EVE General Discussion

Ok. You have built a convincing enough "that's the way I understand it" argument and I'm through having a conversation with you. I'd go back and highlight all of your contradictions, but I'm limited to 5 quotes per post and I don't fee like trying to make the blind see. Reply if you must, rest assured I won't direct myself to you any further. Claim it your victory, or that I'm running because i can't _____ or whatever. I'm tired of arguing and bickering with your stubbornness and irrationality, but mostly your lack of thinking.


It indeed does, but I feel something could be done to bring it back in line. What that "something" is, I haven't thought of yet, without wrecking the rest of the mechanics for the drones.

God i get a kick out of this thread.


I only have one confusion about drones that I have never checked.

If said target is out of drone control range you can not tell the drones to attack it meaning that's basically how far the radio signal to them can go.

But if the drones themselves are farther away then the max drone control range you can still control the drones by telling then to come back to you or attack something else within your drone control range.

That doesn't really make sense to me. I know its designed that way so you are not constantly loosing connection with your drones while you are on grid with them, but it still seems kind of silly that you can control drones outside your drone control range, you just cant tell them to attack anything farther then that lol.

I get why that is the case and getting rid of the max range is not the answer. The only answer would be to have to stay within a certain distance to your drones, and that would just suck to all hell.

From a lore perspective? Look at it this way: there's a difference between just communicating with the drones and providing the drone with accurate target data.

You're not really limited in from how far away you can communicate with your drones — as long as you can see them at all (i.e. they're on the same grid), you can tell them to do things. The limitation is in what parts of space you can designate as an operational area for them, and that amounts to a sphere centred on your ship. As long as a part of space is close enough for your control systems to designate it properly, you can tell your drones to go there and do stuff. Maybe it's just low-precision spherical coordinates and at longer ranges, the margin of error becomes so large that you can't safely use it as a distinct point in space (blame the Gallente for being bad at maths or something ).

Or as someone else said earlier in the thread, look at it as a form of target painting: you can either tell your drones to home in on your communication signal (return and dock / return and orbit) or to home in on a signal reflected from another target (attack, repair, mine, move to and wait for partial command transfer etc).

So because the whole concept is broken, but it is what we have, suggesting anything different is a sin against Bob, and worthy of ridicule.

Not sure what kind of mentality that is, but I can't accept it.

Drone Control range implies how far from your ship your drones can be and still receive and act on those orders.

If the mechanic dictates that Drone Control Range refers to the target's distance from your ship, it should a)be called something else or b) be adjusted to perform as it's expected by the name. But I'm not interested in coining a name for it.

Moving on.

Drones from light to heavy perform as expected. They will engage any ship within the DCR, because a drone cannot travel outside of it by command.
Any drone class will stay on target once engaged, even if the target falls outside of the DCR.

With sentries, being a semi-stationary turret-type drone, the current behavior limits you to engage your drones onto targets within the DCR, which causes (me) conflict with the mechanic, as it shouldn't work like this.

As explained above, the term "DCR" suddenly falls out of line, and the drones don't behave as the name implies.

And it makes sense, too. Any movable drone should not be able to engage a target outside of the DCR, because it's movable. By 4th wall logic, you could say that the drone loses communication and fail-safes to a return flight to the last known location of the ship. If a semi-stationary drone, such as the sentry, remains within the DCR, it should then, again, 4th wall logic, be able to engage a drone outside of it, for the simple fact that it has the weapon range to do so, and the drone itself is not outside of the DCR.

The way I see it is like a remote controlled turret. The turret will have the same range, regardless of where the transmitter is located.

As said above, you can also rationalize the current mechanic by thinking the ship paints the target, thus the DCR makes sense.
All i'm suggesting here is, for sentries, it would be great if it worked as I've tried to explain for 6 pages now.

CCP buff the strongest and most broken weapon system NAOW because of naming terminology that I don't understand. This should be a priority fix. Everyone that tries to offer their opinion that is different from mine, I will call them without logic and stupid, because that way I can win 100% of the arguments.

I sincerely believe that a domi should be able to shoot shi* that is 250km away for 750 dps because names.

It is me or rpers that claim "reasons of lore" have the worst ideas that completely break game mechanics?

It all boils down to this.

As has been said a lot of times in this thread, DCR is an effective limit for the distance between your ship and the targets you are firing at. That is intended. Removing DCR as a damage projection limit makes a drone ship OP, simply because you can put more distance between you and the target without having to use high slots for it.

A practical example for your suggestion being broken would be a sniper Domi squad with no DLAs whatsoever. You can fit all the highs for RR, and placing the drones 60km in front of you would give a maximum projection of 60DCR+120OP+80FALL=260km ahead of you with bouncers. You would be able to hit up to 180km in front of you with 750DPS explo damage in optimal, and no fear of putting your own ship in trouble (both due to range and spider tanking).

Now, add drone assist on top of that, and you should begin to understand exactly why a suggestion like that is broken.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R2vQLhmmW4

/thread

It's not so much a “balance issue” as “completely and utterly broken”. So why do you think it's a good idea to break the balance that way just to solve the problem of your feeling the term is unintuitive?

No, it would make all drone ships less agile in the field since they would have to sit closer to their DPS source and move around less. That's a second problem on top of them being able to engage new targets from much further away. So, again, why would you want to restrict drones in such a way?

Put another way: he's so close to the mark that you can't think up of any kind of counter-argument without being horribly blatant about how bad an idea it is, so you'll have to try (and fail, as always) to just dismiss it out of hand and hope that it'll be enough…

If set to aggressive, controlled drones will engage any enemy that either targets the drones themselves, regardless of whether or not they are in control range. Also, if I remember correctly, drones can be ordered to recall to your ship even if they are outside of your control range, which is odd but not something that I would complain about.