I came back to the game a month ago and have been ratting Drone Horde sites constantly. I have not been on since the new patch 20.04 dropped. I got on today and started ratting in Drone Horde as usual.
I use an Ishtar with Praetor II and now the amount they target my drones is highly unusual. As soon as your drones get to the NPC they stop targeting me and target the drones. All the NPC stop targeting me and go after the drones. This was not an issue before this patch for me.
Something has changed because I am constantly having to micro manage my drones to the point where I do not even want to do these sites anymore. It was relaxing gameplay but now it is just a micromanaging nightmare.
I see no changes in the patch notes for drones but I sure know something if off.
EDIT- 4/13 I got back on today and ran a couple drone hordes and the issue seems to be gone. Everything back to normal.
Are you sure “relaxing” and not “complete AFK while drone’s auto-target and auto-attack clear the entire site”?
Because the latter is sort of a problem, and CCP has made numerous attempts at fighting against AFK pve tactics.
It generally helps if you both have equipped and use weapons, remote repairs, e-war, etc. to keep the NPCs focused on you, otherwise they will focus on the next threatening item on the field (e.g. your drones).
Though most of the AI-related changes or CCP breaking NPC AI is usually inadvertent, and usually gets fixed in a hotfix afterwards when they start focusing drones above all else.
I never complete AFK because I am space poor and hate losing ships.
The problem was when I put out drones and they reached an NPC the entire grid would go to yellow brackets and start targeting my drone all together, none would stay in red brackets targeting me. Every NPC no matter how many on grid went quickly to the drones and it made it a micromanaging nightmare, like it was crazy bad.
This seems to be fixed because the NPC’s are back to their normal behavior targeting me as usual. Guess it was just a fluke that day in the system.
This is a long standing issue that crops up on the forums. For some reason one day nothing you do prevents drone aggro, I have seen people claim that using another ship or repackaging your ship works but I have never been able to prove it.
I can’t really add much other than you are not alone, this has happened to others (and presumably a lot of folk that don’t report it) and it could happen again. I suspect its a rare bug but .
this has definitely happened to me, all the way back to 2012 the first time i moved out to nullsec. some people say that exiting and re-entering your ship in space works to reset. docking, exiting ship, logging off, logging back on, and re-entering ship works most of the time. often just changing systems works, but then the problem starts back up on re-entering the original system.
It happens a lot to me, ive docked up changed ship then back, ejected from the ship and re boarded etc, all to no avail, also flying Ishtars with all variants of Praetors and whose bright idea was it to change the damage from left to right to right to left?
What are you even suggesting here? That it is perfectly reasonable gameplay to have to constantly recall drones? If that’s the case than active modules need to start jamming with a significant down time before a player can active the gun / missile launcher again. Oh and auto repeating should be turned off permanently.
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