Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Okay, so recently Reddit's EVE community started a thread about the various EWAR drones in New Eden, and their role in combat. A common opinion players communicated was that EWAR/combat utility drones weren't all created equal. ECM and Cap Neuting, the most useful EWAR drones, for those of you who haven't yet looked into them yet for whatever reason, have an advantage over the other drones (Tracking Disruption, Stasis Webbing, Target Painting, and Sensor Dampening) because they don't have the stacking penalties that the less loved drones have. All this means is that, unlike drones with stacking penalties, as the number of drones on the battlefield increased, so did the effectiveness of them. It makes sense that it would work that way, realistically, but when a fleet of a hundred players or so use a full swarm of ECM or Neuting drones and engages a smaller sized fleet, you lose part of the rock-paper-scissors fun that EVE is so special for.

A second issue is that the drones that do have stacking penalties, when compared to how the regular EWAR Modules on your ship perform, can be kind of silly to consider using when a full flight of light or medium drones can actually be (and often is) LESS effective than equipping a Tech 1 EWAR Mod of the same type; and, due to stacking penalty mechanics, fails to compete with regular-ol' Meta4/T2 ship mods, especially those you can fit with scripts.

What I propose is, instead of performing the ewar for you, change EWAR drones to instead give pilots a bonus to ewar against that drone's target (of that specific ewar type, of course).
For example, the Light ECM drone would no longer jam, but instead apply to its target a +10% bonus to all incoming hostile (or friendly >:3) ECM. This effect would have the same stacking penalty you'd expect from, say, a weapon upgrade like a heatsink.

I would also remove the different sizes of drones in favor of a single, small, 5m3 drone for each EWAR type. This would, I hope, encourage a lot more variation in drone combinations because you wouldn't have to field all EWAR drones if you didn't want to, because you'd still get that 10% bonus even for those ships that only have room for one drone. I also hope droneboat pilots would feel more confident in experimenting with different combinations of drone types in their bay.

There's other benefits too, over the current system (a lot more than I'm probably even aware of, including probably a few negative aspects as well). EWAR Drones would no longer compete with EWAR Ship Modules, or screw with the overall effectiveness of your EWAR by being confuddled by stacking penalty mechanics. This would eliminate a bit of redundancy in gameplay mechanics as well as give EWAR drones a defined, standardized role in combat.

Also effected would be the way large fleets would benefit from their extra numbers. ECM drones and Neuting drones wouldn't be able to simply swarm smaller enemies and be able to lock down your ship until the inevitable horrible death occurred. Solo players would also be able to get a nice 10% bonus to their ewar of choice by simply fielding a single drone, which I can see being pretty tempting for those players who play that way. Scalability is a huge issue within MMO's, so I really want to highlight this benefit to everyone. Proper scalability is essential to any MMO, even more to for EVE because, well, this is EVE.


The Original Thread - [url]http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/urmhd/unconventional_drone_uses/[/url]

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Feel free to voice your opinion on this idea, I'd love to read your feedback and ideas.