Don’t exaggerate - it hasn’t been ‘removed from the game’ at all. It’s use in certain specified circumstances has been curtailed, but the same utility can still be easily achieved by manual control.
Ofc I recall them in such cases, that’s part of drone game for me. But that’s a completely different beast compared to manually navigating them from traget to target each and every time.
If you’re doing PvE, it’s completely removed from the game.
Then your complaint about having to monitor them is unfounded, as you already do so.
Why do you say it like its more than just pressing F? Is it an effort to do so for your other weapons?
Just monitoring them is nice and fun. Normally drones do their thing and I have to intervene just from time to time.
Manually controlling them for every single target changes their use completely since I need to lock all drone targets first and foremost, not only the first one.
Some might call this lazy or “afk”, I call it “worksharing”. In PvE, after entering a site, I take care of one part, drones of another. Afterwards we meet again. That’s an enjoyable PvE experience for me. Now it’s removed because of economic reasons which could be solved in better ways imho.
I dont understand why you wouldnt target the first 5-10 primary targets as soon as you enter the site, regardless of whether you carry drones or not and keep that queue up as you kill stuff off.
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Normally I just lock the first frigate and send drones after it. Afterwards I can focus on the bigger stuff and keeping the ship intact or checking the scanner in low/null or if drones go crazy. I guess you know the drill…
Not needing to care of one part of the mission because I have a ‘smart’ weapon system in bay is part of the fun.
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This is a position I simply dont agree with. I dont think we need to debate this any longer.
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Congratulations, I guess, on I believe being the first dev team in history to remove the pets from a live MMO.
Now that Drones are losing their pet identity and becoming essentially turrets - will drones be getting some turret advantages to replace their lost drone advantages? For example all drones being fitted with jump drives to instantly engage an enemy like turrets do, and having the ships tank applied to them to give them the same protection from damage as turrets?
you’re gross. My drones are my comrades not my pets.
Yeah, I don’t think of inert until controlled objects as companions either.
Three more days guys, three days. 
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Don’t know if anyone saw your post and offered a possible solution. Many people have reported a “hyper agression” bug that makes a life span of a drone almost comically short. An apparent solution is to take the affected ship, travel to a safe spot, leave ship for 30 seconds, reboard and the problem should be resolved. I do know the problem and possible solutions have been discussed in these forums; let us know if any of them work. Good luck!
Not everything is black and white, pvp bleeds into pve. Npc AI is increasing and CCP is working on ways to introduce randomness “Choas” into pve, look at pochven for instance.
A bot may be able to do boring things like anoms better, only becuase people wear out after 8 hours straight where bots can keep going, in a 30 min span a bot can not compete with a human as it will never have the same technical skill at flying a space ship.
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I think you have an unreasonably optimistic view of PvP prowess being a uniquely human trait that robots can’t copy. I think you’ve conflated ‘bots can’t pvp’ with ‘bots don’t pvp’.
PvP is comparatively not lucrative when manpower is free, but I would assume that highsec ganking is PvP, and this process seems very rote. It requires precise execution, a task in which bots excell. The primary proof offered that someone is a bot is unreasonable efficiency. So called F1 monkies in null could just as well be bots. You shoot who the FC tells you to. You lock who the FC tells you to. People make mistakes, forget to cycle reps, don’t notice a broadcast, or get distracted by whatever is going on in the room they’re in. Bots have no such disadvantage.
Bots don’t enjoy winning. They feel no satisfaction. They have no motivation to PvP and their RMT operators have no reason to care, either. A person may beat an unsophisticated bot in a ‘fair fight’, but as it is said if you’re in a fair fight you’ve already made a mistake. This change has nothing to do with bots and everything to do with stupid NPCs CCP doesn’t want to fix.
There is nothing wrong with the drones as a weapon system as evidenced by them remaining unchanged in PvP encounters. It was put on a sacrificial altar to appease the gods for the NPCs sin of being mindless. It creates an inconsistency in a system by sheer fiat that people will have to memorize to address a problem with another system.
I’m fine with doing something to stop the bounty faucet, or with this as a temporary work around to stymie the flood. I oppose it as a permanent solution to a separate problem.
“nothing to do with bots” - at least you’re right on this one.
“stupid NPCs CCP doesn’t want to fix” - this part’s wrong.
CCP has been working on improving NPC behaviors and statistics. It just turns out it’s a lot harder than finding a switch inside the game’s engine that says NPCUniqueBehavior=False and changing it to True.
If you look at the core gameplay loop of combat in EVE Online, what do you think can be altered so that NPCs are “stupid” anymore?
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Have them shoot drones often enough that if you afk for a 20 minutes you lose them. Seems within the realm of possiblity to me.
So… you just want to introduce a different flavor of the tedium by forcing players to micromanage their drones by pulling them in/out, flight time, etc. etc. rather than CCP’s current change of requiring you to lock them?
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CCP has obviously thought of that solution but as scoots has pointed out that would make 90% of people even more irritated with pve.
I would personally prefer squadrons with drone abilities and such, it would balance drones better in pvp too becuase e-war + web will be more effective since its only one target allowing drones to do a bit of cool stuff to rebalance it rather than just npc’s shooting drones.
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