Tbf, if the better NPC AI is about NPCs actually jamming drones, having more logi that are priority targets, or using smartbombs and such, that would be somewhat interesting, and provide a fair challenge for active players.
If it’s just NPCs switching targets to drones and damaging them more often, forcing players to have to recall drones constantly to restablish aggro, that would just piss me off.
A better solution would be to fix the content not the drone mechanics.
You can’t afk Abyssals, DED sites, Missions, Wormhole Sites no matter what the drone mechanices are… The answer is staring you in the face, yet you don’t see it… Redesign null sec anoms. This isn’t a drone problem it’s a CCP design problem… You really don’t want to make the current null anoms attentive gameplay, there are games on the marker that offer considerably better content than that.
Thanks, “tak” on danish
If we listened to you, this nerf to drones might not be getting reverted.
In future should this calligraphic dioreha continue, expect more people to flag your posts as such.
If CCP wants to fix AFK ratting, I argue adding a chance for dreadnoughts to spawn on sites as per havens/sanctums is an existing and more impactive change.
Yeah, that would be almost as bad as the drones just standing there getting beat.
Jamming drones is going to have as much impact as them getting shot, you can’t really tell who is jamming one of your drones after all, not without a massive drone UI rework. Note, I’m not against it, but massive reworks simply take far longer, and in a lot of cases should have the small changes happen first.
Smart bombs = the drones getting shot also, in fact all drones getting shot rather than just one, which is almost even worse.
Now priority targets like NPC logi, where it doesn’t increase DPS that you/your drones take, but if you just hammer blindly you struggle to break reps, that’s not a bad idea. I’d just ask you to consider how many different sites there are, how many waves per site, and that’s how many they would have to manually balance to add logi to each site. As well as do all the QA checks on. Compared to one behaviour change to your own drones like they did. And you start to see why they made the choice they did initially.
Now obviously the unintended behaviour with drone assist where it was impacting an active player/fleet using drone bunnies was serious, and CCP pulled it off that issue till they can come back with a solution. Yay legacy code that ties drone assist to the same as aggressive mode.
The real reason CCP is rolling back the drone change, is unsub, low online player number and empty null space. They learn the lesson from blackout. Glade they act promptly this time.
Yeah, I guess I can’t really compare the damage from smartbombs to continuous AoE damage from automata suppressor towers, which I was basing myself on for a comparison, even when taking resistances in account.
I’m not sure if assigning specific orbit distances to drones actually works right now, but if it was possible to improve on this portion of normal drone management, and make them more like fighters, I’d be all for it, as even smartbombs might not be an issue for active drones users anymore.
At which point, we now need to rebalance smart bombs.
Again not anti this idea, because smart bombs probably do need some balancing, but that is a point to consider is domino effects of a change.
Thank you for the update!
I’m personally a fan of both aggressive drones AND of drone assist… but I wouldn’t mind drones being changed to something like the carrier drone mechanics, either. It would make being a droneboat pilot a lot of fun… although tripleboxing Ishtars, Domis, or Rattlesnakes wouldn’t be as easy as it is nowadays (sniff).
BUT… if you really just want to remove the AFK/aggressive potential of the current drone mechanics… and if coding a brand new drone system isn’t something that can be done in 2021 anyway, say… then I suggest just ripping out the aggressive option on drones (IOW passive would be the only option).
Yes, this would kill aggressive drones for PVP as well as for PVE, but… I suspect that it would also allow assist to continue working as it does now (or did before this week) with drones set to passive + assisted/assigned. For both PVP/PVE. And that we could live with.
\o/
Or they can just add acceleration gates and/or manual piloting that must be done inside nullsec anoms (like there already are in many missions in the former case and in many sleeper site/incursion sites for maximum efficiency AND safety in the latter case).
For now! stay tuned.
Hey, fellow 2013er. ;D My 3 mains are at 172, 159, 155 mil right now. 2013/2014. Might be having to finally pause that top toon soon, tho. ;_;
What if anti-drone NPCs could/would jam, sensordamp, tracking disrupt, or web (Cal/Guri, Gal/Serp, Amarr/Sansha, Min/Angel) our drones but WITHOUT shooting them. Other rats could still shoot them if they switch aggro, ofc, but they wouldn’t be on drones 100% of the time like the anti-drone NPCs would…?
Only prob is Blood Raiders… neuts… don’t know that neuting drones would do much other than maybe shutting off their MWDs a bit… but it wouldn’t be as good at slowing them down as webbing would be (and always has been, ofc), so… hmph.
Well said. Your post inspired the reply I just did further up to the other guy about adding accel gates/manual piloting.
That’s basically what they did, but it broke drone assist.
No, drones still have Aggressive and Passive toggle, it’s just that they’re supposed to be the same for PVE and they’re supposed to still work for PVP.
For some reason, doing the change that way caused the assist breakage.
If they just take out the Aggressive option (as in literally remove it when clicking the options on the corner of the drone window so that there’s just a hard-coded Passive and I guuuuuess a focus fire checkbox… or just get rid of that entire thing if there’s no REAL aggressive and passive options any more, that works) for both PVP/PVE, I’d wager assist would still work. But, maybe not. Only one way to find out. (preferably on SiSi next time, though)
Incidentally, when drones are set to passive and assisted to a drone bunny, they behave as though they’re still aggressive in certain sansha incursion sites (mostly the OTA with infinitely respawning 5 eysturs if any of them dies)… this results in your drones doing things the drone bunny is not ordering them to do if the vindi who’s usually the bunny isn’t cycling webs and blasters on new frigate rats often enough.
I suspect that might be related to how this breakage happened as well. There’s clearly some real POS-like spaghetti code in that there drone window of ours.
Well, once every 17 years is ok I guess 
Thank you for hearing us and not just dismissing it as whining as many others have. I’m sure you guys will come up with some good ideas.
which box.?lol
afk cloaking needs to be fixed
who here is mad about them taking back the change? as im not mad in the smallest
I’m just amazed that CCP chicken out on this.
Fixing AFK Cloaking when?
This is a far bigger problem then 95% of what you are “solving” lately. Unlike every other aspect of eve, where there is counter play options (even if sometimes people might not like them), there is no counter play to 24/7 Cloaking campers. They are affecting gameplay of people while being AFK. Eve drones doesn’t affect OTHER’s gameplay while AFK, only your own.
My suggestion, would be an AFK flag in local if you haven’t done anything on your character for 10 minutes (or whatever Number) and when they come back, require a 1 minute “System spool up” time from when the AFK flag is removed until they can do any kind of action. This would allow you to cloak and go AFK for an emergency if you need to, while not allowing you to go AFK for 10 hours and still affect other’s gameplay.
It has actually gone up recently it seems people like to play a game where you don’t need to afk with 10 accounts to succeed.
i see it going down, its not even getting over 30k in the last 3 days.