Player Features and Ideas Discussion

in this instance, I am referring to the size of drone bays on ships

There are a lot of cool drones, combat, utility, logi, ewar, ect..

in my observation, the key limiting factor on the usage of drones is the bandwidth allowed by a specific hull type.

with a 25 bandwidth, your only using 5 light combat drones at most, (or lesser quantity combinations of lights/med/heavy) even with a 400m3 drone bay.

I would venture to suggest that an increase in the size of drone bay (bay only, not bandwidth) might be a beneficial change to the game

This would allow players to not feel so restricted and carry a wider variety of drones possibly

Larger drone bays, mean more drones used, more drones consumed, increase in overall drone useage on missions or what not,

Increased market in drones of all types, not just the combat types

I fully admit, that yes, I personally would pack some of the more interesting drones instead of the core combat drones if I had a larger drone bay. As it stands, I pack what I need immediately and no more. and 99% of the time, that is combat drones.

Increase of drone bay size is a fairly simple solution, it could be further changed by restricting drone bay to X amount of combat drones and Y amount of support or a variety of factors.

Is it dumbing down the game? or making it too easy for one side or the other?
My pvp experience is very limited, so I can only speak from an exploration / wormhole / mission point of view
No, I don't think this is dumbing it down, I feel it would add more choices and options to players, and throw some twists into the fights. There would also be those that just load up the drone bay with max amount of hobgoblins and roll out from there and not take advantage of the opportunity to expand the load out and try new things.

If anything the size of drone bays needs to be nerfed.

With the addition of mobile depots into the game, drone bays are effectively much larger than what your fitting window says.

A T1 mobile depot has a volume of 50m3. Every remaining m3 in your cargo hold can be full of drones if you so wish, and it only takes 1 minute to online your depot and swap drones between cargo and drone bay. This can even be done during combat, although an on the ball opponent will incap your depot before it comes online.

Bottom line: drone bays do not need expanding!

if someone shoots your drones and you have 20 more in your bay you dont have to worry as much about recalling and redeploying drones

Removing one of the major drawbacks of drones, that is, a destructible weapon system with limited reloads, without any kind of an attempt at balancing this tremendous buff, would be kind of silly.

If you're fighting someone with drones, currently you'd kill the drones first. Under your system, he'd have multiple waves of combat drones for you to deal with. This would inevitably tip the balance of combat.

While you personally might use a mix of different drones, everyone else will pack one flight of ECM and cram as many combats as possible into their bay.

currently that is what we do cause there is not much choice

Eve is not a game where you can be prepared for every situation at every time. You should not be able to carry a full flight of every drone available. You have to pick carefully and hope for the best.

If anything, the current drone bay of the drone hulls need to be scaled back some.

increasing drone bay size messes with balance of ships that rely on drones for dps; i/e ishtar.

Ishtar can field 3 flights of sentry drones. Kill those, and the ishtar goes home.

Now if ishtar could field lets say 1000m of drones in his bay, I would just pack it with extra sentries. Forget ECM, webbing, whatever; as they say, MOAR SENTRIES!!!

In practical terms it makes drone boats that much more powerful. Ishtar can kite longer, battleships like gheddon have more utility (sentries OR heavy ECM), and it just demands more rebalancing.

Just think about it, a 50man domi fleet, you bomb them once, twice, thrice, and they keep deploying fresh sentry drones. a bomber can carry only 3-4 bombs...

it would be unbalanced. its allready unbalanced with drone assist and all, this would make even more popular.

so, overall, the problem is more the borderline uselessness of the other drones when compared to the combat drones

at least that is the impression I am getting from the few responses ive seen here and from talking with folks in game.