Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The only issue is that this doesn't make the game better for everyone. And contrary to the intent of your statement, everyone matters to some degree. Depending on where you stand the incursion impact may be something individuals see as inconsequential, or if you are bitter enough, beneficial, but it's not a step in a positive direction. Additionally the impact there is arguably greater than the impact to large scale drone conflicts where the argument of 99% of the fleet assisting and walking away becomes 90% doing the same. This assumes that the omni nerf didn't discourage drone fleets on the subcap end enough to initiate some shifts in doctrine already.

Having nothing to show but a nuisance neither inspires the idea that the love drones need is incoming, nor makes things better for any group outside of those where the numbers involved can make working around it much less consequential.

i do have a few questions for u about this if u dont mind answering them. as a bunch of people have said this many times this change does nothing to fix anything, so if this does not fix or change anything to make things better they why do it.
to quote rise
We feel that drone assist, at a large scale, leads to passive gameplay that most players do not enjoy.
• Assist places too much control in the hands of a single person and leaves the majority of the fleet with little to do
idk about u but how does ccp know that players not like passive gameplay bc they do for the most part take a look at how many afk ways there are to make isk. afk mining, missions, hauling,trading, and pi. has rise ever done fleet pvp before bc even tho im not locking and shooting every target does not mean im sitting on my ass watching tv and not playing eve. i still have to broadcast for reps us mods etc etc. now as if we want to talk about fun i dont think people really care what they fly in 10% tidi as are they really playing or is it more afk. also i look at this change more in line with the pve change for me it did not make pve more fun/better or make me want to do it more it just made it more of a pain and want to pve less. so this change will make me want to do less sov fight in tidi not more why would i want to be a less relible assest for dps.

Drones, for the time being, are the most taxing weapon system for our hardware
•, which means overall play experience has suffered some because of the popularity of sentry doctrines
ok for this if drones are so stressful for the server then why not change the way drones act on the server this changfe does nothing to help how stressed/taxed as it does nothing to change how many drones are on grid or used. just bc a fleet of say 200 domis for dps and now need 20 people to assign drones do does nothing to the fact that i still have the same amount of drone as before.

now for will drone usage change no bc almost every ship in every fleet comp has ships that can drones, so drones will still tax the server bc this change does nothing to change how many drones are use or how taxing they are.now i would like to see the huge spike in drone usage was and was it when the cfc started using them to get them nerfed.

people will still do incursions bc unless its nerfed in to the ground isk wise but it will be more of a pain to do so. that means less people may put the time and effort in to them now so it may affect them which in turn could hurt other areas too.

no **** will not change bc this change does nothing to fix anything drones will still be just as stressfull as before and this change does not make it anymore fun to do

Remove drone assist. The whole drone thingy is not working very well.

tl;dr hey guys i know it looks like we're caving to the demands of a portion of the player base instead of actually addressing the overall problem but i swear thats not actually whats happening.

Well this is mostly the point I was making. Server load caused by drones is not related to drone assist. It is related to actually deploying drones. One way to reduce this would be to reduce the number of ships that can field drones, another is to change large scale battles to be more encouraged to spread out through various systems. Like B-R was fought with 3-4 different battles going on in various systems.

The bandwidth argument still does not address either issue. The point is that Drone latency is not a symptom of Drone assist, so making changes to drone assist does not actually address that as an issue. Thus there isn't any correlation between drone assist and server lag. Outside the fact its called drone assist thats about all the issues have in common.

The problem ultimately comes back to once again the use of drones period.

And I believe drones have been under the microscope, I just don't believe drone assist has been an issue. I can not buy the premise behind it. The issue is drone assist does not actually impact this game at all, outside of a "morale" victory for one entitiy over another.

Personally I think it should be removed, because I think if you are going to play you should play, I also think that other passive things need to be looked at as well.

Most importantly however I think that CCP should be looking at solving the issue that for every major timer battle in nullsec it is just a dog pile. Fix the blob and spread the strain across many nodes (like B-R) and you can have massive battles with 7K+ people. Ultimately the issue is always going to come back to the number of people, and number of objects being tracked by the server. Both of which are completely independent of whether drone assist is or is not a mechanic.

Something that was 10 years old, doesn't magically become and issue, and obviously Rise agrees otherwise he wouldn't keep it in at all. Ultimately the "fix" screams appeasing 65K dudes who all came to the forums complaining about a mechanic because their leadership asked them to, not because there is an actual issue with the mechanic.

(and thank you for responding its nice to see that not all CSM are bound to a masters will)

You are missing the point that nerfing or removing drone assist does not accomplish the goals set out in CCP Rise's OP. Nothing he has presented is going to address the lag issue, and nothing he has presented will make .01% Real time fights fun or enjoyable.

About all he is going to do is make Incursions guys pissy for a few days.

There is no reason to implement his "fix" because it doesn't actually fix anything.

And you are right we should have a comprehensive overhaul of Drones, their mechanics, and the ships using them.

Frigates don't need drones. Neither do cruisers. Neither do destroyers.
We don't need drone assist
Only Capitals should field sentries, Heavies/Mediums for BS, Mediums in BC's and Lights used for utility against frigs/dessies.


But it still won't matter until CCP makes it worth while for 1500 people to split into 6 fleets across 6 systems instead of blobing into 1 system.

Fix Sov and make it playable without max Tidi, and I bet you have people who would rather play then afk.

I don't think CCP should be doting on any voice...no matter how big or small it is. They should be going by the data. Considering the only impactful history of drone assist exists from summer 2013-Now, in lock step with CFC specifically skewing the data for this reason I would say CCP should stay as far away from touching drone assist as they can from a developer standpoint, until a time they have a concrete solution for the problem that is the entire drone weapon system.


There was no over use of drones prior to CFC announcing **** Drone Assist. Even when N3 was using prophecies the 200-300 man fleets they had put less load on the server than the 1K man Baltec fleets they faced off against. Ultimately the data does not support the position. Even if you simply look at specifically the halloween war, every engagement played out as per normal in Tidi. Except in HED where CFC and RUS willingly tried to jump some 500+ Dreads into a grid with over 3K people on it all ready, and even then it was the dread asking for the information on the 15K+ Objects, not the 15K+ Objects already there. The fight was laggy and in Tidi, but otherwise a normal brawl in 0.0 before the Dreads came in.

There is no actual evidence that the Drone Assist mechanic causes issue with the game at all, and there hasn't been in 10 years. Hence why it has never been a problem. (until The Martini said it was a problem and send his Goonies to cry to CCP) The only possible link it has to being a game issue is "fun" which is entirely subjective, and hardly an indicator of a balance issue.

Ultimately it just makes CCP look really weak. It is like if CCP limited the amount of people that could be blue to each other, just because N3PL spent 12 months shitting up every forum discussion on EVEO crying about how imbalanced being able to make friends is.

The actual Tweet and not a Imgur would be better....

LOL found it as you posted it... Still laughing my ass off....

At this point I'm inclined to to agree with Grath and Mario. This "fix" is dumb and does not solve the issue. Instead CCP should be working on a complete Drone overhaul. From tracking and damage output of fighters to a drone bandwidth assist cap, to drone coding, and the drone UI. This all needs to be done in in a single expansion, not a "fixed" soon(tm) point patch.

EDITED: autotype