Upcoming Changes to Drone Aggression

EVE Technology and Research Center Upcoming Features & Changes
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1167

So instead of having to target lock now 90% of drone ships are just unable to do the content due to their drones near enough insti dying? That sounds an excellent change that no-one will complain about…
And gating content doesn’t stop AFK play considering the AFK play isn’t Carriers or Supers anymore already.

You are again substituting your own goals in for CCP and getting upset that CCP’s change doesn’t meet the goals you decided it should.

P.S. Skynet was broken and needed an across the board nerf. Bad example.

1168

Oh really? Because I sure see complaints about how unfair it is that level 4 mission farmers can’t just launch drones and wait for the game to play itself and win the mission.

I don’t know why it’s controversial to prefer targeted improvements over blanket nerfs that hit unintended targets.

This is a carefully targeted improvement. It has very little effect on anyone who isn’t AFK farming.

The semi-autonomous ability is the problem. And now it is being dealt with.

1169

Obviously not understanding what I mean. The gate idea is to stop supers and carriers (just like in DEd complexes) because most of the outrageous isk spew into the game comes from supers and carriers. It has nothing to do with afk.

The anti drone towers work well in the abyss, and abyss pilots rarely lose drones because they pull them in and relaunch. It makes you pay attention and it makes you take time (pull in drones aren’t doing dps). This is the stated goal here right? have people pay attention right?

P.S. Skynet was broken and needed an across the board nerf. Bad example.

SKYNET was broken. Skynet was assigning fighters from a completely off grid carrier to a cheap inty on a gate and slaughtering people.

The ability to assign fighters long existed, what made “skynet” terrible is the change that let fighters (even off grid fighters) get bonuses from things like DDAs and drone tracking mods mounted on the carrier. Before that Drones got no bonuses from DDAs and the like.

So instead of fixing that (such as saying “fighters can only be assigned to Battlecruisers and Above” and/or “Fighters that are not on grid with their carrier get no bonuses from Drone enhancing modules”) what did CCp do? Got rid of Fighter Assign all together.

So those of us who had used fighter assign in various non-broken ways for years got screwed. Meanwhile people just planted Cariers and Supers hundreds of KM off gates and a form of skynet continues to this day.

I know forums are a bad communication medium, but can you understand my concern at all?

CCP is making a bad change that is immediately mitigatable by botters (program the bots to hit F1) and AFK ratters (land smartbombing ship at zero on anom and go/ Use FoF missile ship, wait to hear “a module has run out of charges” every 5 minutes and press F1). Meanwhile those of use who let drones fly free to deal with some ships while we manually deal with others with guns and missiles have extra steps to do to get the same functionality we lost because CCP tried and failed to fix a problem that had nothing to do with us…

It’s like if CCP said "Muninns are a bit too powerful in fleet battles, so we have decided to remove all HACs as pilotable ships in EVE Online.

CCP should target the actual problem (Afk PVE players and botters) a leave everyone else alone. I don’t know why this is a controversial statement , other than the fact that some of you simply like to argue against anything that isn’t your own idea.

1170

I think it’s kind of unfair to say that CCP is moving towards an idle clicker. Obviously, older content tends to be rather boring and easily automated. But, they’ve actually been moving away from that sort of thing. Of course, things like Emerging Conduits have been an exception, but, as an aggregate, newer content has been more engaging and less conducive to automation. Moreover, the ESS rework was a change that helped to make an older form of content more engaging -well, at least I think so.

To be fair, I do understand that the drone change makes it harder to automate a lot of content without addressing how monotonous it feels to a lot of players. So, it’s not exactly an ideal option. That being said, I’m also hopeful this will lead to more engaging forms of play. The change will likely cause some people to leave, but those that stay will have to adapt. They will either adopt more active strategies that have better isk efficiencies per hour and/or per client, or they’ll move on to more engaging activities. Moreover, greater attentiveness is more likely to result in emergent gameplay opportunities, and less of people coming back to find themselves in a pod in station.

1171

Which is nothing to do with what these changes are about, so bringing it up in regard to these changes is pointless & irrelevant, since these changes are not about reducing isk earning.

Because mostly they fly Gilas.

You are missing CCP’s point here, they have addressed exactly what they want with this change, you just keep coming up with side arguments and 'oh what about’isms.

1172

No it is not. The problem is that null anoms (and maybe some missions) are afkable. CCP recognized this and made the Abyss un-afkable.

Why they don’t just repeat that with anomalies is a mystery to me. If they did we wouldn’t have to have a CSM telling them “hey guys, Ewar!”.

1173

I remember why years ago I stopped replying to anything you have to say, and you haven’t changed. We’ve seen this kind of move from CCP before, with skynet and other things, and it doesn’t fix what they want to fix while screwing over people who weren’t abusing anything.

I will never understand posters like you, it’s like a willful blindness that doesn’t make any sense.

1174

So let me get this straight: a mechanic that reduces your DPS by forcing you to cycle drones is good, a mechanic that forces you to actively select targets (with minimal impact to non-AFK players) instead of launching drones and going AFK is an unacceptable nerf?

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1175

This is exactly the problem. Good game design doesn’t make people leave, it makes them want to play more.

Getting rid of AFK game play (which also leads to botting) is something that should happen, doing it this way doesn’t do that while punishing players who weren’t even doing that to begin with.

Why would it be so bad to say “drones used in null security space cannot auto aggro against any npc” (since null is where most of the afking happens) instead of “no more drones aggroing npcs in EVE” which is what CCP is doing?

This attacks the actual problem (which is people afking their way to isk, against which helps botting), it leaves abyss runners , mission runners and others out of it and doesn’t require special rules for Guristas and Serpentis content. CCP region locks content all the time (no bubbles and bombs in low sec for instance" so why not just do it that way?

(These are Rhetorical questions, I know CCP isn’t going to change this).

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1176

It really is. Having an entire line of ships where you can press one button and then passively watch while the game plays itself for you is bad design. The worst abuses of AFK farming merely highlighted that bad design and created stronger pressure to fix it.

1177

Because, as people keep telling you, nullsec is not the only issue.

1178

Forcing people to do that in null where the AFKing happens is fine. But no one here can tell me why EVERY.SINGLE.DRONE USER has to be affected because of afk players.

This is why I mention skynet. I used fighter assist but didn’t do skynet, why did I have to lose something because someone figured out you could assign fighters to intys on gates? Wouldn’t it have been better to say "ok, the problem is intys on gates with fighters, no more fighter assign TO INTYS?

1179

Because I actually read what CCP said they wanted to fix with this rather than inventing reasons then being upset it doesn’t fix the invented reasons?

To humour you with a longer explanation though.
The anti drone towers in the Abyss work because the environment in the Abyss is tightly controlled. You have a time limit, you have a path you must complete in that time limit, you have a circle of death which kills you if you fly beyond it, and you have a highly limited ship range, and you can only ever solo it, or triple box if you are in Frigs. Take those limitations away and the anti drone towers simply cease to be a viable control means. And they impact ALL play, including active play.

So… suddenly Null has no Guristas & Serpentis content does it? Your own arguments contradict each other here, so now we require even more special rules and sec specific rules rather than clear easy to understand mechanics.

You don’t like arguing against me because you keep leaving giant gaping holes in your logic and I’m not afraid to call them out, nothing about me being blind.

Edit. Also ECM was solved, unless CCP happened to leave some NPC’s with old style ECM. And frankly your issue with damps is actually a problem with damps in general, damps should get the ECM treatment, Ewar should not be about solo play, it should be a type of support play like logistics is. Where they can fight back against the ewar ship at the least.

The MER is about sinks & faucets & creation & destruction, not about afk or active playstyles, the MER has nothing to do with this thread.

1180

Ok, show me on the monthly economic report where the other problem is.

1181

We’ve told you why, you just don’t like the answer. Having the game play itself for you is bad design, and the change is negligible for non-AFK players outside of being perma-jammed (and that issue has been brought up as a possible thing to fix).

Wouldn’t it have been better to say "ok, the problem is intys on gates with fighters, no more fighter assign TO INTYS?

No, because that doesn’t address the root of the problem: having expendable ships deploy the firepower of an entire capital fleet while the capitals are invulnerable at a POS. Removing the ability to assign fighters to interceptors would have just moved the goalposts to some other expendable ship.

What does the monthly economic report have to do with the fact that having the game play itself for you is bad design?

1182

The problem always is that I’m trying to explain things to someone who doesn’t have the experiences to understand what’s being said. Maybe I’m not good at that

Yes there is guristas and serp content in null, but serp and guristas anoms are afkable so removing that is ok. It’s not ok to remove something that people who are not abusing are using.

If the problem is afk game play, remove afk gameplay. Don’t remove a key function of a weapon system because people are going afk. Thus the drone towers or something else.

It doesn’t have to be towers. It could be making null anoms more sensative to drones so if drones are doing most of the dps, the anom spawns ever more frigates, putting the drones at risk, making the drone user think more.

I don’t know why I can’t get the point across, I’m trying to say that CCp should stop knee jerk nerfing and actually develop things. They have proved they can with the abyss, why are they going back to old ways now?

1183

Even the abyss is AFKable with drones.

Many rooms you can simply orbit the gate or biocache, and let drones take care of stuff for you.

You mostly only have to really pay attention when the words Tessera or Devoted Knight appear in your overview.

And that’s for a single player farming T1s with a worm.

They want to fix people using drones killing stuff for them with a single, or no input.

It doesn’t matter to them if people were abusing drones, or were just lazy.

It doesn’t matter if it was just me leaving my worm killing stuff in the abyss when I got a “freebie room”, if it was the guy who parked his domi in a lvl4 mission and left drones loose, or if it was a multiboxer using 5+ ishtars to cash in anoms for 10+ hours per day.

The issue here is that drones can kill NPCs without requiring user input, and now they will require user input.

1184

All the ideas you have put forward harm active users who manually target their drones as well to the same extent. Not just afk users. Your suggestions are actually WORSE for fixing the problem than CCP’s solution. Now, Brisc I believe it was did pick up on a good idea which works but has it’s own flaws of allowing drone use straight from the overview with no target locks at all. It’s an interesting thought to run further.

Also you keep trying to claim no one other than you understands, and that we simply don’t have the experience, when that quite simply isn’t true, you aren’t that special, you aren’t 100 times smarter than everyone else.

1185

IMO the easy balance solution here would be to give drones their own lock time before they can open fire. If your ship has a lock on the target when you activate them they respond immediately, if you use the overview hover option the drone spends a size-appropriate amount of time locking the target and then engages.

1186

They already have their own lock time I believe. It’s pretty fast but exists.