So apparently a change that I guess that has been in place for some time is that the drones will no longer players (which from what I’m hearing was a response to the whole MTU aggro trick).
While this prevents the MTU exploit, it does nothing to deter suicide ganking as the drones will not respond to hostile players during ganks. What’s the point of setting the drones to aggressive if all they go after are the belt rats?
Requested change - make the drones respond to ganks. If I have 3 flights of drones assigned to guard a target that comes under attack from the ganker, the drones should respond in the same way they do with the rats.
And in before all the salt farmers show up, yes, this is in response to a gank in which 5 Hammerhead II’s didn’t do anything when a Hulk was shot up by CODE.
If your drones shot at the gankers if would create a limited engagement timer and CONCORD might not bother showing up at all. Drones are set up so they won’t make you a legal target unless you specifically order them to do so. It’s also really unlikely drones would have saved your Hulk.
I’d rather see CCP get rid of the aggressive setting altogether so players need to lock and choose their targets.
While I kinda agree with this, and my gut reaction was to tell the OP to activate the drones themselves, I think she has a point. While it is true that this would auto-generate limited engagement timers (and thus the drones should do nothing if the safety is set to green), the ‘aggressive’ setting should result in the drones responding to a player who attacks their ship (or the ship the drones are assisting) if the attacker has a criminal timer. CONCORD is going to be there in a few seconds and they will be prevented from re-shipping for 15 minutes so there is no danger of the criminal using the limited engagement flag to come back.
It’s obviously a low-priority thing, but I don’t see why the drones shouldn’t respond to a criminal attack other than a general principle of not adding more automation to the game. But I also see why the devs don’t want to leave any window for engagement timers or flags being auto-generated without user input.
So… this one has me stumped. +1? -1? I guess I’ll go with neutral.
If the mechanic was changed, gankers would use a rookie ship to bait the drones allowing the gank fleet to kill the target without penalty. There are lots of things miners can do to make themselves less attractive gank targets - Hulk is a 350-400 million ISK kill mail that can be ganked by a couple of Catalysts. If you want to mine in peace fly something less expensive that’s harder to kill!
Limited engagement flags don’t work that way. If the drones attack a criminal only the criminal gets to shoot back, not the rest of the criminal fleet. Since they are already criminal, they don’t have an extra time before CONCORD arrives or any other meaningful advantage.
In principle they could dock and get another ship and come back in 5 minutes before the limited engagement timer expires, but the 15 minutes global criminal timer prevents them from undocking or boarding another ship so there is nothing they could do.
“Aggressive” setting should not be removed from drones unless they get really significant upgrades elsewhere. Their ability to engage targets without the host ship locking and issuing direct commands is what makes them resilient to ewar, and they pay a heavy toll in the form of being destructible for it, among their other few advantages. If anything that setting should be enhanced so that they go after anything engaging the host, rather than waiting for a new module activation-- currently you can be under fire when you put out drones and they will just sit there until you or your enemy starts a new aggressive action, which is dumb.
It used to work the way the OP wants, and people lost their ships regularly to drone auto-aggression.
I’m not saying that the drones would have saved the Hulk, but given the fit and skills I could have at least taken out one of the 5 cats that dropped on me, maybe two as my ship’s hull turned to dust. It’s more of an “if I’m going down I’m taking you with me” type of thing.
Having to lock and point targets when you’re already trying to process the situation just results in task saturation for the average pilot, so being able to automatically offload just a piece of everything going on would be a hair easier on the target pilot.
As for the limited engagement timer, if they’re asleep/AFK at the helm and somehow manage to survive the initial attack past the CONCORD response and remain out on grid, then they deserve to have the gankers come back and take them out, but that’s just my opinion.