Well finally the straw that broke the camels back. I know it doesnt matter to CCP but me and my four accounts are finally done. I was fine with reducing bounties , but now they are taking away a game play style that I have played for 10 years.
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No, I am not. I’m saying “if there are things within range your drones could be attacking and you are not using your drones, you are using your ship inefficiently”.
False equivalence. You are in a mission to perform a task, which typically includes the clearing of the NPCs so you can progress with the mission. The means of clearing the NPCs involves applying damage to them until they blow up.
Combat drones deal damage. If you withhold your drones because “you don’t think they’re necessary to get a thing to die”, you might as well only activate as many guns as you need to for a given target’s tank to break, even if it means you will spend 10 minutes waiting for it to bleed to death rather than killing it in 10 seconds.
As for ‘efficiently using drones’; if you are not using them, you by default cannot be using them efficiently. This is an elementary-grade concept.
Well, yes obviously, but Im destroying everything before it gets into drone control range, with a few exceptions occassionally, and thats when I launch the drones.
Which Im not, see above.
So in other words you skip any and all missions which might place your ship within 60km of NPCs, or deliberately MJD away from the NPCs to use weaponry/ammo which has less potential damage output than you could be utilizing, for the purpose of ‘EZ-moding’ your missions and doing them inefficiently.
In essence, this entire discussion about drones’ use does not even apply to you in the first place.
Oh and, that first paragraph is meant to be sarcastic, not serious; but still to push a point across regarding your input here.
Did you just “One True Scotsman” this by saying that if I dont prescribe to your playstyle, my experience of using active drones in any ship that carries em since 2009 is irrelevent?
Cos really, thats pretty lame play.
Bad sport, old bean.
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No. I’m saying that you talking about how you play which does not actually really involve the use of drones means that your input on the ‘active and passive’ usage of drones is largely irrelevant. Because you are not the sort of person these changes are applicable to in general and you are likely to lack appreciation for how they may affect others’ playstyles.
In essence, you’re one-true-scotsmanning yourself more than I am…
I mean really, consider what you’re saying repeatedly.
“I don’t let frigates get into range so this change which can adversely affect other players with battleship-sized ships running missions or w/e who do have frigates get in range is irrelevant to me and thus should be irrelevant to others also. Because reasons.”
The point asking to make anomalies more dynamic and interesting, and and/or pay out more is just some hypocrisy.
People wrote all of that while forgetting about abyss, which is dynamic and pays out pretty well, but the people complaining here that PvE is boring don’t do abyss.
It’s not because it doesn’t pay out well or it’s boring, but because they can’t AFK in there.
It’s not content designed for low to no attention gameplay, so they don’t bother doing it, and stick to the old school designed content, which has been optimized to be as low attention as possible over the years, with META fits and the method to clear the sites and missions fully spelled out for them.
This doesn’t mean older content doesn’t need an overhaul, but if it did get an overhaul instead of this change, you’d see the same people complaining they can’t AFK anoms/missions anymore, and that they won’t be able to afford buying stuff all the same.
No, you are just engaging this on the topic of battleships specifically.
Yeah well if you are just going to make assumptions based on a single specific exchange, then I dont think you intend to debate in good faith.
Controlling drones isnt hard. CCP seem to agree.
It’s not about ‘hard’, it’s about ‘efficacy’. Lawdalmighty do you just not get that the game’s mechanics stretch a little farther than your ability to grasp them?
And no, if you do not read into what I’ve said enough to realise I have not spoken purely about battleship size player ships, you yourself do not intend to ‘debate in good faith’.
If you are this intent on getting a rise, Ill indulge it a little more.
And CCP want it less efficent than “drop drones, wait, recall drones, cash in”. For people who have never done it that way, this change makes no efficency change at all.
And yet the only aspect of this you have engaged me regarding is Battleships, and from the fact you have done that, you have made the assumption that long gun Battleships are the only thing I fly. Thats your assumption, and it does not change the same point; that this change is not some hurdle to overcome, its not some hairbrained antibotting move, its just simply sensible deployment of drones. If anything, less drones will be lost, so thats a thing no one seems to care about but is still a possible outcome.
And do you not get that what people choose to do for fun doesnt have to equal the most isk in the shortest time?
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This is half-true. Keep in mind CCP changed NPC AI a bit some years ago (8 now, I think?) so depending on the NPCs in question as well as the players and drones in use within a ‘pocket’, AND some measure of remote assistance/ewar, the NPCs could start changing targets.
The ‘captain’ class ships as example will readily change target to drones of a class they would normally ignore. That is to say, of the normal variants frigates would go for medium and up combat drones, destroyers and cruisers for heavy and up, battlecruisers if I recall for sentries and up); where the ‘captain’ variants would go for one tier lower in all respects, so frigates would still go for light drones.
Consequently people had to at least monitor their drones to see if they were being attacked and recall or repair them as necessary.
This applies to regular missions as it does anomalies/sites etc; things just get more ‘aggressive’ in this regard the higher the tier of content, with sleepers readily going after drones of all sorts, as do Triglavians and incursion Sansha.
Utterly and completely wrong. Ships have only so many targets they can lock. In Gallentean missions/anomalies/sites you deal with sensor damping, and in Caldari ones with ECM. In both scenarios, locking up frigates when you also have cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships to deal with, just so you can ‘actively’ manage your drones on them, is more often than not either nigh impossible or at the very least completely impractical when compared to simply using a ship which does not have as-heavy a reliance on its ‘backup’ in the form of its drones (or worse, as with the ships I’ve mentioned previously, rely on them heavily as their primary source of damage).
Again, drones will return to your ship if they lose their current target and are ‘passive’ or ‘drononavirus™ 2020’. Forpeoplewhoactuallymakeuseoftheirdronesatrangesofmorethan10km this can mean their drones may begin floating back some 30km or more at what could be a relatively slow pace (have you ever used Hammerheads or Ogres?), potentially right back to your ship 60km’ish from the nearest typically sensible target for them.
That is to say, if they did not begin floating back, you would have put them onto the next target within 5km of the last; but… you might be damped or ECMd so hard you simply cannot get the next target locked and poof your drones are floating back to you.
Do you get the problem yet, or must I get out the freaking crayons? (I won’t, because I’ve got more entertaining things to occupy myself with…)
I never even said it is.
If you’re using your drones efficiently and sensibly you are generally not losing many drones anyway… and less drones lost means less industry/trade movement in that respect, which stands to be bad rather than good.
Do you not get that what you do or do not find fun has nothing at all to do with this discussion, and that we’re trying to discuss mechanics and how they affect ship balance…?
Holy hell. Screw this. I’m going to go play something instead.
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Thank the maker, you managed to misread literally everything I wrote.
Maybe learn to actually think about what you’re responding with and why, then people won’t misunderstand your irrelevant drivel.
Maybe read it, and not just write out whatever answer you think equates to the halfbaked point you are trying to make in the form of aggressive entitlement and self-important fallacy.
Ugh, what now?
Rich coming from the one who keeps trying to make irrelevant concerns about mechanics changes because they don’t apply to their own playstyle, and has the gall to speak of a one true scotsman fallacy…
I try “to make irrelevent concerns”? Do you mean Im trying to downplay how much of an impact that CCP think this will make?
Or how much an impact the doomsayers who said they would quit after minerals changed, who said they would quit after moons, who said they would quit after ESS, who said they would quit after Blackout, Triglavian ETC ETC ETC and yet they are still here?
Hmm, I wonder who, to me as a customer of CCP I should find the opinon of relevent, what do you think, hmm?
For a moment I thought you were a native English speaker, given it seemed you understood what I was saying in “…to make irrelevant concerns…”
But I can’t for the life of me figure out what you’re trying to say in this quoted sentence.
I don’t care for people who say they’ll quit because of a change. But you’re woefully oblivious if you don’t have an appreciation for how and why this change negatively impacts non-PVP drone usage overall and especially for those who prefer to use drone-centric ships for the purpose.
Imagine a scenario which just might help you understand the issue at hand.
In this hypothetical scenario, there are ships which have significant bonuses to the mining yield of mining drones, enough so that these ships are able to compete with mining-laser equipped ships, and this is entirely their intended purpose - to be able to make use of drones for their mining instead of lasers.
Much like there are droneboats as there are turret and missile ones.
Got the picture in your head? Right.
Now imagine CCP decide to tell those using such drone-miner ships that, hey, your drones are now going to have to be told to go mine a rock again after every time they return to your ship.
Those using mining lasers don’t have to manually repeat their cycles… if there were such a thing as mining missiles, people using those wouldn’t have to manually repeat those’ cycles either.
For all intents and purposes, under normal circumstances, there wasn’t any appreciable difference in the yield between these three different kinds of hypothetical miners, so it’s not like there was any particular advantage to using a drone-miner-boat - but now there’s an unnecessary detriment applied to their use.
This is the balance aspect of the proposed change to drone behaviour - it doesn’t touch on the ‘laziness’ at all, only on the balance.
In realistic terms, even attentively managing one’s mining drones would see one miss a drone which hasn’t yet returned to a rock, because if you mine sensibly you’re not necessarily putting all your lasers on one rock and instead distributing them. Likewise your drones are going to be floating to disparate rocks and you may begin having trouble keeping track of which was on which rock and getting it commanded to head back in a timeous fashion - again, the laser/missile-miners don’t have this issue, they tell their lasers/launchers to mine and just wait to hear a target was lost.
Now, let’s revisit the issue of ECM and Sensor damping. The ship which ECMs you is not necessarily the one you right at that moment want your drones to be going after, because if/when you finally regain your lock you may wish to keep them at their current general location to deal with more suitable-ship-size targets there.
The ECM boat which is jamming you could be at entirely the opposite side of you in relative terms, and your intention could very-well be to deal with that ship with your guns, which may not be your primary damage dealer or constitute for argument’s sake half of it, before you refocus your guns on another ship - maybe another ECM boat. So, telling your drones to go after it so you can keep your damage up, on assumption w/e they were shooting at died while you’re jammed, means you have a net reduction in damage output which other ‘types’ of ships do not have to deal with (turret/missile boats).
Does the balance issue become clearer yet?
Where missions are concerned, though many mightn’t believe it, FOF missiles are not actually that terrible. I’d argue they’re potentially far better than drones for mission clearing, though not in a solo scenario.
Get the NPCs aggroed, activate your launchers and wait for everything to die. No drones to micromanage at all. No concerns about damps or ECM at all. Yes, your total damage output isn’t quite that great, especially since your missiles are liable to spread about if you don’t keep them grouped, or you and your mate(s) might end up over-vollying the same targets a bunch, but the fact of the matter is they’re the bees knees when it comes to being lazy. And since you’re in a group you can remote rep - ever flown a group of spidertanking H(A)M Tengus? They can work a real treat, only need a handful for class 6 wormholes to be effective.
So this touches on the supposed ‘laziness’ aspect.
You don’t have to worry about NPCs changing targets when you use turrets or missiles, only about tracking/target size for turrets and velocity/size or defenders for missiles.
When just dropping your drones and letting them do their own thing, unless you’re drone-swarming with multiple people, they’re liable to spread out their fire even with ‘focus fire’ enabled, so you might end up with situations where you went AFK only to go come back with one ogre each on a battleship, with nothing dying for the past 15 minutes… So in that respect they’re not that much better than simply using FOFs.
I have full appreciation for why they want to make this change. I simply don’t agree with their approach to it, as I believe there are far better ways the matter could be handled, including at least one suggestion I’ve already made on this post; namely, a captcha-like minigame whenever one’s drones engage a new target which must be correctly completed in order for the drones to deal full damage rather than 1/4 to that target. For a real human who doesn’t have brain problems this wouldn’t take more than a few seconds to complete, maybe 2 volleys out of what would normally be 20-30 for a full pack of Ogre IIs out of a Domi on heavier battleship targets or Hobs on some frigates…
It would have the dual benefit of countering botters, potentially quite effectively, and of forcing those who rely solely on their drones to be at least a little interactive with the things’ use; more so than turret or missile users have to be, even.
So, do you finally see that I don’t give a rat’s ass about what you do and don’t find fun nor how you play, but am instead focused on mechanics and how they influence ship/module balance? That my remarks about your playstyle are not because of you being you, but because your input seems to come from a position of a critical lack of understanding for how and why the proposed change is problematic to such balance and its impact on gameplay for-everyone-who-is-not-you?
Also inb4 tl;dr - if you’ve not the time to read my crayon drawing, I’ve not the time to humour you further.