EVE General Discussion

Damage Types
Drones suffer from having one damage type that they can inflict. Just like weapons this is a huge flaw in omni play styles. It is easy to remedy with a weapon system along side drones, with drone boats the idea is to give enough drone bay to fit every kind. All in all fighters get the long straw of this ordeal. Overspecialization breeds weakness, which is what fixed damage types accomplish. If you want to force people out of omni play styles make it clear and apparent. At least look over the numbers as not all rats have identical spreads. Leading to heat or Gallente to be FOTM for PVE. A flaw created by another flaw of balancing due to Amarr and Gallente's fixed damage types.

Tracking
Not all tracking is equal, some are more equal than others. Another balancing decision that was seemingly made to micmic other weapon systems. Unlike weapon systems drones share similar optimal and falloff up to sentries which varie to a much farther degree. Due to this and restictive omni meta this is something that should be reviewed.

Optimal
Drones are not ships that can be modded for better manueverability. Do they have equal agility? Need clarification...

Falloff
See Optimal

Tank
I see you launched your whole drone bay while being jammed right after they picked up aggro. Pray to your petty drone god they make it back alive! Milk for the cookies, Blood for the blood god, Drones for the rogue hive, that sort of thing. There honestly needs to be more player control over how tanky they want to make their drones. In all fairness I like the idea of penalties being applied for such bonuses.

Repair
Jove help us we want a repair function! This goes back to omni play styles. Station repairs keep players grounded at times a little to often. Creating a different sink such as nanite repair is a system that rewards specialization. There are tons of them in EVE already I don't see the harm in making an already singular skill set more diverse. AKA making it worth while to dip into things other than over heating.

Drone Fitting
The mechanics are already in the game. This would add depth and variety to builds. Perhaps it would help further curve the crutch some drone bearing ships have.

Mining Drone
There is no reason anyone would use harvesters or civilian drones. Travel time is the biggest problem. Giving them sentry styled range would work fine in remedying this. Yield would see a difference however only in the sense if people don't already sit on top of an asteroid.

Logistic bottle neck
All in all it forms restrictive play styles and rewards those who go into both types so they can change on the fly. Once again not a huge issue and I like the idea of being rewarded for preparation.

Electronic Warfare
It is a bloody mess of stacking penalties, lack luster effects, and overspecialization, this will take a great deal of balancing and rework.

Variation
Though they have slowly been adding more meta levels for drones to be on par with other modules and weapon systems. It is good for players to be able to go from light drone 1 to say estambel. Reaching for the stars and all that.

A.I.
Not the Steven Spielberg kind either... This is a huge problem as drones run about doing crazy stuff. Whether they split off and attack multiple targets now lacking the tank busting ability to kill one enemy. Or sitting idle waiting for a command. They either need an attack and return function, or better developed AI. Your move CCP.

Salvage Drones
Access Difficulty Bonus: 3% Volume: 5 m3 Bandwidth Needed: 5 Mbit/sec
Major issues with these guys are currently A.I., user interface making it frustrating to operate, and being mining drones that replace roles you just created with ship releases, aka the noctis.

I will try and add as much as I can as this thread goes along. Remember the more ideas we throw at the wall, the more likely one of them will be taken seriously and integrated.

So basically, you want more control over your drones attributes (maybe drone fittings).

Probably won't ever happen, but it should.

I think modular drones, a idea that is brought up from time to time, would be a good start to tackle some of the problems inherent with static drone models.

For example, there is a chassis, racial light, medium, heavy and sentry, to choose from. On that chassis you can put a main module defining its purpose, combat, ewar, logistics and one or more secondary slots that influence stats of the drone, like armor, damage, repair amount, mwd speed, base speed, etc. The drone fittings could be saved and possibly named individually. You have to fit a drone when you assemble it and unassembled drones cannot be put into a drone bay.

I found it quite interesting. Drones have gotten less attention than belt mining and they aren't even apart of an economic system controlling production of almost every aspect of the game. They are apart of a much larger system which we call combat. The idea I put behind this was to make it more obvious that something needs to be done. A player can expend seven million in drones vs another player who expends seven million in gunnery or missiles and the drone user never sees close to the dps. Not to mention due to bottle necks from mechanics be able to tackle the same feats with anywhere near as much ease.

If CCP wants drones to be in their current state which is borderline bad, and make it known they are working as intended strictly as a secondary weapon type, than fine. But if they are going to claim they are a primary and include ships that rely almost exclusively on dps from them. Than they have to put them on par with other systems. It is fine that CCP wants eve to have completely different combat systems from one another. To achieve this they only have to change very little aspects of everything. Making every weapon type a sword to sniper rifle in diversity makes it impossible to balance. The fleet meta dictates what is going to be played. Make drones a bigger part of that meta.