High slot module to bind drones to F1-F5

As the title says.

High slot module, or a group of modules (25/50/100 Gbit bandwidth) to be able to bind drone attack/mine commands to F1-F5 keys. Group/ungroup like weapons.

Different meta modules might have different (1.5/1/0.5 sec) reaction time lag or something.

I do like micromanaging modules, pulse reppers or ab/mwd, but I hate drone boats cause mouse clicking micromanaging sucks.

You know there are drone keybinds right?

Are there binds for each individual drone though?

The only reason to use drones individually is for AFK Orcas to assign one drone per asteroid.

Making this a very bad idea.

-1

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Is it though?

I was thinking about combat sigs and ratting. Assigning sentries 1 per rat frigate, 2 per rat cruiser. Even controlling Gilas 2 med drones would be more convenient.

It’s not AFK if you have to assign drones to asteroids, is it? And they do do that now, it just takes a million mouse clicks.

And you would have to sacrifice one or several high slots to fit the modules.

Don’t do that, Focus Fire reduces the overall damage you take.

There are valid situations for manually controlling each drone:

  1. delegating drones from mixed drone deployments to their optimal targets (lights to frig/destroyer, medium to cruiser, etc)
  2. Splitting logistics drones across targets (whether repping or ECM)
  3. Splitting salvage drones across multiple wrecks to reduce wasted cycles
  4. Spreading mining drones across multiple rocks to reduce wasted cycles

None of these use cases are specific to AFK game play; they may happen to benefit it, but their core utility is in ACTIVE target management, not idle management. Especially for players with reduced mobility (where the keyboard is a LOT more accessible than a mouse), keybinds for individual drone ‘engage’ actions would be a significant improvement in game playability.

We should not be rejecting accessibility improvements just because AFK players could also take advantage of it to some degree. That’s entirely counter to UX design philosophy.

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A high slot module per drone? This change would either be pointless with the current fits or worse cause a change to high slots in general.

Just to get a key bind per drone?

Even if you agree with the goal, the implementation is terrible.

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I didn’t say the implementation was a good method (there is a better one in the QoL thread) - but neither did you reject the suggestion based on it being a bad implementation. Your basis for rejection that you posted is that the only people who would benefit from the effects are AFK Orca miners.

I agree this is a crap method and shouldn’t be implemented in this fashion. But I disagree that AFK Orca miners are the only beneficiaries of the intended effects of this proposal.

Off the top of my head I cannot envision any meaningful use cases for this, but I can envision this enabling several krabby playstyles. Basically, this is a problem that does not need to be solved and would only be a QoL improvement for playstyles we’re trying to discourage.

I don’t really agree with this.

Sure there would be some benefit to people splitting drones so they can AFK more efficiently while mining, but the time savings is tiny. They’re already clicking like 20 times every half hour or whatever. This just means instead they’re clicking 10 times and pressing 5 buttons instead.

Somehow I don’t think a change like this is going to massively improve QOL for these folks, but it would make actively running drone boats a little nicer. The main case I can think of being swatting small ships in missions and other PvE content. There shouldn’t be much benefit to AFK drone combat since last I checked “aggressive” was still a setting for Drones.

From a top-level interface standpoint, the drone control UI has always seemed clunky to me compared to how module controls work. I sympathize with the problem that you’re trying to address, but kludging together a solution using a module isn’t the answer, making a more effective interface is.

-1.

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No. One Frigate size module with 25Mbit bandwidth would support a flight of lights. One Cruiser sized with 50Mbit for flight of mediums. One BS sized with 100Mbit for heavies/sentries. You can play around with 100+25, 50+50, 25+25+25+25, 50+25 based on how much high slot space you are willing to sacrifice and types of drones you’re using, and number of larger drones you’d like to be able to manipulate.

I’ve always considered Drone’s unresponsiveness, lag or their being seemingly stupid at times, a balancing drawback as a weapons system.

Just fixing the interface would in my opinion make Drones more OP as a weapons system.


Every drone boat out there still uses guns/launchers as a secondary weapon. Only option to fully commit to drones using high slots allows increase range with Link Augmentors, which at some point becomes pointless.

My suggestion is to allow to fully commit to drones by making them more responsive and easier to control. Actually, as easy to control as every other weapons system, thus sacrificing high slots for that.

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