shift, for now I’m in a Leshak IV with the faction weapon and normal faction drones, but it only works really well for the Gala sites
Thinks about another way to acquire geckos 
