In December, we will be modifying the ‘Aggressive’ behavior setting of drones, making them respond only to direct offensive actions taken by another Capsuleer (player) or their controlled drones.
Drones will therefore no longer automatically attack NPCswhen their behavior is set to aggressive and instead will rely on player-issued commands to initiate action against a designated target. We are making this change to ensure that NPC killing activities move closer towards attentive player interactions and rely much less on low or no attention gameplay.
We also wish to maintain the criticality of Player versus Player engagements, and recognize those situations which is why drones will continue to attack your attackers when set to aggressive.
Fly safe o7
Note: Drones will only auto-attack Capsuleers piloting a ship. They will not auto-attack controlled Structures or Player Owned Starbases modules/weaponry when you are attacked by these.
Now just change auto-targetting missiles, otherwise it’s wasted effort trying to hamper bot abuse.
Maybe make them defensive only, so they only target enemy capsuleer drones and missiles that get within range.
Still excellent news nevertheless.
Good job!
Editing my post in order to make it clear that CCP’s main intention with this change isn’t to deal with bots.
I simply believed that it would, at the very least, offer a small inconvenience to bots, which is always a win in my perspective, no matter how small it might be.
The thread seems to have derailed at the beggining due to my misplaced comment, and I’d like to apologize for being one of the main possible causes for that.
Regarding ECM counterplay, a suggestion has been made.
“We recognise that our PvE content is so boring that people choose to afk it using drones, so we are making it so people can’t afk PvE content using drones.”
Swing and a miss again CCP, jesus h christ.
As someone who has run missions for 15 years, I could not be more dissapointed in this change.
Thanks for announcing this while Elite Dangerous is still on steam sale for £5
@CCP_Paradox - Is your development team currently aware of the fact this “maintenance of the criticality” only applies to nullsec? (aka currently pvp autoattack only applies to nullsec; assuming CCP in their infinite wisdom simply remove NPC code and ignore the crimewatch interference with pvp code)
Also, is the player base sufficiently aware that ‘assist’ & ‘guard’ will no longer work for “NPC killing activities”?
speaking for a friend who still plays this game and is subbed.
looking on the ‘bright’ side, at least we won’t have to worry about those annoying times when rats aggress on you before you launch drones. NOW ALL THE TIME WILL BE THAT TIME. LOL
This isn’t a fix. If regular anomaly sites weren’t a boring grind, people wouldn’t afk/bot run them. Make sites more interactive, and worth more. Not by removing or modifying tools capsuleers use, but by changing the content itself.
The current anomalies are simple. Warp in, kill rats. There’s no objective structures, no acceleration gates, no dead drops, nothing but shooting squares.
Drones are already buggy as all hell. I’d prefer if they didn’t get worse.
While I am primarily a PVPer, and this change won’t effect me much, I don’t like it. It makes Drones far worse at dealing with rats, and the PVE content already sucks why would you make it more tedious? This isn’t making it harder after all, just trying to kill players with the tedium of PVE isn’t exactly engaging gameplay.
If you want to solve the problem of PVE being bad this isn’t it. If you want to make people click alot more, I guess good job.
good change, but what do you think about making it so, that drones set to aggressive still attack npc’s that use ecm or sensor damps? Otherwhise this would have a huge impact on serpentis/guristas sites.
Since I came back I’ve often wondered if you guys are purposefully trying to close the game…its obvious you guys dont play the game. This isnt how you fix boring content.
