If you are going to make this change to drones then you need a better way that a context menu to cause drones to attack.
No one wants to right click , attack , right click , attack , right click attack , …
You need 3 extra buttons in the control panel ( and probably 3 extra slots for those buttons )
High F9 - All drones engage ( attack / mine / rep / salvage / etc )
Mid F9 - Return and orbit
Low F9 - Return to bay
@Dav_Varan the following is basically anti botting mission runners, or ratters. Not sure however when CCP will revisit this since it had issues the first time.
Assigning buttons like you said however, would make this transition useless cause then botters could script the button use
Attacking players though, drones weren’t supposed to act any different.
There’s keybinds that do exactly that. Mine are:
F
Shift-r, (wait), r
Shift-r
Yes, ‘return and orbit’ is a combination of ‘return to bay’ and ‘deploy drones’ and I like it that way. Makes enemies stop having my drones targeted. 
Yeah I use r t and y because its less messing around , but when I mouse I want buttons not fiddly menus.
Imagine if ever time you fire missiles you had to right click menu.
Thanks I read the OP.
Your argument makes no sense , bots could do as you say right now with missile or guns.
FYI they have buttons !
You know there are already hotkeys for what you want right.
Ah, already mentioned, for some reason it didn’t show those posts. n/m.
For those who have only one account I really don’t want to press F all day in nullsec. This just makes me feel more bored.
taking away drone agression adds nothing to the game of value.
people who use them to go ratting enjoy the playing the game that way.
it does NOTHING for bots.
The genius change of lowering bounties in systems after repeated kills is already there.
All this does is make people work hard, or encourage people to install mouse-clickers.
Pressing ‘f’ 1000x is not gameplay, it is just work.
It’s not like auto-aiming missile drakes will do anything but laugh.
This topic was almost dead and is irrelevant since the changes didn’t happen… why did you need to post.
The drone aggression was to initially IIRC curb some botting by making a player actively target rats with the drones and not allow the drones to do it automatically… wasn’t supposed to count towards another player however… but like spaghetti code, it got mixed in with other stuff, so it didn’t happen.
Changes didn’t happen? oh. Good news!
thanks for the extra info.
For now. they made it clear when they reverted it in December 2020 that it would be coming back once they can figure out how to code it so it doesn’t break things.
oh wow that makes me not want to reactive my 4 accounts. I was about to spend £1000.
The first time i bought ‘the power of two’ to fly two dominix battleships was precisely because i had become a master of drones.
It sounds like one of the devs has heard ‘botting with automated accounts’ and ’ drones automatically attack things’ and can’t seem to understand they are completely different things because the word ‘automatic’ is in there.
Will auto-attack missiles be removed? because alot of smart lvl4 mission runners just have auto-fire-missile drakes and i don’t imagine they are going to edit the missiles to become brain-damaged-retards with genetic disorders making them incapable of spelling their own name.
Yeah but Sylvia is saying that the devs might still want to do it?
Has anyone got a link to that post? I want to read it before i reactivate my accounts or not.
Auto-targeting missiles.
Also : look at these dominix loss mails.
Alot of them are ratting ships.
Am i supposed to believe that forcing 1000s of players to press a button 1000s of times just because a few people multi-box will positively impact the vast majority of players? it makes no sense.
I mean, who knows WHEN it will happen, but what they were trying to do in December was turn off auto-aggression from drones (set to aggressive) in PVE but leave it on for PVP.
It broke drone assist. As in, assisting your drones to someone just wasn’t working normally.
I think it broke something else as well, but I can’t remember the other thing. But anyway, drone code second only to POS code, right?
And yes, I expect that once they figure out how to nerf aggressive drones in PVE, they’ll be coming for FOFs next. Enjoy them while you can!
Or, i cannot enjoy them whilst i can because i won’t re-sub to eve.
it’s a massive change to drones, for no perceivable benefit to the game at all.
The ultimate protest is not shooting the statue in ammar.
The ultimate protest is to simply not re-sub to the game.
Here are the posts in this very thread CCP made when they reverted the chat in December, btw:
From that, I take it that if they can do something similar to subcap drones as what they did to cap/supercap fighters and bombers… then they will, to reduce low/no attention drone gameplay.
But also, they DO value drone assist (which… while not aggressive drones, is very useful when multiboxing… after all, if you have 5 rattlesnakes on grid and one of them gets attacked by rats, the other 4’s drones are just gonna sit there unless you have all 4 of them guard the 5th one… or unless you just make one the drone bunny and assist all the others to it and just control them that way).
So we’ll see what they get around to doing (and when). I believe one poster’s reaction to the reversion was “see you in 3 years”, though.
players LOVE their drones.
They love ratting with their drones.
They ARE paying attention, constantly looking at local for example, piloting their ship to avoid damage.
very VERY few go completely AFK.
What the hell is AFK abuse anyway?
Is someone with a clocked probing ship-alt in wormhole space ‘afk abusing’?
It’s nonsense.
"Yeah this really zen playstyle that huge numbers of our highest paying customers love is kinda similar but not really to botters clogging up high-sec with their mining vessels "
If the option to control drones like fighters was ADDED , i’d be up for it. It would be nice to control their orbit ranges, and engagement distances.
But taking away auto-aggression? yeah, i’m going to have to think about if i want to re-sub. with my £1000.
I’m a dedicated drone-boat multi-boxer, our voices should be listened to because we are the one USEING this feature.
What next? Auto-pilot removal from freighters?
Miners have to manually move each 1m/3 from their ore bay seperately?
Urgh.
yeah, I was a 1x myrm/domi/rattlesnake/ishtar pilot when I was new, then 2x domi, then 2x ishtar, then 3x ishtar…
and then they nerfed the ishtar and sentries like 3-4 times overall and… yeah.
By that time I was flying Vindis and NMs in incursions and I started to transition over to gunboats primarily.
Now my main can fly all subcaps but blops and edencom and my secondary, Sylvia here, is almost as good (no hictors/dictors or logi, mostly) at combat subcaps. I enjoy guns, missiles, and drones a lot.
But yes, I’ll always consider myself a Gallente droneboat captain first and foremost. ;D