Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This is a cool idea- it could use tweaking, but it'd make rogues more interesting and give them some significance.

However, and just to tell you, those hives are basically incomplete versions of the Jovian Construct, the Jove station (there's one in the system M-FDTD). I have no clue as to why, but it's very interesting to think about..

Also, did you know that there are models in the game files for small, medium and heavy "rogue drones"? these look like they'd literally be usable drones for pilots.

And if we could actually fly a rogue drone frigate/cruiser/battleship, that'd be awesome. The models are all in the game already, so it'd only be a matter of making up stats- and what you said could work well- they'd have to be fast, with few high slots, no turrets/launchers, etc. They'd be close-range drone boats, and should have bonuses to drone speed/hp/velocity/tracking, et cetera- very much geared towards making the drones, especially heavy drones in the case of the BS, usable as a weapons system.

Over all, I like the idea

I'm happy to see that there's some support for my idea, so I decided to flesh it out some more:

The Rogue Drone faction should have neutral or worse standings with almost all other factions (maybe slightly positive standings to and from SoE?), so that working for them a lot could eventually lead to you being not welcome in any Empire's space anymore.

The Rogue Drone faction ships should be Amarr / Gallente (I know the SoE ships are already Amarr / Gallente too, but there's also two pirate factions who have Gallente / Minmatar, so it's not without precedent), with the Amarr bonus being drone hitpoints and the Gallente bonus being drone speed. Give the ships a "+5 maximum drones controlled" special ability (or "+100% drone damage" if the former makes the servers cry, though the additional drones would allow for more versatility) and we have powerful drone boats that have to rely on their drones for damage due to the lack of turret / launcher slots, creating a pretty unique play style.

So, what do you think?

I see nothing against the core concept. I think we could use a few more areas of NPC nullsec to pave the way for other changes. I don't know how you'd explain drones being nice to humans in the storyline though.

It is rare, but there are humans rogue drones are friendly to. VILAMO, in the books was a hive of rogue drones tasked with defending a human.

i preferred rogue drones for the incursion style back ground. but rogue drones with standings?

-10 to everybody ever, never changes.

My idea for drone faction ships from another thread:

I see the drone ships as a needle like central armoured hull with engine nacelles places evenly around the rear (number dependant on size of hull)

The foreard areas would be studded with locking points and power points. Drone modules would attach on these points depending on loadout so each flying vessel would look different. Example of how I see this could work:

Frigate class combat hull:

Central hull with low cap and cpu, armour resists comparable to other frigates. 3 low slots that can hold small drones. These are either fixed drones (armour repair drone with average repair hp per cycle) or mobile drones ( armour rep drone that can rep local or launch and remote rep, both at lower rate than the fixed drone.

3 high slots with the same principle, docked gun/missile drones get dmg buffs but undocked they can engage at distance/ drone assist others.

Dessie hull also uses small drones but with more drone slots, cruisers and BCs use medium, BS use large drones and so on.

Hull cap is low because the drone modules themselves have cap. This should be balenced to not allow gross use of active low/medium fixed mods.

Drone prop mods would be achieved by the attached propulsion drones dragging the hull along as boosters whilst their cap holds out, but also launching drones gives an additional velocity boost like a sabot round, along with an agility increase due to less hull mass.

When docked all shield/armour/hull dmg is spread evely across the central hull and drones. Launched drones can be targeted and destroyed individually. Replacement drones are carried in a drone bay if the hull has one.

The sight of these deadly needles crawling with mechanized horrors could be very nice indeed

I'd also quite like to see 'Drone Clones', created from captured clone blanks.

Another idea I have is why would drones necessarily be the bad guys? Having come into sentience by themselves perhaps they would actually value life(determined by sentience) more than us cavalier capsuleers...