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.
I fear this will be the final straw for a lot of people who are already struggling in RL to play the game. At the minute it feels there are less players farming and more players trying to make ISK quickly to fund other ways to play the game. I know many multibox because it provides more thrill with more being commited to the field. Whether they choose to go AFK is a decision they make. This deal kills that path completely. Lots of comments on here about “giving lazy ass players the boot”. I don’t think they are lazy at all, in fact, catching AFK ratters has been one of the most lucrative ways to hunt. But if CCP thinks this change address, attentive gameplay, (what is the issue around this?) means controlling drones manually, I think the knock on effect will be many accounts going dormant and unsubbed and people getting pissed at spending all of their gameplay ratting to make ends meat. I also think there will be a negative impact on PvP, I’ve personally caught a lot of AFK drone boat ratters but not too many of the other boats. It just feels to me that whilst on paper it will solve a perceived problem (as I don’t think there is a problem with being AFK) with low to no attention game play, it’s actually a false economy.
Once again, why is low or no attention to gameplay an issue?
edit - whilst loss aversion is a problem in today’s game, this change will increase loss aversion even more.
Drone Aggression will not be removed in PVP. Your drone will go aggro if a player attack you. If a player decloak His also exposing himself to being destroyed. That’s for me the life in null.
Exactly - I couldn’t care less if the human is AFK, their ship is in space and therefore it’s a target. Lucky me if there are more of the humans’ ships in space.
Because it’s too easy for someone to start up 10 accounts and have them krabbing in anomalies day in and day out as each account requires very little attention. Compound that with the entirety of nullsec, you end up in a situation where it’s too easy to farm ISK in the game, causing ripples through the ecosystem that CCP doesn’t want.
To me, a graceful solution would be one that remained consistent. Off the top of my head, having NPCs shoot down drones if you’re not on your game would be preferable as far as maintaining consistency. That is probably what a real pilot would do. People would still be annoyed, but drone behavior for aggression would be the same.
There are probably other solutions, too, but what they would all likely have in common is that they’re more difficult for the developers to implement. Solving the problem without introducing an inconsistency is more difficult. I would approve of this change whole heartedly if it were being used as triage, but I have doubts this is the case.
I do not dispute that the change is ‘simple’ from a developer or veteran player’s perspective, and I do not dispute that it solves some problems. What I am saying is that I think it makes the rules of the game a tiny bit more complicated and unintuitive, raising the bar of entry a little bit higher. I believe that is significant enough to warrant extra effort, but this is a judgement call I wouldn’t expect everyone to agree with and I’m fine with people having another opinion. It’s not a topic I care a lot about.
As an aside, I believe I only threw my hat in here for Ramona McCandless. She asked a question. I didn’t trust that anyone would give an earnest answer, and sometimes she appreciates those.
I am a semi-attentive player- When I rat rally points in my gila, I open project discovery and get some skin crates. However, when a hostile player enters the system, I would allign out Immediately, and often when they arrive on site, I have done accelerating and alligning.
Now imagine this in a 700DPS, and a specific damage-type tank Ishtar. It tanks 2000 Rat DPS with gist x-large shield boosters, and it can Also allign out and warp away at the speed mentioned above because it’s basically face tanking the rats, and melting any scram/web rats at an instant. This makes ratting havens even safer, now you Just have to sit in the site and face-tank everything, while allign out to your fortress at 10m/s. This makes losing a farm ship even harder.
If ‘punish active players’ is synonymous with ‘shooting down drones if you’re not paying attention’, yes. If these are not the same thing, then you’ve either unintentionally misunderstood my position, or you’ve committed the strawman fallacy by constructing a simplified position that is easier to argue against than what I actually hold. Pick any of the three.
Have you ever thought about using short cut keys? Shortcuts / drones / all drones: Engage.
I mean like you probibly do it in other games why would you not do it in eve too? On the other side since you have to click why not try learn a better weapon system like guns that can do pve quicker than drones.
If NPC’s attack the drones then you have to recall them to avoid them dying as an active player, and have to repeatedly do so through the site, thus significantly reducing your DPS, by far more than the 5 seconds required to get your first target lock on warp in and then managing your target queue sensibly.
Thereby punishing active players, since it significantly slows your site completion times if you increase drone agro like you suggested.
While the CCP change actually does primarily punish inactive players.
Kindly look in a mirror at how you tried to reduce my post to a simplified binary.
This would be the first option, yes, I would punish active players, as you put it. The answer I gave didn’t make any assumption as to which of the 3 categories you would fall into. Even the quoted segment begins with the word ‘or’, not ‘and’.
So… Why would you punish active players when the entire point of this change is to restrict afk/low attention styles of gameplay? It seems like you are utterly missing the point with the change, it is not intended to reduce income for active players. They’ve already done that with other changes lately.
Because I see things relatively, not absolutely. If everyone has to put in the same effort, the relative value of that effort will reach an equilibrium. If people make less money, the same amount of money has more buying power, thus I don’t think an across the board change that requires attentiveness accompanied by a dps loss would cripple the game or exacerbate some sort of player inequality.
I have lost a lot of drones trying to do exactly as you describe, but poorly. I am aware of the inconvenience, but I also think that engagement and griping to my friends over the drones I lost was part of the experience. Losing drones didn’t necessarily make me unhappy in the long term, even if the short term was rather unsatisfying.
Anyways, I’ve spent a lot more time here than I should have. I don’t particularly care about this subject so much as I care about one of the participants in the discussion. I’m not saying drone aggro is the one best way, either. It’s just what I could think of in the two seconds I was willing to spare on the subject. The bottom line is that I would prefer something that addresses the problem while also being consistent in its behavior for NPC and PC aggression.
No attention play allows a player to run more than one operation/site simultaneously. this leads to a large influx of isk for a single player passively running a lot of sites putting them far ahead of a more attentive player who may only run one or two alts.
As another said, above, this has a ripple effect across the economy.
I will be interested to see what happens to things like the MER once this takes effect.
All I know. is that the change is comming. Either you agree or not.
Deal with it or stop playing drone boats it’s the ultimate stand a player have to deal with.
Man …
… at first I’ve read “anti-semite” player …
… and now I think I shouldn’t have stopped drinking coffee.
Then CCP wouldn’t be discouraging afk gameplay.
To discourage a part of a group from doing something …
… other options of doing the same thing need to have benefits in comparison.
When it doesn’t matter if you’re afk or atk …
… and your drones die the same anyway …
… then all you’re achieving is turning it into a game of luck for everyone using drones.
To me it looks like you’re ignoring the status quo of “afk farming using drones” in an attempt to see it objectively. It looks like you willfully ignore the players in your … uh … considerations. From my perspective, as someone who absolutely considers them, this makes only little sense.
The point is to actively punish the group of people collectively known as lazy assholes, farmers or carebears …
… but of course CCP isn’t saying that publicly, because that would be just stupid.
They want PvE mechanics and PvP mechanics to be identical.
In this particular case though with how much more ewar players use, this would leave certain ewars even more godlike that at present.
This could be solved by giving all Ewar the ECM treatment, so damps don’t prevent you locking the damping ship, only everyone else, etc, though the ECM/Damp combo would still leave you perma jammed effectively at that point. Or by Brisc’s idea of drones not needing a ship target lock.
But both those solutions require much longer processes to look for unintended consequence, this change has very few unintended consequences and the ones that exist are pretty minor.
