EVE General Discussion

This is EXACTLY the whole problem. When you fly a BS with long-range guns, you absolutely rely on your drones to deal with frigs. Some have said "just snipe the frigs before they get in close". Well DUH!! That works fine on some missions, apparently these idiots have never done a mission where the gate drops you right in the middle of a ball of rats with frigs in it.

I don't fly drone boats. I can't even imagine how messed-up this AI adjustment is for them. As it stands now, I'm gonna have to be careful about which missions I do. Once a frig gets close enough to orbit you, there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to take them out without your drones.

Problem solved... 'cept for those who fly ships with 8 gun/missile spots.

The drone system needs to be revamped so that it can compensate for the changes in Retribution. There is too little use drone users can actually do and know with our drones.

made me laugh hard, no they aren't

uninstall, only other advice i have. cause there is no forum for "butthurt complaints because EVE changed", and i'm tired of them, the truth is you just want it the way it was, cause you didn't have to think about it, you didn't have to make any efforts to secure your drones, you just let em go to work..

"oh gee wiz, 60KM off, drone range. GO GET EM", those day are over.

Tried to counter the frig problem today by putting a light missile launcher in the spare high slot of a mega...

It didn't work.

Having two people in Maelstroms 100k away did though.

Not usefull information I know but seems the only way to comfortably do some level 4 missions now is having 3 battleships and 2 logistics, and if you got those numbers, go do scout incursions instead, or pick up a few more floating around the incursions and do vanguards instead. Agent mission rewards barely compensate for the price of 5 tech 2 light drones

I'm not going to point any fingers, but the "adapt" folks are beginning to annoy me.

You're walking down the street. You end up with a small pebble in your shoe. Do you adapt, or do you take the damn shoe off and shake the stone out? Similarly, if you want an example of second-party involvement, you're sitting on a bus and someone sits next to you with their umbrella handle poking you in the ear. Do you adapt? Or do you tell them to watch their damn umbrella?

Same principle. Just because a change happened, and it can be adapted to, it does not:
1. Make it a good change.
2. Make it worth adapting to.

And as a sidenote, the "adapt" folks are surprisingly rigid when it comes to these things. A lot of people I see saying "adapt" were the same guys who, when changes to the game were not to their own liking (WiS instead of FiS), instead of adapting whined to high heavens and shot statues in Jita. That's the ultimate irony of this game - "adapt" and HTFU cuts both ways. Too much carebearing in EVE? Adapt, HTFU or GTFO. Too little carebearing in EVE? Adapt, HTFU or GTFO. Whatever the question, it can be answered with "adapt, htfu or gtfo". We all know it. So why bother saying it?

When someone shows you the new square wheels they made you tell them they are idiots and to rethink it.
You don't mindlessly cheer them and put them on you car.
Sleeper AI works well for Sleeper sites as the sites were designed with the Sleeper AI in mind.
Old mission were not designed for new NPC AI and many are deathtraps now.

See, just because something gets shaken up, it doesn't mean it is a good change.

I mean, think about it. After they fix the current full-room-aggro thing. What is really going to change? I mean, REALLY? Nothing. Missions will be just as tedious. All it did was force people into constantly fighting the drone UI, which is just annoying. It's not challenging or interesting or hard, just annoying. And that's pretty much the only thing this change did, took annoyance and turned it into annoyance+10 due to added drone management. Good change? Hardly. And most people will just re-train for a Tengu, like everyone and their grandma already did, and not even bother with drones. Maybe switch to FoF missiles to run semi-AFK? Everything will keep on spinning. As such, was the time spent implementing it well-spent? I don't see how.

Now, this is not to say that I think missions are fine. They're not. They were outdated when they were introduced. They're ludicrously outdated now, absurdly so. But this wasn't the way to change them. If they wanted positive change, they should have changed missions alongside the AI.

Simplest example I can think of is a mission where you are tasked with protecting a structure. Ships spawn 1-3 at a time, depending on size, and attack the structure. Shooting them pulls aggro towards yourself. Doing this mission AFK is impossible, even with aggressive drones, as new spawns do not aggress drones, they aggress the structure. Structure dies, mission fails. Easy to do, but requires a player's participation at every step. And ship AI can be as hard as it needs to be - neuting, EWAR, what have you. But since ships come at you 1-3 at a time, they are manageable, and it will teach players to deal with these various mechanics.

And speaking of "hideously outdated content", that's what drones are. Drone mechanics, drone UI, etc. What little content there is. There's still content that's missing from drones - such as damage rigs for drones aside from sentries, drone implants, etc. They showed a nice mock-up of a new drone UI at FanFest, but since then pretty much stayed mute and ran away from any thread even mentioning the word "drones".

You will still need to have different aggro management techniques (including getting rid of aggro for a while, which will help you with some of the other changes). If you mass-run them in teams, you will need to adjust who does what when. Oh, and then there's the whole mission-intrusion bit…

Just added the last bit to fixed it for you right there.

NPC damage on drones is currently too high.
Unless you keep the frigates to last, sometimes when launching drones without spending enough time generating aggro on the NPC, the drones will be picked up instantly and die almost instantly.

I ended up with 5 frigates shooting my BS today in one pocket. I had to send and recall my drones 4 times until the NPC stopped targeting them instantly. Than I waited about a minute of webbing the frigates until I considered the aggro enough to send them out again.

I can't image how a new player will react if he send his drones on frigates, they pop in 2-3 seconds, and than he is there, in his relatively new T1 BS, scrammed and webbed by NPC frigates, without any counter measure at all. Can't log off because of NPC timer, can't warp out, can't out run the frigates.
Most likely, he will end up quitting from "WTF is going on??". I'm not sure its what CCP intended (or I might be wrong and secretly they are into making PvE players quit and keep only the PvP players, go figure).