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Within the next 18 months.
Give or take.

You are saying that a MJD works. How does it work on a T3 cruiser PVE setup, or an T2 cruiser?
It is limited to T1 and T2 BS's.
I have never run a mission in a BS hull on TQ (tried a Vargur on Duality) in 4 years of missioning, so I guess my Is Proteus and Ishtar are both garbage now. I had one set for amour tanking, one for passive shields, tuned to handle different types of missions. Both are completely useless, and cannot be re-fitted since drones are done.

Further, what happens with the solo mission runner?
And maybe a double XLASB works on a BS hull, but now you are not only burning through ammo, but a huge amount of cap charges, that adds to a huge cost, plus take up a huge volume. I am sure the Marauder pilot will be thrilled to know he can no longer salvage as he kills.

Bottom line, this was a premeditated attack against mission-running income.

Not sure on this one if everything is that bleak. It sounded like there were far more concrete plans for the short term pvp related AI fixes, even if the timetable was not as certain.

There were concrete plans, and trying to implement it made the whole house come down crumbling like a card castle in a tornado.

So according to my impression, first they have to find why it makes that, fix it, and then realize what the fixes break, and so on.
Or just do it from scratch.

Both of which make any time-frame not any more reliable than the "in the next 18 months" I gave earlier.
As always, may I be proven wrong, by both the pvp AND pve situation improving faster.

So if you agree that was a premeditated attack by CCP to wipe out mission income, why do you berate me when I scream conspiracy by CCP who don't have the guts to say "we agree with the null sec zealots and we are hammering mission income back to the stone ages"?

Because by all accounts and definitions, that is precisely what this is.
The zealots throw out the line about hammering afk income, but we all know that is a complete and utter lie.
This destroys ANY drone based boat. No drone user, even the most alert one, can save their drones.

Fox Four ignored all the input re: the original Retribution code, except to exempt high end plex structures from the new AI, in order to limit the damage to null sec income.
Then Fozzie, the dev from Pandemic Legion, utterly refused to even post in this thread until AFTER he released the next hammer blow to drones, and that was only to post he was on vacation.

How can you say this is not a conspiracy between the null sec zealot element ingame and inside CCP?

911 was an insect job!

I think you're reading wayyyy too much into this. Heck, the CSM posted in the original Dev Blog thread. The current CSM, as far as I can tell, simply waves their hands around and agrees that everything CCP suggests is good. It'd be akin to accusing yes men of being part of a conspiracy. I'm sure CCP said "Hey, we wanna do this" and they said "Sure, do it". That's pretty tepid material for a conspiracy. The fact that they no longer bother to tell us any economic news is slightly worrying, because even the heavily doctored stuff they were releasing at the end was vaguely useless... but really we just have their word on it.

Also, it was fairly obvious from the get-go that it was a slight nerf to casual player income. As far as grand conspiracy theory goes, if a fair chunk of people can read the writing on the wall months in advance... whelp?


When the Lead Game Designer says something is the ultimate goal... how many of his subordinates need to acknowledge it?


I think they're being fairly transparent to anyone paying attention? And after Incarna / monocle-gate / the summer o' rage I'd imagine most folks are watching what they do, and ignoring what they say?

Look, in some cases the game is better than it's been for ages, in other ways it's pretty damn lousy. I'm not sure what to tell you, other than getting seriously emotionally vested into something ran by CCP probably isn't really a smart notion these days?

I'm glad this thread is still gaining traction because it's a fairly direct hit on my game-play, I only have limited time and I really don't want to have to pay attention to something as boring as Eve Online's PvE, but this thing is heading towards four months old... how much emotion can you really still have vested in the idea? Conversely CCP as a company should be much more interested in your opinion. People with strong emotional attachments to a product are vastly more valuable customers... Me? I'm pretty damn apathetic about this change these days. I play less because it's less fun, so I care less.

(Just found this thread via google, my two cents as a crappy PvE player).

Just flew a myrmidon through the Serpentis Watch scan site. Rack of 200mm rails, drone bay consisting entirely of Hobgoblin IIs and Hammerhead IIs. Standard fit etc.

I primaried any guardian frigates/cruisers as I saw them then simply shot targets as we most appropriate for me. Drones would be deployed if I could see no other anti-light NPCs. Whenever a drone took damage (always just one drone) I would recall them then relaunch and try to target fire what might have caused the damage. (I'm not entirely sure what constitutes Elite frigate/cruiser so I ended up guessing after all the explicitly named guardian rats were dead).

Received limited aggro on drones (4 or 5 times) while coasting through. No standard frigate, destroyer, cruiser nor battlecruiser engaged drones as far as I could tell (barring the guess work I had to do 3 times).

This was on TQ.

It's certainly a lot nicer to play with than "deploy drones - drones dead", though it would be nice to have a way to know what ship is aggroing the drones.

This is only a single example though and I was mostly kiting to keep down damage and transversal, if that makes a difference.

Great work on the testing btw, very interesting to read. Hope to goodness CCP takes it on sooner rather than later.

just dropping by to wee if any devs have come back from their long slumber
to start paying attention to the people that pay their salaries

so far no dice eh ???

yes i understand holiday breaks and all but the holidays are over
mean while thread-naughts continue to pile on begging CCP to fix the drone aggro issue

Thanks to all who have provided feedback i hope CCP listens and corrects the issue or rolls it back to the way it was until they can do more testing
But i have been playing since 2007 and in all that time i do not remember a single roll back of a change We just Adapt or die

There we go, so DEVs weren't massacred by a loose Bounty Hunter Gone Rogue.

And maybe somewhere next week we'll hear how CCP thinks drones are now.