The same way the other weapons systems are fine because they require you to manage your locks, load your ammo, and do whatever. Managing your drones should take some of your human brain’s prowess in PvE, so yes. I would be for adding this ‘tedium’ that requires someone to be there to operate this weapons system when facing off with NPCs, same as the tedium they’d deal with when facing off with PCs.
I think of NPCs not as money bags, but as training dummies for players who learn to use these systems. They should be consistent in their behavior.
You left out the part where none of the other systems are susceptible to being shot at and destroyed.
You say this as if screen recognition bots (that already detect when neutral enter a system due to the Local Members list updating) are unable to recognize when a Drone’s Shield Health meter starts to show some red pixels as they take damage…
Cool. CCP doesn’t care what you think NPCs should be.
I would not object so long as the behavior is consistent across player and non player interaction. They could just as easily make drones not auto aggro at all on anybody and I would not raise a complaint.
Missiles can be smart bombed, guns can be tracking disrupted which has the similiar effect of your weapons becoming useless.
Btw drones most of the time have as much ehp as the mother ship sometimes more, which is a huge + in pvp usually its better to not even shoot the drones at all.
You can also abuse tanky drones in pve, like using caldari navy hornets on a worm for fw missions where your main ship needs 0 tank becuase of it, drones being shot is a + as
well as a -.
That’s good. Keep that up, and don’t fall to the dark side.
So, could you give examples of such changes please?
There’s some good feedback regarding E-WAR on this thread, as drones seem to be the main way to counter it, besides ECM resistance modules.
The only offered suggestion to fix that was the ability to press F directly from your overview, which would make drones go and attack the target without requiring the main ship to target it beforehand, as drones already have their own specific targetting times.
Another viable suggestion would be to make drones agress targets applying ECM to your ship, but that would be very counterintuitive, showing that the real issue at hand is ECM stacking not having a proper counter without drones auto-attacking.
Every other suggestion/complaint was to give up on this change and keep drones as is, simply because people don’t want to bother controlling drones manually, or it’s too much work for them, or they can’t adapt to it.
Auto-targetting missiles.
Who knows? Maybe they might even make adjustments to PI as well, in order to make fuel more expensive and whatnot.
What you should keep in mind is that the ecosystem team is going around the whole game checking every activity and throwing a wrench at it, to see if it manages to stablize and balance itself out by checking player behavior.
In particular, I believe this graph is very important.
In short, CCP has identified that the automatic usage of drones in the current state is bad.
They put out the DBS and ESS systems and had a look at how the system adjusted itself regarding player income, but drones apparently were still a concern under the adjusted state.
In short, it’s not a null sec only issue, but an issue going on around the entire ecosystem, so they are going to throw a wrench directly at drones, and check if it works, or if it breaks.
Having used a tristan to recently go do the career agent missions for some quick empire standing gain, I can tell you I have improved my drone control, and learned to prioritize attacking a bunch of enemies grouped together, rather than simply the enemies closest to my ship, as they might not be the ones closest to my drones out in space.
I never bothered learning before because drones did all the thinking for me, but I can tell you I feel a lot happier and more accomplished as a player learning how to effectively use drones, rather than complaining in this thread about how drones won’t be able to think for me anymore.
Of course, in case they do nothing about the E-WAR concerns people raised, and it becomes a shitshow on release, I’ll be complaining in this thread too, just like lots of people complained about bounty multipliers not going up in the ESS/DBS thread, and got a few adjustments to that system some time ago.
I still don’t agree to how the current ESS works, and think it’s a completely wasted opportunity for more endgame hacking content, but I can only hope CCP will improve on it further over time by using the feedback they receive.
Back when I played in 2017, the agency window was complete garbage, and I never bothered using it.
Now in 2020, I was very surprised to see how practical using it is, even though it’s still buggy as hell in some cases, like pirate FOBs not displaying properly, ice belts missing, and etc, but that doesn’t stop me from using it for all the functionality it brings me, and I have sent a few bug reports already, in hopes of the few lingering issues with it being fixed.
Again, this point.
Reworking anoms and missions is something everybody that enjoys PvE would like, but it’s not as easy and creating a bandaid change like this.
You also completely miss the point that if the people farming AFK wanted good PvE, they could be doing abyss filaments, as it’s entertaining PvE and pays out well, but they don’t, as it’s not possible to AFK reliably for hours in it, and one can only dream of multiboxing it without paying attention to other clients.
Nope, because that would be broken af.
They should at least have to go past shield to reliably apply damage to the ship modules, but that would raise the issue on how it would affect armor tanked ships. Maybe only when the ship reaches hull HP you can select specific modules, but by that point, why bother…?
In this scenario, would you be able to recall one turret to be fully repaired while out in space, or once it’s broken you have a broken turrent until you dock up and repair it?
Would bigger modules have more HP to make up for being more easily targetted and shot?
Would each module have different resists to them?
Would you still be able to group weapons together, or you’d need to manage each one individualy?
Even drones don’t require that much manual management, as you can press F and all your drones attack without requiring individual assignments, but being able to target a ship modules it’s still an interesting mechanic, worth taking a look at.
Overhauling a whole system is a completely different subject to removing drone auto-aggro though, and involves a lot more work than you might think.
Advantages of drones over turrets:
ability to select pure damage type;
not having to bother with optimal range and fallout;
don’t use ammo;
Disadvantages of drones over turrent:
can be damaged and ECMed;
travel time to each target influences DPS;
can’t be overheated;
Did I forget anything? Seems pretty balanced imo.
Now you are just being silly.
Not even fighter management is as deep as those examples.
Bots can operate any of the weapons systems. Whether a bot can pull in drones or not isn’t relevant. The point is that drones can operate without supervision of any kind because NPCs won’t shoot them, even when the launching ship does not seem to pose an active threat with its own weapons as is the case for an afk human pilot. AFK human pilots are the only class of character likely to be affected. Having NPCs present some threat to your deployed autonamous space assets seems like an attainable goal.
I am quite certain CCP doesn’t care what I think. I can’t think of anyone who I could say I knew did care, but I think we are generally aware we came here of our own volition to express an opinion to whoever’s reading rather than to actually change anything about the situation. As such, while what you say about CCP’s judgement is true, I don’t see that it has any relevance.
Congratulations, you’ve finally realized what CCP said in their opening post.
…but that’s not the goal that CCP is trying to achieve.
Sure, but you need to realize when your opinion is about a topic that’s irrelevant to what CCP is trying to address. For example, everyone here talking about bots are expressing opinions about a topic that is irrelevant to this change. They’ve made a huge jump to conclusions, convinced themselves that they’re right, and are screaming about how this change won’t stop bots (despite CCP never once mentioned bots or that this change is intended to stop bots).
You are missing a lot more advantages of drones they are still bustedly op even now:
Drones:
Advantages:
Huge hp on drones.
Their flying style lets them track extremely well even applying to frigates with “a Large weapon system” Good luck trying to hit a frigate at 500m with a tychon.
If you don’t beleive me ask the guy who lost his tournament frig to a rattle snake’s gecko one shotting him.
They have endless range you can launch them at 50km’s and they will keep attacking even passed 400km’s.
They have utility you can heal with drones and salvage with drones.
Drones use no high slot’s, which give massive fitting advantage allowing them to either overuse tanking modules or use something powerful in pvp like neuts.
Small and medium smart bombs are abysmally weak, even thou smart bombs are drone “counters” it will take 4 medium smart bombs well over a minute to kill gila drones by that time your ship is more than likely dead never mind that ships dont have anywhere near 4 high slots to use that many smart bombs in the first place.
Drone’s can save your life in abyss, about to die, release drones drones pull damage off you allowing you to heal.
You can switch depending on situation you have something tackled the large drones come out, a pesky interceptor the lights come out, If only you can swap your large guns for small ones on the fly.
There is 5 of them so e-war against them is completely useless and web’s will only reduce damage from 1/5th of them.
…
I would not be surprised if more drone nerfs are coming, they need it.
But better to just redesign drones entirely and give them some cool stuff while balancing them back so people don’t only get a stick.
My position was, and is, that I am against creating an inconsistency in how drones behave vs PCs and NPCs. That people have latched onto my 3 second example of a possible alternate solution is not my fault.
If you ask me if I would approve of making people micromanage their drones, then I will honestly answer that I would. When people put questions to me on tangential topics, I still answer them. It doesn’t mean I’m committed to the idea, only that I would not raise an objection to it.
The bottom line is that the main thrust of my position is not significant to anybody. It only affects the learning curve for people who’re not yet playing by a little bit, and they’re not going to back me up. I don’t know how many grains of sand it takes to make a mountain, but I do know that Eve’s learning curve is a meme and I disapprove of adding another grain to the mountain.
I know the inconsistency is small. I have already said as much. That a negative result is not of sufficient magnitude does not mean I am required not to give voice to it.
People are already figuring out the calculations for ESS and DBS percentage changes.
I’m sure they can handle being told “Drones will auto aggress players but not NPCs.”
You’re over-exaggerating a non-issue and concern trolling with the “grains of sand on a mountain”. Stop looking down on the capacity of players to get over it.
I’m gonna have to agree that PvP is removed from the game. PvE was already very lackluster and boring. This is the reason many people resorted to drone ratting as it still took some attention but you could still do other things as to not want pull your hair out. They they nurfed ratting all together with the new ESS system but wait guys… thats not all. Lets also make you have to pay 100% attention while doing less profitable PvE.
CCP making sure this doesn’t keep happening.
Cry all you want, but you babies have had it so easy that the ecosystem was long bloated. These are all good changes for the game and will lead to a healthier ecosystem overall.
so Making Isk while afk is considered playing? The only thing I knew that is legal afk in this game is manufacturing and hypervegas. imo. speaking of bot’s, are you sure those bot’s are not created by some members of your alliances to pay the sovereignty bill or fund the alliance?
Doesn’t seem like you’d need to mess with drone behavior for people who are actually playing to make it stop working for AFK ratting… Just make them stop auto aggressing after the player goes 1 minute without attacking something, or something like that, no? This will make multi-boxing kind of annoying.
